U.S. military-run slot machines earn $100M a year from service members | Hacker News Reader

U.S. military-run slot machines earn $100M a year from service members

npr.org

380 pointsgeox263 comments

Well that's a change. When I served the military would actively fight addiction problems, sometimes to an extreme. As an example one of the people I served with had a drinking problem. He was put in the brig and had to crawl on all fours pushing a beer can around the complex with his nose all day, every day. This was extreme but so was his BAC. The alternate option I heard a couple colonels arguing for was a court-martial and dishonorable discharge.

I can see the benefit to keeping the gambling addiction losses in-house but encouraging money problems and then punishing people for said money problems seems a bit like an artificially created circular problem.

MWR programs are supposed to be beneficial, not detrimental. Get them some video game consoles. Buy them all VR setups and require {n} hours of physically demanding games and game scores. It's probably less cost than the fallout from gambling addiction. VR combat training rigs, like ARMA on steroids but actually causes pain when you get hit. Surely someone here in the HN world could fund such a thing. Provide time-off and money to the top tier contestants of the VR simulators.

Oh and don't limit this to combat simulation. Implement medical training, surgical training, electrical training, construction, military vehicle repair, flight training like X-plane on steroids, space flight training like Avorion on steroids, recce training, weapon repair training, etc... Let them explore skill-sets they and the military were unaware they had.

My favorite was if you got put in the drunk tank our 1SG would go pick you up and make you run back to the barracks (assuming you didn't do anything besides just be drunk).

It would be cool to see makerspaces or something similar on bases. I recall there were mechanic shops (I could be misremembering) where you could bring your car to work on it and borrow tools. With tools now you could create some hiking clubs and stuff too.

Doing this stuff isn't easy though and I know when I was finished with duty and finished working out for the second time that day I really didn't have energy to do much except play video games and knock back a few beers. Creating new programs, clubs, initiatives are hard. And in the military often times you have turnover on the bases so it's hard to maintain continuity even when someone creates something. If it were up to me I'd have a cadre of 3-10 individuals who ran, funded, maintained clubs and programs for soldiers. I'll not be surprised if I find out that this already exists either lol.

Bases are getting makerspaces; I discovered that Miramar has one in the base library a couple of months ago! They are rolling them out as they get funding.

That's really cool and good to hear. Thank you

In my country it is even difficult to get a security clearance when your siblings are a massive drug or alcohol addict. Due to high chance of bribery

It's very difficult to obtain and retain a security clearance in the US if you were a drug or alcohol addict as well. They also monitor debts and that is a factor for security clearances as well.

That's almost refreshing to hear. When I was in the US Navy 2004-2010, pretty much all alcoholism was aggressively swept under the rug.

Per Navy regulations, anyone who gets a DUI is required to attend rehab. We had a Reactor Operator on my submarine who got two DUIs. He requested rehab in writing twice and was twice denied because "ship's schedule does not support". Then he re-enlisted, I can't imagine why. A few weeks after re-enlisting he got a third DUI. His wife divorced him, he attempted suicide, and then he was discharged and was allowed to keep his bonus.

Our Chief of the Boat (equivalent to Command Master Chief or Command Master Sergeant) was an extreme alcoholic and several sailors filed complaints in writing alleging that he showed up to work visibly drunk regularly, always having driven himself to work. The command ignored that too.

Extreme alcoholism, getting black-out drunk multiple nights per week, getting hospitalized for alcohol poisoning once per year, committing drunken assault and/or vandalism and having your division Chief sweep it under the rug and then extort you to re-enlist was common on my ship. I spoke to friends on other ships and it appears that this was the norm throughout the Pacific submarine fleet in 2010. Rotten to the core.

Maybe the military doesn't really care about the wellbeing of the troops as long as it doesn't affect their effectiveness...?

If so, that's a big change from my time. Perhaps some generals need to be reallocated to Antarctica for an extended tour of duty. Congress ultimately controls purse strings, but Generals can make a phone call and put a stop to anything.

Anyone with a clearance will specifically be looked at for gambling. Gamblers can eventually be leveraged. Considering that the military is one of the fattest pipelines for clearance workers, it'd be a good idea to tamp down on this.

Not just gambling. Any debt.

I worked at a place that sold expensive things. Sold a thing to a guy. Had two guys show up a couple days latter to talk about exactly how he financed thing and etc. Turns out he was an just a middling engineer on the F-35 program, but they confirmed everything he told them using us.

I wanted to confirm that significant debt can preclude someone from acquiring a security clearance. Significant new debt can be reason to rescind an active clearance too.

Bankruptcy & poor finances is the #1 reason for a clearance application to be rejected.

Shows a pattern of poor judgement, and makes the applicant way, way more likely to be bribed or blackmailed.

Bankruptcy also has a court angle, which means you can, with an amount of effort that's trivial for large, nation-state intelligence orgs, find a list of all recent bankruptcy cases in, say, Southern Maryland or Northern Virginia. The CI types lose a lot of sleep over this stuff.

Ok, but isn't there a rather large amount of personel who do basic jobs and won't do anything special nor won't move up the ranks? 18-23 years old young men that enter and leave and that is it. As in, there is huge amount of other people too.

Secure facilities still need janitors, plumbers, electricians other maintenance people. I worked in a downtown data center that did banking and securities trading and had to badge through three doors to get to my desk. Every night a different janitor I'd never seen before would also badge through both of those doors and empty every trash bin on the floor, and then another person would come in around 3am and vacuum the whole floor for two hours. Based on the rate that new people cycled through those jobs I doubt they were being vetted very hard.

People in basic jobs can still compromise security of the facility.

People in basic jobs at Twitter helped murder a journalist.

Like any large organization, the organization does care but sometimes some of the managers don't care as much or don't do a good job. The military brass definitely cares about and understands this based on my experience. It's just hard to pull off.

Historically, the US military used to (until 1975) give out free cigarettes in rations, so there's a precedent in encouraging addiction as well.

I doubt that was really the intent. Back then so many people smoked, and cigarettes were so "normal" that not putting them in rations would probably be akin to not giving people coffee today.

It's about 7 cents out of every $1000 of payroll, if I did the math right.

(seems that wages are about $140 billion a year)

Of course the average being tiny doesn't mean it isn't causing problems for people that gamble way more than the average.

Did you remember to only count payroll from the the non-domestic bases that have slot machines?

No, I overlooked that. Good point.

He was put in the brig and had to crawl on all fours pushing a beer can around the complex with his nose all day, every day.

Damn if only I could have done that to my parents.

Here's the thing, a military that isn't regularly exercised quickly falls prey to the iron law of bureaucracy, as Dr. Hugh Nibley once said "Leaders are those who surprise and discomfort the enemy in war time, and rock the boat and upset HQ in peace"

If war isn't regularly and actively being prosecuted the military turns to infighting, the officers that are promoted are promoted because of their ability to suck up and kiss ass, meanwhile the people that get things done, that bruise egos, and deal with things directly end up phased out and pulled down.

Part of the reason WW1 was so horrible wasn't just because of the technological advances, or the environments they fought in but because of how many worthless brass were involved and f**ing things up regularly. Hell France was only saved from falling within a month because their top general went on a spree of firing over half the commanders and replacing them with people that produced results.

