Kimber Streams at The Verge has written about, New Captcha system uses empathy to distinguish humans from bots. Instead of a highly distorted set of letters to be parroted back, this captcha asks a question like this:

This is a nice idea. Unfortunately, what I’ve found with any captcha system is that they do no good. The only spam that gets through my automated systems is that which is done by hand. And there is a lot of that!

My understanding is that people get paid ridiculously small amounts of money to spam me—perhaps a penny per spam or less. But no spam gets through. Why do they continue? Even at this cost, it does no good. Shouldn’t they move on to other more fruitful sites?

It isn’t hard to spot spam. Most of it has a user name that is obvious: “adult film” or “liquid diet for weight loss” or “Free Games Directory.” And then, the spam comments are all the same 10 or so canned bits. One of my favorites is this, “hello there and thanks for your info ?” Note the space before the question mark? It is always there.

The one good thing about using a captcha is that it would slow the spammers down a bit. Of course, it also slows down users. I’ll have to think about it.

I’ve always found Susie Sampson amusing, but I think this most recent Tea Party Report is particularly good. Or maybe I’m just drunk:

Romney economic adviser Avik Roy was on Up with Chris Hayes today. He pooh-pooh the carried interest loophole, saying, “Carried interests—I can’t remember the exact numbers—but what I think it raises for the government is something like $15 billion dollars or 4 billion—some tiny number that really doesn’t do much…”

I see this all the time from conservatives. If it is something they want to cut, a million bucks wasted can take up a whole day on Fox News. The government lost $500 million on Solyndra, and Fox News and the rest of the right wing echo chamber has been talking about it for a year. But $15 billion or $4 billion (or $2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal) is nothing.

Let’s think about this. Romney can’t be bothered to state a position on the carried interest loophole. It’s just too small. But he can be bothered to state that he wants to stop funding PBS. And how much will that save? The total federal spending on PBS was less than $450 million last year, or less than one-quarter the size of the “tiny” carried interest loophole (using the smaller WSJ number).

Everyone understands that this is what we get from Romney. He is the prototypical politician: slippery with them facts. But Avik Roy is supposedly a serious guy. He is supposed to make the best case for Romney, but not distort the facts. Yet this is exactly what I expect from people like Roy. Let me say it again: the center of gravity of politics in the United States has moved so far right that no reasonable person can continue to be Republican. So Chris Hayes can pretend that Roy is an honest and serious guy, but he isn’t. He is just another conservative freak who happens to be good at lying with numbers.

Every Friday, rain or shine, Eric Alterman makes a post on his blog at The Nation magazine. It has three parts. First, he links to the articles he has published that week. Sometimes, this means there is no part one. Second, he talks about the music and theater he’s seen that week. I call this his “Yes, as a matter of fact, my life is a hell of a lot better than yours” feature. One time, he wrote about a 20 minute conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen, which I thought was adding insult to an already debilitating injury. And the third is, “Now Heeere’s Reed!” This is the part where Reed F. Richardson writes a column.

Why doesn’t Reed have his own blog? I don’t know. Reed is a mysterious person. (See “Artists Rendering” on the left.) But through a few email correspondences and a close reading of his and Eric’s columns, I have developed a theory. Reed was once an intern at The Nation (fact). He worked closely with Eric Alterman (conjecture). Eric doesn’t have a lot of people he likes there (conjecture) because he is very vocal about what fucktards most liberals are (fact). Reed became Eric’s protege (conjecture).

I’ve been reading Eric Alterman for years. He is a great writer with lots of insights and a clear view of the way the world works. I think I’ve read all of his books. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I read What Liberal Media? again. As a result of this, I more look forward to Reed’s column each week than I do Eric’s. This isn’t because Reed is necessarily better, but he is much more likely to have a take on something that is different than my own; I’ve so internalized Eric Alterman’s work that I usually know what his take will be. (But not always!)

From time to time, I want to directly link to Reed’s column. Unfortunately, this has been impossible, given that it was just tacked on to the end of Eric’s blog entry. And it was even worse, because Eric’s blog uses a “fold” where you have to click to see more (thankfully not true pagination). This meant that Reed’s articles didn’t even so up when linking to the base blog.

You know me: I am a persistent pedant. I looked at the source of Alterman’s blog to see if perhaps there was a name anchor hidden there. These are the things that I commonly use for footnotes; they are links that allow you to skip down the page.[1] This is very easy to do, and I recommend it to bloggers, many of whom have this annoying habit of using an asterisk with no link. Do this:

Note that # character is in the link, but not the footnote!

