Saturday, October 27, 2007

2007 Nobel Peace Prize


I am all for Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on Climate Change.

There are some (on Digg and Fox News) that are against it but I am all for it.
They say:
"Historically" big political figures who mediate some peace treaty etc have won the award.

1.In a "Flat World" you will no longer have to be in a government position to have an impact on the world.

2. This isn't the fist time the award has stretched a bit beyond obvious conflict resolution.

1964 - MLK
1979 - Mother Teresa
1999 - Doctors without Borders
2006- Yunus and the Grameen Bank for micro credit lending to the poor (one my favorites)

And Al Gore using his semi celebrity status has had a huge impact on how people evaluate their values and priorities.

Books on CD Review

I finally fnished a batch of Books on CD. Let me know if you want to borrow any of them.

Social Intelligence: (A-) This is really good, similar to Stumbling upon Happiness it is more psychology and anatomy than most things I read. It talks a lot about how our brains were made to interact with others (unlike most animals). They discuss the importance of pre communication with babies on their development. The time in which they can't talk or even jesture their needs but can interact with their parents on a brain to brain level. They also discuss how we create tons of connections in our brains as we learn things but as we get older and have many many connections our brain starts to sacrafice certain connections to keep the ones we use more often. They say this explains why it is so hard for an adult to learn a new language and easy for children.
I wish I hadn't gotten the abridged version of this but I wasn't sure if I'd like it.

Status Anxiety: (Book on CD: C+, PBS special: A*) This has been driving me crazy for a while. This is a 120 min BBC special. It was on PBS in september. I watched it and it was really good, it talks about how freedom in america causes the side effect of not being happy. Because no matter how much you achieve, the oppotunity to go from poor to mega rich will always make you feel like you are underachieving. It was a great show w/ even talk of a French man who came to the US in 1815 or so and predicted this side effect.
The main problem is, I said this was a 120 min BBC special, *PBS only played the first hour and it ended with "now I will tell you how this affects our modern life at home and in the work place" and it ended. So I bought the book on CD which was not as good. A lot of great history but the author himself makes the PBS special very interesting. But for the book on CD they hired an award winning BBC voice and he is terrible. It comes out more like dramatic reading than a discussion.

The World is Flat: (First Half: C-, Second Half: B+) I had heard a lot about this so I got the unabridged version. 22 CDs and maybe 6 weeks of commute time to work. The first 12 or 13 CDs are interesting but not very insightful. Surprise, India and China are coming on strong with outsourcing! Who knew, so lets discuss this for 13 CDs. Not really that bad but it feels like it. The second half gets better with a look at the Dell computer supply chain etc. And he has some theories on how interconnected global economies makes the cost of war too great for modern day countries. He has the McDonald's theory from "The Lexus and the Olvie Tree" Dale has been reading. No countries whose middle class is adavcned enough to support having McDonald's has ever been at was with another country who has McDonald's. His Dell theory he says is even stronger. Any Asian county or anyone in the Dell supply chain won't go to war because the risk of being removed from dell's supply chain is too great.
He also looks at how terrorists are created by Islamic radicals. He says a lot of times it is educated people who leave the middle east only to see how much farther advanced the west is beyond the middle east. They feel humiliated because their belief is that they are the chosen ones. They also do not fit into the western values and use the internet to stay connected to the middle east and their beliefs. Terrorist leaders pray on their frustration and convince they they should become terrorists.

Next on the list:
Made to Stick

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

This I Believe...2

I do believe in Capitalism and Free Markets when they operate within a system that is designed optimize outputs that match with our values. We can't all ever agree on values and ideals so things are always in fluxx (sp. as a nod to the great card game).

I believe this is the 2 min example of how America has been working to be as great as we are today.

1.Employees are paid by companies to produce "stuff".
2.Companies sell the "stuff" for a profit to everyone.
3.Companies use their profit to buy other things from other companies.

* all of the above promotes a healthy stock market
If employees get a lot of money they will invest in markets for retirement.
If companies make a lot of profit their stock goes up.
When companies use their profits to buy things it helps the economy by giving other companies profits and other employees more jobs and higher wages.

When all this works, you get a virtuous cycle that keeps improving our quality of life and motivates companies and people to improve our standard of living.

