Original Cin

Obama Turns FDR Upside Down – WSJ.com

….the economic well-being of the country is not measured by how much taxes the government can collect, or even the size of the deficit. Rather, it is measured by the country’s productive capacity. Our theoretical entrepreneur’s 11.2% decline in taxable income reflects both less effort on his part and a less efficient use of his income in order to avoid confiscatory tax rates. Or, to put it directly, Sen. Obama’s plan would reduce an entrepreneur’s after-tax profits by $70,000 – $56,000 in lost profits and $14,000 more in taxes – just to produce a net revenue gain to the government of $14,000.

It is shocking to think that we have a presidential candidate who would make the private sector $5 poorer in order to make the government $1 richer. More likely, given the calculated political design of the proposal, no one in the Obama campaign told the candidate about the economic, ethical or historical consequences of his suggestion.

Via Thinking on the Margin via Greg Mankiw.

While looking for information on Japanese names, I found this:

Looking Good in a Big Brown Bathrobe – Jedi Training
The true test of a real Jedi is not whether she can blow up starships, or kill evil overlords, or refrain from giggling at Yoda’s Fozzie Bear voice. The true test is how good she looks in a big brown bathrobe.

The aspiring novice does not merely don the big brown bathrobe and suffer in it until she finally looks good. She advances through a number of stages, each time pitting herself against successively greater sartorial challenges. Her master guides her carefully, avoiding both allowing her to rest on her laurels and forcing her beyond endurance until her fashion sense breaks and she refuses to shop anywhere but at the Gap.

McCain calls for building 45 new nuclear reactors

Sen. John McCain called Wednesday for the construction of 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030…

This is a concrete plan that will do more than shuffle the pie around.

I was talking with my friend Jeff today, and we were discussing the economy. I mentioned that GMU Professor Bryan Caplan has pointed to the falling dollar at EconLog as a cause of rising gas prices. The article at US News pointed to by Caplan has a more detailed explanation, but, alas, no charts….

I wrote another 500+ words for the second “People Have Value.” I know how I want to end the series, and I knew how I wanted to start the story, but until today, I was having a lot of trouble with the setting in this particular part. I basically had a serious problem with believability. Rob — the oldest son in the family — has disappeared. I need his family to go looking for him in order to write the ending I want. I originally just had them follow him in right away, but the dialog I wrote to justify this decision seemed… well, boneheaded:

Brian scanned his surroundings and straightened his mustache, lost in thought. “It doesn’t look like a military base. That’s good as far as it goes. If we get in there and explain what’s happened…”

Erm, no. That’s just stupid. When confronted with a giant, mysterious pyramid of unknown origin, how many people would say “not a military base, must be safe?” I have, fortunately, figured a way to get the family inside the pyramid without turning them into brain-dead idiots.

I was working with XUL and Javascript yesterday, and I ran into some interesting problems. I’ve set up my chrome so that the project I’m working on in Eclipse is available in Firefox as “chrome://twodee/content/exampleScreen.xul”. I wanted a function I wrote to accept a filename as an argument, but no matter what I tried, a relative path wouldn’t work.

Well, of course not. You can’t just arbitrarily go from chrome-based URLs to file locations. Tossing a chrome URL into a function that’s expecting a file path is going to have some bad results. Specifically, “not a file” exceptions.

So, this works:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/skin/" type="text/css"?>
<window id="2DYouSee" title="Demo &quot;Game&quot;"
	xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
	onload="Start2D('C:\\Users\\Nic\\workspace\\2DYouSee\\content\\demo\\gameworld.json.txt')"
	width="650" height="490">
	<script src="io.js" />
	<script src="json.js" />
	<script src="twodee.js" />
	...
</window>

This does not:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/skin/" type="text/css"?>
<window id="2DYouSee" title="Demo &quot;Game&quot;"
	xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
	onload="Start2D('gameworld.json.txt')" width="650" height="490">
	<script src="io.js" />
	<script src="json.js" />
	<script src="twodee.js" />
	...
</window>