Posts Tagged ‘gambling’

It is largely known that Singapore is in the process of building two casinos, a huge one on Marina Bay and a second on Sentosa island. After personally visiting Sentosa island, I remember traveling above the construction site on a monorail. It was a serious site to see, and it was plainly obvious that whoever was building it had the money to build. There were dozens if not hundreds of cement trucks dotted like ants on the ground, and the worker housing not only had A/C but also satellite television (from what I saw on the outside of their temporary housing). Where is all this money coming from? From the the pockets of hard working Americans who have been trapped into the snare of gambling.

Once the casinos are built, Singapore will most likely squander what it has made. Their hard earned intellectual achievements in areas of technology and investments will be wasted away in the deadliest of all traps, the casino. Even though I am not Singaporean I do wish the best for the Singaporean people, as they have gone through ups and downs of the 1990’s and have come up on top. Another problem Singapore will experience after the construction is a decline in moral values, as is apparent in Macao (China’s gambling city). There will be a big boom in Singapore’s red light district, but other areas of the city will degrade. I hope the best for Singapore, and hope it has the wisdom to stop what it has started in regards to the casinos.

Gambling (a.k.a donating money to rich casino companies) is a vice that should be spurned at all costs. After recently visiting an arcade I was taught a valuable if cheap lesson in why gambling really doesn’t pay. I happened to have a few tokens with me, which I was using at the arcade to play a shooting game with my girlfriend. Suddenly a machine caught my eye, it was one in which you put a coin in and if the coins already inside fell off, you just picked them up. After wasting a few coins, and getting a few coins back, I was hooked. I kept on gambling with my tokens until they were all gone. Right before they were all gone, I realized that I heard clinking noises, like coins falling. However they were not falling into the pickup tray, they were falling into a secret location. The machine was designed for the coins on the corners to fall into secret slots!

Feeling cheated, I naturally hit the machine, to which it shut down and made some noise. I realized that this is what many people do every day, in the form of putting coins into a slot machine ever hoping for that big win. I pity them, more than I pity myself for wasting tokens that could have been used playing Tekken or some other hand-eye coordination building machine. In retrospect, I feel lucky that I did not waste any big money, and have learned a valuable lesson. Gambling is not fun, and it is a waste of money and time. If you want to really have fun, try swimming in the ocean or playing World of Warcraft (that’s another story)