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Betting on Y2K Disasters
Doug Muth writes "According to
this article in Wired News, there is a company that is taking bets on which disasters will occur when Y2K comes around. Think a commercial airliner will go down? That's 300-1 odds. Think armageddon will occur? That's 1,000,000-1 odds, though even if you win, I think collecting on that bet would be a bit pointless."
Not quite right... Armageddon maybe has better odds than YOU winning the lottery, but certainly has no better odds than SOMEONE winning the lottery somewhere in the world. The event of someone winning the lottery in fact has happened quite a few times in men's history; Armageddon still hasn't.
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"On Discworld, it is clearly recognized that million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten." - Science of Discworld, p. 227
Ever heard the saying, "Lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math?" This is even better.
I spent a long car trip with a friend trying to scheme up ways to make money off these idiots worrying needlessly about the year 2000. Most of the ideas were discarded as "too evil". Now, I wish we had a little less conscience.
I love the reasoning of some of these people:
"Obviously, the Creator uses a base-10 number system and He likes big round numbers. So you would really want to avoid being in, say, mobile home number 1,000,000 on 1/1/2000." (paraphrased from Dilbert)
Our date system is arbitrary. I really doubt that aliens or the Messiah pay a whole lot of attention to it. Life is a lot less exciting than we imagine it to be sometimes.
200-1 that more firearms are sold in the US in December 1999 than December 1998???????
Is there any reason why this would NOT happen?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I'll give 50 to 1 odds that someone makes a submission to slashdot on Jan. 1, 2000, with the title "First Article! I'm l33t!!" :)
Juiced? Or Not?
I'm sure Jesus would be REAL happy to hear that people are gambling over his return.
I'm sure they could cast lots over his clothes too...oh wait... been done. nevermind
I post links to stuff here
There's a 1,000,000 to 1 chance of Armageddon? Am I the only one that thinks it worrying that apparently Armageddon at the turn of the millennium has better odds than winning the lottery?????
- The FAA traffic monitor system runs on a different clock than the typical mm/dd/yy, or the unix 32-bit clock (and I though that it's turnover was due before the end of this year, or about this time next year), such that Y2K should not affect these.
- Most airlines are requiring their Y2K-readiness exec to fly on Jan 1, 2000, prompting these execs to make absolutely sure that they're ready.
Sure, ther will bound to be problems with the air*PORT* system, with schedules going bonkers, lost luggage, and that stuff, but I doubt this will cause the loss of life. If anything, I'd give an airplane crash 10,000:1 odds, and move the bank failure to about 10:1 odds. The banks don't directly have anyone lives in their hands, and many of the smaller bank chains have been slow to implement Y2K as 'it's not that big a problem'.I'll still be getting a written proof of my account status in early Dec, though my bank has promised Y2K complience.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
It would crack me up if their server didn't survive y2k. :)
/. reader who's sig jokes about the number of suckers born each minute? :)
But seriously, there is too much betting and gambling everywhere. The Montreal casino brings in something in the range of 300 million dollars a year (or is it per quarter?) to the government that runs it. Gambling's primary purpose is as a 'voluntary tax' in places where its government run, or just pure profit to privately owned gambling areas. They know you have little chance of winning. Lottery is a huge gamble that every week pulls in millions for nearly every government that runs it. The bigger the jack pot, the more suckers that put their money in.
Put a loony (canadian dollar) in a bottle every morning. After a while you'll have one the lottery, because you'll have hundreds of dollars in loonies stocked up.
Otherwise you're just throwing that money out.
As for gambling on problems at y2k? Aliens landing? Armageddon? Heheheheh. You realise people will just look at the odds and hedge their bets?
Who's that
OFTC: By the community, for the community
It might be a sure thing, but at 1-1,000,000 odds that the world WON'T end, you wouldn't make all that much money in the process. If Bill Gates were to bet his entire net worth on the world not ending, he could only make less than $90,000 on the deal.
For more information, click here.
Armageddeon: 1,000,000-1 that the world will end on 1 January 2000.
:)
This looks like the best bet to me. If you bet that it WONT end, you win. If you lose, and the world DOES end, you don't have the pay the bastards back
Roughly 2/3 of the world will hit midnight
before I get to celebrate. If lots of problems
pop up, will Americans start to lose it before
midnight our time?
Ever notice how American cities have riots
after the local team wins the championship?
Alien captain: Navigator, land us in the prime spot on Earth
Alien navigator: How about Washington, Sir, the centre of power in the developed world?
