Gambling-Focused Internet Cafes Now Illegal In Florida

retroworks writes "I ignored the warning posted here on Slashdot on March 23. Surely someone was setting up some April Fools day hoax. But the Governor has now signed the bill. Whose cold dead hands will they pry the computer mice out of?" Note: while this might not change your opinion of the Florida law or other things it might lead to, it is aimed specifically at the kind of "Internet cafe" where the "Internet" part is essentially just a portal to online gambling, rather than at conventional Internet cafes.

Seems very reasonable

[dwhitaker]

These are NOT internet cafes - they masquerade as such, but are really mini casinos. They are popularly known as "sweepstakes cafes" and often provide free food and drinks to encourage people to stay and gamble. This article (http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20120512/ARTICLE/120519835) does a pretty good job describing some of their features (e.g. one in Sarasota, FL gives out 50 kegs of free beer each month and offers $20,000 jackpots). You can think what you will about whether online (or offline) gambling is a good or bad thing, but this seems well within the purview of a state government to regulate or shut down, and they seem to have acted reasonably.

Re:Seems very reasonable

[SharpFang]

Was it Wisconsin, where following worries about contaminating groundwater with oil they passed a law stating "any even motor vehicle even partially immersed in water must be immediately moved to dry ground" efficiently banning all ships and motorboats?

Re:Florida resident here

[TheCarp]

> Maybe if we can do something about the "WE BUY GOLD" and check cashing places
> we can start to clean up these communities.

Right and maybe if we can get fever under control, we can stop malaria.

We all know, afterall, the primary reason they are poor is that they are out there selling their gold and other hard assetts rather than hording them.

The "Check cashers" are pretty eggerious poverty profiteers, and I know people who have ended up fucked by those deals.

Cleaning up those neighborhoods is not contingent upon stopping them, any more than extending life expectancy will be accomplished by destroying saprophytes. Kill them all, and you still wont be cleaning up the neighborhoods. You need to address the real causes of poverty, for which there likely are no simple single solutions. Do that, though, and the vultures will starve.

Bigger problems are that the economy needs to grow significantly to deal with massive underemployment, and people need to be trained for jobs. Do you have any idea how big the real problems are? We have entire communities where significant portions of the population are technically disabled and on disability.

Why? well... because they can't work. They are easily disabled because they have no ability to get a job that doesn't involve physical labor. A 40 year old woman with a high school level education, who has back pain, likely IS disabled...even though I, and many people I know, could work with the same condition, just because we can get jobs where we sit.

One woman I heard interviewed recently, when asked what job she COULD do, she said she could "find cheats in the welfare system". After being pressed a bit on how she chose THAT of all jobs.... it turns out.... its the only job she knew about where people could work sitting down.

There are entire communities like this, of people who are either disabled from the only work available to them, or who are on their way to being there. The long term answer has to include education and worker training (something that wont even be considered once people are officially "disabled"), but even that wont magically fix things...but it might give the people in those communities a leg up on attacking their own problems.

Of course, it doesn't help that our "justice system" has been systematically abused to disenfranchise uppity niggers who think they can get away with using the same drugs that white kids get slapped on the wrist for using. (which is why I consider the call for more "background checks" incredibly racist) This has also lead to a situation where these communities have well higher than makes any kind of sense rates of felony and minor crime backgrounds, helping to shut the members of their community out from better jobs (and often education)....just adding to the financial woe and human misery.

Its funny, when I call for the drug war to end in reparations, I am sometimes told "you are not getting any money for smoking pot", as if I think its my white middle class pot smoking ass that has suffered, not even close. I thank my lucky stars for my situation, and it makes me mad that others suffer for their persuit of happiness.