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"Slots are often found on bases where there is precious little to do, like Diego Garcia – a 12-sq.-mile island in the Indian Ocean with a population of just ove

• kart23 4y ago
  I mean, its also an atoll in paradise. Theres definitely plenty to do there, the navy for some reason has decided to ban surfing and instead put in slot machines.
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    Huh, I had no idea. https://wavelengthmag.com/curious-case-diego-garcia/ https://wavelengthmag.com/curious-case-diego-garcia/ I'm guessing surfing risks injuring US military... assets.
    • jjulius 4y ago
      I mean, even the article suggests that if the military reversed course and allowed surfing, there may not be as many people jumping at the opportunity as OP suggests. It says that military personnel have smuggled surfboards and failed to get many other folk interested in joining them over the course of a whole year: >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.
      • emiliobumachar 4y ago
        What's the punishment for ignoring the ban? Fear of that may dominate the reasoning of those who declined to join him.
        • packetslave 4y ago
          Ignoring orders in the military is a good way to end up in prison.
        • red-iron-pine 4y ago
          Best case? Non-judicial punishment of some sort, e.g. "captain's mast" or the like. Forfeiture of pay, additional duty, minor imprisonment, changes to your rations, etc. 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.
      • hgsgm 4y ago
        That quote smells like BS. There are a lot of people who don't surf, and those reasons aren't why.
      • watwut 4y ago
        I never tried surfing, so I would 100% not risked punishment to surf. That just seems dumb. My point here is that if something is not allowed, you need a lot more to be willing to try it.
      • yamtaddle 4y ago
        What percentage of Navy enlisted in the lower E-numbers have ever surfed, at all, in their whole lives? Reads like this would be a pretty shitty place to learn, so I can see why people'd balk at the notion, even without the risk of punishment.
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      Military bases, especially in the austere / remote environments where some of them are, have a few differences from most civilian areas. - 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. :(
      • CogitoCogito 4y ago
        > 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. :( 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.
  • passwordoops 4y ago
    After getting a dream job on a paradise island, I can tell you how fast it takes to do everything there is to do on that island before the isolation sets in. 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"
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      Sure, but why don't slot machines get boring?
      • Adraghast 4y ago
        “Addiction By Design” by Natasha Dow Schüll is a good book to answer this question.
        • mickdeek86 4y ago
          I'm reminded of an anecdote I once heard, which I can't readily find atm, that in the days of yore when Chicago dominated the pinball industry, the same complex also dominated the slot machine industry. This business was later purchased by Bally's and moved to Las Vegas, where it appears the book picks up. Along with the business came the statistician whose job it was to make slot machines addictive. He later came out of retirement to work for Tinder. Don't really know if that last part is true, maybe someone here does.
      • paulcole 4y ago
        That's like asking "Why doesn't it hurt when a tick latches onto your leg and starts sucking blood?" 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.
      • ethbr0 4y ago
        Because the human brain is bad at probability and susceptible to hacking. 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...
  • jeltz 4y ago
    I love swimming so I am sure I will have some fun but atoll in paradise sounds like a place with not much to do, at least not compared to a major city like where I live. And I can swim here too during the summers.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      It may have just been his own spin on it but I used to read a lot of this world-traveller Russian blogger's low-commentary (mostly just strings of photos with short captions) posts, and was surprised at how seemingly every truly-remote, small, island "paradise" he visited came off as hellishly dull and absolutely covered in trash (every single one of them seemed to have a severe problem with trash disposal, to the point that there were small de-facto open landfills evidently around every corner and in every cranny when out in the wilder areas... which actually made a lot of sense when I started to think about it, but was just something I'd never considered before) 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.
  • yieldcrv 4y ago
    sounds like someone that's never taken that tropical sabbatical
  • Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    You can play slot machines for more hours than you can surf - and not only that, but you can do it in more types of weather with a lower risk of injury. 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.
• Justsignedup 4y ago
  People really desperately need table top rpgs! If they introduce some pathfinder or Warhammer in there oh man the fun these members can have. But then it is an _expense_ not a _income_.
  • oogali 4y ago
    Like this? I guess it depends on the base and someone stepping up to organize the game. https://jblm.armymwr.com/calendar/event/75270 https://jblm.armymwr.com/calendar/event/75270 https://www.jbmdl.jb.mil/Quick-Links/Get-Connected-Clubs/ https://www.jbmdl.jb.mil/Quick-Links/Get-Connected-Clubs/
  • orwin 4y ago
    In my country, barracks have "open days" (basically a weekend, once a year i think) where they would present all their clubs and invite external personnel to check out and participate (long-term, not only on those two days). I wanted to try fencing, so i went, and i finished joining the tabletop club (and fencing too). This is what brought me back to tabletops. 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)
    • CoastalCoder 4y ago
      That sounds awesome! Which country?
