BK Drinkwater

Considering a return

2011-08-27T12:00:00.000+12:00

Hello, good people who forgot to clean out your RSS feeds!

I am seriously considering a return to blogging. This is because I am still a bureaucrat, and I have a sneaking suspicion that my writing's getting worse as a result. As I'm still a bureaucrat, any return would have to be strictly non-political.

Anyway, would I still have some of my old readers, or would I be starting from scratch?

Closing time

2010-09-12T18:46:00.001+12:00

I post so seldom now I can't justify asking any more for your attention. Therefore, I'm stopping completely. I might come back some day, but not for a while.

Thanks for reading. I hope it's been as good for you as it has for me.

Kiwi bloggers give good quote

2010-08-26T06:15:00.006+12:00

Here are some of my favourites from the last few days, listed in no particular order. My comments in italics.

Gonzo FreakPower: While you're trying to ban lucrative arbitrage, why don't you ban lightning and earthquakes while you're at it?

TVHE commenter: Don’t worry, it’s only a matter of time before someone like BERL comes out in favour of compulsion. All they need to do is show that spending money creates no private benefit. That's absurd! No self-respecting economist would ever assume away consumer surpl... oh.

Paul Walker: Before central planning, a grain exporter, during central planning grain importer, after central planning grain exporter again. I'm sure there is a message here somewhere...

Stephen Stratford: There is a cowshed directly over the road from their school but this was the first time the children had got up close and personal with the business end of the dairy industry so it was all good, especially as we didn’t get shat on.

DimPost: I think there’s a huge audience out there that would never degrade themselves by watching Breakfast but would watch pretty much the same show marketed as a savage satirical comedy.

Eternal Lacking: Bret Favre is un-retiring again, a pair of barely-functioning idiots have gained control of a magazine, and Winston Peters still exists. I’m going back to sleep.

BK's investment tips: Helium!

2010-08-24T06:30:00.000+12:00

Apparently, within my lifetime, the earth will have lost so much of the universe's second-most abundant element that there will be a significant shortage. This carelessness isn't really the earth's fault though, because the earth is nothing but a big dumb lump of rock hurtling through space until such time as it gets consumed by its dying sun, whereupon people will no doubt complain about a helium surplus and demand price controls, reasoning that if enough people believe hard enough for long enough, then price controls might actually solve a problem one day.

If you think that running out of helium is a dumb thing to do, then you'll observe that there's still undone something yet dumber: you can commit yourself, preferably by legislation, to selling off all your remaining stock of helium. At a constant rate. Regardless of market price. Not even a doomed hunk of metal is that stupid: such powerful folly requires the US Government. Lucky for you that the helium market is dominated by the Federal Helium Reserve. Since that contains the words Federal and Reserve, you can be sure that there's a way to get rich off of the American worker.

And this brings me to the first in an occasional series: BK's Investment Tips.

Today's tip is: Helium! It's a lock!

An impending shortage means prices will go up. So stock up now while the Federal Helium Reserve keeps selling the stuff to you at Before Peak Helium rates. Those suckers are so stupid, they don't even realize that it's vital for the world's governments to stock up on non-renewable resources so as to ensure they never get used. All you have to do to profit: buy helium today at today's rates, and hold onto it until Peak Helium, when prices will skyrocket and you'll be richer than Rockefeller.

Of course, there are a few practical difficulties.

If you believe in Peak Helium, you should probably invest now, before everyone else catches on and drives the price up. Since everyone else should be doing the same, we should have seen some movement in the market already. We haven't. That kinda suggests you're out on your own.
There's no clearing house that covers helium futures, so you're going to have to go over the counter with Uncle Sam. I'm guessing that if you believe in Peak Helium, you're also convinced that the United States is a substantial default risk.
And since we're talking forwards now rather than futures, it might be a good idea to give some thought to where you might stick all that helium when it's delivered. If you can't think of anything, I have suggestions.

My point? Don't talk to me about Peak Helium, or Peak Metal, or Peak Oil, or Peak Anything Else until you've put your money where your mouth is. More gently, and paraphrasing a billboard on my street: there's probably no Peak [Insert Commodity Here], so stop worrying and enjoy your life.

