Life is good!

Well it's been an interesting past nine months or so. It's a bit sadder viewing the world in a slightly darker light, but I'm trying to be a bit more upbeat and less emo than my last post here made me seem! Some relationships have fizzled or been cut, but the ones I still have I think are better and stronger because they are based on mutual appreciation and both sides know the other will speak up when they want something.

I'm online, and have been trying to hone my PLO skills playing low stakes omaha, and Stars just introduced their version of Rush poker, “Zoom,” which works very well. As my former coach described it “it's brilliant; it allows one-tabling fish to multitable!” I also like it because it allows you to re-use the same old postflop moves over and over without people catching on, and you can also manipulate your stats without people looking. (Now I can ship the turn or the river light EVERY TIME completely unbalanced, and very few people will notice. I can also min 3-bet all my playable hands against middle and late openers, and then get paid huge when I re-pop aces full pot from regs who I know have their HUD running.)

And without the weight of obligations that I previously had, I have been able to steadily make my own life situation much more tolerable, and even good! I've made many new friends and poker connections, I've moved up a few levels in stakes, I have some staking offers and people who would eagerly be students, I've played in ungodly high stakes private home games... just lots of craziness, but good craziness, happening poker-wise.

I also went back to New Zealand to visit my dad, and once again, had enormous trouble with my step-mom. I thought that since I paid for the trip she would be better, seeing me able to support myself better, but that was not the case. She apparently just does not approve of anything about me or who I am as a person, and I've decided that she's just not a person I care about or want in my life. I love my dad and he deserves to be happy, and she makes him happy (apparently, some how!), so I'm grateful to her for that, but I'm done with my efforts to include her in any way, shape or form in my life. Too bad. Other than her, New Zealand was fantastic and I once again had a fantastic time.

I'm also moving to the LA area which will be good for poker and for life. There's just not much to do in Vegas, and the culture and general attitude of the people is much less appealing than the LA culture/attitude, so I'm very excited. (And LA, in turn, has worse culture and attitude than New Zealand, where being laid back all the time, not wearing any shoes, and just generally relaxing and hanging out with people constitutes a full days work. Paradise!)

So, life is generally good. Keepin' on turckin'. I'm still playing a lot of poker, but I'm at a point where I feel like I'm starting to be able to work towards a good steady life, without much stress, not having to grind on my computer 10 hours a day 6 days a week making less than minimum wage just to barely pay my expenses each month. And I really enjoy the people I've been meeting. The new poker friends I've met are really good and decent people, and networked in the poker and entertainment world like crazy, and the people outside of poker are just generally good people whom I respect and enjoy. Life is good, and looking very much like it will get even better.

I probably still won't update this blog much. I got my twitter hooked up so I can send tweets via text message, and my facebook hooked up to automagically post my tweets on my fb wall, so now that I can just post things everywhere with a single text message, I will probably update those more often (and still not post anything on here more than once or twice a year!).

So yeah, life is good!

On the Resonsibility of Freedom

A lot has happened to me over the last couple of years. Although I moved back to Las Vegas in an attempt to stand on my own two feet and grow up and become free, earning my own freedom, I had only partially succeeded. And each year since I moved here, I felt like I was on pace to become fully independent and free to act and do as I saw fit, but each year, I had failed and fallen back down to approximately where I was when I got here.

My mom was paying for my health insurance, and my dad paid to have me fly to visit him and my step mom. I was still living by the grace of others, and as unacceptable as I found that state, I always felt like at the very least I was working towards breaking away from that and being able to be financially independent. In fact, in the fall of last year, I was doing so well financially that I invited an old friend of mine who wasn't doing so well to come live with me. He was making his own way, but precariously, and his options were running out where he was, so we both thought that Las Vegas would be a great place to be—he, like myself, is a poker player, and having the casinos right here, as well as a bevy of potential students from the weekly discussions groups, and cheaper rent and shared utilities— this all was a much better setup for him. And I had a new comrade-in-arms to hit the poker tables with.

