Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "Wendover Productions"
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@richdobbs6595 The centrifugal force due to uniform circular motion is mv²/r. The centripetal force due to gravity is GMm/r². These are equal when v² = GM/r. In other words, orbital speed is inversely proportional to the square root of the orbital radius.
Think about it this way. If you double your distance from the earth, gravity drops fourfold, but speed only drops by a factor of 1.4. So Thomas sort of has it backwards. It's not that gravity only changes "slightly," it changes tremendously. The reason Thomas probably had this wrong impression is that he was comparing LEO to the surface of the earth, which is just not a very large distance, so of course the difference in gravity isn't that large. But the difference in orbital speed also isn't that large (ignoring terrain and air resistance). When we compare orbits that have significantly different radii, like LEO and geosynchronous orbits, the gravitational force changes a lot, and that's why a lower speed is required.
Or think about it another way. If Thomas's claim were true, then we should expect to see higher satellites moving slower even in a uniform gravitational field. But that's backwards. Higher satellites would actually have to move faster than lower satellites if gravity were uniform, in order to keep v²/r constant.
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@taoliu3949 You may have to go back and read the comments, because you have stalled for so long that you forgot what we were talking about. But I'll try to summarize.
I said that CSMs were easy to cheat with because they could be programmed to give more low rank cards than high rank cards. A CSM uses a buffer of ~40 cards, and by inserting low rank cards higher in the buffer more often, it can ensure that these cards will be dealt more often. (Note that despite the name, a CSM does not "continuously" shuffle cards. The shuffling action happens whenever new cards are put in the machine. And even though they are intended to randomize the cards, they do not do so very well, and in particular a newly added card has a nearly 0 probability of being put on top of the buffer.)
Now, you claimed that even if a CSM were programmed this way, that would not benefit the dealer. In fact, you said it would benefit the player! Your claim was that if more low rank cards were dealt out and fewer high rank cards, the odds would not get worse for the player. I pointed out that this would imply that card counters (playing at tables with normal shoes) should not reduce their bet when the count was low, and maybe even should increase it. This is simply false, and the math behind card counting is old and famous and easy to check.
But you just never engaged with me on that. You still assert that dealing out low rank cards is good for the player, but you refuse to look at the analogy to card-counting. Your hypothesis cannot explain why real card counters (who do win money) follow exactly the opposite strategy when playing with normal shoes.
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@taoliu3949 "Read your very first 2 comments, you even mentioned CSMs which you purported are rigged."
Well let's quote some of my comments directly:
My second post: "They generally wouldn't do this, because it would be illegal and could be detected by looking at a history of payouts. And there are already much easier ways for a casino to cheat. But it looks bad from the player perspective."
My fourth post: "I do not think any casino is likely to cheat this way."
Yeah, I definitely claimed that CSMs are rigged.
"it is not possible to count cards with a CSM, end story, period."
Quote me the post where I ever suggested such a thing, that is NOT the very latest post where I explained how people actually HAVE profited by counting cards against CSMs.
"I have NEVER said when the count is low players are less more likely to win."
What you actually said was "Your suggestion of not allowing face cards to come out does NOT increase dealer odds," and "it would completely fuck the dealers strategy," and "The edge would tip towards the player," and "the lack of face cards means that players are a lot less likely to bust which means they have a much higher chance of winning." In other words, what you DID say was that low cards benefit the player and high cards benefit the dealer, which is the exact opposite of the mathematical truth at stake.
"I've done my bit of math, which you have not addressed, at all."
You've done a bit. Do you have any idea what sort of computational resources are required for this sort of analysis? Or how many decades dedicated gamblers have focused on this exact problem? Let's get back to my yes-or-no question. What is your answer? Sure, you could adjust your strategy or whatever, but suppose you adjust your strategy in the optimal way. After doing so, do you really think you have gained an advantage over the casino that stacked the deck against you?
I mean, this is really what it all comes down to. Do you trust your "little bit" of math or the calculations that the experts trust?
And have you worked out my analogy yet or not? I will entertain questions if not. But if you do understand, I would love to hear your response.
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@taoliu3949 So by your first paragraph, are you saying that when the count goes very low, the player isn't at a disadvantage? Just to be clear, that is your assertion? Because I would love to see you pull out a source for that.
