SOMEWHERE BETWEEN A PROLOGUE AN ANALOGUE AND AN EPILOGUE. or something like that.

There's  a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean near speaking relatively, in ocean distances, the Cocos Island. At one time this tiny island, the third smallest island in the vast Pacific, was a wealthy paradise. A wealthy gated community thousands of nautical miles from any other island. A community that needed no gates. Or walls. The perfect place for the Republican wishing to remain genetically undiluted. I make no mention of being deluded. Few people have ever visited the Island of Nauru, there are no airports, the best way would be by boat. Sailboats, because of the vast distance. It's wealth was at one time in guano. Birds have been visiting that island, and others, where they would nest from their long ocean journey, gorge themselves on the fat fish, and evacuate this orgy of digestion on the rich hillside of the island. Guano is rich in nitrogen. There were so many birds who had stopped by Nauru, over the millenia, that for a couple centuries great sailing barges, then Elegant Clipper ships, then Windjammers, and finally coal and oil-burning cargo vessels tied up in their tiny harbor and took on great quantities of bird guano to be made into fertilizer to feed the world... Some, more grandly than they deserve. There's  a story about an American shipping magnate in 1854, W R Grace, William Russell Grace, who made a tidy profit in this shit. He would dismast an elegant, but now too slow and small, Cipper Ship, tow the hull to a likely guano mine in Peru, and house Chinese guano miners for their short working life while they stripped a coastal hillside of its soil. When that mine played-out, his company would tow the once majestic hull to another location. New Chinese slaves were brought in to replace those who died from lung diseases, a consequence from breathing in the urea. The consequence of mining those rich veins of urea, aside from early death, was the island, or mountainside, or what other geographical terraine draws the fertilizer kings, ends up being a barren space where once a mountain had been. Sort of like how they blast a mountain top today to mine the coal instead of mining in the conventional way, because the balance sheet looks better.

Nauru was such a place. At one time an island made wealthy by carting away in ships holds great quantities of the island. Today it is a doughnut in the vast Pacific, a puka shell on a broad white-sand beach. Narhu now has a new and grander pursuit of wealth. It is the nexus of an online gambling hub. 

Betting on sports, betting on the general health of an athlete, betting on political outcomes, any way the sucker can be fleeced, this new crop of corporate pirates is finding the way. The difference between gaming and gambling is illustrated in an old WC Fields movie where the fool asks, "is this a game of chance?"; Fields ruffles his cards and says, "not the way I play it." Perhaps, at some future time they might build a great data center in its donut hole. What could possibly go wrong.

This is what we do if left unregulated. We spot an Eden, populate it, haul off whatever is valuable, until the only thing that remains, ain't worth a gamble.