However, the weeks and months went by, and he did not attempt to utilize the new options available to him, and the money ran thinner and thinner, and eventually I was covering much of his cost of living. And this was at a point when, as I said, I was still not fully covering MYSELF completely. I was frustrated with his lack of effort, but at the same time, I tried not to interfere with his life and give him leeway. After all, I remember when I was up in Seattle looking for work, and I couldn't find any, and I felt completely helpless. I didn't know what I should be doing and why what I was doing wasn't working. I felt worthless and helpless and I had no idea how to change that.

Then came April 15th.

Suddenly everything was clear.

On April 15^th, 2011 the United States Department of Justice seized the internet domain names of the three largest online poker sites in the world, and froze the bank accounts of their payment processors, all at once. One of my major life-lines had been completely severed. Author and poker professional Matt Matros summed it up decently: “It almost feels as if I’ve been stripped of one of my college degrees — as if a career skill I’ve been honing for all of my adult life is suddenly useless.”

I knew why they had been shut down—most people think it was some moral/political maneuver, but that's not the case. The Southern New York DOJ is famous for its relentless pursuit of money launderers, and there's really no easier method of transferring 5 or 6 figures anonymously than losing it at a game of poker. When it comes out of the account of the “winner” it is legitimate gambling winnings that can be spent freely without needing to be further laundered. For a $20 Western Union fee going in, $3 per hand rake, and $20 more in wire transfer fees going out, I can ship you a few hundred thousand dollars, and nobody can connect us together.

Regardless of the reasons, something in my brain clicked that day. This was unacceptable. My LIFE was unacceptable. As much as poker may be a conduit for money laundering, so is cash. So is the entire city of Las Vegas. And freedom of action, civil rights, must always take precedence over all other concerns when the rights of others are not infringed upon. This is when I realized WHY I was always agitated and WHY I always felt like I was struggling and WHY I found it so difficult to move ahead in life. I allowed the immoral to supersede my own judgment. But no more.

By April 17^th, I had concocted a plan to get back online. I won't go into the details, but I will soon be playing poker online again. There will be no trace of it, or connection to me, other than this blog post. I will accurately report my taxes. I will not act immorally or harm others. I will simply do that which is accepted in nearly every other country in the world. I understand the risks of this endeavor and accept the consequences of my actions.

I had decided all of this within a few days of Black Friday, and I had also decided that I needed to cut off my “friend”. As bad as I felt for him, and as much as I know how helpless I felt, there were more factors that needed to be considered. Firstly, it was not only myself and my resources that I was expending. It got to the point where I was struggling enough that I felt like I needed to go begging at my mom's feet again. Now she has always supported me and come to not only accept but like the fact that I play poker, and she has been willing to support me financially when I needed it, and happily so, with the belief—the belief that I shared—that I would get on my feet soon enough. But when my choices were going to bleed over and start affecting her, that was unacceptable.

For the previous month or two, I had explained that my financial situation was getting dire, and I would barely make it until the World Series of Poker (which has been a nice annual boost, because I know I can deal there each year if I need the money), but still the effort was not increased. I had offered to teach him to deal in time for the WSOP, I had helped find him potential students, stakes him for games, but none of it was taken advantage of. Only I was taken advantage of. And THAT was unacceptable.

When I was in Seattle, feeling helpless, my mom was frustrated with me as well. She too felt like I should be making progress, and it got to the point where she said I had to do SOMETHING even if it was work at McDonald's, and that I couldn't live with her forever. That was the jolt I needed, and about a month later I had packed up and come back to Vegas and was going to try to make a go at poker.

I was very angry at her for that for a while, because I felt like I wasn't ready. But although, as I mentioned at the start of this post, I wasn't completely on my own two feet, I was at least partly there and making a darn good attempt. And I eventually was grateful to her for forcing me to “sink or swim” because I think I would have continued wading in the kiddie pool forever if she hadn't. I owe her a lot for that jolt into action.

