Wednesday, March 13, 2002
An economic lesson on umemployment
Anyway, by some mysterious process, we've arrived at a recession level of unemployment that's lower than the expansion level of five years ago. Pretty neat stuff. Which only leaves us one question:
Where the hell's my job
Via InstaPundit.Com, Megan McArdle on unemployment
Rob and I were talking about unemployment the other day. I had remarked that economists (or business leaders, or both) had said that there is a minimum amount of unemployment that is needed to keep the economy working. At the time, we both theorized that it was the level required to keep those employed in line (the Cynical/Conspriatorial Theory).
The article above (mediumish length, but worth it) goes into detail about how this minimum level of unemployment to sustain our economy comes (or came) about. It's less a conspriacy and more a way companies find the maximum profit given the rules of the game.
Blog commentary
Several weeks ago someone asked if it would be possible for people to leave comments here, a feature that a log of online journals/weblogs have (such as Live Journal). I took it under consideration, and even wrote a long entry about it that I never got around to posting since it was long and rather dry.
In a nutshell, I talked about the problems I had in integrating it into the format I use here—not actual storage problems, but referencing problems. As I have it now, you can select arbitrary portions of my journal (c.f. The Electric King James Bible) I never thought of ways to exclude content from the range. And therein is the crux of the problem—I don't necessarily want to always print the comments for an entry, but it should be easy to view them and, as always, get ranges of comments.
I also have a bias—I hate threaded web discussion boards (the best example of what I dislike: Slashdot. I always read the comments in “flat mode”—all comments visible (and on Slashdot, at a fairly high rating level but that's Slashdot and I'm digressing). I think what I dislike about them is the ping-ponging you ahve to do going down and up the thread chain following comments (Scripting News' commentary system is particularly bad in that reguard). But like I said, that's a bias I have and I don't want to needlessly exclude people's preferences in reading habits if I can avoid it.
But just now, via Blogger (I occasionally get curious as to
what the competion is doing), I came across BlgKomm, a commentary system that
has a unique feature—“[c]omments
appear within your blog, below the posts, with any popups.”
I try it out, and yes, it is rather interesting—the comments are initially hidden until you select a link, then they're flushed out for that post only. Now granted, that's a display issue and not a referening issue, but it still is something for me to think about.
And I still have to figure out the whole reference to comments thing.
