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Discrete vs. continuous sports
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Feb 15, 2023
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There was a little interesting tidbit mentioned in this Freakonomics podcast episode with Michael Lewis regarding statistics in different types of sports:
It's just so much harder to generate good statistics out of a flow sport like basketball or a really complicated sport like football. Baseball, it's very easy to isolate and assign credit and blame on a field and capture it with a statistic.
I've never heard the idea of grouping different sports into "flow" and "non-flow" categories, but it makes a ton of sense. Sports like basketball and soccer have all players in continuous motion doing all kinds of things at once, while sports like baseball are centered around discrete events involving only a few players at a time. Football is more of a mixture of continuous and discrete where there are continuous events (a single play) happening at discrete times (between when the center snaps the ball and when the referee blows the whistle). #sports
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Static vs. dynamic markets
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Feb 12, 2023
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I'm not an economist, but I've noticed there's a fundamental difference between markets where you buy a widely available item, like cookies or clothes or a car, versus markets where the supply is irregular, like buying a house or finding a job (maybe not technically a market, but it follows the same trend). For the former, you can pretty much go to any market at pretty much any time, and you can buy pretty much the same thing. Sure things change a little over time, but it's a fairly static market in that it doesn't really matter when or where you make the purchase. For houses and jobs, the market is more dynamic, where the offerings could be completely different from one day to the next. Plus a buyer can't typically own more than one at a time, so it comes down largely to timing and chance. #money
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College state
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Feb 12, 2023
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That "state" in college sports really makes a difference. Michigan State vs. Ohio is very different from Michigan vs. Ohio State. #sports
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Competent redundancy
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Feb 12, 2023
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At my old job, I wasn't usually the smartest person in the room, but I was often the only person in the room who knew how to do certain things. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because it's good to be competent, and it's also good to be valuable. But it often felt like if I wasn't there, my tasks wouldn't get done. It was a single point of failure.
At my new job, it feels the exact opposite. Not only am I not the smartest person in the room, but the room is also filled with a lot more competent people, and there's beneficial redundancy. If one person is incapable or unable to do something, another person can fill in the gap. #business
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Name brand job
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Feb 9, 2023
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I worked for the army for a long time. People know what an army is, and they know what the army is, but it was always difficult to talk to people about what I actually worked on. "So you blow shit up?" It's hard to put into words how far off that is from reality, but yeah, sure, I blow shit up.
My wife worked for a long time for M&M Mars, the candy company. That was easy to explain. Even if it was hard to explain what she did specifically, everybody knows what M&M's are. There are probably only a few people on earth who aren't familiar with at least one Mars product.
Now that I work for NASA, I feel like I finally have a name brand job. I do some pretty specific things for some pretty specific projects, but everybody knows what NASA is. In fact, a lot of people know more about the project I'm working on than me. #business
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