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The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

These odd bots don’t really make sense within the normal parameters of the high-frequency trading business. High-frequency traders do employ algorithms to look for patterns in the market and exploit them, but their goal is making winning trades, not simply sending quotes into the financial ether.

Donovan thinks that the odd algorithms are just a way of introducing noise into the works. Other firms have to deal with that noise, but the originating entity can easily filter it out because they know what they did. Perhaps that gives them an advantage of some milliseconds. In the highly competitive and fast HFT world, where even one’s physical proximity to a stock exchange matters, market players could be looking for any advantage.

SkyNet is watching.

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Everybody needs a hobby. I doubt that it will float, though — or fly.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Yet another good reason to stay away from Facebook.

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Obama persists in acting as if he were president of a University rather than President of the United States.

Specifically, he has bypassed the Senate confirmation procedure by (1) installing Don Berwick, via recess appointment, as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and (2) making Elizabeth Warren a “special adviser” so she can create and oversee the new consumer financial protection bureau.

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Bearing in mind, of course, that what journalistas think is ‘far-Right’ is actually moderately conservative. Still, it’s a healthy sign, considering the galloping dhimmitude toward which Sweden has been on track for the last few years.

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Now that we have entered the implementation phase of ObamaCare, things are becoming more clear.  Many of the bold promises that were offered to sell ObamaCare to the American public were not based in reality.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Taxes increases hit Americans next year and, in many states, they are already seeing health insurance rates increase as a result of ObamaCare. In addition to the Obama Administration promising that insurance rates would not go up, they have also promised that rationing of care would not happen.  But bad things seems to be happening sooner than expected and contrary to explicit promises of this Administration.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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How liberal sentimentality often leads to genocide.

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Life has become extremely complex in the University of New Mexico’s English department in the three years since Lisa D. Chávez, a tenured associate professor, was discovered moonlighting as the phone-sex dominatrix “Mistress Jade,” and posing in promotional pictures sexually dominating one of her own graduate students.

Sounds like every professor’s dream.

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Bastiat said long ago that you can have a society in which the few plunder the many (which is eventually what all societies become), the many plunder the few (which is unstable but obviously popular), everybody plunders everybody (which is what we have developed from the Old Republic), and nobody plunders anybody. The latter was what he favored, and is in theory the goal of the Libertarians, but it is a difficult state to achieve. In part because that’s because we don’t really agree on plunder, and we don’t really agree on what services government ought to provide. I thought of an example of that while on my walk this morning: a young mother was getting her small child into the car. The amount of equipment it takes legally to transport a small child is astonishing. All my children grew up in an era in which seat belts were an option available on a new car for a price, and car seats didn’t exist at all. They survived. Is it freedom or irresponsibility to allow parents to drive children without a federally approved car seat? Is enforcing that restriction a legitimate act of government? I suspect there would be wide disagreement on this even among the Tea Party people.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

This is not a list of one hundred greatest movie scenes, and it isn’t a list of one hundred long movie scenes.

These are movie scenes that promise something wonderful, and compel you to watch them. They assert themselves. They do not merely tempt you to put off a potty break. That would not work; that is what pause buttons are for. These are scenes that you can intuitively sense must be kept intact, no matter how long they are, and you have to consume them that way.

Read it.

Innovation doesn’t come at the top, but at the bottom.

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Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty, who lost the Democratic nomination in Tuesday’s primary, won the Republican nomination as a write-in candidate, the District board of elections said.

This is just a crazy year in politics.

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“There was a time when the 3,000 miles was a good guideline,” said Philip Reed, senior consumer advice editor for the car site Edmunds.com. “But it’s no longer true for any car bought in the last seven or eight years.”

Read it.

Mao Zedong caused the death of 45 million people according to a scholar who was given unprecedented access to Chinese Communist Party archives.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Take the rail link between Tampa and Orlando that imagineers hope will shuttle theme-parkers at speeds reaching 186 m.p.h. President Obama has already thrown $1.25 billion at the line. Presumably, the named expresses will be The Absentee Balloter and The Recount.

The reason high-speed rail has more allure in Europe is because people live in cities. Nor do they like driving their cars on the cobblestones of historic quarters. In China, cities are megalopolises and few Chinese own cars or want to drive them across the vast country. France is a one-city country, so all rail lines lead quickly to Paris, as Louis XIV would have wanted.

David Friedman nails it.

Bush is responsible for the Republican insurrection and the Tea Party Movement twice over. To begin with, he spent eight years demonstrating that Republicans were at least as willing to increase the size of government, and to do it with borrowed money, as Democrats—indeed, more willing than the most recent Democratic administration. That was a good reason for Republicans who believe in the sorts of things Bush said he believed in to conclude that electing Republicans was no great improvement over electing Democrats, hence that renominating current incumbents would mean the wrong people being elected—whoever won. From there it is a short step to nominating someone else, even at the risk of losing the subsequent election.

The best thing you can say about George W. Bush is that he was better than his father.

The Onion.

