What I fail to understand is how no one was charged with anything (again). In 2008 the Societe General "lost" 4.9 bilion Euros and the blamed it all on one guy, Jerome Kerviel, a junior trader who supposedly could gamble around with nearly five billion Euros without cheking in with his superiors.

In this case, the CEO of JPMorgan even blamed "a small group of employees" yet still, the US DOJ is not charging any indivduals.

It seems the banks have grown so far out of the reach of the world's justice departments in the last few years that they not even bother to present a fall guy for their crimes anymore.

Yeah, it's a bitch. I didn't know I was an alcoholic until I was running away from hard times. Then even after I had gained a marginal amount of success, the alcohol remained. Fucking alcohol. It really does make you a different person. Sometimes a very very excellent, if not womanizing person. But sometimes a monster. Best I avoid the stuff beyond what I think I need or can handle, one drink at parties. Parties can be bad if I violate this. Or good -- it's a gamble lol.

You know what though, it's addiction period. I stopped drinking, my life improved; but, I replace it with something else. I am addicted to video games. I do 80+ hour, no sleep binges playing a game I'm seeking to master. Addiction.

Pretty soon I will have to go cold turkey even on things like marijuana, which make me mellow, happy, heightened senses, and artistic/creative focus/drive, and which my peers claim is not addicting. Nah, everything in my life is an addiction. Even creative endeavors or day to day work -- it commands my utter and impenetrable existence, allowing my world to fall to shambles, meanwhile I create art or engineer new false existence. A system of dice I throw forever for no real reason other than I am addicted forever to throwing dice. Boom. Boom. Cards. Mmm, yeah, gambling is fun and bad too, and consume entire weekends. Sex. Typing things. It's ALL addiction to me.

The only thing I get from typing my mind is the rush and addiction to the finality of saying the truth, regardless of the consequences. It just comes out and the fists raise my adrenaline and I'm fighting now. Haahhahahahahaha!!! Addiction! Adrenaline. Energy. I'll run for 4 hours straight to achieve a moment of elation and existence outside of the day to day shuffle. Addicted to life? I sit at my desk addicted to death? No, life. I am addicted to EVERYTHING.

This is far too late a reply. My mind was on Venus, my heart was on Mars, and my nether regions were on the good planet Vaseline, in the Proctor & Gamble constellation.

I miss this place.

I miss you.

Think of me as a stiletto in your boot.

If threatened, I'll be a razor tongue that cuts without thinking.

Happy Drunken Irish Bastard Day - yes...my people can say that....

The people of Earth!

Ahhh ha ha ha ha!



xoxoxoxo

It's actually over a bar and not watching you gamble.

Also this is a bit of a different angle then any other i've seen for comparison regarding viewing angle.

Your video, Giant floating face watches you as you gamble, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

http://makezine.com/2015/01/30/this-giant-floating-face-creepily-watches-while-you-gamble/

Unfortunately, it's one of those forced-perspective effects. Would have been cooler if it was like, 40-50 transparent LED screens sandwiched together.

And that's the issue right there. I think you and I are arguing about completely different things. In terms of the person who stole the photos and posted them, yes there is no middle ground--that person 100% committed a crime and needs to be punished.

However, in terms of responsibility of people for putting themselves in the position to be victimized, there is a huge range of possibilities--but often this range of possibilities isn't examined for fear of someone shouting "Blaming the victim!" The link I posted above goes to great lengths to point out that the criminal who commits the crime is 100% responsible for the criminal act (by virtue of having made the choice to commit it) but that the victim can in fact also have contributed to the crime in a continuum of ways starting with not at all (100% innocent, as in a child who is abused) to fully responsible (as in the case of a rapist who is killed by a potential victim in self-defense during the rape attempt--in this case the rapist becomes the "victim" of a shooting that he brought completely upon himself). There is lots of middle ground between these extremes.

Let's examine a simple case:

I am walking down the street in LA during the early evening in a neighborhood that normally has very little crime. A homeless man shambling past me suddenly pulls a knife, rams it into my chest, and steals my wallet which happened to contain several hundred dollars. I think we can agree in this situation I've no responsibility for this incident occurring. I could not have predicted it would happen and there is little I could have done to anticipate or prevent it. I am 100% an innocent victim in this scenario.

Now let's change the situation. I go down to Skid Row in the early evening and start showing all the homeless people there wads of $100 bills and telling them how worthless they are and how if they only got off their asses and worked hard like me they could have money too. Again, I get shanked in the chest and my money is stolen. Am I 100% an innocent victim in this case? It seems a bit absurd to say yes, doesn't it? My actions (choosing to go to an area that is not often policed, at night, alone, and flash money while belligerently accosting random people who don't have a lot left to lose) are directly linked to the stabbing.

Note that in both cases the person committing the crime is still 100% responsible for their own actions--they chose to stab me and steal my money. But in one case I clearly could not have foreseen or prevented the attack coming whereas in the other it was reasonably foreseeable that my actions were going to lead to problems (not necessarily a stabbing but at the very least some sort of altercation, unless the most patient and forgiving homeless people on Earth happened to be gathered on Skid Row that day). Does that mean the stabber in the second case should get a lighter sentence? No. But it does mean I have some responsibility for what went down and can be justly criticized for my actions. I can't hide behind the "don't blame the victim" catchphrase. I still deserve justice, though, despite being an offensive idiot.

