Author: Glenn Hauman

…Happy Veterans Day.
We here at View From Above deliver this message in advance to those of you who may not be able to accept in person
after your service to our country. Know that your sacrifices of mind,
body, fortunes and lives will be honored, however inadequately– in
many cases, far too inadequately– by those you have served. Jon
Carroll expresses similar sentiments here.
I, for one, would like to apologize for all the merchants who are
having sales today, but somehow aren’t able to give deeper discounts
for those folks who have actually served.
And for that matter, I would also like to tip my hat to those folks who
put their lives on the line for my sake even without going to war– the
men and women of the police and fire departments.

From Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
Read it. Forward it. And get off your ass and do something with it.
I spent most of the 5th walking around the next Congressional District
over, trying to get out the vote for Anne Sumers. Yeah, my leg hurts,
but I got at least one person to the polls that wouldn’t have
otherwise.
How about you? Did you help out your side? Did you even vote? Or were
you too busy raking leaves?
I have a few thoughts on the issue on what to do, I’ll be posting more
about it in a day or two.

This is what paranoia leads to:
The last few posts here have been spent discussing how two people
mucked around with a computer system to create winning tickets that
shouldn’t, to enrich themselves to the tune of three million dollars.
Now we have in Florida (a place rife with election shenanigans) brand
new and untested electronic voting systems, to completely replace paper
balloting with electronic votes. And we have reports from Drudge that
people “voted
for McBride, but the machine counted it as Bush. It did this three
times. The polling worker finally said, ‘We have to reprogram this
machine. Another person was having the same trouble while I was there.'” And there are now no paper ballots to check against.

And of course, Voter News Service
took themselves out of the exit poll business yesterday, because the
numbers they were getting seemed to be completely at odds with what the
actual votes appeared to be.
How much is a House seat worth? Certainly more than three million
dollars…
As I said, this is what paranoia leads to– combined with lack of trust
in the people in charge.

Because Peter David’s blog
reaches many more people than mine does, I hijacked it for a post.
Considering the subject, I don’t think he’ll mind.
Why? Because down the street from me is my town library, my voting
place– and from the steps of that I saw the results of the a very
important hijacking– my photo of what it looked like is at left. And
two years earlier when I voted here, there was another important
hijacking, this was of a presidential election. So when I go to vote
today, I’ll be reminded of both those events.
And you should be too.
If you think the current administration has done a horrible job of
tracking down the people responsible for that day, or are trying to
pull a bait and switch of targets with Iraq, or if you think that Bush should have at least stopped reading to kids when he heard about the plane crashing into the Twin Towers, or if you think that the current administration has done all it can for its corporate contributors and damn little for anybody else, or if you happen to think the President is a liar and a buffoon, or if you’re terrified about the judges that would get appointed and everything else that would happen in a Bush-dominated Congress, or if you just don’t want to see what happened to Jesus Castillo happen to anybody else– then your vote is needed.

Remember– you can’t complain about the Supreme Court taking away your vote in the last election if you don’t vote in this one.

So go vote!

Ernest Dahlman has weighed in on the Pick Six disaster, and he’s NOT happy. And as this NY Times article
points out: “In the horse racing community, that pronouncement by
Dahlman is akin to Warren Buffett questioning the integrity of the
stock markets.”
Stay tuned. I think heads are going to roll over this one. And while
you’re at it, I’d think about selling every share you have of Scientific Games.

