Special Interest Group on CRAP » Rants

Two months without chocolate?

Kevin McCurley — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 02:55:49 +0000

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 looking forward to eating key lime pie, graham cracker crust, and other delights.

Stock markets are a Ponzi scheme

Kevin McCurley — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 05:23:49 +0000

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 a trillion dollars from the bailout have been investing their way to recovery. My hypothesis is that a trillion dollars can buy a lot of pumping up of the stock markets, but there is nothing to sustain it.

In reality, unless a company pays dividends to stockholders, the owner of a share of stock holds essentially nothing. It’s universally true that an asset is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. Some assets possess some intrinsic value (e.g., glittery stuff like diamonds or stuff that keeps you warm like oil or real estate that you can live on). By contrast, stock has no intrinsic value whatsoever. It’s like any other currency, and the people who create the currency have the power to devalue it at their own discretion.

All of my life I have heard the mantra that long term investments in the stock market will outperform other types of more conservative investments, but like many individual investors, I have recently come to regard such claims as untrustworthy and self-serving. By staying on the sidelines for the next ten years I may forego gains that flow to others who participate in the game, but I think I’m pretty much done with gambling. I have now seen two major collapses of stock markets in the last ten years, and I don’t care to participate in any more.

The annual tax torture

Kevin McCurley — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 07:13:28 +0000

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 have investment income, then taxes turn into a byzantine mystery as you struggle to figure out what is actually counted as income. My tax software, broker, and employer are of little help in this process – they tend to report things in language that is subtly different from what the IRS specifies things in. This is probably caused by various attempts to simplify things by using simpler language, but the end result is that things end up being obfuscated.

It’s not clear what all this mess and smell is supposed to accomplish other than to be a full employment act for tax professionals, accountants, and IRS employees. Whenever I hear calls for a “flat tax” I am baffled by why people think this will improve the situation, because it simply replaces one piecewise linear function with a second piecewise linear function. The problem is in figuring out what counts as income, and it seems like it should be a lot simpler than this.

Monthly spam from ACM

Kevin McCurley — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:37:51 +0000

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. I wonder if any of the mechanism design people have analyzed the data from this spam to see how effective it is. What metrics would you use to judge effectiveness, given that it continues to build up long-standing animosity among a few people like me?

This is a supposedly reputable “scientific society” whose sole purpose seems to be to lock up publications behind a pay firewall and spam potential members to encourage them to join. These clowns even throw in a “Free World Clock Calculator”. Is that the kind of professional society you want to belong to?

Here is the latest spam. I am posting it in the hope that it will encourage spammers to spam them.

Dear KEVIN MCCURLEY,

We have an important chance for you to join ACM, including a world clock calculator, if you respond at:

https://campus.acm.org/public/qjstuwithbook/joinacm2.cfm?client_no=%27%2B%3C%27%2FPL7%2B3%20%20%20%0A&promo=PSAP28SVL

As a member of ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, you will have access to a host of career-enhancing benefits including the newly re-launched “Communications of the ACM” magazine, the most trusted source on advanced computing.

Essential reasons to read “Communications” each and every month:

* News, analysis and insights from the computing world’s leading authorities on the cutting edge of technology
* Balanced and accessible coverage
* Broad and in-depth technical analysis
* Serious and insightful commentary
* Access to an active global community of computing professionals
* Full, real-time, website access to additional content, tools and resources

ACM members are raving about the fully redesigned publication:

“A must-read from cover to cover”
“More articles relevant to my work and interests”
“A top scientific journal”
“Quality technical content”
“More engaging”
“An exciting layout”
“A vastly better magazine”

Learn more about all of the additional benefits of ACM membership, including access to thousands of online books and courses, by visiting:

https://campus.acm.org/public/qjstuwithbook/joinacm2.cfm?client_no=%27%2B%3C%27%2FPL7%2B3%20%20%20%0A&promo=PSAP28SVL

Join ACM today and receive a 15% discount plus an ACM Free World Clock Calculator!