Back to the case at hand.

You are correct, the woman did nothing "wrong" in the moral or legal sense, and the person who violated her privacy is 100% responsible for making the photos public. But I dislike the idea that because she's a victim of a crime, her actions can't be criticized. She might not have done anything "wrong" but she did indeed make a huge error of judgement when she decided to snap naked pics of herself and post them to a social network which is known for dodgy privacy practices. Given the state of technology today, one should be able to infer that there is a pretty high risk that racy photos are going to get leaked at some point, particularly if posted online. If you are okay with that risk, go ahead and post them. And if they are leaked, by all means prosecute the offenders. But don't expect people not to criticize you for gambling that nothing is going to happen, especially when there is plenty of evidence to believe the contrary.

..And of course there's a catch. Of course there is. It's sponsored by a swedish gambling web site. But still - dat music!

The way a bank is supposed to operate is that it matches the terms of its loans and its deposits. A 5 year mortgage is funded by 5 year term deposits or bonds or whatever. This is what a bank that wants to make a safe reasonable profit does. Of course the big American banks aren't really banks any more. They're gamblers and what's worse they are the kind of gambler's that think they can recoup their losses by gambling more.

It's obvious. Your ratio of loans (risk) to deposit (resource) needs to be capped at a sane ratio.
Additionally banks should never be allowed to gamble on derivatives with depositor money.

reminds me of my idea for a national 50/50. could limit drawing to once a month so funds are substantial, there's always a winner, and the more tickets you buy, the better your odds.

50 % of the winnings go to the winner. The other 50% goes toward paying down the national debt (and nothing else). Unlike state lottery or other gambling winnings, this would get a special untaxed IRS exemption (without which it would be more like a 25/75 rather than a 50/50).

20 years ago was the tail end of the shareware boom, which is a different approach to "freemium". In that model, developers created a great game (Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Jazz Jackrabbit, Quake, OMF 2097, etc) and gave you a sizable, fully playable chunk of it for free as promotion.

The difference is, back then there was not much attention paid to "casual gaming". Games were designed to be fun and challenging. Times have changed and now games are designed to be easy and addictive instead.

Today's freemium model is more like video poker. It's not much fun but you keep putting money in because of the potential for an easy reward. That's the mechanic that keeps gambling addicts going back to the casinos and it's also the business model that makes "casual gaming" so profitable without having to make good games.

The problem is you're talking out of both sides of your mouth.

On the one hand you're saying you know how dangerous a guy with a knife is. That being the case, you know that as close as he was to one of the officers, he could have murdered the officer if the officer attempted anything other than to completely stop him (by killing him).

And on the other hand you're saying the officer should consider the guy's mental well-being. Okay, and do what about it, try to talk him into seeking counseling?

There is no such thing as "containing the situation" when "the situation" is a guy standing a very close distance to you with a knife and approaching. There's no talking to him, no tasing him, no tossing a net over him... there's nothing that will guarantee he won't stab you except shooting him.

Still on a third hand you're staying it's part of an officer's job to risk his life to deal with the threat instead of neutralizing it, but that you feel officers shouldn't gamble with their lives. Those two concepts are completely contradictory.

It's quite a thing to realize he's dead within 20 seconds of the police arriving, but everything about that has zero bearing on his killing. When a guy is approaching an officer with a knife within seconds of their arrival, he's not going to call out to the guy and bystanders to ask them if the guy was showing aggression to anyone else because why in the fuck would that matter. He's directly showing aggressive intent towards the officers themselves for goodness' sake! Nothing that happened before that matters.

If as a cop your life is in imminent danger, the guy's mental state, what he did before you arrived, what alternatives to a gun *might* stop him or "contain" him... NONE of that matters because THERE IS A GUY COMING TOWARDS YOU WITH A KNIFE. That's all the cops were thinking and that's all they needed to be thinking when they decided they had to to shoot him to have as close to a 100% chance of survival as possible.

To summarize: Guy approaches you menacingly with a knife, you. must. shoot. him, if you want to attempt to guarantee you're not going to die.

BUT

we can agree to disagree.

Just for the record I am well aware of how dangerous a knife can be. And no, I don't feel that police officers should "gamble with their lives".

I feel they should use the training they're supposed to have and the tools they do have instead of just shooting the guy.

Watch the video again. The police don't arrive until 1:20. Before that the guy is just standing around. People pass within feet of him and he doesn't show any aggression. He's dead 20 seconds later. 20 fucking seconds.

He was clearly mentally unwell, but they didn't even try to contain the situation.

If you really think that's acceptable.... well, once again, I'm just glad I live in a civilised country.

Finally a voice of reason. So very glad I'm not all alone on this. Thanks for chiming in.

It's such an obvious thing, but maybe only to people who are aware how dangerous a guy with a knife can be that nearby.

(But still, @ChaosEngine seems to be aware of that and still thinks the officers should be obligated to gamble with their lives.)