Monday Morning Update

And... We're back. Did you miss me? Of course not, because we posted a few things while we were supposed to be off. The family and I went to the Grand Canyon, and stopped at every tourist trap along the way. Then we went and stayed a week in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Grand Canyon: Indescribable in its enormity. Pictures cannot fully capture how deep, how wide, and just how beautiful this part of the Earth is. We took the train in and only spent a few hours, but I want to go back some day and do the mule ride to the bottom. How a person could behold something like this, and still insist that the Earth is an infant 10,000 years old is beyond me. They have rocks there about 1.8 billion years old. The tiniest spec, the size of a pixel in the full image, could be a building at the bottom of the canyon. But more about my trip later. Here are today's links:

Yet another mass shooting, this time at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Police are calling it a case of domestic terrorism.

In unrelated news, this article says that fewer Americans own guns, but those who do are hoarding them more than ever.

Lewisville Lake is under a special order to control zebra mussels. The pests are not only ecologically damaging to the lakes, but water users in some North Texas cities will begin paying 14% more for their water in order to cover expenses related to the zebra mussels.

Speaking of Lewisville Lake, it is currently at 518.92 feet, just over 3 feet low, and 86% full.

Texas public education will now be another $300 million short in this biennium because the Texas School Land Board has refused to turn over earnings that were budgeted by the legislature.

Free back-to-school haircuts for children at JCPenney salons.

Two Texas counties did not hold runoff elections in the primaries.

Errant trades on Wall Street were a result of untested computer code.

This article in Wired Magazine goes into a lot of detail on how the professional gamblers on Wall Street use computers and high-speed networks to make money off your trades:

"High-frequency trading raises an existential question for capitalism, one that most traders try to avoid confronting: Why do we have stock markets? To promote business investment, is the textbook answer, by assuring investors that they can always sell their shares at a published price—the guarantee of liquidity. From 1792 until 2006, the New York Stock Exchange was a nonprofit quasi utility owned by its members, the brokers who traded there. Today it is an arm of NYSE Euronext, whose own profits and stock price depend on getting high-frequency traders in the door. Trading increasingly is an end in itself, operating at a remove from the goods-and-services-producing part of the economy and taking a growing share of GDP—twice what it did a century ago, when Wall Street was financing the enormous industrial expansion of the economy. “This is counterintuitive, to say the least,” wrote New York University economist Thomas Philippon in an article for the Russell Sage Foundation. “How is it possible for today’s finance industry not to be significantly more efficient than the finance industry of John Pierpont Morgan?”

At a press briefing a few months ago, Mary Schapiro, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said she was concerned about the volume of trading “unrelated to the fundamentals of the company that’s being traded.” Proposals have been floated for ways to rein it all in, such as penalizing traders for canceling too many orders. Most of them are stranded in the proposal stage. “Circuit breakers” arrest a spiraling market, but right now high-frequency trading is essentially unregulated. (The SEC now says it will at last audit microsecond-scale trading—by buying access to Tradeworx’s data.)"