Original Cin

[W]hen someone asks you for $700B for reasons he can’t clearly explain, you hang up the phone.

- Bryan Caplan, “Paulson as a High-Pressure Telemarketer,” EconLog

A new blog by Casey Mulligan has a good explanation of the current noncrisis:

There was a time when people believed that the Sun and stars revolved around the Earth. Of course, now we know that the Earth is not the center of the universe, or even the center of our little solar system. In the somewhat more recent past, economists thought that the non-financial sector in a modern economy revolved around financial markets, despite the facts that only 4 percent of the workforce was employed in the financial sector (including insurance and real estate), and even today that sector employs only 6 percent of the total. President Bush and supporters of the recent massive Wall Street bailout plan still believe Wall Street to be the center of the entire economy.

As seen on Marginal Revolution

From http://xkcd.com/221/

License

NANACA†CRASH  is fun.

I was having a hell of a time trying to get keyboard input to work for a custom UIComponent in Flex. Many messages on the web about this particular problem are not very helpful, don’t identify what’s going wrong, and tend to misidentify the problem as failing to call the super.keyDown() method. After determining that my UIComponent extension wasn’t receiving focus, I found this comment by Khelonium in the documentation:

I had a little problem when I tried to have focus working on my custom Components. The UIComponent class documentation looks like Focus is enabled by default, but it is not. To have Focus enabled you have to implement the IFocusManagerComponent , I have found the documentation(thanks to the mailinglist) here :
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flex/2/docs/00001727.html

Chalk it up to boneheaded language design, poor choice of defaults, and bad documentation that this problem from no later than Sept 2006 is still confusing in 2008.

Corfam – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The 1966 Chilean issue of Reader’s Digest claimed that by 1983 there would not be enough leather from cows, demand exceeding supply by 30%.