Truck and Barter

Wiping off the Dust

I'm going to start this blog over; just me alone with just one rule: I cannot get myself fired.

Even with that severe restriction, I hope to get to show you all new tricks I can do.

Thanks to Ian, Paul, Bob, and everyone who joined T&B up at some point. Your posts are archived, and I'll make sure that readers can find out more about who you are, if you want.

Where am I?

The real world continues to keep me away from blogging, sorry.

Trackbacks Disabled

FYI, trackbacks have been disabled permanently, as the cost-risks of attack and abuse now greatly outweigh the infrequent benefit of sincere use.

Horse Fish?

Local fishermen found the following weird looking fish- if any body knows the scientific name for it, drop in a line.

Collina’s stuff on auction

A local daily Haveeru has organized an auction of items used by the world's most popular referee, Pierluigi Collina of Italy during the 2002 FIFA world cup finals. The proceeds of the auction are to go to families who lost their homes in the tsunami disaster of 2004. They will be on E Bay soon, auction closing on the 25th December.

Related; Some cool pics of Pierluigi Collina

Daniel and Gnarls

I'd like to announce two new contributors -- well, one nearly new and one very new.

First, Daniel Goodman returns, now pursuing a Masters degree in the economics program at Vanderbilt, after studying economics at GMU as an undergraduate.

Second, the pseudonymous Narl S. Barkleigh promises to bring some hard-boiled thrashing to T&B's usually calm and polite pages. You can call him Gnarls.

Re: Paul

Paul has let me know that he will be extremely busy in the forseeable future, and will be posting far less frequently. I gather that he must refocus his energies on earning a living.

My thanks go to Paul for being an incredible one-man show, and I hope he finds the time to contribute.

The Perfect Anonymizer?

Will this be the end of internet censorship;

“A modified version of Mozilla Firefox that lets users browse the web anonymously has been released.

The Torpark browser can be stored on and run from a flash USB memory stick, which can effectively turn a PC into an anonymous terminal.

Hacktivismo - an eclectic bunch of lawyers, artists, hackers and human rights activists - has created the modified portable web browser.

On its website the group claims to be "committed to developing technologies in support of the highest standards of human rights."

Explaining the motivation behind Torpack, Hacktivismo founder Oxblood Ruffin said: "We live in a time where acquisition technologies are cherry picking and collating every aspect of our online lives - so it seems that it's a browser attempting to redress that supposed imbalance."

No installation is required to run Torpark but the two folders generated from its free download website have to stay together for the browser to run.

Working in conjunction with The Onion Router (TOR) network, the tool anonymises a user's connection through encryption and constantly changing net addresses. This makes it incredibly difficult for ISPs to track an individuals web-related activity and location.”

I haven’t tried it- let us hear from those who have used it.

Comments Offline Back Online!

Due to excessive spam attempts causing repeated server crashes, comments were offline for 6 days while I figured out how to implement strict security protocols.

All commenters must now enter a 6 digit code to validate their comments. Please let me know if you have any trouble!

Homeland Security warning on Microsoft Windows

The US Department of Homeland Security has urged Windows users to install the latest patches from Microsoft as quickly as possible;

“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is recommending that Windows Operating Systems users apply Microsoft security patch MS06-040 as quickly as possible. This security patch is designed to protect against a vulnerability that, if exploited, could enable an attacker to remotely take control of an affected system and install programs, view, change, or delete data, and create new accounts with full user rights”

Via BBC

See what the world is watching

Google has started a new feature- Google Trends;

Sex; top 4 regions, Pakistan, Egypt, Vietnam, Iran, top city is Cairo

Money Supply; top 4 regions, Pakistan, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong

Milton Friedman; top 4 regions, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Hong Kong

Bin Laden- Why’s Norway and Argentina on top.

Have fun with it.

