I’ve started reading Martin van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State. I haven’t made it too far in yet and I’m still reading through the section on pre-state political communities. Today, I came across a particularly fascinating fact about confidence in “public” treasuries. Simply put, the confidence in the government’s ability and willingness […]
Author Archives: the proprietor
Series of Unfortunate Jaunty Upgrade Events
28 April 2009 – 12:32 pm
Recently, there was a new release of Ubuntu. I’ve had relatively good experiences with past releases, and I was looking forward to trying out the new notification system, so I decided to run the upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04. This turned out to be a very bad idea. I think it might have been something […]
Mozilla: Web Feeds vs. Delicious Add-on
19 April 2009 – 4:24 pm
I have the official Delicious extension installed in Firefox. It’s a great extension and I use it somewhat regularly, but I recently noticed a problem with it. I was trying to use the Web Feed icon that appears in the address bar to add a feed to Google Reader. Normally, this should not be difficult […]
Garth Turner Joins the Liberals
The news item of the day for Canadian political junkies is that former Conservative, more recently Independent, MP Garth Turner has joined the Liberals. I’ve read only a little bit of the online commentary and it mostly seems to be what I would expect. The current incarnation of Garth Turner, MP was a lightning rod […]