How Full Tilt Poker Screwed Poker Players Thanks to Republicans

I actually went to my old work yesterday.  They hired me back for like 1 day a week or whatever.  So yesterday was the day I was trying to remember my old phone number and get passwords and remember to plug in LAN connections.   One day a week ain't bad.


In fact it seems all the people Walker tried to get rid of are now double dipping.  Schools are hiring back teachers because they can not find replacements and so forth. So instead of hiring new people to replace the old people, there are not enough trained new people. 


BTW - did you see that it seems many of the jobs Walker said he created are actually OUTSIDE the State of Wisconsin?  It's almost like he was not telling the truth or something.


But you can't get totally mad at Republicans (of course you can but follow along).  11 years ago Republicans were all anal about online poker because the Christian right Tea Partiers (before they were formally called Tea Party) believed poker was evil.


The Republicans wanted to shut down all online poker because it was not regulated.  After passing a bill which basically DID shut it down online poker (and took $10,000 a year out of my pocket).  They made it illegal for banks to accept poker money . . . like a bank could tell it was poker money.  So what happened was that Neteller, a very very large  AND SAFE bank in England was shut down to Americans.


So with only a few places still open to Americans we were forced to leave our money IN the online sites instead of transferring the money to safety.  But recently it was getting harder to get money INTO the online sites (I had not tried to get money INTO a site since 2001 . . didn't have to it was always coming out).


WELL - It seems one major online site.  Full Tilt WAS CROOKED.  It was a giant ponzi scheme that the Republicans forced poker players to partake in.


The problem started with getting money INTO a poker room. Full Tilt could not get accept money into their accounts, HOWEVER, it wanted business, so it just SAID the money was in the accounts so people could play.


So Full Tilt had hundreds of millions of dollars in virtual money that people were playing with.  When someone wanted to cash out they would us OTHER peoples money. Except all of a sudden everyone wanted their money.  $300 million is owed to American players.  Meanwhile the people running the company were pulling out tens of millions of dollars a month.  In fact $444 million were paid to owners and partners while payouts were not being processed.



Lawyers say it was not a ponzi scheme . . . it was just bad management.  PokerStars the rivel was having the same problem getting money from US players but instead of saying "yea we got it trust us" they said - "sorry no money no playing"


The whole problem as with all ponzi schemes is what happens when everybody wants their money at once.


So while Republicans sort of had the right idea saying money COULD be stolen, they totally screwed Americans with how they attempted to fix the problem.  They actually CREATED the problem by closing all of the SAFE places to store money. 


And these guys think they have a better idea on financials?
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Columbus had another 0.42 inches of rain yesterday and combined with the 0.72 inches the day before we are pretty soaked. Madison has had twice that amount. This LOW system has been siting over Wisconsin for about a week now and if you have been watching, a 50 wide 200 mile slash down the middle of Wisconsin has been some of the coldest weather in America.

Also of note is "weather forecast slippage". This is a really hard part of the year for forecasting. The battle between good and evil, summer and winter has begun. The week long predictions for the most part are pretty good but there has been nothing to push the low away. There is a cold front not even on the west coast yet that is now suppose to push it away. We will see.
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Ticket for the Nebraska/Wisconsin game are going for $400 a ticket on ebay. Did playing high school teams and technical schools really help UW prepare for Nebraska? This is a totally different animal. The College football world will be in Madison this weekend.  The game of the week in America.

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Last weekend I was at the International Wooden Boat Show. This was the first time the show has ever been in Wisconsin and WOW, were there some amazing boats on Lake Geneva. Most were built in the 30s and 40.  I walked around all day Saturday snapping photos and now have the task of preparing all 300 for viewing. 

 

The boat above was the first boat to ever go 100mph. It was built in the early 30s   Huge engines.  The cool thing here is that the owner was able to fire up it's engines from this dock and have it on the trailer in 42 seconds.  He demonstrated it.  You can't tell from this shot but it's 33 feet long!

In fact that was one of the odd things.  As he left the dock and turned left so we could see the broad side people gasped at it's length.  They built boats very long back then.  At the end of the day there was a boat parade with over 130 antique boats!  AWESOME!!!

You can see more at Rod Melotte dot com,  I'll be slowly putting more and more shots out there.  

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Watched Pan Am last night - excellent show - not like anything else on TV and I liked it.   Check it out or record it for something different.

Have a great day today!

Rod