Carnival of Carnivals

Why is that in the most advanced country on the planet, more than 2 million parents insist that education ought to be the delivered by the parents; US Department of Education figure is around 1 million. As the Economist reports;

“The market for teaching materials and supplies for home-schoolers is worth at least $850m a year. More than three-quarters of universities now have policies for dealing with home-schooled children. Support networks have sprung up in hundreds of towns and cities across the country to allow parents to do everything from establishing science labs to forming sports teams and defending their rights and reputation. When J.C. Penney started selling a T-shirt in 2001 that featured “Home Skooled” with a picture of a trailer home, the store faced so many complaints that it withdrew the item from sale.”

For more see Carnival of Home Schooling.

Other latest editions of Carnivals; Carnival Of Education, Carnival of Tomorrow, Medical Carnival, Carnival of Personal Finance, Carnival of NFL, Carnival of Godless, Carnival of Marketing, Carnival of Recipes, Carnival of Capitalists, Carnival of Entrepreneurship

Quote for Reflection

“Aware adults with autism and their parents are often angry about autism. They may ask why nature or God created such horrible conditions as autism, manic depression, and schizophrenia. However, if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses… If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.”

- Temple Grandin, quoted in ‘An Anthropologist on Mars’ p.292, by Oliver Sacks

Autism didn’t prevent Temple Grandin living a full life, completing a Ph.D in animal science and becoming an accomplished author and researcher. When actor Dustin Hoffman researched his role in the movie "Rain Man," he came to her for advice.

For Comment : I’m a great fan of Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory. It seems to me that a lot of autistic people are great visual thinkers.

Related Links:

- Temple Grandin interview at NPR discussing Animal Behavior and autism

- BBC All in the Mind discussion on latest autism research

- Blogs covering autism issues; Autism Diva, Mind Hacks, Neurodiversity Blog

- Autism Spectrum Disorder- a podcast discussion at Radio National

- Autism TV

Slacker...

Special thanks to Paul (and Ian) for taking charge of T&B while I slack off quite a bit. My life has focused around my career, which I cannot write about, and my son, who has a considerable speech delay. He has what the experts call "specific language impairment", meaning that with current tools and tests we cannot identify any physiological reason for his silence. He's not autistic, or even on the spectrum; he's not developmentally disabled, besides the usual difficulties one would expect of a 2.5 year old child unable to join together many words. He just doesn't talk much at all, though what he does say, he says rather clearly.

All of which is a long-winded way of pointing to my new blog dedicated to that childhood speech delay. For quite some time, I've been reading the academic literature on childhood speech delay; my brain's full of the stuff, and now's the time to change the balance of trade -- remaking the imported raw material into exports, as it were.

My particular concern is laying out how SLI cases are identified, and how they are treated. I'll also look at the costs and benefits of such "intervention". I don't know if I'll keep writing to the blog or not, but given that I've now linked to it, I'll be embarassed not to.

*** Please note that this research is on my own time, and paid for with my own dime; it is unaffiliated with my employer, for whom I have not done any other research on intervention. ***

Definitions

T&S still gets a pretty decent amount of traffic from searches on "accounting definitions". In a prior response, Kevin put up a note on this post.

I wanted to point to another page that may be of help as well. Reuters has just started a Financial Glossary wiki. Maybe this will prove a help to those people looking up definitions.

Purging Spam

Due to my complete inattention, T&B publshed approximately 3,000 spam comments In the last two months. That's actually a pretty low number considering I was using a dumb filter and was suffering from a strange hardware configuration that wouldn't let me alter software parameters.

T&B receives a spam comment every ten minutes -- roughly 6 an hour, or about 150 per day -- 9,000 over the past two months. So the filter caught ~66% of these, without me doing anything, while subjecting honest commenters to a 1-2% false positive probability.

I've culled the spam, and reconstituted the filter, hoping to up the catch rate to 98% with a less than 1% false positive rate.

Thanks for your patience.

Clarification

I am not related to Lillo Brancato, and have absolutely no inside information about his arraignment for the murder of an NYPD officer.

Shaped Charge and a Restart

The sudden end of the Wal-Mart blog has taken a very big toll on me, and I have had little desire to blog at all. But I'll be returning to T&B shortly.

