I’d like to thank Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert cartoons and all-around philosopher) for removing any need or incentive I may have for further posts about global warming any time in the near future:
Adams on Global Warming, Part 1
Adams on Global Warming, Part 2
The Christian Science Monitor and the Cato Institute have recently run op-eds that have prompted me to write about something that has often occurred to me in the past about agricultural subsidies. Without belaboring the details, the government pays huge subsidies to farmers, who then grow less than what they are capable of growing, which in turn raises the commodity prices of various agricultural goods. The fact these programs are effective demonstrates a basic economic truth about agricultural markets - if allowed to be purely competitive markets, the equilibrium price for the otherwise-subsidized goods would be much lower, to the point that many farmers would likely face poverty. However, I submit the subsidy programs are a bad idea. (more…)
As any of you who have been reading this blog have probably figured out, my brain is cluttered with more useless crap than I can objectively measure. Predictably, my home - and especially my home office - and how I live are an unfortunate reflection of that phenomenon. Earlier this week, something in my head snapped. I am going to slay this clutter dragon now if it kills me. (more…)
More geeky shit today. JavaScript has a Math.round() function, but no convenient way to achieve a precision round. So for example, if you have a value of 8.942 and you want to round it to 8.94, you have to do some more math in your code. This handy little function lets you do that a little more easily.
Building on that, here’s another function I wrote that’s pretty handy for expressing numbers as formatted dollar values, complete with commas for values above $1,000. You can call this function one of three ways:
var v = dollar_value(); // $0.00
var v = dollar_value(3.4); // $3.40
var v = dollar_value(3.4, ‘€’) // €3.40
Here’s the dollar_value() function. Note you need the precision_round() function for this to work.
Here’s an article about the Iraq situation that I think is superbly written, and to date I don’t think I’ve read anything on this matter with which I find myself more in agreement. And it’s an interesting position to take, too. For those too lazy strapped for time to read the article, the gist of it is that the Democrats could achieve their supposed objective - ending the war - by shifting their focus from “it’s a failure, we should cut our losses now” to “we accomplished what we set out to do a long time ago, so now we can bring our troops home and celebrate our victory”. By so doing, Niskanen argues, enough Republicans could be convinced to essentially change sides. The interesting aspect of this to me is that it highlights something I find at once obvious and little-known (or at least, little-appreciated). (more…)
Geek post today. I have developed a cross-browser JavaScript class that adds drop-down “shufflers” to a table which will allow the user to change the order of the rows in the table on the fly. (more…)