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Sunday, April 24, 2011

Poker Card Marker Arrested At Sands Casino

A poker player who resorted to cheating to gain an edge over his opponents now finds himself behind bars after his antics were discovered by casino security.
According to reports, the culprit was Sefula Seji, 43, of Oak Ridge, New Jersey, who came under suspicion after casino authorities discovered marked cards after a routine review of all the playing cards used from the day before.
Apparently, Seji marked the cards with a piece of sandpaper with each wear signifying the strength of the hand. For instance, a mark in the upper left corner would indicate an ace and and so on in descending numerical order.
However, during their investigation casino staff at the Sands Casino Resort in Bethlehem were able to precisely narrow down the incident to poker table 1 at 2:30 to 8 p.m. Friday.  After then reviewing security footage Sefula Seji was identified as a possible culprit.
Amazingly, Seji returned to the Sands Casino the following afternoon ready to work his con once again but this time he was being scrutinised by security.
Eventually, Sefula Seji was spotted spinning then dragging his finger across the back of his cards, all of which was caught on CCTV. By the time he was arrested 45 minutes later, 39 of the 52 deck pack were found to have been marked.
A search of Seji then revealed a piece of sandpaper in his right hand, as well as a  container with numerous pieces of sandpaper on his person.
Sefula Seji was subsequently charged with engaging in prohibited acts before then being sent to Northampton County Prison in lieu of a $75,000 bail.
In the meantime casino authorities declined to comment on whether Seji won any money from marking the cards. It might, however, throw further doubt on Seji’s previous poker tournament cashes over the past four years, which includes a 27th place finish at the $1,650 WSOPC Atlantic City last month for $4,526.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Why I Am Never Going to Own a Home Again

Part 1. Financial reasons to NOT buy a house.

 Cash Gone. You have to write a big fat check for a down payment. “But its an investment,” Historically this isn’t true. Housing returned 0.4% per year from from 1890 to 2004. And that’s just housing prices. It forgets all the other stuff I’m going to mention below. So when you write that check, you’re never going to see that money again. Because even when you sell the house later you’re just going to take that money and put it into another downpayment. So if you buy a $400,000 home, just say goodbye to $100,000 that you worked hard for. You can put a little sign on the front lawn: “$100,000 R.I.P.”

Closing costs. I forget what they were the last two times I bought a house. But it was about another 2-3% out the window. Lawyers, title insurance, moving costs, antidepressant medicine. It adds up. 2-3%.

 Maintenance. No matter what, you’re going to fix things. Lots of things. In the lifespan of your house, everything is going to break. Thrice. Get down on your hands and knees and fix it. And then open up your checkbook again. Spend some more money. If I rent. My dishwasher doesn’t work. I call the landlord and he fixes it. Or I buy a new one and deduct it from my rent. And some guy from Sears comes and installs it. I do nothing. The Sears repairman and my landlord work for me.

Taxes. There’s this myth that you can deduct mortgage payment interest from your taxes. Whatever. That’s a microscopic dot on your tax returns. Whats worse is the taxes you pay. So your kids can get a great education. Whatever.

You’re trapped. Lets spell out very clearly why the myth of home ownership became religion in the United States. Its because corporations didn’t want their employees to have many job choices. So they encouraged them to own homes. So they can’t move away and get new jobs. Job salaries is a function of supply and demand. If you can’t move, then your supply of jobs is low. You can’t argue the reverse, since new adults are always competing with you.

Ugly. Saying “my house is an investment” forgets the fact that a house has all the qualities of the ugliest type of investment:

Illiquidity. You can’t cash out whenever you want.
High leverage. You have to borrow a lot of money in most cases.
No diversification. For most people, a house is by far the largest part of their portfolio and greatly exceeds the 10% of net worth that any other investment should be.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Is this racist? scale of 1-10.

Dear White Man,

We regret to inform you that your kind has been slated for termination. We, the various Third World majorities of Africa, Asia, India, South America, and the Middle East assert that your long history of success at building civilizations, developing new technologies, creating stable governments, fostering good will, feeding much of the world, and increasing peace and prosperity even amongst the riotous hordes of our own homelands, has made us envious and resentful of you. We, who make up 92% of the global population, feel that we can no longer accept the great disparity between your success and our abject failure. The solution to this inequality should be obvious to all concerned.

We are planning to invade your ancestral homelands, little by little, and to facilitate this, we have the full cooperation of your controlled media and government, academia, and law enforcement organizations. While we, personally, do not control any of these entities ourselves, we are profiting endlessly from the crypto-Marxist system put in place many decades ago by an ethnic "fifth column" which operates with complete impunity at all levels of your political, academic, and media culture. Their interference in the natural development of your constitutional republics has been indispensable to our efforts to wrest from you the control of everything that you've struggled to build and maintain over the last century. Indeed, were it not for them, none of our present plans would have even been possible.

