I’m not asking, I’m driving.

“A Sailor of Austria: In Which, Without Really Intending to, Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire (The Otto Prohaska Novels)” (John Biggins)

On Onions, Oil, and ‘Speculators’:
Politicians who blame “speculators” in futures markets for the run up in oil prices — such as Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) writing in this morning’s USAToday — should consider a lesson from the lowly onion.
Onions are one of the few commodities in the United States for which there are no futures markets, according to an item published Friday in Fortune magazine. (Futures markets allow the sale of commodities for set prices at future dates.) It seems that in the late 1950s domestic onion producers blamed those same speculators in futures markets for driving onion prices DOWN. They successfully lobbied Congress to ban all futures trading in onions, a ban that is still in place a half century later.
So has the absence of futures-market speculation kept onion prices low and stable? Quite the contrary. According to Fortune:

And yet even with no traders to blame, the volatility in onion prices makes the swings in oil and corn look tame, reinforcing academics’ belief that futures trading diminishes extreme price swings. Since 2006, oil prices have risen 100%, and corn is up 300%. But onion prices soared 400% between October 2006 and April 2007, when weather reduced crops, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only to crash 96% by March 2008 on overproduction and then rebound 300% by this past April.

Sen. Dorgan and his allies will need to find someone else to blame for volitale and rising oil prices.

Murdering Hookers Is One Thing, but Having Sex With Them…:

When I found myself in the unaccustomed position of seeing merit in a class action lawsuit, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I came across one that was easier to ridicule. Even The New York Times has trouble keeping a straight face about the lawsuit over “hidden sex scenes” in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Here is how what is ostensibly a news story about the case begins:

“Lawyers who sued the makers of the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas profess to be shocked, simply shocked, that few people who bought the game were offended by sex scenes buried in its software. Any buyer upset about hidden sex in the violent game could file a claim under a settlement the lawyers struck with the game’s makers, Rockstar Games, and its corporate parent, Take-Two Interactive. Of the millions of people who bought the San Andreas version after its release in 2004, exactly 2,676 filed claims.”

Each of them will get coupons or discounts worth $5 to $35, at a total cost of less than $30,000. The lawyers, meanwhile, will get $1.3 million, equivalent to a contingency fee of 4,300 percent. They emphasize that Take-Two also has promised to make a “charitable contribution” of $860,000 to everyone’s favorite charity, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

The problem is not just the extreme lopsidedness of the payments but the difficulty in figuring out exactly how consumers were injured by Take-Two’s failure to completely eliminate the sex scenes that had been edited out of the official game. The scenes were “accessible only to knowledgeable players using third-party software,” the Times notes, so it’s not as if easily offended people accidentally stumbled upon them. In any case, how many easily offended people play Grand Theft Auto? Players who unlocked the sex scenes presumably viewed them as a bonus, not a bug.

The discovery of the scenes did lead to a change in the rating for the unexpurgated game, from MA (for players 17 or older) to AO (for players 18 or older). That might make a difference to retailers and therefore affect Take-Two’s ability to distribute the game, which is why it ultimately released a cleaned-up MA version. But from the consumer’s point of view, it’s a trivial distinction. Since the only way to see the hidden scenes was to go looking for them, the only consumers who might have been upset about them would have been parents who bought the game for their more tech-savvy kids. They would have to be parents who are OK with a video game featuring the murder of police officers, prostitutes, amd random passers-by but draw the line at cartoony sex. To the credit of the American public, there don’t seem to be very many of them.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin

Privacy: What It’s Like To Fly With No ID Under The TSA’s New Regulations

Previously:
How to really fight terrorists

How to nap - Boston.com:

boing boing: Ancient Roman D20 for sale, $18,000:

Kevin Andrew Murphy sez, “I knew that Lady Puabi of Ur had d4s for the game boards found in her tomb, but it turns out the Romans had d20s and a nice green glass one is currently up for sale at Christie’s. Only $17,925, for the gamer who has everything.”

Link

(Thanks, Kevin!)

The Market and the Government, by Arnold Kling:
On the one hand, The Washington Post reports,

high fuel prices are having disparate effects: the end of free pizza deliveries at major franchises, a plunge in the sales of sport-utility vehicles, a steep drop in the price of houses that are far from jobs or mass transit.

On the other hand, from another story on the front page,

In 2004, as regulators warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending.

Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes…HUD stuck with an outdated policy that allowed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to count billions of dollars they invested in subprime loans as a public good that would foster affordable housing.

…From 2004 to 2006, the two purchased $434 billion in securities backed by subprime loans, creating a market for more such lending. Subprime loans are targeted toward borrowers with poor credit, and they generally carry higher interest rates than conventional loans.

These stories illustrate that markets adapt while government regulation can exacerbate problems. However, I doubt that this will alter the standard narrative, which is that every imperfection in markets requires more government regulation.

Tip: See Dictionary Definitions in Real Time:

I’ve just run across a useful little variant in how you can use Mac OS X’s built-in dictionary service to see definitions of words in your documents. You undoubtedly know that you can Control-click or right-click any word and choose Look Up in Dictionary to display a little pop-up definition (some applications instead launch the full Dictionary application). And you may know that if you press Command-Control-D, the little dictionary pop-up appears for the word currently under the pointer. But if you press Command-Control-D and keep holding the Command and Control keys down, in either Tiger or Leopard, that little dictionary pop-up stays on screen and changes to define whatever word is under it as you move the pointer around. Try it yourself, or watch my brief screencast demonstrating the feature.

Copyright © 2008 Adam C. Engst. TidBITS is copyright © 2008 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you’re reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

The ultimate guide to Mac keyboard shortcuts

Hero Stops Mass Shooting:

From a Winnemucca, Nevada police statement:

On Sunday May 25, 2008 at approximately 2:30 a.m. the Winnemucca Police Department was dispatched to the Players Bar and Grill …. There were approximately 300 patrons in and around the bar….

The officers on scene discovered three adult males who had died from obvious gunshot wounds. Two additional gunshot victims were also located[, treated, and released from the hospital]….

The … investigation lead detectives to believe that [Ernesto Fuentes] Villagomez[, 30,] entered the bar and at some point began firing multiple rounds. At least two of these rounds struck and killed the other two decedents, Jose Torres age, 20 and his brother Margarito Torres, age 19 both of Winnemucca. At some point during this shooting spree Villagomez allegedly stopped and according to witnesses reloaded his high capacity handgun and began shooting again.

It was at this point that … [a 48-year-old Reno man] produced a concealed handgun and proceeded to fire upon Villagomez who succumbed to his wounds. The Reno resident was in possession of a valid Concealed Carry Permit issued through the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office…. [T]he shooting of Villagomez by the Reno man was [concluded to be] a justifiable homicide ….

The investigation is currently pursuing a lead that indicates that this event may have been the result of a long standing feud between several families….

My hat is off to the anonymous man who likely could have blended into the crowd and escaped, but who put himself at considerable risk to protect the lives of others.