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Thread: My Wizard Of Vegas rant!

  1. #61
    I just read this whole thread.
    Here are my thoughts:

    1. Holy shit... Kentry! Wazupppp.... Did you ever get that haircut?
    2. I like this forum. Its like a reunion of sorts.
    3. Did Singer reproduce? OMG. Your husband must be very lucky.
    4. We all (including me) need to work on making our points with fewer words. Long live Twitter!

  2. #62
    Originally Posted by MisterV View Post
    LarryS., if the numbers are correct then the obvious explanation is that the media, both news and social, trumpet and display the lurid crime details today, unlike "back in the day."

    The same shit was going on, it just wasn't splashed in front of our eyeballs on our big screens and our computers/i phones.

    SS, very DD.
    This is correct.

    We just have very heightened awareness compared to before, thanks to the constant access to 24/7 coverage of everything (including amateurs with smartphone videos).

    The only thing that has gotten significantly worse over the years has been the school shooting situation. Unfortunately this became much more commonplace after Columbine 20 years ago, whereas prior to that, disturbed kids generally didn't think of doing this.

    But it's still very uncommon and affects a tiny, tiny percentage of kids in the US.

    Anyway, yes, violent crime was far worse in 1990 than today. I'm speaking about adult-on-adult crime, which comprises an extremely high percentage of violent crime.

    In fact, there are plenty of really rough neighborhoods I remember from the early 1990s which are far safer today. Maybe not quite as safe as 5 years ago, but still a lot better than 1990.
    Check out my poker forum, and weekly internet radio show at http://pokerfraudalert.com

  3. #63
    Regarding Kentry:

    (I might split this thread into two parts later on, as we have two separate topics going)

    I also think there's a possibility that he's a troll. I'm not going to ban him, but Mission raises a good point that he seems like a caricature of a bottom-tier, low-limit, problem gambler.

    I mean, taking haircut money from your mom and gambling with it? And then posting on forums about it?

    Possible, I guess, but it really does smack of parody.
    Check out my poker forum, and weekly internet radio show at http://pokerfraudalert.com

  4. #64
    Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    Regarding Kentry:

    (I might split this thread into two parts later on, as we have two separate topics going)

    I also think there's a possibility that he's a troll. I'm not going to ban him, but Mission raises a good point that he seems like a caricature of a bottom-tier, low-limit, problem gambler.

    I mean, taking haircut money from your mom and gambling with it? And then posting on forums about it?

    Possible, I guess, but it really does smack of parody.
    18 years ago I was driving trough Tahoe 11:30 at night on the way to Harrahs to check in with my wife.....and about a half mile from the hotel someone shot a bebe gun pellet in the passenger side window and shattered it. the window stayed mostly in tact but there was a inch hole made in it. i pulled into a dennys and asked them to call the police(no cell phone owned at the time). The police vame and looked at it, and said it must have shattered from the cold. And I pointed out the hole but that was about it. I came to think that writing up reports and entering data might increase the crime level for a town and may make the "numbers" look bad for people who visit or want to move there. Visitors and new citizens moving in make money for the police and the city.
    Now with the internet where people can look up crime rates for every city in the country......and decide if they want to move there or visit......or send their kid there for school, or open a new business there......the crime stats are very important to the health of a city or town.

    I think that with the internet and the open availability of getting "numbers"...cities and townships have it in their best interests to low ball crime reporting if they know whats good for them. For the health of the city, for the re-election of the politicians, for the job security of the police commissioner......

    I think we are living in a world where we visually see one thing, and physically experience one thing......and the numbers tell us another thing.

    With less cops walking the beat, with less cops due to cutbacks as cities have had to make cuts, with police in their cruisers rather than on the streets, with more drugs, with more "stuff" out there that people want to have compared to 1990...with single parent households and less child supervision, and even less child supervision in 2 parent households.....with the Uas falling to 22 outof 27th in drp out rate compared to other developed countries.....and from the visual view of the world through my eyes......I dont trust the numbers. I trust my lying eyes.

