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April 22, 2005

No sacred cows

In an interesting and controversial article at the Asia Times, someone writing under the pen name Spengler has written about a way to save Europe from demographic ruin:

"Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity."

We live in an age where in the West most people see religion as personal, and while they might shout for hours to convince someone about their position on gay marriage, wouldn't think of telling someone to conduct their spiritual life, excepting maybe a their spouse, a future spouse or a child. But let's turn over every rock for solving the worlds problems, especially at the price of reading a delicious little article like this.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2005

Gay Marriage?

User eno2001 in the Slashdot article "Microsoft Abandons Gay Rights Bill" Says something I found interesting:
"The love that two men or two women feel for each other is no different than the love that a heterosexual couple experiences. There is no difference at all. None. That same warm indescribably wonderful feeling that a hetero remembers (I'm straight, so I know what it feels like) feeling on their wedding day is no different from what a gay man or a lesbian woman would feel on their wedding day. But our sick society is trying to deny that love can be experienced outside of a heterosexual relationship. It makes them so uncomfortable that they cover their ears and scream loudly, "I'm not listening! I'm not listening! I'm not listening"!"

How would you establish this? I'm not sure that you could say that the love that two heterosexuals feel for each other on their wedding day is the same, let alone make any sort of generalization about it across couples. We know that homosexual sex work different that heterosexual sex does, so I'm not sure that we could establish this. He's barking up the wrong tree here. It has nothing to do with love.

The real question that the homosexual debate is struggling to answer is wealth redistribution. My prediction about the outcome of this issue is that even in homosexual marriage remain illegal, that many of the legal trappings (but not benefits) of marriage are going to be shareable with one person of your choice. There are two sticking points, ownership of the word marriage and if the government should should subsidize all relationships equally regardless of their social contribution or the moral opinion of the majority.

This first fight is one between those who feel that the word has a human rights element and the others who feel that tradition and religion warrants preserving the definition as is. The second is if the many subsidies provided by the taxpayer to those in married relationships should be provided to others. This further divides in those who want this regardless of means, those that want it through democratic means, those that don't care and those that do not want the expansion of the subsidies. The later two groups form the majority of Americans today.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:21 PM | Comments (0)

Bizarre Video games

We aren't all guns around here. We care about butter too. Good parents have to teach their children about the less fortunate, and what more effective teaching method than a video game that doesn't suck?Food Force is a new video game where you can try to get emergency relief food to people in disaster areas. Kids learn all about nutrition and the need for social action while having (some) fun. Just goes to show you you don't need aliens and tons of gore to have a good time. One year my sister didn't buy my twin brothers a birthday present and instead just got them a big roll of bubble wrap. They liked it better anyway.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:42 PM | Comments (0)

$2.5 Million to put a pyramid on its side? Someone is walking around with $2.49 million.

At a new USDA website you can see a custom designed food pyramid based on your activity, age and gender. A neat idea, because the old one tried to be right for everyone, which gave bizarre caloric ranges. it also relied on serving sizes, whereas the new one tells you the volumes (of wet foods) and weights (of dry ones) you should eat each day. It still doesn't control for weight or height, but this is a big improvement.

This is what mine looks like:

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2005

Do they get everything wrong about your job too?

The New York times is reporting that the New York Stock Exchange is merging with the ECN Archipeligo. The new entity is owned about 70% by the chairs of the NYSE and 40% by the shareholders of Archipelago. That's pretty amazing when you consider that it values the company at 42% of the ancient and powerful exchange. But in the Time's coverage, they missed the point. They said:

Every electronic market is scrambling for a way to steal some of that market share. Recent rule changes by the Securities and Exchange Commission could make it easier for competitors to capture some of that market. The new rules favor electronic trading by requiring that all trades be executed at the exchange posting the best price. Electronic markets allow traders to access that price and execute a trade more quickly.

As I discussed in an earlier article, this rule benefits the exchange more than anyone else. My analysis of this merger is that it is to provide the exchange with an insurmountable volume and price lead, while giving it access to bleeding age e-trading technology.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:03 PM | Comments (0)

And you kiss your mother with that mouth?

