Talk about a captive audience rife for exploitation.
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)
Coincidentally, my partner's father was an airplane mechanic stationed in Okinawa in the 1980s... and apparently played a lot of D&D.
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.
Was this out of environmental concerns / the crabs going extinct or was there something more to it?
I'm guessing surfing risks injuring US military... assets.
>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.
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.
My point here is that if something is not allowed, you need a lot more to be willing to try it.
- 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. :(
> 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 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"
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.
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...
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)
That's the best line I've ever read on this site
>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.
A few years after moving there, he's back in the States.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
lol
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.
If both are yes then that's a pretty interesting place.
Oh well, only for soldiers anyway.
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).
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!)
Ethical ethnic cleansing is hopefully not a thing.
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.