Texas Calculatem and Poker Office Blog

It was a dull yet tough day today. Volumes were at all time lows in equities, nothing was happening, and I dozed until about 3pm when one of the relationships that I trade made a big move with no news being screamed out of the Squawk Box. Anyway, my account is all in, and I hope that it will go the right way tomorrow. Either that or my sponsored cat is going hungry.

Tomorrow I have a live game at my pad in South London. A few of my brother's mates will be in attendance, and so will some of my buddies. I have no idea what the expected numbers are, but we should have enough for a full table, and if there are too many I'll just save my cash and play xbox. Juice might be joining us. He hasn't played with us in a live game for ages, and I look forward to seeing him do the Chav Troll up his, erm, I probably shouldn't put such crude terminology on a family blog. Oh well. I've digressed...

Moving onto something that's confused me a bit lately...

Fair Trade

I bought some bananas over the weekend. Being the conscientious consumer, I bought Fair Trade bananas. Or did I actually buy them because I didn't bother checking the price or label?

Anyway, there are a few contradictions regarding fair trade.

The basic idea behind fair trade is to give producers a "fair" price for their produce. However, what is a "fair" price? Supporters of fair trade will argue that a fair price should enable a farmer to live comfortably and have enough to invest in his family and local community.

However, what gives them the right to expect to be able to make a living from farming? Let's compare them to professionals fromm other industries. Seeing as this is a Poker blog, let's consider the life of a Poker pro. Poker pros play Poker to make money, and thus provide for themselves and their families. It could be argued, that their income comes from recreational players, who pay for the challenge and privelage of playing with a top professional by losing to them. However, if the unskilled recreational player gets lucky against the pro and wins, is it reasonable for the bankrupt pro to throw his prams out of the pram and demand a massive rake rebate from the casino in order to feed his hungry puppy? We've all read poker blogs, where the players blame their unskilled opponents for their losses. It's almost as if they feel they have a right to win every time they play. Even I do it from time to time. Every time I lose a cent to Juice I add it to the payback account that is going to wreak havoc on his bankroll at some point in the not too distant future.

Another problem with a lot of fair trade produce, is that seeing as it comes from distant third world countries, it needs transportation. This destroys the planet. And if the planet gets bashed too hard, everyone will suffer/die.

The final point that I'll mention (there are many more, but it's getting late), is that these fair trade producers must be operating terribly inefficient businesses, and should probably try a different career. Relying on charity to get a decent return on investment is just bad practise. What if the charities decide that a beneficiary has become wealthy enough, or the consumer decides that coffee just isn't fashionable anymore? And besides, why are charities encouraging people to pay more for goods, when Civitas has recently shown that a third of UK adults are living on state benefits? Surely charity begins at home? Why not argue for Fair Trade MacDonalds by doubling the minimum wage?

Labels: coffee, fair trade, macdonalds

I just had a good go on FEAR Multiplayer. It's free and you can get it from http://www.joinfear.com/./

Being the miscreant that I am, I had the most fun team killing and getting booted off various servers.

Have also been trying out America's Army, another FPS, produced by the US Army as a recruiting tool. I think I might call myself Mr Bush and see how many friendly fire incidents I can get before being kicked.

If any of you played the Resident Evil games in your earlier years, you may find the video amusing. It's got Japanese school kids reenacting Resident evil. The acting is great. The guy event moves in a rediculously rigorous way. Changing from walking to running, stopping and standing rigid to turn etc... Pure magic.

This blog has just moved to the new blogger. Well, the updated version atleast. I hope it works out. My Edge Trading diary is under a different account but I can't remember the user name, though it's linked to this one. Oh well, it wasn't really pulling in the bucks anyway.

On Monday, my cheapskate mate sent me an email informing me that Landlords prefer to let to Muslims first, and Chinese 2nd. At the bottom of the league were Australians, locals and South Africans. I have no idea what the reasons are for the first two listings. I guess landlords might not like Aussies and South Africans, as most are young travellers throwing constant house wrecking parties. They also have less formal living arrangements, with people constantly moving in and out, and could thus be harder to collect rent from. Why landlords would dislike locals is a bit of a confusion. When I was renting, most of them seemed to want "young professionals", the majority of whom would have steady jobs and thus be able to pay rent. Many young professionals could be locals, though I suppose they could easily be from other parts of the country, and thus not be locals. Locals could more literally mean local people, who haven't been lucky enough to move out of their little hamlets or Staines clones. I remember a family friend telling me not to let property out to families. Not sure if families are more likely to be locals or not, though I don't think many will be Australians or South African. Basically, the friend had been screwed over time and time again by families who claimed they couldn't pay the rent. Seeing as the families had children, and that he was a nice guy, he couldn't turf them out. But he was nonetheless unhappy about having to foot the bill for the parents' failures. Anyway, I can't dig the story out to provide a link to it.