I've complained here and elsewhere about comment and traceback spam. These dreadful folks post spam all over the blogsphere, not so that people will read it, but to boost rankings on Google by raising the relative authority of their website. They they channel these referrals to poker, spam or pornography sites for a cut of the action.

But who are these people? How could anyone do this for a living? The register has an interview with one such horrible person. The tone is silly, so it almost sounds made up, but many of the technical details are good, so it is well researched, even if it might be a composite of several people or partially fiction.

"Sam - let's call our interviewee Sam, it's suitably anonymous - lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But "it's not not all rock and roll and big money", says Sam. What isn't? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that's what.

For that's what Sam does, pretty much all day long. He - we'll use the male notation, it's easier - would do this anyway for fun, but it's more than fun; he says he can earn seven-figure sums doing this. Sam is a link spammer. He's unapologetic about it. Skilled in Perl, LWP and PHP, Sam's first professional programming was done aged 13, when he sold some code to a gaming company. He's 32 now, and spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity."

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:44 PM | Comments (0)

New features

Belligerati now has icons for the categories Politics, Personal, Science & Technology, and Economics & Finance.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:55 AM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2005

Persistent Income Disparities by Race in America

The National Urban League (NUL) has released their 2005 study on the state of America's black population. It has some interesting findings, including that the average black household has a net worth of only $6,100, while a typical white household has $67,000.
and that black unemployment was 10.8 percent while white unemployment was a far lower 4.7 percent. The news wasn't all bad. Nearly 70% of black households own their own home. The census reports that white median household income was 46k to the back households' is 30k. But in New Zealand, a wealthy and free country, the entire population has a household income of only $23,296.So their lot isn't all bad.

The NUL has some awful suggestions for remediation like raising the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an per hour and lowering down payment requirements on mortgages, some pointless ones like expanding the Community Development Block Grant program, Making full day access to pre-school education universal (which doesn't do anything to educate students). And then an amazing thing happens:
8. African Americans must energize their focus on savings, investing and estate planning.
9. African Americans, especially the African American middle class should increase their commitment to civic tithing. Civic tithing means financially supporting as well as giving volunteer time to African American institutions like Historically Black Colleges and Universities, churches, civil rights organizations like the Urban League and more.

Which is to say that the Black community has to take responsibility for its own future and invest in it, the same great point that my friend John H McWhorter has been making for years. One can only hope that this helps excite the black community about transformation from within. An article in today's WSJ makes the point that social security persistently discriminates against African Americans because of their lower savings rates and shorter life expectancy.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:18 PM | Comments (2)

Mapping Belligerati

Kartoo is a neat visual search engine that lets you see how your pages with your keyword are connected by related keywords and to each other. If this sounds a bit confusing, take a look at how a search for belligerati would look. They don't make it easy to link directly to a search or I'd include that as well.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:32 PM | Comments (0)

The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance

A new project, Individual-i, is working to create a new banner under which to get people excited about the cause of individual rights

This is the symbol they propose.

We'll see how the movement shapes up; if it turns out to a genuine liberterian movement, we'll use it around here.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:04 AM | Comments (0)

April 18, 2005

I, Robot

Cory Doctorow a liberal, post human enthusiast and sci-fi author recently made a rewrite of "i, robot" to mock Asimov's three laws of robotics and the totalitarian society required to enforce them.

The story includes his typically excellent creative vision of the future, stared in by police officer Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, in the mega-state of UNATS. I am consistently entertained by the creative situations he manufactures to make philosophical and economic arguments. However, they always seem to fall short. I am stuck on questions of plausibility he never addresses as he develops the story. I strongly prefer Stephenson's vision of post scarcity society Diamond Age to Cory's less plausible utopia in In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom One kept wondering about if money would really disappear in a world with finite real-estate and real cost to gathering and producing content. He does not make it clear why the law-abiding robots would be dumber and less capable of making smarter robots than the lawless ones. He suggests that the robot lawless society would have no crime, but why? In "I robot", I wondered why robots unconstrained by human law would care about us. Eventually they surely would not.