An unexpected finish

2010-08-24T06:15:00.002+12:00

A semi-interesting article on the increasing availability of pornography in Iraq ends rather alarmingly:

In a nod to the politically elusive dream of Arab unity, Hanoun carries a collection entitled Cheap Meat. "It's got Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese girls," he says. All the Arabs. But, in an ironic symbol of the difficulty with which Arabs have had coming together, the DVD gets stuck in a loop in the first five minutes.

Overall, I'm not convinced by the article's attempts to extract insight from the titles slapped by vendors onto porn DVDs. More useful for gauging the state of the world than drawing patronising and vaguely Orientalist inferences about a war-torn psyche or somesuch—when "men are pigs all over the world" would be an equally if not more valid conclusion—is the fact, left implicit, that Iraq is so far behind its postinvasion development schedule that the internet has not yet there routed all other porn-distribution mechanisms.

Sun rises in east; students defrauded

2010-08-17T06:15:00.002+12:00

Once you've spent a few years paying attention to student associations in New Zealand, you get numb to a certain level of incompetence, mismanagement, and fraud. Eventually, the numbness becomes more distressing than the outrages perpetrated again students by the very unions that claim to represent them. When I head that Whitireia's students association was not only defrauded, but cleaned out by its own elected officers, I was angry. But not because I was surprised. I was angry precisely because I wasn't surprised.

Think of the student associations in New Zealand as a volcanic archipelago. Every now and then, there's a fraud eruption on one of the islands. I wouldn't necessarily have guessed that the next eruption would be at Whitireia, but this simply isn't the type of event that can shock me any more. It shouldn't shock you, either. The truth is that, nearly continuously over the last decade, students have been defrauded by their associations.

David Do, Co-President of the umbrella group of the associations, would have us believe that the recent unpleasantness at Whitireia was a one-off that occurred because that particular association had left his umbrella group. Let's leave aside his vested interest. He got one part right. The Whitireia fraud was a one-off: an organization can't get cleaned out twice. Check out this link again and tell me you honestly believe the rest.

But here's what makes me mad: we know what makes student associations vulnerable to fraud, and people resist doing anything about it. Student associations are funded almost entirely by students who are rationally ignorant of how their money is spent. These students only pay because such payment is a rent imposed on them as they study. And all this is enshrined in legislation. In most Universities and some Polytechs in New Zealand, membership in the school's parasite student association is compulsory.

This needs to change. Parliament needs to pass the Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill.

Capital-short bank: compulsory savings are great!

2010-08-13T06:15:00.002+12:00

Governments and firms are necessary evils, at least in the sense that, in an ideal world, everyone would be super to each other and everyone would have all the stuff they wanted. But since we don't live in that world, we're pretty much stuck with governments and firms. But when the two necessary evils cohabitate, the unholy union produces vile offspring indeed: corporatism. Big business in cahoots with big government.

Exhibit A: Ralph Norris (who admittedly has a dog in this fight) points out that KiwiBank struggles for capital because it doesn't make as much money as a bank of its ambition should. Exhibit B: KiwiBank calls for compulsory KiwiSaver membership. Unable to find as much capital for itself as it wants, KiwiBank wants to force you to lend it yours.

Because I have a high future-discounting rate, which is my prerogative, when I got a job, I became one of the [ x = a not very well-publicized number ] people who opted out of KiwiSaver. I have very little debt. I may be part of this country's "consumer spending addiction", but I'm not a participant in the "debt to finance consumer spending addiction" problem that everyone keeps telling me New Zealand has.

So compulsory savings would affect me directly. In particular, compulsion would cost me the chance—a chance I value—to spend my own damned money right now as I damned well please. So why does KiwiBank want to punish me for its own incompetence?

Arbitrage of the year

2010-08-12T20:22:00.000+12:00

And Crampton thought he was doing well...

You know iPredict is collecting some pretty slick traders when messages like this crop up in the forums:

For those sports lovers you can make great money in the same way with betfair vs any other online betting site that gives free bets as signup speicals. Sign up, put the money on a free bet that in all reality you want to lose. And then go to betfair and back the other result. So all outcomes are covered. if the betfari backing wins you have instant profit to withdraw, if the free bet acocunt shock wins then you just need to bet it again before you can withdraw (free bet conditions). A big one a while back was a free 100 UK pounds bet, covered myself and more in betfair and came away with about 280 pounds profit.

