I am happy to report that the “Subscribe to Comments” feature on the site now appears to be functional. Thank you Marc for reporting this logistical issue. I have taken the liberty to subscribe people that attempted to subscribe for the past couple posts to those posts (so they do not have to manually confirm).
(Update, November 12, 2019: It’s broken again. Grrrrrrrrr……..)
On a side note, it is intriguing how email has become less and less of a reliable utility as the internet has aged, especially with the advent of centralized free mail providers (e.g. Google Mail, Hotmail, etc.) which effectively can shut off most of the internet when they blackball mails from less centralized (and usually compromised) servers. The issue then becomes how these free mail providers make a mint by harvesting the information. If you are a high profile person of interest, using such services is absolutely insane, but it still happens. You hear stories about this all the time (example). Properly securing your email is not as trivial as it may seem – on a shared webhost, they can obviously access your information at will (but at least it is not likely to be retained by Google or Microsoft and the like), so the only real defense is running your own private server and ensuring that sensitive communications are given proper levels of security.
Of course, when there is a need, there is a market. The question is – trust.
Also, on a slightly related note, just imagine if you were some foreign hedge fund that made their specialty living (illegally or otherwise) hacking into publicly traded companies’ financial infrastructure and you got wind of their earnings releases in advance of their release to the market. It doesn’t even have to be full financial statements, it could be a single line item, such as consolidated revenues. Such information would be a cash generating machine, or at the very minimum give you a huge heads-up on whether to long or short. The potential gain for these firms makes it easy to think that it does happen.