The Dumping Ground

I hate debit cards. With a passion. Your money is in your bank account for less time, thus earning less interest. Also, they don't come with the same level of consumer protection and fraud liability as the good old-fashioned credit card. To boot, they are a huge money-making scheme for the banks. Their popularity has been artificially inflated with clever marketing campaigns that tout their one supposed upside: You can't spend more than you have in your account.

Except it's bullshit. If you're a smart person, you keep as little money in your checking account as possible, since it bears little or no interest. Unfortunately, with debit cards, it's really easy to lost track of how much you should keep in your account. So you drain your account - but instead of your card being denied, the bank "helpfully" transfers money from your savings account, under the guise of "overdraft protection". And they charge your a huge fee - like $20. So your morning latte just cost you $23.57! Great!

Now, of course, they have to notify you of your overdraft. But what notification scheme do they choose? Oh, right, the United States Postal Service. They send you a letter, telling you that you've just overdrawn your account, and that they've taken their fee, and you should really transfer some more money into your account. But, being the postal service, the letter doesn't get there for three days; and, as a normal American, you buy a lot more stuff during that three days of ignorance.

You buy lunch: $7. Overdraft. Another $20 fee.
You pop in for a beer at the pub: $4.50. Overdraft. Another $20 fee.
You swing by the store for a gallon of milk: $2.69. Overdraft. Another $20 fee.
And so on - for three more days!

The end result? A little screw-up turns into hundreds of dollars in bank fees and a dozen letters in your mailbox. Oh, did I mention they won't let you opt-out of this service? Hot damn those banks sure are helpful!

Hopefully, it's about to change. Buried near the end of this NYT article on impending changes to credit card regulation is this tiny little gem:

The proposal also seeks to regulate overdraft protection, banning companies from assessing a fee unless the customer chooses not to opt out of that service.

One can only hope.

Matt over at Machination wrote a little blurb on veteran suicide rates. I was immediately suspicious as to whether the statistic of 6,256 suicides in 2005 was actually meaningful, or whether it was just an attempt to play shock-the-public. Suicide is much more common than people generally realize. More people commit suicide every year than are murdered. (And if that isn't an indication of how screwed up civilization is, I don't know what is. But I digress.)

Let's take a few minutes with Google and a calculator: First, let's pull the national suicide rate for 2005: 89.4 suicides per day. If there were 6,256 veteran suicides in 2005, then that means there was 17.1 suicides per day among that group. Divide that by 89.4 suicides per day for the general population, and it turns out that 19.2% of the suicides every day are by people formerly serving in the military. Good to know. Now, is that actually significant?

If all other things are equal, then we would expect veterans to commit suicide at a rate proportional to their representation in the population. So let's get the total U.S. population of veterans: 26,403,703 people. That means veterans make up about 9.3% of the U.S. population.

And there you have it: Veterans make up 9.3% of the population, but make up 19.2% of the suicides. The evidence suggests that veterans really are more likely to commit suicide than the general population.

Unfortunately, the only good numbers for the number of veterans are from the 2000 census, so we could be a bit off on our percentages; but it seems doubtful that the percentages changed enough from 2000 to 2005 to skew the results significantly. Also, it should be pointed out that the number of suicides per day reported above was only for 45 states. Since our other statistics are for the entire population, that means that unless the other five states had zero veteran suicides in 2005, then the percentage of suicides for veterans is actually greater than reported. So the problem is even worse than the numbers here show.

It looks like the numbers from CBS check out. It's nice to see reporters checking their facts now and then. Good job!

The new Target store is open, and it seems everyone is excited about shopping there. It's undoubtedly good news for the neighborhood, and good news for the District, but unfortunately it's not good news for Hedda and I. We won't be shopping there.

See, we've been personally boycotting Target for several years, since learning that they tolerate pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for the morning-after pill. It's a hard boycott for us, because we both really like the store, their merchandise, and their prices. But as long as Target values the personal and arbitrary religious beliefs of an employee more than the professional medical opinion of a board-certified physician, then they won't see a dime from us.

The current debate over the use of waterboarding seems new and fresh and relevant. But if working on a digital archive of historical newspapers has taught me anything, it's that we've pretty much already done everything.

