Follow this link to the story in OpEdNews. I haven’t read enough of this web site to vouch for this story based on that. However, the story seems to be legitimate and the links look good, although I haven’t had a chance to follow them yet.
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Let’s see if this quote piques your interest:

When “market making” (matching buyers with sellers) was done strictly by human brokers on the floor of the stock exchange, manipulations and front running were possible but were against the rules, which were strictly enforced. Front running by computer, using complex trading programs, is an entirely different species of fraud. A minor potential for abuse has morphed into a monster. Keiser maintains that computerized front running with HFT has become the principal business of Wall Street and the primary force driving most of the volume on exchanges, contributing not only to a large portion of trading profits but to the manipulation of markets for economic and political ends.

You ought to be sufficiently horrified if you read more.

There are so many stories on OpEdNews about financial shenanigans that I could hardly post them all. I decided to link to this one story. You can read the others if you have the time.

2010/04/29 – I clicked on the link in the article for U.S. patent no. 5,960,176. This actually leads to patent search on Google which gives you the patent and patents that refer to it

This link takes you to actual patent 5960176

The name of the patent is Computer-Implemented Securities Trading System With A Virtual Specialist Function.

There is also patent 6,505,174.

Patent 6,505,174 has the same title as patent 5,960,176. The younger patent references the older patent.

In this video, President Obama explains what we have to do to make the elections in November 2010 a success.  Success being defined as helping to continue to carry out the platform that the President outlined when the nation decided to make him our next President.

Follow this link to the web site where you can get more information.

Follow this link to the story in Slate by Ron Rosenbaum.

He describes what is toxic about the Tea Party’s distorted version of history.

The muddled Tea Party version of history is more than wrong and fraudulent. It’s offensive. Calling Obama a tyrant, a communist, or a fascist is deeply offensive to all the real victims of tyranny, the real victims of communism and fascism. The tens of millions murdered. It trivializes such suffering inexcusably for the T.P.ers to claim that they are suffering from similar oppression because they might have their taxes raised or be subject to demonic “federal regulation.”

I don’t know what to make of the link to Victoria Jackson’s interview on Faux Noise. Is she still acting the ditzy airhead upon which she based her comedic career or is that really what passes for her thinking?

My recent post, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, discusses the book that is in large part about how difficult a problem it is for news and other organizations to continue to get paid for the work they do in providing content.

A recent announcement by the Worcester T & G that they will attempt to charge for some of their content has spurred me to a new  realization.

When I pay a subscription fee for a hardcopy newspaper, magazine, or book, I try to make sure that I read enough of what I bought to get my money’s worth.  I know I have just so much time I can spend reading.  In the past, when I could match my available time to the content that I could reasonably afford and obtain, the trade-off wasn’t impossibly difficult.  It was also not too difficult to predict what I would want to pay to have access to.

The internet has changed the situation enormously.  I now have easy access to far more than I have the time to read.  I can no longer predict which sources I will want to read for which items now that I have the ability to find out what so many sources are writing about.

How much would I be willing to pay each source?  Would I spend $2 or $3 a month to each of the hundreds of sources I might tap?  How do I decide which of these sources to spread the $2 or $3 per month each that I could afford?  How would I keep track of all these subscriptions to renew the ones I wanted and to cancel the ones I no longer wanted?

So, I think that even a relatively low fee of $2 or $3 per month is not viable.

If an organization came along that would provide me access to a large number of these sources and charge me $10 or $20 a month, I might think about subscribing.  After the fee that the organization would take as its profit, it could distribute the rest of the money to the sources that provide the content.  They could make the payments proportionate to the amount of readership on a per eyeball pair per minute basis. (I do not know how to account for reading speed or information absorption speed.) This would spread the money around in a fair manner that I could not possibly accomplish on my own by trying to distribute my payments individually.  By fair, I mean fair to the content providers and fair to the content consumers.

Google already is able to collect this kind of information as a way of extracting payments for the ads that it places on web pages.  It also shares some of this revenue with web sites on which it has placed the ads. It does the collecting and distributing on a per click basis.  If nobody clicks on your ad, you don’t pay and the web site doesn’t get paid.

Somebody just needs to turn it around and use it as a way to distribute subscription income.  There is not a far distance from what Google is already doing and my new idea.

Add in to the mix the retail selling of intellectual property that iTunes and Amazon do, and you are not very far away from what I am suggesting.

How about Publisher’s Clearing House? This would be a natural business for them to enter if they didn’t define themselves so narrowly.

If someone else doesn’t wake up, Google will have a monopoly on this end of the business, too.

I have published this idea as a knol on Google.

March 26, 2011

Making the payments proportional to eyeball per minute is of course only one method of making payment. Some amount of research and thought will have to be given to exactly how to distribute the payments. For instance payments per page per click could easily be gamed by the content provider by breaking up articles into many small pages. On the other hand, a content provider that published a long detailed article would be unfairly penalized by getting paid the same amount per page as a publisher with many small articles. Some of these problems might be ameliorated by natural free market forces. The method of payment adopted ought to promote a fair distribution of payments, however difficult it is to decide on what is fair.

