Month: September 2002

LAnug Correction!. Glendale Galleria has gone pathological. They close at 8:00pm now.
That gives us all of half an hour in the store before we get booted, so
latecomers are out of luck. Why don’t we meet at The Grove? They’re open
till 10:00.

well said mr obrien. we will meet at the Grove Apple Store.

martina wilson [NewtonAsMuse]

This is good news. The Grove is close enough to my apartment that I might just be able to go to this meeting!

My latest cable bill had a notice that the new UltraLink service is available in my area, so I promptly called to sign up. This service increases the speed cap to 3Mbps download and 384 kbps upload, roughly twice as fast as the normal service. So far I’m pretty happy with it.

  Everytime the hullabaloo about journalism vs. webloggers surfaces I think of Michael Lewis’ book (Next:  The Future Just Happened) and Jonathan Lebed.  Jonathan was a kid that used his access to information networks to play the market by Wall Street’s rules.  He analyzed stocks, took a position in those stocks, and published his analysis with enthusiasm on message boards and on his personal website.  He made nearly a million $$ doing this.
The SEC was mortified that an individual dare play Wall Street’s game.  So they attempted to shut him down — lean on him.  He wasn’t impressed.  He had done his homework on every stock he talked about.  In fact, the SECs own rules now dictate that every bit of corporate communication on earnings etc., must be made available to the public at the same time it is disclosed to analysts.  So, it was almost impossible for them to claim that if an individual like Lebed understands how to do financial analysis, he couldn’t do it based on publicly accessible data.  In other words: the insiders on the street don’t have any real legal advantage over individuals when doing stock analysis. 
Of course, the SEC didn’t like this at all.  People like Blodget and Grubman who do this type of thing were respected analysts at top Wall Street firms.  How dare a kid attempt to do what they do!   In the end, he gave them back about 1/3 of the million $$ he made to get them to drop the case.   
Think of all the professions that make money via the mystique of access to privileged information.  What happens when the walls and barriers to that information fall?  What happens when individuals can publish what they find, with analysis, to a global audience?  What if people find this low cost advice and informaiton actually is good or at least 90% of what they need (or in Lebed’s case it was actually 90% as bad as Grubman’s and Blodget’s but on a much smaller scale)?  [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

Here’s another example of why the SEC whould be abolished.

Lance asks why there is no debate on war in Iraq in the US. Good question. I’ll do my part. I’m in the US. I am against the US going to war with Iraq. Saddam has had chemical and biological weapons for a long time. Nothing new there. The US apparently doesn’t believe he has nuclear weapons, but even if he does, or if he gets them, he’s about as likely to use them as India and Pakistan were in their war earlier this year. In the end the same balance that applied betw the US and the Soviet Union and China in previous decades applies in Central Asia. Nuclear weapons are not tactical devices, they are strategic. They are only useful as potential weapons. They say Saddam is a madman. I don’t think he’s so crazy as to use nuclear weapons. My hope is that this war talk is just posturing to get the inspectors back in, which of course would be a good thing.  [Scripting News]

Wow, so many mistaken ideas in one paragraph. I’ll see if I can address them all.

First, both Dave and the person he refers to seem to think there’s no debate on war with Iraq here. This is ridiculous, as Dave himself has demonstrated by offering his opinion. People without web access can simply pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Times or some other newpaper for plenty of debate.

Pakistan very likely would have used nuclear weapons on India if the skirmishing had turned into a full-scale war, because they wouldn’t have stood a chance against India otherwise. No doubt this influenced the Indians’ decision to let Pakistan off the hook.

Some nuclear weapons are tactical devices–both the US and the Soviet Union once had quite a few tactical nukes. However, I doubt Iraq would build such devices instead of larger nukes, and even if they did it would make more sense to use them as strategic weapons.

Using nuclear weapons isn’t automatically crazy. They’re just big bombs, and like any other bomb they can be used for a variety of reasons. The most obvious thing to do if Iraq had nuclear bombs would be for Saddam to say, “leave me alone or I’ll nuke you.” In fact, he’d be crazy not to.

Getting inspectors back into Iraq is certainly not a good thing. Using the UN to stomp on another country’s sovereignty sets a dangerous precedent which may be extended to the US. With their “International Criminal Court,” the Tranzis have already tried in fact. We don’t have any more justification for “inspecting” Saddam’s country then we do for invading it.

