- Never, ever live in an apartment beneath someone else’s apartment, as you will share the same pipes, and when your upstairs neighbor flushes something down their kitchen sink that they shouldn’t, YOU will be stuck with a plumbing headache when the pipe clogs and it all backs up into YOUR sink.
- Headhunters will not call you back if it looks like they might have to put the slightest bit of real effort into helping you find contract legal work, but that’s ok, because you’re probably spending most of your afternoon trying to unclog your sink.
- Strong Bad emails just aren’t funny anymore. There. I said it.
- Rick is an amazingly nice guy who will link to you if you confess to an addiction to playing no limit texas hold’em, even if you do something obnoxious like call it the “cadillac of slotdemo“.
- Today is Cesar Chavez Day here in LA. Now, if you’re like me, you might think that Cesar Chavez is a professional boxer of some reknown, but you’d be thinking of Julio Cesar Chavez. Plain old Cesar Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association and was some sort of champion of migrant workers. Net effect to you: you will pay $5 more in greens fees at the local golf course because of the “holiday”.
You Gotta Know When to Fold ’em
When you don’t have a day job, and therefore don’t spend 8 to 12 hours a day sitting in front of a computer, sometimes things get lost in the shuffle for a few days. Like this, for example. It seems that the WTO has decided that the U.S. policy of “prohibiting” (and I use that term loosely) online gambling violates international trade law.
My favorite part of the article is this quote from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA): “It cannot be allowed to stand that another nation can impose its values on the U.S. and make it a trade issue.” I’m sorry, Bob, but isn’t that what the U.S. does in half of the world?
Does anyone belive this ruling will have any serious impact on the state of the online gambling industry in the U.S.? If the U.S. was willing to go to war in Iraq without the support of the United Nations or most of the world, then the U.S. certainly is not going to cave in to pressure from a tiny nation like Antigua & Barbuda or even the WTO on the matter of a trade issue. The Justice Department is going to continue to prosecute American media outlets that carry advertisements on behalf of online casinos. And Americans, like yours truly, are going to continue to gamble online.
It may be that the U.S. policy violates international trade law, but given that Americans are continuing to gamble online (in increasing numbers, albeit not at the pace of a year ago), I’m not sure how A&B; can argue that it’s dropoff in online gambling business is a direct result of that policy.
Maybe we should just invade them and annex them as part of the U.S.