    I tend not to trust govt figures especially if they can gain by it. And in my opinion town cities and municipalities have alot to gain financially and politically by lowballing the numbers,

    I tHINK WE ARE BEING LOWBALLED INTO A SENCE OF SECURITY

  5. #65
    Been a busy few days, sorry guys, I've barely even been on WoV.

    Okay, this conversation has kind of dwindled off, so I'm just going to respond to everyone at once.

    Half Smoke:

    I'll grant that the statistics don't include that, but that's only because you don't know you have a violent crime until you know that you have a violent crime. While unfortunate that many of them probably aren't, certainly a good many of them are just runaways.

    In the overall sense, if you just regarded all of them as having fallen victim to a violent crime (which isn't even close to the case) it still wouldn't move the needle too much on the overall crime rate. We certainly wouldn't be looking at, "All-time highs," that LarryS claimed and that I was originally contesting.

    LarryS:

    I believe that I already stipulated two parents are better than one on an, "All else equal," basis. It would be kind of silly for me not to concede that much.

    I don't know where you get the idea that having a ton of kids and, "Baby daddies," is in anyway glorified. Granted, the women aren't generally denigrated the way you seem to think they should be, but I don't think they are lauded as heroes for pushing out a few kids.

    I only know what the statistics say. If you want to extrapolate your personal experiences to the entire country, that's up to you. I just go by what the numbers say. For the purposes of debate, I would suggest that Government statistics hold more water than do personal observations.

    Dan Druff,

    Those are all interesting, and quite valid, points. I think it's kind of a slippery slope because, on the one hand, you do want to keep the crime rates down and part of that entails criminals having a healthy fear of police. On the other hand, I think we would all agree that unarmed people getting gunned down is a bad thing.

    I'd really have to sit down and think about it to decide where I stand on the issue. I think body cams are a good thing, but I think police should at least be allowed to say whatever they want to suspects, it takes a good deal of their effectiveness away if they're not allowed to be intimidating. I think the biggest problem in this regard honestly is easy media, you have millions of people (most of whom aren't trained police officers) Monday Morning Quarterbacking something that was done in the heat of the moment.

    So, yeah, don't kill people and don't egregiously beat the shit out of people. Other than that, I'd be willing to give police officers a wide range. My understanding is that people are supposed to be a little intimidated by cops, especially if the person happens to be a criminal.

    As far as statistics, it doesn't change that the crime peaked in the early 90's and we are currently at levels comparable to the 60's and 70's...whatever it was the chart said. Violent crime was one and overall crime was the other. I was just countering LarryS' fallacious claim that crime is at an, "All-time," high. It's not even close.

    LarryS (Again):

    You can only fit so much print in a newspaper and you can only fit so much coverage in a half hour news segment. Half of what you read and saw back in the day was probably local paper and local news, why should a newspaper in Lake Tahoe (or wherever you grew up) care about a kidnapping in Georgia, for example? In contrast, there is no limit to how much print you can put on the Internet.

    As to your most recent post, rationalize whatever you want. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but again, I can't debate against someone's imagination. If you think there is an unspoken effort to lowball the crime rate for the purposes of ZIP code property values, then you can think that. I don't know how you expect me to present a counterargument against that, though.

  6. #66
    Originally Posted by GrooveStreerforlife View Post
    How lucky we are that we do not need to go to Vegas to play some casino like bgaming casino list. You do not waste money on flight tickets, on hotels and on strippers lol. And you can win same amount of money as you do in Vegas. So, if i were you i would have thought about that.
    While I believe your post is a spam for a gambling software developer, I agree that we no longer have to go to Nevada to gamble.

    I do not and never would gamble online: for me, the alternative is tribal casinos.

    People correctly point out the potential problems with tribal casinos, e.g. lack of accountability and transparency, but at the end of the day they offer a reasonalby good gamble.

    Their craps tables offer much the same thing as the ones in Las Vegas, they offer entertainment and often comped food and a comped room.

    So yeah, who needs to fly to Las Vegas anymore just to gamble?

    There are now viable alternatives much closer to home which are much easier and less expensive to get to.
    Last edited by MisterV; 07-31-2018 at 08:00 AM.
    What, Me Worry?

