Incidentally, this also presents a solution for those of us looking to earn money from anywhere with a flexible schedule that leaves time for outside interests.

Also, if you sign up for one of the online poker rooms like Full Tilt using our affiliate links, the residuals get donated to Less Wrong/Singularity Institute. That way, the more poker you play after you sign up, the more money you direct towards raising the sanity waterline and creating provably friendly artificial intelligence.

This all sounds great, but there is a nearly complete absence of numbers in this posting or at your site. Here are some estimates I came up with that may provide a more complete picture.

Suppose you sign up to play using one of their affiliate links, and then become very good at poker. Good enough to win (on average) $50/hr playing. If you play 20 hrs/week and 50 weeks/year, that gives you a comfortable $50K/year income (before taxes) and plenty of time for outside interests. So far, so good.

Next, I'm going to assume that you make that $50/hr by playing in 5 person games in which each of you bets about $2000 per hour. You win back a collection of pots totalling $2050 each hour - hence your $50 'earnings'. What happens to the other interested parties?

Well, the total 'action' is $10000 per hour. From this, the 'house' rakes its cut of 5% or 500 dollars. $100 of that is attributable to you, one of the five players at the table. Of that $100 gross revenue, the house is going to claim 'administrative expenses' of about $75, leaving $25 of net revenue. The affiliate's cut of that is 20% leaving a payment to the affiliate (SIAI) of $5/hr. That is about $5K/year toward raising waterlines and constructing FAI. Cool!

But what about the 4 less rational people sitting there at the virtual poker table with you ( the 'fish'). Since poker is a zero sum game, and you are winning $50, and the house is raking $500, that is $550, or $137.50 each / hr that the fish are losing. If they play poker as much as you, they are losing $137.5K/yr. Luckily for them, they are probably not irrational enough to keep doing this for long. Instead, for the sake of your own moral peace of mind, imagine that you have 40 victims, each playing poker against you for only 2 hrs/week. So each of your 40 victims loses only $13,750/yr. They can afford it. right?

So here is the bottom line. SIAI gets $5K. You get $50K, having spent 1000 hours that could have been spent actually creating something useful. The house rakes $500,000 of which they call $375,000 'administrative costs'. Of the $125,000 'net', $25K gets distributed to the affiliates - $5K to SIAI (who recruited you) and $20K to the less virtuous websites that recruited the 'fish'.

And the fish? Each of these 40 fools is soon separated from $13,750 of his or her money - an amount that will hurt (a lot) but which they can probably afford. Think of it as a semi-voluntary lesson in rationality.

Who knew that making the world a better place could be so ... exciting?