From the FT: stock in Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s company, jumps every time Anne Hathaway, the actress, gets a lot of media play.
Investor programs respond to the name without realizing the context.
This made me think of the swarms of "book dealers" I see at library sales and the Goodwill outlet these days, all plugged in to their smarphone barcode readers, automatically scanning Amazon to tell them what books are 'good'. As a tool they're fantastic at what they do, but they can also lead people into a hole, like the woman I saw at a recent sale cleaning out a table of ex-library children's books.
First, children's books are the most problematic genre from a condition standpoint. Basically, kids destroy books. You have to access any potentially saleable kids book you come across extremely critically, as the odds favor someone drawing all over the pages, or tearing out their favorite bits, or smearing food across the illustrations, etc etc.
Second, that danger is vastly amplified in a library environment, where not even the (debatable) value of 'pride of ownership' extends its protection to the threatened tome.
It's bad enough that I don't waste time on the kid's section at a library sale, other than a quick swing through the chapter books when I've finished with everything else.
Automated systems make silly mistakes, which should give folk pause as everything we use becomes ever more intertwined with everything else we use, all of it automated as much as possible.
Heck, even your technologically paranoid narrator has automated the updating of this humble blog.
But rest easy, my impeccably prepared risk assessment specialist assures me the worst that can happen is a moderate prose spill resulting in slightly elevated hyperbole levels in the water supply.
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