I thought I’d do some lunch time reading and ventured over to About.com’s atheism channel. Austin Cline has been the host of the channel for quite some time and he usually has a lot of good things to say. It looks like he’s added a bit of graphical art talents to his portfolio with some amusing posters.  Check them out.

One of my favorite anecdotes that exemplifies unintended consequences is one call “Bootleggers and Baptists”. Wikipedia has a decent explanation.

If you want to skip the link and get the summary it goes something like this:

It isn’t often that you find bootleggers and baptists on the same side of the fence. Consider moral laws that prevent merchants from selling booze on Sunday. Now a baptist would wish alcohol not be sold at all, and especially on the day God rests. Afterall, would you really want drunks out on the road while all of the fine church-going folk are spending time with their families?

The problem that most people miss is that the bootleggers are more than happy to sell alcohol when the churchgoers are busy praying and singing. They could charge a markup specifically because the law does not permit alcohol sales on Sundays.

If you’re not too slow, you might see the bit of the paradox arising. If someone were to challenge the law because it is absurd on its face, you end up with the bootleggers and the baptists on the same side of the voting booth. Bootleggers would end up with very little money and the baptists would lose out on forcing their moral superiority on anyone who doesn’t agree.

A bootlegger therefore has to do very little if the baptists pursue keeping alcohol sales illegal on Sunday. In fact, they will throw as much support behind the baptists as possible if they were smart.

Whodathunkit.

I don’t really know what to write but I will say it has been a good weekend. So good, I wasn’t bitching while I scrubbed the floors. Or complaining about dusting.

As of Tuesday, December 30, I have passed two of my tests:

• Nebraska Life, Accident and Annuities
• Series 7 Broker exam

I have the materials and I have started studying for my final exam to become fully licensed as a Financial Advisor. The final test, the Series 66 exam, is the final step to be fully licensed. Once I have completed that I will continue the process of developing my practice here in Omaha. I have been pursuing this process for the past 3 months - undergoing extensive training and development with a regional broker-dealer. Because I am not fully licensed, I can not solicit any new business but I have been building up much of the supporting structure for my new business. I’m excited, scared, happy and sad to a degree.

I won’t be blogging about my career all that much. FINRA’s rules on new media make the entire process overly restrictive. What I will say is that for all the complaining about a lack of regulation in the financial sector - it’s disgustingly wrong. Of course, if you know me personally or read this blog regularly, I am highly an anti-regulation person. Regulation does very little to stop any illicit or unethical behavior. Like squeezing a water balloon, the more you squeeze, the more the balloon slips out between the fingers.  It is a never-ending process of trying to burden actions of people to the point of making any action futile.

What I want to know is why the securities industry does not have their own “Federalist Society” for demanding reform and reducing the regulatory burden?

I always love watching Republican values at work. Sarah Palin’s daugher has a baby out of wedlock. This was released just after news arrived that Virginity pledges don’t work.  I wonder if Google has an irony detection system - I was browsing Google and found this:

Oh the irony of Republican reproductive values

LA Times runs an article where David Axelrod, an Obama advisor states:

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Axelrod, a senior advisor to Obama, said, “We have to act. Every economist from left to right agrees that we have to do something big in terms of job creation, but we want to do it in a way that will leave a lasting footprint.”

I bet I can think of at least two economists who disagree with Axelrod’s assumption. And there are a host of other economists who disagree, whether they view the Austrian tradition in a positive/negative light.

The problem here is that our new administration is posturing this as a Global Warming-type “scientific consensus” issue that has already been used and beat into the ground. I’m sure Axelrod will start backpedaling and trying to reign in the comment with something to the effect of “the best economists” or the “brightest economists” to properly qualify the statement. Unfortunately, those definitions would be at the sole discretion of Axelrod and only as qualified as Axelrod is to determine who is the best and brightest.

The problem is that we don’t turn to scientific study to determine what the future is. We infer from the data that we have in an attempt to predict, with some reasonable probability, of future events.  There is a significant difference.  Prediction carries the inherent possibility of chance - the product or outcome of the unexpected is a distinct probability.

With this in mind, an economist’s opinion is only that - the opinion of the scientist. To assume an economist can predict the future with any certainty, which Axelrod appears willing to assume through the “consensus” opinion, is nothing short of malarky. If you believe that an economist knows the future any better than a carnival fortune teller, you are sadly mistaken.

Viat Radley over at The Agitator comes a link everyone shoudl bookmark:

here’s a link to one of my favs

And another good link of a shoplifter caught in the act, confonted, and bolts out the door with the goods:

link

After being blocked from Technorati, it looks like I am, once again, in the fold. I’m not entirely sure why I had been blocked although it appears my playing around with Adsense in multiple places may have been part of the cause.

Well, I’m back and advertising free.

After being somewhat disenfranchised with the Windows build of Io I grabbed a copy of VirtualBox and built Ubuntu mini up with a barebones, just-enough-for-io-and-a-little-more set of libraries. I added KDE4, Konqueror and Konsole for a little bit of visual pleasure.

Thankfully I was able, after several hours, get Io running with *most* of the addons compiled and installed. It took a little bit of hackery but I finally got the $%@#% thing built. And because most of my programming is done on the web I wanted to play with the new(ish) webserver tools that were built into Io.

Rich Collins did some great work with his HttpServer implementation. However some of the code I found on the Internet was a little outdated. Cliff Wells, another Io hacker, had run some benchmarks with apache’s benchmarking tool ‘ab’. This was done back in October.

However, as I’ve found out - a lot of things change quickly with relatively young languages. If you grab Cliff’s code and get a couple of errors, I’ve done the hard work for you and fingered it out. A couple of the changes are as follows:

server := HTTPServer do(

… should be changed to

server := HttpServer do (

The same goes for two lines down where you see HTTPResponse should be changed to HttpResponse After you do this, you need to add a single method to get the server to start outputting data to your browser.

renderResponse := method ( request, response,
response body = ( createBody )

)

This should get you current with the latest (as of the date of this post).

Have fun!

p.s. I really hate how the wordpress editor busts your $@#% up swapping between HTML and Visual.