To clarify why this is awesome: arbitrage (trading a commodity or security simultaneously in disconnected markets to take advantage of a price discrepancy) is a risk-free strategy that usually generates only small profits relative to the size of the transactions. This trader, by treating sport betting as security trading instead of gambling, and by managing to halve the cost (at least) of adopting the risk-free strategy, has found a way around the requirement to plough back winnings from the 'free bet' at sign-up and pocket the subscription inducement. Genius. Sheer evil magnificent genius.

Movie thoughts coming up

2010-08-06T06:15:00.004+12:00

Hey everyone.

I'm rather pushed for time tonight (Thursday), but I want y'all to know that I've got a few movie posts started, which I'll feed you one by one.

For the record, the movies that I've seen most recently (excluding Film Festival stuff, which I went to but in all honesty had little appetite for) are: Eclipse, Inception, and Predators.

A sneak peek: I enjoyed Eclipse far more than I should, which is to say quite a bit; I haven't felt as explained-to as I did at Inception since I was at university; and Predators was pretty much exactly how I expected it to be.

For the record...

2010-08-06T06:00:00.004+12:00

People ask me how the soccer sweepstake went for me.

I came out of pool play a full game and a half ahead. For the round of sixteen, I deviated from my rule (by picking the top-placed team from each pool to win) and suffered. The sweepstake was set up so that you could only get points if at least one of your implicitly-picked-to-be-there teams was playing. Consequently, I continued to suffer.

I finished the sweepstake second.

Prime opportunity for first movers

2010-07-27T18:25:00.003+12:00

Stephen Stratford sees a statistic—

adult fiction accounted for only 6.1% of New Zealand-published books sold last year, compared with non-fiction’s 70.9%, according to Nielsen BookScan.

—and quibbles admirably. However, I can't help but feel he's missing the most important angle. Clearly, there's a gap in the market for adult fiction. At last, I sense an opportunity for all my years of slashfic-writing to pay off.

Cake for BK!

2010-07-27T08:41:00.000+12:00

Wellington bloggers!

I encourage the newly-adopted process wherein local bloggers bake me cakes and leaving them at my door in the morning. I believe this should be made a tradition, or possibly an initiation rite.

To protect the identity of the wonderful blogger or blogress who baked this absorbent and yellow and porous delight, I shall say no more except Thanks!.

I don't know much about soccer, but...

2010-06-17T06:15:00.000+12:00

I neither know much, nor do I care much, about soccer. I am, however, a degenerate gambler. So when I was called upon to participate in a small sweepstake on the soccer world cup, I happily availed myself of the opportunity.

My near-total ignorance of soccer, in principle, should be a disadvantage. Fortunately, due to the structure of the sweepstake, it is not.

For each game in pool play, I was to hazard a guess at the score. In each game, I get a point if the match result (win-draw-loss) implied by my predicted score eventuates (even if I get both teams' scores wrong). Each team's score I get right earns a point. So I can get up to three points each game.

I did some cursory googling. Apparently, soccer is a low-scoring game. Draws are less common than results. A global ranking of national teams exists. This was enough information for me to formulate a strategy: I predicted that each game would go 1–0 to the "favourite" as implied by rankings.

At the time of writing, I'm doing okay. Fourteen matches have been played. Out of a possible forty-two points, I'm on seventeen. This puts me second in the sweepstake by a single, solitary point. For someone who doesn't know a damn thing about soccer, I don't think that's too bad at all.

Manual Labour

2010-06-11T06:30:00.002+12:00

In politics, it's the little things that get you in to trouble.

What Shane Jones does in the privacy of his own hotel room would ordinarily be between just him and the cleaners. It would be either puritanical or prurient for me to care. That is, until 10 January 2008, when he decided to get taxpayers involved. Now, all bets are off.

And besides, I'm in a prurient kinda mood.

If you want sane commentary, go to KiwiPolitico. Mum: stop reading. Now.

The shenanigans began on a summer's night in Auckland. I don't know what the weather was like, but we've reason to believe that things were heating up in Mr Jones's room at the Sky City Grand. As the Honourable member reached for his wallet, his hand slipped (not for the last time), and he accidentally flopped out his 3.37-inch Ministerial Services credit card.