Down that road lies much more the Matrix or Mechanoids than the idyllic utopia he suggests. I also wondered if what he suggested was at all likely. Viewed through his lens of Bush hating, he sees the sky falling in restrictions on the funding of stem cells and the department of homeland security. As a social critic, he sees an obligation to draw attention to the dangerous path on which we tread. There is not a lot of danger in this. First, as Asimov has mentioned in his books, and the reality of AI research suggests, developing an AI is massively expensive and time consuming. Virtually all applications would be in wealthy countries, with high costs of labor and the technical skill to produce such robots. That leaves only a handful of countries. Can you see Japan or Europe, who have nearly given up on the use of deadly force by their governments, creating robots with the brains and tools for murder? Can you see the United States, with its stance of human life and crazy regulatory environment doing so? I cannot. By the time countries who flaunt these norms could produce their first AI, rich countries will be cheaply producing low cost AI’s with the law. Like the Betamax vs. VHS, the network externalities might give the law-abiding models an insurmountable lead. Like nuclear containment, international treaties and the occasional use of military intervention (or its threat) could largely prevent the spread of this technology.
This does not address why we should care about the laws. Do we want robot police officers and soldiers that badly? I doubt it. Would making them obey the laws stifle robot creativity? Maybe, but Cory does not explain why. Is it to prevent a totalitarian society to enforce the creation of robots with these laws? This is the strongest reason that Cory suggests, but he does not explain why. Would preventing sociopath robot rampages require at least as much intrusion as Asimov’s laws would? I would think so. Lots of questions, few answers, but a fun read nevertheless.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:10 PM | Comments (0)

What will they think of next?

An article, Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world shows why it is essential that scholars read far beyond their focus. Utilizing image processing algorithms developed for processing satellite imagery, researchers examined the the Oxyrhynchus collection, a group of 400,000 fragments of ancient Greek writings. To the naked eye, the bulk of the collection is useless damaged by parasites decayed and blackened by time's caress. But reassembled by these powerful image processing tools, they give up their precious contents. Already fragments of lost works by Sophocles, Lucian and others have been reconstructed. When the entire collection is examined using these techniques some say will increase the stock ancient Greek works by 20%.

You can read more about satellite image processing here.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:56 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2005

Hey I never noticed that...

The dead programer noticed a mural in the subway near my house and saw beneath its ugly exterior to the wierd details.
Check it out:
www.deadprogrammer.com

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:49 PM | Comments (0)

More Schiavo Wisdom

Another great piece of writing on the Schiavo story. Reason's Jonathan Rauch writes in his new article, Law Trumps Life on why it was that Americans overwelmingly disapproved of how Republican lawmakers hadled the sistuation. The short of it is that the American people love of the rule of law.

Exerpts
"After 15 years in which Schiavo lay in what most doctors said was a persistent vegetative state, the courts of Florida, acting on what her husband said were her wishes, removed Schiavo's feeding tube and let her starve while her parents looked on. No civilized person could watch this excruciating process without flinching. Yet appeals to the "culture of life" met with stony public indifference, bordering on hostility. Why?
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Life is not the ultimate public value for most Americans. Law is.

Conservatives, of all people, should know this, because they have been saying it for years. More than four years before Schiavo, another difficult legal case transfixed the country. In Bush v. Gore, the outcome of the 2000 presidential race depended on Florida's disputed vote. Democrats, having narrowly lost in the initial tally, demanded manual recounts. In an election, they said, accurately determining the intent of the voters is surely the ultimate value. What could trump that?

Law, replied Republicans. They insisted that a fundamental principle was at stake. Florida's election statutes did not provide time or authority for manual recounts, they said; and if the rule of law means anything, it means not making up the rules as you go along"

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:08 PM | Comments (0)

Are you sure you want that index fund?

Index mutual funds are mutual funds that make no asset allocation decisions beyond obeying the index. Take for example the S&P 500 index fund like the Vanguard 500. Investors turn over their cash, and in exchange, the investor gets their money invested in the 500 biggest companies (by market capitalization). But if you invest $500 you don't get a dollar worth of every share. That would be a capitalization-weighted index fund. Most funds, and all of the famous ones, are like this. But that isn't optimal.