Card counting does not, in general, involve adjusting basic strategy. It involves adjusting your bet. When the count is low, you bet low (or even leave the table). When the count is high, you bet high. If the casino could ensure the count was always low, this would be to the disadvantage of the players. It blows my mind that you can deny this.
Yes, a deck with low cards means players who hit on 17 are less likely to bust. But unless the count is extremely low, hitting on hard 17 is still almost always a bad strategy. The house has an inherent edge in blackjack no matter what strategy you play with, even though the house is forced to play with the same strategy every hand. The only way to beat this is by adjusting your bet. There is no clever adjustment to basic strategy that can put the odds in your favor. If you disagree, give me a source, because this is pretty well-known stuff.
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@taoliu3949 "With a CSM, that would mean that the face cards would never come out (there is no 'top' of the deck/shoe)."
No it doesn't. If low cards get put higher up than high cards on average, you will still get some high cards and some low cards, just more high than low.
Your claim that people are more likely to bust if the deck is full of higher cards is false. If you start out getting dealt J9, you will stand. If you start getting dealt 37, you will hit. If you then get a 5, you will hit again. If you then get a 7, you bust. The probability of busting on a given hit is higher if the deck is full of high cards. The overall probability is higher if it is full of low cards.
But for like the tenth time, you continue to ignore the fundamental problem with your analysis: this analysis has already been done. And even when a player knows that the remaining cards in the deck are low, they still suffer a significant disadvantage, more than normal. How do you account for this?
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OK, I've come up with another way of explaining this. We both have conflicting claims, so we will perform an experiment to distinguish between them.
Your claim: When low cards are more likely to get dealt in a game of blackjack, the player has better odds than when high cards are more likely to be dealt.
My claim: the opposite.
To test our claims, we need to actually set up situations where more low cards or more high cards are dealt measure the winnings in each situation. After many trials, if the low-card group wins more, then your claim is supported, and if the high-card group wins more, then my claim is supported.
It turns out that this experiment has already been performed many, many times. If a shoe has more low cards than high cards remaining, then they are more likely to be dealt, just like if you were playing with a rigged shuffler. This happens precisely when the count is low. ALternatively, if the shoe has more high cards than low cards (i.e. when the count is high), then high cards are more likely to be dealt. So we compare the winnings in these two cases.
And what do you know, players win more when the count is high than when the count is low. That's why they bet more on high counts. That's the whole point of the system. From this we can conclude that when low cards are more likely to be dealt in a game of blackjack, the player has worse odds as a result.
Note that it doesn't matter why low cards show up more often, just that they do. This could be because there are more low cards remaining in a conventional shoe, or it could be because a continuous shuffling machine has been rigged. Either way, the result is the same.
What about this explanation do you disagree with?
(And incidentally, it is not true that cards just dealt are equally likely to come up next in order. For one thing, dealers do not usually put cards in after every deal but after a few. More importantly, most machines are actually not very effective at randomizing the deck, and in particular, cards just put in do not tend to go to the top. Some machines with small buffers have actually been exploited by card counters in the past with more success than against a conventional shoe. Some machines do not suffer from this problem, but none are perfect. But none of this is relevant to the rest of the thread.)
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@neumo5005 There is more than one way to define multiplication by infinity. On the extended real line for instance, which is the union of the set of real numbers with ∞ and -∞, 0×∞, ∞×0, 0×(-∞), and -∞×0 are all left undefined. Similarly, 0/0, ∞/∞, (-∞)/∞, ∞/(-∞), and (-∞)/(-∞) are all undefined, as are ∞-∞, ∞+(-∞), (-∞)+∞, (-∞)-(-∞), 1^∞, (-1)^∞ and 0^0. This reflects the fact that these are all indeterminate forms in calculus. That is to say, if we have functions f and g with lim f(x) = ∞ and lim g(x) = 0, the product f(x)g(x) may have no limit, or it may have any limit. We get similar results on the projective real line, which has only a single point at "unsigned" infinity. A very different notion of infinite numbers comes from Georg Cantor, where they are used either to compare the size of infinite sets or to label infinite lists. In these cases, any number (even an infinite one) multiplied by zero equals zero, by definition.
