I'm not dissagreeing with you, just commenting on some details. The ROI on scratchoffs is much worse than anything in vegas. (I recall reading 60-75% but I am at work and can't get on any gambliong web sites.) If this guy is playing the lotto every week he is losing, say 25%, on average every week *including the big wins.* He is not breaking even for any amount of time unless he is very lucky. And I mean Larry-Niven-ringworld-bread-for-luck lucky.
He manipulated his odds a little by only purchasing the scratchoff past a certain number on a roll. If the roll weren't past a certain number, he would go to another store or select another type of scratch off. Evidently he found a pattern where the bulk of the winners are in the middle of end of a roll.
If you had 1 billion dollars and spent it and all your winnings every week on the lottery, you would end up with under 1000 in a year. People overestimate wins and underestimate losses, especially their own.
Yes, that was one of the things I was hoping to point out but it didn't come out as obvious as you put it.
Next time you see this guy, thank him. He and people like him are paying the government so people with some math sense can pay less in taxes.:)
I tell him all the time that the lottery is nothing more then a stupid tax. Perhaps I should just print your post and show him what you think.
That wall is only possible after they put the war on budget.
In short, when the war is off budget, the wall doesn't exist. The spending is deficit spending which means it isn't there to spend otherwise anyways. If that is the reason, there are a lot of people out there being scammed.
I've never been accused of staying on-topic, so what's baseless about the comment on the Iraqi war? It was presented as a quick little war, and the non-oil reasons (terrorists, Saddam, etc) all fall apart when poked at.
There were legitimate reasons for the Iraq war without bringing oil into the mix. And to note, oil from Iraq has never benefited the US even when the left was attempting to make it so by claiming that Iraq's oil money should be paying for the war.
Now it turns out after the fact that a lot of those legitimate reasons were not valid and they were posed because of Saddam's attempts to make it appear that way out of fear of retaliation from it's neighbors. Don't let that sentence confuse you, a legitimate reason can be illegitimate after the fact when we find out more then we knew at the time. What I'm saying is that if everything points to A, then A can be treated as being true until it is proved false. Even people like Hans Blix who came out against the war claiming there was no WMDs, provided misleading statements in his reports to the UN security council that made the world believe they were there. Some of these statements were that previously declare destroyed munitions were showing up and surprise inspection sites, banned chemical weapons machinery that was declared destroyed ended up at an agriculture chemical processing facility in which is wasn't far off from being used again for weapons production. In the month leading up to the war, he showed proof of illegal missile systems, and so on. At the time the US wanted to goto war with Iraq, most of the world leaders believe the same as we did but they didn't agree that war was necessary. It wasn't until after the war that we found our understanding to be so far off base.
The war was never about oil unless you count the secrete oil deals France was making while violating the UN sanctions and using that for leverage. Iraq was cooperating until France issues a proclamation that it would veto any vote for war with Iraq, then they went back to the stall and hide tactics. Some say the corruption surrounding the sanctions and UN oil for food program is what defeated the sanctions and allowed Iraq to posture itself the way it did in the first place. I agree with them and state further that Bush could have never found a reason to invade if Iraq would have been forced into compliance to the 1993 armistice agreement as the sanctions were intended to do.
I will also go further because I know the mindset and customs prevalent of the middle east, and say that 9/11 might not of ever happened if it wasn't for years of Iraq pushing us around and making us look like we were all talk. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the then number Al Qeada official told interviewers that they didn't expect the American response because of how it treated Iraq when in defiance and the response to other Al Qeada attacks.
The problem I has with that part of your statement was the connection to oil. If you want to say scared over bad intelligence, fine. If you wanted to say retaliation for actions that emboldened Al Qeada, or because Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was inside Iraq operating a poison and explosives terrorist training camp with Iraq protecting him, fine. But oil is nothing but an anti-war conspiracy designed to inflame people without addressing any of the facts before, during, or after the war. If you want to claim the war was because Bush was an idiot, I'm somewhat fine with that (although at the time there was plenty of evidence to suggest strong military actions dating from 1995 forward). It's the connection with oil that simply does not exist that I have issues with. Just because it is there does not make it part of the puzzle. We were involved in the middle east before oil was a priority, we will be there long after it is. In fact, we have had relations in the middle east since the beginning of our country Kuwait was a long time ally and port safe harbor and trade and they even allowed Thomas Jefferson's marines to resupply during the invasion into Tripoli to stop the Atlantic pirating on US ships even though Kuwait was part of the ottoman empire too.
Well, to be concise, currently we can't audit offshore casinos and the frozen assets are only for offshore casinos outside our reach. I think this is a little different then the DEA's program in that we have a clear record of what gains are from illicit activities as in payouts for offshore internet gambling sites where as the DEA program used to be everything first. It should also be noted that now the DEA has to show that the items were purchased or paid for with drug money to take.