I'd never thought to search for waterboarding in Chronicling America, but the post on boingboing this morning led me to do a search for water cure, with some fascinating results.

It turns out that practice was just as fraught with controversy then as it was now. It prompted a Congressional investigation, and the court-martial of a general (although he was acquitted).

It was even used as a discipline tool in a Kansas mental hospital! The article states that the torture was used on patients who failed to follow the orders of the institution's head, Miss Houston, who administered the punishment herself. The practice ceased when Miss Houston was replaced as head of the hospital by the ostensibly more gentle Miss Gower. She merely had the problem patients "strapped to a bench and whipped."

Over at Wired, there's a great little editorial on one player's discovery of so-called terrorist tactics in Halo 3.

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I'm only making it easier for them to shoot me -- and thus I'm marching straight into the jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I'll whip out a sticky plasma grenade -- and throw it at them. Because I've run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I'll die -- but he'll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed someone "from beyond the grave.")

[...]

The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes -- haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away -- just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3.

Terrorism is a military tactic - a tactic of last resort. We decry the tactic as shameful and unfair, but we continually fail to realize that it is a rational tactic for combatants with nothing to lose, fighting a lopsided conflict they cannot hope to win. It is a tactic we cannot defeat by invading any place for any reason (real or imagined), because it is born of the inequalities inherent in civilization. Despite its apparent general ineffectiveness as a tactic, terrorism will continue to re-evolve because a chance at minor success is a better option than no chance at success.

Faced with such a hopeless situation, what would you do? As the gamer above demonstrates, each of us are not as far removed from such tactics as we'd like to think.

So, I guess there's something going on about whether or not Clinton's campaign left a tip after dining at a restaurant in Iowa? Whatever. Who the fuck cares? I guess the news media.

Buried at the end of technology article, about Clinton's new instant-media-response web site, is this great little gem:

“You people are really nuts,” [the waitress] told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

Amen, sister.

You've seen the spam. It's some of the most insidious, and some of the most profitable. Con artists blast emails around the world touting a "hot tip" on some worthless stock that they've purchased. The laws of probability mean that some idiots out there will fall for the scam and buy the stock. After the price has been run up sufficiently, they dump the stock. The scammer makes a tidy profit, and the dummy is stuck with a worthless stock. There's a sucker born every minute.

Now, the SEC is looking to take the incentive out of the practice by freezing trading on stocks targeted by such spam. It's being hailed as a brilliant move across the Intertubes. Most notable is Google's very public endorsement of the plan. If the SEC starts cracking down on these scams, then maybe they'll stop spamming!

Stop a minute, though, and take a step back from the seething rage you feel for the crap in your inbox. There are a couple of negatives to this plan that deserve scrutiny.

First, the SEC is making themselves inadvertent accomplices to blackmail. If the SEC consistently shuts down trading on spammed companies' stocks, then it is only a matter of time before spammers extort honest companies under threat of falling beneath the SEC's hammer. Remember: These scams usually involve small companies which are not traded on major exchanges. These little guys are probably not in a position to fight the SEC, and may very well pony up to avoid further damage to their company. At least in the current scenario, the sucker is the one losing out. With the new scheme, it becomes possible to zero in on a helpless target.

Second, in response to the SEC's move, it seems quite likely the spammers will execute a classic risk-distribution strategy: diversify, diversify, diversify. Spam is ridiculously easy to send out, and just as inexpensive. The criminals here can easily spread their penny holdings around much more than they already are, and then spam a much broader range of companies. In theory, they could pump a thousand companies' stocks one week, and target another thousand the next. The SEC cannot hope to keep up with a flood of that kind, and the companies and markets won't bear that type of interference for long.

In short, this entire idea is destined for failure. We've known for a long time that the solution to spam is simple economics. If you remove the profitable endpoint from the scenario, the spam will stop. Unfortunately, it's impossible remove the profit from stock pump spams. We'll have to find another way.

(Photos modified from the originals (Mail and we've got mail) by GoldenEel and anna banana, respectively; used and redistributed under a CC BY 2.0 license and a CC BY-SA license, respectively.)