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VolenteHawk

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by VolenteHawk

  1. On 7/27/2020 at 8:16 AM, Longhorn said:

    Greg Kelley can make this team better, whether there is a season or not. He isn’t going to help the team by starting at OLB.

     

    His story, what he went through, leading the team through a “life isn’t always fair, but suck it up and take control of what you can can control” mentality is what he brings to a team. His work ethic, his fight, his humbleness, his professionalism, etc... are what a team needs in and off season.  Give him a locker, give him #49 or some other shitty number and get him positively influencing the team.

    Yeah, I’d have went and watched him work out and added him outside the walk on process if you had to. He’s been through actual adversity in life, not “we’re trailing Iowa State with only 8 minutes left” adversity.

  2. 11 hours ago, BradInATX said:

    I didn't see any of this and we were out and about. We ate on the patio of Tumble 22 at peak lunch (12:30) and there was one other couple out there, 40 feet from us. The curbside at Tacodeli in the same strip mall was insane, but I didn't see any crowds at any place from River Place to Allandale to Round rock and back. 

    Austin has been pretty on-point lately, thus the nice sharp downward trend we're seeing. Good stuff.  Also Tumble 22 is worth the hype. Really good.

    I’m guessing you didn’t glance at the Twin Peaks parking lot as you drove by...that place looked like a total shitshow when I passed it yesterday.

    It seems like most places that are busy are the neighborhood B&G type places. You close a couple dive bars and those regulars congregate in whatever joint is close and meets the 51% criteria.

  3. 3 hours ago, Orange&White said:

    My 'olds" is kicking in and about 18 months ago, I started needing readers to read most any text. I can still see my golf ball clearly from 265 yards as it rolls into the sand trap and I definitely have no issue reading signs on the highway.

    I also just got notice from the DMV that my license is expiring in September and I have to physically go renew it.

    I am unable to find a clear answer to how reader glasses effect my drivers license?

    If I have to use the readers to read the eye chart, it seems like they will put something on my license that says I have to wear glasses to drive. However, if I wear readers while I am driving, that would immediately put myself and every single person near me on the road in imminent danger because I wouldn't be able to see shit outside of the car.

    Is there some sort of process that I need to go through? Do I need to go to an eye doctor to get something that says I can see road signs clearly and readers would make it dangerous for me to drive? Is the eye chart such that I won't actually need the readers to pass the test?

    If I am going to be required to go to an eye doctor, I'd rather do that before going and wasting half  fucking day at the DMV only to be told to go do that and come back and waste another half a fucking day.

    It seems odd that there is no clear direction on this online.

    Thoughts and ideas? Thanks in advance.

    If you need readers you're aren't going to pass the eye test.  You probably need to hit the eye doctor for real glasses.

  4. 5 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

    Ah. How soon we forget all the naysayers. Amazon doesn't make profit! Why would anyone buy online and wait 3 days for it when I can get it locally!

    It’s just an online bookstore! This valuation is crazy!

    • Like 1
  5. 23 hours ago, justhookit said:

    I’ve read a few articles on that subject and mostly it seems like it’s too early to do that kind of real analysis. Some deaths like accidents are certainly down but on the other hand other types of death are up because people aren’t going to the emergency room as often for heart attack/ stroke type things. I’m sure we will see Facebook posts in the coming months that Covid is saving lives!

    I read a study (that I can’t immediately find now) that estimated that up to 1/3 of excess deaths could be from people delaying going to the hospital for treatment of serious health issues. They used a couple of papers, one a delay of care to outcomes study, and some death rate compares for other diseases.

    My impression was that I didn’t know if the study would stand up to peer review rigor, but it also wasn’t crazy.

  6. 8 hours ago, Larry T. Spider said:

    How much were you or other pros you know putting on games? Always been curious about that. 

    I know it’s probably too much to type out but I would love hear about your process for betting college basketball. It does seem like the place you could find some bad lines with the sheer number of games on the board each day.

