Thanks, Congress.
Today I got an email from PokerRoom, my online poker site, about the new US restrictions regarding online gambling. To summarize, on October 25th I'll lose my ability to deposit real money, on November 6th I'll lose my ability to play in real money games. They're leaving the ability to withdraw forever, but I only have $23.33 in there right now so I'm kind of tempted to play a couple $10 tourneys in the last two weeks. The payouts for those are high enough to make a withdrawal worth it if I do well in one and if I don't then oh well I'm still way up anyway.
That said, this is horseshit. Obviously I'm not mad at PokerRoom, they're just playing the cards they've been dealt (groan...) but I am mad at the idiots who feel the need to pass this law. I mean, how exactly does this make America better or safer? Anybody with a gambling addiction still has a million other ways to lose their house, and people who just enjoy the occasion poker game but don't feel like getting a home game together are out of luck.
I see online gambling as the new marijuana. It's illegal because some old guys decided that it was A Bad Thing, yet many other things that are just as harmful are legal because those old guys make money off of taxing it. The alcohol and cigarettes versus marijuana debate is almost identical to legal casinos versus online gambling. The only real difference is that one side was declared illegal while the other fell into the "you shouldn't do this but we can't stop you" category, with no convincing arguments with regards to why.
P.S. I guess I don't actually know if the government taxes casinos, which slightly weakens my argument if it turns out to not be the case, but not by much.
That said, this is horseshit. Obviously I'm not mad at PokerRoom, they're just playing the cards they've been dealt (groan...) but I am mad at the idiots who feel the need to pass this law. I mean, how exactly does this make America better or safer? Anybody with a gambling addiction still has a million other ways to lose their house, and people who just enjoy the occasion poker game but don't feel like getting a home game together are out of luck.
I see online gambling as the new marijuana. It's illegal because some old guys decided that it was A Bad Thing, yet many other things that are just as harmful are legal because those old guys make money off of taxing it. The alcohol and cigarettes versus marijuana debate is almost identical to legal casinos versus online gambling. The only real difference is that one side was declared illegal while the other fell into the "you shouldn't do this but we can't stop you" category, with no convincing arguments with regards to why.
P.S. I guess I don't actually know if the government taxes casinos, which slightly weakens my argument if it turns out to not be the case, but not by much.
posted by SomeJerk at 2:17 PM
4 Comments:
I think this bill was signed into law for 2 reasons:
1) Election day is coming up, and limiting online gambling sounds like a good thing to constituents
2)Online gambling is much harder to regulate than established gambling venues
That said, online gambling isn't illegal, just transactions between gambling sites and US financial institutions. I'm willing to bet you'll be able to find sites that will start accepting e-gold.
Yea I'm not surprised it got in. I just think it's crap.
My big problem with finding a site that has ways around this is that most poker sites use a downloaded client, which is always Win32 only. PokerRoom is the only place I've found that also has a online OS-agnostic Java client.
The real problem is that it wasn't a bill against online gambling. It was actually a bill against terrorism, they just wrote it like a bunch of retards (which alot are). No congressmen in their right mind would vote against stopping terrorism.
Bills that passed in congress often have ridiculous things attached to them that often have nothing to do with the original intent of the bill.
Yea it was just a rider to something I think called the Safe Port Act, which of course nobody can shoot down. Asking Congress to decide between fighting terror or protecting online gambling just isn't even fair.
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