Special Interest Group on CRAP

I saw a story today on the New York Times about a hedge fund manager who has cornered the cocoa market and how chocolate prices are likely to rise. I can’t think of a better reason to develop a taste for other flavors. It’s another reminder that wall street is essentially just a casino. I’m [...]

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Like many small investors, I have recently started thinking of the stock market as nothing more than a Ponzi scheme in which companies and financial services companies conspire to print lottery tickets. Many of us have mostly sat on the sidelines while the DOW went from 7,000 to 11,000, while financial services companies who received [...]

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Every year when I fill out my taxes, I am amazed at how screwed up our taxation system is. If you are an average wage earner, perhaps with a mortgage, then you end up with a really simple procedure for filing your taxes. If you have a business (sole proprietorship, partnership, etc) or if you [...]

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I went back to look at the spam that is sent out by ACM trying to get me to buy a membership. It turns out that it is sent out on the 11th of each month, right on schedule. I guess that means there is a cron job someplace that is firing off these things. [...]

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Just think if the Internet had been designed by the telephone companies: We would have four different internets, with gateways that restricted what could flow through them. You would have to buy your computer from your ISP, and you couldn’t switch ISPs and keep the same computer unless the remainder when you divided the MAC [...]

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Today I got another spam from ACM, plus a spam from “World Scientific Publishing” that tries to look like they are acting on behalf of Purdue University. I have appended the one from World Scientific Publishers in the hopes that it will shame them into avoiding spam in the future. Why would Purdue University consent [...]

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Has anyone else noticed how the airlines have steadily devalued frequent flyer miles over the years? I just cashed in some miles to fly to Boston on United, and after much hassle with an arcane web site, managed to secure some economy seats. United has something called “Economy Plus”, but in reality, they created a [...]

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I got another spam from Cambridge University Press today. Apparently this is their new strategy for success as a tree-murdering paper publisher. They provide an opt-out link at the bottom: http://listserv.cup.org/t/49324/239073/2681/0/ which obviously contains campaign information in it, but apparently they were too incompetent to encode my email address in there because the form asks [...]

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Today I received spam from Cambridge University Press, using an email address that I used to register for the ACM Electronic Commerce Conference in 2006. It appears that even supposedly reputable organizations cannot resist the temptation to send spam.

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Everyone probably gets these emails telling you that you have a long lost uncle who was an official in Africa who left you $21 million, and if you’d just send $1,000 to them then they will wire you the money. They are called 419 scams. About once a year I also get an airmail letter [...]

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