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$33 Million In Poker Winnings Seized By US Govt
An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times story reports that, 'Opening a new front in the government's battle against Internet gambling, federal prosecutors have asked four American banks to freeze tens of millions of dollars in payments owed to people who play poker online. ... "It's very aggressive, and I think it's a gamble on the part of the prosecutors," Mr. Rose said. He added that it was not clear what law would cover the seizure of money belonging to poker players, as opposed to the money of the companies involved.' Many players are reporting that their cashout checks have bounced."
First, you ahve no garuntee you will get paid.
second, you ahve no way of knowing if it's fair.
You can skew the odds 10% in the houses favor, and no one would notice. probably more.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Remember, Obamas laughable speech a few days ago?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/us/politics/10obama.html
Is this the US GOVT. response? Please Obama, stop making yourself look like a fool.
Explain to me what skill makes that next card be a queen and not a fucking deuce? I'll wait.
The skill is in recognizing:
The cards themselves are random. Every play carries some element of risk, which is why they're called bets. But a skilled player will make good bets -- the ones where the odds are in his favor -- and avoid bad bets. It takes skill to know which is which. This is more or less how insurance works, too: an insurer doesn't know whether or not any given house will burn down, but he can estimate the risk and if he's good at his job, he'll charge just enough in premiums to come out ahead in the long run.
You're welcome.
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plenty of evidence to suggest strong military actions dating from 1995 forward
Yes. In fact, having admitted in the first war that Iraq under Saddam was criminal we never should have stopped until he was removed.
There were legitimate reasons for the Iraq war without bringing oil into the mix.
Yeah, but we didn't use any of them. If we had we'd have invaded before 9/11 and had an obvious humanitarian mandate.
a legitimate reason can be illegitimate after the fact when we find out more
No, it's an illegitimate reason that appeared legitimate. It happens, but there's no need to sugarcoat it.
Hans Blix ... no WMDs, ... misleading ... reports ... UN security council ... previously declare destroyed munitions ... banned chemical weapons machinery ... agriculture chemical processing facility ... weapons production ... leading ... war ... proof of illegal ... and so on.
Yeah, it's like FOX news all over again.
If we needed a reason to get rid of Saddam it was his continual gassing of the Kurds, or any of umpteen other well-documented murder sprees in his capacity as leader of Iraq.
The shit you're repeating, while technically true that most of those incidents happened, was happening all along and nobody cared until they decided to invade, then they took the usual diplomatic push-back by a tyrant against supervision and declared it to be plans for ... exactly the same low-level genocide we'd been fine with for years, but now we care!
At the time the US wanted to goto war with Iraq, [...] It wasn't until after the war that we found our understanding to be so far off base.
Convenient - you want to go to war with someone and all the evidence your special hand-picked teams can find point to reasons for war. It's not until you realize the war isn't over in a month or two that you start to question the rest of their advice...
It was all an obvious lie, imho. We'd always had enough reasons to justify war with Saddam for moral and security reasons. But these weren't used because it would set bad precedents to be used against us. Instead we're given more of Bush's "Trust me" speeches about how he had all this evidence, and it was great, but we just couldn't see it yet... If we'd have had real secret info even his hinting at it would risk compromising it. If we'd been worried about Saddam, for real, Saddam would've have figured it out during the months that CNN showed us to be running around like idiots talking about this supposed proof and attacked us then.
But so far all I've done is piss on the "reasons" we were given.
The war was never about oil unless ...
No, unless by oil you mean money and power, largely through control of oil.
I think Bush had this image of a quick little war and being welcomed in Iraq as a liberator as the international coalition was seen to be during the first war (until they packed up and left, people unsaved). So I don't think it takes a lot to explain his calls for war. If you think we'll win handily and quickly you don't need to gain as much.
But what does the USA gain from Iraq?
More oil available/less hoarded by our 'enemies', more oil processed by western companies, and more oil sold in dollars.
Even right there it probably enough to make it worth while. Then consider that Bush and his advisors have connections to the companies doing much of the work, getting oil contracts, etc and it's pretty easy to see how they could all be a bit biased.
Then there's the value of Iraq for military bases in the area, and a million little imperialistic benefits.
Oh, and they thought