Why? A few reasons. First, let's say that some stocks in the index are undervalued and others are overvalued, but that you don't know which. You routinely invest in a capitalization weighted manner, then you are buying less of the undervalued stocks (because they make up less of the index) and more of the overvalued (because they make up more). If, over the long tern, stocks average or converge to their true value, you'll be harmed by this process. Second, you don't take maximum advantage of portfolio diversification. This can be overstated, because most of the advantages of portfolio diversification come from owning as few as 15 stocks (others say 40). This might be a problem, but only if you owned the Dow instead of the S&P 500. With the S&P 500, you put 1% or more of your investment in 15 companies but only 26% of your assets in the first 12 securities. That means that you have real diversity. Another strategy is equalization weighting. This is just sticking a dollar in each stock. Unfortunately, these indices are less common and have higher expense ratios.

Further discussion here

Gerald D. Newbould & Percy S. Poon, The Minimum Number of Stocks Needed for Diversification, Financial Practice and Education at 85-87 (Fall 1993).

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)

Master, there is a breach in sector six

Safety Dynamics is an Illinois based retailer of advanced sensor technology. One of their new projects is a sensor and data processing system. It emulates the way that human beings suspect and detect suspicious sounds. That means fewer false alarms, less bored security guards and cheaper security. And more effective, less expensive, and less burdensome security policies is the best way to maintain vigilance. And keeping terror and crime down is the best way to maintain maximum freedom from the state. Because, as much as we wish that we could all be as Benjamin Franklin was, some will always trade "...liberty to obtain a little temporary safety".

Reminds me of the facial recognition software hullabaloo from a while back.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2005

Hating Bush

I understand that lot's of people hate Bush, but is seems that enough people want to kill him that they made a t-shirt.

Protecting their brand, cafepress pulled it as hate speach. which they refuse to sell. I gues the'll have to make their own website and t-shirt press if they want to sell them. Freedom of press requires a press I guess.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:13 PM | Comments (0)

Extremist Uniterians?

The first communiqué from the Unitarian Jihad.

Excerpts:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.
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People of the United States, why is everyone yelling at you??? Whatever happened to ... you know, everything? Why is the news dominated by nutballs saying that the Ten Commandments have to be tattooed inside the eyelids of every American, or that Allah has told them to kill Americans in order to rid the world of Satan, or that Yahweh has instructed them to go live wherever they feel like, or that Shiva thinks bombing mosques is a great idea? Sister Immaculate Dagger of Peace notes for the record that we mean no disrespect to Jews, Muslims, Christians or Hindus. Referred back to the committee of the whole for further discussion.

Check it out here

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:46 PM | Comments (0)

Amazing quote

I loved this Nietzsche quote:

Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.

Longer version:Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)

Microsoft Word Grammar Check

Sandeep Krishnamurthy, a professor at the University of Washington at Bothell, has a great new website devoted to improving the Microsoft Word grammar check function. Any grammar snob, snoot, or simply any word user frustrated or embarrassed by those green squiggles and the changes they suggest should take a look at Dr. Krishnamurthy's site. Here are some horrible sentences that pass muster:

Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. Updating of brand image is bad for processes in one company and many companies.

McDonalds is good brand. McDonald’s is good brand. McDonald’s are good brand. McDonalds’ are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola is good brand. MCDONALD’S AND COCA COLA IS GOOD BRAND.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:36 AM | Comments (0)

The blogs I read - 7

Kevin Kelly has an wonderful series of blogs on page. The two that interest me are "The Technium", his work on a new book on the history of the scientific method and "Cool Tools", his research into the finest books, gadgets and tools needed to be productive and comfortable. What seperates cool tools from other gadget blogs is that it isn't about what is new. This is about users submitting the finest tools they use, new or old.

Check it out for yourself:
www.kk.org

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:17 AM | Comments (1)

April 12, 2005

Looking for education reform in all the wrong places

Home schooling, an outgrowth of informal rural education systems that have existed in the United States since its creation, is the education of children at home or perhaps by the community in an informal setting. While most students are educated in institutional settings like public (86%-87.5%) or parochial (11%-12%) schools, between 0.5% and 2% percent of the 2002–03 school-age population is home schooled. This is a 29 percent increase over the last 4 years and more than ten points faster growth than that of private and public schools.