With that in mind, and secure in the knowledge that my “friend” was not going to do any more than he had been doing, I informed him that I was cutting him off—I was moving out. I don't know what he's going to do, and I don't know if he knows either. All I know is that I can't afford the emotions or the finances he needs for support. He has drained me, and I let him do it.

My friend, do not try to find me or contact me; I will not be there. If you are to die in the street starving, I understand that is a possible outcome. If some day you understand why I feel not that I have abandoned YOU, but that YOU have abandoned ME, and if some day you understand why and how I can care about you while still being numb to what happens to you, and if some day you are standing yourself on your own two feet and wish to meet me on equal ground, and if some day you wish to share a friendship and knowledge that is of mutual benefit, then on that day I will want to be found by you and be your friend. I understand that that day may never come and that you may always be angry at me for what has happened, and blame everything but your own choices on how your life turns out. But I hope that is not the case.

I know I am not in the wrong. I have helped two other people prior to trying to help you. They both took advantage of the opportunity and got themselves back on their feet, and I am proud of what they've accomplished and who they are, and proud to be their friend. They did not view life as endless struggle, to be lived day by day with no forethought and with only the avoidance of today's pain in mind. They did not wait until the last minute to fix problems they knew about in advance and then claim to be so unlucky as to have the problem still exist after all this time. (And no, I will not remove or edit this post.)

ANYWAY....

So I had come up with a plan to get back online, and I had decided to move out—in short, I had realized that my own inability to stand fully on my own two feet was my acceptance of that state of being, and I had decided that was no longer acceptable.

Backtrack about a year and a half.

I went to New Zealand, on my dad's dime of course, to visit my dad and my step mom and see New Zealand for the first time. (South Island FTW!) I thoroughly enjoyed the trip but having then run me around all over to make sure I got to see all of it got tiring, and I requested a day or rest and hanging around home once or twice. Additionally, I didn't sleep well a few of the days, and was thus more concerned with when we were getting to the destination rather than the scenery.

Background info: My step mom has never liked me. She tolerated me because I was my father's son, and she loves my father. But she wholly disapproves of my view on life, my ethical standpoint, my lack of religion, my poker (gambling).... pretty much everything about me and who I am as a person. That's fine. She's allowed to think and go about life however she pleases. Although I disagree, I understand WHY she feels this way because I know what her world view is, and I can see why I appear to her the way I do. And besides, she makes my dad happy, and for that, I am eternally grateful. I have basically tried to just avoid communication with her because it seems that we end up in a disagreement every time we speak, so I feel that not talking was the cleanest way to handle things.

Now then, as I said, I was very much enjoying the New Zealand trip, but I was worn out for some of it, and I guess it showed. My step-mom wrote an exceedingly vile letter (because speaking out loud was too difficult) about how ungrateful I was, and basically how I was a little punk leaching off my dad and not properly appreciating the trip which he had paid for. The other main point of the letter was that I was a poor communicator and didn't attempt to engage her in conversation. As I said above, I thought not speaking was the best way to keep the peace, but apparently, she disagreed! (You can read it for yourself, Page 1 and Page 2.)

I have written a similarly vile letter. When I was in high school, I had a long distance relationship, which is certainly odd for being in high school, and my parents were concerned about it, and I wrote a long hate-filled diatribe about them, their separation, and who are they to judge me blah blah blah. I don't have a copy of it to link to, but I would happily show it if I had it, because I am rightly ashamed of it. I also don't expect my parents to forgive me for it. I love them, and I think they understand WHY I wrote it and how confused and angry I was when I wrote it, so although it was completely unacceptable and unforgivable, I know they at least know where it came from and that I have grown past such stupidity, and that I love them and appreciate them for who they are and all they have done for me.

Similarly, I understand why my step-mom felt the way she did, and the torment boiling inside of her that forced her to express such feelings. I do not forgive her for it, since she has never attempted to understand me and my life, and why I am proud of the person I am, while I have sought to understand her and her world view. But at the very least, I do understand why she feels the way she does, and I know that from that point of view, I am a gross outsider and a freak. An immoral and disrespectful person.