While doing this, they have pushed, inch by inch, to open the borders of ALL White nations to our own sullen masses, throwing open the gates to invasion while assuring the public that "race doesn't matter". Since race, in fact, DOES matter (and no one knows it better than We), they have likewise put into place a totalitarian system of "hate speech" and "hate crime" laws, to further alienate and penalize those few Whites who might harbor some simmering resentments at the increasing decay of their society and culture. All of this is in keeping with the far-reaching plans of this particular ethnic "out group", and has been sometimes referred to as the "Long March".

The Out Group, who maintains a sense of racial cohesiveness hitherto unknown among even the most tightly-knit of all dispersed human peoples, maintains a grip on the press and electronic media that is nearly monopolistic in its all-encompassing reach. Since they are so thoroughly in control of these organs for the dissemination of propaganda, they are in the best position to spread hostility against the White peoples of Europe and America, inciting the minority against the majority in these lands: Black against White, Latino against White, Asian against White, Arab against White, Indian against White, and so on, and so forth.

This is facilitated by decades of brainwashing, beginning in early school years, portraying Whites not as the builders of a great civilization, or the admirable leaders of the Free World, but in a lopsided, entirely slanted way as oppressors, enslavers, genocidal "Nazis", southern Klansmen, imperialistic Colonials, and toothless hillbillies just itching for a chance to lynch the first coloured individual that comes along. This brainwashing not only inflames the minorities in these now racially-mixed "schools", but also inculcates a sense of "White guilt" that the Out Group finds particularly useful in maintaining control.

Thus, in light of the fact that you are socially, morally, mentally, intellectually, and even legally castrated, We, the teeming masses of the Third World who thirst for what you have and what we can never obtain, are going to finally swamp your once noble and advanced societies, your pristine cities and unsullied neighbourhoods, and rape your countries for everything they are worth.

We are going to move in, right under your noses, and set our churches, mosques, synagogues, and strange gods up in place of your own. We will ensure that OUR celebrations and festivities and holidays are observed, while YOURS are erased from the pages of history.

We will drain the public coffers of welfare, food stamps, and all forms of social aid available. We will swamp your children's schools, change the language in which lessons are taught, form street gangs to terrorize and torment your family, steal, vandalize, harass, threaten, and cajole you until we get what WE want.

That it will be entirely at your expense is irrelevant to us.

We will beat and murder your sons; we will rape your wives and daughters.

We kill twelve White Americans every day; your government could care less.

We have shut down hospitals with our teeming numbers. We have flooded the streets, demanding "special rights" for those millions of us that are here illegally.

We nearly had your major politicians ready to grant all of us an "amnesty" in the name of "diversity" and "equal rights". We are filling up the ranks for unskilled labour. We are raping pre-teens. We are doing the jobs Canadians won't do.

As your global economy crumbles, and it gets harder and harder to feed your families, as your birthrate plummets and you face the eventual dispossession of the country your forefathers founded for YOU and YOUR posterity, just remember: there is nothing you can do to stop us. The Out Group has made sure that the law is on OUR side, not yours. No matter how piffling your criticism of us is, the Out Group will use their media to label you with shocking epithets and broad smears: racist, hater, bigot, neo-Nazi, nativist, White supremacist, domestic terrorist, etc.

Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, and all other bourgeois manifestations of your high culture will be vanquished forever. All of your legends and heroes will be spat upon, purged, and finally forgotten. Your cultural folkways will be transgressions; your identity will become a crime.

We come for your JOBS, your MONEY, your WOMEN, and eventually your LIVES. It will not be much longer now.

In closing, We, the huddled masses of the Third World yearning to "breathe free", would like to thank the Out Group, the media monopolists and political plunderers who made all of this possible. We wish them well, and we know they wish us well, just as long as we don't trespass upon their own homeland, which they stole fair and square several decades ago.

Besides, many of you are even anticipating this with something akin to sick glee. After all, that's how the TV set told you to feel. The brainwashing is almost complete, and the sheep are in line to shear.

Have a nice day.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Are smartphones making us dumber?

Anywhere between 6-10% of Internet users are addicted.
Do you ever sneak away from people to check your smart phone?
Have you ever check your blackberry while at a meal with others?
Do you use your smart phone in the bathroom?...and wish you could use it in the shower?
Do you feel lost or naked if you don't have your phone with you?
Do you have to check your phone before bed and immediately when you wake up?
Do you constantly check your phone even when you know there is no new email or text?
Have you ever ignored others in a real conversation to use your phone?
Have you ever checked your phone at a stoplight?

you might have a problem.

3 billion cell phone users. 12 Billion text messages are sent worldwide every day.

Before office workers received their company issued blackberry's, they were working about 47 hrs a week. 9 months later they were averaging over 70 hrs a week.