Easier said than done….

Read it.

Personally, I am tired of the term “RINO.” Some on the right are quick to label anyone a RINO who disagrees with them, about anything. And yet there are times when the term really does apply.

No shit.

A true Republican in name only is not a politician with a conservative foundation but also a sprinkling of moderate or liberal views on certain issues. John McCain is a good example of that type. A RINO is a politician for whom politics is not a matter of ideology, and the party is only the means to a self-gratifying end. Mike Castle, it appears, may be in that category.

I think that’s too generous to McCain.

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Since transit is heavily subsidized by the taxpayers anyway, I guess it doesn’t really matter in the long run.

We could just give union members welfare payments directly and save all of the frictional costs of pretending to launder it through the market–but that would be too honest for our political system to cope with, I suspect.

Read it.

How much would it cost to get them to do the rest of us the same favor?

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How do entrenched, corrupt Democratic Congressmen extract money from lobbyists? Through an old-fashioned shakedown. If you want to see how crude the Democrats’ techniques are, listen to the voicemail message that Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton left for a D.C. lobbyist.

And it’s not just limited to Democrats – there are plenty of corrupt Republicans who work the same scams. Democrats are merely more polished and professional about it.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, makes an obvious analogy explicit.

With separationism not an option this side of some great politico-cultural upheaval, presumably we are stuck with having Muslims among us in quantity.  Is this so bad?  In the approved political liturgy of today’s West, the chanted response here is: “Most Muslims are moderate and law-abiding.”  I suppose that is true, but when was history ever driven by the passive “most”?  Most Russians in 1917 were not Bolsheviks.  Come to think of it, most Arabs in A.D. 622 were not Muslims.

Islam is worse than Communism, because it is longer-established, religion-based, and not as economically suicidal. And we still haven’t beaten Communism, as a look at our own Democrat party and its policies makes plain. We’re in for a Long War, and we’d better get buckled down to it.

Read it.

The owners of Mickey Mouse have a lot to answer for, as do the Congressmen that they bought.

This one is from a few months back, but I think it’s an interesting topic that deserves some discussion. Rufus Pollock decided to look at how many books would be in the public domain today  if we’d either kept copyright law at its original 14 years (plus the possibility of a 14 year renewal) or if we had copyright set at 15 years flat (a number that a recent research project suggested was the optimal length for copyright (pdf). Not surprisingly, he found that a hell of a lot more works would be in the public domain.

Rather than 19% of all books being in the public domain — as the situation is today — we’d have 52% of books being in the public domain under the 14+14 scenario and 75% of works being in the public domain under the 15 yr copyright scenario. As he notes, that latter number is comparable to the percentage of works in the public domain in 1795, in the early days of copyright law in the US. This is important to note, because if you actually understand the history of copyright law, you would know that it’s true purpose was to expand the public domain, and thus it seems worthy to look at how it may be doing the exact opposite of that. In the past century, copyright law in the US has only expanded — with the single exception of recognizing that federal documents (mostly) don’t deserve copyright. Nothing new has entered the public domain through copyright expiring in quite some time, and nothing new will do so for many years as well (and don’t be surprised if we get another attempt at copyright extension soon…).

Truly, we have the best government that money can buy.

Read it.

Nonsense. We grouchy pessimists don’t have hearts, so it’s not a problem.

Fargin’ sentimental know-it-alls….

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This is the sort of bullshit that passes for economics these days.

Software ‘licenses’ are transfer payments from users to producers. Every dollar that might have gone to a producer stays with a user instead; there is no ‘loss’. Since the software can be infinitely replicated at trivial cost, any value created by the replication and use of that software is pure rent-seeking by the software creator–we’re not talking widgets, here, where something that took actual physical resources is going to be languishing in idleness (and perhaps get wasted as scrap) if it doesn’t sell.

From a macroeconomic perspective, the result is software in the hands of people who, in many cases, would not have ‘bought’ it because they couldn’t have afforded the economic ‘rent’ being sought. To the extent that the use of that software creates economic activity, it actually increases the overall supply of goods & services; the economy as a whole is larger than it would have been had the software not been ‘pirated’. So it didn’t cost ‘the world’ anything at all; rather, it profited ‘the world’ by the extent of that increase, which would not have taken place had the transfer payment actually occurred.

So whenever you see one of these bullshit industry-sponsored ‘studies’, mentally put the correct ‘ourselves’ in place of the usual ‘the world’ or ‘the industry’, and you’ll see what’s actually happening.

Read it.

I’m all for people actually looking out for consumer rights, but sometimes I wonder who appointed these folks as our “watchdogs?”

A very good question, and one that is too infrequently asked.

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Slow news day.

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The plan is to first upgrade each cell site’s backhaul connection to Gigabit Ethernet so they’ll have the necessary bandwidth to support the 5-12Mbps down and 2-5Mbps up speeds with 30-150ms latency promised for Big Red’s LTE network at launch.

Check it out.