Most of the education reform debate has focused on conversations between urban elites over charter schools versus voucher based systems. This discussion has missed that home schooling is the real force in school reform. Nationwide, charter schools enroll about 500,000 students. Private schools funded by vouchers educate even fewer students, a piddling 20,000 nationwide. But out of a school age population of 53 million, this is just a drop in the bucket. Meanwhile, home schooling is educating twice as many children. Depending on who you ask and when, between 850k and 1100k children are home schooled. Growing far faster than private schools which are expected to grow by a 7 percent over the next few years. Note that this is nothing to sneeze at either, and much faster than public schools are expected to grow. The system is failing these people either in the quality or substance of the education that their children are receiving, and as such they are expending tremendous resources to educate their children at their own expense of time and money.

Since states retain most of the control over education, federalism can offer a way out. Individual states should experiment with partial privatization of school systems, expanding voucher programs, and increasing charter school enrollment. But states should find ways to help parents and communities interested in home schooling be more effective. This could take any number of forms, from ending the marriage penalty (to allow more parents to do it), allowing tax deduction of education related expenses for home schoolers, or even making standardized testing free to all people in the state (so that charter students could use these tests to measure their academic skills against those of more conventional students. Ideology is important. To me, it seems rather wasteful for large numbers of families to devote so much resources to educating their children, when class size doesn't seem to have a clear causal effect of education equality. Likewise, I assume that professional education in educating children makes for better teachers, so hordes of unskilled teachers probably wouldn't be a net benefit for society. But, many families don't feel the way that I do. If government has to expropriate money from us to redistribute it, it should at least be in a manner that is consistant with our revealed preferences.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)

Are we starting to win in Iraq?

With talk of troop reductions in Iraq and the election a seeming public relations and practical success, one has to ask, are we winning? Looking at the fatality and insurgent attack rates, we can see encouraging trends. Both attacks and fatalities are down significantly from both the highs and further reduced after the elections.

Sources
http://icasualties.org/oif/
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/03/30/iraq.attacks.ap/

	Range of Monthly Attacks	Monthly American Military Fatalities
Spring 2004	300-600	89
Fall 2004 (Faluja offensive)	2400-2700	93
Pre-election	1500-1800	107
Post-election	1200-1350	36

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:01 AM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2005

The extinction and the happiness paradox

Additional money beyond a middle-income level (by international standards a few thousand dollars a year) does not clearly make us happier. There still maybe wonderful freedom and efficiency based arguments for people to take view unfettered markets as the optimal form of resource allocation. But happiness? That jury is still out, but weighing against at this point. A simple (and major) criticism is that even the very best (most powerful) models of predicting happiness only manage to predict 60% self reported of happiness. That is pitiful when you consider that this includes income, wealth, social-status, nationality, social-ties, occupation, education, health, and more factors. In fact, some estimate that the most accurate (corresponding to true underlying models as opposed to merely over-fitting survey data) models really only predict 30%.

Now income may the factor among of all of these that is easiest to modify through economic policy. But, once a country is no longer mired in poverty and per capita income reaches a few thousand of dollars a year, income ceases to be a predictor of happiness. Sure, relative income matters, but since this zero-sum lump to distribute, economics cannot really help here either. Don't worry, the emperor still has clothes. People crave additional income and claim (at least briefly) that they are happier when they get it. Nevertheless, this has some tremendous consequences in economic decision-making.

What does all this have to do species extinction?

You see in cost-benefit analysis, where we try to figure out efficient methods of making complex decisions by weighing the costs of implementation and its benefits, we depend heavily on a concept called the discount rate. The discount rate in effect establishes how much society will pay today for a dollar next year. The idea here is since we would rather have a dollar today than next year, you have to pay me to delay getting my dollar for a year. In general, since people use things like the average rate of return on the stock market or bond markets because this reflects an aggregate measure of this preference getting your money faster. For many projects, this makes sense. If you can build, sell your factory today for a million bucks today or in a year for $1.03 million, then knowing you can invest your money in the stock market for the next year at 8% would help you decide to sell today. However, people carry this tool far from this narrow use, leading to strange conclusions.

You see one reason that we argue for using up natural resources and endangering wildlife is that we cannot afford not to. Many people treat economic progress as a necessity. With all of society’s problems, with too many unable to afford the full prosperity of American life, protecting charismatic macro-fauna and their environment can seem unimportant. What if these luxuries don’t make us happy?

