Why the Welfare State Looks Like a Free Lunch (via Brad DeLong)

The econometric consensus on the effects of social spending confirms a puzzle we confront in the raw data: There is no clear net GDP cost of high tax-based social spending on GDP, despite a tradition of assuming that such costs are large.

Also from DeLong: Crude Life Expectancy Estimates

minmax.js – transparently adds CSS minimum and maximum sizes (min/max-width/height) for IEPC. Andrew also has a few other similar scripts

The Copyright Cage

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I WAS TALKING WITH A LAW SCHOOL COLLEAGUE about cyberlaw and the people who study it. “I’ve always wondered,” he said, “why all the cyberprofs hate copyright.”

Powerbook sleeves:

• Booq PowerSleeve12
• Marware SportFolio II
• Willow Ashcroft SC-20 Powerbook Sylph
• Incase Nylon Laptop Sleeve

Unison writeup: openBench Labs: Linux and Windows in Open Sync

Recently, as I’ve gotten back into doing JS/DOM development, I’ve begun wishing more and more for a real JavaScript IDE. Mozilla is partway there (Jesse’s bookmarks, the DOM Inspector, and Venkmann are great), there still some stuff that I’d really like:

• Object Browser – integrated with run-time watches/reflection, and with a comprehensive reference
• Library management – integrated w/ Object Browser
• BrowserCaps – flagging (a la TopStyle w/ CSS), cross-referenced w/ alternatives, bug-DB; inline auto-complete stuff would be neato

Is anyone still working on a ‘developer edition’ of Mozilla?

• Eclipse Plugin: JavaScript Editor

David Eggers writes an editorial on the AmeriCorps (and its betrayal by the current administration).

Lisa’s Daily Show clips are great (well, for someone like me who doesn’t watch TV). Steven Colbert’s take on the blacked out 9/11 report as conceptual art is pure genius.

Hmm… it seems that when creating an image, Mozilla doesn’t update the height after changing the source, but after a reload it does. This is strange. I could just replace the offset subtractions with the static dimensions, but hopefully I can also find out what the proper behavior is supposed to be (or if it’s even specified).

The specs are unclear on the behavior of this, so I switched to the older DOM constructor so I could pre-declare width/height there. This incidentally breaks Safari corner rendering (assigning document.createElement(“img”).style properties work, but the JS engine just stops on Image.style properties – the Image object doesn’t inherit from the DOM2 Element object?)

• XULMaker 0.5 – mozilla-based visual XUL application builder
• XULKit – a collection of tools useful for developing XUL applications
• cview – XPCOM component Viewer