How Big Data and Poker Playing Bots Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling

From The Kernel:

In his new book, The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling, Adam Kucharski details how trying to understand dice games led one mathematician to develop probability theory, how one of the first wearable computers was designed to covertly predict the fall of a roulette ball, and how poker-playing bots are advancing more quickly than we think. As he

How to Get a Job In Venture Capital

In a 2014 post* I introduced the writer thusly:

And now Mr. Turck (*"Partner at FirstMark Capital. Previously, Managing Director at
Bloomberg Ventures and before that, co-founder of TripleHop
Technologies, acquired by Oracle....")
In this first paragraph of a post from last September I don't think he was talking specifically about Marc Andreessen but...

Playing “fake VC” (or the portfolio

Bonhams Auctioneers Has Allegedly Installed Sprinklers To Douse Homeless Outside the Building

It seems they got the idea from the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
Now, the auctioneers may think they are offering the homeless a cool, refreshing shower but boy the optics are bad.
From Curbed San Francisco:

SF Luxury Auction House Allegedly Turns Sprinklers on Homeless [Update]
Dousing the homeless with water as a preventative measure is nothing new in San Francisco 


Potrero Hill's Bonhams

Noah Smith: "Economics Struggles to Cope With Reality"

From BloombergView:

There are basically four different activities that all go by the name
of macroeconomics. But they actually have relatively little to do with
each other. Understanding the differences between them is helpful for
understanding why debates about the business cycle tend to be so
confused.

The first is what I call “coffee-house macro,” and it’s
what you hear in a lot of

Questions America Wants Answered: "Is the Jetpack Movement Finally Taking Off?"

From the Wall Street Journal, June 7:

..."Even Google couldn’t make it work. 'The jetpack is a death trap because
the engines go off and you’re dead,' says Astro Teller, the head of X,
the so-called moonshot factory of Google parent Alphabet Inc.
His team dropped the jetpack in favor of a gyrocopter—essentially a
backpack helicopter that descends slowly thanks to a rotor that turns

What’s the point of virtual reality?

If the psychologists are correct that the mind eventually accepts as real what is actually just virtual or imagined,* one natural endpoint is to use the technology to indoctrinate children to look up to me. In more ways than just physically.
And there will be no more back talk, short ones.

From techcrunch, May 26:

VR needs content if it’s to be more than a flash in the early adopter pan. But 

On the productivity puzzle: Does business investment explain it all?

Following up on last week's "Productivity Growth: It's the Investment, Stupid".
James Pethokoukis at AEI's Ideas blog, June 10:






This, I would venture, is a pretty illuminating econ chart. It comes from the White House econ team.
Productivity growth has been glacial since the end of the Great
Recession. And a collapse in “capital intensity” plays the biggest role.
From the CEA’s Jason