Tag: Money Management Mishaps

Why Fraud Pays

Why do people continue to do fraud? Because it pays well, often even if you’re caught. Take for example this case over at Bruce Schneier’s blog:

Here’s one scareware operator who sold “more than 1 million software products” at “$39.95 or more,” and now has to pay $8.2 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint.

A man was in charge of an Internet scam where a pop-up appears in your web browser informing you that your computer is infected with some kind of malicious software. These pop-ups then try to get you to purchase software that will disinfect your machine. The problem is these are scams and no reputable anti-malware developer would use such tactics (as it would be the end of their business likely). The software author charges a said amount for the software (in this case $39.95) and that’s that.

Well if you have 1 million customers who paid you $39.95 and are required to pay the FTC $8.2 million you’re only paying $8.20 per sucker leaving you with $31.75 in profit for each person who fell for your scam. That’s a pretty good profit.

According to the story the FTC will use the money to pay back the customers who were suckered into the deal. If this is the case that means each sucker will not be getting all of their money back (we’ll call this a fine for being dumb) or their reimbursement will be subsidized by tax money (which would be a horrible idea). Honestly I’m betting money the FTC never gets around to paying those suckers back.

Let this story also be a lesson to you, don’t fall for scams that claim your system is infected.

Kimber Failures

Kimber is one manufacturer that people seem to either love or hate. I don’t own any of their pistols so I never formed and opinion. With that said this news story doesn’t bode well for their PR department:

Little more than a year after buying 150 collector-grade handguns, officials at the N.C. Division of Alcohol Law Enforcement say the $1,055 pistols were so unreliable they had to get rid of them.

ALE Director John Ledford said the Kimber pistols repeatedly suffered such problems as rounds jamming during training exercises, broken sights and the weapon’s safety button sometimes falling off. He made a deal with a local firearms dealer to swap the pricey pistols for less expensive handguns without spending any additional money.

Maybe my reading comprehension isn’t great but I can’t find anywhere in the article that states what cheaper pistol the department replaced their Kimbers with. Either way spending $1,055 on a pistol is a serious waste of tax payer money when there are so many good options on the market that are much cheaper (Heck a Glock or M&P is going to be less than half the price when law enforcement discounts are figured in). But it seems this particular department likes to waste money, although they claim it’s money obtained through seizures instead of taxes:

An avid gun buff and collector, Chandler ordered Kimbers with special sights and the ALE seal carved into their handles, spending $158,250 provided to the agency through federal seizures involving alcohol, drugs and illegal gambling. The purchase was also approved by Chandler’s supervisor, Gerald Rudisill, the chief deputy secretary of crime control.

I have a hard time thinking law enforcement agencies should get the spoils of their arrests and seizures. On one hand it’s a way to fund a department without tax money but it opens the door for a huge conflict of interest. In order to get more equipment a department has to increase the amount of property they seize which in turn gives grounds to start seizing property of non-criminals. When I say this people usually claim I’m being paranoid and that this type of thing could never happen but sadly they are wrong as evident by the actions of Minneapolis’s own Gang Task Force.

The department also replaced some of their assault rifles (correct classification as these rifles appear to have a selector switch to go from semi-automatic to rock ‘n’ roll):

In addition to the new pistols, ALE agents have been issued new assault rifles after leaders determined their $1,495 Swiss-made Sig Sauer rifles, bought in 2006, weren’t up to snuff, either.

You know they could have obtained an M4 pattern rifle for cheaper. Wait that’s exactly what they did and saved themselves some money:

In exchange, a Greensboro firearms dealer provided the agency 120 Bushmaster M4 assault rifles valued at $1,270 each.

Or not:

ALE also got special Eotech 512 “holographic” sights that make a red dot appear on a target, valued at $439 each.

It sounds as though the department just obtained the EOTech sights which requires me to ask what was wrong with the standard M4 sights that the Sig rifles had correct? Who knows but this story does give a nice how to on wasting money needlessly. I guess it’s a good thing I don’t run law enforcement departments as everybody would be issues the most reasonably priced reliable handgun I could obtain (probably a Glock or an M&P) coupled with the most reasonably priced reliable rifle I could obtain (probably an AR-15 or AK-47 pattern rifle).

