On comment moderation for a blog with ancient posts

I confess, I haven't blogged very often. Blogger, it's not me, it's you. I now have the siren call of Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, and community blogs where I can vent my spleen, nose, and elbows.

Starting a week or two ago, you began to email me. Daily, twice-daily, thrice-daily even, with comments on posts from 2008. Yes, spammers had finally reached the least-influential blog on the internet, and had decided this would be an excellent place to post links to products.

As far as I can tell, Google / Blogger flagged them all as spam candidates, and none made it onto the site, but the energetic commentors continued. So I dug through the configuration for Blogger and finally disabled anonymous comments.

My apologies to the legitimate, interested readers here who don't have an openid or gmail account or google+ id (the latter two being one in the same, now). I'm normally in favor of anyone and everyone having their say with minimal regulatory fuss, but the signal to noise ratio on recent comments has been zero, and my spam-moderation time is better spent cleaning my desk, or shaving, or coding.

So, to my anonymous followers, all two of you by the latest scientific estimates, my apologies. And to the spammers? Through tiny, annoying papercuts across hundreds of thousands of sites, you're making people's lives worse. You may not be murdering anyone, but your behavior in aggregate is stealing time away from hundreds of millions, if not a billion, people who could be living more happily.

The Fed and the economy explained

Global markets trader and blogger Macro man has written a clear and clever summary of the current US economic situation, through the lens of The Princess Bride.
Macro Man: Vizzini takes charge of the Fed

There was a remarkable development at the start of the Federal Open Market Committee's deliberations last night which somehow managed to stay out of the financial press. Fortunately, Macro Man has a mole in Washington who's filled him in on what went down.

Shockingly, Ben Bernanke and the rest of the committee have abdicated responsibility for determining monetary policy this month. Fortunately, the policy vacuum has been filled by an incomparable intellect: Vizzini, the Sicilian of Princess Bride fame. Macro Man's mole has provided him with a verbatim transcript of yesterday's policy deliberation after a black-cloaked stranger walked into the Federal Reserve conference room:

Vizzini: So it is down to you, and it is down to me. If you wish the economy dead, by all means, keep moving forward.

Dread Pirate Inflation: Let me explain--

V: There is nothing to explain. You are trying to kill the consumer that I have rightfully supported.

DPI: Perhaps an arrangement can be reached?

V: There will be no arrangement, and you're killing the consumer.

DPI: Well if there can be no arrangement, then we are at an impasse.

Read the rest here - Macro Man: Vizzini takes charge of the Fed.