[peishang]

"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 over 4,000 people – where the Navy runs 52 slot machines"

Talk about a captive audience rife for exploitation.

[Justsignedup]

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_.

[red-iron-pine]

I've been to Diego Garcia. It is boring as hell; about all there is to say. We got in trouble for trying to organize an expedition to secretly catch and eat some of the coconut crabs (which is verboten).

Also played D&D in the service. Most active tabletop gaming group I've ever been in too.

Didn't D&D in DG tho.

[rkuykendall-com]

There's no way organizing a secret group to capture and eat some sacred monsters doesn't count as D&D.

[poulsbohemian]

> secretly catch and eat some of the coconut crabs (which is verboten).

Was this out of environmental concerns / the crabs going extinct or was there something more to it?

[orwin]

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]

That sounds awesome! Which country?

[orwin]

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).

[oogali]

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://www.jbmdl.jb.mil/Quick-Links/Get-Connected-Clubs/

[isk517]

According to my buddy the Canadian Navy is absolutely crawling with Warhammer players, apparently being a player has been pretty good for their career.

[yamtaddle]

Yikes, probably cheaper just to bribe superior officers for promotions :-)

[isk517]

True, but if you've already spent the money might as well choose a career that will at least allow you to tell your parents 'See, I told you these plastic models will pay off one day.'

[yamtaddle]

Fair point. That would indeed be priceless.

[nacho_weekend]

Anecdotally, my brother in the Air Force had a pretty regular and frequent D&D group in the past 3 years. But I don’t know how widespread that is.

[JamesSwift]

Very common in all branches, it just differs based on what the job is. Mechanics? Probably less likely. Intel? Way more likely.

[Wohlf]

Can confirm it was fairly common in the Marine Corps, even some of the grunts and motor transport guys would get interested on ship duty. When you're bored as hell you'll take anything you can get.

[wyldberry]

Boredom and creativity go hand in hand. Not necessarily good creativity. On my first deployment i chugged a bottle of syrup for $50 bucks and gave the corpsman heart attacks. It is not fun throwing up syrup for an hour after.

[poulsbohemian]

>Mechanics? Probably less likely.

Coincidentally, my partner's father was an airplane mechanic stationed in Okinawa in the 1980s... and apparently played a lot of D&D.

[runjake]

These games, along with D&D, were alive and well when I was in the military.

[hangonhn]

Didn't the Prussian general staff basically invent the idea of table top gaming/simulations?

[radicalbyte]

The Chinese were doing it >2000 years ago - I expect that such games were a common tool.

[reef84_]

Cheaper to go to slot machines!

[LegitShady]

or you can get them into 40k and take the rest of their money

[pmarreck]

this man Warhammers

[kart23]

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.

[passwordoops]

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"

[red-iron-pine]

Islands are expensive. It's hard to get stuff, and hard to get places. If I want to jump in a car and go 2 hours in any direction I can, and there is probably something for me to do there. Ain't so in the island. Ditto for job options.

You hit the beaches. Hang out. Get sunburned. Hit a few of the in-town stuff; they're played out after 3 months and you're bored. More folks rotate through so there is the novelty of banging the tourists and new-bloods, but either they (or you) are probably departing soon so it's hard to make any real connections, romantic or otherwise.

[grecy]

> I was told the week I landed "there's two type of people

Same when you live somewhere remote like the Yukon or smaller places in Alaska. People won't even really associate with you until you've been there a full 12 months because they don't want to invest time in someone that is likely to just leave anyway.

-48C (-55F) is a hell of a thing, but the lack of sunlight I personally found much, much harder.

The wonderful part though is that virtually nobody lives there that doesn't love it, because if you don't love it, you leave. That means the people that stay are passionate about it, and do every possible activity all the time - more so in the dead of winter!

(I stayed 4 years, miss the place intensely)

[mickdeek86]

I'm right now sat on a comparably remote island in the Alaska fishery, relatively new here. I've always romanticized the sea, landlubber as I am, and after a few months here, I went to Waikiki for vacation and - hated it. I couldn't leave soon enough. Too much happiness. The people here have mostly been here for many years, and will remember someone they worked on a boat with for a few weeks in the 80s or what-have-you. I have time to read, be left alone when I want to be, grab a beer off-site. I can see why healthy people would go insane, and why insane people would go healthy.

[grecy]

I'm happy to hear you're enjoying the isolation!