Normally, I show respect when I feel it is earned... and as I've said, I'm not the fondest of her and don't respect much of the way she approaches the world. But the thing is—she had a RIGHT to expect respect.

That's important, because it's the crux of my entire problem. I was relying on my dad and in part on her, not just financially, but in many respects. And because I was dependent on her, she felt she had a right to expect certain things from me. And you know what, she's right. When I was supporting my friend, I had a RIGHT to expect him to try and break free of my support. And if my step mom is in some way supporting me, she has a RIGHT to expect things of me.

Fast forward now to a few weeks ago. I was at a game night with some friends, and the wife of one of my poker buddies, in a completely off-hand comment mentioned that she thought I was a virgin. (My ego compels me to mention that I'm not, although seeing as how my mom is the most frequent reader of my blog, I'm not sure how grateful I am about my ego's desire to put that out there. Hooray for awkwardness!)

Anyhow, prideful as I am, I was a bit upset about this, but it only took a moment to realize that she ALSO had a right to this opinion. She's a smart lady, and I value her friendship and her opinions, and if she thought this of me, it was not a fault of hers, but of mine.

The image that I project to the world clearly is not the image I have of myself. And you know what? The image I have of myself just isn't accurate. My projection is my actions and my way of presenting myself, and those ARE who I am, so it is my own image of myself that needs adjusting. And who I really am is not who I want to be and who I thought I was. This women thinks I am a soft spoken computer geek virgin, and I think I am some kind of god. The problem is, she's closer to accurate than I am.

That is unacceptable.

Because she's RIGHT to think of me the way she does, and because my step mom was RIGHT to feel the way she did, and because I am RIGHT to leave my old friend in the dust, because of the moral code which makes these values real to me—my moral code—I needed to change who I was and how I approached my life. Being dependent on anybody else for my finances, for my happiness, for my well-being, for my LIFE, is unacceptable to me and will not stand any longer.

From this point forward, I will be responsible for my destiny. My life will be my own, completely and irreversibly. If that means when I go broke I work at McDonald's, then that's what it takes. I will at the very least still have my pride and my knowledge that I am doing what it takes to EARN my own way in this world, without relying on the charity of others. If I visit my dad in New Zealand this year, it will either be on my own dime, or with the understanding that he wishes to treat me to the trip as a gift, and that I am free to enjoy the gift as I see fit, and not in any manner that he expects of me. (To be fair and clear, he DOES already feel this way—it was only my step mom who didn't.)

In a similar vein, I have recently realized that I am no longer a liberal democrat. I am an anarchist. If I felt that government COULD work, I would still be a liberal. (The people who self-identify as the American Christian Conservative Right are the most evil and vile people whose way of existing actively harms the rest of humanity, and they should be fought fervently, whether you are for or against government.) But alas, I think the red-tape bureaucracy is too ineffectual to work, and acting in accordance with my morality of self-reliance, I have realized that I must live for myself, in every respect, including politically. (I am NOT an anarcho-capitalist... I have already outlined many of the problems with capitalism and shown more reasons why if government can work, more regulation is better.)

I will from this point forward respect myself. That means not just being financially independent and free in all other respects, but treating myself with the respect I deserve. This means getting my fat butt back in shape, speaking my mind more often and clearly, and projecting to the world the person I want to be and feel that I should be.

I am a good person, and I seek to leave the world and humanity at large better than I found it; therefore, any action I take to better myself and make myself happy and achieve what I want in life is a moral action.

I can now pay my own way and stand on my own two feet, and I will make sure that is always the case. My life is my own, wholly and without reservation.

I will live for myself. I will only help others if I can afford it and if the enjoyment I get from being able to help them and see them succeed is worth the price I am paying. I will treat others with the respect they deserve in my eyes, no more and no less. I will act according to my own morality at all times and in all things. I will treat myself, my body, and my mind with the respect they deserve. I will love others for who they are and what they bring to my life and to the world, in combination with the knowledge of their love for who I am and what I bring to their life and to the world. I will choose freedom over security; I will choose my life over others' beliefs that I owe them things I do not owe. I will be free. And I will earn my freedom.