The confusion comes from the fact that the idea of "zero times infinity" is underspecified. "Infinity" is too vague in this context. If we want to know how many elements are in an infinite product of empty sets, the answer is zero. It doesn't matter how many times you combine these empty sets, there will never be anything in any of them. But if we want to find the area of a shape by cutting it into infinitesimally thin slices, we are effectively calculating a sort of "zero times infinity" that clearly must have a positive result, since the shape has some positive area. And indeed it could have any area. Or you could try to calculate the area of the whole plane and get infinity. And there are even more pathological examples where you can't reach any answer at all. So it really depends on context.
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@EEVblog I assume you mean the most isolated major city. There are some extremely isolated cities in the world, such as Hanga Roa, Easter Island; Iqaluit, Nunavut; and Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland. These blow Perth out of the water, but they are also comparatively tiny. Even among "major" cities (depending on the cutoff), there is a lot of competition from Yakutsk, Russia, which is extraordinarily isolated in Siberia. Note that most of these are also capital cities, like Perth.
As an honorable mention, Barrow, AK is inaccessible to virtually everyone by land, but it is another tiny city, it is not a capital, and it is not as inaccessible as Easter Island or Iqaluit.
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Driving in the USVI is a nightmare. The main issues of course are structural, with poor road conditions (narrow lanes, markings inadequate or completely absent, missing fences or grates allowing cattle and chickens to block traffic, etc.), but driving on the left is also a problem. Virtually all of the cars in the USVI are American imports with the steering wheel on the left, so you have to look all the way across the car to see oncoming traffic. And the majority of tourists are American, too. Imagine how many tourists get confused when, while driving in their own country in a car with the wheel on the left and no lane markings, they suddenly discover a van careening straight towards them in the same lane at a clearly unsafe speed?
And to be honest, the BVI basically have all the same problems, but at least then more tourists are British and there is a measure of consistency.
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Gary Baldi All right, think this through. Your position is that if flight cost ten times as much as its current rate, nobody would fly, because nobody is that rich. However, you are the one who pointed out that 45 years ago, flights did cost ten times as much as they do now. So, um, kinda shooting yourself in the foot there.
The airline industry is doing fine. New airlines continue to open and succeed. New planes continue to be made. Yes, a lot of individual airlines struggle; that's always been the case. But your reasoning would also seem to imply that, say, restaurants are going to go away because so many restaurants go out of business. If current prices are unsustainable, then prices will go up, or government subsidies will increase. But they aren't just going to scrap all their planes and close up shop. You have zero evidence for what you seem to consider a self-evident truth.
And you can't just say "something better will come along" than airplanes. Has something better than ships ever come along? We've had those for thousands of years, yet we keep making them. You can't even come up with a plausible replacement for planes, because there isn't one, let alone one in the foreseeable future.
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@samk2266 Instead of reflexively barraging me with conservative talking points, you should do some research from neutral sources. The idea that solar and wind will "never create more than 5% of the power" is so preposterous, they already create far more than that. In the U.S., wind produced 7.3% of our energy in 2019, solar produced 1.9%, and total renewables were 17%. And worldwide, renewables now account for over 25% of energy production. This is all in spite of the lack of funding and heavy resistance to change, as well as substantial subsidies for existing fossil fuel plants.
Coal plants are precisely 0% "cleaner" than they used to be with respect to carbon emissions, which are the problem we are discussing here. Yes, the fly ash and smog are cleaner, but the warming effects are the same.
The claim that hydro power is more environmentally harmful than coal is equally silly and shows you are trying as hard as you can to maintain a specific orientation here rather than evaluating the evidence on its own merits. Dams do harm the environment by interrupting fish migrations, but coal blows pollutants directly into the water, and into the air, and the soil, and warms the entire planet, and comes from massive mining operations that strip the ground or remove whole mountain tops. Which do you think destroys more habitats? Or more human lives? Yes, solar panels require the mining of rare earth elements, and battery storage requires the mining of lithium. But these are not fuels, just components in the finished product that can operate for decades. Are you really going to tell me that over its lifetime, a solar panel will require more mining per kwh than a coal plant? Just think it through.
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