Anyway, back to the story. Eric Alterman’s blog had no name anchor for Reed’s column. So I wrote to Reed and asked him about adding a name anchor to the blog posts. I knew that Reed was an editor of some kind and so he might be a bit of a pedant. I still don’t know, but he cared enough to asked his editor. And to my surprise, the editor thought it would be a good thing for their interns to learn. And two weeks later, inside the Alterman blog post is:

What I particularly like about this is that it is simple. A lot of blogs that use name anchors make them stupidly complex. Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!

This week, Reed has a column about Jim Lehrer’s terrible debate moderating and what it says about political reporting generally. It is well worth reading. In fact, I highly recommend reading him every week. And if you do, perhaps he can start being paid. Eric Alterman is a slave driver (conjecture).

[1] Like this!

Dave Weigel made a funny about having found Andrew Sullivan’s car. But you don’t have know that Sullivan is one of that growing group of conservatives who are starting to wake up to the fact that the Republican Party is nuts. This picture paints about 10 Sullivan columns. Or David Frum:

Paul Krugman has a really interesting article this morning where he presents a new formulation for reporting unemployment. As everyone should know, the unemployment rate is deceptive because it only counts people who are actively looking for work. As a result, a lot of people prefer the employment to population ratio. This number has gotten a lot of attention by Republicans ever since a Democrat has been in the White House.

Krugman points out that this is a useful statistic but it skews the numbers toward the older population because our country is getting older. His idea is to divide the population into three parts: 16-24, 25-54, and 55 and older. Then he weights these groups and comes up with the the graph below. In effect, he’s removed the bias of an aging population that should be working less.

I added the red dots. These are the values taken from the standard employment-to-population ratio graph. You’ve probably seen this graph before, and if you click over to Krugman’s article, you can see the graph itself. The thing that is disturbing about it is that there seems to be no (or very little) change after the 2008 recession.

But by weighting these three age groups, it is clear that over the last year and a half, we’ve seen steady, if frustratingly slow, job grown. This is what my intuition tells me. It is also what this month’s BLS data tell me. And what it should tell all of us. Jack Welch included.

I’ve had a thought all night long. I don’t claim that it is original. In fact, it seems kind of obvious. Romney supposedly won the debate. And yet the only really memorable line from the debate is a clear blunder, and it was by Mitt Romney. Obama didn’t have a bad performance so much as he had a boring performance. My initial reaction to Romney’s performance was that it was too aggressive and that he repeated the same talking points over and over. In fact, he said “$716 billion” five times! What’s more, his low level of disfluencies made me think that he was just spouting memorized lines—as he likely was.

I’m sure that his attack on PBS was similarly scripted. It’s pretty obvious, they knew Jim Lehrer was the moderator. But I think adding “Big Bird” may have been an ad lib. Or maybe his campaign made a mistake. I know I wouldn’t have flagged it as something that would go viral. I would have argued that whether people admitted it or not, they wanted to take a poke at Big Bird and would be delighted to see Romney do it.

Just like “You’re no Jack Kennedy” in 1982, the only thing people seem to remember about this most recent debate is that Romney wants to kill Big Bird. After all the grief that Obama and company got Wednesday night and Thursday, they’ve got to have been thanking God for Friday.

First things first: I don’t like Big Bird. I never have. Nor am I fond of those metrosexual cohabitors Burt and Ernie. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t fight for Sesame Street. If only for the sake of Grover, we must protect Sesame Street.

Romney’s comment about Sesame Street roiled me, but not about ending funding for PBS. Let’s be clear: all conservatives want to end funding of this kind. If a TV show isn’t interrupted every 10 minutes so that corporations can sell stuff, what is the point? Am I right?!

But Romney said more than that. Here is the full quote:

Alas.

As I’ve discussed before, We Are Our Own Investors. If our government debt is owned to any monolithic creature, it is the American People. China owns roughly 7.5% of our debt. Total foreign debt ownership is roughly a third—half what we Americans own. So this is a non-issue. What’s more, it is a fact that Mitt Romney surely knows; his statement is demagoguery plain and simple.

What’s more, the implication of this claim is that by China holding government debt, they control us. If they decide to get stop buying our debt it will cause our economy to collapse. China is—according to those who make this claim—propping up the value of the dollar. The exact opposite is the truth. As Dean Baker has pointed out, the reason China owns as much of our debt as they do is because they peg their currency artificially low compared to the dollar. Mitt Romney might have heard about this since he’s always talking about it with regards to manufacturing. Another aspect of this is that China can buy our bonds for less than they are worth.

That is why China owns 7.5% of our government debt. But regardless of this, 7.5% is not all or most or even a lot.

If Mitt Romney wants to kill Big Bird (and I wouldn’t complain), he needs to come up with a better reason than China.

Update (5 October 2012 2:28 pm)