Mr Jones, who at one point yesterday morning professed to be a movie buff, charged you $39.80 for the privilege of having him critically evaluate two films—we may never know which—according to a probably-limited variety of criteria, followed by, or possibly concurrent with, a solo piece of performance art. While nobody except the man in the mirror saw the show, it was evidentally considered successful enough to run several more nights over the course of the year.

Man, this stuff writes itself. I'm beginning to feel guilty. He's just too soft a target. If I wasn't afraid I'd get the preposition wrong, I'd call this whole thing a beat-up.

In all honesty, I have some sympathy for the man here.

It's not like Shane Jones invented porn-watching. I get that porn is a tricky question in feminism: sex-positivity collides with an obviously exploitative industry. So I'm not going to go down (at least, not in public) the it speaks to the man's character path. Even if I did, I doubt that'd be valid: while he's alone in a hotel room, he's not throwing coke and hookers parties and then going back home to his wife and lying about it. The issue for me isn't what some dude I don't know jacks off to. It's the mind-boggling stupidity of charging it to the taxpayer.

To succeed in politics, it's pretty obvious that you need to have at least one of two these things: iron self-control (when Type-A personalities get that much attention, it's a miracle they don't fuck everything they can reach that has an even number of legs), or an obsessive streak when it comes to covering tracks. Jones fails at both.

An aside: I'm getting seriously tired of the "Red-Blooded Male" defence. If someone uses that, I take it as license to pull out the "you're picking on me because I'm gay" card whenever they legitimately criticize me. The defences are equally lame.

Having said all that, I'm not convinced that there really was a conscious decision to make you pay for Jones's recreation. The pay-per-view charge was probably just added to the hotel bills, which were quite legitimately put on the Ministerial Services credit card. In the back of his mind, he must have known that it was a bit dodgy, and that it would all come out (ahem) sooner (ahem) or later. But at the end of a busy day, I doubt that the kind of exercise Jones was looking for was the small mental challenge of a careful risk analysis.

The only point I'm stuck on is this: who the hell still pays for porn in a hotel? Isn't that what the internet is for?

Three Links [7]

2010-06-08T06:15:00.000+12:00

So, you think you've got what it takes to be a saint?; the freegan establishment; teen dystopia.

Since getting a real job, I have...

2010-06-01T07:00:00.000+12:00

Updated my Facebook status twice;
My blog just ten times;
And my Google status not at all.
Collected six paychecks;
And blown six paychecks.
Been to three movies;
And read lots of books (while letting some really good ones pile up);
Bought a CD (Shostakovich Preludes & Fugues).
Won two games at chess club;
And lost rather a lot more.
Written almost nothing for fun.

Of course, I've been reading blogs. My favourite bloggy things? Eric Crampton, during the birth of his second child, managed to find time to argue mechanism design with an attending clinician. And, well, I can't even pick my favourite Matt Nolan comment in this thread. Remind me not to piss this guy off.

I've subscribed to two new blogs. Patrick Gower on politics has a URI so catchy (http://www.3news.co.nz/Politics/Goweronpolitics/tabid/1382/articleID/157713/Default.aspx), you don't even need to bookmark it. It's also bloody good. David Huebner's ambassador-blogging is much better than those two hyphenated words might suggest.

Stephen Stratford continues, at a leisurely pace, to feed us morsels from the not-forgotten cupboard of the long-gone Quote UnQuote magazine. They're not stale at all. But that's not why I read the blog. In between, he's easily the best writer in the NZ blogosphere. I envy his mad skills.

There? Are we all caught up now? Good.

Three Links [6]

2010-06-01T06:15:00.000+12:00

Once upon a time in Afghanistan...

A half-century ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real.

Studies in futility: the mother of all spreadsheets

Komanoff’s spreadsheet, which he has posted online, calculates how new fees and changes to existing tolls affect traffic at different times of day. It calculates which costs are borne by city dwellers and which by suburbanites. It calculates how long it takes passengers to dig for change and board buses. And it allows any user to adjust dozens of different variables—from taxi surcharges to truck tolls—and measure their impact. The result is a kind of statistical SimCity, an opportunity to play God (or at least Robert Moses) and devise the perfect traffic policy.

