> Now, people play poker, and cheat, and they want the government to police their poker games and make sure they're fair.
No, if you personally run a poker game in your house and cheat your friends the government doesn’t care. The FBI isn’t going to be interested.
If you join the mafia and run an organized crime ring that operates poker games as a business which systematically defrauds people for large amounts of money and funnels the proceeds to organized crime through money laundering operations, the FBI will be interested.
If you look at this story and only see “some people cheated at a poker game” you’re missing the real story. This was a full on organized crime business operation
It's not even lunch yet and "the mafia should be allowed to build onto their tower of crimes in peace" is a take that I don't think that will be beat today.
The poker games were run by the mafia, who pulled in a lot of cash by luring and cheating suckers. I want the FBI to stop scams that funnel money to criminal organizations.
A lot of cash? It says “at least $7m” over 6 years across supposedly 4 crime families and how many people? They’d have been better off opening up a Jimmy John’s franchise.
If you run a Jimmy John’s, most of your customers will pay with credit cards. Everything runs through banks. You can’t launder that easily. It’s all traceable. It’s all taxable.
Run a poker operation and you can get your marks to give you crypto, cash, or small transfers.
$7 million in pure cash and crypto proceeds from a poker game is a lot more valuable than $7 million in revenue from a sandwich shop for an organized crime operation.
We’re supposedly talking about 4 major crime families, it wouldn’t be one McDonalds it would be dozens and dozens. And all legal.
Nothing about this story makes sense other other than as yet another headline to try to get people talking about something other than Epstein.
Did illegal gambling take place? I’m sure. Were 4 different crime families investing significant resources to take home barely $1m/year? I’m extremely skeptical and given this is coming from Kash “I always look like I just did a line of coke” Patel, I’d say it’s more likely than not we’re getting incomplete, if not bad information
I’m expecting some pardons will shape the expectation that this all could have been avoided with strategic political donations. In this era, what would you accept as a substitution for accountability?
That's not the part that's bad. I don't care whether they cheat or not. I don't want the government policing what is and isn't fair in a poker / NBA / etc game.
I think arresting people for cheating legitimizes backroom / mafia gambling. All the other rings (and those left from this one) can say "Look, those other guys got arrested. The law protects you. We don't want that to happen to us. Our game is definitely fair." Of course, they too are cheating.
The only reason the FBI cares here is probably because one of the victims had pull. If you or I get cheated, the FBI won't care about that.
> I don't want the government policing what is and isn't fair in a poker / NBA / etc game.
Operating a business that defrauds people is the domain of government enforcement.
I think you’re trying to reduce this to some sort of small scale friendly poker game between friends. It was not. It was an organized crime business operation that was systematically committing fraud.
Fraud is illegal and within scope of government enforcement.
The raison d'etre for the offense of fraud is to protect commerce.
The state / society needs to enforce a basic level of trust for Business A to buy widgets from Business B, and for Customer C to be employed, etc.
Betting on sports / poker / etc. is not part of that. Nobody is creating anything of value when you spin the roulette wheel. At best, the house wins and most players lose... and that is a harm to society. At worst, the house cheats or some subset of players cheat, and most players lose... and that too is a harm to society. (Edit: At worse worst, it leads to violence, extortion, etc...)
Gambling does not deserve the legitimacy of being policed.
> I think arresting people for cheating legitimizes backroom / mafia gambling. All the other rings (and those left from this one) can say "Look, those other guys got arrested. The law protects you."
Disagree, this case demonstrates the exact opposite -- you think your underground game is legit because there's celebrities playing? Think again, it's a far more sophisticated scam operation than you could imagine.
> The only reason the FBI cares here is probably because one of the victims had pull.
Again, I doubt it. Likely it's because the mafia is involved, and according to the indictment "the defendants and their co-conspirators used threats of force and violence to secure the repayment of debts from illegal poker games."
I think the comment goes more in the direction: “previously playing poker was a totally private thing, didn’t cost me a dime, now part of my taxes is used for that”
I'd appreciate it if the police could help stop cheating in my kids' soccer game as well. One of those brats keeps pretending to be injured! Lock him up.
you're right, they should outlaw gambling as a business because it's inherently predatory, rigged ("the house always wins" isn't just a cute phrase) and has addiction issues that disproportionately impact the poor
Except, correct me if this is wrong, but he wasn't even convicted of money laundering, let alone the underlying crimes you suggest he was launder the proceeds of. It was simply for failing to register / setup an appropriate AML system. Whether any ML occurred, by whom, and in relation to what... are outstanding questions. If he had done all that and all they got him on was a 4-month technicality, that tends to suggest he was probably innocent (or the investigation was inept).
I'm not sure you understand the point. It isn't that CZ himself was specifically putting forth the effort to launder money. It isn't that he was specifically doing things to try and make it easier. The point is that he had a legal duty to actively attempt to prevent money laundering. Binance was legally required to do this to operate in the US, and did not. The court case produced messages from the Chief Compliance Officer pointing out a myriad of ways in which they were not complying with various laws of this nature and they were ignored.
