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My city has a festival every year where they have fried food and street carts and I like to treat myself to a bag of the jumbo size cotton candy (ya know, the huge one your parents never let you get as a kid).
A couple years ago I was in line behind a family with 3 small kids and they got a small bag to share between them all. The kids were grumbling about it and how they wanted a big bag. I ordered my jumbo bag and was waiting for my change when I hear the ~6 year old boy say "mommy why can that lady have a big cotton candy and I can't?"
The mom says "someday when you are grown up with your own job and your own money you can buy a huge bag too."
He then told her how it was unfair that I got my own bag and they all had to share theirs. She told him that next time she would go without him and get her own bag and he wouldn't get any if he didn't stop complaining.
I smiled at her as I left and looked at the kid who was glaring at me with pure hatred in his eyes and just smiled at him too and left.
It's great when people actually parent their children. And I love being able to get a jumbo cotton candy all to myself, with only my own sticky fingers in the bag.
I wrote three posts about Benford’s Law and GameStop over at the SS sub. I have compiled them into one post which I would like to put here if Mods can please approve as DD.
Introduction
For a while now, apes have been saying that the prices of GME look very sus, e.g. closing at perfectly round numbers and weird movements intraday. So I wondered what the Benford’s Law test would show if applied to the daily closing prices of GameStop. These days, Benford’s Law is most often used in forensic accounting, e.g. it is used by the IRS to investigate tax fraud and is used a ton by academics to investigate collusion and financial crime in asset prices, fund returns, the LIBOR manipulation, etc. It is not hard evidence of fraud but if a set of numbers deviates significantly from Benford’s Law that is a serious Red Flag 🚩. So in that sense it is a good screening test and widely accepted as reliable if used on appropriate data.
A book I use a lot is one written in 2012 by a supreme authority on Benford’s Law, Mark Nigrini, who put Benford’s Law on the map in the 1990s as a screening tool for fraud detection. The book is called Benford's law applications for forensic accounting, auditing, and fraud detection. This is from the Foreword:
“As you read the following pages, do not be daunted if you aren’t a mathematician in the vein of Benford or Nigrini; you can still tell time without knowing how to build a watch. The important thing is to understand enough to apply these techniques to detect and deter fraud. And by doing so, you are helping make the world a better place.”
Joseph T. Wells, Special Agent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Chairman of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE)
What is Benford’s Law?
Basically, according to Benford’s Law, naturally occurring sets of numbers (e.g. country populations) are not randomly distributed. You might expect them to be, in which case each number from 1 to 0 would have an equal chance of appearing as the leading digit in a number. But it’s not the case. When such sets of numbers are unmanipulated, they stick to a quite strict distribution. The unit of measurement also doesn’t matter (proven by Roger Pinkham in 1961), whether dollars, centimetres, quantity of leaves on trees, or whatever. This is Benford’s Law. It will not work for made up numbers or randomly generated numbers, say by a computer. But it will always apply to naturally occurring sets as lon
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Feels good man
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