      • orwin 4y ago
        France. The city i was is was Rennes (There is 4 barracks there), but i'm pretty sure the same thing exist in Paris (CESNAD? Not certain).
  • runjake 4y ago
    These games, along with D&D, were alive and well when I was in the military.
  • 4y ago
• shanebellone 4y ago
  It's almost literally death, jail, or slots.
  • realo 4y ago
    Presented that way, jail does not look so bad ...
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  The officers need a new golf course!
• sixothree 4y ago
  And they use that money to pay for golf courses somewhere nicer? I'm getting a bit grossed out by that thought.
• shmde 4y ago
  US has a naval base so near to Indian peninsula?? Damn never knew about it. Guess big brother likes to be everywhere.
  • treis 4y ago
    It's not really near anything. It's in the middle of the Indian Ocean ~1,000 miles from any other significant land mass.
  • pphysch 4y ago
    Don't stop there. Diego Garcia and the surrounding Chagos islands were ethnically-cleansed by a joint American-British operation just 50 years ago [1], to make living-space for this military base. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation
    • lostlogin 4y ago
      Do you mean ethnically cleansed? Ethical ethnic cleansing is hopefully not a thing.
      • pphysch 4y ago
        Yes, fixed.
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      Don't forget that people are supporting part of this whenever they buy an .io tld. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#History
      • Y_Y 4y ago
        You mean github.io isn't for projects relating to the Indian Ocean‽
    • Y_Y 4y ago
      To be fair the just scooped the Chagossians out, whereas ethnic cleansing usually refers to extermination. Those who ended up in the UK have been fighting a legal battle since and seem to be making slow progress. From the British point of view it was a slam dunk, since they didn't care about the "man Fridays" and they got trident missiles in return.
• markus_zhang 4y ago
  Can I read books and access computers? Can I break open slot machines to learn how to repair them? If both are yes then that's a pretty interesting place.
  • Rebelgecko 4y ago
    You can bring your own computer but if you want internet you'll have to pay obscene amounts of money for dialup speeds. I've heard that the UK customs officers also take great joy in limiting what kinds of literature and files the soldiers are allowed to import. They confiscate anything they deem obscene (eg Playboy magazines or a hard drive with porn on it) or antisocial (apparently "motorcycle gangs" were a hot topic at one point, so be prepared to say goodbye to your copy of Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
    • markus_zhang 4y ago
      Lack of Internet is even better! it's like a prison without the hassle of it. A dream. Well the customs officers are a bit of annoying but it's OK. Oh well, only for soldiers anyway.
• HideousKojima 4y ago
  Had a co-worker who was stationed there back in his Air Force days. He said one day there was a fire. It was nothing major, but as a safety precaution until it was put out (in case it reached the fuel tanks) they had to evacuate a safe distance from the base, and the only safe distance meant standing out in the shallows on the beach.
• kerpotgh 4y ago
  It sounds like heaven. I would read, go for runs and hang out with my buds.
  • Oxidation 4y ago
    Sounds like Heaven, indeed: from the Forever War.
• runnerup 4y ago
  It would be somewhat less objectionable if the "house" didn't take a cut. There's no good reason for the military to profit off this when they could offer the "entertainment" for free.
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    > they could offer the "entertainment" for free 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.
    • runnerup 4y ago
      I’m aware. I hope most other HN’ers are aware. 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.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        If you know you're getting it all back, what's the point? At least the way you word it, it sounds like an equal distribution, which means no payout. Even if it's not an equal distribution like your example, you're still going to have people loose. 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.
• jxramos 4y ago
  > studies show these slot machines save $250M a year against alternative more expensive forms of entertainment. lol
  • undersuit 4y ago
    Why are you laughing. That's $250M in entertainment that doesn't need to be shipped to a military base. Assuming it isn't all downloadable media that's a lot of physical goods that doesn't need to be inspected, shipped, and inspected to remote Military bases. 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.
    • jxramos 4y ago
      I mostly posited it as a joke for winking at the fictitious studies, but yah the comparative cost to alternatives may be not too shabby after all. "Compared to what" is often a question left as an afterthought. I try to think of alternatives right off the bat. But once you start diluting a story against reasonable alternatives and see where a decision landed in the valley of options the story loses some of its outrage edge.
      • undersuit 4y ago
        If this article was written by almost any other news org I would say "compared to what" would be some attempt to privatize the entertainment so someone could make a profit, luckily the article seems genuinely interested in the harm the machines are creating for the military.
  • glitchc 4y ago
    Less funny if you think about gambling beating drugs as a go-to form of entertainment.
• rsj_hn 4y ago
  Or an audience desperate for some diversion, especially a risk-seeking audience. 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).
• pmarreck 4y ago
  I’ve been to DG for about a month when I was in the USAF. It was the end of 1995 and the Internet had just reached it, which meant I at least had early Internet web access in such a remote location, for free, which was amazing. 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!)
• deleted 4y ago
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