    For an off the shelf college basketball game where I thought I had a regular edge, I was betting $500 per game.  For major conference stuff that was no big deal and could be done in one bet at one book (find best number, pull trigger).  For smaller conferences most shops would limit you more than that, so you might have to bet it in a couple of spots.  You also might wake up to $50 limits on any given morning, depending on your success rate.

    I'm an an analytics guy, so my process for betting was actually kind of boring.  I had a spreadsheet with power ratings, so I'd make numbers for every game before they came out, compare the opener to my number, if two teams I had strong conviction on were playing I'd immediately bet it...I'd dig deeper into the others, sometimes the market is right and I'm wrong, obviously. How the spreadsheet was made is probably more interesting.  In the preseason, I'd use the previous years stats to assign a number to each team Big 6 + A10 + Missouri Valley (arbitrary but it took about an hour per team).  Anybody can do that, of course, the trick in making the numbers "good" is being able to figure out who was a basket better or worse than they "should" have been the year before.  What I was doing was finding outliers in certain numbers that don't actually represent a skill, even though most people think they do.  My favorite example (that people still argue about) is 3P% defense.  We all grew up with coaches yelling at us to defend harder/contest/whatever, so it's intuitive to think defense has a lot to do with 3s going in or not...but with very few exceptions it's actually random.  A team that is otherwise properly rated by the market but has been extremely lucky or unlucky on 3s going in against them was a gold mine...for every team that you find a couple of points of value in vs the market, that's worth thousands of dollars. Sadly, you could use KenPom's data to make better numbers today than I ever had, get every team, and spend less time than it took me to rate Creighton in 2001. If I could pick one way that KP fucked me the most it was teaching people to adjust properly for tempo. We all understand now that having Florida State +5 against Virginia is WAY different than against North Carolina, but not many people were thinking that way 20 years ago.  And that rat bastard showed everybody and for free.  In the early days he actually adjusted this too much, and systemically overrated ultra slow teams.

    My NFL style is a little more intuitive to people, once you explain the logic to them.  Recovering a fumble is a pretty random event.  Some crews call more penalties in the secondary.  A team's SOS is better measured by projected win totals than last year's records (ESPN still fucks this one up every year).  Third down conversion is dictated far more by how successful you are on 1st and 2nd down than by teams having vastly different ability to convert 3rd and longs. The other area I made money was by not overreacting to injury moves, that's almost universally overrated. If Patrick Mahomes misses a game and whatever warm body starts, I'd move that game about 8 points.  People think "8 points isn't much, Patrick Mahomes is the MVP", but NFL teams are so jammed together that it's actually a shitload.  Hence my Dolphins love last year.  You can quibble with the difference between Josh Rosen and Ryan Fitzpatrick, I didn't even calculate it last year...I just saw the number come down and go back up 6 points different and immediately knew that was wrong. The fact that they beat the Patriots in week 17 to give the Chiefs the 2 seed capped my love affair with that team.

    Full disclosure: I was successful but never moved worldwide lines.  That's some baller shit.

    • Like 1
  7. On 7/8/2020 at 12:41 AM, Larry T. Spider said:

    Hold on, we have a pro sports bettor on here? We should all be rich by now.

    I did it professionally for almost 15 years.  Getting busy with kids at the same time that analytics on the internet drastically tightened up lines eventually made my edges small and rare enough that it was just too much work for too little return.  I'll still handicap season win totals and bet some of those, and I'll still grab bad numbers when I see them (ironically MLB seems to have the most these days even though it was the first market to be heavily influenced by analytics).  I also still do the NFL Super Contest, but those are static lines so it's different.

    I was mostly a pro football and college basketball guy, but with 2 or 3 internet accounts and about $50...you can have nearly every statistical advantage I enjoyed for the 2000s across both sports, so in practice everybody now has that info for essentially free. The two sports that were my wheelhouse are now too efficient for me to reliably beat because of it. I'm not sure the NFL is beatable at all if you're betting the pre-flop spreads...it's bordering on perfectly efficient unless you figure something out before the market.  As one example, last year the market reaction from the Rosen -> Fitzpatrick move was insane, so for several weeks I was on the Dolphins at huge plus numbers until they figured it out.  The Dolphins were 40% of my season long individual game bets last season, which shows you how little conviction I had in every non Dolphins game.

