I hate it when I start reading my Sent Items like they’re new messages. In the brief few seconds before I figure out what’s going on, it’s pretty creepy.
Apparently the earthquake jiggered the Earth’s mass distribution sufficiently to measurably impact (fractional microseconds) the length of the day. Bring on the leap seconds and GPS updates!
Aside from fairly frequent rain, the weather here is beginning to improve. Algore says severe winter weather substantiates global warming due to increased ocean evaporation driving heavier precipitation. I never saw anything about the scientific method saying to start every statement with, “See? That proves …” I guess this implies summer precipitation should be out of this world?
By the way, water vapor in the atmosphere can be in itself a major (like, the most influential) factor in any greenhouse gas-driven warming of the globe. But, clouds of water vapor apparently mitigate this effect due to their reflectivity. (NASA: “The overall effect of all clouds together is that the Earth’s surface is cooler than it would be if the atmosphere had no clouds.”) So, if we are unfortunate enough to have lots of warm water vapor in the atmosphere without thick clouds I guess we’re hosed. Chicken Little wouldn’t know which way to run at this point.
“Opposing” global warming is about as ridiculous as “believing in” it. Just like we learned watching Pi, the more you look for something the more you see it. But then, once you figure out the fundamental meaning behind it all, you drill out the portion of your brain that was concerned with it in the first place. So, maybe it’s better to don your shades and Speedo and live like you were dying. Take a bucket with you in case you need to water down a beached whale or something. In these trying times you just never know.
I tend to steam up windows really bad in the wintertime whenever I enter a taxi here. I think this may mean that my very life contributes disproportionately to the wholesale destruction of our sweet world. Let alone my dastardly career’s impact. But, most taxis here run on LPG, so I think I’m carbon neutral on the margin as long as I stay away from the nicer cars. I need an online tool to measure my water vapor footprint. Or is it my vapor cloud?
Speaking of calming things down, my boss today mentioned that I always reassure her nothing’s going to go too wrong with the budget this year. My colleague quipped, “The only thing Brandon fears is God.”
While watching an unsuccessful attempt to pelt Turkish PM Erdoğan with a shoe, BBC was nice enough to recommend a few other shoe-related stories to me.
Not sure if this made the rounds in the US, but the Iraqi shoe thrower actually had a shoe thrown at him, which I don’t think constitutes irony but certainly qualifies as funny. I think “apt” is the right word.
Internet pedanticism has really ruined a useful term there.
It has been a long-standing project of mine to figure out what the Barenaked Ladies song “I Know” was about, and it’s apparently Robert Tilton. At least most of it. Still not so sure about the dog teeth stuff.
While I’ll always root for the US in everything, we shared a hotel breakfast with the Finnish national hockey team in Prague, and they seemed like pretty cool guys. Go Suomi!
Google looks quite a bit more like Microsoft recently. When have you seen a review of a Google application that says things like “confusing” and “complex?”
Let alone the automatic data-hiding, which to me rings of the awful “menus show recently used commands first” in Microsoft Office.
I turned off Buzz, simply because I loathe the idea of Twitter for my own uses, and I can’t stand to use Facebook for much more than an extended address book. A clone between the two? Not for me, not yet.
The mobile features do seem to make some sense and have some promise. That’s probably the thing to watch with Buzz.
Thanks to anyone who has been using the UserVoice page to submit thoughts about brightlamp. I have a very nice punchlist for this weekend, and rest assured you will be getting your votes back as I close these fairly quick-fix ideas.
Between South Africa and pretty severe project fatigue following the push to beta-01, I haven’t been working on the project at all. But, I am wanting to get started again on a more casual level (while keeping Sigma in mind as the inspiration comes), so these fixes are a good way to jump back in.
I’m very concerned about the next real feature-adding step of the project, as the commenting/tracking/following features are going to be very much a hit or a miss depending on what an active user would want.
My basic ideas are this:
Commenting to a reading by a registered user will be possible. Owners of a reading can delete comments on that reading. While commenting is non-threaded, owners can comment on their own readings.
A “Notable Readers” list concept will be introduced that basically behaves like a friends list. By default, a user’s profile page will also include readings from that user’s notable readers. This can be disabled by anyone viewing the profile using a checkbox that says “only show readings from this user.” This will look something like the Facebook wall concept.
Finally, a user can choose one of their notable readers to “follow,” meaning a reader will have the next sequential reading from the followed user as an option on their reading page.
And, of course, we need post editing (and comment editing). I have a typo on one of mine.
Any thoughts on this? Hit up UserVoice or the comments here to save me some time and pain!
Nuclear power? Environmental interests coinciding with economic policy and benefit? And with a government loan rather than a grant? Rock my world, Mr. Obama!
