As Switters said: the more advertising I see, the less I want to buy (Tom Robbins). I am no fortress, however. This appealed to me:
…you freeloading “Internet generation” types should subscribe to the damned magazine already, for the so-low-it’s-sinful price of $19.97 per year.
Now I subscribe to Reason online and in print.
School shootings (Again) offer no explanations.
Gun control lovers fill their tanks on this stuff (State lawmakers push, pull on gun control following NIU shootings).
This time, investigators find a link (Gunman, Virginia Tech shooter used same Web dealer) suggesting that the shootings might have had a third party in common.
Besides well-meaning but misguided Americans, who would like to succeed in disarming the American populace? A foreign enemy, that’s who.
This is a perfect opportunity for the JTTFs to stop training layabouts to act like terrorists (Myths of Domestic Terror) and find the real foreign agents sowing violence in our midst.
Reality check: I have no more evidence than the articles linked above. Nevertheless, weaker leads have sparked investigations. If our enemies are plotting to weaken our domestic defenses by fueling (and, who knows, possibly staffing) the gun control lobby, they are very wise indeed. I stand behind an “individual rights” interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Use the Scientific Method to determine the validity of the Scientific Method.
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Have you heard of Marl the Stock Robot? Google “Marl” and click the first ad you see. You don’t have to read the whole page because I have summed it up in the next paragraph. Please click the ad anyway. You’ll understand why in a minute.
That page tells a story about the invention of “the first commercially available stock picking robot” which is available for $28,000 per license, which includes a week of training in the programmer’s home. The script assumes you can’t afford the software and offers you a stock tips newsletter subscription for only $47.
Maybe it’s a great newsletter. I don’t care about that. I am interested in the Marl software which, at $28,000, is out of the reach of anyone earnestly reading that page but vastly under-priced if it does what they claim.
Normally you would reject this sort of offer on the “too good to be true” rule alone but I wasn’t satisfied. I went looking for the software and I didn’t find any information leading to the purchase of a Marl software license. I did find a large number of sites echoing the same story and offering the same newsletter.
The site is one of a great many taking part in an affiliate marketing scheme to sell a newsletter subscription. This is just one of countless schemes telling lies in order to sell something. This is why I told you to click the ad rather than publish a link. They are paying for those ads, baiting real suckers, lying about a non-existent robot. Your clicks cost them money.
I don’t know whether the newsletter is any good. Maybe it can teach you enough to make some lucky investments. But if you want to make real money from Marl, I suggest you set up an affiliate marketing web site to sell that newsletter and buy all the ads you can get for $47.
Update 1: This is how a person can make money on a stock tip scam and why the government puts them away:
The volume of distribution of a newsletter such as the one at issue can rapidly become large enough that its membership, acting on the tips they receive, create an artificial demand for the penny stock and consequently cause the stock price to rise. If one reacts quickly enough and buys the stock before this wave of demand comes to market, it may be possible to realize a very high margin of profit where no real value exists in the merits of the company being traded. In this scenario, the biggest winner will be the first person to know about the tip and act on it, i.e. the publisher of the newsletter. Subscribers can profit, too, but they must buy fast and sell before the artificial demand bubble pops and the price regains parity with the actual market value.
Update 2: A reader going by the name of Mistlethrush left a very important comment below. It reveals the inner workings of the Marl software!
I just got off the phone with an old friend who moved away when we were in middle school. We hadn’t really talked in more than sixteen years. He reminded me of something I said when we were eleven years old, sitting in detention after school:
Grades show what you’re doing, not what you can do.
I was being a wise-ass but my friend took it as wisdom.
Let me reconstruct the scene for you. Our project was due that week and we had made no progress. The teacher recognized us as the brightest kids in the class and she was terribly disappointed whenever we slacked off. She would lecture us about our “potential” every time an assignment failed to captivate our attention—more often than not. This time she insisted that we show some effort.
The teacher balanced her grading system on two independent values: quantity of effort and quality of work. A deficit in either value could be made up by a surplus in the other. A student producing poor work could score well by virtue of having put forth sufficient effort. Contrariwise, we aimed to produce brilliant work with little effort. In this way we spent less of our valuable youth on boring sixth grade assignments and yet came away with ample grades for advancement.
(Notwithstanding the Marxist underpinnings of her grading system, our strategy had its own Achilles Heel: effort at study is an effective tool for impressing knowledge onto young minds. By avoiding effort, we circumvented our lessons while producing “evidence” of our successful learning. Any rebellion against education will succeed against learning.)
We got the grades we needed but the teacher chided us for merely “sliding by” whenever our work was less than brilliant. In her frame of reference we were flaunting the worst sort of insolence. Yet in spite of her lectures, we would not compromise. We had discovered a strategy that let us win the game of school without cheating and we felt we deserved praise for this accomplishment. This was our potential.