In the next substantial military conflict the US faces we will spend a long time losing until we fire most of the people currently in charge and the thinking changes.

As evidence let me point to the continual massive investment into the fighter program. Those advocating the fighter program are the cavalry commanders of the 1910, thinking in an outdated and outmoded way of thinking that they are wedded to, and will continue to rely on and push for despite the fact it is a clearly outdated and obsolete way of thinking.

EDIT:

As noted below Dr. Hugh Nibley was Professor of Ancient Scripture at BYU if you feel that substantially impacts your opinion of this quote.

If experience is exercise, name a more exercised force than the US military.

Any number of war-torn countries' militaries would meet that criterion, from Afghanistan to parts of Africa.

A fair point, and this is one thing we may have on any other country of similar size and standing, but as we've seen with Russia, that only counts if it's been what you've been working for.

Our military is exercised to an extant, but it's also been exercising for fighting asymmetric warfare, and irregular combat, not conventional combat on a battlefield against a comparable enemy. It's like running 3 miles every day in preparation for a marathon, it's something and helps you work out some things, but its going to be very different once the gun fires to start the race.

One of Russia's big issues I've heard is that they command down from above. They do not have a strong force of decision-making NCOs. This seems plausible given their poor and reactive performance in Ukraine.

that's certainly a good explanation for what we see, and I have no counter-evidence, but I'm also suspicious of the matchup with a common cliche/trope: the WWII Nazis and the Imperial Japanese forces were also not able to think for themselves, and how many Star Trek episodes and alien races are foils for the idea that it's the fluid complexity and individualism of "Americans" and "humans" that makes them so adept at succeeding in the shifting tides of battle...

The soldiers aren't the avatar; they don't keep state after death.

How do you compare the exercise in Vietnam vs the exercise in Afghanistan? Is there a ratio of how badly beaten they are by people shooting back in flip-flops with soviet era AKs?

How many of those experienced personnel stick around to pass on their knowledge? Not nearly enough to have an effective military. We'll find out our true readiness when we face a competent enemy.

And who should that be? Certainly not Russia, they're getting their asses handed to them in Ukraine and won't be a threat for decades to come - Germany post 1945 had an immense amount of industry and other production to help us getting back on our feet rather quickly, but Russia doesn't have anything beyond exporting oil and gas.

And not China either, because no matter how unexperienced the US Army is, the Chinese have virtually no experience other than trading shots and fist fights on the Indian border or acting like a school bully in their neighborhood - and most Chinese stuff is based on old Soviet shit (whose "quality" is currently being shown in Ukraine) or stolen Western tech.

> old Soviet shit (whose "quality" is currently being shown in Ukraine)

Both sides in Ukraine rely heavily on Soviet equipment. One of the major problems Russia faces in Ukraine is the highly effective air defense infrastructure the Soviet Union built.

As for China, it has a mixture of heavily upgraded Soviet equipment (e.g., Flankers with modern sensors, electronics and missiles), and its own indigenous designs (for example, it's the only country other than the US to develop and produce a 5th Generation fighter jet). Given China's proven ability to develop high-tech products and manufacture at scale, why would you doubt that it's capable of producing modern military hardware?

> Given China's proven ability to develop high-tech products and manufacture at scale, why would you doubt that it's capable of producing modern military hardware?

Oh, they are certainly capable - but unlike the US, nothing what the Chinese build in terms of heavy equipment has been tested in an actual battle, neither has the logistics of their army or the command structure, both of which Russia sorely lacks in Ukraine. In contrast, the US has all three aspects nailed and refined for decades.

Also... who says that it's not all just a paper tiger? Everyone was scared about the T-14 Armata or a lot of other Russian stuff that was in reality just fraud everywhere along the chain. China suffers just the same problems with endemic corruption and a yes-men attitude as Russia does.

> the US has all three aspects nailed and refined for decades.

The US has plenty of experience, but it's all in fighting opponents who can barely fire back. No one has any idea how the US would fare against a real opponent. Even the shock to the public, which is used to relatively low-casualty colonial wars, would be difficult to gauge.

> China suffers just the same problems with endemic corruption and a yes-men attitude as Russia does.

I don't know if there's much similarity between the China and Russia, given that I only know the culture of one of those countries relatively well. What I will say is that based on my own observations, China is highly competent at pulling off large and complex projects - much more so than the US.

It's hard to produce effective military hardware when your customer is a parade-ground military. The incentives don't line up, which is killer even if you have a strong culture of integrity.

That’s the point: there are no other competent enemies, either in the sense of funding, or in terms of wartime experience. No one else even comes close. It’s possible that China will get there someday, but that’s likely decades and multiple conflicts away.

For context, Hugh Nibley was a prolific apologist for the mainstream Mormon church.

Attack the argument, not the person.

I'm not attacking anything. If anything, I mostly agree with the argument being made. I just think Nibley's prolific work as an apologist is interesting context to his words.

Well Nibley also was part of the 101st Airborne, and stormed Utah beach, was involved in Operation market garden and participated in the Battle of the Bulge so there is that going for him.

The description is oddly context-free, as if a reader is supposed to know if this other work about a religion was related to the observation about garrison vs field soldiers.

  apologist
  noun
  SYNONYMS: defender, supporter, upholder, advocate, proponent, exponent, propagandist, apostle, champion, backer, promoter, campaigner, spokesman, spokeswoman, spokesperson, speaker, arguer, enthusiast. 
  ANTONYMS critic

An apologist is a defender of a philosophy or religion that proceeds by first taking certain (often unprovable) axioms as true without proof (i.e. worldview), then proceeds to defend it vigorously with a veneer of logic.

One can be an apologist for, say, the axiom of choice (an actual axiom), a Neopagan faith, #metoo, etc., regardless of how much evidence is against or for the worldview based upon the assumptions.

I could see this happening in the Russia / Ukraine conflict. Perhaps Russia will improve over time because of this.

Whats a better alternative to the fighter program?

Drones. Sure you can buy a $22 mil next gen stealth fighter to secure air superiority but I can buy 200 drones that cost $2k for 1/100th of the price, launch them from much closer to the battlefield and good luck shooting all of them down to establish your air superiority. Or even better you send in your fancy fighter/bomber combo, I'm going to blanket the effected air with drones programed to move in an erratic and choatic manner and suddenly I just cost you $22 million for something that I paid $100 for.

Remember the Panzer was a better tank than the Sherman, but it didn't matter because the Sherman was cheaper to build and faster to make.

You wildly underestimate costs. A F-35 costs 85m-125m. NGAD will likely cost similar and won't be affected by most forms of Jamming, unlike current drones which makes them useless. It's only sheer luck that drones work in ukraine due to the meme levels of shit that is the Russian forces. Drones cost around a quarter or less of fighters normally but can't be flown in contested airspace due to jamming with current technology.

> can't be flown in contested airspace due to jamming with current technology

Can't be flown or can't be remotely directed?

Who exactly is flying a drone?

Remote personnel with joysticks.

Alternatives would be self flying or pre-programmed flights.

Jamming seems to something to work around in the latter two use cases.

Both of those require signals to the drone, hard to do if the area is being jammed.

Self flying and preprogrammed do not need signals to the drone. Perhaps you read the comment strand too quickly.

You should check out the NGAD program. It's exactly what you're talking about.

