profitable

Shamelessly picking on Kevin Rose for my own self-serving interests and to educate you guys and gals about critical thinking and gambling let me throw this out there.  What is Kevin Rose drinking?

Seriously. He just had another announcement about another upgrade to Digg and there he is again with that blissed out grin of his holding a fluted glass with something in it. That, my friendly readers, is the question. What is it he is drinking? First blush, somebody would say that it is champagne. Okay, he has a great company and he is celebrating. I don’t know him personally so I can’t say if that is really Martinelli’s apple cider. Same kinda bubbling. Maybe it is just water. Maybe it is something faintly bubbling like Fizzies.

Maybe it is urine. Yuch. To each his own I suppose.

Here is the deal. If I have done my job right, I have got you thinking about not taking images at face value. For all of us humans that have been thrown into forced short term attention span thinking, we look at an image and depending on our background and experience, make a logical conclusion based on our own experiences without thinking about asking the question – what exactly am I looking at?

Most of the time, you can pretty much assume that what you are looking at is what it seems to be. Whatever it is that Kevin Rose is drinking, he clearly is happy about it and is in either a toasting mood (“To urine?” Yuck) or to us (“To my Diggers” Better and not so Yuck). The impression that he wanted to deliver is clear and well received. Pretty innocent so far, huh?

The problem in real life is when you get news pieces, web blasts, pictures and information without anything other than a soundbite or web blast. Most people turn into parrots and start repeating what they have heard without thinking about was the context of the information. Questions you need to ask yourself or at least think about when you get information (and even from a guy who writes about urine like me) are:

What is the context of the information?
What does the person who is releasing the information have to gain from telling us about it?
Is it really from an unbiased source or am I being gamed?

With the coming political campaign hitting a head I strongly urge everybody to really listen to the candidates and ask them hard, clear questions that you are entitled to get hard, clear answers.

When you see the ads from either party, make sure you sift through the rhetoric, the emotional bullets they are trying to fire and get to the meat of the images.

The same holds true in business and in gambling. People will focus in on anything that will reinforce what they believe in. When it comes to craps for example, people think that just because a number hasn’t been thrown with the dice that the number is “due”. The reality is that the odds are the same for each throw of a pair of dice (if they are not fixed) no matter what.

When it comes to something more subjective like pictures, videos and articles (especially by urine writers like me), things aren’t cut and dry. As you speed thru your digging or your social interactions of choice, please take the time to sometimes ask what is going on behind the scenes.

Oh, and by the way, for whoever gets to be elected President, if you want to get America going, spend money rebuilding the infrastructure (freeways, bridges, roadways, dams, etc). The money will be put to keeping America together in a very LITERAL sense, it will create jobs in America, and the people making that money will spend it in America.

Oh, and spend more money in helping people and families with special needs, like Rett Syndrome.

See? All of that urine stuff was just to get your attention to tell you how you should vote and what you should you tell your candidate of choice!

Practical Craps: A Guide to Being a Winner With Dice

Kim Greenblatt

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