cgpSoftware

A calculator of the overall effectiveness of competition in a particular market.

For instance, do we really have competition in the distribution of cable TV? There are lots of factors here:

Symptoms of a well functioning market:

• Lower price for service
• Number of service providers
• Fluidity in choice (is the market dominated by long term contracts?)
• Quality of information regarding choices
• The number of channels being distributed (quality channels vs. non-quality channels?)
• Offering of Pay channels
• Improved digital service

Conditions which market forces may have to deal with, in some cases these can be temporary

• Government Regulation
  • Restrictions on market size
  • Ability to restrict abusers of the system
  • Mandates on availability (of which there are none now)
  • Mandates to provide ala carte service?
• Natural disaster?

Note: A similar list could probably be done for cell phone service, and broadband service.

Close enough list for now.

The point of the broken window parable is to show that one cannot ignore the hidden costs of taking wealth from private citizens to create wealth (in the form of building roads or whatever) when totaling up any such "net benefit." Basically, there are unseen possibilities.

Well duh.

Using the parable in the context of government spending, it is assumed the boy is the government. To argue against this comparison when someone proposes the BWP illustrates that government spending takes money away from the economy, you can immediately claim that there is a false equivalence that the boy throwing a rock through the window is the same thing as government spending money. You cannot accept that the boy in the example represents government without equating all government spending as being wasteful. Government spends money in lots of ways. Some of them useful, some of them not.

The underlying point made by the broken window parable against government spending can be made for it. (the point that there are unpredictable and hidden costs in any economic transaction) The shopkeeper may choose not to buy his suit in the example until well after that money could have been returned to him (by the purchase of goods by the farmer and the glazier). In this situation, the broken window scenario comes out well ahead of no broken window.

Which brings up the second false equivalence in the parable. That the shopkeeper will always be an ideal actor in the market. In the real world, shopkeepers are just as apt to misjudge the market or misallocate resources as the government is.

But that should be expected, analogies and parables often contain a lot of false equivalences and gee, maybe there are a lot of possible outcomes not considered.

After making these arguments to your compatriot, it must ultimately come back to one of two ideological discussions:

1. Does the government spend more wisely than the free market?
   • The answer is of course, it depends on your definition of what wise is, and whether or not you believe governments or corporations are more accountable to their citizenry. The answer is not the same for all cases, and it may depend on YOUR needs. But that's why government is run by the people no?
2. When the private citizen wastes money it is ok, because they made their own choice, therefore government spending is bad.
   • Sure, but this only works if we choose to ignore the role government must play in order to create a working society. It is not in the best interest nor can private citizens spend efficiently to purchase many common goods like police, fire, education, defense, roads or regulation of currency markets. Government is most effective when it creates efficiencies and predictability in the market that is unlikely to be fulfilled by private spending, either due to a lack of domain/authority or clout in the form of capital.

On the second point some start to wax poetically about how we private industry could provide some of the services or that the invisible hand will fix everything. This is a classic response point, and you're best to tell them they are free to move to Somalia or Afghanistan, paradise of a Laissez-faire society.

In an ideal world, everyone is moving making working hard, providing services and creating value whether that's the government or not. Knowing when the government is going to be effective is the trick and we shouldn't fool ourselves into believing in any ideology blindly.

Yesterday I ran into a little problem logging into Drupal. Weird thing was that it worked fine under Firefox but IE and Chrome were both failing to log in. There were some suggestions that it could be cookie related, but I cleared my cookies and that didn't seem to do the trick, nor clearing cache, and a restart of my machine (as silly as that seemed) didn't seem to work either.

As usual, the truth is much simpler: I should have noticed when I started getting random SSL certificate expiration notices that talked of certificates being expired, yet the expire date on the cert was 7/23/2011. (On a Google tool no less).

So, long story short, after a half an hour, I took a look in the lower right hand question and saw that the time had been set to the future and it was causing cookies to expire too soon - set my time back and everything looked good.

How Custom Events Will Save the Universe by Andrew DuPont...

Someone (Mike) recently asked me a question about session variables in Drupal and I didn't realize that Drupal actually "overrides" the default session handling of php. (a good thing ultimately). So basically, if you want to use the standard "$_SESSION" on "non-drupal" pages, you have to bootstrap Drupal. This sounds a little contradictory, and it probably is, but basically, those are the facts. To bootstrap drupal, just add it in:

require_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);

---

Testing session variables in drupal.
Source code of this page:

$timeStamp = date(DATE_RFC822);

$_SESSION['setOutsideOfDrupal'] = $timeStamp;

echo "Session variable (setInDrupal):".$_SESSION['setInDrupal']."<br>";
echo "Session variable (setOutsideOfDrupal):".$_SESSION['setOutsideOfDrupal']."<br>";

Session variable (setInDrupal):Fri, 03 Sep 10 08:19:37 -0600
Session variable (setOutsideOfDrupal):


So what does test.php do?

My brother is getting married soon and they are putting together a page to collect money for a set of gifts rather than the traditional set of wedding gifts because they are pretty set in that area. The idea works out pretty well - here is what it looks like:

Props to Ben Nadel's "Creating A Sliding Image Puzzle Plug-In" article. I ripped out the div-creation-styles routine right from there (but gutted the puzzle portion of it)

I've been following Ben a couple years now, and pretty much everything I've seen him put together is top notch, so it's worth a visit.

The fun stuff happens here:

...
function pieceClickHandler() {
   console.log($(this).data('index'));
   $(this).toggleClass('unbought');
  }
  
function init() {
  jImg = $('#myImg');    
  jContainer = jImg.parent();
  arr2DBoard = []; 
  initPuzzle(100);
}
...

The "action" can take place in the "pieceClickHandler". init() takes care of the setup. I probably could have coalesced it into a single function call, but *shrug* - not sure if it's necessary or not.

An editable demo contained here.

Drupal deployments & workflows with version control, drush_make, and Aegir.

I'm not familiar with Aegir and this is a complicated issue, I was thinking about more granularly (is that a word) deploying modules using cvs and this technique which is a little more lightweight (and probably cheaper), but I could see where the other approach would have it's strengths.

As with any technology or process choice, there are pros and cons to each.

Clearly, again, the one take away from all of this is that drush is awesome.

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