Anything else is unacceptable.

Poker's Black Friday

http://goo.gl/8Q1E7
http://goo.gl/ooaSr
http://goo.gl/5yeBi
http://goo.gl/NOS6S
http://goo.gl/qXgHr
http://goo.gl/lnwjc

What makes a happy society?

Many of you may have heard of a classic ethical dilemma: You are standing at the switch for a train which cannot be stopped and on whose tracks lay 5 people on the right switch, and 1 person on the left switch. The switch is currently set on the right, and the train will kill 5 people if you do nothing. The train cannot be stopped, and no outside-the-box tricks can be used. You either throw the switch or you don't. Easy... you throw the switch and let a single person die instead of many.

Now the dilemma is altered: You are on a bridge above the tracks and the train is still heading towards the 5 people. You can however throw a passerby off the bridge onto the tracks and derail the train, saving the five people. (Once again, you cannot jump off the bridge yourself or use any other tricks of logic... either you throw a passerby off and save the people—and that will work every time guaranteed—or you do nothing and the five people die.)

The second dilemma, when asked to groups of people, gave far more varied answers. Whereas the first situation was very clear, many people seem to have reservations about the second situation because we are involving a person who was not involved in the situation to begin with. What this means is that any rational discussion of ethics must concede that the optimization of the utility of an individual or group does not necessarily create the happiest society.

(It should now be noted that I consider the field of ethics to be the study of how to promote happiness or unhappiness among creatures that are capable of feeling it to any degree. Thus, ethics does not concern rocks, highly concerns humans, and to a very tiny degree concerns individual flies and bees.)

You often see in movies stories about a squadron of soldiers going into enemy territory to rescue one man, killing many in the squadron in the effort, because “we don't leave anybody behind.” In sheer numbers and utility of soldiers, this is a terrible idea. But do the soldiers perform better because they know that their buddies truly have their back when it counts? Are they more willing to die in the field knowing they were helping to save another person? Are we as a society actually better off with a mentality like this? Can we and should we be proud that damn the numbers we will do the right thing?

It may be so that society as a whole is better off (in terms of overall happiness) if we allow people to harm themselves and do things which look in theory to be awful.

But there are certainly gray areas and considerations. Take the second example of the train and standing on the bridge. How many people would have to be on the tracks for you to consider it ethical to throw an innocent passerby off the bridge? What about in the first example if the one person on the left tracks was a baby, and the five people on the right tracks were the baby's parents and grandparents begging you to let them die so that their child may live? Are we better off, happier people, if we live in a society that saves babies in that situation? I don't know, but I certainly think it's possible. And it makes for an interesting discussion.

This was sparked by none other (and really, what better source is there for ethical dilemmas...) than Star Trek. The situation proposed in the show was somewhat different, but an interesting dilemma nonetheless. Our part of the galaxy is at war with another part of the galaxy. Projections which are deemed to be 99.9% accurate state that no matter what we do, we will lose the war and be enslaved for approximately 150-200 years (before we revolt and reclaim our portion of the galaxy).

The war just cannot be won—we don't have the man power or resources. Furthermore, the projections say that if we continue fighting the war, approximately 900 billion people will die in battle. (Also, it should be noted that the enslavement will not be concentration camp type enslavement—the conquered peoples will still have a decent amount of freedom of action and not entirely unhappy lives. The conquerers really just want claim over the territory and will not interfere with day-to-day life except as it pertains to larger territorial politics.) However, there is a small group of people who can give over our battle plans to the bad guys in order to force us to lose the war sooner rather than later, at a cost of only a few billions lives (as opposed to the almost trillion lives that would be lost in a long drawn-out battle). Many high ranking people were asked about this, and they all unanimously said something along the lines of “damn the numbers, we're not going to lose this war!” indicating that they would prefer to go down fighting. One man was left to decide whether or not to stop the “traitors” from giving up our battle plans... he was left to decide whether a long war or a short war was best.