The problem with drones is that they're easily jammed. Ukraine is lucky that Russia has been so incompetent, but I bet the next major conflict has large scale jamming on just about every frequency.

NGAD strikes a balance between drones and manned aircraft.

I don't really like the WWI cavalry analogy, either. The fighters being used in Ukraine are a far cry from what 5th/6th generation technology can achieve. The gulf war is a better example of what happens when you achieve air superiority. It turns out that's really important in modern warfare.

> The gulf war is a better example of what happens when you achieve air superiority. It turns out that's really important in modern warfare.

Not certain if true, as this has been claimed since LeMay but has not lead to victory since 1945. Iraq was not modern, not antique, maybe vintage is the word for them. Iraq and Afghanistan show that despite air and every other material superiority, the home team advantage is psychologically decisive against a non-genocidal alien force. You might even say that WWII proves the rule in that the US made a genocidal show of force.

Is air dominance helpful? Sure. Is it really important in getting to a victory condition? Jury is AWOL.

If one side has stealth fighters up, good luck to the other side in getting those 200 drones near the battlefield.

It's about a 1-2 ratio. F-35 costs around $80m and a single predator drone costs around $40m.

That's not even accounting for the fact that Predators aren't able to realistically be used with S-300/S-400 SAMs sitting everywhere. There's a reason you aren't seeing aircraft near the front unless you're talking about helicopters at or below treetop level. Neither side in this conflict has stealth fighters capable of fighting on the front lines.

The irony of criticizing the F-35 while complaining about armchair generals.

Hi.

I downvoted you because your comment is a casual insult without bringing anything to the discussion.

Here in Finland slot machines (and most types of legalized gambling) are controller by a government-owned nonprofit that distributes the revenue to various charities. I think that's the best way to run these kind of things if they need to exist.

In a lot of US states, lottery proceeds go to education. The problem, of course, is that dollars and euros are fungible, and governments can and do reduce the tax contributions to education commensurately.

Sort of. It really depends. Education funding in the US often comes from several entirely independent sources, with differing constituents, differing motivations, and various rules on allocations. It's not like it's one big bucket with one entity that has the ultimate ability to reallocate.

Yeah, it is pretty complex and differs heavily by state. I know that in GA, for example, lottery proceeds go towards HOPE/Zell Miller scholarship fund for college students (which I am immensely grateful for, as it funded most of my own college education). Though, sadly, I've been reading over the past few years that it is on its way to drying out :(

For a short while, Norway had extremely liberal slot machine laws. They were in every supermarket, post office, anywhere. There was (and is) a state-run gambling monopoly, but slot machines weren't covered by it - they were considered a continuation of Payazzo games, a form of very-low stakes skill-based gambling machines that charities had long been allowed to operate. So charities got to operate slot machines.

Some may say the charities got just as addicted as the gamblers. I remember in particular in a TV debate, where Thorvald Stoltenberg, respected former minister and president of the Norwegian Red Cross, declared that although he realized the harm they caused, he had decided to defend slot machines "no matter what" because they were such an important income source for his organization. He said it as if it was some selfless commitment.

Eventually, though, gambling addiction became a too big and obvious problem to ignore, and the gambling monopoly took over, sharply reducing the numbers of machines and (supposedly) making them less aggressive. There were some concessions to the charities that lost income as a result of it (which, as I recall, screwed over the few charities that had taken a principled stand against slot machines).

What’s the thought process as to why they exist? What would actually happen if the government mandated that they were illegal to operate?

In australia, slot machines are controlled by organisations which are effectively white collar gangsters. The NSW organisation is currently suing an ex-employee who worked in anti-corruption and subsequently whistle-blew on unactioned corruption reports, while he’s on his deathbed with terminal cancer.

Context: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/25/clubs...

My "favorite" part, for lack of a better adjective, is how ClubsNSW (the slot machine organization) successfully got a federal court order telling the whistleblower to stop "intimidating, harassing" the poor, innocent ClubsNSW, while at the same time the home of the guy who interviewed the whistleblower gets firebombed, twice!

To be fair, friendlyjordies has pissed off a lot of people, I think as far as motives go, there are plenty of likely and unrelated parties who would be capable of doing that.

> What’s the thought process as to why they exist? What would actually happen if the government mandated that they were illegal to operate?

> In australia, slot machines are controlled by organisations which are effectively white collar gangsters.

The thought process is that if it wasn't government run, it would be ran by actual gangsters with much less accountability.

As opposed to not letting anyone run it, I mean.

I suspect the reality is that preventing illegal gambling via enforcement would be basically impossible to do effectively without spending a significant portion of the police budget on it. Allowing heavily regulated legal gambling is more like the lesser of two evils.

I’m curious why you think that. There will always be illegal casinos, but the interest in slot machines would surely not be large enough to reach prohibition level behaviours?

But I’m also unsure how I feel about prohibiting a behaviour, given the whole slippery slope article etc

It'd still be run illegally - I'm sure in Queensland there were illegal casinos in pub districts before pokies were legalised in the... 1980s I want to say (or maybe early 1990s). They probably offered gambling on credit and other stuff that is now illegal (not to say it still doesn't happen but it'd be very uncommon).

> Here in Finland slot machines (and most types of legalized gambling) are controller by a government-owned nonprofit that distributes the revenue to various charities. I think that's the best way to run these kind of things if they need to exist.

US state governments use the "it's for a good cause" justification all the time as well. But... it's still addictive and exploitive of vulnerable populations (especially lotto)

In New Zealand you will find slot machines in many pubs and hotels, they are very accessible to the public. They are also operated by charitable foundations and claim they do a net good by donating the profits to the community.

I despise the model just like lotteries, it's a regressive tax and the lions share of profit comes from those with addictions.

I've been to finland a few times, it's crazy to see people play slots at the front/back of the grocery story at 1 pm.

Tangentially, I recently learned that Sega (of games, consoles, Sonic fame), started as a slot/amusement machines selling business for the US military bases in Hawaii and later Japan, and that the name, Sega, is derived from its original name: "Service Games".

I was surprised by this article for this very reason. Sega's predecessor started as an American company that had business in slot machines on military bases in Hawaii, and when slot machines were banned in the US, it bought them up and moved to Japan to American bases in Japan. "Moved" is really simplifying things, there were mergers and split-ups and re-mergers along the way. But in short it became a Japanese company run by Americans in the military sphere and in the 2000s was merged with Sammy, a pachinko machine company.[1]

So Sega started with, and ended up back as a slot machine company.

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/2009/04/21/ign-presents-the-his...

That's amazing, I never knew.

Horrible idea: require a military id to log in to the slot machine; each person's jackpot is equal to the amount they've sunk into the machines, and they're guaranteed to pay out every 1000 pulls.

At the Brainwash laundromat / cafe in San Francisco (RIP) they had a bill changer that took $20 bills and returned quarters, which was quite fun and entertaining to use, sounded spectacularly jingly, earned you lots of attention and accolades from everyone in the room, and gave reliable 1:1 payouts every time. Plus you could have food and coffee and beer and play video games while waiting for your clothes to clean and dry. That should be implemented at every military base.

Reminds me of a probably-apocryphal story I read somewhere years ago.