I understand that. The problem is that he thought he was going somewhere. This could have been much worse as far as gambling addiction goes but the fact that he couldn't grasp that he wasn't making anything more then he normally would have illustrates the type of mental processes people goes though when they gamble.
I have always held the rule-belief that if you couldn't drop the money on something frivolous or in the trash can, then you shouldn't be gambling with it. I'm not anti-gambling but I am anti lottery where they promise money is going to the schools but it generally makes up less the 3-5% of their funding. It's mostly a stupid tax that ignorant people play based around a false hope of something better. Many of the people get a rude awakening when they find their $5 mill jackpot only pays a lump sum of $1.2 mill and the government takes a little more then half of that. This is what a local office pool of 4 employees found out after quitting their jobs thinking they were getting 1 mill a peace to find out it was less then $160K. I look at it as entertainment rather then making me rich. Some people can't grasp the concept of spending $300 to make $100 is a loss and breaking even is not getting ahead. This may be because they are stupid or because the need for hope or winning is so large with them, or because of a number of other reasons I'm not even qualified to suggest.
Nobody is suggesting stopping gambling, just non-state sponsored gambling where taxes aren't being paid. All your moralizing about gambling is totally irrelevant here because the US Gov would be really happy if the addicts would ruin their lives in approved casinos.
Actually, there was no moralizing there. It was just an illustration of how they would get people to follow the laws. And seeing how they only froze payment to the no-state sponsered sites, then you can look at it as directing the gamblers away from those sites and to approved ones.
It's absolute theft to take this money. It belonged to one person, he gave it to another, they gave some back. Now the government decides that like the "house" in a crooked casino we can't leave, we owe a percentage of each transaction to them. For the favour of doing business in their turf.
This is not unlike a regular casino, you have to report your winning and pay taxes on them and if they are over a certain amount (I think about $5 grans) they will take taxes out before you leave the casino.
The rest of your comment I pretty much agree with except the Iraq comment. It's totally baseless and out of whack with reality.
What exactly is the difference between the government of a town owning a library and the people of a town getting together, deciding to build a library, funding the immediate building of the library with town-issued bonds, and paying off the interest on the bonds with town coffers. In one case you have the governing body of an area paying for something through taxes, and in the other you're going through mental gymnastics to pretend the creepy "gov'ment man's hand" isn't on your money.
The government can act autonomously on the people's behalf where the people have to agree within a majority. The one is an act of government creating the socialism where the other is a socialistic act but done by the people and avoiding the definition of socialism with the library having to consistanly ask for funding.
Face it: when a group of people get together, vote, and come to a decision, that's a government. There are times that it works well, and times that it doesn't. Libraries are a classic example where it worked well in the past.
Not really, I voted at my last board meeting and it isn't a government nor is the corporation. Granted it's just a small one but size wouldn't have made a difference. A government is the organization that is the governing authority of a political unit. Voting can be a governing act but not the government.
True but irrelevant since we signed onto the WTO treaty.
And the WTO treaty we signed on to has no provision for the ruling made. That make it un-irrelevant.
The WTO is attempting to enforce a treaty we DID sign. And no they are not making up crap. The US permits remote gambling, but only if you are dealing with US based companies. That is a violation of the WTO treaties. It's not making crap up, it's reading the damn paperwork.
No they are not. The US permits remote gambling only if the server is located within the state the gambling is taking place in and the state allows it through their laws. If a foreign country wanted to operate in the US, they can operate according to US law just the same as all American companies have to. The WTO made shit up about not giving the same access when it is there all along and invented concepts to justify it. Read the damn ruling then read the treaties we have ratified (yes, mere signature isn't enough, ratification has to be present).
Um, the US is attempting to opt out using the morality clause. IE. gambling is morally unacceptable therefore we will not permit it across our border. That's fine, except that the US does permit gambling within it's borders. The WTO correctly ruled that the US can't have it both ways.
That was just one of the multiple defenses given and it gained the most attention. We also claimed it was impossible to force states to regulate this within their border and the WTO treaty has a provision for government structures without autonomous authority like that. There was several other defenses too like protecting against fraud. Again, read the treaty and the ruling.
Article I -- XXVI of the gats section of the Uruguay Round table agreements which set the WTO in motion declares in section 1-3: "In fulfilling its obligations and commitments under the Agreement, each Member shall take such reasonable measures as may be available to it to ensure their observance by regional and local governments and authorities and non-governmental bodies within its territory;" The gist of it here is that the US federal government has no constitutional authority to force states to accept gambling of any kind. It does have the authority to force the states to allow foreign companies access according to their state laws. The WTO court attempted to use section part 3 sections XVI-1 and -2 to override that provision in 1-3 and it had no authority to do so. In fact, section 3-1 under part 1 was specific put there to account for situations like the US is in.
