In the interests of full disclosure...

I'm back, and I'll be posting the next installment in my series tomorrow, probably early afternoon Pacific time.  I'm announcing this because I have an ulterior motive for writing this story, and in particular for writing about it now.  I'm hoping to draw attention to the problem of regulatory capture in the financial industry because there is a bill before the California state assembly that is likely to make a bad problem even worse.  But there's a narrow window of opportunity to get this bill amended so that it makes the problem better.  By the time I'm done, I hope to convince a those of you who are citizens of California that the problem is serious, and that you can help by sending a note to the relevant people in the Assembly.  I'll provide contact information before I'm done.

In the hopes of drawing attention to the problem I've been submitting these posts to Hacker News.  The first one got quite a bit of attention, the second hardly any.  There's about an hour-long window of opportunity between the time a link is submitted to HN to the time it falls off the New page and into the cosmic void, never to be seen again.  If you have a Hacker News account I would really appreciate an upvote tomorrow afternoon.

I'm being up-front about this because I anticipate getting a lot of flack when I publish the next installment.  It's the story of a failure.  Silicon Valley loves a failure, but it hates a whiner.  They want you to fail fast, fail quietly, and move on.  And I am mostly on board with that.  Dwelling on failure is usually counterproductive.  But in this case I think there's a valuable lesson to be learned from my failure, and so I'm going to take the risk of being labelled a whiner and a sore loser in the hopes that it might spur enough people to action to do some good and get a very bad law changed for the better.

That's my agenda.  I hope that by being up-front about this it will help shield me from some of the criticism that I'm pretty sure will come if I'm successful in drawing attention to tomorrow's post.