This according to Rick Fifield, a credit councillor and security company owner who’s seen the darker side of how VLTs often play out in people’s lives.

Fifield recently told the CBC “When you take a look at your costs — loss of life, the cost of jobs, the cost to employers — if you do a cost benefit analysis, what you’re going to find is that you’re not making any money.”

He’s been trying to find some hard numbers on what the probability of winning is on these machines through the province’s Access to Information and Privacy Protection Act, but he, like the VLT players he far too often encounters through his line of work, hasn’t been having much luck.

Meanwhile, check out the wording on the Atlantic Lottery Corporation’s website on the matter:

Payout percentages vary per game, but all range between 93-95%. This means that 93-95% of all money played is returned to players in prizes, in varying amounts. The payout percentage is higher than the actual cash-out percentage because consumers play the prizes they win in order to extend their play.

In other words: people are so addicted to the sensation of gambling that they’re rarely able to stop until the money’s all gone — we know this, and we’re comfortable with it.

No, it’s not the oil plume itself, though we’ve already seen what that would look like if perched atop the Avalon (hint: it completely obliterates it).

White gannets are migratory birds, many of which come to Cape St. Mary in the spring to lay their eggs and raise their chicks.

They spend their winters south in the Gulf of Mexico, wherein thousands of litres of oil has been spilling daily for the past month courtesy of British Petroleum.

In terms of what can be done to help the gannets that have come into contact with the oil, Bill Montevecchi, a bird researcher and professor with MUN told CBC yesterday that there isn’t much.

“You can clean them on the outside but they are dying on the inside.”

Montevecchi isn’t simply being poetic. The birds inadvertently ingest the oil covering their bodies, which is one of the many ways it can kill them.

Update: AP Photographer Charlie Riedel filed eight new photos yesterday of birds caught in the oil spill on the beach of Louisiana’s East Grand Terre Island. Click here to see them on Boston’s The Big Picture.

[photo via I Bird 2's flickr stream]

No, that’s not M for Mayor. By the looks of the About page, it’s straight up M for Mark. As in this is Mark’s word, now what’s yours?

The M Word is a new corner of the CBC’s vast website, where Idler’s front man Mark Wilson serves up question-of-the-day type videos with the intention of stirring up debate in the community. After you watch a video – there’s only one up so far, and it’s so bad it’s good – you can share your thoughts in the comments section below.

The M word might as well be Municipal, too, since the harmonious co-habitation of the residents of St. John’s, culturally, politically, and environmentally, seems to be the ultimate goal of Wilson’s quest.

More power to him, and to us all.

Below is a screen grab from the new site.

Today’s story on CBC.ca about the plague of dealer-on-dealer drug crime in Gotham City St. John’s reeks of PR-serving, headline-grabbing BS.

It contains no actual news, no story, just a bunch of quotes from cops and lawyers about how out-of-whack the illegale drug trade is getting now that dealers have started turning on each other en masse.

I mean, get a load of their weapons!

If this had followed a report on something that actually happened, an instance of such a case that the CBC themselves had investigated, I would see the need. But the entire report is in response to nothing other than whatever information the RCMP and RNC have decided to disseminate. A lot of which amounts to, “well, crimes like these are rarely reported, but we know.”

It’s like ambulance chasing without the actual ambulance. Just reports on how loud the sirens were.

MUN, VOCM and CBC are all over the recent arrest of three 20-something guys and a 17 year old gal. They’re accused of stealing laptops from the library.

I had to laugh at CBC’s Television coverage. Just watch for 20 seconds and you’ll see what I mean as their writers nail their major demographic. Bonus monocle near the end.

…anyway, Charges will also be laid against some of the people who purchased the stolen laptops. Knowingly having stolen property worth less than $5,000 is a summary offense.

The really sad part is, a student’s computer is their life at this time of year. All this coverage probably dissuades would-be crooks from ruining someone’s academic career. I can get behind that. This incident demonstrates that sketchy b’ys are not hard to track down on a campus with closed circuit TV cameras everywhere.

Good job, RNC/CEP.

I bet you’re all giddy to see some of the first scenes from Republic of Doyle, now available on CBC’s website.

In case you’re aren’t one of the gaggle of people working on this show, CBC has some of behind-the-scenes photos. The project is creating opportunity for local talents of all kinds, and the results look fantastic.

