Do Not Install Firefox 1.5 (Yet...)

I went ahead and updated my Firefox browser to 1.5. Java apps won't load anymore! I Googled for Java problems and apparently several people had trouble with the release candidates. Re-installing/updating everything didn't help. It's probably not compatible with some other extensions.
If you don't care, everything else seems to work well. But I need Java! I hope they fix this soon. I know it's not happening to everybody there would be a lot of noise about it.
UPDATE: This is only happening to people who are using the AdBlock extension (which is pretty much the most popular extension - and my favorite). Somewhere out there on the net is another extension called Adblock Plus that's supposed to fix the Java problem. I think I'll just wait till they fix the old Adblock so I don't lose my filters. Disabling the adblock extension and re-starting Firefox does allow Java to run. The Firefox Folk recommend getting the new Java in any case; You can get it at java.com
UPDATE2: It turns out you can export your adblock filters, uninstall adblock, install adblock plus, then re-import the filters tools>adblock>preferences. Works! I'm Firefoxing 1.5'ing and adblocking (and Java-ing) all at once! The way God meant browsing to be.

Tech Tags: firefox adblock plugin bug

The Oregonian Must Die!

I stopped advertising in The Oregonian Classifieds a couple months ago. They responded by raising the cost of my ads, because now I'm a low volume user. I explained that their circulation is down and their subscribers are getting older (so are we all), but my customers stay the same age (cf Matthew McConaughey in "Dazed and Confused" on high school girls). And the Oregonian competition, especially Craigslist, is cheaper, faster, and better in virtually every way.
The Oregonian is following classic old monopoly behavior. "We don't care because We don't have to." As little as a year ago, advertising in the Oregonian was required business practice for me. About 80% of my business came directly from that advertising. This year, because of Craigslist and my own website, www.bestportlandrentals.com, only 10% of calls were coming from those (expensive) Oregonian ads.
I have to think loss of classifieds to the Web is happening to every regionally dominant newspaper with a weak web presence and (the Oregonian farms out their website, such as it is, to another company). Newspapers with competition are more conscious of losing market share and sometimes even have free ads. Monopoly papers muddle along with blinders thinking all they have to do is churn out enough tons of inky pressed pulp and the dollars will roll along, merrily. But that won't work much longer.
So the Oregonian Must Die! And not just because I want it to.

Tech Tags: classifieds ads portland oregonian newspaper

Why the Fed Should Hide Inflation

Robert Lucas most famous idea is "rational expectations" where he argued that if people expect (for example) inflation based on some reports or policies, they will adjust prices before it happens. From the old days through to the 1960s people had built in a lag for higher production costs to trickle through the economy including higher pay, CPI etc. In the 1960s - 70s Friedman and others emphasized the "quantity" idea of inflation which pretty simply says more money = more inflation. But they didn't address the lag issue. Lucas speculated that the "verbal" basis of their theories made incorporating something like expectation too complex and so was ignored (even though the older papers acknowledged that such a thing ought to exist). So he said in his Nobel lecture.
Anyway, here's something interesting: Lucas showed that a moving average of M2 correlates very strongly with inflation. (his graph didn't show if that was adjusted for GDP. I would think it would have to be.) Unemployment (Phillips curve) on the other hand, has at best a tenuous negative corellation. More money means Inflation.
Now, last week the Fed announced they're no longer publishing M2 because it's not meaningful anymore.
Either something has happened recently that is throwing m2 off (possible. That's what the fed argues. The money/financial market effects are skewing M2 so much that it has lost its significance for policy decisions). That may be true. The fed has to make relatively short term decisions. A 10 year moving average (where the correlation shows up) is not meaningful for policy.
But...it could also be true that the Fed realizes publishing a powerful forward indicator of incipient inflation is against their interests!
It creates a rational expectation of inflation.
(Robert Lucas is considered the most influential economist of the last 30 years. Nobel in 1995. But he's not Friedman-esque. His work is Very mathematical. In fact, he's apparently responsible for making graduate economics so heavy on math. I think it's really interesting that you almost never read in the press or even most macroeconomics textbooks about dynamic -- continuously changing in time -- models of the economy vs simple static equilibrium models you always see. Partial differential equations, stochastic Markhov chains, Banach function spaces -- a bit of a jump compared to the little Supply-Demand graphs. Yet it's the dynamic models most economists take seriously these days).

Tech Tags: economics rational expectations inflation bernanke federal reserve

How to Gouge Passively by Joe Exxon

The huge oil company profits after Katerina aren't from simple price gouging. It's more subtle, but equally insidious. It's the Refineries. The fact is the domestic oil refiners have an incentive to underbuild. Under normal conditions, the refinery capacity might be adequate to meet ordinary demand. The refiners might even make a little more money if they built extra capacity for demand peaks. The thing is, they make A LOT more money ($50 Billion for Exxon?) if they do not build that capacity and there is a shortage. Simply, the supply curve (short term domestic) is much steeper if they don't build that extra capacity. When there is a shortage because of a hurricaine or whatever, the profits are huge compared to what they would be in the same circumstance if the refiners built a litte more capacity. Because of this incentive, they may actually underbuild vs what is required to optimize even normal demand. It's a kind of passive profiteering. Draw the little rectangles under the curve for relative profits (or read Exxon's quarterly), and you will see what I mean.

Tech Tags: economics gas prices refinery capacity supply demand