"I was in a casino, and saw a doddering old man sitting not at a slot machine but at the change machine. He fed in dollar after dollar, and would cheer and call out 'I won again!' every time it dispensed his quarters. It was harmless, and better he 'play' that than lose at a real slot machine, so I left him alone with his fantasy.

I saw him again the next day. I pointed at the change machine and asked why he wasn't playing that one since it was his favorite yesterday. His reply: 'It was dispensing six quarters for every dollar until they fixed it.' "

Almost every laundromat bill changer I've used accepts 20s. I always felt very self-conscious getting so much change at once, but maybe it'd be more fun if it had lights and bells on it.

I remember the opposite experience in the USA when I was a child. We needed to make an international call from a payphone. Struggling with it, eventually my dad called the operator, who said the call cost $8 or so, and we needed to put the coins in quickly. We tried several times, but my dad and I were unable to feed in 32 quarters before something on the machine timed out, and spat them all back out.

We wondered why $1 coins weren't in circulation.

Interesting. I used some kind of pre-paid international calling card for the handful of times I needed to make international payphone calls. I'm too young to have remembered a time when payphones were in constant use, but I definitely used the payphones at my high school once or twice to call my mom when my cell phone died.

FWIW, $1 coins were (and are) in circulation, but not very common and probably not accepted in payphones. The NYC train and subway ticket machines have dispensed $1 Sacagawea coins as change for as long as I've used them.

We were in some small town with a crossroads and a motel, and it was night. Eventually the motel let us use their phone.

Coming from the UK with £2 coins in widespread circulation (worth over $3 at the time) we hadn't thought to prepare for this.

That's like my fair slot machine idea, a slot machine that spreads the winnings out evenly. You put in a dollar and then win 95 cents, every time; fun!

I'm offering lottery tickets for half off. They are used, but have a higher expected value than the new ones.

For practical implementation (less change to manage), the machine should probably take $1.01 or $1.05 and return $1.

The military base version could just take in $1 and return $1.

Military base version already for sale here: https://www.gameroomguys.com/American-Changer-AC500-Bill-Cha...

You can further optimise this by taking 1 cent or 5 cents and returning nothing. The military version is simply a button.

I was kinda aiming for "the methadone of gambling" but I think your idea fits that better than mine.

That's entirely unrealistic.

No slot machine pays out 95%.

According to the Nevada Gaming Control Board, $1 slots pay out an average of 95 percent of receipts. (25 cent slots pay back an average of 93 percent, 5 cent machines: 90 percent.)

https://www.lasvegas4newbies.com/chap10-2.html

95% every pull, no. But over long periods of time, that's about what most machines pay out.

I'm mostly joking, but it's closer to 90%

https://www.americancasinoguidebook.com/slot-machine-payback...

Even more horrible idea: Adjust the payout probability in proportion to the number of enemy combatants that an infantryman has killed.

Question: Would you rather than service members gamble on military facilities or at the local casino/bar?

I'm not talking about harm reduction per se, ie reducing gambling. I mean would you rather have soldiers gambling/drinking in the controlled environment of a base or out on the town? I've been in situations/deployments where the CO has closed the base, restricted our movements off base to operational only. It really isn't much fun. So I am hesitant to criticize any on-base activity that at least some people enjoy responsibly.

I think they should gamble at the local casino (because there aren’t a lot of those locally forcing service members to have intermittent gambling habits rather than continuous exposure). The ready availability of having it on base at the NEX or whatever creates an easily accessible temptation. For destructive isolating behaviors like gambling I believe there should be no accessibility to it on base and definitely not DoD sponsored.

> Question: Would you rather than service members gamble on military facilities or at the local casino/bar?

1. The argument that soldiers are going to do drugs anyways isn't a good reason to provide a weekly cocaine ration.

2. I don't think all of these bases have a nearby casino.

3. Lowering the activation energy for going to the slots will increase use of the slots. If I had a magic tap that soda and beer came out of at my house, I'd be drinking more soda and beer. Despite having a corner store on the other side of the street.

The military should be lowering the activation energy for less destructive past-times, instead.

>> 1. The argument that soldiers are going to do drugs anyways isn't a good reason to provide a weekly cocaine ration.

That happened in Canada. When Canada made pot legal, their military went through a debate about whether it should be sold on bases. They already provide alcohol on bases, even on ships. Why not pot? But I have not heard of any slot machines on Canadian bases.

Why should we be surprised that the United States military takes advantage of the foolishness of people who gamble? Many of the various states likewise profit from their least wise citizens by running lotteries. It wouldn't be a stretch to argue that government as a whole is just that: gaining power and money at the expense of everyone you can fool into going along with it.

And "services that contribute to resiliency, retention, readiness and quality of life," indeed!

They are military. They signed up to live under military discipline. So how about imposing on them the discipline of not gambling, at least on base? The Navy has strict rules banning alcohol on ship: strict rules are not impossible

> So how about imposing on them the discipline of not gambling, at least on base?

When I wore the uniform, it was handled indirectly with constant reminders that failing to satisfy debt obligations is punishable by Article 134 of the UCMJ.

Some places need extra reminders and discipline though, e.g. Nellis AFB (Las Vegas, NV) and Keesler AFB (Biloxi, MS) are two bases I'm familiar with that come to mind.

They have been running them a long time. I remember playing them on post in the '80s in (West) Germany

I can understand troops wanting to have something to do and the military providing it...but maybe just go with games that have odds that are more even and put the money collected into military pensions? I can see the argument that troops will maybe go stir-crazy or grow homesick without some activities, and you can't have games that remove all possibility to lose (that's not fun) so there has to be a happy medium. Even if they invest in video games, or table games that have less house favoritism. Then putting the money into a pension fund or similar so, even though you -can- lose, you will benefit everyone when you do.

From reading WW II and earlier books: service members' time-honored custom is playing poker. Richard Nixon was reputedly an excellent poker player.

I think I read that the Roman legions played dice games, using knuckle bones from animals.

Variants of that are played worldwide, even today especially in Central Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knucklebones

I'm surprised this isn't outcompeted into failure by domestic civilian competition base-adjacent where they can offer far more, ahem, "services", to complement the gambling.

I am sure prostitution does well too.

Outside of every base there is inevitably a row of pawn shops, tattoo parlors, asian "massage" joints, and one 24-hour pizza place.

Every base has a standing order to avoid all of those under penalty, except the pizza place, where it is discouraged mostly because it's not great pizza.

Diego Garcia, however, is an island in the middle of nowhere with nothing on it, so none of those exist.

Don't forget car dealerships specializing in the Ford Mustang, Jeep Wrangler, and Dodge Challenger, all at the highest interest rates in town!

This is a complicated problem. I'm sure there are plenty of service members who occasion the slot rooms and fully understand what they're getting into.

And why shouldn't our service members enjoy some of the things they'd be able to at home when possible?

But yeah, it's very bad optics to essentially take their paycheck back. But one of the reasons they are playing the slots are to win money. So if you make it cash neutral, it's really pointless.

And you could instead just set up a free-play arcade. Or even a quarter to help with maintenance costs. But people look at video games and gambling differently. One is for children and one is for adults.

But then again, these people signed up to be told what to do, what to eat, etc. I would say it's fair that the military could say that gambling while enlisted is not allowed and shut down the slot rooms.

>I would say it's fair that the military could say that gambling while enlisted is not allowed and shut down the slot rooms.

