(April 3, 2018 at 12:55 pm)Tiberius Wrote:(April 3, 2018 at 12:31 pm)wallym Wrote: The post office is losing money overall. And an allegedly significant part of that is the shit deal with Amazon.
I've already pointed out that there is a law which prevents the post office from losing money from these deals. The deal was also reviewed by an independent commission and approved. This has nothing to do with overall profitability.
Quote:Again, going back to poker, if you're losing money overall. And you're barely over breaking even with AA and KK, I would say the money you're losing playing Aces and Kings poorly is why you are losing money. And someone who doesn't think that way would say "No, he's making money with Aces and Kings. You're wrong."
You can't make a statement like that without knowing what the player's other hands were, and more importantly, what the other players had when you have AA and KK. If you have AA and everyone else has shit, even if you slow play them, you aren't going to convince someone to go for a large pot if all they have is high card or a pair. Similarly, if 99% of your other hands were rubbish, and you are terrible at bluffing, then you are losing money because you are terrible at bluffing, not just because you play AA and KK badly. Good poker players don't sit around and lose money hoping that they get AA or KK. Good poker players can turn a shit hand into gold.
Could the post office make more money off the Amazon deal? Certainly. However that's not the reason they are losing money overall, because they are actually profitable in that area. No business should point to its profitable area as a problem, when they are losing money in another area.
Trump is lying when he says that the post office is losing money from the Amazon deal. They aren't. They are actually making money. Whether they could make more money from it is entirely separate from the fact that they are actually making money from it. Trump is lying, plain and simple. You are twisting his words in a laughable attempt to make it seem like he has some kind of advanced understanding, when he just doesn't. He's lying. It's OK if you support the President, I don't particularly care, but you can't be taken seriously as a Trump supporter if you don't admit the guy lies, because at that point you're just deluding yourself.
Re Poker: Most people who play/played poker even a little seriously online the past 10+ years had programs to store all the hand histories and parse the info into a database, then compile the data into useful stats. So when I say 'losing money with AA and KK', I'm talking a large number of AA's and KK's over a significant sample of hands. Knowledgeable players could look at someone's database, see the AA/KK win rates are too low. Then look at the statistics that indicate how they played the hand and determine what they are doing wrong. An easy example is not raising enough with AA. Of course someone slow playing AA preflop is going to have a shit ton of other leaks, because that's a novice mistake. But it was an example that required only a little poker strategy knowledge. But I forgot that when I talk about 'playing AA', I'm thinking in terms of how it was played over 10,000's hands of poker. Not an individual hand in a specific scenario. The key takeaway though, is that a losing player could be winning money with AA despite playing it poorly, and the knowledgeable player would characterize it as "losing a ton of money with AA, and that's why you're a losing player."
I think you probably can know what I'm talking about when I say ^^^. But I bet we lost a bunch of people. Which is also related to the point. Do you explain a bunch of stuff that many people won't understand. Or hit the highlights, even though that's not as accurate an explanation of what is happening?
--
I am well aware Trump lies, obfuscates, misleads, etc... It made him very difficult to vote for. Because you have to guess his true intentions. Hillary had a similar problem. Even Bernie, you had to try and guess how feasible any of his solutions were, because he certainly wasn't going to tell you.
So I look at this situation, and whether you want to call it truth, lie, misleading, whatever, the takeaway is Post office should make a better deal with Amazon.
Contrast with his immigration thing, where he talked about Bad Hombres, but we see some people who've spent their life harmlessly living in the US getting deported. It's the law, and if that's how they are going to do it, that's their prerogative, but it was a lie and an important lie from the campaign to imply they would be left alone.
But that's just how things are. I remember the 2012 elections with "If you like your doctor, you can keep them." Or remember when Mitt said Russia was the #1 geopolitical threat, and Barack said something about the '80s called and they wan their cold war back.' And all the Obama supporters simultaneously jizzed all over eachother. Just open flat out lies for the purpose of winning elections. That's when the new standard was agreed upon in my opinion. The idea that you can say whatever you want. Which again, means we're left guessing at true intentions. And for his part, Trump seemed to have meant more stuff that he said than I thought when it came to campaign promises. Some for the better, some for the worse.
