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Comment by throwa356262 | Hacker News Reader

And just like that, smoked Salmon became popular again :)

BTW, did you knew municipalities can easily measure fluctuations in drug usage by testing the sewage water? In fact, sometimes they can see clear differences between different parts of the city.

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> BTW, did you knew municipalities can easily measure fluctuations in drug usage by testing the sewage water?

Yep. Not just drugs are monitored this way, but also the spread of infectious diseases. That can lead to sometimes pretty weird findings - for example, polio virus is supposed to be extinct, but every so often it shows up in sewage monitoring of major German cities [1]. The cause most likely are people (tourists and immigrants) from Africa and Asia that got an attenuated virus-based vaccination in their home country shortly before they came here.

Covid is, at least in Bavaria, also part of the regular monitoring schedule [2], Austria monitors for Covid, RSV and influenza [3].

[1] https://www.aerzteblatt.de/news/erreger-der-kinderlaehmung-i...

[2] https://bay-voc.lgl.bayern.de/abwassermonitoring

[3] https://abwasser.ages.at/de/

Is data like that sold anywhere? I wonder if there’s an analytics market for profiling neighborhoods based on sewage water content now. If my browser history wasn’t already rock bottom, that’s a new low for the ad market

The European Wastewater Surveillance Dashboard:

https://wastewater-observatory.jrc.ec.europa.eu/#/content/th...

Also, Wastewater analysis and drugs — a European multi-city study:

https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/pods/waste-water-ana...

Fun fact: if you sign up for many online casinos or betting sites they will indeed use Google Streetview to lookup your house to estimate how much money they might extract from you.

that's wild, do you have a source? curious to know more

A friend working in the business told me. I don't think it's a strategy the casinos would publicly disclose.

Streetview and a visual model seems excessive when there's plenty of databrokers straight up selling your mortgage info and shopping habits (from CC purchases)

Seems quite cumbersome to do this manually when you can get purchasing power assessments at street-level granularity from data brokers.

You would think so, but you have to remember that customer profitability is exponentially distributed. I e., one addict gambling away their and their loved ones life savings is worth more than hundreds or thousands of regular players. Thus, focusing on acquiring and retaining such addicts makes perfect economic sense. So much that individual sign-ups are analyzed down to Facebook stalking and Streetview googling. Much in the same way the addicts hunt for the big win which will make them rich do the casinos hunt for the whales that will fund the whole office for months.

I know that people who work for at least one non-profit, use Google Streetview to see how much money they should ask people for.

Their strategy is more in-depth than that, and they’re more accurately looking for sharps. Somebody working minimum wage in a trailer betting for “their guy” isn’t a problem, even if they’re not going to make the book much money. Somebody working minimum wage in a trailer smurfing for a sharp can be a huge problem. You can read first hand info from professional bettors, books don’t like to reveal their risk management methodology for obvious reasons.

I feel like looking up official county records which show outstanding mortgage terms and purchase price and permit applications would be a better resource than an image from google street view. You should be able to figure out people's mortgage payments just based on the info on homes.com

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