>I can see why healthy people would go insane, and why insane people would go healthy.

When I got to the Yukon a friend was introducing me around for the first 6 months or so. Every introduction would go "This is <Dave>, he's a bit crazy." "This is "Mary, she's a bit crazy".

It took me a while to catch on, and your quote captures it perfectly.

[passwordoops]

>I can see why healthy people would go insane, and why insane people would go healthy.

That's the best line I've ever read on this site

[devin]

"Island fever" is a very real thing. I once strongly considering moving to a tiny island and after talking to a number of friendly locals I got the sense that _many_ people love the idea of moving there, but it's definitely a life that does not work for everyone. The number of stories they had about people moving there and being gone within a year was way more than I suspected.

[AlbertCory]

I know a guy whose dream was to retire to Maui. He would go on & on about how he just didn't want to come home when he was vacationing there.

A few years after moving there, he's back in the States.

[hgsgm]

Sure, but why don't slot machines get boring?

[ethbr0]

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...

[nekoashide]

It's the government, you may as well have another set of people observing the test givers as well.

[Adraghast]

“Addiction By Design” by Natasha Dow Schüll is a good book to answer this question.

[mickdeek86]

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]

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.

[jxf]

Because slot machines are synthetic dopamine generators and humans have thousands of years of evolution tweaking us to favor dopamine-generating activities.

[ChuckNorris89]

Because they're designed to be addictive.

[ceejayoz]

Huh, I had no idea. https://wavelengthmag.com/curious-case-diego-garcia/

I'm guessing surfing risks injuring US military... assets.

[ethbr0]

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]

> 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.

[jjulius]

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]

What's the punishment for ignoring the ban? Fear of that may dominate the reasoning of those who declined to join him.

[red-iron-pine]

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.

[packetslave]

Ignoring orders in the military is a good way to end up in prison.

[yamtaddle]

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.

[watwut]

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.

[hgsgm]

That quote smells like BS. There are a lot of people who don't surf, and those reasons aren't why.

[jeltz]

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]

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.

[Broken_Hippo]

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.

[yieldcrv]

sounds like someone that's never taken that tropical sabbatical

[runnerup]

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.

[lastofthemojito]

The way I read it the military isn't taking that money to buy guns or tanks or whatever - it's the relatively piddly MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) groups that are profiting, and then using the profits for other MWR activities. From the article:

> A Pentagon report in the early 2000s claimed that without the slot machines, the MWR groups would not be able to afford other amenities for military members such as golf courses and family activity centers. DOD spokeswoman Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman echoed that argument, telling NPR the machines "contribute significantly to the non-appropriated fund and many other recreation and entertainment overseas programs."

The military base I've lived near had plenty of such activities - adult sports leagues, an auto skills center, bowling alley, etc. I guess it might not be as ideal as every such activity being self-sustaining in terms of costs, but it doesn't really seem like a scandal for all of the MWR income to go into a big MWR pot to be spent on various activities.

[runnerup]

It’s the least objectionable place for the money to go but that’s actually rather shrewd. I assume that if the military did not pay for those creature comforts that morale would suffer and operational readiness / effectiveness would be reduced.

If foreign bases don’t have fun things to do then maybe younger siblings won’t enlist without more expensive bonuses. Or maybe the unmotivated soldiers won’t go the extra mile while maintaining vehicles. Or the infantry will leave the boring-ass base and fraternize at popular military “companion” bars and come back with STDs and get into fights with locals, losing some of the military’s license to operate bases as freely in that nation.

The military would have to spend some of this money anyways if it wasn’t coming out of the soldiers own pockets.

[lmm]

IDK. Taking gambling income and funding golf courses with it feels pretty regressive.

[ChuckNorris89]

> 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]

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]

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.

[runnerup]

> If you know you're getting it all back, what's the point?

I meant to word it like "They could make it so that 99.9999% of gamblers lose all their bets, but one gambler per year wins $100 million". Just as long as the military isn't taking that a % of that money to use lieu of money they should have budgeted properly for creature comforts.

[giantg2]

"money to use lieu of money they should have budgeted properly for creature comforts."

I mean, the MWR budgeting is a completely different conversation. The way that budgeting works now, they wouldn't replace that $100M.