Somehow the marketing has convinced us that it's a better way to do things. Studies have shown it is associated with increased levels of stress, burnout and decreased job and life satisfaction and increased marital conflict. Smart phone designers engineer them expecting users to touch them over 200 times a day for 20-30 seconds at a time. One of the great myths of technology is that gadgets are supposed to give us more time. But doesn't it feel like they take time away from us?  We are always tinkering with them, changing settings and troubleshooting etc.

The productivity paradox has shown that the more a company invests in technology the LESS productive it's people are.

What I see is more and more distraction. Less deep thinking and more superficial information just being passed quickly along.  Like foreworded texts of a joke, or a twitter picture of someones lunch. Can our brains keep up with all the modern demands for our attention?

Are we all born multitaskers? Cell phone researchers use a term called inattention blindness to describe the mental state we are in when talking on our phones as opposed to listening to music. What is even more frightening is that cell phone users who are proven to have missed parts of tasks, BELIEVED that they were aware of everything going on around them. On average, texters look away from the road for almost 5 seconds. At 50 mph you can travel the length of a football field without looking at the road. At any given time 10% of drivers are texting and 23 times more likely to be in an accident. Our brain is really only capable of doing one thing at a time. So if you think you are a good multitasking actually what you are doing is switching tasks very quickly.  Studies have also found that a middle aged person who "multitasks" makes more errors. One interesting positive is that surgeons that play video games make less errors in operating rooms.

It may seem that we are getting more done, but really we are just getting sloppier. Because when we are doing this we are paying partial continuous attention to many things. This can't be good. Because we have to reorient our brains every time we shift back and forth to tasks. Some research shows that those that multitask the most have more memory problems and are more easily distracted.  All this media is aggressively going after our attention.

Younger users have had their attention spans shortened by technology. They can't handle large chunks of information. Their music reflects this and their choices reflect this. Most students spend less than 2 hours a week reading and studying for class but over 9 hours on facebook per week. With the Internet the majority of brain energy is used to find information and not to deeply study it once it's found. It inhibits creative thinking because instead of pursuing an idea, your twitter followers give you instant feedback before the idea can fully develop.

In the end there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. The flow of information through our lives is only going to increase as new and faster devices are made. The simple solution seems to be to turnoff and tune it out. But is that possible? We can either manage our usage or it will manage us.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Las Vegas. Sin City and the American Capitalist Dream.

"This town, is a make-you town. or a break-you town."-- Frank Sinatra.


Yes it's true, there are no clocks in Vegas casinos. Yes it's true they pump oxygen into the casino to keep weary gamblers awake and at the tables longer. Yes it's true beautiful women will spend the night with you if the price is right.  Vegas is a place where anything is possible and EVERYTHING has it's price.


Inside the grocery stores there are video poker machines. It is a strong probability that you will see a woman with a filled grocery cart, and an infant, sitting on a machine with a cigarette in her hand.  A grandmother spending her social security money in $20 dollar increments.  At any stoplight its common to count 5 or 6 cars over $80,000. I counted.


I looked down on my wrist to find a Platinum Rolex watch. the price tag read $50,488.  On my way to the grocery store I saw 2 Bentleys and a Rolls Royce Phantom. I learned the difference in cut, clarity, and color of diamonds at Tiffany & Company.  I ate platefuls of steamed crab legs dipped in butter and jumbo shrimp smothered in cocktail sauce. Prime rib. Sirloin steak, $170 bottles of wine. I saw two naked girls jump into a giant fishbowl. My pocket Jacks got lucky and turned into a Full House.


Top shelf alcohol flows freely, delivered by gorgeous cocktail waitresses.  At any second someone is risking it all. people shout and clap out loud at blackjack tables. A guy in a big cowboy hat and cowboy boots has his girlfriend blow on his dice for him. This isn't a movie. This is real.  In an elevator I counted 4 different languages being spoken. The latest fashions from Tokyo, London, New York, and Milan walk right by you on your way to the bathroom. Modern design and architecture is redefined with every new casino built.  The week before I arrived, the $3.9 billion dollar Cosmopolitan Casino opened. World famous chefs from Italy to Peru have restaurants all over town. Elvis has a new show. Frank Sinatra has one too. Hopes are turned into elation, dreams are dashed with the flip of an ace.


Three football games are on television, next to a college basketball game two NBA games, a hockey game a soccer match from England, and a car race of some sort. You can wager that Kobe Bryant will score more points than the number of the winning Nascar driver (Jimmie Johnson's car is 48). The waitress asks you if you'd like another cocktail. or beer. or anything you want.


In Vegas, celebrities are on vacation just like you.  In one week I saw Mathew Fox (from Lost) and magician Penn Jillete (Penn & Teller). I saw Chris Angel get into a Bentley with the license plate: B-LEEVE.


I hadn't been to the Mirage poker room in over 18 months. Every dealer there recognized me and asked how I was. One of them gave me a hug.  A dealer named Bobby asked me how my trip was. I told him it was great and I'll be back as soon as I can. He said:

"It's Vegas. Everyone comes back".  So true.