    • Like 1
  8. I’m a member at Great Hills, but if you ran the numbers for Balcones and couldn’t make it work, GH is worse than that. The advantages of being at a club are you can walk 9 (or 7 at GH) after work by yourself for “free” and range balls/practice areas are “free”...so you very quickly don’t need to find 5 hours to play. Great Hills also has, by far, the best playing membership in town. There have been years I’ve been a 2 during the club championship and not even been in the championship flight.

    But from a strict financial perspective, you have to play so much to make it work that it pretty much never will. That’s pretty much universally true of private courses.

  9. 8 hours ago, UT_OB1 said:

    I'm not sure it would have been possible to shut down Texas or the US enough to choke the virus out, with our size, how spread out we are, and how much travel we have coming in and out.  We know now that there is a large percentage of people that get and spread the disease without showing any symptoms.  At just the Texas level, if we absolutely ground everything to a halt and "stopped" it during the March time frame, it just takes one person escaping NY or traveling from FL or Mexico to light it off again.  On a national level, a lot of people were all freaking the fuck out because milk, beef and pork prices were rising.  To shut down at the level to truly kill it off would cause anarchy.  I don't think people grasp what is required to keep goods produced, hospitals stocked, and the supply chain running to get those goods to everyone.  And even if we managed to do that, again, it just takes one flight in or travel from across one of our borders to light it all off.  Look at where Mexico is at now.  If we were 100% virus free, does anyone think we could realistically keep it from coming up from Mexico?

     

    8 hours ago, Burt Macklin said:

    How do you think that ever would have been possible? Even if we could have theoretically enforced a strict enough lock down for long enough to choke the virus out (we couldn’t have), as soon as you open travel again, people will bring the virus here and ti would spread like crazy again, just like it did the first time. 

    Yeah, there is nowhere in the world that demonstrated it possible to do this. My bad.

  10. 7 minutes ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

    In my opinion, if we hadn’t shut down in March it would have been much worse, with schools and mass gatherings open until June. That would have been criminal.

    I’m not talking about school closings and big gatherings, those were positive. I’m talking about shelter in place without making the lockdown drastic enough to actually choke the virus out...that policy was just kicking the can down the road.

    And whatever numbers are in your head for what the first wave would have been like, hang on...we ain’t peaked yet.

    • Like 1
  11. 6 hours ago, drt said:
      Reveal hidden contents
    Prevalence of Self-Reported Obesity by State and Territory, BRFSS, 2018
    State Prevalence 95% Confidence Interval
    Alabama 36.2 (34.6, 37.9)
    Alaska 29.5 (27.0, 32.2)
    Arizona 29.5 (27.8, 31.3)
    Arkansas 37.1 (35.1, 39.1)
    California 25.8 (24.8, 26.9)
    Colorado 23.0 (21.9, 24.0)
    Connecticut 27.4 (26.2, 28.7)
    Delaware 33.5 (31.7, 35.4)
    District of Columbia 24.7 (22.9, 26.5)
    Florida 30.7 (29.1, 32.3)
    Georgia 32.5 (31.2, 33.8)
    Guam 29.8 (26.6, 33.3)
    Hawaii 24.9 (23.6, 26.3)
    Idaho 28.4 (26.3, 30.5)
    Illinois 31.8 (30.2, 33.4)
    Indiana 34.1 (32.6, 35.6)
    Iowa 35.3 (34.2, 36.5)
    Kansas 34.4 (33.2, 35.6)
    Kentucky 36.6 (34.9, 38.4)
    Louisiana 36.8 (34.9, 38.7)
    Maine 30.4 (28.9, 31.9)
    Maryland 30.9 (29.8, 32.1)
    Massachusetts 25.7 (24.3, 27.2)
    Michigan 33.0 (31.8, 34.2)
    Minnesota 30.1 (29.2, 30.9)
    Mississippi 39.5 (37.8, 41.2)
    Missouri 35.0 (33.3, 36.8)
    Montana 26.9 (25.2, 28.5)
    Nebraska 34.1 (32.9, 35.3)
    Nevada 29.5 (27.1, 32.0)
    New Hampshire 29.6 (27.9, 31.4)
    New Jersey 25.7 (23.3, 28.2)
    New Mexico 32.3 (30.7, 34.0)
    New York 27.6 (26.7, 28.6)
    North Carolina 33.0 (31.2, 34.8)
    North Dakota 35.1 (33.3, 37.0)
    Ohio 34.0 (32.7, 35.3)
    Oklahoma 34.8 (33.1, 36.6)
    Oregon 29.9 (28.4, 31.4)
    Pennsylvania 30.9 (29.4, 32.5)
    Puerto Rico 32.9 (31.2, 34.7)
    Rhode Island 27.7 (26.0, 29.5)
    South Carolina 34.3 (33.0, 35.6)
    South Dakota 30.1 (28.1, 32.1)
    Tennessee 34.4 (32.5, 36.3)
    Texas 34.8 (32.8, 36.8)
    Utah 27.8 (26.7, 28.9)
    Vermont 27.5 (25.9, 29.2)
    Virginia 30.4 (29.1, 31.6)
    Washington 28.7 (27.6, 29.8)
    West Virginia 39.5 (37.8, 41.3)
    Wisconsin 32.0 (30.2, 33.8)
    Wyoming 29.0 (27.3, 30.8)