Then we have permanently given up a fraction of our heritage and part of the world’s beauty for a few baubles. Moreover, we know that people value nature for its beauty and as a good with intrinsic value (i.e. even if they never visit or benefit from it) often at far greater value than public policy seems to indicate. Therefore, if public policy is predicated on the notation that maximizing aggregate (or even maxi-min) utility requires economic progress at the expense of permanent damage to the natural world, then public policy is misguided. We should either switch to justifying markets based on the freedom they engender or revisit public policy to reflect true utility maximization.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

April 8, 2005

Watch as the drug war eats all your freedom

Suspected drug dealer Antonio Wheeler was arrested on drug charges, and allegedly told Orlando police officers of his cocaine use. They tried to make him take urine test at Florida Hospital, where he refused to give a sample.

Maybe I hate a false choice more than the next guy, but anyone would hate what happened next, he was handcuffed and strapped down to a bed. Then hospital staff tried to catheterize him. He fought back, as almost anyone would. That is when Officer Peter Linnenkamp reportedly jumped on the bed, kneeled on Wheeler's chest and tazed him twice with 50,000 volts. After all this, Wheeler finally agreed to surrender a urine sample. The police is in trouble pending a bigger investigation and the prosecution of Wheeler is proceeding normally.

Read it all here

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day

In USA today of all places, Eugene Low, I read the most insightful comment on the Schiavo tragety / debacle, "staff writer for The Straits Times, Singapore, in a column: "Medical technology, while useful, was ultimately insufficient to determine what (Schiavo's) life was worth. ... Depending solely on science to determine whether a person should be allowed to die only throws up more moral ambiguities. This calls for humility when it comes to making the choices that determine the life or death of another human. When doctors and judges decide when a patient is to be given the right to die, they are presuming that they have the moral wisdom to do so."

I thought this hit things right on head.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:23 AM | Comments (0)

April 7, 2005

Does the NYSE control the global stock market?

In a recent article at Mapping Strategy Blog, Art Hutchinson writes about the dangers of monoculture in stock markets. He worries that the expansion of the trade through rule (discussed earlier) to the NASDAQ will promote monoculture and therefore make the markets more vulnerable. This is an interesting point. I argued that a homogenous regulatory environment promotes has moral and practical value. But I'm interested in Art's point. After all, if the self regulatory organizations are allowed to create a diverse environment, then firms and investors can experiment with which works best.
Nevertheless, the NYSE doesn't have the dominance he suggests. It is true that the NYSE has a makes up about 35% of worldwide market capitalization This is almost three times as large as the NASDAQ. However, the NASDAQ is still larger than the London Stock Exchange, the Deutsche Borse, Euronext and almost as large as the Tokyo Stock Exchange. So certainly, they are a big enough franchise to survive. Well, they are at least big enough that size won't be the reason they fail. Likewise, volume statistics. Likewise, while only 71 of the companies in the S&P 500 are listed on the NASDAQ, they include world-class companies like Microsoft, and any other country would surely covet such a stable. Finally, NASDAQ share volume is greater than NYSE share volume.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:33 AM | Comments (0)

April 6, 2005

Movable Type Problems

I kept getting the unhelpful error, "The site you're trying to comment on has not signed up for this feature. Please inform the site owner." whenver anyone tried to login to leave a comment. Alas, help on the internet was hard to find. I found a hundred people with the same problem, but I had to read 63 before I could find a solution. As a service to the internet I thought I'd leave this post as a tutorial.

Another guy has a deep discription of the problem, but he gave up before he found a solution.

I found the answer here.

The basic idea is that in the section "Your Weblog Preferences" you need the full URL, not just the domain name. Then you append the directory that contains movable type and stick a slash at the end.
In this case http://www.belligerati.net/

Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:09 PM | Comments (0)

April 5, 2005

Even more pointless security theater

Google just added satellite photos to their maps page.
Above is a picture, downloaded from the system, of the capital building. Notice that the capital is much blurrier than the surounding buildings. Oh no! Now that the imagery is blurry, however will anyone ever do anything bad to the building? If it works, why are the other buildings (like the Whitehouse) not likewise blurred? Just how does this help?
Sigh.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

The Trade Through Rule

The trade through rule is up for expansion. This rule (currently in force at the NYSE) mandates that most stock trades must go wherever they can fetch the best price (highest bid or lowest ask) This seems like a good idea, all customers, even the little minnows, get the best price possible. The reality is more complicated. Some people want things other that the best price. They want the fastest trading possible, or to take slow execution or more complex execution for anonymity, or put trades through ventures in which they've invested.