But in the meantime, I present you with an example of how to get others to believe you've validated your model: A visual side-by-side comparison of a model of a shaped charge with the detonation of the real thing:

Thanks Kevin

You know, I was just coming to announce it and Kevin beat me. Oh well, so as Kevin posted immediately below, I started a new blog to post my options trades and reasons behind them. I've done trading journals on Elitetrader.com before and found it to be a very usefull excercise. A public airing places some contraints on trading, in other words, maybe I won't do some things that I might be tempted to normally. Besides, I just need a place to write my thoughts down each day. I could write it up on a yellow pad or in Word, but why not show worts and all.

As Kevin noted, another reason to start it is I'm getting in on the ground floor of options/derivatives blogging. There aren't any option blogs out there except the sole one I ran across, the lonely Galatime. If you know of any others let me know. I'll be a part of two blogs in the process of the specialization of the econosphere, Hedging Options and the possibly soon to be former Always low Prices. Hopefully, I won't get any legal letters or a phone call from the SEC.

Edit: And to be honest, I debated at the beginning of the semester whether to take two or three class'. The cancelling of one of them made the choice easy.

Hedging Options - Bob's New Blog

Although he hasn't asked me to advertise it, I must point out Hedging Options, Robert Arne's new trading blog. Bob is a man who has his priorities straight:

This actually my first trade in a while as I basically took the last six months off from trading. In addition to being a trader, I'm also a Phd econ student. No, they don't mix very well, so I cut back to two classes a semester to focus more on trading.

One reason I wanted to start this blog is that theren't hardly any options blog out there.

I took a Master's level mathematical finance course a while back, but the whole topic wasn't really exciting to me. But Bob makes it sound like loads of fun!

Here's to econ blog specialization!

T&B Breaks 200,000

Sometime last night -- and we do get plenty of people through the evening, largely I suspect because of the time zone issues for those interested in the dinar -- Truck & Barter had it's 200,000th hit.

Thanks to everyone who's visited, commented, returned, and, most especially, linked to one of the facets of Brancato Industries.

More on Pyramid Schemes

My earlier post on Pyramid Schemes seems to have upset some people. Please let me clarify my position on the �Biznas.com�.

I�ve also seen a presentation of the �Biznas.com� products and to me it seems too good to be true. All the people I know who bought this did so in order make some money out of selling it to other people, not for the utility derived from the range of products offered. I invite anyone who bought it for the sake of the products it offered to please comment.

Will Eisner, 1917-2005.

The father of modern comics passed away yesterday at the age of 87.

Certainly his most famous work is from The Spirit, a blue-suited crime-fighter that served to not only for revolutionizing comics, but was a model for countless detective characters for years. However, you'd do yourself a disservice if you didn't read his more personal works, such as A Contract With God or To the Heart of the Storm.

I nearly pursued a career as a comic book artist, in large part because of the work of this man and the people that followed him. Of course, when I realized that my ability to draw had peaked around age 14, I wisely looked elsewhere for a vocation. But if you want a glimpse at the promise and power of comics (a poor term, though not nearly as contorted as "graphic novel"), his work is the best place to start.

Donating to Tsunami Relief; A look at Amazon

I'm taking Vinayak's suggestion that this is one of the best places to donate if you'd like to provide some help to the victims of the earthquake/tsunami.

Of course, a good deal of discussion is going on about public and private donation. For me it's akin to the debate about voting. No, the amount I can afford to send is not going to be decisive in someone's life, as much as I might wish it to be. But when you aggregate the donations, the real effect can be huge.

Take, for example, donations through Amazon's Red Cross page. As of Glenn Reynold's posting about it yesterday at 1:49 pm, the total stood at approximately $2,000,000. Right now, the total is $4,356,235.12 (at 10:50 am, EST), over 72251 donations, for an average of $60.30 for each donation. Personally, I find the mobilization of private funds amazing. My hope now is that it will get to where it's needed and do as much good as possible.

I need a favour from you.

My hometown of Madras (Chennai) in South India was hit by the Tsunami.