    It's not in the margin of error.  Texas is significantly fatter than NY, NJ, MASS etc, as are most southern states.  Has been a trend as long as the CDC has been keeping stats on it.

    I'm not sure what your hard on for the NE is, but I don't agree that our current surge in Texas was always going to hit these numbers.  We fucked up by not mandating masks and keeping reasonable social distancing restrictions in place, and then doubled down by moving through reopening stages at a fast enough rate that it wasn't possible to quantify the effects of the changes we made.

    Texas certainly moved too quickly through reopening phases, but I don’t know how much that has to do with the current numbers...if that is the primary reason it makes California pretty hard to explain, for example. I think dcar is right. While we shut down places that didn’t have much of an outbreak (like Texas and California) for good reasons, it was too early. So we took 8-10 weeks of good compliance to SIP (compliance that we’ll never get again) and, while building up supplies and learning, we created pent up demand to do something, anything social.

    Mask usage and social distancing compliance has been extremely high in my observation for several weeks now, but it took the outbreak to get there. Without a significantly harsher lockdown March to May, Texas was always going to have a pretty harsh first wave, we just waited until now to get there.

  12. 48 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

    Have you seen any places where the sick leave rolls over? I have not, but granted I'm only familiar with a handful of companies with these plans. I've seen it reset at all of the places I've worked with or talked to about it.

    In Austin, National Instruments does it this way...there is an accrual limit, but it's a lot (several years worth).

    Vacation used to roll over similarly with a generous cap, then a less generous one, and as of a couple years ago doesn't at all.

     

  13. 13 minutes ago, Wally Pryor said:

    Adler and tribe having an emergency meeting on Thursday.  They're likely (likely? stupid me) to vote for a 35-day shutdown of the city starting next Tuesday.  And then Abbott enters the picture.  

    Yay.   Such fun times. 

    https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/atx-council-to-discuss-plan-to-shutdown-city-to-lower-virus-level-reopen-schools  to then allow for the school year opening. 

    We did that for longer when there were fewer infections, and it didn’t do much other than delay our first wave. They’re gonna need the essential business list to be far shorter, which I don’t think anyone will have the stomach to do.

    • Like 2
  14. 6 hours ago, Gardner Barnes said:

    But shit like this is going to force the hand of governing bodies when 1/6th of them get sick in a month. If these fuckers could just stay home for like 6 weeks we could have things this fall - like school. And football. And restaurants. And bars.

    We couldn’t squash it with a 6 week SIP when there were a fraction of the cases. We’ve had all the good compliance to lockdowns that we’re getting out of young, healthy people.

    Buckle up.

    • Like 1
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