Then you'd have the right wing whining about how "woke" the military is with their cancel culture, shutting down gambling the same way they shut down homophobia and sexism and racism by integrating and ordering enlisted people to suck it up and follow the military orders and regulations they signed up to follow.

Right wing typically doesn’t support gambling, so getting rid of it would be a good thing to them.

Of course they do. They are as much proponents of state funded lotteries as anyone else.

Ok.

Except those forms blessed by the church like bingo, keno, pickle cards, raffles, etc. As long as the invisible friend gets a cut, they’re a-ok with gambling.

The right wing has absolutely no values or principles any more and is totally about performative obstruction and opposition to anything they don't perceive as far right as they are, as demonstrated by McCarthy taking 15 rounds of voting to get elected to Speaker of the House by his own majority. They're much more passionate about using gas stoves and abusing drag queens and electing pathological liars than any "traditional" conservative issues.

I'm a Biden Republican, if you say I have no values or principles that's fine. I'm glad you found a way to fit us all into one nice little box. It definitely makes reality easier to navigate.

"overseas", does it mean tax free? Usually there are very high taxes on such machines.

Isn't the Federal government exempt from taxes imposed by the States anyway?

I won $25 in nickels from a slot machine in Giesen (1998). Turns out it's hard to find a German bank that wants to accept and exchange that. Spent two years feeding it into vending machines on post.

Slot machines are basically a dopamine hit machine. This would be analogous to government supplied recreational drugs.

At least in ancient times back in 2004, while I was on Nellis AFB (North Las Vegas, NV) a large part of people stationed there would just go down to the strip or downtown. I remember a number of orientation briefings about addiction counseling but they took on a different tone being in Las Vegas.

This is so little money that one can only assume that this is done for morale reasons. The whole damn U.S. military makes only $100 M off this? It isn't worth the revenue at all.

Talk about government recycling programs, that's almost like money laundering when what they pay servicemen just comes right back in the form of captive gambling addicts.

Remove the coin collection box = cash goes back to player. It is then a game of statistics and probably the gambling aspect will be gone and the machines made ~~ worthless

The proceeds go right back into paying for other recreational facilities: sounds ok to me. Maybe have a cap of how much you can spend at the casino per period of time?

They'll feel right at home once they're done with active duty since they're basically 2 slot machine shops at every neighborhood intersection.

Reminds me of that line in Band of Brothers "Never put yourself in a position where you can take from these men".

Yes, and they mark up exchange prices for MWR (in the name of not competing with off-base businesses).

If the goal is providing entertainment, why not just adjust the payout to be 0 profit?

This is how Sega got their start.

that's enough money to give everyone in the USA a million dollars!

"Slots are often found on bases where there is precious little to do, like Diego Garcia – a 12-sq.-mile island in the Indian Ocean with a population of just over 4,000 people – where the Navy runs 52 slot machines"

Talk about a captive audience rife for exploitation.

People really desperately need table top rpgs! If they introduce some pathfinder or Warhammer in there oh man the fun these members can have. But then it is an _expense_ not a _income_.

I've been to Diego Garcia. It is boring as hell; about all there is to say. We got in trouble for trying to organize an expedition to secretly catch and eat some of the coconut crabs (which is verboten).

Also played D&D in the service. Most active tabletop gaming group I've ever been in too.

Didn't D&D in DG tho.

There's no way organizing a secret group to capture and eat some sacred monsters doesn't count as D&D.

> secretly catch and eat some of the coconut crabs (which is verboten).

Was this out of environmental concerns / the crabs going extinct or was there something more to it?

In my country, barracks have "open days" (basically a weekend, once a year i think) where they would present all their clubs and invite external personnel to check out and participate (long-term, not only on those two days). I wanted to try fencing, so i went, and i finished joining the tabletop club (and fencing too). This is what brought me back to tabletops.

Then covid, moved to a city without any barracks close by, so i couldn't continue, but military definitely have tabletop rpgs (and they are very partial with those where battlemaps are easy to set up)

That sounds awesome! Which country?

France. The city i was is was Rennes (There is 4 barracks there), but i'm pretty sure the same thing exist in Paris (CESNAD? Not certain).

Like this? I guess it depends on the base and someone stepping up to organize the game.

https://jblm.armymwr.com/calendar/event/75270

https://www.jbmdl.jb.mil/Quick-Links/Get-Connected-Clubs/

According to my buddy the Canadian Navy is absolutely crawling with Warhammer players, apparently being a player has been pretty good for their career.

Yikes, probably cheaper just to bribe superior officers for promotions :-)

True, but if you've already spent the money might as well choose a career that will at least allow you to tell your parents 'See, I told you these plastic models will pay off one day.'

Fair point. That would indeed be priceless.

Anecdotally, my brother in the Air Force had a pretty regular and frequent D&D group in the past 3 years. But I don’t know how widespread that is.

Very common in all branches, it just differs based on what the job is. Mechanics? Probably less likely. Intel? Way more likely.

Can confirm it was fairly common in the Marine Corps, even some of the grunts and motor transport guys would get interested on ship duty. When you're bored as hell you'll take anything you can get.

Boredom and creativity go hand in hand. Not necessarily good creativity. On my first deployment i chugged a bottle of syrup for $50 bucks and gave the corpsman heart attacks. It is not fun throwing up syrup for an hour after.

>Mechanics? Probably less likely.

Coincidentally, my partner's father was an airplane mechanic stationed in Okinawa in the 1980s... and apparently played a lot of D&D.

These games, along with D&D, were alive and well when I was in the military.

Didn't the Prussian general staff basically invent the idea of table top gaming/simulations?

The Chinese were doing it >2000 years ago - I expect that such games were a common tool.

Cheaper to go to slot machines!

or you can get them into 40k and take the rest of their money

this man Warhammers

I mean, its also an atoll in paradise. Theres definitely plenty to do there, the navy for some reason has decided to ban surfing and instead put in slot machines.

After getting a dream job on a paradise island, I can tell you how fast it takes to do everything there is to do on that island before the isolation sets in.

I was told the week I landed "there's two type of people: those who immediately fall in love and never leave. Then there's the ones who get island fever after 6 months and never come back... You won't find too many mainlanders who have lived here for very long"

Islands are expensive. It's hard to get stuff, and hard to get places. If I want to jump in a car and go 2 hours in any direction I can, and there is probably something for me to do there. Ain't so in the island. Ditto for job options.

You hit the beaches. Hang out. Get sunburned. Hit a few of the in-town stuff; they're played out after 3 months and you're bored. More folks rotate through so there is the novelty of banging the tourists and new-bloods, but either they (or you) are probably departing soon so it's hard to make any real connections, romantic or otherwise.

> I was told the week I landed "there's two type of people

Same when you live somewhere remote like the Yukon or smaller places in Alaska. People won't even really associate with you until you've been there a full 12 months because they don't want to invest time in someone that is likely to just leave anyway.

-48C (-55F) is a hell of a thing, but the lack of sunlight I personally found much, much harder.

The wonderful part though is that virtually nobody lives there that doesn't love it, because if you don't love it, you leave. That means the people that stay are passionate about it, and do every possible activity all the time - more so in the dead of winter!

