888 Holdings is a $1.5billion company built on spam. Last year, prior to their CSFB underwritten IPO I noticed that a large portion of the comment spam on my own site was from them and called them up in their gangster den in Gibraltar (largely for a laugh).

Their share price is holding up nicely, after all, blog spamming etc. is far too geeky and seems too trivial for people to listen to. I would argue that 888’s revenues, and certainly their initial competitive edge, are significantly dependent on spam. Recently one of their own industry organizations, the International Gaming Affiliate Marketing Initiative, IGAMI, has blacklisted them because of spamming.

If this had been a company employing the same techniques in traditional marketing, their IPO would have been pulled and some of its employees would likely have ended up in jail. But no investigative journalist has so far covered the case.

This is from a report by the IGAMI:

“iGAMI has been meticulously investigating and tracking unscrupulous marketing activities since September of 2005 conducted by and/or for the online casino - Casino on Net / 888; which is currently listed on the London Stock Exchange

Would you help an alcoholic by giving him $100 to buy liquor?

The US is adicted to oil, according to the president. The proposed solution… to subsidize gas.

CNN.com - Senators to push for $100 gas rebate checks - Apr 27, 2006

Quines (self-replicating programs)

The Republican religious base is crawling out of its primordial slime to promote its main priorities for the mid-term elections: banning some people from using a particular word to describe their relationship when it is closer to their own ideal of a monogamous family unit and making it illegal to destroy graven idols representing a line on a map.
These are important issues after all, when the alternatives are global unrest dues to energy crises and the death of the planet due to environmental catastrophe.

The fascinating thing about the social conservative disease is that it requires a view of the world which is not based upon traditional morals or any concept of progress. To demonstrate this, let’s use the example for gay rights.

Most social conservatives, who aren’t criminals, probably agree that someone like Elton John should not be dragged into the street and pelted to a bloody death with rocks, (despite the release of ‘I’m Still Standing’). Most of these people also agree that he shouldn’t be put in jail because of his sexual preference. Yet most of these people would argue that Sir Elton shouldn’t have been able to marry his partner. The argument is ‘things have just gone too far’. This is not a political belief so much as an uncourageous disposition - cowardice in the face of progress.

The problem of social conservatism is the ‘reverse induction’ argument. I.E. the same group of people 50 years ago would have thought that outright murder of gays was probably wrong and that marriage was so inconceivable as to be not worth bothering about, but a good idea was making sure that being openly gay could get you locked up in the one place where you would definitely get laid by another guy.

In short, social conservatives are not defending traditional values (if they are they are breaking the law) or looking to a brighter future, but are an insignificant artifact representing the fleeting transience of the here and now.

CNN.com - GOP hones its core agenda - Apr 15, 2006

The Oil We Eat (Harpers.org)

Richard Manning proposes that staples such as wheat, corn and rice are plants that thrive in the type of barren flooded landscape the were the result of the catastrophic melting following the last ice age. Farming, he proposes, is the ‘nuking’ of the landscape, the clearing of the forest.

“Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.”

Interesting article, however, the opening points which state that all our energy comes from plants capturing solar energy, ignore geothermal, gravitational and atmosperic energy. As can be demonstrated by the fact that we could theoretically grow plants underground under electric lights powered by the tidal energy from the moon.

The guys behind Blox were the Oddpost guys, and they pretty much created ajax. Blox was an online spreadsheet app and it was great but before its time.

With the release of Google Calendar, Excel is the only reason I have to go near a PC or any Microsoft products. I’ve got nothing against Microsoft as a big corp, I just think their products are like badly made, vintage toys

So please, I want Blox back.

Google Calendar