I think Step 3 has recently been broken (or at least less efficient). And they are taking advantage of the entire system we have created, halting or slowing our virtuous cycle.

S&P 500 companies are making record profits. Not only record profits but those profits are growing at great rates. But these companies are all sitting on all of this money rather than reinvesting it into the economy. Last I heard I think all of the cash sitting in the S&P 500 is close to several trillion. Maybe I am off a bit but it is on the order of magnitude of our national debt.

If you listen to CNBC a lot you will hear the following phrase:

"the consumer is driving this economy"
"business spending is still very slow"

We (Step 1) have been trying our best to to keep the cycle going.
Consumer productivity is up.
Consumer spending is way up even to the point of personal debt being way up.

But companies are not doing their part. The point of giving companies tax breaks is so they can make good profits. They should use those "extra" profits to hire more people, pay their current employees more and spend money to help the economy.
This is not happening to the same degree as normal. As a result we feel the pain. If you company is growing profits at 10% shouldn't your salary increase 10% per year (or at least total compensation including benefits).

I am fine w/ profits if it keeps the economy and virtuous cycle going.
The need for profits without improving the economy results in:

1.Making ALL insurance more expensive.
You can see my comments on Dale's blog about Health Insurace. But also the Katrina issues with home owners insurance not wanting to pay people the amount they had insured because it hurts their profits. Aritlces then discussed the practices at All State (which I dumped) in that area as offering people very low payouts vs what they were entitled. If they faught the settlements then make it very expensive (i.e. lawyer fees) for them to come get their money.

2.Making college more expensive.
With limits on Financial Aid and Govenment loans it is bad when the "best" option for more money is Astrive.com who's 9%+ rate is touted as "cheaper than a credit card".

3.Giving you 3,000 calories per meal at Chilli's.
They get more profits for that $10 meal than the $9, 2,800 calorie meal they gave you last year. The extra costs of health affects of eating too much and eating bad is an external singularity because it is not paid for by the food comapnies it is paid for by everyone.

This is why even while a capitalist and economist I support local and private companies.

The current system makes giving money to companies (step 3) less efficient in keeping the economy going. It makes it more efficient to give it to individual owner or private comapnies.

I loved going to Madison's market in Glendale. It is a neat little grocer w/ Stewarts cream soda and great sandwiches (it was the last place I ate as a single man). It is now closed because people preferred to go to Kroger or Subway for groceries and subs. Even though those chains are less efficient at giving the money back to Glendale than even just the rent of Madison's.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Online Poker Cheating

I took this from a Digg story:
Background: Someone won a big tournament and was suspected of cheating. The data provided by the poker website also suggests he may have known everyone's hole cards.


The Absolute Poker controversy keeps getting more wild by the day.

So when we last left you, Absolute Poker had issued a statement denying that anyone had access to a "superuser" account and that no one could see any hole cards. After poring over the hand histories and evidence, they said, they had found no evidence of any wrong-doing. They would continue to investigate though, they had said. I thought at the time that Absolute Poker would just go into ignore mode from that point on, and the issue would eventually be dropped.

Well hold on..

Apparently, "CrazyMarco" (the player who had come second in that now infamous tournament that was won by "Potripper") asked for the hand histories from this tournament from Absolute Poker.

Absolute Poker sent the hand histories. Unfortunately for them, they also included the hole cards of every player at the table, and not just CrazyMarco's hole cards.

After viewing just a couple of hands, you can come to the conclusion that Potripper was cheating. The evidence is overwhelming. It is just ridiculous, and I find it hard to believe that they didn't do a better job of hiding it. Always getting his money in good, and never putting in an extra chip when he is behind in a hand. Going over the top of a re-raiser of a board of 8d 6d 3s holding the Q 10 of clubs, when his opponents are holding K J and Q J. Holding pocket Jacks against an opponent holding A Q, and check folding on the turn when a Queen comes out. Playing almost every hand when his opponents aren't dealt a big hand, but folding when an opponent at the table is dealt a big hand. Open folding KQ one hand (when an opponent is dealt AA), but raising 2/6 UTG when none of his opponents at the table have big hands. Going through a stretch when he wins something ridiculous like 65 hands out of a total of 90 hands. You can go on and on; if you need to see for yourself, there is plenty of evidence on Pocketfives and Twoplustwo. The people on those sites have done a TREMENDOUS job in getting these hand histories out to the public. Who knows how many other tournaments on Absolute were won in this fashion?