On that subject, the exchanges shouldn't mark up items above cost, nor should the commissary charge that 5% fee, etc. In the grand scheme of things, voluntary gambling is the least exploitive, since the others have been imposed manditorily over time. And we still have some military families on food stamps... so there's a lot to discuss and would probably benefit from a complete compensation/benefits system restructuring.

[jameshart]

If the payout rate of the machines could be set to pay out 100% of the take in prize money, the military would not be taking a profit, but the gambling would still be real.

[majani]

That would mean giving away lots of prizes and you would have an addicted military very, very quickly. For most people, the losses are what stop them in their tracks

[Y_Y]

Why not 105%? Keeps people of of trouble. I bet the military would rather you sat a Skinner Box than broke your leg surfing or leaked military secrets on TikTok.

[eternityforest]

Wouldn't that make gambling addiction more likely and cause problems when they return to civilian life, and try to recapture the high?

[HideousKojima]

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.

[jxramos]

> studies show these slot machines save $250M a year against alternative more expensive forms of entertainment.

lol

[glitchc]

Less funny if you think about gambling beating drugs as a go-to form of entertainment.

[undersuit]

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]

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]

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.

[markus_zhang]

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]

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]

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.

[rsj_hn]

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]

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!)

[sixothree]

And they use that money to pay for golf courses somewhere nicer? I'm getting a bit grossed out by that thought.

[JustSomeNobody]

The officers need a new golf course!

[kerpotgh]

It sounds like heaven. I would read, go for runs and hang out with my buds.

[Oxidation]

Sounds like Heaven, indeed: from the Forever War.

[shanebellone]

It's almost literally death, jail, or slots.

[realo]

Presented that way, jail does not look so bad ...

[shmde]

US has a naval base so near to Indian peninsula?? Damn never knew about it. Guess big brother likes to be everywhere.

[pphysch]

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

[ethbr0]

Don't forget that people are supporting part of this whenever they buy an .io tld.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#History

[Y_Y]

You mean github.io isn't for projects relating to the Indian Ocean‽

[Y_Y]

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.

[pphysch]

You may want to check your definitions. This is a clear example of ethnic cleansing and should not be minimized just because it isn't literal genocide.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ethnic_cleansing

[Y_Y]

Oh shit you caught me

[pseudolus]

The issue of the Chagos Islands was the subject of an International Court of Justice advisory opinion which concluded that 'the United Kingdom’s continued administration of the Chagos Archipelago “constitutes a wrongful act entailing the international responsibility of that State”, that the United Kingdom “has an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible, and that all Member States must co-operate with the United Nations to complete the decolonization of Mauritius' [0].

[0] https://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/169

[lostlogin]

Do you mean ethnically cleansed?

Ethical ethnic cleansing is hopefully not a thing.

[pphysch]

Yes, fixed.

[aosmith]

Ever heard of the .io TLD? Dig deeper...

[treis]

It's not really near anything. It's in the middle of the Indian Ocean ~1,000 miles from any other significant land mass.

[yamtaddle]

So near? Might want to double-check that. Indian ocean's big, this isn't terribly close to India.

[IncRnd]

The proximity to India is why there is a US base on a British owned Island.

[yamtaddle]

This one probably had more to do with protecting shipping lanes from French interdiction, given the location and which other countries had colonies and other operations semi-nearby (spoiler alert: France). As far as why the British cared to hold it in the last century, I mean, not for why it's still a base now. Leave all the islands in that area to France and it'd have been a dagger pointed at shipping crossing the Indian ocean via the canal. Seize a couple of the islands yourself, and at least you can keep an eye on things and mount a plausible threat if a hot war breaks out, to keep France from getting too bold with their use of the nearby islands.

Britain had a bunch of other islands much closer to India. Not even counting Sri Lanka.

Though, yes, protecting shipping lanes to and from India would have been part of the purpose, but not just to India. British Malaysia, various Pacific territories, and the commonwealth states of Australia and New Zealand, would have shared those same shipping routes, largely.

I'd guess that as a US base it's more likely to support US or NATO operations, real or hypothetical, in or around the Horn of Africa than it is to have much to do with the subcontinent.

[IncRnd]

For the US timeframe, the island was viewed during the Cold War as strategic to the United States, due to it's proximity to India, a potential ally of the Soviet Union. It served (and may still serve) as a Navy communication station. It has been used to monitor Afghanistan and China's activities in the South China Sea.

[kornhole]

800 to a 1000 bases around the world