The group’s activity bears the hallmarks of a longstanding strategy for improving the odds to beat scratch-off games. The approach relies on publicly available data on ticket sales and unclaimed prizes to determine if and when it is advantageous to jump in and buy up tickets, several lottery experts and statisticians told IndyStar.
These public policy vignettes, coupled with Utah’s Covid-19 economic response, income equality, social mobility, and nation-leading social capital, suggest a path forward that beckons others to follow. Those who journey down the path start with the premise that social capital is like a bank account. Communities with abundant social capital make withdrawals and invest in civic virtue to prevent and solve complex problems. As this investment occurs, a variety of positive things happen.
How? Simple: they just need to legally assume absolute power, then use it absolutely. This would have been literally trivial four years ago, when Republicans controlled all three constitutional branches. Now it would take a constitutional hack to even get the Presidency back, and a couple more to reach real power. Let’s walk through the steps. (Content warning: this “very legal coup” will not actually happen.)
Alternatively, we might adopt the “data-driven” approach: let market performance tell you which stocks benefitted most and least from COVID-19. Naively, we could simply look at which stocks/sectors have performed best/worst this year. This is a reasonable starting point but contains a lot of noise because stocks move up and down for all sorts of reasons. A better methodology for understanding how some factor (in our case, COVID-19) affects stock prices is is to compute the beta of the asset returns to the factor. Concretely, we examine the correlation between the daily change in stock prices and the daily increases in COVID-19 cases: if a stock tends to have negative returns whenever COVID cases rise, we may believe that there is some association between COVID and the stock. The nice thing about this approach is that we can remove the effects of as many other variables as we want by introducing them as additional regression variables.
Williams had long prepared for the possibility that a raging wildfire could encroach into his neighborhood in Malibu Park, essentially creating what amounted to a fire station on his own property, complete with 2-inch fire hoses, pumps and 50,000 gallons of stored water.