Caught this one?
We have what may be one of the biggest frauds pulled off in horse
racing going on right now. A few people have asked me to explain it, so
I’ll write it all up to make sure I don’t miss anything.
The brief upshot, for those too lazy to follow through on the links,
is that certain individuals appear to have gotten into the computer
system for tallying horse bets and written themselves some winning
tickets– specifically, the Pick Six at last Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup,
which would pay about three million dollars. How? First, some
background.
The Pick Six is like the Daily Double times three: you have to pick six
winning horses in consecutive races. A horseplayer can select more than
one horse per race, but adding contenders increases the amount of the
bet. For $2, a bettor can choose one horse in each race, for example,
but if a bettor chooses two contenders per race, the wager increases to
$128.
As you can imagine, this can get complicated (and expensive) quickly. I
know people who regularly bet over $5000 just in $2 combinations for
one day’s racing. But the payoff can be huge. Hundred thousand dollar
Pick Sixes are common, even hitting the Pick 5 (five out of six
winners) will net in the low five figures. On this day, a day with over
$4.5 million bet on the Pick Six, the numbers would be huge– and
because it’s an event day in racing, all the money would have to be
disbursed to winners that day. Normally, the handle for the day’s Pick
Six bets would be split, with 75% going to the winner(s) of the Pick
Six and 25% to the winner(s) of the Pick Five. If there is no winner of
the Pick Six that day, they would carry the pot over to the next day
until there was a winner of the Pick Six. But this day, if there’s no
Pick Six winner all the money would go to the multitude of Pick 5
winners.
Now, what apparently happened here is that some mook named Derrick
Davis had a winning ticket for the Pick Six– but it was an odd bet.
First, it was for $12 combinations. Second, the bet consisted of
singletons (only one horse picked) in the first four races, and then every horse
in the last two races. Third, it came in from a phone bet, and the
account for Davis had only been created two weeks earlier. Fourth, two
of the first four winners were long shots– 26-1 for Domedriver and
13-1 for Starine.
The final tally? 6 $2 Pick Six wins at $428,392 each ($2,570,352) plus
108 Pick Five wins at $4,606.20 ($497469.60) for a grand total of
$3,067,821.60. Nice return on $1152 of bets.
Except now it appears that the bets aren’t legit. It appears to have
been an exploit of really bad computer design. Once a Pick Six bet is
closed, a track or an OTB reports only how much was bet on the wager at
its facility. They are not required to report the actual numbers of the
horses used on a ticket until after four of the six races have been
run. In this state of limbo, someone who had the password to the data
system could alter the ticket after the results of the first four races
of the pick six were known.
Further investigation has discovered that Davis had a frat brother who
works at Autotote, which processes just that information, although not
anymore– he’s been fired.
And now, unfortunately, it seems that it’s happened before. At this
year’s Saratoga meet, an individual bettor held the only winning
tickets on the Aug. 4 Pick Six, which paid $421,998, and the Aug. 17
Pick Six, which paid $330,389.
Which could be BIG trouble. In the case of the Breeders Cup, the 78
other winners should be findable and they’ll receive a windfall of
$39,331 per ticket. But the people who should have won at Saratoga are
out of luck.
And, believe it or not, this is why we need to legalize Internet
gambling– because it’s going to be the only way to have some degree of
accountability in the system. If this can happen in a regulated case,
how bad is it out in the unregulated wilds? (And for that matter, why
would someone be so STUPID as to bet someplace where they can’t trust
the house? And what happens to horse racing if bettors cant trust the
track?)
UPDATE: Looking back, I didn’t explain the significance of the $12 bet
sufficiently. The amount was crucial in that it was an odd enough
number that doing a search on all the bets placed would allow that one
to be singled out, because we have to assume that there’s no
identifiers on the bet itself so that an inside guy could say, “Oh,
this is Derrick’s, I’ll change this one.” But a $12 bet with that type
of betting pattern– four singletons and then everything in the last
two races– would be unique. And perpetrators could explain away a $12
bet by saying they mistyped a number, as Davis has claimed.

I was in a lousy mood, writing in my basement office (yes, Virginia,
despite the name, View From Above is often composed in a basement. I’d
write from the roof, but the wireless connection up there tends to
clash with the hub’s from the school across the street, and they get
very antsy when I bring my rifle up there with me to write) and the
doorbell would ring every so often.
Now, I had enough of this earlier in the day, when the school denizens
proceeded to march around the block showing off their costumes in an
impromptu parade, complete with banging drums that did wonders for my
powers of concentration. And now they were ringing the bell. This is no
way to work.
So I decided to take the side exit out of the brownstone into the
alley, with candy in hand. I came up behind the kids and parents on the
porch, who were peering inside, trying to see if someone was going to
come give them any treats. They were oblivious to me.
What else could I do? I shouted “RrrrraaaAAARGH!” at the top of my
lungs. The kids, of course, screamed in terror. So, to my delight, did
some of the parents.
This set the trend for the evening. I would lie in wait in the
basement, wait for unsuspecting victims, and make my own fun. Shame I
didn’t have any really good scare items handy, like a chainsaw or an
axe.
Oh, stop looking at me like that. At least I didn’t do what TBogg did (which I shamelessly lift here):

