Reason has an interesting link to a story on illegal immigrant tourism. You (yes you!) can be the first kid on your suburban block to go through the adventure of sneaking in to your own country. Well, not quite your own country – just the other side of a fence in a park in Mexico.  But it feels so real! The only downside is that when you leave the park, the game stops and immigration people are not really hunting you.

Don’t let the title of the post fool you. I’m not talking about people. I’m pretty much talking about technology. I was going through Google Finance, checking out eBay’s stock price. I typically avoid the forums as it’s swarmed with nutters. But one thing did catch my attention:

There was a link to so-called “news” from PRNine.com which can be found here. The article is bad enough. Yet another “outraged” eBay seller griping about his/her misfortunes on eBay and how eBay “stole” her money. She tries to provide an “example” of just how horrible eBay’s pricing is. Yes, her analysis is, well, bad for a self-admitted MBA.  Her assumptions are all wrong. In essence, she treats eBay and PayPal’s fees as the same when they are different. For example, she would, in most cases, pay some form of fee for payment processing to someone else. Whether the fees end up at eBay or PayPal is irrelevant.

The second point, and one she goes on to nag about incessantly is that her poor margins are slim. ~10%. She is then upset that on 182 items, she made less than minimum wage. Yet, in reality, most brick and mortar stores have far more than 182 products on the shelves. I could go on, but I won’t. It is pretty sad to see someone this inept writing such garbage. Eh, GIGO I guess.

What does amuse me though is that with all of this newfangled new media technology, it is still pretty stupid. PRNine should be a bit ashamed for publishing such a horribly written PR piece. While most PR releases are fluff pieces, this letter breaks every rule of PR releases with no shame. So PRNine isn’t filtering their content for garbage and Google is sucking up without filtering garbabe and so now we all see the garbage.

So there’s the money making idea: How do you create a technology that can filter out the human induced garbage? This isn’t the first time I’ve found crap in Google. Google pretty much dumps wholesale garbage syndication into the Finance section.

Humans can filter this data down when the reliability and quality of the content is pivotal to their core business. In Google’s case, they provide the service for free. What is incentive for providing free service? Traffic. Yet when you begin to let the garbage creep in you also greatly reduce the potential for quality traffic landing on your site.

The problem is that Google is now making it harder for the consumer to filter out the garbage from the good – something Google supposedly does better than any other search engine.

clipped from www.breitbart.com Justice Dept Approves XM-Sirius Deal WASHINGTON (AP) – The Justice Department approved Sirius Satellite Radio’s $5 billion buyout of rival XM Satellite Radio on Monday, saying the deal was unlikely to hurt competition or consumers. The Justice Department, in a lengthy news release explaining its decision, said the two companies compete not just with each other but also with other forms of radio and entertainment. “The likely evolution of technology in the future, including the expected introduction in the next several years of mobile broadband Internet devices, made it even more unlikely that the transaction would harm consumers in the longer term,” the Justice Department said. “Accordingly, the division has closed its investigation of the proposed merger.”

In a free land, you do not need the permission of the government in order to conduct private business.

clipped from www.wowt.com NCAA Tournament Brings Out The Scalpers Their boldness was contagious. “I’m with the media,” said Justin. “We are doing an undercover story on scalping. Why are you scalping right here?” “Because you called me.” “I know, but you realize you’re breaking the law?” “No I didn’t.” Now he does, but this fish wasn’t happy. “What I do know is that you told me to come down here.” “Yeah, it’s not illegal for me to ask, but it is illegal for you to offer, but anyway thanks for coming down.”

I hate Omaha. I hate our local news. It’s about the most worthless things I can think of next to having nipples on a man. Here’s a classic example of our media having nothing better to do than sit around trying to “bust” so-called “scalpers”.

The irony is that the tickets are sold out. If you want to buy them, the scalper has them and you are going to pay the price for them. I really don’t give a shit if they are paying more than face value. If your dumb ass can’t get in line like everyone else, there is no reason you should expect someone to do it for you without paying for it.

But hey, it’s Omaha, worthless news for a bunch of complacent bitchy people with nothing better to do than chase down someone who was smarter than you or just a bit luckier at getting some tickets.

I hate this fucking city.

Rarely am I sad to see a TV show go, much less any source of entertainment. The Wire was different. Even at its worst, it was still thought provoking. At its best, it was both infuriating and left me with a sense despair about the very reality of the world we live in.

The reality is that while embellished for entertainment, The Wire will go down as the best story ever told on television.

(ok, he really didn’t say to kill yourselves)

I thought I was, well, skeptical of the government. But Lou Dobbs is so depressing, I wouldn’t be surprised if the suicide rate of his viewers is a hundred times higher than the national average. Here’s a talking comb-over who could use a re-adjustment.  I mean, he is perpetually dumbfounded throughout the entire show. He just doesn’t stop. being. dumbfounded.

I fail to see how his ratings can do anything but hinder CNN – making it the news channel that can’t afford anyone with a brain. So I give Lou Dobbs the Jim Jones Club Card of Cult Leaders.