Jobs and productivity
Which is better, 1) a factory that employs 1000 people and produces 50000 widgets a year, or 2) a factory that employs 100 people and produces 100000 widgets a year?
If you answered “1″, congratulations! You are qualified to be a politician! (Bonus points if you asked “union or non-union?” before answering). If you answered “2″, then you make too much sense to be an elected official.
I’ve touched on “make work bias” before, but Walter E. William wrote a fine column. “Trade versus Protectionism”, so I’d thought I’d link to it.
Volcano taco
Have you had a volcano taco from Taco Bell yet?
I’ve had a few…dozen of them. I love them. Actually, it’s just a regular taco with “lava” sauce and an inexplicably red shell (which tastes just like the non-red shells). So, I guess what I love is just the lava sauce.
Incidentally, before the lava sauce comes out of the bottle, it’s referred to as magma sauce.
I’ve recently learned that the volcano taco will soon be discontinued, so I thought I would soliloquize it here, in iambic pentameter.
Volcano taco missing from my life,
Erupting thy way into my lone heart.
Shall I compare thee to the summer’s heat?
Thou art more lovely and more delicious.
Rough winds do shake my glad taste buds anon:
Your retail lease hath all too short a date.
Good bye, volcano taco, and may a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.
.NET tools you want
I’ve been attending some user groups and informational sessions lately at the local Microsoft offices, and I’ve come across some very handy tools (if you use Visual Studio).
- GhostDoc (free): A tool that automatically generates XML comments for C#. It doesn’t generate comment stubs, it actually fills in comments based on best guesses and naming conventions.
- Resharper (not free): This is an add-in which adds a lot of handy functionality to C#: refactoring, coding assistance, refactoring, code generation, etc. It’s like intellisense, except with a lot of additional…sense.
- Microsoft Pex (free CTP): This add-in hasn’t been officially released, but you can download a CTP. Pex is a tool that helps to generate automated test cases based on an intelligent algorithm that crawls your logic for edge cases, exceptions, assertions, etc. If you like the idea of TDD, but think that it might require too much work to write test cases, Pex is a tool that is a must have.
- NUnit (free): speaking of TDD, one might find the built-in testing framework in Visual Studio to be less mature than something like JUnit, which has been around for a while. NUnit is a .NET version of JUnit.
Catherine Vogt
Cathering Vogt noticed that Obama was very popular among her 8th-grade colleagues.
So, she tried an experiment. She wore a homemade t-shirt with “McCain Girl” written on it to school one day just to see how tolerant Obama’s supporters were.
Here are some responses:
- Classmate(s) suggested that she be be “burned with her shirt on” for “being a filthy-rich Republican.”
- One person told her to “go die”.
- Some people were “calling me very stupid”
- And finally, one person said that “she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain”. Her teacher.
She wore an “Obama Girl” shirt the next day and got less flak.
Not all that suprising: these are 8th graders who are bombarded with The Daily Show and Green Day and the agenda of the NEA and what not every day.
But the most bothersome quote to me was that she was a “filthy-rich Republican”. There is clearly a populist perception that Republicans are all greedy and rich, and got that way by “exploiting the common working family” or some such tired rhetoric. This is a very dangerous thing, because it leads to very stupid laws that are meant to “reduce economic inequality”. And they will reduce economic inequality: they will make us equally miserable.
The way to improve economic conditions is not to make conditions worse for the rich–it’s to improve conditions for everyone. It’s not by envy and soaking-the-rich, but by reduction in government interference: subsidies, price controls, taxes, bureaucracy, tariffs, bailouts, entitlements, protectivist trade, and monopolies (government and private). Let’s be very skeptical about central planning and err in the favor of markets.
Travolta pumpkin
There was a pumpkin carving competition at work recently.
Our group decided to (as usual) not make any sense and carve a pumpkin with John Travolta’s face.
I can’t really take any credit: the artistic work is entirely Jonny’s. So, I’ll just leave these pictures here…
So haunting…
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