Take care man, I just got banned for three days for linking to a crowdfund site raising money for a court case against the owners of Purple Lounge!

Btw, I think I already mentioned it, but my eldest son is getting married in Amsterdam on Saturday, July 1. I'll arrive on the afternoon of June 29.

Can anyone either give me couch to sleep on for three nights, or recommend a really cheap place where I can stay? If the couch option is possible, I'll be paying for the beers!

I'll be coming straight from Las Vegas where I'll be from June 23. If any of you boys are around, be great to meet up. I'll be staying at the Palms. I'm there for work, not play unfortunately, but I'll be happy to cheer on any STTFrs actually putting money on the felt.

Peru

Not going through LA?

I'll be in the airport for only a couple of hours both ways, and arriving I'll have to get through immigration ugh!

However, I'll be back for longer for WSOP 2018, and may return for other business things over the next year. If so I'll definitely let you know. It would be great to meet you Micro!

fwiw from June 22, I'm taking over as the head of content for iBus Media, so my responsibilities, amongst other things include PokerNews and the WSOP live reporting deal

Cool. I don't know if it's possible with security or whatever, but I live 3 miles from LAX and would be happy to stop in for a pint. I can ride my motorcycle and parking is no big deal.

Sounds like things are going well Joss, very good to hear. I'm still guarding inmates. It's ok, but fairly dull most days, and the other days you wish it was a dull day.

My wife is "working" in prison now too. She's teaching yoga. I put it in quotes because she's not paid. She's breaking into the yoga business and it's for the experience mostly.

At some point we'll all either be prisoners or working in prisons.

Lacky,

I'm starting an anarcho-syndicalist collective in a few years. Wanna join?

You would need to provide some educational links/details before I could even form an opinion micro. Scale would help too, commune, town, national, world...what's the scope of this collective?

And I think we will all be in or working in hospitals/nursing homes first, that's the growth industry today.

As for prisons I don't have the answers. People want less people incarcerated, but those same people want someone put away for life when they hear they did something horrible. Having worked inside one for a few years I know we need them. There really are people that aren't safe to live around. How we deal with the ones that aren't truely a threat, I don't know. The kid texting in Texas probably won't ever do it again, but people will still want him in prison for a while. Same with hundreds of other cases where someone did something stupid and hurt people. Or people having criminal sexual relations with minors. Etc, etc. I don't have the answer, or know where we should draw the line differently.

Well, the anarcho-syndicate is democratic, so if you join you get to say as much as anyone else, but here's a mini-manifesto.

A primary principal of anarchy (social or collective as opposed to anarcho-capitalism) is that power comes from the bottom up instead of top down. So, even in a "national" or "global" system, power is still mostly local and relationships between local groups is more of a confederation than conventional states. That would apply to any anarchy based commune within a state the same as it does in a stateless system.

But, anyway, I'm not really ambitious like that or dogmatic. Say you have 50 acres in a semi-rural semi-wilderness area. Everyone collectively owns all of it, but everyone gets a small area, like 1/3 acre to which they have exclusive rights and exclusive responsibility. You can build a house or put a trailer or w/e on "your" spot and it's all yours. On the collective area there would be collective stuff. A farm, a solar farm, well, a building where you'd be free to live, etc, where people would share stuff and responsibilities (still very flexible - people could opt out of participation easily and temporarily). The syndicalist part is there would be collective business. For most collectives that might be a farm, but it could just as easily be web development, or solar installation. No one would be restricted from having outside business, but this would be like a business and the collective has an interest in the products of collective labor/property. So, it's like an employee owned business/housing cooperative.

Anyway, it's just a thought. My youngest has three more years of high school before I have even a remote possibility of doing anything crazy.


As far as prisons go, I have worked with probably the "best" of prisoners and have had a couple guys who spent years in prison who worked for me and I also taught a solar class (segment of a construction class really) for people who just got out of prison. I don't know how well it's representative of the prison population as a whole and it's still a fairly small sample size, but my experience has been entirely positive.

And yeah, health care. Maybe prison doctor is the job of the future.

Let's make weed legal on a federal level (including giving people the right to grow and sell w/o a license - at least in small scale), and we can improve/lower the cost of some people's healthcare, and reduce the prison populations at the same time.

But apparently more fentanyl, et. al is the solution.

Let's make the federal level illegal.

Cheers Steve, I am indeed pretty happy with the new position Give my best to the family. Harry and Emma are now 9 and 13, but still gorgeous, and we've completely transformed the house - you wouldn't recognize it now it has doors and windows and floors and stuff!

Micro, I just checked, and my return leg actually misses out Los Angeles, it's straight Las Vegas to Vancouver before changing to a flight to Amsterdam. I think we'll have to do our beer on my next trip.

Feels like this new job is dragging me back from the third world into the first after ten years of sitting in the sun. Going to be an interesting adjustment - I'm going to the bank tomorrow to ask for a credit card - I haven't had one for ten years, but I don't suppose you can survive in the UK/US/EU without one these days.

Good to hear that the prison thing seems to have worked out for you Steve. I remember how miserable you were commuting to Canada and only seeing the kids at the weekend.