The WTO also stated that the US failed to show it's arguemnt for exception under part 2 Article 14 a and c in which it states (a)necessary to protect public morals or to maintain public order c)necessary to secure compliance with laws or regulations which are not inconsistent with the provisions of this Agreement including those relating to: (i)the prevention of deceptive and fraudulent practices or to deal with the effects of a default on services contracts; (ii)the protection of the privacy of individuals in relation to the processing and dissemination of personal data and the protection of confidentiality of individual records and accounts;
This is obviously problematic because the US supreme court has already ruled that morals can only be enforced that is consistent with the community meaning that only the state and local government has the ability to set standards on morality in the US. Several states have done so which was brought up by the WTO. As regard to C, the Wire Act, the Travel Act and the Illegal Gambling Business Act, are specifically designed for both subsection i and ii. They totally ignored that.
The appellate board then overturned the panel saying that the three US laws were consistent with the morals and public order and that the previous panel had no right to rule on the state laws.
Lol.. I didn't say that at all. I said that they do result in a net flow of funds out which the government should be very concerned about. In otherwords, online gambling should be high on their list just as the trade deficit and possibly other online games along with other things.
However, online games don't really draw the amount of capitol that gambling does so why it most likely should be on the lists of concern, it shouldn't be near the top like the effect of online gambling. We also have to acknowledge that there is a law against the gambling and not games.
A big problem with this is that regulation has to be general and enforceable which sort of contradicts each other. You need specific to enforce regulation but the entire concept needs to be covered when the regulation exists. What we end up with is shady loopholes that less then ethical people can climb through to get around regulation.
Suppose you wanted to end sub-prime lending to low income people. First, you would have to define low income then define sub-prime. If you define low income as people making less then 2/3 the median area income, then it's entirely possible that someone in rural Alabama could qualify when they would be disqualified in New York state. So you define it as a debt to asset ratio, well most well off people pay leans on their property while investing the sum in something paying more then the interest on the lean. This can give the appearance of a high debt to income or asset ratio where the most likely to pay it off could be disqualified but a just over poverty level married couple who own a 20 year old house trailer and a $500 credit card limit would fair better. Combine the two, and poof, you open another can of worms that allow for sliding applications. So now lets define sub-prime. If it is an interest rate below the prime rate for a period of time, then does it include PMI adjustments or not? You can easily take a couple points in PMI in order to negate a down payment and with a sub-prime rate, still be paying more then prime. But the idea is to encourage investment for those who can afford it and not those who can't.
Generally something gets lost in the details and the regulation covers in spirit but doesn't cover all situations and people can take advantage of that. This is often considered corruption even though it is technically legal and not by definition.
You can't enforce what you want the regulation to say if the regulation doesn't actually say it. So while some will follow the spirit of the law, others will bury themselves into a backdoor around it and regulation will eventually lead to corruption or the possibility of it. The bigger issue is that the regulation is there for a reason so it's sort of a chicken and egg concept where rules cause it in response to it being there to cause the rules. And this is all compounded by the complexity of the government attempting to micromanage with regulation as in the example above with eliminating sub-prime loans to risking groups but keeping them availible to encourage investment and development.
I don't know why you got marked insightful. Iraq funding is all borrowed money (deficit spending) and until this year was off budget. That means that if it stopped, the funding would stop and congress couldn't spend it somewhere else.
Obama did put it on budget this year (or is trying to) and if congress had any whit to them, they would take it back off. When it's on budget, the budget ceiling gets raised and when the war stops, the money can be used for something else. The problem with this is that it still is deficit spending and is in large being used to justify deficits larger then it's cost. Congress knows this but is probably going to ignore it and instead of lowering the ceiling, they will just continue to spend "the savings from not spending on the war".
Actually, it goes a little deeper then insurance companies.
Medicare and medicaid pays based on an average costs of the approved treatments in the area. That places the hospitals interest into driving up those costs in order to get as much guaranteed money they can. Insurance companies negotiate based around the same standards and generally attempt to get lower prices but the prices are increased then discounted. This is why insurance pays different for in network and out of network access.
Sure, Insurance is part of the problem but government payments started it and still fuel it. The $100 dollar aspirin is an exaggeration but I know of hospitals charging $40 for one because a nurse has to give it to you and ask the doctor if it's ok first (yea, that's not covered in the already overpriced room and board). But when the government started paying like that, it more or less became a free ride because the more they can jump the averages, the more the government pays. I know a guy with no insurance and basically no way to pay- who broke his ankle and had to get pins placed in. The surgery was considered emergency and billed out at over 15k but they magically reduced the costs to around 2K if he agreed to make payments and kept current with them. I'm sure they didn't operate at a capitol loss by doing that, it probably more accurately reflect the real costs of the surgery even though they might not have pocketed as much profit.
