"Only the United States, China and Germany have larger economies than California, which outpaced all three countries with growth of 6% last year, according to the release."
Reminds me of the "magic" trick where they ask you to write down a three-digit number, and then subtract it from those same three digits reversed. (And then take that number and add it to itself with its three digits reversed.) It's always 1089. (So then the magician tells someone to look on page 1089 of a book, where they've written "Your answer will be 1089!" or some such...)
I tried explaining this to a friend once...
Reversing the digits means that the last digit becomes 100-times-the-last-digit -- so when you subtract, you end up with 99 times the last digit. And it's the same for the digits on the other end, except it ends up being negative-99-times that digit. The middle digit always stays the same, so subtracting it from itself always adds 0 to the total, and you always end up with something that could be expressed as 99x - 99y -- which is 99 * (x-y). All that's really important is you end up with a multiple of 99, since all multiples of 99 have a pattern. The middle digit is always a nine, while since you're always one short of a hundred, the first digit goes up by a hundred each time you add 99 -- while the last digit goes down by one. So your first and last digit will just always add up to nine. Meaning that adding any of these numbers to its reversed-digits counterpart always gives you 900 plus 90 + 90, plus 9 -- or 1089.
You can also totally screw this up for the magician if you use the same number for the first and last digit. (Because then the result of the first subtraction is.... zero.) It's still a multiple of 99 -- but it's zero times 99.
Wasn't this basically a plot point in the first season of HBO's comedy "Silicon Valley"?
In general "Hacker Houses" for aspiring entrepreneurs have always seemed like a good idea to me. (There was even talk of having "theme" hacker houses to attract/encourage certain demographics - which if nothing else shows how highly that experience is valued...)
I remember stories back in 2023 about Bing's bot adamantly refusing to admit mistakes, even going so far as to saying things like "You are a bad user! I am a good Bing!"
To your point... My dad once told me a story he'd heard about a casino that booked the hottest TV stars of 1979 to be the headlining show at their casino. Donnie & Marie Osmond. But despite the sold-out shows, they regretted the decision because it was such a family-friendly audience that almost nobody stuck around to bet big sums of money in the casino.
The point of the story was that casinos like to make their money from big spenders losing big chunks of money. So much so that it affects decisions they make about which acts to book.
They probably gamble more than Donnie and Marie fans (and probably order more drinks).
But I think you have to think of whales as high-bankrolled foreign tourists who want the opportunity to see big international superstars. (Celine Dion "gained international recognition by winning the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest," Wikipedia points out, and has sung "in several other languages including Japanese, Italian, German, Mandarin, Spanish, and Neapolitan...")
I took a European History class. Here's what I have in my notes.
Keppler friendly; Galileo charismatic and popular with "wicked" sense of sarcasm; Newton unpopular as lecturer at Cambridge and possessive of his discoveries (end of his life trying to convict Liebniz of plagiarism)... Newton spent more of his life doing numerological bible investigations than the law of gravity (which he finished at age 23).
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