  7. #67
    I don't know where you get the idea that having a ton of kids and, "Baby daddies," is in anyway glorified. Granted, the women aren't generally denigrated the way you seem to think they should be, but I don't think they are lauded as heroes for pushing out a few kids....mission

    there is more than one tv show that centers around DNA testing for to fnd the father. Often the owman comes back multiple times with different men...and its all great fun...isnt it?There as a time that a woman would be viewed as a tramp if 4 or 5 different men could have been the father and they all ccame back negative. Or even one positive test out of 1...but without a stabnle marriage also would be viewed negatively. And because of this lax view of motherhoods standards we have the streets in some communities over run with poorly parented kids.

    All races in the USA have increased the single parent family model. And in thiis model kids are generally less educated, and therefore are less finacially stable as an adult due to lower paying jobs.
    The black community has 72 percent single parent households.......how is that working out for them? Not so good. You can blame the white man all you want....but beofre the white man can touch them adversely when they go out into the workplace......they have already sealed their fate in the years leading to that point.

    You can only fit so much print in a newspaper and you can only fit so much coverage in a half hour news segment. Half of what you read and saw back in the day was probably local paper and local news, why should a newspaper in Lake Tahoe (or wherever you grew up) care about a kidnapping in Georgia, for example? In contrast, there is no limit to how much print you can put on the Internet.....mission

    exactly. Because there was a time where a missing child was so rare that it was a national story. And now they are a dime a dozen. A parent that chained and kept them in a cage would be a national story at one point in our hisotry. Now we are immune to the horror of what goes on around us.

    the bar has been raised with 9-11.....and a few deaths here and there dont phase us anymore.

    The news story of Colombine went on for months and months and even produced a documentary.that was nationally released by Michael Moore. Now school shooting gothrough a couple wee news cycle and die out.

    The shooting in vegas are a distant memory. The church shooting is long forgotten. The movie theater shooting is an afterthought. But there was a time people would still be talking about it.

    Its just that our society has deteriorated to such a point where daily murder and crime is nothing to us. And yes there was a time that a child killing in georgia would matter to someone in california. This is how fucked up crime has become over time.

  8. #68
    Originally Posted by LarryS View Post

    there is more than one tv show that centers around DNA testing for to fnd the father. Often the owman comes back multiple times with different men...and its all great fun...isnt it?There as a time that a woman would be viewed as a tramp if 4 or 5 different men could have been the father and they all ccame back negative. Or even one positive test out of 1...but without a stabnle marriage also would be viewed negatively. And because of this lax view of motherhoods standards we have the streets in some communities over run with poorly parented kids.
    I know that not all the Springer guests were legitimate, so the first thing I accept is that it is quite possible this is rigged. It doesn't even need to be rigged by the show, some woman can come in with guys who they KNOW are not the father, but have them tested, because the show compensates both for being there...in many cases. I know the cases are real on Judge Judy, for example, but the people are also compensated just for being there.

    I think people do think that the ones with four or five negative testing guys are tramps. I certainly have no plans to stick it in someone promiscuous enough to have had sex with five different guys in such a short period of time that they could all be the father, I don't know about you.

    All races in the USA have increased the single parent family model. And in thiis model kids are generally less educated, and therefore are less finacially stable as an adult due to lower paying jobs.
    The black community has 72 percent single parent households.......how is that working out for them? Not so good. You can blame the white man all you want....but beofre the white man can touch them adversely when they go out into the workplace......they have already sealed their fate in the years leading to that point.
    I don't know where you're getting the notion that I ever disputed that single-parent households are generally poorer, have higher crime rates and lower graduation rates than kids from two-parent households. I never disputed that. I disputed your initial erroneous assertions that graduation rates are at all-time lows and crimes are at all-time highs. Neither of those statements is even close to true, again, I'm sorry if that doesn't fit your narrative or viewpoint.

    exactly. Because there was a time where a missing child was so rare that it was a national story. And now they are a dime a dozen. A parent that chained and kept them in a cage would be a national story at one point in our hisotry. Now we are immune to the horror of what goes on around us.

    the bar has been raised with 9-11.....and a few deaths here and there dont phase us anymore.

    The news story of Colombine went on for months and months and even produced a documentary.that was nationally released by Michael Moore. Now school shooting gothrough a couple wee news cycle and die out.