We tried trains remember? They failed big time. The last passenger rail system in America was bailed out by the government (Amtrak) and municipal railways don't cut it unless you have a bunch of skyscrapers where literally thousands of people parking for one building would require shuttle service anyways. Even the New York subways, one of the more used and efficient municipal train networks are government subsidized to some extent.
The main reason trains failed outside of them just becoming to costly to operate was that with a car, you operate on your schedule and not some public transit schedule. That alone can save hours a day in time let alone the benefits of the convenience of it.
Global warming might end up killing us all, but that's a diffuse and abstract concept. The guy pointing nuclear missiles at your city, or launching mortars at your kid is much more concrete.
Global warming won't kill us all, it will kill our grandchildren' grandchildren if it goes down as currently listed. Well, that is unless you start counting storm damage and weather events as "global warming" as if they haven't been around before.
The other is not only much more concrete, but effect the now instead of sometime in the future where others can fix the problem.
What problems did Bush have understanding it and what does this have to do with the current conversation? If your talking about Iraq, they already ceded parts of their sovereignty to satisfy the 1993 armistice agreements. If Afghanistan, then your right, we trampled on their sovereignty because the behaved in a way that undermined the direct and indirect safety of the US. If your talking about extraditing software pirates from Australia or other countries or arresting people when entering the US, then it's up to international treaties and local sovereignty which is already agreed upon.
I'm not sure what your talking about or what it has to do with the situation at hand.
There is no leap of faith. It's against the law for US companies to operate online gambling sites across state borders without specific permission from the state. There is no legal 50 state gambling sites in the US and only the offshore sites can escape US law. The majority of online gambling is done through offshore companies. The winnings seized or frozen was only seized or frozen for winnings from offshore sites.
The story/article and a little attention to the situation is all that is needed.
Most libraries except for the library of congress is funded by bond, grant, and private donation, rather then the government. This is where the people collectively decide to fund it by vote and not the government.
In early days, libraries were all funded privately, then when that started drying up, bond issues and grants backed by bonds were placed on the ballots in order to fund them. It is still true to this day with the exception of a few places and is certainly true in my county. This differs from socialism in that the people themselves provided the funding rather then the government owning the libraries and finding them. Very few libraries are actually owned by the governments. They are usually a trust in their own and the government has a share in it in order to allow certain laws to apply.
I think your forgetting the differences between state and local governments and the federal US government. Post roads is explicitly place under the domain of the US federal government where Fire and police services aren't. In fact, there are special rules that need to be followed before a US marshal or FBI agent gains legal jurisdiction over a violation of law.
All of this is spelled out in the constitution in which is outlines what the Federal government can do. The constitution wasn't designed to limit the government, it was designed to specifically empower it with the remaining duties being left to the state or the people respectively. The bill of rights and amendments either limit the government in obvious ways or change how some constitutional authority operates.
What is left is operated by the states or local governments and it would entirely depend on their constitution and laws to weather they are capable of doing something like that or not.
To further expand on this, the government has a duty to not waste the money it imposes the obligation for on the people. It would be just as risky of a bet for any government to tax the people and take the tax money to the horse track. This obligation is no different then you becoming the executor of an estate or trust when someone else is the receiver and having to be prudent in the investments or risk not only jail time but having to repay any losses in the process.
I don't know why you are marked as Flamebait. What you said is technically true and it's about time people started realizing the truth. The US federal government has absolutely no constitutional authority to own private enterprise and it has used the same stretches of constitutional authorization that allows welfare to exist to take over GM and Amtrak and other business bailouts.
At best, congress can build and/or provide for "needful buildings" but there a demonstration of need has to be made as in it's necessity of the survival or operation of the country. Buying out businesses to promote a pet project already being tackled by private enterprise is a hard sell on that.
In short, what we are seeing today shouldn't be possible if the constitution was intact. Buying businesses to give tech away would undermine the capitol system that our economy walks upon. It would end up doing more damage economically and constitutionally then it would do any good.
All countries possess it and can't be subjected to rules or laws they don't agree to be subjected to. Some countries have waved their sovereignty in some respects and actually allow international bodies to create laws that they have to abide by. The US is not one of them. The WTO was out of line in their ruling, they tread in areas that wasn't under their jurisdiction by treaty and stomped over other treaties and governing bodies like WIPO.
The WTO's governing body is made up of countries that don't like US foreign policy and the ruling was an obvious retaliation to that effect. The leadership of the WTO rotates every so often to give other countries equal say, in this case, that say was abused. There was no basis in obligations for it and the supposed remedy is illegal by other treaties in effect.
It's still luck and chance. the skill basically plays the odds but the odds aren't the end all say all of it. You can have better then an 80% chance of winning the pot and still loose to someone who made a better hand on the last card. I have seen that happen plenty of times where an inside straight flush get hit and beat a four of a kind or something. I probably would have folded the hand but for whatever reasons, other people do keep them- especially when we are playing horse and buggy where you need two wins to take the pot and folding out takes you out of the game for the duration.
