Do the Republicans really want to stimulate the economy?

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Jason

If the Republicans really want to stimulate the economy, then why did they try so hard to reduce the items shown to be most stimulating, and increase those shown to be the least stimulating?  Is the below data just plain inaccurate?  What gives?

Should we consider the Congressional Research Service biased?
Source: http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/R40104_20090227.pdf page 13

Table 1. Zandi’s Estimates of the Multiplier Effect for
Various Policy Proposals
Policy Proposal  One-year change in real GDP for a given policy change per dollar

Tax Provisions
Non-refundable rebate 1.02
Refundable rebate 1.26
Payroll tax holiday 1.29
Across the board tax cut 1.03
Accelerated depreciation 0.27
Extend alternative minimum tax patch 0.48
Make income tax cuts expiring in 2010 permanent 0.29
Make expiring dividend and capital gains tax cuts permanent 0.37
Reduce corporate tax rates 0.30
Spending Provisions
Extend unemployment compensation benefits 1.64
Temporary increase in food stamps 1.73
Revenue transfers to state governments 1.36
Increase infrastructure spending 1.59
Source: Mark Zandi, Moody’s Economy.com.
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Fckeditor & php: HTML header is gone?

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Jason

Fckeditor is something that I’ve used for home and work often. It is a lightweight, very adaptable open-source wysiwyg editor. The editor can be used with most major web languages (php, js, coldfusion, etc..).

Recently I ran into a problem that I have not seen before (and this could be due to the complexity of the site I was working on, being too complex for its own good:)).

I had an existing site built mainly in PHP, and wanted to add the ability for the site’s owner to edit the pages using Fckeditor.

After uploading the Fckeditor, the _samples directory had mostly working PHP examples. However, each time I would edit a file, the html and head section would just disappear.

Hitting the “source” button on Fckeditor, revealed that it did not see the or other sections of my code.

After quite a bit of googling, I discovered that I needed to enable full page edits with this fckconfig.js addtion:
FCKConfig.FullPage = true;

In addtion, since some of the files had php code in them, I needed to add:
FCKConfig.ProtectedSource.Add( /<\?[\s\S]*?\?>/g ) ; // PHP style server side code

While I can understand Fckeditor “hiding” html head sections and things like server-side php code, given that it is supposed to be a wysiwyg editor for non-programmers, the major problem is that is LOSES that data.

Fine, if you want to, by default, hide much of the source code of a file, at least do not lose it upon post.

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Feinstein and net neutrality

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Jason

Posting an email I just sent to Feinstein.
——————————

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/feinstein_stimulus_amendment/

“US Senator Dianne Feinstein hopes to update President Barack Obama’s $838bn economic stimulus package ”

“reasonable network management practices such as deterring unlawful activity, including child pornography and copyright infringement.”

A) Please help to stop the practice of tacking on unrelated additions to bills in the House and Senate. This sort of network neutrality issue has nothing to do with stimulus and you know it.
B) I can fully understand your desire to protect copyright, as well as protect the innocent from indecent material, but you are going about it in a very very dangerous way.
….i. Forcing (Or even allowing) ISPs’ to filter, shape, or otherwise manage their network traffic, will directly conflict with our Nation’s idea of free speech. Allowing an ISP to determine what traffic gets priority on a network, or what traffic gets to be “heard”, is exactly the opposite of the principle of freedom of speech.
….ii. Prioritizing network traffic (or filtering) based on the current desire of an ISP, which amounts to prioritizing/filtering traffic based on that ISP’s largest customers, stifles any chance that startup companies have of gaining significant market share within the internet.

Please consider directing laws towards the root cause of the problems, and not the medium in which they exist. For example, if drug smugglers often use ‘trucks’, making trucks on the highway drive 50% slower, really doesn’t solve the ‘drug problem’. Now imagine if every local road crew had the ability to slow down any car type they wanted, because for them, that car type was bad/wrong in some way some of the time.

That is exactly analogous to any sort of network shaping, filtering or management.

Of course, I could be completely wrong in my understanding of your attempted stimulus package modifications, but how could I attempt to become more informed, when much of these “little details” are worked out behind closed doors.

I know that most Senators feel that “this is just how things get done in Washington” but I beg of you to truly embrace the idea of change that was voted for in the recent Presidential election.

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Stimulus

Posted on February 8, 2009 by Jason

I completely agree with this commentary. The bottom line is that something needs to be done to change the mindset in Washington, namely, that facts are irrelevant to policy creation.


Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

When facts can’t change someone’s mind, should they really be a US senator? Why do these boneheads keep getting elected….

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Design Code

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Jason

While I’m not a pure web designer (anymore) I thought this video was great.  

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The city of Caral

Posted on December 5, 2008 by Jason

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral

Just watched a bbc video about Caral.  It is the oldest major city in the America’s, yet it is so far south.  If people crossed the Siberian/Alaskan ice bridge during the last ice age, why is the largest oldest city so far south in Peru?  Shouldn’t there be bigger cities either closer to the equator (warmer during ice age) or at least more north than peru (closer to the crossing point).

Sometimes I almost feel like we should be devoting more money to Archaeology.  I just keep feeling like our world view of humanity is messed up.  Just this week, they found stone tools that push back modern human behavior 100,000 more years.  It was currently 80,000-120,000 years.  So if modern humans were around for 220,000 years, what the heck were we doing for 220,000 years?  Just chillin I guess ;)   Then all at once we decided to build cities and in the span of a few thousand years landed on the moon.  Yeah right… :)

I guess there might many theories that might match the new data, like:
1.  Modern human behavior was present in earlier monkey-like ancestors to us.  So stone tools, etc.., were being used by not by humans, but by some pre-cursor to us that later evolved into humans.
2.  “Something” kicked our minds up a notch.  Discovery of pyschadelics leading to abstract thought and writing, aliens, a new evolutionary trait in the brain, etc..
3.  Some critical population mass was reached that exponentially allowed the sharing of ideas:  like either pure numbers of humana, or climate changes that forced people to form larger groups to survive.
4.  Others…

At any rate, I find our origins very interesting to speculate about.  I hope we learn much more in my lifetime.

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