After dinner I settled down at the computer to look for things to
post on the blog. I was just finishing an article on Harvey Pitt and
his failure to let the other members of the SEC board know about recent
appointee William Webster’s membership on an audit committee that faces
fraud charges. With this in mind, and the idea that investor confidence
would surely be shaken, I was surprised to hear a knock at the door.
Upon opening the door I found two oddly dressed children standing on
the porch with open bags and expectant looks on their faces. Needless
to say, it immediately occurred to me that they were going door-to-door
begging for food. I thought to myself, has the economy collapsed this much? Is this what we have come to?
When I asked them if they were hungry, they glanced at each other with
quizzical looks that I took to mean “duh…of course we’re hungry”.
Thinking that they looked like they could use a hot meal, I asked if
they would like to come in and have, maybe a grilled-cheese sandwich.
At this point they nervously glanced toward the street and I saw what I
assumed to be their parents standing on the sidewalk with anxious
smiles looking toward us. How incredibly sad! These people had been
reduced to taking their children out on a cold October night to beg for
food!
Have we become a third world country? Is this what the Bush
administration has brought upon us?
Noting the awkwardness of feeding only the children and not the parents
I decided the best course of action was to give them canned goods
because who knew when they would get a chance to eat this evening and I
couldn’t count on them still having refrigeration, much less a home to
return to. After dropping several cans of corn and a can of asparagus
into the young girl’s bag, I decided to give the boy a special treat
hoping that he would understand the type of world he would have to make
his way in. I dropped into his bag a slightly dog-eared copy of Adam
Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Although I felt a copy of Atlas Shrugged
would be more informative for the young lad, I didn’t have an extra
copy to spare at the time.
Apparently the children were shocked at my generosity for they were
speechless. I told them “Good night” and yelled, “Good luck” to their
waiting parents and started to close the door. As they walked back
toward their parents I heard the boy say an amazing thing. He looked in
his bag at the precious book I had given him and muttered to his sister
one simple word: “Asswipe”.
Now my heart was truly broken for I realized that these people were so
poor that they couldn’t even afford toilet paper and the book would
soon become a poor substitute. Poor Adam Smith– he never meant for his
words to be treated in such a way, but these are the times we live in…

We have this story
of how Frank Lautenberg “as he walked past 150 demonstrators on his way
into the studio, one reached out and punched him in the arm”.
Okay. Rather than debate against the man, rebut his views, anything
like that, the preferred method was to throw a punch at a 78 year old
man? Nice.
(Via Eschaton.

Y’know, for someone who thought he’d use this blog as a place to
perform his morning writing exercises– to prime the pump and get
something down, so he could get on to writing paying work– I haven’t
posted a lot lately.
Much of it has been distraction and lack of focus on my behalf– I’ve
been requested to put together some websites and pages on very
short deadlines, and then had to kill one of them. There’s a big site
I’ve been working on that has been bogged down in some large
programming problems. Writing– well, I’ve done some of that, with
proposals for two new science fiction anthologies and the reworking of
a Star Trek: SCE proposal– that took some time, as the powers that be
felt that Starfleet characters wouldn’t behave in a certain way, even
though every military organization in history has behaved in similar
ways.
And of course, the usual reluctance to do things like cleaning the
office, etc.
Running three different weblogs doesn’t help either– I’m often torn
whether to post things here or there.

In any event, I’ll try to do better. I’ll post about how I got my fun on Halloween later. In the meantime, click here and here
for some real Halloween scares.

My wife Brandy, the ratings queen, brings up a depressing thought: more
people probably watched tonight’s Presidential debate on The West Wing than watched the real Presidential debates.