Anyhow, here’s a proposition – if you end up rich and famous promise me you’ll remember me in your autobiography, and if you end up spending some time in confinement at the request of our government, then I promise I’ll visit you.

ok?

So to the extent that your activities reduce the sizes of payouts, and particularly the larger ones, you may actually be driving problem gamblers away from this market. I don’t know how your model works, so I can’t comment further.

Just sayin’.

Not since I learnt that a large project that I had played a small part in, was being lauded on the TV for its success in killing foreigners at long distances.

I never found out how many people were killed; I am not sure anyone even bothered to count; they were only Iraqis, after all.

I once spent several months working for an insurance company that sold elevator-failure insurance to unemployed citizens of Aboriginal communities, in outback Australia, where the tallest things around are drought-affected trees. If the software had succeeded, not only would more high-margin insurance products have been shifted, the newly automated system would have resulted in hundreds of office staff being laid off.

Fortunately, dysfunctional project management caused the development staff to work more toward deflecting blame than producing a working system.

And just for the record, I don’t think we’re being quite restrictive enough in Australia. Currently, the extent of gambling in this country is pretty impressive/depressing: for example $8bn is lost by punters annually just through poker machines (source). (Incidentally a lot of the losses go straight to public coffers: $350/pp/year in Victoria, source).

But because the problem is one borne by society, I think the morality needs to be questioned at that level. For individuals, I generally see no problem. (And I’m not just saying that because my job is quite similar in many ways to yours!)