Alien captain: No, actually, I was thinking about that large dome thing built on that wasteground near the Blackwall tunnel -- you know, the one with all the nasty fumes from the nearby industrial works.
Alien navigator: Righty ho, Sir. Beginning our descent now...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Banks running NT crash: 10:1
Microsoft blames the crash on time's "exceptional and in-depth knowledge of date manipulation on NT workstations": 5:1
Odds of Armageddon on Jan. 1st: 1,000,000:1
Odds of finding one sober person when the Armageddon comes: 1,000,000,000:1
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Although the type of "oh, the millenium doesn't finish until 01/01/2001" pedantry generally irritates me intensely (look, we're all going to get very drunk whatever, OK, pedant? If you really want to you can stay at home and sulk, just don't expect everyone else to join in) in this case it could be quite interesting if the law became involved.
More information on this tricky topic can be found at the US Naval Observatory, or alternatively from Douglas Adams, who explains things much better than I could.
Actually, the FAA system runs on an IBM S/370 machine with software written in the 1960s. An effort to re-write the whole system was scrapped after 10 years and tens of millions of $. An article in Computerworld described the system as so antiquated that the wires literally crackled from age.
If re-writing the system was so difficult, I wouldn't be surprised if fixing it for Y2K wasn't carried out successfully. See, the people who issue these compliance statements are lawyers or MBA biz execs. Typically, they have no clue about what OS, software, etc. constitutes the system and what exactly the problems are.
As for the airline execs flying on Jan 1, 2000. I know a programmer at American Airlines who chuckled and said there was no way he would fly. Airlines don't handle the scheduling and path determination of flights - collision prevention is done by the FAA (read above.)
Keep in mind that the FAA system doesn't have to schedule 2 planes flying opposite each other - simply having a non-working or disabled system can cause a crash. In today's news - a pilot went down the wrong runway and crashed into a construction zone. I would hate to imagine what would happen if the central system went down and you had 100s of planes flying around without any guidance.
I bet that a lot of people are going to run around in the streets like headless chickens, waiting for an apocalypse that doesn't happen (they don't even realize the Julian calendar is fundamentally screwed up, and 2000 isn't even 2000). The rest will have something that doesn't work (I already know my neat 4-head stereo VCR from 1992 won't handle Y2K, meaning I'll have to stop all my advance taping - oh, wait, in 7 years of owning it I have yet to tape anything - never mind!). There will be a few minor glitches, I'm sure - but I think for the most part the world will just keep on chugging along.
Me? I work for an insurance company, and I'm in charge of the desktop remediation. We've tested, and tested, and tested - and at this point every known element in our network is A-OK. I'm sure some user goofed up a spreadsheet date function or something, but we'll find out on Monday and deal with it then. The mainframe was fixes a year and a half ago. We already have a generator - it's tested, too. Ergo, I'm not worried.
Maybe I should go take some of those bets...
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
10) IRS doesn't manage to complete remediation efforts. On second thought...
b leh inadvertently trip button marked 'Doomsday Device', unable to blame End of World on Bill Gates
9) IRS manages to complete remediation efforts
8) Hotels booked solid, Antichrist's family forced to sleep in a manger
7) The election of anyone currently running for the presidency of the United States
6) Electrical power fails on Jan 2cd when survivalists simultaneously switch off their kerosene generators
5) The Artist Formerly Known As Prince realizes the futility of a career entirely based on "1999", goes insane, burns down World Trade Center in Minneapolis, gets bodyslammed by Gov. Ventura
4) Rising mound of Y2K memorabilia towers over United States, topples, raises sea level 2 feet when it falls into the Pacific, drowns Antarctic penguins and Tokyo
3) Feuding geeks arguing over merits of KDE/Gnome/EMACS/vi/GTK/Motif/GNU/Linux/*BSD/blah/
2) God certifies the Universe Y2K-compliant, inadvertently forgets nearby meteor storm, is sued by rampaging trial lawyers, points out Acts of Me exemption clause
1) Entire planet shuts down when Jan 1st is declared World Hangover Day
We want endless gardens of data, where the bits can flower, flourish and reproduce. -- Andy Mueller-Maguhn
Looks like I'm going to make some money. They're taking a US firearms sales increase at 200-1 odds. US firearms sales are already up a few percentage points over last year. Even if December sales are relativly static, I'm sure the last rush of nuts will pull up December sales.
And at those odds, it's better than the RH IPO.
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