bodog is such a joke (with a screen shot)

[jukofyork]

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I consider people like Calvin Ayre (or <insert billionaire here&gt to be the biggest thieves of all time. What right do they have to such a big chunk of the worlds resources for themselves?

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This is terrible. Since when is having earned a lot of money evidence of theft?

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So if it were possible for one single person to amass the rights to every single resource on the planet and just sit back and watch everybody else suffer and die, then this would be fine just because they "earned" it?

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You didn't answer my question, but I'll answer yours anyway: No. If you really feel this is in danger of happening soon, let me know and we'll see what we can do about it.

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If you define stealing as to take what does not rightfully belong to you then I do class somebody who has claimed the rights to enough resources for 1000's of people to have stolen it. They might have done it within the current "laws", but I'm quite sure that if you asked the entire world to vote on if he should be forced to redistribute his wealth the answer would be an overwhelming majority yes. I think if you were to do the same for the "average" person, then I think the overwhelming majority vote would be no. If you think that just because the "law" says it's ok for them to have so much, then see my point below.

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The law shouldn't protect the billionaire from losing his money to thieves;

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I'm just going to leave this out here percolating for a while...

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Who is it that makes the laws then? Is it a couple of billion Indian and Chinese peasants that make them? No, it's rich westerners who are also in the pocket of the rich billionaires and corporations. The vast majority of the wealth is in the hands of the top few percent of the population, and the wealth they have buys them power to influence society and it's laws.

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the law should protect the normal person from the billionaire taking far more than their fair share...

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You keep saying things like "fair share". Who decides? You?

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The very fact that they have so much excess wealth that they have to protect themselves from it being stolen is an obvious sign that they have way more that their "fair share". I agree it's not easy to define their "fair share", but I'd guess again that if the entire world voted on if a billionaire had more than their "fair share" the answer would be an overwhelming majority yes.

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The problem is that your argument applies to any two people who have different amounts of money. According to you, the one with less is justified in stealing from the one with more.

If this is not the case, exactly how much money do I have to have before I deserve to be robbed?

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Exactly how much money do you need to live a reasonable quality of life?

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You didn't answer my question again. The answer to your question is "it depends". While I certainly have an opinion about what the answer is for me, You seem to think you have the "correct" answer and would like to impose that answer on everybody else. I doubt if you would want somebody else imposing his answer on you.

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How can I answer your question as you know full well it has no answer. Again, the very fact that others are envious of them and they are in danger of being stolen from seems to suggest they have far more than is fair. Again, if the people of the entire world were to decide about the "fairness" of a single guy taking so much - see my point above. I think the closest you can get to answering this question is if a person can live of $500 a week, then making $100k a week is making far more than they "need" to live a "reasonable" quality of life.

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Do you think Calvin Ayre put in several million times more effort to make his money than some random guy making carpets 16 hours a day in an Indian sweatshop?

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Obviously not. As with poker, there is a lot of luck involved. Does this mean the carpet guy has some claim on Calvin or any other person with more resources than him?

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Is the "carpet guy's" life is worth less than Calvin? If not, then why should the "carpet guy" and his family starve while Calvin lives the life of luxury? If their was enough resources for everybody and no starving sweatshop workers in the world then I would have nothing against him having so much, but since that is not the case then for the interest of all Calvin should be forced to redistribute what he has gained by "luck" as you call it.

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If you want a society that encourages extreme greed as the ultimate goal for all humans to aspire towards then that's your view and nobody can change that, but I think you'll find that's there's a few billion people on this planet that struggle just to feed themselves each and every day and I don't see why some [censored] like Calvin Ayre or Bill Gates should be allowed to just suck up the rights half the world's resources for their own private use.

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img]

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What I want is a society that encourages extreme liberty and doesn't punish extreme ability (or extreme luck).

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So you have no care at all about the poor people of the world who are extremely "unlucky"? You are happy for a single person to lay claim to so many resources and wield so much power just because they were "lucky"? I would like to see a society that was forward thinking and ruled for the best interests the people (not just to protect the rich), but I doubt it will ever happen. What are the odds of the people with the money and they power ever denouncing their own beliefs? Zero.

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You seem very angry about this. Why would you hate somebody for being successful/lucky?