In the end he decided that part of being in a free society is the freedom of action, the freedom to fight, and that it was wrong to hand over his people to the bad guys without a fight. I think he was wrong, but only because of the size of the difference in numbers. So many hundreds of billions of people, many of them innocent civilians on other planets, are going to die just because he feels that the society is better off if people are allowed to fight.

I can see his point, but not to the tune of 898 billion extra people that are going to die. Surely at least a few billion of them would rather surrender. Who's right? (Obviously, I think I am.) It's at the very least, worth pondering how many people this situation would need to involve before the scale tips one way or the other on how much the freedom to fight and die in a lost cause is worth. And it's worth noting (and the point of this whole thing) that letting people destroy themselves can in fact make a better and happier society because it makes them feel so much better off to know that they have such freedom of action. (I'm still against hard drugs, since I feel that their addictiveness takes away that freedom, but that's a whole other blog post...)

Wow, really Fox News, really??....

For those of you not up to date, a few of the major internet providers were wanting to be able to regulate what their customers could and could not view on the internet. This included blocking certain sites, throttling torrents, etc. The FCC recently took them to court trying to legally prohibit them from doing so, and won.

The phrase "net neutrality" means quite literally keeping the internet neutral. That means unrestricted. So anybody who says "net neutrality" is referring to the concept that the internet should be unrestricted to all. If they do not mean that, they are getting the term wrong.

This is a clip from Fox News about that recent court ruling and they get it entirely wrong. They believe (incorrectly) that the FCC is trying to regulate the internet, when in fact the FCC is trying to PREVENT the internet providers like (Cox and Comcast) from regulating the internet. The FCC is trying to keep the internet free and unrestricted by stopping the corporate internet providers by blocking things from customers and/or charging for different parts of the internet. The FCC is the good guys in this one.

Fox News not only got this outright wrong, but blatantly stopped the guy from defining it and then closed the segment. They spun it off as some kind of difference of opinion, but in reality they simply got their facts completely and utterly wrong. Fox News has always been insanely biased and full of shit, but apparently they have now stopped even attempting to hide their disregard of facts and logic.

It's just... WOW. "Wow" is the only appropriate word for it. Well that and "disturbing" and "dismaying" I suppose.

Remember, BOTH people on the two "sides" of this want unregulated internet. One simply doesn't know that that's what he's getting and is upset due entirely to his own misunderstanding (and refusal to take the time to understand).

Jesus Christ. It's amazing.

Plutonomy, poker, imigration

Plutonomy/Plutocracy: goo.gl/BmdL

Poker over the past few days 4-tabling: goo.gl/cjLv

Immigration Effects: goo.gl/d3ag




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How crazy would Americans today get if they heard these verdicts?

Edit: These have nothing to do with my thoughts on immigration; I just laugh thinking about how crazy people would get if these laws were recent. Also, as a note, just because they aren't recent doesn't mean they aren't Supreme Court rulings.


Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886)

"Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," applies to all persons "without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality," and to "an alien, who has entered the country, and has become subject in all respects to its jurisdiction, and a part of its population, although alleged to be illegally here."


Wong Wing v. U.S. (1896)

Citing the first case I listed, in the case of Wong Wing v. US, The Supreme Court further applies the citizenship-blind nature of the Constitution to the 5th and 6th amendments, stating "... it must be concluded that all persons within the territory of the United States are entitled to the protection guaranteed by those amendments, and that even aliens shall not be held to answer for a capital or other infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."


Plyler v. Doe (1982)

In Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law prohibiting enrollment of illegal aliens in public school. In its decision, the Court held, "The illegal aliens who are plaintiffs in these cases challenging the statute may claim the benefit of the Equal Protection Clause, which provides that no State shall 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' Whatever his status under the immigration laws, an alien is a 'person' in any ordinary sense of that term… The undocumented status of these children vel non does not establish a sufficient rational basis for denying them benefits that the State affords other residents."


Thanks to this page, made by the research of Robert Longley for pointing these laws out.

How outraged would modern Americans be...???


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