Gigs Shrugged

I found this today:

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article taking from the federal government the power of borrowing. I now deny their power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender. I know that to pay all proper expenses within the year would in case of war be hard on us. But not so hard as ten wars instead of one. For wars would be reduced in that proportion besides that the State governments would be free to lend their credit in borrowing quotas.

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private By Thomas Jefferson

Every dollar in existence is backed by exactly 1 dollar of debt. It is impossible to increase the money supply without increasing aggregate debt. It’s also impossible to decrease debt without decreasing the money supply by the exact same amount.

That’s one reason the Fed is pumping out money like crazy, and congress is spending it. As the debt markets unravel, people are paying off debts, and other debts are being declared total losses and being written off and new debt isn’t being offered as much… all of this causes money supply contraction.

So why are they spending and creating so much money?

The optimistic answer is that they are doing it to prevent deflation. The cynical answer is that they are spending money because they can, giving it to political friends in massive pork spending contracts, and the Fed giving directly to politically friendly bankers, in the most massive wealth redistribution scheme this country has ever seen. Except it’s not the socialist kind of wealth redistribution, it’s the kind where a corrupt government transfers money from everyone to its political friends. The worst sort of crony corrupt capitalism. And yes, Obama is a party to it.

Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce…when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.

-James Garfield, 20th President

I had a problem for a long time now that Firefox would go forward or back while I was trying to type into a text box. I discovered, somewhat by accident, the cause of this today.  It turns out if you have a wheel mouse that uses detents to scroll in discrete increments, sometimes the wheel can stop between detents, depending on which mouse you have.   A few seconds or minutes later, the mouse wheel will “pop” into place, normally just causing a little unintended scrolling.  This happens with a lot of Microsoft Mice apparently.

But when you are holding the shift key, say because you are typing in a text field and capitalizing a letter, instead of scrolling, the wheel popping into place will cause you to navigate away from the page you are on, potentially losing all that you typed.  It’s extremely frustrating, and it doesn’t happen often enough to realize what is causing it most of the time.

Here is the solution, for Linux and Windows at least:

Go to about:config and change mousewheel.withshiftkey.action to 0.  This makes the wheel scroll even if shift is held down.  This prevents firefox from losing text that you type with unintended navigation.

So if Firefox is going forward and back randomly while you try to type a message, this may very well be the cause.

The passage below is reminder of how far Linden Lab has gone from their original dream of being “bigger than the web”.  Self-limiting decisions such as this “adult ghetto”, banning people for “unacceptable fantasies”, and in general, moving further and further from the concept of a common carrier, and turning into something more and more like AOL in 1995…  a sandboxed playground for kids and people who can’t figure out how to use anything better.

Linden Lab wrote, in December 2006:

We could never write a set of rules that would work for all people all the time, nor could we enforce them across a population that is growing so rapidly. Instead, we believe that the best way to foster communication and expression is to put power into the hands of the people by giving you better tools for local control. And that’s what we’ve been doing for several months now. [...]
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