Pilots charged over ‘friendly fire’ deaths. Two US F-16 pilots are accused of manslaughter for mistakenly killing four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. [BBC News | Front Page]

This is a pretty blatant political prosecution. Friendly fire casualties happen during war. It’s too bad when it happens, and everyone tries to avoid it, but wars are simply not safe for the participants. Prosecuting military personnel for an honest mistake hurts the military’s ability to function.

Moon opens for business. A private US company has won permission to launch its own probe to the Moon next year. [BBC News | Front Page]

If this really happens it would be a huge step forward. I’m wary that NASA will find some way to interfere, though. And then there’s this quote:

bq. Winning permission took TransOrbital more than two years. To get federal blessing it had to prove the Trailblazer satellite would not contaminate the Moon with biological material, pollute the lunar surface or disturb previous landing sites.

Good grief. “Pollute the lunar surface,” indeed!

NYTimes.  I have always thought the best thing that could have been done to limit the stock bubble was to increase margin requirements (most of my financial industry friends didn’t think the Fed had the power, they do).  Here is what Greenspan said earlier in the cycle:

In September 1996, at a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, he told his colleagues, “I recognize that there is a stock market bubble problem at this point.” And he had a solution: “We do have the possibility of . . . increasing margin requirements. I guarantee that if you want to get rid of the bubble, whatever it is, that will do it.”   Yet he never did increase margin requirements, that is, require investors to put up more cash when buying stocks.

Of course, it is history now that Greenspan never increased margin requirements.  He now says it wouldn’t have worked.  What gall! [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

I think the best thing the Fed could have done was to not create the bubble in the first place. Well, technically the best thing would have been to go away, but that’s not too realistic, alas.

Listening to the Velvet Underground as I blog tonight (they are so great).  Watching the second half of “In the Bedroom” later.  Conflicted on this movie.  What would you do if a son or daughter was killed by a rich kid that could skate virtually scoff free? [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

I’ve seen that movie, and thought it was quite good. I think the parents acted prematurely–they should have given the system a chance to work, even if it probably wouldn’t have. That said, I would probably have done the same thing eventually. And in the case of the movie, I think the parents are at least somewhat guilty for not making sure their son was armed, especially since they knew of his girlfriend’s abusive ex-husband.

I am starting to work on an active outline for the widely read news subscriptions.  Still need to find an elegant way to insert the coffee mug that links to Radio’s fast subscription feature.  I like the presentation of this better than yesterday’s effort.  It will allow me to scale the number of sources better.  Let me know if you have any ideas.  [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

To me the outline is the interesting thing. A week ago I wrote about making instant outlining accessible via the web, and it seems like the activeRenderer is a solid step in that direction.

My Encounter with the Poverty Pimps: The World Summit on Sustainable Development, Part 3. Jim Peron at Laissez Faire Electronic Times –

My Encounter with the Poverty Pimps: The World Summit on Sustainable Development, Part 3 –
A first-hand account of the gathering in Johannesburg. [grabbe]
bq.
This time it was different. Far more different than first meets the
eye. You had to read the signs these poor people were carrying to
understand how much their message contrasted with that of affluent
protesters from the Northern Hemisphere. If you stepped in front of
the man with slivers of leather attached to his feet you’d see his
sign said: “Trade Not Aid.”

The marchers in this protest were mainly poor, virtually all black,
and mostly women. They were street traders and farmers. Without fail
everyone had a sticker saying: “Freedom to Trade.”

Farmers from India marched side by side with Zulu women wearing T-
shirts saying: “Biotechnology for Africa.”

On the sideline the press and Summit delegates stood aghast. What do
you say to poor people with signs reading: “Stop Eco-Imperialism” or
“Save the Planet from Sustainable Development” or “Free Trade IS Fair
Trade”.
[End the War on Freedom]

A man-on-the-street perspective on the “Anti-Civilization” summit. There’s some very good coverage of the unusual protest march by actual poor people. Usually protesters at these kinds of events are rich college students and “professional radicals” from North America and Europe–it’s nice to hear about actual poor people speaking out against the parasites who use them as an excuse for collectivist policies.