You can be skilled at a game of chance, that doesn't mean it isn't a game of chance.
The way you roll a dice can effect the outcome of the die to some extent, what to bet and when to bet will effect your overall winnings but the reality is that chance dictates the outcome, you either have it or you don't. Of course in poker, you can bluff and act like you have it when you don't.
Actually, it should be near the top of the list. This is especially true given the state of the economy.
Online gambling generally results in more losses then winning as it true for most gambling with the exception of professional gamblers. When these sites are hosted outside the country, we have the problem or our wealth being distributed to places that won't benefit us anymore. When this happens, jobs are lost, and so on which is sort of what we should be attempting to counter right now.
Think of it this way, if you and your neighbor trade for stuff that each other needs (suppose you raise meat and he raises vegetables), then the exchange and wealth stays there. But suppose I purchase all his vegetables (take the money by online gambling offshore), he now has nothing to offer you and you either need to sell your meat or take a loss on it. Either way, it's worth is less then it was when you could get what you needed. Now suppose this happens again, you have to find something else worth of value or accept the loss or raise less meat. The effect is that your neighbor can purchase less, you can purchase and do less, it just detracts from everything.
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That should have been il-legalize it.
He manipulated his odds a little by only purchasing the scratchoff past a certain number on a roll. If the roll weren't past a certain number, he would go to another store or select another type of scratch off. Evidently he found a pattern where the bulk of the winners are in the middle of end of a roll.
Yes, that was one of the things I was hoping to point out but it didn't come out as obvious as you put it.
I tell him all the time that the lottery is nothing more then a stupid tax. Perhaps I should just print your post and show him what you think.
That wall is only possible after they put the war on budget.
In short, when the war is off budget, the wall doesn't exist. The spending is deficit spending which means it isn't there to spend otherwise anyways. If that is the reason, there are a lot of people out there being scammed.
There were legitimate reasons for the Iraq war without bringing oil into the mix. And to note, oil from Iraq has never benefited the US even when the left was attempting to make it so by claiming that Iraq's oil money should be paying for the war.
Now it turns out after the fact that a lot of those legitimate reasons were not valid and they were posed because of Saddam's attempts to make it appear that way out of fear of retaliation from it's neighbors. Don't let that sentence confuse you, a legitimate reason can be illegitimate after the fact when we find out more then we knew at the time. What I'm saying is that if everything points to A, then A can be treated as being true until it is proved false. Even people like Hans Blix who came out against the war claiming there was no WMDs, provided misleading statements in his reports to the UN security council that made the world believe they were there. Some of these statements were that previously declare destroyed munitions were showing up and surprise inspection sites, banned chemical weapons machinery that was declared destroyed ended up at an agriculture chemical processing facility in which is wasn't far off from being used again for weapons production. In the month leading up to the war, he showed proof of illegal missile systems, and so on. At the time the US wanted to goto war with Iraq, most of the world leaders believe the same as we did but they didn't agree that war was necessary. It wasn't until after the war that we found our understanding to be so far off base.
The war was never about oil unless you count the secrete oil deals France was making while violating the UN sanctions and using that for leverage. Iraq was cooperating until France issues a proclamation that it would veto any vote for war with Iraq, then they went back to the stall and hide tactics. Some say the corruption surrounding the sanctions and UN oil for food program is what defeated the sanctions and allowed Iraq to posture itself the way it did in the first place. I agree with them and state further that Bush could have never found a reason to invade if Iraq would have been forced into compliance to the 1993 armistice agreement as the sanctions were intended to do.
I will also go further because I know the mindset and customs prevalent of the middle east, and say that 9/11 might not of ever happened if it wasn't for years of Iraq pushing us around and making us look like we were all talk. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the then number Al Qeada official told interviewers that they didn't expect the American response because of how it treated Iraq when in defiance and the response to other Al Qeada attacks.
The problem I has with that part of your statement was the connection to oil. If you want to say scared over bad intelligence, fine. If you wanted to say retaliation for actions that emboldened Al Qeada, or because Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was inside Iraq operating a poison and explosives terrorist training camp with Iraq protecting him, fine. But oil is nothing but an anti-war conspiracy designed to inflame people without addressing any of the facts before, during, or after the war. If you want to claim the war was because Bush was an idiot, I'm somewhat fine with that (although at the time there was plenty of evidence to suggest strong military actions dating from 1995 forward). It's the connection with oil that simply does not exist that I have issues with. Just because it is there does not make it part of the puzzle. We were involved in the middle east before oil was a priority, we will be there long after it is. In fact, we have had relations in the middle east since the beginning of our country Kuwait was a long time ally and port safe harbor and trade and they even allowed Thomas Jefferson's marines to resupply during the invasion into Tripoli to stop the Atlantic pirating on US ships even though Kuwait was part of the ottoman empire too.
