Regulating Cigarettes
Who really wins when the government protects the public
It looks like Obama and the Democratic party are going to move the regulation of cigarettes under the umbrella of the FDA. For years this has been resisted because the FDA was simply not put in place to regulate substances that we know are harmful, but that many of us want to use anyway. There simply is no such thing as a safe cigarette.
Tyranny of the Majority
Two wolves and a lamb
The United States of America was formed, in part, to resist the tyranny of ideas that existed in Europe. People came here to restart their lives the way they saw fit. To do what they wanted, to worship the way they wanted, to speak the things they couldn't speak in Europe.
Unfortunately times have changed and America is no longer the place to go to exercise your rights...
Government Run Banks
The two problems
The government has a large stake in all of our largest banking institutions now. Their stock prices have fallen to alarming levels. Other countries have outright nationalized them and it is to be seen if the United States follows suit. There are at least two major problems with the government having such a huge stake in our banking institutions that we should be on watch for.
Big Brother Was Watching
Traffic Cameras in Great Britain
A while back I wrote a short blog about the surveillance cameras being installed in DC to keep an eye on us all. I had some ideas about exactly how we should handle this situation.
Well the people of Great Britain have been dealing with surveillance cameras for some time. London is completely covered with them. By all accounts the English simply don't mind the cameras much. On the other hand, they get awfully offended about cameras used to catch them speeding. They don't like these one bit. The following link includes a number of pictures of cameras the English have done away with in various creative ways.
Speed CamerasFunds and ETFs
Letting other people make money for you
Many of us have experience in investment funds through our 401k plans at work. These plans often offer a menu of funds in which employees can invest. The funds are often all managed by the same company, maybe Vanguard or another big name in the industry. A fund is simply an account managed by somebody else. You give an expert your money to invest based on a set of goals and they invest your money in stocks, bonds, or other instruments. Some funds try to match the movement of a given index, while others have a time horizon, or an investment strategy, possible value or growth. There are funds that will invest your money anyway you would like.
Java Concurrency in Practice
Threading is everywhere
This book was recommended to me by some of the readers of comp.lang.java.programmer as the book to read to gain a better understanding of the issues involved in writing multi-threaded applications. If you program in Java, the odds are that you use threading already. If you write code for a web server, you use threading. If you use RMI, you use threading. If you write Swing applications, you, quite probably, use threading.