(I stayed 4 years, miss the place intensely)

I'm right now sat on a comparably remote island in the Alaska fishery, relatively new here. I've always romanticized the sea, landlubber as I am, and after a few months here, I went to Waikiki for vacation and - hated it. I couldn't leave soon enough. Too much happiness. The people here have mostly been here for many years, and will remember someone they worked on a boat with for a few weeks in the 80s or what-have-you. I have time to read, be left alone when I want to be, grab a beer off-site. I can see why healthy people would go insane, and why insane people would go healthy.

I'm happy to hear you're enjoying the isolation!

>I can see why healthy people would go insane, and why insane people would go healthy.

When I got to the Yukon a friend was introducing me around for the first 6 months or so. Every introduction would go "This is <Dave>, he's a bit crazy." "This is "Mary, she's a bit crazy".

It took me a while to catch on, and your quote captures it perfectly.

>I can see why healthy people would go insane, and why insane people would go healthy.

That's the best line I've ever read on this site

"Island fever" is a very real thing. I once strongly considering moving to a tiny island and after talking to a number of friendly locals I got the sense that _many_ people love the idea of moving there, but it's definitely a life that does not work for everyone. The number of stories they had about people moving there and being gone within a year was way more than I suspected.

I know a guy whose dream was to retire to Maui. He would go on & on about how he just didn't want to come home when he was vacationing there.

A few years after moving there, he's back in the States.

Sure, but why don't slot machines get boring?

Because the human brain is bad at probability and susceptible to hacking.

And on the other like-a-fox hand, the military does have a strong incentive to identify individuals susceptible to developing gambling addictions.

It's cold, but putting them in close proximity to available gambling isn't the worst test...

It's the government, you may as well have another set of people observing the test givers as well.

“Addiction By Design” by Natasha Dow Schüll is a good book to answer this question.

I'm reminded of an anecdote I once heard, which I can't readily find atm, that in the days of yore when Chicago dominated the pinball industry, the same complex also dominated the slot machine industry. This business was later purchased by Bally's and moved to Las Vegas, where it appears the book picks up. Along with the business came the statistician whose job it was to make slot machines addictive. He later came out of retirement to work for Tinder. Don't really know if that last part is true, maybe someone here does.

That's like asking "Why doesn't it hurt when a tick latches onto your leg and starts sucking blood?"

They've been designed (evolved) for a purpose.

Pulling a lever/pushing a button should get boring. Slots are designed to not be boring while they bleed you dry.

Because slot machines are synthetic dopamine generators and humans have thousands of years of evolution tweaking us to favor dopamine-generating activities.

Because they're designed to be addictive.

Huh, I had no idea. https://wavelengthmag.com/curious-case-diego-garcia/

I'm guessing surfing risks injuring US military... assets.

Military bases, especially in the austere / remote environments where some of them are, have a few differences from most civilian areas.

- Specialized personnel, who are required to fulfill the base's mission

- Substantial logistical costs for additional personnel or materiel

- Limited medical facilities, often lacking in higher standards of care, supplies, and with substantial evacuation distances

Since Diego Garcia is a major airbase, some of these are lessened, but they still all apply.

If someone is injured, they have to be rotated out and someone with the same specialized training rotated in. If something is needed (say, medical supplies), they have to be flown or shipped thousands of miles.

Each doctor/nurse/piece of medical equipment thus has a logistics footprint several times what a mainland one would. Which means a bare minimum medical presence.

Which means if something really bad happens (major trauma from a shark attack), someone is probably dying.

Weighed against that... a ban on surfing for recreational purposes seems fair.

At the end of the day, when you're deployed in a remote environment with the military, you're there to serve the mission. Fun comes secondary, or not at all. :(

> Which means if something really bad happens (major trauma from a shark attack), someone is probably dying.

> Weighed against that... a ban on surfing for recreational purposes seems fair.

> At the end of the day, when you're deployed in a remote environment with the military, you're there to serve the mission. Fun comes secondary, or not at all. :(

I wouldn't be surprised if the risk of shark attack to surfers there is lower than the risk of death due to basically every other activity on the base. There are maybe a dozen deaths (not just including surfers) due to sharks each year in the whole world. Banning surfing due to the risk of shark attack is totally illogical. Surfers are so much more likely to injure themselves or die in any number of other ways surfing. The risk of shark attacks just doesn't even enter the conversation.

I'd be interested to hear the reasoning on the ban. If it really is due to shark attacks, the military might consider getting someone more rational to make those decisions at the base.

I mean, even the article suggests that if the military reversed course and allowed surfing, there may not be as many people jumping at the opportunity as OP suggests. It says that military personnel have smuggled surfboards and failed to get many other folk interested in joining them over the course of a whole year:

>Somehow, he’d managed to smuggle his 8’6 pintail out there (we’d find this tricky to believe were it not for the images featured in the original article above) and he spent his year finding fun down the line tubes to jam it into. Unfortunately for Tom, he wasn’t able to coax many mates out into the lineup to join him, largely due to the abundance of hazards that lurk between the fast-breaking waves and the shallow coral reefs, including an array of hungry sharks, sting-rays, and stonefish. And of course, the the limited medical facilities on land should you come to blows with any of them.

And just because something's "in paradise" doesn't mean there's plenty to do, and simply suggesting a sport that not everyone's into doesn't really support that assertion. Paradise can be quite uneventful, even if it's still paradise.

What's the punishment for ignoring the ban? Fear of that may dominate the reasoning of those who declined to join him.

Best case? Non-judicial punishment of some sort, e.g. "captain's mast" or the like. Forfeiture of pay, additional duty, minor imprisonment, changes to your rations, etc.

In a highly secured, remote base it's totally possible you get court-martialed, busted down in rank (aka losing out in monthly pay and bennies), or even catch a bad conduct discharge or something.

Ignoring orders in the military is a good way to end up in prison.

What percentage of Navy enlisted in the lower E-numbers have ever surfed, at all, in their whole lives? Reads like this would be a pretty shitty place to learn, so I can see why people'd balk at the notion, even without the risk of punishment.

I never tried surfing, so I would 100% not risked punishment to surf. That just seems dumb.

My point here is that if something is not allowed, you need a lot more to be willing to try it.

That quote smells like BS. There are a lot of people who don't surf, and those reasons aren't why.

I love swimming so I am sure I will have some fun but atoll in paradise sounds like a place with not much to do, at least not compared to a major city like where I live. And I can swim here too during the summers.

It may have just been his own spin on it but I used to read a lot of this world-traveller Russian blogger's low-commentary (mostly just strings of photos with short captions) posts, and was surprised at how seemingly every truly-remote, small, island "paradise" he visited came off as hellishly dull and absolutely covered in trash (every single one of them seemed to have a severe problem with trash disposal, to the point that there were small de-facto open landfills evidently around every corner and in every cranny when out in the wilder areas... which actually made a lot of sense when I started to think about it, but was just something I'd never considered before)

Dude completely broke me of my childhood desire to go to see every little middle-of-nowhere island I could find on the globe. But did make me way more interested in visiting Ethiopia, so, there's that.

You can play slot machines for more hours than you can surf - and not only that, but you can do it in more types of weather with a lower risk of injury.

Plenty to do there if you are there for a week. 6 months in, those things aren't nearly as neat and you will probably need some other entertainment. Slots wouldn't have been my first (or 10th) choice to offer folks, though.

sounds like someone that's never taken that tropical sabbatical

It would be somewhat less objectionable if the "house" didn't take a cut. There's no good reason for the military to profit off this when they could offer the "entertainment" for free.

