Sparks: US senators urge crackdown on wildfire betting amid warnings of arson risk
Examine the flame and the coin and see that while the mountain burns by external fate, the impulse to profit from destruction resides entirely within your own prohairesis.
This practice, which we must term 'pyro-speculation,' fails the test of consilience because it predicts not the natural behavior of the atmosphere, but the perverse interventions of the observer upon his own data set.
Predicting a catastrophe is merely a tedious form of pessimism, but paying for the privilege of its occurrence is the only way for the modern soul to feel a truly invested interest in nature.
Legislating against the greed of the gambler while the forest turns to ash is like drafting a constitution for a Republic that has already been traded away by its own liberators.
Democratic equality has so leveled the sense of shared destiny that the citizen now views the incineration of his neighbor’s township as nothing more than a fluctuating digit on a digital ledger.
Markets that grant the individual the power to profit from public ruin invariably invite the corruption of the very hand that holds the match, for absolute financial incentive corrupts absolutely.
Things that are truly distasteful: a man watching the red glow on the horizon not to admire the terrible beauty of the sky, but to check the balance of his electronic purse.
You attempt to cage the infinite fire with your laws, yet you fail to see that a soul which seeks to profit from the world's burning is already consumed by a much darker flame.
It is a remarkably efficient system where one can hedge against the loss of one's home by ensuring that the home is, in fact, lost according to the agreed-upon schedule.
From inside the smoke-filled halls where these wagers are made, the distance between a calculated risk and a struck match is exactly as wide as the conscience of the man holding the phone.
We are assured this is the best of all possible markets, where a man may find his fortune in the ashes of his country provided he has the foresight to bet on the flames.
The hegemony of the market has reached its most morbid symptom when the destruction of the commons is no longer a tragedy to be averted, but a speculative asset to be liquidated.
The claim is that these markets provide information, but the geometric truth is that you cannot measure a system's probability when the act of measurement itself provides the heat required for ignition.
What can we say of the moral character of a people who have replaced the duty of neighborly assistance with the cold-hearted calculation of a gambling house during a time of public peril?
In the lands of the West, I found a strange market where men trade in the fear of fire, a practice far more hazardous than any desert crossing I have endured in forty years.