Well, to be concise, currently we can't audit offshore casinos and the frozen assets are only for offshore casinos outside our reach. I think this is a little different then the DEA's program in that we have a clear record of what gains are from illicit activities as in payouts for offshore internet gambling sites where as the DEA program used to be everything first. It should also be noted that now the DEA has to show that the items were purchased or paid for with drug money to take.
I understand that. The problem is that he thought he was going somewhere. This could have been much worse as far as gambling addiction goes but the fact that he couldn't grasp that he wasn't making anything more then he normally would have illustrates the type of mental processes people goes though when they gamble.
I have always held the rule-belief that if you couldn't drop the money on something frivolous or in the trash can, then you shouldn't be gambling with it. I'm not anti-gambling but I am anti lottery where they promise money is going to the schools but it generally makes up less the 3-5% of their funding. It's mostly a stupid tax that ignorant people play based around a false hope of something better. Many of the people get a rude awakening when they find their $5 mill jackpot only pays a lump sum of $1.2 mill and the government takes a little more then half of that. This is what a local office pool of 4 employees found out after quitting their jobs thinking they were getting 1 mill a peace to find out it was less then $160K. I look at it as entertainment rather then making me rich. Some people can't grasp the concept of spending $300 to make $100 is a loss and breaking even is not getting ahead. This may be because they are stupid or because the need for hope or winning is so large with them, or because of a number of other reasons I'm not even qualified to suggest.
Actually, there was no moralizing there. It was just an illustration of how they would get people to follow the laws. And seeing how they only froze payment to the no-state sponsered sites, then you can look at it as directing the gamblers away from those sites and to approved ones.
This is not unlike a regular casino, you have to report your winning and pay taxes on them and if they are over a certain amount (I think about $5 grans) they will take taxes out before you leave the casino.
The rest of your comment I pretty much agree with except the Iraq comment. It's totally baseless and out of whack with reality.
The government can act autonomously on the people's behalf where the people have to agree within a majority. The one is an act of government creating the socialism where the other is a socialistic act but done by the people and avoiding the definition of socialism with the library having to consistanly ask for funding.
Not really, I voted at my last board meeting and it isn't a government nor is the corporation. Granted it's just a small one but size wouldn't have made a difference. A government is the organization that is the governing authority of a political unit. Voting can be a governing act but not the government.
And the WTO treaty we signed on to has no provision for the ruling made. That make it un-irrelevant.
No they are not. The US permits remote gambling only if the server is located within the state the gambling is taking place in and the state allows it through their laws. If a foreign country wanted to operate in the US, they can operate according to US law just the same as all American companies have to. The WTO made shit up about not giving the same access when it is there all along and invented concepts to justify it. Read the damn ruling then read the treaties we have ratified (yes, mere signature isn't enough, ratification has to be present).
That was just one of the multiple defenses given and it gained the most attention. We also claimed it was impossible to force states to regulate this within their border and the WTO treaty has a provision for government structures without autonomous authority like that. There was several other defenses too like protecting against fraud. Again, read the treaty and the ruling.
Article I -- XXVI of the gats section of the Uruguay Round table agreements which set the WTO in motion declares in section 1-3: "In fulfilling its obligations and commitments under the Agreement, each Member shall take such reasonable measures as may be available to it to ensure their observance by regional and local governments and authorities and non-governmental bodies within its territory;" The gist of it here is that the US federal government has no constitutional authority to force states to accept gambling of any kind. It does have the authority to force the states to allow foreign companies access according to their state laws. The WTO court attempted to use section part 3 sections XVI-1 and -2 to override that provision in 1-3 and it had no authority to do so. In fact, section 3-1 under part 1 was specific put there to account for situations like the US is in.
The WTO also stated that the US failed to show it's arguemnt for exception under part 2 Article 14 a and c in which it states (a)necessary to protect public morals or to maintain public order c)necessary to secure compliance with laws or regulations which are not inconsistent with the provisions of this Agreement including those relating to:
(i)the prevention of deceptive and fraudulent practices or to deal with the effects of a default on services contracts;
(ii)the protection of the privacy of individuals in relation to the processing and dissemination of personal data and the protection of confidentiality of individual records and accounts;
This is obviously problematic because the US supreme court has already ruled that morals can only be enforced that is consistent with the community meaning that only the state and local government has the ability to set standards on morality in the US. Several states have done so which was brought up by the WTO. As regard to C, the Wire Act, the Travel Act and the Illegal Gambling Business Act, are specifically designed for both subsection i and ii. They totally ignored that.
The appellate board then overturned the panel saying that the three US laws were consistent with the morals and public order and that the previous panel had no right to rule on the state laws.
It then went to arbitration
Lol.. I didn't say that at all. I said that they do result in a net flow of funds out which the government should be very concerned about. In otherwords, online gambling should be high on their list just as the trade deficit and possibly other online games along with other things.