I just took part in an action that I realize is more historically significant than the issue itself.

There is a little local brouhaha going on about the behavior of a member of the Board of Selectmen.

Follow this link to one of the items about this on Sturbridge Political Watch.  This item is a call to sign a recall petition to recall the board member.

The value of the internet in this event cannot be underestimated.

The Internet Is A News Source

I have always felt at a disadvantage in local politics, because I found it hard to be as informed as one can be with respect to national politics. You just never get enough news coverage of what is going on locally. True the author of the Sturbridge Political Watch is a Board of Selectman member, but the other members are free to write their own blog if they want.

Also this is not my only source of information. After being alerted to this story, I had opportunities to hear from eye witnesses.

The Internet can promote timely calls for action

This email I received is a great example

Hi.

The recall petition is circulating this a.m. at the recycling center until noon.  This afternoon some residents are collecting signatures around various neighborhoods in town.  I'm unsure if they plan to be in your neighborhood? 

You may also stop by our house to sign at 85 Breakneck Road.  Our number is 347-9216.

Thanks.  It's slow-going, but we are continuing to collect signatures and hoping to hit the 1300!

Jennifer Babcock

The Internet is awakening a new level of democracy

As a result of seeing the news items about this issue, having the time to mull it over, and then receiving a reminder about the petition, Sharon and I drove over to the Babcock’s and signed the petition..

Had the internet not been available, I might not have taken action after I missed my opportunity to sign the petition outside the polling place for a recent local election.

Local politicians can no longer depend on the apathy of the local electorate nor the local electorate’s ignorance of what is going on.

I already sent my email to Scott Brown before I even received the following email:

Steven — Last week, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell got all 41 GOP senators to promise to oppose Wall Street reform. He thought President Obama would back down in the face of a unified show of force. He was wrong. Instead, the President stood in front of Wall Street bankers Thursday, going to bat for consumers and confronting the toughest of crowds with a strong message: Reform is good for Americans, good for the market, and it’s time to get on board. Bipartisan discussions have begun again — but Wall Street lobbyists are still swarming Capitol Hill, trying to trip up negotiations and maintain the gridlock that has defined Washington for far too long. So now, it’s up to us. We need to show Republican senators that the American people are watching closely to see whose side they end up on. Tell Republicans in the Senate to stand up to the special interests and work with the President to pass Wall Street reform. The President laid out a bold plan to hold Wall Street accountable, to protect American taxpayers by ensuring they’ll never again be asked to bail out a big firm “too big to fail,” and to put in place the strongest consumer financial protections ever proposed. But this fight isn’t just about fixing Wall Street. It’s also about fixing Washington. For too long, it’s been a place where special interests have set the rules and petty partisanship has stood in the way of progress. As the President said Thursday, “We can and must put this kind of cynical politics aside.” Thanks to strong leadership from the President and Democrats in Congress, the gridlock is starting to crack, and Republicans are slowly giving signs that they’ll come on board. The Senate has even scheduled a preliminary vote for Monday at 5:15 p.m. But Wall Street lobbyists are flooding in to firm up opposition — trying to carve out loopholes and exemptions for big banks and lenders who have long exploited consumers. The only sure-fire way to make sure that the special interests don’t get their way is to show Senate Republicans that Americans are standing firmly with the President. Tell them to join us to fight for American families who are counting on reform, not the big Wall Street banks. Send a letter today: http://my.barackobama.com/WallStreetReformLetters Thanks, Mitch Mitch Stewart Director Organizing for America P.S. — Want to learn more about what reform means for you? Check out our online Wall Street reform resource center.

Paid for by Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee — 430 South Capitol Street SE, Washington, D.C. 20003. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Follow this link to the call to deem May 20, 2010 as the first annual Everybody Draw Mohamed Day!.

I can empathize with the pain that a Muslim might feel at seeing a purported drawing of Mohamed if they feel that their religion forbids such drawing.

Some radical Muslims might think that violent threats and actions are their appropriate reaction to the perceived offense. I have no control over what they think

However, I cannot condone threats and acts of murder over such an offense. This call to a non-violent action, Everybody Draw Mohamed Day!, seems to me like an appropriate response to such threats of violence.

Of course the response to acts of violence needs to be full enforcement of the law.

A Facebook friend, Tangelia Sinclair-Moore, posted, on her Facebook page, this rephrasing of an idea from a Baltimore Sun letter to the editor :

WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? The Medicare Part D enacted by the Bush administration REQUIRES all individuals who enroll for Medicare benefits to buy prescription insurance from private, for-profit insurance companies. Individuals who do not purchase a Part D insurance plan and who do not have other prescription insurance MUST pay a one-time PENALTY as well as increased monthly premiums once they do enroll in Part D.

I read the full letter after I wrote my comments below.  The author of that letter does an even better job of making the point than I did.

I am surprised that this fact had not occurred to me when I was reading about how all these Governors and State Attorney’s General are going to take the Health Care Reform bill to the Supreme Court because they believe it is unconstitutional for the federal government to require citizens to buy private health insurance.

I wonder if they have thought of the ramifications for George Bush’s legacy if they win their argument.