I'm cross-posting this rushed entry from my own blog. Please help in any way possible:

Today, I'd like to ask everyone I know of through this forum - Chris, Govind, Masa, Ngan, Florian, Philip, Adora, Jacqueline, Kerry, Ian, Kevin, Bryan, William, Daniel, Tyler... get the word out. Get people to help. This is my home town... and I want to know that I did everything I could to help get money in.

Back in undergrad, I worked for two years with one of the most incredible charities in South India - AID. They are an incredible organisation, started and run by Indian students abroad, and powered by a gold medalist genius who left it all to work for the poor. One of the biggest positives of working with AID is that your money goes into what it needs to with the path of least resistance. Normally, around 10% upwards of most charitable contributions gets lost in administrative costs. Though I don't have AID's percentages off the top right now, it is extremely low. In 2002 and 2003, nine city colleges in Madras ran a charity collection drive - in 2002 we used the funds to send it to orphanages and poor children with special needs - in 2003 we instituted an endowment that paid the salary of 4 deserving social workers for one year.

AID is now working day and night on Tsunami relief operations across Tamil Nadu.

You can read more about it by clicking on this line. Please, please contribute!

You can also find authentic news from students on the ground on the site.

New at the Wal-Mart Blog

I realize not much has been going on here at T&B, but at Always Low Prices we've been discussing everything from RFID to WM selling anti-WM books to the firing of high-ranking executives for alleged misconduct.

We Shall Not Beg!

While two first-rate professors with a top-grade economics & culture blog are holding out their hats to pay for bandwidth, we at T&B have way too much pride for that.

So let me be clear on the T&B donation policy:

1. I don't want your damn money. Thanks, anyway!
2. I don't need your damn money. Thankfully!
3. I prefer that you leave a comment rather than click on an ad.
4. If you insist on sending a donation to me or a coblogger, then do so.

I blogged when it was free, and I blogged when it cost me money. But thanks to these folks, T&B is currently a positive cash-flow enterprise. No, I do not distribute dividends to cobloggers, because their posts aren't driving the revenue. If they were, I would.

Someday, this money source may disappear, but so be it. We will still have no paypal link, no amazon suggestions, no begging--just Google ads, which you don't click on.

Thank you for your patronage.

Veterans Day

It's a brief deviation, but I wanted to make a special note on the site, especially considering that it appears there are some current and ex-military people who visit the site to discuss the Iraqi Dinar.

To all those who serve and have served, to those who support them in both physical and emotional ways, and to those who sacrifice so much so that the members of the military may continue to give so much for the United States:

Thank you.

It's Time to Join T&B

I've made previous calls for people to join Truck & Barter, and I am making one again. Anybody who wants to blog about economics, send me an email, and I'll hook you up. In the past I've let anybody join who wants to, regardless of education, qualification, or ideology, and these terms are still on the table.

Why start from scratch, alone, when you can start with hundreds of readers? Try it out for one month, and if you don't like blogging on T&B, then ride off into the sunset...

I will not edit or alter your posts, except for bad URLs or content that leaves me liable for criminal or civil damages. If you stop posting for a long time, then I'll assume you moved to Novosibirsk and took up ice fishing, and I'll cut you from the masthead.

Pyramid Scheme Warning

Some of our readers might have heard of the web based pyramid scheme involving a company called SkyBiz:

One SkyBiz presentation claimed, "This system was put together by a gentleman named Eric Rasmussen who basically joined SkyBiz and six months later was able to retire with an income of about 400,000 a month. Currently, [he] lives in the Gold Coast of Australia and he's making 76,000 a week and growing�They provided CD-Roms, computer disks, videos and books promoting the SkyBiz programs and they provide a PowerPoint presentation on their website that can be downloaded to aid in recruiting new members. The cost to join the SkyBiz Program is $125, ostensibly used to buy an "e-Commerce Web Pak," but in reality was to purchase the right to receive compensation for recruiting additional participants. Participants were urged to invest in more than one "Web Pak," to maximize their earning potential.