Joss- I haven't had a credit card for many years, I use a debit card directly linked to my bank account, run through visa, that works exactly the same, can be run by merchants as either credit or debit, etc. Basically the same, it just withdraws directly from my account, and will decline if there is no money in the account, so you never have debt from it. Its another option anyway, don't have to have credit cards.

Micro- You aren't wrong, I know many in prison now that I'm sure will do fine on the outside (and also know others that I'm sure will be coming right back after release). As an example all use one I know fairly well, had bad anger issues he grew out off after about 6 years in prison, has had no issues for about a decade now, is a plumber inside, etc. That said, he still shot a guy in the head as a young man, ruining the man's and his families lives. If we had better ways of deciding who would do well and who wouldn't we could reduce prison times in many cases, but it would also create the same issues with racial bias, etc, etc, and the risk of being wrong and citizens getting hurt.

I agree we have to large a prison population, I just don't claim to know the solution once you get past minor drug offenses

So anyone in the group have experience with global poker? Ave had several people (non-pros/regular players, a good sign) mention it to me lately, and have read around the internet poker threads about it. I would be far easier if someone I know and trust gave their opinion though. If nobody has one maybe I'll play guinea pig, but I'd be surprised if none of you have formed an opinion about it already.

Micro-honestly, if I was gonna move to be a part of something like that I would just buy a sailboat and sail off with the family instead. That's been my dream for a long time.

That might have sounded good to me at some point, but in my old age I get sea sick.

I have another dream of walking the earth.

Appalachian trail style, or wanderer/hitchhiker style? I'd be down for either other than the wife/kids thing. I could sweet talk them into a sailboat though. I'd be hoping for the best on the seasick front though. The younger two have never been in an ocean swale, so no idea.

Realistically something like a month on the Pacific Trail or something like that might be a possibility at some point. Probably just a fantasy though for a while. I have one kid starting college next year and the next one follows. At this point the first has like 80% scholarship/aid, but there will be expenses for sure and I'm going to do what I can. I want to do something like the Pacific Trail though before I'm too old.

I have a debit card Steve - opened a bank account just over a year ago, before then I used PokerStars/Neteller and Western Union.

The problem is that Peruvian bank debit cards can't be used on the internet, so if I want to book flights/hotels while I'm abroad, or even simply buy wifi access in an airport, I'll need a credit card.

My wife just got a new credit card - comes with a $70 a year fee and an interest rate of 122% which is pretty standard - she wants it to buy clothes online from the UK.



And while we're online, a nice first step for the US prison system would be to cut every custodial sentence in half.

I remember when Martin McGuiness was caught with weapons and explosives in his car, at the height of the IRA terrorism blitz.

He got 8 years, out in 4 after time off for good behavior. He was the Provisional IRA Chief of Staff responsible for planning all their terrorist attacks.

Went on to become the Education Secretary after being elected to the Northern Irish Assembly.

He'd still be in gaol under the US system.

Or look at Todd Kohlhepp.

My point being saying let everyone out sooner because of a Martin McGuiness makes no more sense than saying never let anyone out because of a Todd Kohlhepp. It's not a simple problem, and there aren't simple answers (assuming we place value in both the inmates quality of life, and that of future victims, the two things we are trying to balance)

So Joss, why can't you just open a bank account in UK? Have you son open a joint account even if you can't on your own. If Peruvian accounts are a pain that seems like an easy option (not that I really know, I'm not very international)

I'd need to be UK resident.

I've looked into this now, and I can open an offshore account in the Isle of Man which will give me a debit card I can use online. That'll be good enough for me.

My son now lives in New York ....

So...initial impression on global poker. Signup was easy and comes along with $2 "sweepscash", basically same as cash, 10k "gold coins" (no cash value). There are daily cash freerolls that can be qualified for playing the gold coin games, so site would be good for dinking around, playing cheap. On the cash side, plenty of cash games up to .5/1 or so, less after that, but always been games when I have looked up to 10/20. I've turned the $2 into $10 playing .02/.04, and those games are obv soft, no idea higher though. Sng's seem to have decent traffic but again at low stakes, not much higher. Mtt's decent number of guarantees, some with overlay.

Downside, fairly primitive software, and no tools like holdem manager, table ninja, etc. Realistically I could probably 6 table or so, but would need to use auto hot key to write my own code for the gamepad, just like the old days.

No wait lists for tables that I can see. Software and feel it's a lot like the early party poker days, tables need to be reasonably large to see everything (larger than pokerstars tables seems like, but my sight is also worse, the right glasses might help)

So, overall I'm encouraged. I'll probably play some until Sheldon adelson gets his government menions to wreck it.

Update-my free $2 is now $50. I'm struggling between just depositing money and moving up or trying to play me way up. Pros for playing my way up:

1) it's been 5 1/2 years, the practice at micro stakes has been a good thing.

2) I really, really want to be able to say I never deposited a dime as I withdraw money later. Much like being able to say I only ever deposited $50 on party poker.

Cons-obviously it will take longer to get there, opportunity cost and all that.

Played in a $.50/1 home game Sat. night - my first time playing poker in a couple years. Check raising pre flop? Not cool. Dramatically slow-rolling? Totally fine.

Normies man.