The BSA is not a technicality and trying to reframe it as one is wild. It is to make sure that people that have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye to money laundering don't turn a blind eye to it. You don't need to be directly involved in the money laundering to be incentivized to let it happen.
The guy was punished with a 4-month jail sentence. It's reasonable to assume his crime was of the sort that would result in a 3-6 month sentence... generally misdemeanors.
It's certainly in a different category than speeding or jaywalking, but it's a lot closer to that than to the 150 years that Bernie Madoff got.
Professional sports used to exist to profit off viewership, and thus games would occasionally be rigged to increase entertainment value and align with market demand. However, the authenticity carried a large part of why the sports were interesting to watch.
Now, sports exist to facilitate gambling. Sports are interesting to viewers who have money on the line, and thus the authenticity is irrelevant and actually undermines the sport. Every gambler wants to believe they have an edge and that the outcomes are rigged... in their favor. If the outcomes are determined by the players simply trying their best, then what's the point of gambling?
There has been so many questionable calls by officiating in most all pro sports over the years that have heavily favored the large market team. People are only half kidding when they say things like “the fix is in” or “the refs are bought.”
That's neat. The shape of the campus does fit better on the 8.5x11" paper when printed that way, but that wouldn't have required the text to be aligned the same. I see the main entrance is on Oxford, to the (not South...) West, making this a case where the campus has an orientation and they're putting the top of the campus at the top of the map.
I think this is a meta-allusion to the theory that human consciousness developed recently, i.e. that people who lived before [written] language did not have language because they actually did not think. It's a potentially useful thought experiment, because we've all grown up not only knowing highly performant languages, but also knowing how to read / write.
However, primitive languages were... primitive. Where they primitive because people didn't know / understand the nuances their languages lacked? Or, were those things that simply didn't get communicated (effectively)?
Of course, spoken language predates writings which is part of the point. We know an individual can have a "conscious" conception of an idea if they communicate it, but that consciousness was limited to the individual. Once we have written language, we can perceive a level of communal consciousness of certain ideas. You could say that the community itself had a level of shared-consciousness.
With GPTs regurgitating digestible writings, we've come full circle in terms of proving consciousness, and some are wondering... "Gee, this communicated the idea expertly, with nuance and clarity.... but is the machine actually conscious? Does it think undependably of the world, or is it merely a kaledascopic reflection of its inputs? Is consciousness real, or an illusion of complexity?"
I’m not sure why it’s so mind-boggling that people in the year 1225 (Thomas Aquinas) or 1756 (Mozart) were just as creative and intelligent as they themselves are, as modern people. They simply had different opportunities then comparable to now. And what some of them did with those opportunities are beyond anything a “modern” person can imagine doing in those same circumstances. _A lot_ of free time over winter in the 1200s for certain people. Not nearly as many distractions either.
Saying early humans weren’t conscious because they lacked complex language is like saying they couldn’t see blue because they didn’t have a word for it.
Well, Oscar Wilde argues in “The Decay of Lying” that there were no stars before an artist could describe them and draw people’s attention to the night sky.
The basic assumption he attacks is that “there is a world we discover” vs “there is a world we create”.
It is hard paradigm shift, but there is certainly reality in “shared picture of the world” and convincing people of a new point of view has real implications in how the world appears in our minds for us and what we consider “reality”
It should be almost obligatory to always state which definition of consciousness one is talking about whenever they talk about consiousness, because I for example don't see what language has to do with our ability to experience qualia for example.
Is it self awarness? There are animals that can recognize themselves in mirror, I don't think all of them have a form of proto-language.
That's fair, but enterprises are often naive and prone to groupthink.
It was just a few years ago when automakers and rental car companies unanimously decided (has they had been told to decide) that COVID-19 would reduce demand for cars. They cut production, sold off fleets, and almost immediately found themselves unable to keep up with demand.
The phone rep is almost easier, because all they can do is withhold their confirmation. So, I told the Sirius guy who I was and that they were no longer authorized to charge my card, hung up, and wrote a note in my files. Sirius charged me again, and I submitted a chargeback. Quick and easy.
Sirius were obnoxious when I didn't convert from free to paid, on a service I wasn't using. The number of times I got phone calls and emails from them ended up with me repeating to them that their behaviour was guaranteeing I would never use them, and would tell friends not to either.
> Though substantial progress was being made, Pfizer decided to pull support ... [t]he “gliptin” class of drugs peaked at annual revenues of around $10 billion and remains a major oral therapy for type 2 diabetes.
> Pfizer found other routes to remain successful (some, such as their mRNA COVID19 vaccine, also in-licensed from smaller companies).
> Even the biggest blockbusters can be dismissed ... by ... ambitious people, ... because ... ideas of how the market will react... .
> These same dynamics are undoubtedly playing out today [seemingly referring to previous statements on their COVID-19 vaccine], and it will likely take decades to determine just how costly some of today’s mistakes will prove to be.
> then the implication is that they released the mRNA vaccine because it too would increase disease (and thus avenues for profitability)
Sure, a disease that kills a patient very quickly is bad for business. Better for them to be alive and fall ill later on from a laundry list of profitable ailments.
However, if you assume they were feeding the information to the platforms...