As if financial markets didn't have enough risk already, now would-be banker barons have to deal with an entirely new flavour (or an old one microwaved): political risk

Of course, government actions always affect the economy, but usually in an undramatic way: an interest-rate cut here, a new regulation there. The economic downturn and the debt crisis have given us instead a world where governments are among the most important players in markets—injecting money into economies on a colossal scale and routinely propping up, or even nationalizing, troubled companies. As a result, investors have a vast range of new things to worry about, like voter sentiment in Westphalia.

FPP and fairness, done right

2010-05-04T12:51:00.000+12:00

The UK elections, and the polls leading up to them, are stirring up a debate about the first-past-the-post (FPP) election system used there. In my last post, I took a few swipes at what I thought was an amateurish attempt to prove the hideous iniquity of FPP. Today, I merely want to bring your attention to a much better post.

Math and politics seldom have much interesting intersection. There's an exception for comparison of voting systems and apportionment methods. Tim Gowers, master and commander of the math blogosphere, (Fields medallist, Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and many other things besides), takes a look at FPP. Go read. Now.

FPP and voter-power done wrong

2010-04-27T06:15:00.001+12:00

The Green Party blog, FrogBlog, linked something yesterday that I found a little disappointing. The post was headlined This is how crap FPP is – statistically speaking, and the link is to a British website that purports to calculate each voter's ability to influence the outcome of general elections by electorate. The gimmick is that voters have far less power than the "one person one vote" ideal seems to demand.

Regular readers will know that I'm no fan of the first-past-the-post (FFP) electoral system. But the argument against FPP isn't the one I'd make.

First up, a quick exposition of the site's methodology for those inteserested.

For each electorate in Britain, the probability of the seat flipping is estimated, using the size of the current MP's majority and historical data. (Generally, seats where MPs have slim majorities are more likely to flip than seats where incumbents enjoy whopping majorities:

A pretty decent fit to historical data is given by exponential regression). This gives a "marginality" index. Then, the electorates are inversely weighted according to population. The idea is that people in marginal electorates have more power to change (or retain) governments, as do people in small electorates. The results are then scaled, and each electorate's "voting power index" is the quotient

\[ \Large VPI = 200\bar{x}\frac{P(flip)}{x} \]

where P(flip) is the estimated probability of the electorate flipping parties, $x$ is the electorate's population, and $\bar{x}$ is the average electorate population. The scaling factor, $200\bar{x}$ is chosen so that the "ideal" voting power comes out at 100: the situation (or its equivalent) where an electorate is a toss-up, and has exactly average population.

Here, I start to have problems.

I'm not actually a fan of the normative judgement that people's votes in non-marginal electorates don't matter. Are not the votes of those within whopping majorities counted? The successful candidate enters Parliament, as per those voters' wishes, and also has some political capital to spend, in the sense that they can afford to alienate some supporters. Are not the votes in fringe minorities rightly discarded? Elections are all about deciding who wins and who loses. When fringe minority votes don't lead to Parliamentary representation, well, those voters are the losers. There's nothing undemocratic about that.

Also, the increased "voter power" in marginal electorates is grossly overstated. The chances of your vote having dispositive impact in even a very close race approximate to nil, and this model simply doesn't account for that fact. If anything, the website linked doesn't provide an argument for "Britain should change its electoral system" so much as "voting is irrational".

And I'm really not wild about the notion that the ideal democracy is one where every electorate is always a toss-up. This describes a situation where elections are just noise: without some stability [continuity? find a better word], the feedback mechanism from population to Parliament breaks down completely. Legislation by crapshoot would be no less democratic.

So, to summarize: I think FPP is pretty bad, but I really don't think that the argument frog linked is the way to prove it.

Three Links [5]

2010-03-22T06:15:00.000+13:00

So many kinds of crazy: the guys who tried to give Al Qaida nukes; live after Justice Stevens; a superhero custody battle.

Hi All!

2010-03-16T06:15:00.001+13:00

You'll have noticed that I haven't written a whole lot lately, and a bunch of you probably deduced that this is due to the fact I now have a job.

As anticipated, paid employment will be interfering with affecting my blogging a bit. Here's the situation, and here's what's going to change.

