I really hate the “non productive” argument as you only see it with sports, not say, the video game or movie/tv industries. Just has this real whiff of “I don’t like this activity and I don’t see why anyone else should!”

Of all the non productive uses of money and time, at least sports has a bunch of ancillary benefits, especially for youth. I don’t imagine youth sports leagues, which keep kids in shape, keeps them doing something positive instead of the usual juvenile delinquent stuff we’d have been doing, teaching them to be a part of a team etc. And then those stadiums tend to get used for a bunch of cultural/musical events.

Perjorative term for all sports.

Mostly internet and I would imagine strongly correlated with those who are still angry they had an unpleasant high school experience.

I think you’re missing two large parts; escapism and booze.

From the sportsball moniker, I imagine you aren’t a fan. Sometime, it’s worth it to go to a bar that supporters of whatever team go to. There’s something magic about hooting, hollering and cheering with a crowd of complete strangers about this one thing. And in that brief couple of hours, it becomes larger and more magic. And some folks chasing that feeling get drunk and go too far when it goes wrong.

I wish I could opt out of those messages. On streaming platforms that should be doable! (I really hate spoilers.)

Admittedly, 538 was pretty good about showing their work after. While individual events suffer from the unfalsifiability issue, 538 when Silver was around, did pretty good “how did we do for individual races/states” and compared their given odds to the actual results.

Silver made a prediction. That’s the deliverable.

I see what you’re not getting! You are confusing giving the odds with making a prediction and those are very different.

Let’s go back to the coin flips, maybe it’ll make things more clear.

I or Silver might point out there’s a 75% chance anything besides two heads in a row happening (which is accurate.) If, as will happen 1/4 times, two heads in a row does happen, does that somehow mean the odds I gave were wrong?

Same with Silver and the 2016 election.

You’re conflating things.

Your model itself can be wrong, absolutely.

But for the person above to say Silver got something wrong because a lower probability event happened is a little silly. It’d be like flipping a coin heads side up twice in a row and saying you’ve disproved statistics because heads twice in a row should only happen 1/4 times.

I think there’s a lot of armchair simplification going on here. Easy to call investors dumb but it’s probably a bit more complex.

AI might not get better than where it is now but if it does, it has the power to be a societally transformative tech which means there is a boatload of money to be made. (Consider early investors in Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and even the much derided Bitcoin.)

Then consider that until incredibly recently, the Turing test was the yardstick for intelligence. We now have to move that goalpost after what was preciously unthinkable happened.

And in the limited time with AI, we’ve seen scientific discoveries, terrifying advancements in war and more.

Heck, even if AI gets better at code (not unreasonable, sets of problems with defined goals/outputs etc, even if it gets parts wrong shrinking a dev team of obscenely well paid engineers to maybe a handful of supervisory roles… Well, like Wu Tang said, Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

Tl;dr: huge possibilities, even if there’s a small chance of an almost infinite payout, that’s a risk well worth taking.

Birds are super good for the environment, take a quick google!

Squirrels on the other hand, are an invasive species in much of the world.

In my home province squirrels make it pretty hard for some of our local trees etc.

Wild and well put, thanks!

Knew someone was going to rock this, thank you!

Great, so now in addition to being big enough to kick me to death they can now plan how they’re gonna get away with it.

I just have a vision of trump realizing some rally goer is in trouble and asking his rally attendees to sell him some bottled water at three times the price.

30 years seems reasonable. On an unrelated note, Audrey Hepburn died 31 years ago.

MerXNT Dad, I’m a MerXNT!

Yeah because rental properties are often shitholes and it skews the numbers

Sure but my point is that this lady has made an extremely expensive purchase and now continues to pay for it.

Most rents are cheaper than mortages.

Yeah because rental properties are often shitholes and it skews the numbers

Rent is usually paying for someone’s mortgage for them, why would they make it lower? Who are these generous landlords?

Ahhh, there’s the misunderstanding. Local/single owner rentals are actually a small proportion of tenancies. Most are large organizations which have purchased a large building etc. It’s actually a kind of fascinating issue but worth reading about!

If I borrow a half million from the bank, I have to pay it back in monthly installments, commonly known as a mortage. Those costs are now added to your regular expenses.

Most rents are cheaper than mortages. So taking on a giant purchase + the cost of the mortage is a huge financial cost. Yes, she gets an asset (which she could sell at any point) but it’s going to be more expensive.

A quick look at Denver apartments for rent confirms this, a lot of 1 bedrooms available for between $400 and $500 cheaper a month.

“I just made the most expensive purchase of my life and I can’t figure out why I am living paycheck to paycheck.”

Except that definition had an absence of evidence.

It’d be weird after half a century of tv, if suddenly in the 2010s it somehow escalated all the self harm/suicide stats.