Guys at work this week were discussing the Civitas report. I'm still working out how to try and get my cut, and am looking forward to my state funded pension in 3 years.

Greed is back, and greed is good.

Here's a survery by ICM Research (click here to see it).

Poker has been fairly quiet this week. I sat down at Laddies with Juice last night, but just paid blind for an hour, and had to retire as my head hurt. I have a bit of a cold, but need to go to a birthday party in a few minutes...

Aside from that, I've observed a ridiculous amount of stupidity this week.

In the news, Peter Hain, one of my favourite MP's, apologised for the slave trade on behalf of Ireland and Wales (read more). icWales reports that Welsh historians "insisted that there was no sympathy for slavery in Belfast." To me, it just looks like a cheap token comment to gain popularity. Afterall, he didn't participate in the slave trade himself, and making such a broad statement on behalf of such a large group of people is ridiculous. It isn't as if Mr Hain has any intention of backing up his apology with compensation to the ancestors, or anything like that. His words are just empty and without consequence to him or anyone else. Anyway, after his comments last week (read more), there's no doubting the high quality of the words that comes spew from his mouth.

Moving on to work, a stupid over educated monkey pressed a wrong button and lost me a load of cash. There wasn't really anything I could do about it, and it was really frustrating, but it just shows that plenty of people with phd's are just full of shit.

The third and final piece of stupidity is quite funny. My cheapskate mate, Mr C, has moved onto doing his successful bet strategies in physical bookmakers, rather than online. His bets are growing in size, and today he was lectured by an old man who told him to calm down, providing worthless advice on using a betting bank to make his money last longer. Mr C continued to place a few large bets which happened to lose. The kind old man put his hand on Mr C's, and told him to consider his future, then threw a tantrum and stormed out saying "there's no helping some people" when he continued.

Anyway, Mr C has just checked the scores and lost all his bets today. He's looking forward to meeting the kind old man tomorrow, and reporting his bigger losses.

N.B. Losing a bet in a bet shop doesn't mean that the punter has lost on the match. Mr C had a very successful day despite his losses at the bet shop.
High five!

I read about an interesting book called Affluenza in The Metro today. It's about the excess of America's consumer society, and is probably applicable to the debt laden UK as well.

My cheapskate mate saw the article as well, and was most bemused, as he's been preaching about the hollowness of consumerism for years. Why spend £500 on a watch when you can get a free one online?

Also, following on from my previous post, how can Peter Hain criticize the overworked folks in the city for receiving their just rewards, when a sizeable proportion of the population are throwing away even more more money on unnecessary baubbles? Surely the local Chavs could be giving £10 a week to the local animal shelter, rather than hanging around outside MacDonalds eating Big Macs and buying Elizabeth Duke jewellery from Argos? Anyway, being an insignificant minority, there's not really much I can do other than bitch about it on this blog.

If you'd like to read an extract from Affluenza, please Click Here.

A few months ago, Harriet Harman, a Labour MP, criticised city bonuses:

"The big gap between those at the top and those at the bottom makes for a sick society."

And in the past week, Labour cabinet minister Peter Hain has attacked bonuses again, stating:

"We've lost a sense of moral corporate responsibility here."

(click here to read more)

While I'm a long way from 7 figure bonuses, I certainly don't think that these sort of statements are improving British society.

For a start, the implication is that the people bringing in the big bucks are immoral, and are reaping the rewards from other peoples' work. This can cause people to become envious the successful, rather than trying to emulate them by either working hard or coming up with entrepreneurial ideas.

Also, one of the areas that generates big bonuses is trading. Traders make cash by betting on inefficiencies in the financial markets, risking their own (or their company's) cash in the process.

Suppose a trader has a good year and makes £10 million in a year. Are they then supposed to pay themselves a £30k salary and give the rest to the monkey in the local MacDonalds? Suppose they then lose £5 mil the next year. While being up £5 mil overall, having given away most of the previous year's profits, they'd be fucked.

Signed up Juice for Yahoo Personals today. Let's hope he gets lucky.

I would have thought my greed quotient was higher. How sad.

Your Greed Quotient: 65%

You're definitely a greedy person, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to keep what's yours. You are a bit spoiled and demanding at times - make sure to give a little back to those who are generous with you!