Now it seems the SkyBiz has been born-again in the Middle-East and Asia by the name of a company called BizNas. From Maldives, Sri Lanka to United Arab Emirates, people are being fooled to buy their package and are being promised commissions if they recruit additional participants. It sounds too good to be true.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan has web notice declaring the winding up of the company BizNas.com Pakistan (Pvt). It was also involved in a similar multi-level web based marketing scheme, offering public to purchase its membership card at US $99, and in return giving different packages of learning and facility of web hosting. Here is more of �Biznas.com� rip off in the Indian Subcontinent. The problem in poor countries is that there are no consumer protection agencies and people can be ripped off easily.

Here is an excellent little book (Little black book of scams) issued by Office of Fair Trading Australia. Here is another creative pyramid scheme which tried targeting women.

Carnival of the Capitalists: Almost Anniversary Issue

Check out the CoTC at Drakeview, now nearly one year old! Note that T&B has not appeared often in the CoTC, since I try top submit only exceptional posts...

Over 100,000 Served

Thanks to the Iraqi Dinar speculators, T&B just had its 100,000th visitor.

Cool.

Regarding T&B Traffic and Bandwidth

The lack of new posts on T&B has not stopped traffic from reaching absurd levels for us. My posts (1,2) on the Iraqi Dinar have been receiving ~1000 hits a day from search engines. This seemed to have no drawback until jobbers and speculators used one post as a forum. Before I knew it, more than 1700 comments (now archived elsewhere) were put on a single post. (Note that if you want to talk about the Iraqi Dinar, I suggest the Investors' Iraq Forum). At the climax, each download of the post was about ~1MB in bandwidth--requiring 2GB of bandwidth in 24 hours.

I point this out because I can now prove that spontaneous order exists by pointing to one that I own--one based on trust, reciprocity, and mutual assistance in the pursuit of speculative profit. What was the function of this order? The commenters exchanged information on how and from whom to buy Iraqi Dinar (on ebay and elsewhere), when and where exchange of currency could take place in the US, etc.; more importantly they tried to grasp the actual economic situation in Iraq by means of presenting and debating the little information available. I think they're wildly over-optimistic about the future exchange rate of the Dinar, and I've said so by not speculating on Dinar at all, even though the folks tell me I'm losing out on the opportunity to become a millionaire...

I made no sustained or difficult effort to support the spontaneous order--the people did it themselves--but I wound up creating a public good.

Then along came an intellectual entrepreneur who provided a superior product--a new, more sensible and sustainable format for comments. I still get the search engine hits, but I send the speculators to the competition, a real-world Macy's sending customers to Gimbals so they find exactly what they're looking for...

Selling Out

You might have notice the color-matching Google Ads in the rightmost sidebar. I won't tell you to click on them, because you won't even if I plead.

I have not added them because I need the money. I have added them to capture funds from all those people who find T&B by searching for Truck or Barter or automobile insurance companies that covers a mobile unit truck in iowa or difference between s&p and moody's credit rating.

T&B's usual content is only tangential to these searches, leading people to go elsewhere quickly. And I'd like to profit off their exit. Regular readers won't even look at the ads unless they're funny--which they're not, since Google perceives T&B to be about credit and investing.

Can You see T&B?

It has come to my attention that some T&B readers using Internet Explorer 5.5 and before are having to wait eons for the page to load. Others have the link bars on the right overlapping the text. Please let me know (and send a screenshot, if you can), should you have any such difficulty reading T&B.

Email me at kbrancat-at-gmu.edu or kevin-at-truckandbarter.com ...

Classified Work

I'll be working in a classified environment for at least the next few days--possibly part of next week--and won't be checking email or posting except in the evenings, or if sleeping baby permits, the very early mornings.

This reminds me that yesterday, Businesspundit linked to a Forbes top 10 list of jobs that won't be outsorced offshore. The list is rather silly, including CEO's and surgeons.

Not included on the list were the jobs guaranteed not to be outsourced offshore --military positions in and out of warfighting specialties.

However, working in the military is not just a career move, it is a lifestyle choice not usually among the top picks of Forbes readers. (I'd make a terrible military officer--I can't even lead and inspire a team of bloggers! I just let them do what they want!)

Also, any job, like mine, that requires U.S. citizenship, or a security clearance, will not be performed for 1/10th the cost and 1/9th the productivity elsewhere on the planet--even if economic profits are to be had by doing so.

