voluntaryXchange

A First … For Me

I received an e-mail to launder money through the account I use to pay for the bills for this blog.

Technorati Tags: money,laundering

Too Funny

Comment spammers will hit just about any post.

A year or so ago I posted that they’d tried to comment on a test post made by blogging software.

Now someone has left comment spam on that post entitled “Spammers Will Comment Just About Anywhere”.

Technorati Tags: comment,spam

NIU Snark

Regarding the meme circulating from an “economic historian” that private investment in capital isn’t important, Cold Spring Shops author Stephen Karlson quotes Kids Prefer Cheese’s Mike Munger who wrote this about said historian:

He apparently thinks that if you write about stuff you don't understand, that makes you an "economic" historian. Yes, sure, I'm a snob. But the guy has a PhD in History from Northern Illinois U. A two-time loser.*

Without any prompting from Cold Spring Shops, he subsequently revises and extends.

*A clarification:  Northern Illinois has a number of quite good departments, including econ.  But the history department is a doctrinaire marxist ideological chop shop.

I'm not sure the description of History is completely accurate.  Professor Livingston surely got onto the culture-studies ride at the right time, but the history department has also been reduced in size and scope over the past 20 years.  We do what we can [with] what we have in economics. And we have Quidditch.

31 October 2011, midafternoon on what passes for a quad.

Karlson is a brave blogger to dis his own school.

Technorati Tags: northern,illinois,economic,historian

Spammers Will Comment Just About Anywhere

One of those test posts that blogging software (like Windows Live Writer) puts up to make sure that they have appropriate functionality on your blog … just got a comment from a spammer.

Technorati Tags: spam,comment,test,post

Page Views vs. Hits

I’ve been looking over my traffic. Hits are not what they used to be.

My host tracks my hits: I’m down to about 2400 per month, or 29K per year. Each of their hits is somewhat more than 1 page view, so figure there are perhaps 40K page views there.

But, I feed 228 people that get every post. That works about to about 120K page views per year.

All told, about 160K page views per year, of which only a about a quarter count as hits.

Technorati Tags: page,view,hits,feed

My Feeds

On the suggestion of bookofjoe, I just went and checked out how many people are receiving the feed of this blog: 228.

I’m not sure if that’s large or small, but I know bunches of academics whose research has never been cited by a single person. For a lot of them, peer review means looked over by two referees and an editor.

Technorati Tags: feed,cite

There Goes the Day

Google Reader Play posts one image from different blogs in an album you scroll through.

Technorati Tags: google,reader,play

Some Old Hen*

Kids Prefer Cheese reveals where the name came from.

* Hat tip to Miss Smith's 1976-7 algebra class at Mill Middle School in Williamsville, NY.

Technorati Tags: trivia

Milestones

This is the 3,000th post on vX.

Also coming up on a 6th year anniversary this Saturday.

I wish I could say that I still generated comments and trackbacks at the rate I did in 2005 – but spam has led to so much of that being closed down here.

The Panic of 1907

My friend Sage reviews this timely book on the Wall Street panic from a century ago.

Technorati Tags: panic,1907