    The shooting in vegas are a distant memory. The church shooting is long forgotten. The movie theater shooting is an afterthought. But there was a time people would still be talking about it.

    Its just that our society has deteriorated to such a point where daily murder and crime is nothing to us. And yes there was a time that a child killing in georgia would matter to someone in california. This is how fucked up crime has become over time.
    I think more like there was a time when it was rare for a missing child story to even come to be known by a national news station. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, two totally different things. I don't think a sheriff in Cobb County, Georgia necessarily got a missing child report in the 70's and said, "Oh, I'd better call CNN with this," whenever it happened.

    I don't think the Sheriff of Sacramento County, California called WTOV-9 News in Steubenville, OH and said, "Hey, I've got this double homicide, do you guys want to talk about it in your half hour news show?"

    The point is, if you need air filler, you can just hop on the Internet, find your filler, report it.

    As to the rest, I think you're confusing an increase in mass shooting incidents with an increase in overall crime rate. An increase in one doesn't necessarily result in an overall increase to the other.

  9. #69
    Mission146:


    your quoting of crime statistics did not include crimes against children - specifically sexual abuse and molestation and distribution of child pornography.

    I don't think they kept statistics earlier than 1976. This is from a U. of New Hampshire crimes against children research center (linked).

    "After growing dramatically between 1976 and 1992, rates of child maltreatment reports and substantiations have been at a plateau since 1992."

    distribution of child pornography which is a general crime against all children and is not included in these statistics surely has increased by a tremendous amount because of the internet

    your statistics do not consider that although the per capita rate of homicide may be similar, because of a huge increase in the population there are many more homicides than for example in 1960 when the U.S. population was only a little greater than half of what it is today.

    so, if you consider your neighborhood to be a 5 block area of Chicago, and in 1965 there were only 2 homicides within that area, and now in the same area there may be 4. the homicide rate may be the same but a person doesn't feel the same. they feel much more endangered.

    also, the nature of the crime today is much more horrific, i.e. the Newtown masssacre. there was nothing remotely similar to anything like that in the 60s or 70s. there are many other examples of horrific crimes in the modern world which never or only very, very rarely happened in the 60s and 70s.

    so, all in all, your crime statistics may demonstrate something but they are far from truly representative of the difference between the 1960s and 1970s and today.



    http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/factsheet.html
    Last edited by Half Smoke; 07-31-2018 at 10:33 AM.
    please don't feed the trolls

  10. #70
    Half Smoke,

    That's true, but it still wouldn't matter in the context of the original argument. LarryS said all-time highs, crime was higher in the 90's (significantly, actually) because crime was higher in the 90's, we cannot now be at all-time highs.

    If you're going to go the child pornography route, and it hasn't been included in the statistics. You need to have a report or arrest in order to have a known crime. Besides, even if you are right, (which you quite probably are) that has to do with the existence of the Internet, not how people were raised, which was LarryS' original contention.

    LarryS said, "Crime rate," not number of homicides. There are probably some third-world countries someone so inclined could move to that have a comparatively much smaller number of actual incidents...if that's what someone is looking at. Problem is, they're much more violent and the probability of that person being involved in one shoots way up.

    I'll concede your last few paragraphs, except I would point out that more 24 hour news channels, and most importantly, the Internet, give us a greater range of access to what is or is not going on around the country crime-wise.

    Anyway, LarryS said, "Crime Rate," which means incidents per 100,000 people. That's how, "Crime Rate," is almost Universally defined for statistical purposes. He then said, all-time high, which I take to mean higher than at any other time. I don't think any amount of massaging or redefining is going to get you up to early-90's crime levels, and we're over two decades removed from that.

    I can't emphasize this enough, I was contending, "All-Time high." That's all. I wasn't alive in the 60's or 70's, so I have no claims to make about how people felt or crime levels were perceived then.

  11. #71
    Can you Wong into progressives and machines left in a favorable state by previous players online ?

  12. #72
    Progressives, yes. Some online progressives go positive.

  13. #73
    Time to say something nice about Mission. He seems a lot cooler than I originally thought he was.

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