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I am angry about this yes, but it is not the fact that they are successful that I hate - it is the fact that they take so much of what is not truly theirs and leave so many of the world to rot from starvation and poverty. Their are a lot more ways to measure "success" than simply owning seven houses and three private jets.

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Does that somehow make it harder for you to be successful/lucky?

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No, but does their "success" do anything to improve the lives of the other people of the planet?

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The reason I reject your position is that it seems like a copout that allows you to rationalize stealing from those you deem deserve it while simultaneously rejecting that defense from somebody who would steal from you.

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To be 100% honest I don't really care what you think and what you do/don't reject. You have quite clearly stated what you think and I have clearly stated what I think along with what I think the vast majority of the poor people of the world want if anybody listened to them. If you think I'm talking [censored] and the poor people love to have rich billionaires sucking up the rights to the resources, then their is very little I can try to do to convince you otherwise. You keep telling me that I didn't answer your questions, so let me ask you a two simple questions:

a) If everybody in the world had a single vote, and they were asked "Force all billionaires to redistribute their wealth?" what do you think the majority vote would be?

b) If everybody in the world had a single vote, and they were asked "Force all people to redistribute their wealth?" what do you think the majority vote would be?

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Perhaps I'm wrong, but the next time you're out walking the mean streets of Leeds, UK, if some poor person hits you in the head with a tire iron and steals your wallet, I don't think your first thought upon regaining consciousness is going to be, "Gee whiz, I didn't get a chance to thank that guy. After all, what right did I have to such a big chunk of the worlds resources for myself?"

Cliff notes: Be careful what you wish for. You are somebody else's billionaire.

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Cliff notes: If you try to take more than the average person deems as "fair", don't cry when poor people try to steal it from you.

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[El_Hombre_Grande]

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i just sent bodog an email saying i was unhappy with the way i was treated. im not really expecting anything out of them, but if the bodog dies in a grease fire tomorrow, i wont be at the funeral crying.


as for any elaborate chip dumping schemes, yeah, it maybe could have worked and been a +EV play. But ive done some really shady stuff in the past, and paid really hard consequences for doing it. im not like that anymore, and dont want to be.

ill update this thread again if anything else happens.

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how exactly were you treated poorly?

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look, im not saying the owe me anything. but if i had misplaced 1.3 million, my version of saying thank you would not be ten bucks.

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Exactly. Anything less than 1,000 is total BS. They made a 1.3 million dollar mistake. This is simple. An absolute dick gives you 10 bucks. Is that supposed to deliberately insult him? Seems like it.

Of course, he isn't owed anything, anymore than you are owed a "thank you" when you hold a door open for someone or a tip for a waiter. you can stiff the waiter, if you want, and Bogog can stiff this guy if they so choose, but that makes them dicks.

[El_Hombre_Grande]

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What I want is a society that encourages extreme liberty and doesn't punish extreme ability (or extreme luck). You seem very angry about this. Why would you hate somebody for being successful/lucky? Does that somehow make it harder for you to be successful/lucky?

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It makes it more difficult for some people to eat. This is a world of limited resources. You can live in your fantasy world and pretend that the current trend of extreme concentration of wealth is a good thing, but its not, and you are delusional to believe otherwise.

I love that no one who advocates this world view ever suggests that its actually a good outcome, or the outcome they prefer, but instead suggests that the world will fall apart unless we allow a few grotesquely greedy bastards to rape the world.

Its not true. It won't fall apart tommorrow if we insist on some minor level of fairness.

[ment52]

Is jukofyork a communist?

[neverforgetlol]

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Is jukofyork a communist?

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that's stupid and irrelevant

i would've kept the 1.3 million [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[jukofyork]

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Is jukofyork a communist?

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Hehe, not really - more of an environmentalist. That's why I asked these two questions:

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a) If everybody in the world had a single vote, and they were asked "Force all billionaires to redistribute their wealth?" what do you think the majority vote would be?

b) If everybody in the world had a single vote, and they were asked "Force all people to redistribute their wealth?" what do you think the majority vote would be?

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I believe in all honesty that the answer to (a) would definitely be yes and the answer to (b) would most likely be no. Perhaps if I asked this 90 years ago the answer to (b) might also have been yes, but I think the last century has kinda shown that communism doesn't really work in practice.

