Hirschman describes emigration as a safety-valve in regulating political stability by providing the most disgruntled citizens a peaceful way out; suppress this vent, however, and you have yourself a time bomb. Without the option or desire to leave, a nation’s only hope for stability is to be able to keep up with the sometimes conflicting demands of its public by progressing and finding compromise at an adaptive rate.

At its core, All Quiet is a collection of stories and little else. Although this may sound like an empty statement, the book is actually remarkable in this regard for its purity when compared to other works of fiction.

The underlying dynamics of the sports betting industry are governed by the same principle as the financial markets: uncertainty stemming from incomplete information. Sports matches are incredibly complex interactions predicated on an (uncountable?) number of minute parameters and initial conditions, making it virtually impossible to deterministically model future events more than a few seconds in advance. Instead, we model this complexity with statistics, assigning probabilities to outcomes as a way of aggregating events and casting this computational irreducibility as “random” probabilistic events.