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Now fears have been raised over the safety of the activity, after a mother-of-two was left paralysed following an accident during a pole-dancing class.

Debbie Plowman, 32, suffered devastating injuries when she fell, breaking her neck and severely damaging her spinal cord.

She was left paralysed from the chest down and remains on a ventilator to enable her to breathe. She can communicate only through a computer that tracks her eye movements.

The obvious question, of course, is why a mother-of-two was pole dancing.

She’s not eligible for a Darwin Award because she’s already reproduced.

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NB: Paying bribes is not inconsistent with shari’a law.

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NB: Democracy is not a Muslim value.

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Who cares about the corn genome when you can study chocolate instead?

The genome sequence, which enters the public domain today, is the result of a partnership among a few unlikely bedfellows: Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms, Milky Way bars and other treats; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service; and IBM. The trio hopes international agricultural researchers will immediately start refining the sequence. As with any gene mapping project, decoding the complete genome will take some time.

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The police have told Sverigedemokraterna (the Sweden Democrats) that they must cancel all their public meetings because their safety cannot be guaranteed.

In other words, Swedish law enforcement admits that it either can’t or won’t prevent anarchist and Muslim thugs from assaulting and firebombing the meetings of a officially registered political party whose members are assembling lawfully and peacefully.

This is what the electoral process has become in modern multicultural Sweden.

The classic response to this, as seen throughout Europe in the 1930s, is for the party to form paramilitary forces of its own, leading to increasingly violent clashes in the streets between the two sides. We’ve been down that road before, and it always ends badly.

David Friedman thinks not.

Any desire on my part to research this for myself is insufficient to overcome my native indolence, so I’m happy to accept the results of his labors.

Read it.

They really do want everyone except the public employees to leave.

Pogue is. Of course, he’s paid to be.

Hipmunk is a flight-search site, a rival to Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia or Orbitz. But it’s far less cluttered. Its main screen has only 14 buttons and controls (From, To, Depart and various corporate links). Travelocity and Expedia each have over 40—not including ads, which don’t appear on Hipmunk.

So you type in JFK, SFO, 9/30 or whatever, and hit Search. Then, instead of an all-text table, the flights are laid out, color-coded by airline, as bars on a timeline of the day. You see exactly when they leave and land, and how many hours you’re traveling, based on the lengths of the bars.

Sounds like a winner. If I traveled by air — which thank God I don’t — I would love it.

Read it.

Ummmm, okay.

Charles Murray is always worth reading.

In 1963, thirty years after the New Deal started, the federal government still played little role in vast swathes of American life, from K-12 education to the way people went about providing goods and services to their fellow citizens. We can argue about which of the subsequent interventions were warranted and which were not, but not about this: The way that presidents and Congresses see their power to intervene in American life in 2010 is profoundly different from the way they saw it in 1963. In 1963, among mainstream Democrats as well as Republicans, it was accepted that an overarching purpose of the American Constitution was to limit the arenas in which government could act. Now, that recognition of that purpose has all but disappeared—in the executive branch, in the Supreme Court, and in Congresses controlled by Republicans as well as by Democrats. Big change, reflected in big government.

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More inconvenient truth:

Islamist enmity for infidels, regularly manifested in the jihad, is by now moderately well known. Lesser known, however, but of equal concern, is the mandate for Muslims to be loyal to fellow Muslims and Islam — a loyalty that all too often translates into disloyalty to all things non-Muslim, including the American people and their government.

This dichotomy of loyalty to Muslims and enmity for infidels — which, incidentally, corresponds well with Islamic law’s division of the world into the abode of war (deserving of enmity) and the abode of Islam (deserving of loyalty) — is founded on a Muslim doctrine called wala’ wa bara’ (best translated as “loyalty and enmity”). I first encountered this doctrine while translating various Arabic documents for The Al Qaeda Reader. In fact, the longest and arguably most revealing document I included in that volume is titled “Loyalty and Enmity” (pgs.63-115), compiled by Aymen Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two.

I say “compiled” because most of the words are direct quotes from the Koran, the Muslim prophet Muhammad, and Islam’s jurists (i.e., this doctrine is not an “al-Qaeda” phenomenon but rather permeates the Islamicate worldview).

There are no ‘American Muslims’. There are only Muslims who happen to be living in America.

Read it.

Read it.

Everyone repeat this 100 times.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it. And watch the video.

What we need to do is re-value the currency by a factor of five. That would reduce prices to where they were when I got out of college and make the penny useful again.

Read it.

This is a case study in how government expands. First there were free school lunch programs for poor kids. Then that got expanded to breakfast, and further expanded to summertime, when school isn’t in session. Now it’s being expanded from poor kids to everyone, so that instead of spending school time learning to read and write and do math, students are chowing down on Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms. And the responsibility for feeding children devolves away from parents onto the state, in partnership with the lobbyists for the manufacturers of Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms.

It’s funny how the same people who argue against tax cuts for the “wealthy” who don’t “need” the money have no problem dispensing Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms to children who don’t need them.