I think sadly though we have gone way too far in the other direction over the last 30 years or so, and if the current trends and belief systems continue on for another 30 years, then I don't see very much hope for humanity's future: The Easter Island Story is a pretty good parallel of where we are heading with the current resource grabbing society we live in.

The current system just encourages short-sighted greed and sadly it's the "haves" who want to perpetuate this system so the "have-nots" think this is what they want too, but all things being equal I don't think this is what the majority of people really want if they actually sat down and thought about it carefully, but like I said in the other post; no billionaire, or politician is going to denounce wealth or power and start promoting a fairer more forward thinking society...

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[ment52]

Stupid and irrelevant is that commie BS in this Bodog-related thread.
And that thing about billionaires distributing money...Of course the majority is not billionaires and they would agree to get some $ from them. I'm not a billionaire and I would want to get money from them too. But that is just nonsense and unfair.

[Ron Burgundy]

Party gave me $400 for free once.

[qwnu]

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[a lot of interesting stuff]

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I can't handle all the embedded quoting, and we are way, way off-topic, so I'll probably just leave it at this.

Believe it or not, we are largely in agreement on the problems of worldwide income inequality, and probably on our visions of how things "ought to be". But I can't support your means of getting there through force, or for suspending the rule of law as it applies to billionaires.

I haven't really heard any concrete policy proposals except "billionaires should be forced to redistribute their wealth". I think we both agree that this wouldn't even make a dent. There just aren't enough billionaires. To say nothing of the assumption that the best way to improve people's lives is to give them money.

Perhaps its a reflection of the American tradition of individual liberty trumping collectivism. But I'm not comfortable enforcing my view of what constitutes an "unreasonably" decadent lifestyle on my fellow citizens.

I'll also reiterate that your reasoning towards the super-rich must also apply to yourself, obviously to a lesser degree. But unless you're living in a cardboard box, you are living in great luxury compared to those peasants you mentioned.

Finally, I don't think it's fair to demonize Bill Gates. You can argue that he's not doing enough, but to characterize him (and all other billionaires) as soulless and selfish is caricature (wikipedia):

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According to a 2004 Forbes magazine article, Gates gave away over $29 billion to charities from 2000 onwards. These donations are usually cited as sparking a substantial change in attitudes towards philanthropy among the very rich, with philanthropy becoming the norm.

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I can't find the reference, but I think I remember reading an interesting article in the New Yorker (maybe in the past year?) describing how the Gates Foundation was essentially single-handedly winning (or making a lot of headway in) the fight against Malaria.

Anyway, I think this is a very important discussion to have, and I thank you for your thoughtful comments, even if I can't fully endorse them. I also think the young people who spend a lot of time on here need to think more about these issues and decide what kind of world they want to grow up in.

[jukofyork]

I agree this could go on and on, and the only statement I strongly disagree with is this:

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I haven't really heard any concrete policy proposals except "billionaires should be forced to redistribute their wealth". I think we both agree that this wouldn't even make a dent. There just aren't enough billionaires.

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Perhaps using the term "billionaire" was a bad choice, but if this UN report has it's facts right then: <u>the top 1% own 40% of the worlds wealth</u> and <u>the bottom 50% own just 1% of the worlds wealth</u>. I don't think you can really say that redistributing this would not make a big difference to those in the bottom 50%.

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To say nothing of the assumption that the best way to improve people's lives is to give them money.

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It's not the money that you would be redistributing, but the resources that the money represents (labour, fuel, minerals, farmland, technology, etc). Western countries are not rich because of money, but because of the resources their money lays claim too. Look at the UK for example: if we all lost our monetary wealth overnight, then what would we actually have? We're a tiny island with bugger all... a bit of coal, a tiny bit of oil, some fish and just about enough farmland to feed ourself, yet we live a great quality of life because our monetary wealth allows us to exploit the resources of other countries. It's crazy!

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Anyway, I think this is a very important discussion to have, and I thank you for your thoughtful comments, even if I can't fully endorse them. I also think the young people who spend a lot of time on here need to think more about these issues and decide what kind of world they want to grow up in.

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Maybe it falls on deaf ears now, but all I can be sure of is that the current system just can't go on unchecked. Whether it's natural disaster, man made disaster, a revolution, or a final realization of what is important for humanity as whole; something will have to give sooner or later... The optimist in me hopes for the latter, but the realist in me says it's unlikely without some HUGE change of mindset.

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]