I hope you will take a moment to consider how valuable an ACM membership and “Communications of the ACM” magazine can be to your career!

Sincerely,
Lillian Israel
Director of Membership
ACM
acmhelp@acm.org

ACM Member Services Department
1-800-342-6626 (U.S. and Canada)
1-212-626-0500 (Global)
======================================
To be excluded from future offers of ACM Membership and services, please reply
to unsubscribe-sig@acm.org with the following line in the “Subject” field:

UNSUBSCRIBE

ACM will never sell or rent your email address.
======================================

The chaos of data on telephony networks

Kevin McCurley — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:10:33 +0000

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 address by four was equal to the remainder when you divided the third octet of your IP address by four. (did you get that?)
Packets between ISPs would be billed at the rate of $125/megabyte if they carried email.

I’m hoping to see some of this change during my lifetime.

Even more spam from scientific publishers

Kevin McCurley — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:16:02 +0000

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 to such behavior?

Dear friend,

Purdue University has named World Scientific as its publisher for the notes from its immensely popular “Electronics from the Bottom Up” nanoelectronic devices and materials lectures! The press release outlining the milestone collaboration is appended in the email. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any queries.

Thank you and regards, Jason Lim Marketing Executive World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd 5 Toh Tuck Link Singapore 596224 Tel. +65 6466 5775 ext. 247 Fax. +65 6467 7667 Email: cjlim@wspc.com

United frequent flyer scam

Kevin McCurley — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:45:31 +0000

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 new class called “Economy Minus” which used to be called Economy. When you go to check in, you are asked if you want to upgrade to “Economy Plus” from “Economy Minus”, at which point they wanted $148 for one way. I think…nah. I’m average sized and I have a wife to lean against, so there was no real value in this. Turns out that the “Economy Minus” section is full, so they wouldn’t give me a seat assignment, instead giving me a “Boarding Management Card”, which is more like a “Boarding Torture Identification Card”. Now I get to wait in the boarding area until they have verified that there is nobody traveling on this flight who is stupid enough to pay $74 for a seat that they are going to get anyway if they hold out like I am. I’ve played this game before (and ranted about it), but now it’s an established procedure so it’s merely an amusement for me.

Apparently United Airlines has forgotten that the frequent flyer programs were started in order to reward loyal customers, and have instead turned them into programs to torture customers they regard as unworthy. Warren Buffet once said that someone should have shot down the Wright Brothers and saved investors 100 years of agony. Airlines have repeatedly demonstrated a level of management incompetence that is truly amazing, and part of this is the unique ways in which they turn loyalty programs into disincentive programs. If you want to chuckle at their incompetence, read this.

MORE spam from Cambridge University Press

Kevin McCurley — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:39:39 +0000

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 for my email address again. That’s another sign of disregard for their diminishing set of customers.

I had previously complained about ACM spamming me – are they now enabling third party spammers as well? More SIGCRAP.

Spam from Cambridge University Press

Kevin McCurley — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:51:21 +0000

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.

You may have already won

Kevin McCurley — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:17:30 +0000

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 from Africa with one of these scams, trying to get me to send them information for them. For the last four years I have also been getting phone calls to my office from these clowns, trying to get me to yield to temptation and help them steal from me. This last week I got three of these calls, all from country code 233 indicating Ghana. It’s getting more and more annoying (though perhaps the solution is simply to disconnect my phone).

If you try to shop on craigslist, you regularly come across semi-obvious scams, and there are even more scams that are fairly well concealed. I am now getting several spammers a day following me on twitter, and my spam folder on my personal email account typically has 5,000 spam messages in it (I never look at them).

All of this is a reminder that a lot of people on this planet try to make their living from fraud and other criminal activities. Technology has become an enabler for these scams, and the most chilling offender in my mind is voice over IP, which makes phone calls from countries like Ghana essentially free. People who are naive or lonely or otherwise vulnerable (particularly senior citizens) are going to fall victims to this criminality. It used to be that if you wanted to avoid crime, you could mostly do this by sequestering yourself in a civil part of the world. The Internet is making that more difficult.