Check out CBC’s Municipal Election 2009 page. Lest my eyes deceive me, they’re primed to bring in the results as they’re made available.

Nothing yet as of this writing, but the polls did just close.

*OR*

Check out the City’s Get Results page. It’s got it going on!

Note: this is not a photo of the actual crash.

At around 3am this morning a guy was caught speeding by a cop in the east end. Rather than simply pull over, he crashed his pickup into a house.

The man then got out of the truck and assaulted the officer before running away, police said.

He was arrested a short time later.

The driver faces a total of seven charges, including assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, impaired driving and refusing a breathalyzer.

Cripes dude, stay home and smoke a toke next time instead.

[photo via]

The news hit today like a fan full of shit: Ed Byrne has been released from prison after serving four and a half months of a two years less a day sentence.

Byrne was found guilty of stealing defrauding $117,812 in taxpayers’ money and sent to the Bishop Falls Correctional Facility last spring. He is now out of prison and back in St. John’s where he must wear an electronic monitoring device around his ankle, though not much is known about why or for how long.

If the comments on both the CBC and Telegram stories are any indication, the people of this province are unimpressed.

[note: Telegram comments can be linked to directly while CBC comments cannot]

Nasty Nate:

We are ALL to be treated equal under the eyes of the law. Time to practice what we preach for a change rather than lie to the population to make it look as if you have done your jobs properly and ethically.

wannabeflea:

Some people such as politicians, judges, Dr’s, lawyers have more privileges in today’s society. How foolish are we to believe that the judicial system is for everyone!

I bet you when Danny Williams went to the Health Sciences with his back he waited for hours in emergency like the rest of us. Again we are fools to believe that the world is fair and equal.

your kidding!:

I wonder if motor vehicle will accept one sixth of the traffic fines I have outstanding, or Revenue Canada will accept one sixth of my outstanding taxes I owe? If they will, sh*t I’ll gladly wear a bracelet for a few months.

QZPM75:

Amazing. Once again we have to ask how long he would have gotten if he had stolen $117,000 by robbing liquor stores. Stealing this money does real harm to people. That amount of money could have built several units of affordable housing, or run an entire literacy program for a semester.

I was pretty excited when I heard Ramona Dearing say she was going to start the show on Radio Noon today with an interview with the United Nations’ synthetic drug expert, Matthew Nice.

Earlier this week the CBC ran a story where they published unquestioned speculation from the RCMP about how ecstasy was being marketed to kids in the province as candy.

Getting an ecstasy expert on the line and sharing with us some hard facts about the drug should go far towards making up for their rather uncritical treatment of such a serious subject.

Or so I thought.

Little in the way of facts or figures were presented in the conversation. Nice explained that high blood pressure and heart failure can result from long term use of MDMA (the active ingredient in an ecstasy pill). Of course, the same could be said for prolonged use of bacon.

As for death caused by overdose, Nice had this to say: “People die from overdose.”

Right, but how many people die from overdose? How often? Under what circumstances? This kind of information is actually very hard to find. You’d think if people were dropping like flies over this shit the authorities would be pushing the numbers.

As for the RCMP’s assertion that ecstasy pills are brightly coloured and cartoon-clad to appeal to kids, Nice agreed. He then went on to explain that his definition of “kids” is the under-24 club-going demographic — hardly the image the RCMP were trying to conjure with their references to Spider-Man.

I can appreciate that there is an agenda in place here, which is to get ecstasy off the streets. What I can’t appreciate are the tactics by which this agenda is being carried out.

Tactics such as proliferating vague or false information about ecstasy only strengthen that drug’s staying power. The truth will always surface, and as it does the validity of the authorities and their agenda will be weakened

One thing Nice did confirm, which was of value, is that a lot of so-called ecstasy pills, who’s main ingredient should be MDMA, are cut with far more harmful substances which attempt to either mimic the effects of the drug or encourage addiction. That, I think we can all agree, sucks.

If the RCMP really wanted to send the message home about the dangers of ecstasy pills, they wouldn’t be conjuring boogie men to try and scare us, they’d be publishing lab tests which confirm what chemicals are found in the pills they confiscate and explaining to us in honest detail what the effects of those chemicals can be.

Information, not speculation, please.