A Slight Overreaction

The police in Australia must be bored because they seem to be looking for excuses to deploy their helicopters. A thief stole a woman’s iPhone from a hospital, the woman used the Find My Phone app to track the whereabouts of the phone, and the police went into action with a fucking helicopter.

Let’s do some quite math here for a second. The price of the top of the line iPhone 4 in Australia is $999.00 plus any additional taxes. The cost of flying a helicopter is a complex formula which adds up to being a lot fucking more than an iPhone. If the police wanted to do something while saving the tax payers money they could have just purchased the victim a new phone and called it a day.

I’m Glad They’re Working on the State Budget

While Minnesota is facing a $6.2 billion deficit it seems at least one representative is looking to introduce a bill that would build a subsidized stadium for our state football team:

Three days after the collapse of the Metrodome roof, Sen. Julie Rosen, a Republican from Fairmont, said she planned to introduce a bill in late January to build a new Minnesota Vikings stadium with public subsidies.

According to the laws of physics as we understand them the fasting speed anything can travel is the speed of light. What modern physicist haven’t studied is the speed at which the state of Minnesota hemorrhages money because it’s faster than the speed of light by a long shot. Even though Minnesota is bleeding money several state representatives are willing to diverge state money to build a stadium for millionaires… again (fuck you Twins and your stadium which I’m paying for part of).

I guess we’ll just have to jack up the sales tax in Hennepin county again so those worthless fucks can have a new stadium (because as we know patching that easily patchable roof would be so fucking difficult).

Education Spending

The Obamessiah is calling for hiring 10,000 more teachers in order to bolster math and science grades in school. Of course this doesn’t actually add up as pointed out over at Random Nuclear Strikes. Take a look at some charts.

The first chart shows the number of public school employees versus the number of students enrolled since 1970. Notice something odd there? The second chart is an adjusted for inflation (thanks Federal Reserve) display of the cost of K-12 public education versus the percentage change in achievements of 17 year-old students. Once again something is amiss there.

It seems simply throwing money at the problem isn’t helping. I know our current administration believes strongly that if something isn’t working you just have to do it again only harder but that doesn’t actually work. And interesting book I’m reading through right now (which is available for free in PDF form) is The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. The book goes through the history of education in America and indicates our country’s problems in academia seems to stem back to the turn of the century. The main issue is our country’s education system used to cherish education for education’s sake, now we do workforce training and teach kids to do as they’re told because they’re told to do so.

Richest 1% of Americans

There is a lot of talk about how we need to increase taxes for the richest Americans. People spout lines about how the rich need to pay “their fair share.” What these people never do is actually look into how much the richest Americans pay in taxes. Solely because I like to rain on peoples’ parades I looked into the matter.

I’ve discovered that the richest 1% of Americans pay 40% of the federal income tax. That means of all the money stolen by the government via income tax 1% of Americans pay 40% of it. In dollars that means the top 1% pay more than the lowest 95%.

Here’s the raw data on the percentage of income taxes per income bracket. I’d say the top 1% are already paying their “fair share” and then some. Maybe instead of looking to gouge these people which gives them cause to consider moving somewhere else (and remember these rich people generally own companies that employ a lot of people) our government should look at reducing the amount of money they spent. I’ll help them out here.

First and foremost bring our overseas troops back home. Our spending on national offense defense is a huge majority of our spending. Cancel all government approved bailouts, if a company is facing bankruptcy they did something wrong and their assets could be sold off to small start up companies who actually have good ideas. Eliminate welfare and social security, we can plan for our retirements better than the government. Disband some of the hundreds of federal agencies because frankly we don’t need an agency that exists only to ensure taxes and regulations on alcohol, tobacco, and firearms are followed. Hell if the government follows my ideas we won’t even need a federal income tax to make ends meet.

A Fool and His Money

You know what they say, a fool and his money are quickly departed. Take this example for instance. It’s an application that alerts you when there are lightening lightning strikes in your area and it only costs $5.99!

