Day: July 30, 2001

A Good Article about Bad Robots

CamWorld posted a link to a very helpful page on How to keep bad robots, spiders and web crawlers away.

Conversant has really helped me cut down on the bad robot traffic by making it relatively easy to serve up “Please go away” pages to known bad robots. For example, I can wrap the template to this site with a macro like,


Sorry, e-mail collecter bots are not welcome.

[Normal page template goes here]

The server handles the rest (a similarly easy-to-use method is available for serving up pages optimized for known search engines — or to block known search engine robots altogether). Of course some robots disguise themselves, while others ignore the robots.txt file. The article lists some very clever ways to identify those robots and then prevent them from visiting your site.

You probably can’t completely get rid of these annoying bots, but you can make it a lot more difficult for them to harvest e-mail addresses.

House Approves $670 million “Plan Colombia” Budget

On July 25, 2001 the U.S. House of Representatives approved the $670 million ‘Plan Colombia’ spending package designed to fight the drug war in Colombia. Democrats in the House of Representatives wanted to divert some of the money to drug treatment programs in the United States, but that proposal failed to garner enough votes. Meanwhile, new evidence is emerging that even if you accept that Plan Colombia’s methods are ethically justifiable, they simply are not working. In fact Plan Colombia is backfiring in dangerous ways.

The main focus of the plan is to eradicate coca crops in Colombia by spraying herbicides on large patches of crops. The plan has created a number of controversies. Aside from the repugnancy of spraying toxic chemicals on the land of peasants struggling to get by, the United States is using mercenaries to carry out the risky spraying operations.

A recent audit of the spraying by the United Nations Drug Control Program found that the spraying was, in the words of The BBC, “inhuman and ineffective” since spraying occurred even only small plots of land where only a very small amount of illegal crops were being grown. Of course the United Nations hardly has its hand clean since it accepts the right of the United States and Colombian governments to spray herbicides on larger plantations where coca crops are being grown (so much for the “freedom to farm” promised by Republicans so many years ago).

Meanwhile, the spraying is not nearly effective as it was originally claimed to be, except perhaps at creating outrage among farmers.

In an analysis for the Cato Institute, Ted Galen Carpenter reports that the United States claims there are about 340,000 cares of coca under cultivation, and that spraying that began in December has occurred over about 75,000 of those acres.

But a new study by the United Nations suggest that there are far more than 340,000 acres of coca under cultivation, and that U.S. estimates of Colombian cocaine production ere far too low. Whereas the United States estimated that about 780 tons of cocaine were produced ever year, the United Nations reports estimates that as many as 900 tons of cocaine come out of Colombia each year.

The upshot is that despite claiming to have fumigated 22 percent of all farmland growing coca, there has been absolutely no movement in cocaine prices within the United States. If the spraying were really eliminating coca plants, there should have been a rise in cocaine prices as coca became more scarce. As Carpenter writes, “The fact that not even a modest price spike has occurred clearly indicates that Plan Colombia is having now meaningful impact on the supply of cocaine.”

What it is having an effect on, however, are Colombians’ attitudes toward their government and the United States. Carpenter reports that at a recent trip by Colombian President Andres Pastrana to a drug-producing region, Pastrana was met by demonstrators carrying signs showing a Colombian flag being subsumed by the American flag with the caption, “Plan Colombia’s Achievements.” According to Carpenter,

Given the political situation in Colombia, the outpouring of such sentiments is cause for great concern. The Pastrana government already confronts a three-decade-old insurgency being waged by two left-wing guerilla armies. The last thing Bogota should be doing is giving in to U.S. pressure to wage a drug war against its own population. That course of action is certain to produce more recruits for the radical leftist insurgencies.

It won’t stop the drug flow, it will alienate Colombians, and it is going to cost American taxpayers $672 million. Only in Washington, DC, could such a plan stand even a chance — but there, of course, it will flourish.

Source:

Plan Colombia: Washington’s Latest Drug War Failure. Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato Institute, July 27, 2001.

US congress approves anti-drugs aid. The BBC, July 25, 2001.

US backs Colombia drugs fight. The BBC, July 25, 2001.

Those Greedy Bastards!

For months now, California Gray Davis has been moaning about the evils of private power companies charging that state outrageous prices for electricity, and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer even went so far as to say that, “I would love to personally escort [Enron CEO Kenneth] Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi my name is Spike, honey.'”

But it turns out that while Enron and other companies may be greedy bastards, the politicians in this case are of the lying variety — the prices California was paying to Enron and other private companies for power was a bargain compared to what it was paying public utilities to buy power.

Of course as National Review notes, Davis only released information on exactly how much each utility was charging California for power after a lawsuit forced his hand.

It turns out that while private companies were charging California $250 per megawatt, the L.A. Department of Water & Power was charing the state $292 per megawatt, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District a whopping $330 per megawatt. Meanwhile California managed to pay Seattle’s City Light Department an amazing $634 per megawatt of electricity.

The added irony in this, by the way, is that municipal power departments like this are allowed to buy power from the federal government at prices far below what most private utilities can produce electricity at. So these utilities were buying electricty at extremely low prices and then turning around and charging prices far in excess of what private companies were charging.

I wonder if Lockyer wants to personally escort the people who run the public utilites to 8-by-10 cells?

A Pyramid Scheme with a Feminist Twist Hits Great Britain

The Sunday Times recently ran a story about a pyramid scheme that has tricked thousands of women out of their money in Great Britain. The pyramid scheme uses semi-feminist rhetoric about women’s empowerment to sell its get rich quick message.

According to the Times the scheme originated with a 57-year-old businesswoman named Theresa Hammer who joined a group known as Women Empowering Women, which apparently had its start in the United States. Literature for the WEW scheme claims,

It is the belief of the WEW gifting groups that there is plenty for everyone. When we are open tot give, receive and encourage each other, emotional and financial benefits will follow.

We are literally creating a new economic experience. The old belief of having to work hard for anything worthwhile in life is now changing and shifting with this process … the process is strong and continues to grow stronger with each participant, created through the wisdom of Women Empowering Women.

Of course what is really going on is that money is simply changing hands without any productive work taking place in a scheme that is unsustainable and quickly burns out — but not before thousands of people lose everything they put into the scheme.

It wouldn’t be a feminist-tinged pyramid scheme, however, if there wasn’t a blame-the-men angle to it. The Times reports that it contacted friends of Hamer who claimed she was getting a raw deal from her critics,

They denied, however, that she had made money out of other people’s misfortune. Her intentions and actions had been entirely charitable, they said, but the WEW ideal had been hijacked by men who had transformed it into money-making schemes. They also denied that Hamer, now in America again, had fled there with funds made by exploiting other women.

The really shocking thing about this is that more than 80 years after Charles Ponzi invented the pyramid scheme and pulled off one of the biggest con jobs in history, all con artists need to do is dust off the scam, add a twist such as “women empowering women,” and people will still fall head over heels to give their money away.

Source:

Crackdown on feminist pyramid scheme. Tom Robbins and Rachel Dobson, The Sunday Times (UK), July 29, 2001.