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They won't let me have access to the wireless ethernet at work. The IT department charges $10 per head every month, and I don't do enough to justify it. This is despite the fact that the IT department sees fit to issue as standard equipment laptops with built-in 802.11b.
I still have a bigger cubicle than my boss. I just never get to work there.
9:55:12 PM 
Categories: LiveJournal
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This would be a pretty damning article... if economists were actually like that. Real economists realize that people do what they do, and so real economics must be able to match the real actions of real people. "Policy wonks want people to be rich; economists want people to be happy." (Unfortuately I can't look up the citation for this quote since most of my books are still packed. Maybe Steve Landsburg?)
Note that the person quoted, Thomas Friedman, isn't an economist.
Thomas Friedman ran his "In the history of the world, no one ever washed a rental car" quote again. There are actually some serious points to make about the quote. I've washed rental cars, so it's wrong. Am I the exception that proves the rule? I doubt it. Mostly, people rent cars for very short periods of time. The *actual* rule here is that people almost always rent cars for less time than they go between car washings. How many people wash their cars every week? How many people rent cars for twice as long as they would go between washing their own car? In fact, the statement is normative -- economists fervently wish people would behave the way economists say they do. But not all of life is an economic calculation, and the prescription that people *should* behave that way wreaks inestimable damage on the world, our society, on our psyches, and on our souls. There's no honor in driving an extremely dirty car because you are going to return it in a few days. Say you're a victim of a flock of birds -- wash the car. Say you find a wallet -- give it back. Say a cashier gives you too much change -- give it back. Say you're brushing your teeth -- turn the water off until you need it. Say your community is at peak electricity use -- wait until off-peak to wash clothes, etc. Say you're buying a vehicle to commute -- buy one that gets good gas mileage, and therefore pollutes less, and/or avoid commuting. If you think a little harder, you can find economic justifications for most behavior that economists theologically insist is irrational and therefore *bad*... in their belief system. But as individuals and communities, we should consider this a matter of honor, and reject the economists' worship of greed. [licentious radio]
9:44:38 PM
Categories: LiveJournal
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Paolo notes a problem with Yahoo's feeds, announced last night. They flow a huge amount of stuff, even if you just subscribe to one feed, there might be dozens of new stories each hour. Maybe this is just something to get used to. I remember the NY Times felt strange that way too at the beginning, now it's very normal to get several dozen stories in one update. There's another concern, linkrot. Links into Yahoo News rot relatively quickly, as compared to News.Com, for example, which is near perfect. So, until I hear something has changed, I'm going to use Yahoo to read news but try hard not to point to stories on Yahoo from my weblog. [Scripting News]
The number one feature I've wanted to handle this situation is "Catch up on this feed". You can set Radio to have all the delte boxes checked by default or unchecked by default. However, whether I am most likely to want them checked or unchecked really depends on the type of feed. For these straight news kinds of feeds, I would typically want scan the headlines an select a few to save while discarding most. Other feeds I want to keep until I've read through.
In addition, sometimes a feed just goes wonky, and I get a large quantity of old articlesshowing up from teh feed again. Sure, you could spend a lot of time trying to debug why they didn't match agains the record of articles already deleted, but no one is really that interested and it's going to be different every time. There are even good reasons why the articles would show up again in a way that couldn't be matched. "Catch up on this feed" is less elegant, but less effort too.
An even better feature, which I think might actualy be easier considering the way that Radio does things, would be "Catch up on this contiguous block from this feed" since the aggregator keeps things organized by reverse time order. A batch of new articles that were dowloaded together will show up together, but the batch from the last download will be further down the page (or even a different page).
And if I were half the programmer that people think I am, I would just write it myself. But I'm not.
7:55:45 AM
Categories: Radio
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