The way I read it the military isn't taking that money to buy guns or tanks or whatever - it's the relatively piddly MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) groups that are profiting, and then using the profits for other MWR activities. From the article:

> A Pentagon report in the early 2000s claimed that without the slot machines, the MWR groups would not be able to afford other amenities for military members such as golf courses and family activity centers. DOD spokeswoman Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman echoed that argument, telling NPR the machines "contribute significantly to the non-appropriated fund and many other recreation and entertainment overseas programs."

The military base I've lived near had plenty of such activities - adult sports leagues, an auto skills center, bowling alley, etc. I guess it might not be as ideal as every such activity being self-sustaining in terms of costs, but it doesn't really seem like a scandal for all of the MWR income to go into a big MWR pot to be spent on various activities.

It’s the least objectionable place for the money to go but that’s actually rather shrewd. I assume that if the military did not pay for those creature comforts that morale would suffer and operational readiness / effectiveness would be reduced.

If foreign bases don’t have fun things to do then maybe younger siblings won’t enlist without more expensive bonuses. Or maybe the unmotivated soldiers won’t go the extra mile while maintaining vehicles. Or the infantry will leave the boring-ass base and fraternize at popular military “companion” bars and come back with STDs and get into fights with locals, losing some of the military’s license to operate bases as freely in that nation.

The military would have to spend some of this money anyways if it wasn’t coming out of the soldiers own pockets.

IDK. Taking gambling income and funding golf courses with it feels pretty regressive.

> they could offer the "entertainment" for free

But free slot machines aren't "entertaining" though. People get addicted to slot machines, and other forms of gambling, because they make you put skin in the game and so your brain's chemistry goes all over the place when you win or loose giving you various highs. You don't get such highs when everything is free and you have no skin in the game. It gets boring instantly. But once you put your hard earned cash in, then it gets interesting.

I’m aware. I hope most other HN’ers are aware.

When I said “free” I meant that every dollar taken in should be paid out to the gamblers. Not that gamblers would use the machines without depositing some money/bet/ante. If the government chooses to offer gambling to the servicemen it shouldn’t result in headlines with eye watering profits being skimmed off the top.

At least the old-school rampant gambling in the barracks (poker games, scorpion races, etc) usually don’t have a house cut. Every dollar taken in is paid out.

That would be the minimum ethical requirement here for the government.

If you know you're getting it all back, what's the point? At least the way you word it, it sounds like an equal distribution, which means no payout. Even if it's not an equal distribution like your example, you're still going to have people loose.

The money does go back to the gamblers... and other service members and dependents. It's in the form of MWR programs. That's why you can get a tennis lesson with a pro who has played in the Open for $10, have free access to the rec hall, cheap bowling, cheap pool access, hobby shop access, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if it goes to towards lodging like the Hale Koa, or other services like space-a flights.

> If you know you're getting it all back, what's the point?

I meant to word it like "They could make it so that 99.9999% of gamblers lose all their bets, but one gambler per year wins $100 million". Just as long as the military isn't taking that a % of that money to use lieu of money they should have budgeted properly for creature comforts.

"money to use lieu of money they should have budgeted properly for creature comforts."

I mean, the MWR budgeting is a completely different conversation. The way that budgeting works now, they wouldn't replace that $100M.

On that subject, the exchanges shouldn't mark up items above cost, nor should the commissary charge that 5% fee, etc. In the grand scheme of things, voluntary gambling is the least exploitive, since the others have been imposed manditorily over time. And we still have some military families on food stamps... so there's a lot to discuss and would probably benefit from a complete compensation/benefits system restructuring.

If the payout rate of the machines could be set to pay out 100% of the take in prize money, the military would not be taking a profit, but the gambling would still be real.

That would mean giving away lots of prizes and you would have an addicted military very, very quickly. For most people, the losses are what stop them in their tracks

Why not 105%? Keeps people of of trouble. I bet the military would rather you sat a Skinner Box than broke your leg surfing or leaked military secrets on TikTok.

Wouldn't that make gambling addiction more likely and cause problems when they return to civilian life, and try to recapture the high?

Had a co-worker who was stationed there back in his Air Force days. He said one day there was a fire. It was nothing major, but as a safety precaution until it was put out (in case it reached the fuel tanks) they had to evacuate a safe distance from the base, and the only safe distance meant standing out in the shallows on the beach.

> studies show these slot machines save $250M a year against alternative more expensive forms of entertainment.

lol

Less funny if you think about gambling beating drugs as a go-to form of entertainment.

Why are you laughing. That's $250M in entertainment that doesn't need to be shipped to a military base. Assuming it isn't all downloadable media that's a lot of physical goods that doesn't need to be inspected, shipped, and inspected to remote Military bases.

And if you're running the gambling halls it's going to be a lot harder for a soldier to get into a compromising amount of debt.

Besides the $100M a year in "profit" I'd wager these machines generate even more in cost savings.

I mostly posited it as a joke for winking at the fictitious studies, but yah the comparative cost to alternatives may be not too shabby after all. "Compared to what" is often a question left as an afterthought. I try to think of alternatives right off the bat. But once you start diluting a story against reasonable alternatives and see where a decision landed in the valley of options the story loses some of its outrage edge.

If this article was written by almost any other news org I would say "compared to what" would be some attempt to privatize the entertainment so someone could make a profit, luckily the article seems genuinely interested in the harm the machines are creating for the military.

Can I read books and access computers? Can I break open slot machines to learn how to repair them?

If both are yes then that's a pretty interesting place.

You can bring your own computer but if you want internet you'll have to pay obscene amounts of money for dialup speeds. I've heard that the UK customs officers also take great joy in limiting what kinds of literature and files the soldiers are allowed to import. They confiscate anything they deem obscene (eg Playboy magazines or a hard drive with porn on it) or antisocial (apparently "motorcycle gangs" were a hot topic at one point, so be prepared to say goodbye to your copy of Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

Lack of Internet is even better! it's like a prison without the hassle of it. A dream. Well the customs officers are a bit of annoying but it's OK.

Oh well, only for soldiers anyway.

Or an audience desperate for some diversion, especially a risk-seeking audience.

But no reason the machines can't just pay out 100% and so offer risk to people who want to buy it in small doses without making money off the troops in aggregate.

Anyways, much better than state run lotteries (which have way worse payout odds than slots).

I’ve been to DG for about a month when I was in the USAF. It was the end of 1995 and the Internet had just reached it, which meant I at least had early Internet web access in such a remote location, for free, which was amazing.

But most of that month was admittedly spent waiting for work, reading Memnoch the Devil (RIP Anne Rice), drinking really cheap beer, playing pool and surfing the early Internet (there was possibly some Scorched Earth in there, too!)

And they use that money to pay for golf courses somewhere nicer? I'm getting a bit grossed out by that thought.

The officers need a new golf course!

It sounds like heaven. I would read, go for runs and hang out with my buds.

Sounds like Heaven, indeed: from the Forever War.

It's almost literally death, jail, or slots.

Presented that way, jail does not look so bad ...

US has a naval base so near to Indian peninsula?? Damn never knew about it. Guess big brother likes to be everywhere.