Our federal government sets and enforces rules meant to restrict the flow of information and technology outside the country, and I won't even give the appearance of violating those rules.

Saludos

My name is Bob, I'm going to be blogging here on T&B. I'm an open-minded virgo with undergrad degrees in economics and spanish. I play lacrosse and I study phillipino martial arts (sticks and knives). I also have a cat.

Like most people who visit or post on this site, I find economics to be an excellent lens for looking at the world. One of the reasons I enjoy economics so much is that I love disagreements with other people. Not the violent, I'm-going-to-smash-your-face disagreements; the intellectual kind. With economic principles tending to be opposite what most politicians and idealist say, I have plentiful opportunities to argue the virtues of Wal-Mart and free trade.

I am most interested in the application of economic principles to the politics and everyday life. (Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite authors). I am a registered independent though, so if my blogs seem politically charged, rest assured that my disdain for all but a few politicians is equal in its veracity.

All that being said, I look forward to disagreements, discourse and fine economic thinking!

Allow myself to introduce... Myself

As Austin Powers said "Allow myself to introduce... myself". My name is Taggert J. Brooks, I'm a recently promoted Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse. I answer to my intials, T.J., since that was my intended name, but unfortunately people convinced my mother to give me a *real* name. She wanted something out of the ordinary which she definitely got when she stumbled on the name Taggert while reading about one of Charlie Manson's victims . Taggert Ohta, son of Dr. Ohta and only 11 years old, poor kid.

Now the only people who call me Taggert are credit card companies with amazing deals on payment protection. I do use the name Taggert professionally mostly becuase I look like I'm 16 and initals would make me sound like it as well. Besides I'm not famous enough to just use my initials. I've thought about using T. Jonathan but it doesn't have the ring of N. Gregory or J. Bradford, or the myriad of other people using their first initial and middle names.

Anyhow, enough about names, on to the important stuff, my interests. There isn't much in economics that doesn't interest me, but these days I seem to be working on economic education stuff, and I still write on exchanges rates, in particular PPP, becuase there aren't enough PPP papers out there. I'm up for tenure in the Fall so my *real* research interests will remain a mystery until then.

Finally thanks to Kevin for the opportunity to blog here, I hope to help improve his Marginal Product, and in the process hopefully not dimish mine. I will still try to post on my own blog as well: A Random Walk.

Help Increase my Marginal Product!

My marginal and total products have been decreasing in practically every task lately--in particular at my paid job. Some people would call it a bad slump; I call it a dangerous one.

I know I'm overextending myself with the job, baby, dissertation, and blogs, but I find myself unwilling to lower voluntarily my committment to any of them. Hence, economic law has stepped in, and nature is lowering my productivity at all of them--except perhaps the routine tasks and pleasures of taking care of a baby.

This is most dangerous at work, where I used to pride myself on productivity and achievement--leaving me ample time for the grad school coursework and blogging. But now I find myself wasting more and more time every day, and I'm getting further behind.

Hence, expect my posting to be pulsating and bizarre for the next two weeks or so, as I try out various work/home schedules, so that I may once again try to write a dissertation without quitting my job, or driving my wife nuts, or never seeing my son.

Also, I'd like for your assistance in my quest for a higher marginal product. Truck and Barter could use an additional blogger or two. If you'd like to blog about economics on T&B, email me. Novices welcome. Experts will be given a laurel and hardy handshake. I'll even give you an email account @truckandbarter.com, if you want.

Welcome to the New T&B

T&B has moved over to Movable Type; I've worked hard so that nobody can see too much of a difference.

The old blogger archives will be up and running, but will not be imported into the new framework. You can still access them on the right side...

Look for subtle--and not so subtle--changes in layout over the coming months.

Please go here to see recent posts in May--like Ian's on E-Voting, Regulation Causing Higher Crime, and Taxing Everything; my recent posts show why high school basketball stars should go straight to the pros, and how the man behind Two Buck Chuck wants to covert the US into a wine-loving nation.

Also note that the syndication link has changed--I've deleted the old one.