The NASDAQ doesn't have this rule. On average it seems to be better without it. For companies in the S&P 500, the bid-ask spread on shares are are 56% lower narrower on NASDAQ than the NYSE. The average-effective spread is 1.6 cents on NASDAQ versus 3.7 cents for NYSE-listed S&P 500 companies. NASDAQ also executes trades between three and 10 times faster than the NYSE does, depending on the measure.

This isn't the whole story either.

NYSE has automated trading matching systems too, and one, direct plus will execute in one to two seconds, just about as fast as NASDAQ gets. Also, there are 75 NASDAQ listed members of the S&P 500 versus the NYSE's 421. There may be selection bias at work. The 71 NASDAQ listed stocks are tech heavy, and have taken a bath since the bubble burst. Since there are regulatory reasons why stocks tend to have spreads as a percent of price, their lower stock prices may explain the tight spreads

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson (Republican) is likely to vote (along with the two Democratic commissioners) on altering the NASDAQ to follow the same trade through rule as the NYSE. The two other Republicans will vote no. Why might he do this? Besides grandstanding about the little guy that is. Well remember those lower average spreads? They aren't distributed fairly. People moving big blocks, uniform blocks get the fast execution and the best prices on the NASDAQ. On the NYSE, everyone is treated the same.

Now it may be that the small time fundamentals investor is as extinct as the yeoman farmer, but the financial regulatory system is still built around them. Reports like the 10-k, Def 14-a and the 8-k are aimed at conveying to investors company information. Annual reports are sent to millions of shareholders every year, be very few of them read much of it. Insider trading and full disclosure laws protect those not in the know, at the cost of market efficiency. Likewise, the small time investor, who has holds for the long term, has little use for fast execution. Lower transaction costs in the form of tighter spreads translates directly into higher returns for them.

Even though I've long thought that regulatory focus on the small investor was stupid, I think that this rule change is consistant with the current regulatory philosophy. Provide the information and fair markets to serious small investors so that they can participate in the markets in the same manner that the big banks, endowments. funds and insurance companies do. In the absence of real reform aimed and making the markets a place where professionals operate and focusing the regulation and disclosure of the funds in which consumers should be investing, constancy of regulation has value. Hopefully, once the markets operate in the same manner, it will create constituency for real reform, making them clearly articulate before the public why the entire regulatory philosophy should be different.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:29 AM | Comments (0)

April 4, 2005

Building a liberal majority

Do the democrats even want to win? Perhaps they would prefer grandstanding.

Check out the review of the book below for a sharp look by a serious lefty (a Nation contributor no less) into the problems of the Democratic party.
Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (A Progressive Guide to Action) by George Lakoff
I especially enjoyed the quote inside.

It's not just in the rarefied climes of The Nation that this sense of liberal unreality surfaces. Barely three weeks after the election the trendy MoveOn.org, the motor force of the so-called "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," rallied its adherents coast-to-coast in a round of 1,600 house meetings. The assembled liberal activists -- some 18,000 -- polled themselves and then published their top six political priorities. The results, in order, tell you all you need to know about the current state of progressive detachment and denial. Election reform and media reform came in first and second. The war in Iraq was third, followed by the environment, the Supreme Court, and civil liberties. In short, the biggest problems liberals face are those damned voting machines and Fox News. Glaringly absent from this activist wish list is anything vaguely resembling an aggressive populist agenda. The MoveOn plan provides no answers to those sweaty plebes out there who are "stoked" by kulturkampf rhetoric as well as all-too-real fears about their jobs, wages, health insurance, and school tuition.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:21 PM | Comments (0)

Improving Screening

April 4, 2005
Assistant Secretary David M. Stone
TSA HQ: TSA-1
601 South 12th Street
Arlington, VA 22202-4220
Dear Sir:
On Thursday (3/31/05) morning, I flew from JFK to San Diego on Jet Blue. The security process frustrated me and I had several ideas for improvement. Long taught by my parents John Stuart Mill’s maxim that "any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful" I am writing you in hopes of humanizing and speeding the security process.
The prominently posted Pledge to Travelers of the TSA says, “We pledge that if additional screening is required, we will communicate and explain each step of the additional screening process.” This pledge went unfulfilled.

