Surely no legislature would craft an entire bill just to outlaw one person’s as-yet unprofitable small business?
So when Nick Jenkins, founder of Betcha.com, calls a proposed Washington State law the “Kill Betcha.com Act”, certainly he must be exaggerating, paranoid or both, right?
Actually not. I read the bill, and indeed its sole purpose seems to be to redefine gambling so as to make Jenkins’s company illegal.
First some background. About two years ago, Jenkins, a crazybrilliant lawyer turned entrepreneur, started Betcha.com in Washington State, where gambling is illegal. Betcha.com was a peer-to-peer betting site with a huge caveat: losers didn’t have to pay if they didn’t want to. Because they weren’t necessarily risking money, they weren’t gambling. The Washington State authorities were not amused; they raided the company and jailed Jenkins & co, even extraditing them to Louisiana over seventy cents.
Then, in February 2009, the tide began to turn. Reversing a lower-court decision, the Washington State Court of Appeals vindicated Jenkins and his business model: Honor-based betting was not gambling. The former lawyer had done his homework well and, sure enough, was right all along.
So, some Washington State politicians decided to put the honor back into gambling. They proposed to redefine a bet as risking money on the understanding that you “will or may receive something of value” if you’re right, adding in the crucial two new words “or may”. So far, two attempts to pass the revised wording have stalled, keeping hope alive for an eventual resurrection of Betcha.com.
Apparently Washington State has a history of extreme positions on gambling, including outlawing writing about or linking to gambling websites, despite the standard hypocrisies of supporting state lotteries, horse racing, and Indian casinos.
Jenkins’s new mission is to keep the governor who turned him over to Louisiana authorities off the Supreme Court should Obama nominate her. Christine Gregoire couldn’t have gained a more tenacious and law-savvy enemy.
Thank you Nick Jenkins for continuing to fight when most would have given up long ago. Your hard work and sacrifice brings desperately needed clarity to gambling laws and paves the way for US gamers to someday get the products they want.
Applause please
I recently spent two days at an economics workshop. In some ways it felt like visiting a foreign country. For one, the audience doesn’t clap. Especially when the speaker ends with “thank you”, the silence is deafening. I hadn’t realized how instinctual the reaction to applaud had become. Of course, it’s arbitrary whether a community claps or not when one of its members concludes a speech. If a community always claps for every speaker, the signal is meaningless as a gauge of satisfaction, like restaurant patrons tipping 18% regardless of service. In fact, almost surely the speaker is just as grateful to have the attention as the audience is to receive the information. It’s not like a political rally where clapping indicates loyalty. Still, it seems like a nice gesture with near zero cost, so why not? Maybe it’s because computer scientists are generally poor speakers that we like to reassure one another. It reminds me of my first international flight. When we landed, all the passengers cheered — the tradition on international flights at the time and apparently at one time on all flights. It seems that now even international flights do not culminate in a round of applause for the pilot. I find it sad that apparently “don’t clap” is the stable equilibrium.
Second, each session was organized with two presentations followed by a lengthy review given by a “discussant”, usually a senior member of the community. I found the format useful: the discussant highlights the main points of the papers in a different voice, helping to reinforce the message, and provides some of their own opinions and insights. The main drawback is that covering two papers takes a full hour and a half, with almost no time for questions and discussion from the audience.
Luckily, even though some of the rituals were foreign, the language was familiar. It so happens that economists and computer scientists speak a remarkably similar dialect of math. Those of us working on market design are especially close: we inhabit similar circles at meetings, universities, and now industry labs (“mini universities” according to Susan Athey) like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, and even co-author papers. Al Roth may have inadvertently suggested why. He encourages thinking of economics as engineering. Computer “science”, like the design branch of economics, seems less science than an amalgam of math, engineering, and art.