Xaston

This is not purely true. If the count is significant enough in either direction it can influence your hit/stand/split/double down decisions as well, increasing the % of hands you win. But yes varying your bet size as the count changes is the main edge, by far.

Surely a lot of businesses would love to have to pay rent on less square footage of work space

Is there a quick/easy way to see how many quarters of dividends a cumulative preferred is owed?

I think it's really easy to underestimate the esports thing. I love regular sports and have watched a ton of all the major American ones my whole life. But at this point only 1 of my three favorite sports to watch is a still a "real" one (NFL). There's a certain age of the population that considers esports as legitimate as regular sports, and the amount of the population that was born in a year late enough for them to considers esports as legitimate is the ultimate tailwind. That number is only going up from now till the end of time. And there's so many "mechanics" to the games that are not realistic or possible in regular sports (shoot giant energy balls out of your hands, be an alien, be a robot, be Mario, control multiple entities at once instead of just yourself, have a jet-pack and rocket launcher and exist in the year 2160), that if people who think they are as valid as regular sports, looks around the world of esports enough, they'll find something that connects with them. And because of the nature of it, it will be live on twitch at that very moment at some pretty high level of play. And that sport will be able to have large updates to the game that are as significant (or a LOT more) to what perfect strategy is as pushing the extra point kick back 15 yards would be in NFL or adding the 3 point line in the NBA with regularity if need be to keep the "league" to be as fun as possible to watch and/or play. And in any given geography for regular sports you realistically only have like 5 options (or 0 now but I mean regularly) to watch without adding a lot of friction, you can only watch it live and played at an elite level a small portion of the week (for only whatever season length during the year it's on for, with none outside the season), and those 5 options are still all constrained by the laws of physics and the physical limitations of a human being in ways that esports just are not. If you just like to watch the very best (e.g. pro leagues), you can have all the fun little rituals too for watching them that you do for regular sports and just watch them like that too and not worry about making it not special by oversaturation. But also if you want to be oversatuated you can because in addition to the major leagues with esports you can also easily consume tons of the minor but still pretty expoert play, and practice play between elite players or teams. Just to further illustrate what they can be that you can't really get in a regular game, my favorite esport is kind of like if chess had 3 different sets of unique pieces you could choose from at the beginning of the game (creating 6 different types of unique matchups for the spectator before you even add in the question of who is even playing), and it was both players turn at all times. If you're into the strategy of games something like that is inherently compelling. My second favorite one has ~100 different characters to choose from (where the biggest differences between many of them is MUCH larger than the difference between Shaq and Steph Curry), and is a 5v5 game unlike the 1v1 game that I described at the beginning of the paragraph. This means every game you ever watch of that has an added layer of uniqueness that is literally impossible to recreate in regular sports. And what is going on in the world now just set the timeline on them forward some large amount (how much is tbd), on their battle to draw eyes and openminded brains away from regular sports to them.

I would just say that the ethical considerations for buying such stock are inherently large, so do a bit of soul searching before you buy, because it would be a lot better emotionally than buying now and later realizing you don’t find it ok. Same thing should be done for all investments, just the scale of the pros and cons are larger here so it’s probably worth more contemplation than an average investment.

Last thing I read that I felt I had to suggest to anybody who would listen was Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem trilogy.

I bought some Synchrony preferreds on Monday that seemed like a great deal to me. My first ever purchase of preferred stock.

Nice thread idea. I read about the Iceland data the other day and it made me feel better. This is the first I've heard about the Faroe Islands stuff though so thank you for that.

AZO, MTCH, ITRN, GOOS, XPEL, PAYS

Video games. Everyone under 20 plays video games all the time, boys and girls.