I think we everyone needs to take a deep breath and then go back to read the actual definition of "gambling".
This is a pretty good definition:
Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value (referred to as "the stakes") on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods. Gambling thus requires three elements be present: consideration, chance and prize.
Let us define "something of material value" to be the earnings you would have were you to consolidate your skillset and apply it to your own business venture. This would certainly fit into the definition of gambling you have provided above (especially since many people gamble on a line of credit....which is to say, they GAMBLE money they do not yet posess). So if the THING we are gambling is future earnings (analagous ot a gambler betting on credit) we see that putting your skillset to use in your own business will earn you that $10x (where x is the salary the company would pay you) instead of the company you are interviewing for getting that $10x. So take whatever the company is offering you and multiply it by 10: that is the amount of money youa re giving up (i.e. gambling) by working for that company instead of delving into your own business. You may argue that starting your own business requires startup capital but in this day and age of technological innovation, you can get a business website and google adwords campaign going for a trivial cost: this, of course, takes an entrepreneurial spirit.
Does employment pass that test? You're not actually wagering any of your own money on it - quite the opposite. For it to qualify as gambling, you'd be relying on time and effort to count as the "stakes".
Employment does pass that test according to your own definition of gambling. Your future earnings were you to streamline your skills into your own business can certainly be considered "something of material value." The fact that you LOSE these future earnings when you take a position with a company means you have essentially GAMBLED THEM AWAY. In the same way Gamblers often gamble on credit (i.e. wager "something of material value" despite the fact that they do not yet possess that "something of material value")
The outcome doesn't have any uncertainty either, in most employment situations. Work X hours, get paid Y dollars. The length of time for which you'll be offered that deal is uncertain, but while you're actually doing the work there's no uncertainty.
But every day you work for a company, you are gambling: at any time you can be fired; this can be a good thing because now you can go ahead and make much more money applying yoru skills to your own business. But, you seem to discount the possibility of your boss firing you on a whim and whether or not that happens on any given day is a gamble (every day people get fired on a whim, out of the blue, with no forewarning). If your company is secretly insolvent, you may not get paid for your work; if your company had you unknowingly commit fraud, you may even be legally liable for the unintentional fraud you committed and have to pay out of pocket. So these added risks do add uncertainty even while you are actually doing the work. And we see that you can actually wind up OWING SOMEONE MONEY after you have taken a job.
While I do admit that in general these kinds of risks are minimal, they are still there. And thousands of people each day find this out the hard way when they are suddenly laid off, or have worked for a month and realize that because their company is filing for bankruptcy they will not be getting paid for that work, or find out from the DOJ that all those papers they had been signing every day at the request of their superiors had been acts of fraud. Or how about those people who worked a lifetime wiht a company to find their 401k's and pensions have lost 90% of their value? No risk? Come on now. Stories like these are BECOMING THE AMERICAN NORM!!!
It is, of course, a no brainer that employment passes the third test. But you've gotta draw an incredibly long bow to get it to pass the first two.
I don't believe the bow I've drawn is that long at all. While i do consider the scenarios I presented as unlikely, i would not say they are highly unlikely. More and more people are being laid off and fired each day; and when they bought that house with a large monthly mortgage payment in anticipation of keeping their jobs over the long run, THEY GAMBLED and lost! The job that was supposed to "GUARANTEE" a monthly income at least enough to cover the mortgage payment has suddenly disappeared; now, taking that job wound up costing them money after all, wouldn't you say? You may argue that "well now they no longer work for the company so they can just go run their own busienss and make 10 times what they made at the company" but I say to you is it not too late for that now? Once you ahve been programmed to work for a company, you will be ready, in most cases, not to self start your own business but rather to work for another company. Getting sucked into the routine of working for someone else, I say, will tend to keep you in that routine for the rest of your life. It's like that old saying, once you are in, you are in for life.
And keep in mind that even if you do get fired, you're only losing your
future potential to earn money - they don't take away the money you've already earned.
If your company goes bankrupt, you don't get paid. If your company has commited fraud, you could be liable. The money you have already earned is at jeopardy as well in many cases.
Compare that to poker, where you can very easily end up with
less money than what you started with.
Same thing can happen if you take a job with a company. You take a job with a company which is supposed to guarantee you $x per month. So you then go ahead and take a mortgage out on a house for a certain percentage of that $x a month. Now you lose your job and THEN WHAT? you don't pay your mortgage and you lose your house. I'd say you very easily end up less money than what you started with....in fact, before the job you probably had a decent credit rating and after the job you have a foreclosure on your credit report. NOT GOOD!!!
And even if someone were to concede your previous arguments about employment being a gamble, there's still no way you can
ever reduce the risks in poker to an extent where it's less "risky" than employment.
Tell that to the countless number of professionals who consistently minimize risk and maximize profits in their daily poker games. It takes a long time to get there but it can certainly be done. You must be commited to making it happen though! Think about what professional poker players have been doing all the time people have been losing their jobs in the dwindling economy; they have not suffered, they have flourished. The amount of money they make is entirely dependent upon the decisions they make each day. If you never risk your whole bankroll, you'll never lose your whole bankroll. Poker to me is basically just like running your own business without all that overhead: in a business you have so many aspects to consider, all the parts of the daily grind that at the end of the day add up to a P&L. POKER just cuts right to the P&L part. If you learn to manage risk properly, POKER can be just as safe as any company job. If you don't, it can be just as risky!
So... long story short, I'm not really sure what your point is. If your point is that everything in life is a gamble then yes, if you stretch the definition of "gambling" far enough then you could make that argument. I don't know what that's supposed to prove though.
My point is that people who consider POKER a risky endeavor do not fully consider the risks inherent of working for a company. Yes, poker can BE REDUCED TO A RISKY ENDEAVOR, but it can also be REDUCED TO A SAFE ONE! It all depends on the decisions we make as poker players. I think the biggest risk one takes when opting to work for a company is the risk that he or she could have made much more money had he or she self started his or her own business.
And there has been no "Stretching" of the definition of gambling here. I used your definition pretty faithfully. If gambling is, as you said, "the wagering of something of material value" then every person who takes a job for a company is most certainly gambling. This should be as clear as day now.
Until the PPA successfully manages to get the definition of gambling changed to something other than the one above, then they're barking up the wrong tree. Poker is gambling, cut and dried. Consideration, chance, prize. Passes all three tests with flying colours. You might as well try to argue that marijuana isn't a drug