You see, due to recent knee trouble it was difficult for me to remove my shoes. In preparation for the going through the metal detector, the TSA agent “recommended” that I remove my shoes. Not wanting to do this unless necessary, I declined to do so. Again, the TSA agent “recommended” that I remove my shoes. Knowing that my sneakers contained no metal and that I had already emptied my pockets, I did not set off the metal detector when I went though it. Immediately after walking though the metal detector, a TSA agent flagged me for follow-up screening anyway. The first thing they made me do was take off my shoes. I wondered why if not removing your shoes flags you for additional screening and shoe removal automatically, that agents would describe it as recommended and not mandatory.
I can understand that security demands may now necessitate measures that are more intrusive. Nevertheless, if new security procedures are necessary than they should not be articulated in the guise of choice. This frustrates and indignifies the citizen-traveler. I asked my screener why it was that I was recommended for further screening for failing to do so voluntarily. He said, “I am not allowed to tell you why.” Without access to the procedures governing searches, how can citizens verify that they are followed accurately and fairly? Without a list of things to avoid, (do rivets on jeans matter? How about zippers?) how can we prepare for travel to avoid hassle and indignity? Without clearly articulating the rules that govern this process to the general public it will forever remain capricious at best and deliberately unfair at worst.
The procedure for handling sensitive photographic material serves as a model for improving the screening process. Travelers with who want to travel with film can easily discover that they are entitled to a hand screening. They can read about such things on the internet. If they ask a TSA agent, they will tell them the same about their right to such a screening. The screening policy should be posed on the internet as well as on a large sign, posted prominently, wherever the TSA screens. This would go a long way toward allowing us to avoid many costly and pointless searches. This would speed screening, generate far fewer false positives and make the fewer remaining searches more effective in detecting contraband and dangerous materials by concentrating them on meaningful searches.
I feel citizen feedback is an essential requirement for efficient and pleasant provision of government services. As such, I asked the TSA for the address for feedback at the TSA. Unfortunately, neither the screening agent nor the airline service women knew to what address I could direct my feedback. Eventually I found a TSA manager and after 15 minutes of waiting, he was able to provide it to me. The TSA should post the address, web address, and phone number of the TSA wherever the TSA interacts with the public. Regardless, it should not take 15 minutes to provide this information.
I know you are very busy, but I look forward to hearing back from you about my feedback.
Sincerely,
OneEyedMan

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:38 PM | Comments (0)

April 3, 2005

More pointless security theater

In a new show of how helpless they think we are and perhaps how stupid
they are, the TSA has banned lighters, including non-explosive battery powered lighters. Somehow, this is going to make us safe?

Despite repeated failures to stop weapons at checkpoints and control the airplane environment, we now have to endure yet more in a mythic pursuit of safety at the cost of freedom and convenience

Press release

"LIGHTERS

Due to security concerns, TSA recently issued a new rule that bans ALL lighters from your carry-on luggage, including lighters that don’t use fuel such as electric lighters with a battery and nichrome element.

TSA screeners will begin to enforce this new rule at security checkpoints on April 14, 2005, when lighters will no longer be allowed in carry-on luggage or on the person. Until that time, you can still bring up to two lighters onto the plane as long as they are fueled with liquefied gas or with absorbed liquid (for instance, Bic or Zippo lighters). As always, ALL lighters are banned from checked baggage for safety reasons.

TSA strongly recommends that you double-check your baggage and pockets for lighters before arriving at the airport. Some people carry sentimental or collectable lighters, and TSA would rather that you keep these items than collect them at the checkpoint. Because of federal laws and operational considerations, TSA cannot return any prohibited items voluntarily abandoned at the checkpoint.

MATCHES

No matches are permitted in your checked baggage, and up to four books of matches are allowed in your carry-on baggage or on your person. For safety reasons, strike anywhere matches are prohibited at all times from carry-on and checked baggage."

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:25 PM | Comments (0)