First up: I am now in the employ of the Ministry of Health. I'm a lowest-level analyst there, and so far, I'm loving my work. While there's been a fraction of culture-shock for me—wearing a suit, getting up before noon—, my colleagues and superiors are pretty much the awesomeness, and the adjustment isn't as big as I feared.

The preceding paragraph is the extent of the work-blogging that will ever appear on this website.

Now, some consequences. I'm under a pretty standard civil service code of conduct. As far as this blog goes, there are going to a few effects.

Number one: I make clear here—and I amend the disclaimer at the bottom of the page to make clear everywhere—that under no circumstances at all are the positions I take ever to be interpreted as representative of the positions of the Ministry of Health. Ever. This should be pretty obvious, partly because of...
...Number two: I'm not going to be commenting at all on stuff that involves the health portfolio. Partly, this is just me being supercautious and drawing a bright line. Mostly, it's about me not wanting my work to creep into other parts of my life.
Number three: personal attacks on politicians and attacks so frequent & fierce as to constitute open partisanship appear to be out. This will be a bit of an adjustment for me, but I'm sure I'll cope.

The volume of blogging and the emphasis here will shift. So that I can still devote some time and mental energy to my friends while also keeping a blog and job, here's what should be a workable routine for me:

There will be no weekend blogging. I'll try for about three non-math posts per weekday, counting...
...Three Links, which will appear on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Those posts are harder work than they look.
Since Tuesday night is chess-club night for me, and I'm usually up pretty late then, Wednesday blogging will be pre-scheduled, non-topical stuff. Expect stuff about movies I've seen or books I've read.

Since no restructuring proposal is complete without an interim plan...

Interim Plan
There will be no blogging until Monday.

I'm telling you all this rather than just doing it so you all know what to expect, and to go on record saying that I won't be abandoning this blog any time soon.

So Many Kinds Of Stupid

2010-03-15T06:30:00.002+13:00

One of the reasons blogging is hard is pretty much every blogger is superfluous.

There's in the order of hundreds of millions of blogs online. Everything I've got to say has already been said by someone smarter and funnier than me.

Fortunately, it's seldom the same person. I'll seldom catch all my moments of failed originality (and suffer the consequence ego-blow), and you'll seldom find them (and I still won't suffer the ego-blow). Sadly, there's a site out there that both captures near-perfectly all my views and is staffed by comic geniuses. Naturally, I am referring to The Onion.

So when I heard that the SST did one of those "look how easy it is to smuggle bombs into crowded places" pieces of shit attempts at investigative journalism, I could only think of this. Enjoy.

Reporters Expose Airport Security Lapses By Blowing Up Plane

Three Links [4]

2010-03-15T06:15:00.001+13:00

Tomorrow's wars; what Lewis Carroll taught us; a Matt LaBash piece (and therefore recommended reading).
EDIT: BK try StealthBlogging! I just need to put this picture somewhere where it can get a URL. See this thread for the 'why'.

Three Links [3]

2010-03-02T06:15:00.000+13:00

Filling in the blanks; depression's upside; Anthony Lane—my favourite movie critic—on 3D.

iPredict Play

2010-03-01T06:30:00.001+13:00

The great and good folks of iPredict have now launched a playmoney market, meaning that you may now participate in a prediction market without risking your hard-earned dollars.

iPredict Play should be an awesome way to get some practice in if you're a bit shy about trading in a prediction market. Hopefully, once you've got your confidence up a bit, you'll be ready to play with the grownups in the realmoney market.

Because no real securities are traded in the playmoney market, iPredict isn't so constrained in what stocks it can run. This means they've got stocks on when the All Blacks crap out of the World Cup; the Oscars; and the Super 14.

Me? I've been focussing on the Winter Olympic medal-count stocks. Using my intial $1000 of playmoney, I clobbered this set of stocks into rationality—their aggregate price was well above $1—, but then realized that there was more money to be made betting that the US would take the most metal home. So I proceeded to cover all my shorts—except on the Germany-wins stock—and buy up on MEDALS.US.

As a result, I clobbered the set out of rationality again, and if you get there quick-smart, you might be able to pick some crumbs off my table. UPDATE: Opportunity now gone.