Casablanca gambling? I'm shocked!

lesatseaside0 HN recommenders · 2015–2025
1.2M views · comedy · evergreen · Uploaded 2010-03-18

The classic Casablanca scene in which Captain Renault is 'shocked, shocked' to find gambling at Rick's, just before being handed his winnings.

HN uses it as a stock joke reply to feigned surprise at obvious corruption, crypto fraud and corporate misbehavior.

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14 comments from Hacker News

@fnordfnordfnord2015 · in “Five Big Banks Plead Guilty to Rigging Currency Markets and No One Goes to Jail”

Like it or not, Sarbanes-Oxley is the law (since 2002). We wound up with that law because of executives who built incentive structures within their companies which they knew would cause unlawful behavior while keeping themselves one or more layers removed from the actual criminality. The gambit was to feign surprise and throw the "rouge troops" under the bus if they got caught. That gambit is played out now. You missed your opportunity to play the naive CEO card [VIDEO]

@cs7022018 · in “Sexual harassment is rife in the sciences, finds landmark US study”

Seeing Nature reporting this as news feels to me a bit like watching Captain Louis Renault telling ‎Rick Blaine: "I am shocked -- shocked! -- to find that gambling is going on in here!" [a] Still, it's progress. [a] [VIDEO]

@mayukh2018 · in “C.I.A. Concludes That Saudi Crown Prince Ordered Khashoggi Killed”

Awww. Do you mean publicly distance themselves? Of course they have ! ( [VIDEO] ) Privately ($ with a B in the front of it), let's be real, would you ?

@kome2020 · in “Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data”

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" – From the classic scene in Casablanca, 1942 ( [VIDEO] )

@josh26002020 · in “Ethereum Is a Dark Forest”

I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures. Remember that all complex systems operate in a degraded state. If there's ever a way that only part of a complicated swap executes correctly the trade can get really far out of position. People in Ethereum land will say things like "the smart contracts can't possibly execute if all of these conditions aren't met!", but I can assure you that lots of extremely fault-tolerant systems built by very smart people (like electronic stock exchanges) have failed in very surprising ways. Weakly collateralized flash loans are just faster leveraged tools with all of the tradeoffs that entails. YMMV, there's definitely a lot of money to be made. [VIDEO] << Relevant.

@sam_goody2020 · in “Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings”

"I am shocked, shocked... " Chrome creates a unique ID for each user (there has been much discussion about the entropy vs the uniqueness for the install key), they have been found to give a pass for Google Analytics when visiting from Chrome, etc. And what else do you expect when it is in their interest to track you (and to have a excuse to justify their knowledge when found out in other grey areas). EDIT: The quote above is from Casablanca, was once very famous [1] [1]: [VIDEO]

@lytfyre2020 · in “Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?”

> I can't think of many stand-out moments in it To me, the `La Marseillaise` scene[1] is incredibly powerful. The crowd trying to out-sing the German soldiers with the French national anthem, and the sheer raw emotion of the scene. Amazing character moments from Ricky, Victor, and Illsa. I haven't looked into the veracity, but the legend around the scene is that most of the extras in the bar were French refuges - and the emotion of the scene was very much present on set. Casablanca was filmed during the height of WW2, and came out in 1942, so it does seem plausible. Louis's brief "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" - Handed a pile of his winnings by the croupier - "Oh, thank you very much." exchange [2] is also a fantastically memorable comedic exchange. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]

@aidenn02021 · in “Voltswagen of America”

Even non-global economies end up diffusing the blame for poor labor practices. So many big-box stores end up in a wage-theft situation just because the upper-management sets benchmarks that are only achievable through wage-theft and then they are shocked[1] to find out that the individual store managers are committing wage theft. 1: [VIDEO]

@DonHopkins2021 · in “Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages”

More like Proof-Of-Waste, both of precious electricity, and of precious rare earth elements and other materials. Not to mention how much precious time cryptocurrency shills waste, and dangerous greenhouse gasses they produce from all the hot air of their rancid breath, by droning on and on and on about cryptocurrency all the time, parroting all the lies they heard in youtube get-rich-quick pyramid scheme videos. Another shill in this thread just mindlessly repeated the same old lie they parrot all the time: >Crypto helps accelerate the growth, demand, and build-out of renewable energy. That's like saying using more Cocaine helps you quit using Cocaine faster. "Cocaine makes me feel like a new man. And he wants some too!" In an unfortunate and unintended way, it's true... And the absurd idea of using a crypto rig as a space heater has already been completely debunked in this thread. Go back and read it. If it's such a great idea, then why doesn't everybody already have one or a hundred of them, huh? matheusmoreira: Do you really believe in get-rich-quick schemes and perpetual motion devices and miracle cures, even when you can't seem to find any for sale that actually work? Then you must not believe in the free market, either. Is it easier to believe there's a huge well organized conspiracy suppressing these technologies, instead of simply the laws of physics and economics? Go back and read astoor's comment again, which trixie_'s fancifully wishful reply simply doesn't refute.

@chriselles2022 · in “Josh Hawley introducing his own stock ban bill”

60 Minutes broke this story a decade ago. [LINK] Due to the traction the story got, it led to the Stock Act. But once the news cycle was over it was quietly, rapidly, and largely repealed: [LINK] And here we are a decade later “shocked” [VIDEO]

@DonHopkins2022 · in “Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme”

Meanwhile in other news, water is wet, the sky is blue, Putin is a tyrant with blood on his hands, and I'm SHOCKED, SHOCKED to find that GAMBLING is going on in here! [VIDEO]

@willcipriano2022 · in “YouTube Premium Price Increase”

Oh me too but the average person? YouTube's leadership has to be aware of it and I'd bet money it's part of their strategy. Although if you brought it up they would be shocked like this guy: [VIDEO]

@xg152023 · in “Europe Turns on TikTok”

Don't want to excuse TikTok here, but how all the lawmakers suddenly realize that social media is addictive kind of reminds me of the famous Casablanca scene. [VIDEO]

@cs7022025 · in “”

I'd be shocked if X is not training AI models with every bit of user data that has ever touched the company's servers. I'd be as shocked as Captain Renault in Casablanca: [VIDEO]