However, online games don't really draw the amount of capitol that gambling does so why it most likely should be on the lists of concern, it shouldn't be near the top like the effect of online gambling. We also have to acknowledge that there is a law against the gambling and not games.
A big problem with this is that regulation has to be general and enforceable which sort of contradicts each other. You need specific to enforce regulation but the entire concept needs to be covered when the regulation exists. What we end up with is shady loopholes that less then ethical people can climb through to get around regulation.
Suppose you wanted to end sub-prime lending to low income people. First, you would have to define low income then define sub-prime. If you define low income as people making less then 2/3 the median area income, then it's entirely possible that someone in rural Alabama could qualify when they would be disqualified in New York state. So you define it as a debt to asset ratio, well most well off people pay leans on their property while investing the sum in something paying more then the interest on the lean. This can give the appearance of a high debt to income or asset ratio where the most likely to pay it off could be disqualified but a just over poverty level married couple who own a 20 year old house trailer and a $500 credit card limit would fair better. Combine the two, and poof, you open another can of worms that allow for sliding applications. So now lets define sub-prime. If it is an interest rate below the prime rate for a period of time, then does it include PMI adjustments or not? You can easily take a couple points in PMI in order to negate a down payment and with a sub-prime rate, still be paying more then prime. But the idea is to encourage investment for those who can afford it and not those who can't.
Generally something gets lost in the details and the regulation covers in spirit but doesn't cover all situations and people can take advantage of that. This is often considered corruption even though it is technically legal and not by definition.
You can't enforce what you want the regulation to say if the regulation doesn't actually say it. So while some will follow the spirit of the law, others will bury themselves into a backdoor around it and regulation will eventually lead to corruption or the possibility of it. The bigger issue is that the regulation is there for a reason so it's sort of a chicken and egg concept where rules cause it in response to it being there to cause the rules. And this is all compounded by the complexity of the government attempting to micromanage with regulation as in the example above with eliminating sub-prime loans to risking groups but keeping them availible to encourage investment and development.
I don't know why you got marked insightful. Iraq funding is all borrowed money (deficit spending) and until this year was off budget. That means that if it stopped, the funding would stop and congress couldn't spend it somewhere else.
Obama did put it on budget this year (or is trying to) and if congress had any whit to them, they would take it back off. When it's on budget, the budget ceiling gets raised and when the war stops, the money can be used for something else. The problem with this is that it still is deficit spending and is in large being used to justify deficits larger then it's cost. Congress knows this but is probably going to ignore it and instead of lowering the ceiling, they will just continue to spend "the savings from not spending on the war".
Actually, it goes a little deeper then insurance companies.
Medicare and medicaid pays based on an average costs of the approved treatments in the area. That places the hospitals interest into driving up those costs in order to get as much guaranteed money they can. Insurance companies negotiate based around the same standards and generally attempt to get lower prices but the prices are increased then discounted. This is why insurance pays different for in network and out of network access.
Sure, Insurance is part of the problem but government payments started it and still fuel it. The $100 dollar aspirin is an exaggeration but I know of hospitals charging $40 for one because a nurse has to give it to you and ask the doctor if it's ok first (yea, that's not covered in the already overpriced room and board). But when the government started paying like that, it more or less became a free ride because the more they can jump the averages, the more the government pays. I know a guy with no insurance and basically no way to pay- who broke his ankle and had to get pins placed in. The surgery was considered emergency and billed out at over 15k but they magically reduced the costs to around 2K if he agreed to make payments and kept current with them. I'm sure they didn't operate at a capitol loss by doing that, it probably more accurately reflect the real costs of the surgery even though they might not have pocketed as much profit.
We tried trains remember? They failed big time. The last passenger rail system in America was bailed out by the government (Amtrak) and municipal railways don't cut it unless you have a bunch of skyscrapers where literally thousands of people parking for one building would require shuttle service anyways. Even the New York subways, one of the more used and efficient municipal train networks are government subsidized to some extent.
The main reason trains failed outside of them just becoming to costly to operate was that with a car, you operate on your schedule and not some public transit schedule. That alone can save hours a day in time let alone the benefits of the convenience of it.
Global warming won't kill us all, it will kill our grandchildren' grandchildren if it goes down as currently listed. Well, that is unless you start counting storm damage and weather events as "global warming" as if they haven't been around before.
The other is not only much more concrete, but effect the now instead of sometime in the future where others can fix the problem.
What problems did Bush have understanding it and what does this have to do with the current conversation? If your talking about Iraq, they already ceded parts of their sovereignty to satisfy the 1993 armistice agreements. If Afghanistan, then your right, we trampled on their sovereignty because the behaved in a way that undermined the direct and indirect safety of the US. If your talking about extraditing software pirates from Australia or other countries or arresting people when entering the US, then it's up to international treaties and local sovereignty which is already agreed upon.
I'm not sure what your talking about or what it has to do with the situation at hand.
