Mokka mit Schlag

I spent a couple of hours in Prospect Park early this afternoon on a really nice, chilly Fall day. The lawns and leaf litter were practically covered in sparrows, and many other species were evident too. Overall I saw 36 total species including the first Hooded Mergansers of the season (about 10 on the lake). There are now over 120 Northern Shovelers on the lake, with more arriving on every north wind. I also managed to relocate all four banded geese I first spotted on Monday. They may stick around through the winter as well.

In Firefox 1.5, there was a simple preference to tell Firefox to accept cookies for the main site but not for web bugs and advertisers on the site. This was a nice compromise that blocked a lot of privacy-invasive uses of cookies while still allowing most poorly-implemented, cookie-based sites to function. That’s why I was quite surprised when I happened to look at my cookies in Firefox 2 and noticed lots of cookies from sites like ads.pointroll.com and 4.adbrite.com.

Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Cookies -> “Allow sites to accept cookies” and “for the originating site only”

No big deal. The preference must have been nuked when I upgraded, so I opened up the privacy tab and looked for the right option. It wasn’t there! Maybe in security? Nope. Not there either, nor anywhere else I could find. It seems Firefox has given in to the howling of incompetent developers who never understood HTTP in the first place and were annoyed that their sites broke when users turned off third party cookies. Consequently they eliminated the preference. Don’t worry, however. There is a workaround.
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The name servers from EasyDNS seem to be having problems, and as a result lookups into the elharo.com domain are timing out or failing completely. Usually trying again in a minute seems to cure the problem. I’m not sure what’s going on. I’ll open a trouble ticket.

Update: EasyDNS tells me they were the target of a denial of service attack today. Should be fine now.

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It was a nice day, so I took a quick spin around Prospect Park at lunch time. I picked up 34 total species including two American Wigeons, a Belted Kingfisher, and a record high 40+ American Coots. However, the highlight of the day was not one, not two, not three, but four banded geese:

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It always amuses me when economists go out of their way to claim that economics is a science (more or less true) and that they base what they say on purely on the scientific principles and not value judgments (very often false). It’s especially amusing when they blow the science to get the value judgment they’re looking for. Here’s the latest example I’ve seen. George Mason economics professor Walter E. Williams attempts to explain why for-profit entities sometimes spend on unnecessary luxuries:

You say, “Professor Williams, for-profit entities sometimes have plush carpets, have juicy expense accounts, and behave in ways not unlike non-profits.” You’re right, and again, it’s a property-rights issue. Taxes change the property-rights structure of earnings. If there’s a tax on profits, then taking profits in a money form becomes more costly. It becomes relatively less costly to take some of the gains in non-money forms.

Actually taxes have little to nothing to do with this. There is a real economic reason for this behavior (as well as several psychological and sociological ones, but economists like to ignore those factors so let’s stick to the purely economic for the moment) and it has nothing to do with taxes. Read the rest of this entry »