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Message: [QUOTE="punctual, post: 2324497, member: 105248"] Y'know, I'll concede that starting up your own business fits the definition of gambling: you're putting up a stake (the startup capital) on an event with an uncertain outcome (the success of the business) with the intent of making more money. [B]When you work for a company, you lose the money you would have gained had you been working for yourself. This assumes that when a company pays you $x as a salary, they must be making at least $10x (for otherwise, it would not be worth it for them to hire you in the first place...i say the multiplier is 10 here but it could be higher or lower depending on the job....it most certainly would never be equal to 1 or anywhere close to 1). So instead of making that money for your company, you could be making it for yourself![/B] I still don't see how that's an argument for working as an employee being gambling though. First of all, it's laughable to suggest that [i]everyone[/i] currently working as an employee has the capacity and opportunity to start up their own business and earn 10 times their current salary. [B]When i say "start your own business" i mean to suggest any kind of self employment where one literally works for one's self. Where the amount of money you make at the end of the day is in direct proportion to how much you've worked that day. So we all have skills. If we did not, we would not be employable. I'm saying if we took those skills and applied them to generate income for ourselves rather than for a company, the $10x profit that would flow to your company as a result of your working skillset would actually now come to you. So when you agree to apply your skillset to making money for a company, you are gambling away the additional income you could have had (or, if you will, are giving away that extra income to your company), had you decided to generate income for yourself.[/B] And even if it were gambling to work as an employee, it's a far less risky gamble than starting your own business. [B]This would depend on what you consider risk. Do you consider it a risk to give up luxury for "security?" For example, working for a company you could take out a mortgage on a house for say $200,000 and spend the next 30 years working for your company and paying off that mortgage. If you worked for yourself, you could buy a $200,000 house outright! When you choose to work for a company rather than work for yourself, you are choosing years of high-labor little-reward over high-labor high-reward. In my book, that is most definitely a gamble: in fact, you are assuredly throwing away a better life by choosing "security" over luxury. And security must be in quotation marks because as I have demonstrated in my argument above, working for a company is not as "SECURE" as one is led to beleive.[/B] Put in poker terms, you're saying that someone who only sits in play money games is gambling because they could be using that same time to play $100NL, and someone who plays $100NL is gambling away the income they could be getting from playing the nosebleeds. [B]I'm saying that the opportunity cost of playing fake money games can be significant if that person is not learning something from his/her play. And I am not saying "why play fake money games when you can be playing $100NL?" or "why play $100NL when you can be playing nosebleeds?" Instead, the question is: "If I am consistently making money in play money games, then WHY DON'T I start playing real money games?" and "If I am consistently making money playing $100NL then WHY DON'T I start playing nosebleeds?" This argument is analagous to the one I argued above: that if you are getting paid $x by a company then that company is getting $10x out of your working there; so the isomophic question would be "why keep making that money for your company, when you can go out and make it for yourself?" Surely, you have skills that are making the company $10x....so why can you not go ahead and make yourself $10x? And by continuting to make that company $10x, you are denying your self that $10x.[/B] The reality is that the play money player would almost certainly lose their money at $100NL, and the $100NL player would almost certainly lose their money at the nosebleed tables. In the same way, the vast majority of people would probably just lose their startup capital and end up worse off financially than when they started if they set up their own business. [B]If a person can apply a skillset to achieve the objectives of a company, then that person can apply that same skillset to create wealth for himself. I firmly believe this. A person who would fail in applying his skillsets to his own income-generating trade would soon be fired by a company anyhow for being unable to apply his skillsets to achieve the objectives of the company. If you can successfully utilize your skillset to achieve the objectives of your company, then you can do the same for your own personal income-generating trade.[/B] Whether or not employees have made separate financial decisions that carry a large risk, such as taking out a big mortgage or deciding how to invest their retirement savings, is a secondary issue IMO, and unrelated to the question of whether employment is "gambling" or not. [B]I believe that all these things, over-extension of one's lines of credit, come along with getting a new job. You get a new job, then you get a new car, then you get a new house (or new apartment). This is how society has programmed us to behave. I think that these values have been so ingrained in the psyche that the one necessarily comes along with the other. When you get a job, you buy nice things and if you are american, the nice things you buy are borderline affordable according to your income (in other words, you over-extend yourself). Retirement savings are monies earned through employment with your company so I think it is part of the reward you get for working for a company: the gamble you made for "security" over luxury earned you a retirement and/or pension. And I'm saying that in many cases, such reward has actually diminished to a ridiculously small amount by the time you are ready to retire. Contrast this with the massive amounts of money you could have saved all those years by engaging in your own income-generating trade and it becomes clear just how much of a gamble it was for you to take that job working for a company.[/B] Note too that you're making out the worst possible case for employment (company going bankrupt, committing fraud, losing retirement savings) while ignoring all the worst cases for poker (being robbed while leaving the casino, being cheated in the game, online site not honouring your withdrawls, being an Ultimate Bet customer, etc) [B]With poker you basically know what you are getting though. You get robbed leaving the casino, ok.....you know those streets can be mean (contrast this with getting robbed by your company executives who will dump the company stock on a whim and send the value of your 401k down the tubes without as much as a moment's notice).....If you play online poker, would you be surprised to find out that cards are rigged? If some independent company investigated online poker and came to the conclusion that it was in fact rigged, would you be shocked at that? NO. Because you already know what you get with poker; in poker you are dealing with some of the most honorable people in the world and at the same time with some of the most dishonorable people in the world: at least you know what you are getting upfront! In cases of poker sites not honoring your withdrawals, there are ways of safeguarding against that: for example, never keep more than a certain amount in the site at any given time. treat the sites like a bank: anything over a certain amount consider too risky to keep in teh account: in this way, if things ever go bad with the company, your loss is limited.[/B] Here's the way I see it: the only thing certain in life is death. If you stretch the definition far enough yes, you can define pretty much everything else as gambling. But even if you do that, it's insane to suggest that playing poker is [b]less[/b] of a gamble than working as an employee. [B]At least with poker you can dream big and with the right decisions you can achieve those dreams. When you work for a company, it is a long arduous road to TRUE SUCCESS! Your success and promotion up the executive ranks of a company depend on so many factors that you simply can not control. In poker, your decisions determine your outcome. While in the short term variance will hurt you, over the long term the right decisions will get you where you want to be. Working as an employee, you give up SO MUCH: you choose servitude over ownership, "security"<<QUOTATION MARKS<< over luxury, the enrichment of your company's coffers over the enrichment of your own. Taking a job for a company is probably the biggest and worst gamble of a person's life: it is that person conceding his soul to the leviathon; that person basically saying "I am no more....I am the company[/B] I don't get the endgame here either. Are you seriously trying to convince yourself (or someone else) on this point to justify choosing to play poker instead of getting a job or something?!? Because you don't need to redefine gambling to do that, you just need to know whether or not you earn more from poker than working :p [B]The endgame is to shed light on the fact that when you take a job you give up so much more than when you choose to work for yourself or play poker. I'm not saying don't work; i'm saying WORK FOR YOURSELF whether it be through poker or your own income-generating trade. If you want to and are able to physically form a business then do that; if not, then just be self-employed. Don't GAMBLE AWAY your future by working for a company. Take your skillset and make your own way in life. That is all that I am saying. Whether or not that involves poker is inconsequential. [/B] [/QUOTE]

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