Of course the article also brings up the fact a whole 58 people are killed (on average) every year by lightening lightning. The population of the United States is 307,006,550 according to Google meaning .0000188921051% of the population of the United States are killed each year (on average) by lightening lightning.

With a risk that tiny who the Hell is going to buy a shitty $5.99 app?

EDIT 2010-08-18 22:02: Proof reading is important just remember that. And no matter how many times you use the closely spelled but completely incorrect word it doesn’t make it right. Thanks for pointing it out Linoge.

Barnes and Nobel Up for Sale

Well this is sad news. It seems Barnes and Nobel has been struggling as of late and now put themselves up for sale. Considering how much Barnes and Nobel has contributed to the reading industry this really does suck. Yeah a lot of people will harp that Barnes and Nobel killed off more independently owned book stores but that was due to the fact the big retailer had actual selection.

In La Crosse there was a small bookstore I often when to with my mother back when I was young. Yes they could order you almost anything but there were two majors issues that ultimately killed the store. The first problem was their inventory, although good for a small bookstore, was still pretty pitiful. Every book I wanted to read had to be special ordered which meant at least a week until I could start reading it. Their second problem lied in the fact that this was before widespread Internet access and hence there was no efficient way to search for titles. If you wanted to order a book you had to know what the title was and who wrote it. Ultimately this second problem was the biggest because it meant you had very limited ability to discover new books.

Enter Barnes and Nobel, a massive bookstore that stocked everything. The first time I walked into one of these stores I just about jumped up and down for joy. See Barnes and Nobel had something no other bookstore at the time did; an honest to God full sized science fiction section. Barnes and Nobel really did help science fiction titles get more recognition just by the fact that they actually stocked them. This is how I discovered some of the lesser known stuff that I read. For example I would have never heard of the Vampire Earth or The Lost Fleet series if it wasn’t for the fact I stumbled into Barnes and Nobel one night and spend some time browsing through the sci-fi section.

But it wasn’t just science fiction that Barnes and Nobel helped. Pretty much any specialty subject could (and still can be) found in Barnes and Nobel. Do you want a book on programming in some semi-obscure language? If so check the programming section by the other computer books. Yes that’s right they have a section dedicated to computer programming. This was a big benefit to me in the days before having reliable Internet access as it allowed me to learn new languages (back in the day when said programming books came with CDs containing the needed software to start programming). If you wanted a book dealing with astronomy, paleontology, auto service, or any other niche offering chances were high Barnes and Nobel had a section for it.

Of course it seems more people are moving back to the old model of buying books, stores not dedicated to book sales. According to the Slashdot article (which is sourcing the New York Times and thus requires you register) one of the primary killers here are today’s equivalent to the general store; Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, etc. I can’t fathom this because I’ve browsed through all three of those stores’ book sections and they don’t stock shit. If those stores were the only sources I had of quality reading material I’d pretty much have to give up reading.

Of course the other competition for Barnes and Nobel comes from electronic books which they tried to get into in the past but failed (pretty miserably I might add). Now they are trying it a second time around and having better success but in a market populated by some pretty stiff competition (namely the Kindle and now iPad).

I afraid the next owner of Barnes and Nobel isn’t going to be so good as to keep the wide selection of titles and awesome reading environment. Hopefully I’m wrong but I’m certainly not an optimist by nature.

Hell I’ll Do That for Free

Random Nuclear Strikes has another post showing how incompetence of our government when it comes to money management. It seems our government paid $92.86 to destroy a single firearm. The kick in the teeth is the fact that they paid to have 1.4 million firearms destroyed.

I have a proposition for our government. Should you come across another 1.4 million guns you no longer want (or more, or less) I’m offering my services to take them off of your hand for free. That’s right instead of having to waste $92.86 dollars per gun to dispose of them you can give me the firearms at no cost to you. It’s simple, it’s easy, and best of all it’s free! I’ll also ensure the firearms I do not want find good homes (don’t worry I’ll ensure background checks are completed and everything). Yup that’s right I’m going to be green on this and recycle those arms that I do not want.

So donate today to Christopher Burg’s Home for Wayward Guns.