Don't stop there. Diego Garcia and the surrounding Chagos islands were ethnically-cleansed by a joint American-British operation just 50 years ago [1], to make living-space for this military base.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation

Don't forget that people are supporting part of this whenever they buy an .io tld.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#History

You mean github.io isn't for projects relating to the Indian Ocean‽

To be fair the just scooped the Chagossians out, whereas ethnic cleansing usually refers to extermination. Those who ended up in the UK have been fighting a legal battle since and seem to be making slow progress. From the British point of view it was a slam dunk, since they didn't care about the "man Fridays" and they got trident missiles in return.

You may want to check your definitions. This is a clear example of ethnic cleansing and should not be minimized just because it isn't literal genocide.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ethnic_cleansing

Oh shit you caught me

The issue of the Chagos Islands was the subject of an International Court of Justice advisory opinion which concluded that 'the United Kingdom’s continued administration of the Chagos Archipelago “constitutes a wrongful act entailing the international responsibility of that State”, that the United Kingdom “has an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible, and that all Member States must co-operate with the United Nations to complete the decolonization of Mauritius' [0].

[0] https://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/169

Do you mean ethnically cleansed?

Ethical ethnic cleansing is hopefully not a thing.

Yes, fixed.

Ever heard of the .io TLD? Dig deeper...

It's not really near anything. It's in the middle of the Indian Ocean ~1,000 miles from any other significant land mass.

So near? Might want to double-check that. Indian ocean's big, this isn't terribly close to India.

The proximity to India is why there is a US base on a British owned Island.

This one probably had more to do with protecting shipping lanes from French interdiction, given the location and which other countries had colonies and other operations semi-nearby (spoiler alert: France). As far as why the British cared to hold it in the last century, I mean, not for why it's still a base now. Leave all the islands in that area to France and it'd have been a dagger pointed at shipping crossing the Indian ocean via the canal. Seize a couple of the islands yourself, and at least you can keep an eye on things and mount a plausible threat if a hot war breaks out, to keep France from getting too bold with their use of the nearby islands.

Britain had a bunch of other islands much closer to India. Not even counting Sri Lanka.

Though, yes, protecting shipping lanes to and from India would have been part of the purpose, but not just to India. British Malaysia, various Pacific territories, and the commonwealth states of Australia and New Zealand, would have shared those same shipping routes, largely.

I'd guess that as a US base it's more likely to support US or NATO operations, real or hypothetical, in or around the Horn of Africa than it is to have much to do with the subcontinent.

For the US timeframe, the island was viewed during the Cold War as strategic to the United States, due to it's proximity to India, a potential ally of the Soviet Union. It served (and may still serve) as a Navy communication station. It has been used to monitor Afghanistan and China's activities in the South China Sea.

800 to a 1000 bases around the world

I don't think my English vocabulary extends enough to properly describe the surreal mix of stupefaction and disgust this very concept creates on me.

"now ain't that some shit"

May I Suggest "cluster fuck".

"Fucked" is another option. The US wastes so much money on the military, but that all gets funneled to contractors and the enlisted soldiers get fucked.

or SNAFU? Situation normal - all f**ed up

Just off the Alaska Highway in BC there are two lakes right next to each other, officially named "SNAFU" and "TARFU" by the military back in the day when they built the road. They're great places to camp and canoe.

No. Doesn’t begin to describe it. Need something much stronger.

Is this a reference to that one movie?

Consider the fact that the US military fleeces taxpayers to the tune of Elon Musk's entire net worth every 10 weeks; I'm fine with consensually subsidizing that a bit from the incomes of those who explicitly opted in to participating in it.

They've actually double opted in: first to join up, and second to put money in the slot machine. Let them pay for it.

Next up: U.S. Military cocaine dealers earn $100M a year from service members.

I was gonna write more, but I fear I might be giving readers ideas and honestly no military needs any more ideas on how to monetize their soldiers.

The military has traditionally been kind enough to give stimulants to servicemen for free. Cocaine until between the World Wars, amphetamines got phased out in the past few decades, and now mostly modafinil.

As a serviceman I've never heard of this. Do Rip Its count?

Stimulants are often given to pilots or people on Special Forces missions to prevent fatigue. It's not a hidden thing, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psychoactive_drugs_use... for some details. Historically, the use was far more common.

Traditional ≠ special forces

I don't have any idea what you're trying to say here. The US military still gives out stimulants to servicemen, though far fewer of them receive safer drugs than in the past.

I'm only at odds with the words "traditional" and "often". I'm a serviceman and I haven't heard of it. Were you a pilot?

I'm also saying that special forces aren't exactly traditional. Would you say that the military traditionally sports beards and ballcaps because SF do?

The practice is traditional, and it's still done with pilots and special forces. I don't know why you haven't heard about it, the use is well documented.

NO-Explode & Rip Fuel.

Not provided by the service, though.

I almost died from a RipIt overdose.

A lot of alcohol before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...

That's just Fort Bragg.

Congress barely dents scourge of hunger in military

> Fully 24 percent of active-duty servicemembers recently experienced “low food security,” meaning they sometimes lacked quality meals, according to the latest Pentagon survey of troops in late 2020 and early 2021 — before the recent inflation surge. Of those, 10 percent periodically experienced “very low food security,” meaning they sometimes ate less at mealtime, missed meals entirely or lost weight due to inadequate food intake in the previous year.

> Those percentages suggest that 286,800 active-duty servicemembers have had some level of food insecurity of late, and nearly 120,000 of them have sometimes gone hungry recently due to a lack of food, according to senators on the Armed Services Committee. The figures do not count family members of those active-duty personnel. Nor are reservists and their family members included in the tally.

https://rollcall.com/2023/01/13/congress-barely-dents-scourg...

So what? Can someone explain what this article is trying to get me outraged at?

State lotteries collect ~$30 billion in revenue a year. If we're supposed to be outraged that the government profits from gambling, shouldn't we talk about that first?

Or is this just another driveby article taking potshots at the US military?

Someone please explain how a right-thinking person is supposed to read this. There's an axe being ground here, not sure what it is.

Some people believe that gambling is immoral, and that hosting slot machines or other gambling games is exploitative.

Some people are not necessarily opposed to gambling, but strongly believe the government should take care of military personnel. To them, this may be an example of the government failing to provide more wholesome (or at the very least, less expensive) activities.

Some people are outraged by the amount of money the government spends on the military. To them, this may be an example of the government collecting yet more money from enlisted personnel rather than using their extensive budget to properly fund the "morale, welfare, and recreation" programs.

I suspect the article's intent is to highlight the latter two points. Personally I'm not sure how to feel about it. While I am not opposed to gambling, I do think we need support for managing addictions (including gambling addictions).

Slot machines are particularly insidious. With a lottery, it's possible to become a problem gambler, or become adicted, sure. But slot machines are designed to hook people. All the images, the sound, the gameplay is designed specifically to psychologically manipulate people, draw people in and basically make them addicted. It's pretty evil really.

Agree they're terrible. So lets talk about outlawing slot machines altogether because they're too addictive.

Something tells me a lot more money is made off of slot machines in casinos than on military bases. I just don't see why they're singling out the military in the article.

I guess my point is the article feels like a classic "abc is bad, and xyz does abc, so therefore xyz is bad" type article.

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