There is no leap of faith. It's against the law for US companies to operate online gambling sites across state borders without specific permission from the state. There is no legal 50 state gambling sites in the US and only the offshore sites can escape US law. The majority of online gambling is done through offshore companies. The winnings seized or frozen was only seized or frozen for winnings from offshore sites.
The story/article and a little attention to the situation is all that is needed.
Unless they legalize it and not have to worry either way.
Most libraries except for the library of congress is funded by bond, grant, and private donation, rather then the government. This is where the people collectively decide to fund it by vote and not the government.
In early days, libraries were all funded privately, then when that started drying up, bond issues and grants backed by bonds were placed on the ballots in order to fund them. It is still true to this day with the exception of a few places and is certainly true in my county. This differs from socialism in that the people themselves provided the funding rather then the government owning the libraries and finding them. Very few libraries are actually owned by the governments. They are usually a trust in their own and the government has a share in it in order to allow certain laws to apply.
I think your forgetting the differences between state and local governments and the federal US government. Post roads is explicitly place under the domain of the US federal government where Fire and police services aren't. In fact, there are special rules that need to be followed before a US marshal or FBI agent gains legal jurisdiction over a violation of law.
All of this is spelled out in the constitution in which is outlines what the Federal government can do. The constitution wasn't designed to limit the government, it was designed to specifically empower it with the remaining duties being left to the state or the people respectively. The bill of rights and amendments either limit the government in obvious ways or change how some constitutional authority operates.
What is left is operated by the states or local governments and it would entirely depend on their constitution and laws to weather they are capable of doing something like that or not.
To further expand on this, the government has a duty to not waste the money it imposes the obligation for on the people. It would be just as risky of a bet for any government to tax the people and take the tax money to the horse track. This obligation is no different then you becoming the executor of an estate or trust when someone else is the receiver and having to be prudent in the investments or risk not only jail time but having to repay any losses in the process.
I don't know why you are marked as Flamebait. What you said is technically true and it's about time people started realizing the truth. The US federal government has absolutely no constitutional authority to own private enterprise and it has used the same stretches of constitutional authorization that allows welfare to exist to take over GM and Amtrak and other business bailouts.
At best, congress can build and/or provide for "needful buildings" but there a demonstration of need has to be made as in it's necessity of the survival or operation of the country. Buying out businesses to promote a pet project already being tackled by private enterprise is a hard sell on that.
In short, what we are seeing today shouldn't be possible if the constitution was intact. Buying businesses to give tech away would undermine the capitol system that our economy walks upon. It would end up doing more damage economically and constitutionally then it would do any good.
Do you know what the concept of sovereignty is?
All countries possess it and can't be subjected to rules or laws they don't agree to be subjected to. Some countries have waved their sovereignty in some respects and actually allow international bodies to create laws that they have to abide by. The US is not one of them. The WTO was out of line in their ruling, they tread in areas that wasn't under their jurisdiction by treaty and stomped over other treaties and governing bodies like WIPO.
The WTO's governing body is made up of countries that don't like US foreign policy and the ruling was an obvious retaliation to that effect. The leadership of the WTO rotates every so often to give other countries equal say, in this case, that say was abused. There was no basis in obligations for it and the supposed remedy is illegal by other treaties in effect.
It's still luck and chance. the skill basically plays the odds but the odds aren't the end all say all of it. You can have better then an 80% chance of winning the pot and still loose to someone who made a better hand on the last card. I have seen that happen plenty of times where an inside straight flush get hit and beat a four of a kind or something. I probably would have folded the hand but for whatever reasons, other people do keep them- especially when we are playing horse and buggy where you need two wins to take the pot and folding out takes you out of the game for the duration.
You can be skilled at a game of chance, that doesn't mean it isn't a game of chance.
The way you roll a dice can effect the outcome of the die to some extent, what to bet and when to bet will effect your overall winnings but the reality is that chance dictates the outcome, you either have it or you don't. Of course in poker, you can bluff and act like you have it when you don't.
Actually, it should be near the top of the list. This is especially true given the state of the economy.
Online gambling generally results in more losses then winning as it true for most gambling with the exception of professional gamblers. When these sites are hosted outside the country, we have the problem or our wealth being distributed to places that won't benefit us anymore. When this happens, jobs are lost, and so on which is sort of what we should be attempting to counter right now.
Think of it this way, if you and your neighbor trade for stuff that each other needs (suppose you raise meat and he raises vegetables), then the exchange and wealth stays there. But suppose I purchase all his vegetables (take the money by online gambling offshore), he now has nothing to offer you and you either need to sell your meat or take a loss on it. Either way, it's worth is less then it was when you could get what you needed. Now suppose this happens again, you have to find something else worth of value or accept the loss or raise less meat. The effect is that your neighbor can purchase less, you can purchase and do less, it just detracts from everything.