Absolute automatically loses all credibility because they say that there was no evidence of a "superuser" account in the hand histories. Oh really?

The best part of this story is just being fleshed out right now though. Who was involved in this operation?

Absolute Poker not only made a huge blunder in sending out the hand history with all of the hole cards displayed, but they also included the email addresses / account id's / IP Addresses of everyone who opened up a table as an observer during this tournament.

Apparently an Absolute Poker account with an ID of 363 opened up Potripper's table two hands into the tournament and railed him the entire way. The ID number is significant because this would indicate that this account was one of the first accounts EVER at Absolute Poker, making it likely that this is a person with extremely close ties to the company (employee, owner, shareholder, etc.)

Potripper folds the first two hands of the tournament, then ID 363 opens up Potripper's table to observe, and suddenly Potripper starts going wild, winning practically every hand.

The prevailing theory in the poker community? Potripper was a dummy account, and ID 363 had access to hole cards, and was relaying them to "Potripper."

Taken from Digg etc:

Apparently the IP address of User ID 363 resolves to Costa Rica as well, which is home to Absolute Poker.

The story gets more interesting by the minute, and I am doing my best to keep up with it.

I feel that it's important to report on this story, as it has big implications for online poker as a whole. In the end, protecting players is much more important to me than burning a bridge with an online poker room. We need to do our part to get the story out there, so that everyone can figure out exactly what happened, and make sure that it doesn't happen again. Nothing can be explained away in regards to this situation, the cat is out of the bag..

Here are some of the details behind the data analysis

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Weekend

This was a busy weekend.

Friday:
Amanda came down from Dayton and Rachel made her favorite spaghetti bake for dinner. It was really good then and when I had leftovers on sunday.
Then we went roller skating at Skateown USA after confirming they served Nachos (C+ for "bingo style" - a heated cup of cheese). Here are some pictures:


Saturday:
Amanda stayed over since we had to wake up at 6:30 am. We volunteered to be the victims in a Christ Hospital emergnecy drill. The situation was the Enquirer building caught on fire and collapsed. I picked an easy victim, I was a green tag, 19 yr old w/ chest pain, shortness of breath, and a history of bipolar. Rachel and Amanda were both DOA and went to the Morgue.
After a really long nap we went to Rachel's Mom's to see the OSU game and Rachel got her baby fix as Matt and Shannon were down with little Sam. Once the game was in hand we played Fluxx and 5 bazillion Rummy, as it is known in my family. My Rummy game was really off, but I was used to Grandma Sturgis throwing me an Ace or two when Grandpa wasn't looking.

Sunday:
Rachel and I went to Yellow Springs for the afternoon. We ate at Young's Dairy and walked around town. It is somewhat similar to Concord or Chatam with neat little stores. There were a lot of neat cars going through town including:

The red Ferarri every young boy had as a matchbox
A Bentley
A Tiumph 3 and an MG
An old 70's volvo wagon that someone near me really liked
Lots of motorcycles

Even after buying our house, Rachel still loves open houses, so we went to one for an old house in Yellow Springs. The front half was very old with original 1930's wooden floors and built in bookshelves in the library. In the back they added on a new kitchen which was nice, but didn't really fit the rest of the house. The back screened in patio felt more like Massachusetts with a really mature and grown in back yard with a lot of shady trees.

Monday:
We went to the Patriots game, Rachel's brother Robby was able to come on late notice so we picked him up at UC. The Pats won 34-13. At first the crowd was really into the game. They got a little down once the Pats went up 10-0. When the bengals finally scored you would have thought they won the super bowl the way the crowd went crazy and started talking smack. By the second half the crowd was quiet and even sat down. By the 4th quarter they started to leave since they "were getting screwed" on all of the calls.

I didn't have to say a whole lot since they were so down but my top comments were:

1. "This is just like the game against Cleveland"
2. "Oh No! Ocho No-catch-o"
3. "Randy Moss is amazing"
4. "Wow!"

Rachel had some good ones too for a couple of the annoying fans behind us, I'll let her post them.