I feel under-informed to comment too much on monetary policy (maybe everyone is, for that matter), but it really seems to make sense that the government should be a lender rather than a granter. We know very well that lending money invokes a multiplier that enlarges the money supply, busts deflation, and stimulates GDP growth. And, despite what the kookie-head Paulies on Youtube say, that’s a Good Thing when times are tough.
Banks do this, but when they don’t do this you really shouldn’t force them to. I’m not a big believer in the decision-making capacity of banks. Any institution that relies on something as ridiculous as the American credit rating system could not be seen as very insightful or analytical in my eyes. But even if your standards are a little funky, if you’re not willing to lend it’s probably for a good reason; otherwise, your board of directors will be looking to have your head.
We can measure the risk capacity of the ordinary consumer in their relative debt level, the driver of which is basically related to the inverse of the marginal propensity to save. Banks take risk by allowing this to happen, by making interest rates attractive for lending and unattractive for saving (meaning, low). And willingness to lend is based on the bank’s cost of money and their view of lending risk. Cheap money allows for a higher risk appetite on the part of the banks. If this gets too out of hand, you start issuing no-doc loans to idiots. The Fed influences the cost of bank funds, so interest rates are certainly a huge policy tool when trying to influence private sector investment preferences.
If I’m the government and I start handing out massive grants (and sadly things like TARP seem to degrade to grants very often despite being sold to the taxpayers as loans or investments), I can’t rightly get this money back without just raising taxes and burning the money, which in implementation probably ranges from outright theft to hopelessly complicated (post-stimulus bonus tax, anyone?).
Classical economics education normally illustrates the creation and destruction of money via government debt (bonds). If you as the government pay off bonds (by printing/releasing cash), you grow the money supply. If you take on debt, you shrink the money supply. So the government works productively backwards to the rest of the public in the classical format. It makes sense, as people buy bonds (directly or indirectly) when they save, and savings sent to the government takes money out of the private sector.
But what happens when the government begins to produce cash outflows (increases to the money supply) without a bond trading hands the opposite way? You’ve just enlarged the money supply with no claim to reduce it when desired. You start looking like a bit of an indian giver when you try to tie strings to the funds (these are businesses, not states, for goodness sakes).
So the role of a debt-holder seems to make a heck of a lot more sense for the government. If the government grants money to a company, they start to look like a shareholder rather than a debt-holder. This is what happened to GM. The government injected capital without a bond changing hands, and the company effectively became government-owned. Maybe it was necessary to take the reins here, but it’s certainly not the standard case. This puts a lot of really non-business-savvy bureaucrats in the position of having voting rights in a company deemed quite important to the country’s prosperity.
If you’re a debt-holder, you have it pretty nice. You have no input into the daily operations of the company (unless covenants are broken), and you have first claim to the carcass if the company happens to fall over. The government can agree to restructure or extend the duration of the debt at will, but they also have the right to reclaim the money and have firmer control on inflation while operating directly in the private sector (rather than depending on the banks, which throughout the crisis have been quite loath to follow recommendations regarding the use of capital injections).
The central bank becomes a bit more like a regular bank, save the luxury of having the Federal Mint in the vault rather than time deposits.
Debt gives you the chance to make rules and carries with it implied limitations on the interactions between the two sides of the agreement.
I’m proud to say my recent efforts have brought me to a public beta release of my secret project, brightlamp!
brightlamp is a daily scripture reading service. The whole thing is designed to work via e-mail to the highest extent. Meaning, the readings come to you sometime around 4 AM whenever you’ve done a reading the previous day. If you don’t read, you don’t get new e-mails. You can read your passage within the e-mail if you choose, or you can click a link to read it in the translation of your choice on Bible Gateway.
When you’re finished, you just click on the brightlamp link in the e-mail to record your progress. This logs you into the site automatically, and you have the chance to write a journal entry regarding the passage, record any prayer requests, and select your next reading (with an emphasis on sequential progress).
Features to come are community-oriented: commenting, keeping up with the progress of other people, and even following the reading progress of someone else.
Let’s keep this in “the family” for now, meaning primary readers of this blog. I think whatever is there is generally okay (and I have unit tests to prove it), but I’m not feature complete or heavily tested at this point, so I would like to wait before any significant growth happens.
And please follow instructions if/when you get the “white screen of death,” and send me an e-mail with the crash report. And more importantly, file all your ideas and requests on my shiny new feedback site. I’m using this as my bug-tracker as well, so posting a crash report there also works. You don’t even have to register with the site to post.
So, hope you enjoy it, and that something good comes from it! I’m sure I’ll have more updates as the second tier of features begins to develop.
