Adding half-page scrolling to Firefox

This is partially googlable stuff, but I thought I might as well put it down in a post, for memory's sake if nothing else.

I found myself swearing over how pressing the space bar in Firefox scrolls almost a page down, which is less than ideal for continuous reading as you lose almost all context. It also means that sites with overlaid "menu bars", like Twitter or Techcrunch, swallow some rows of each page.

The ideal solution would be to have a built-in setting in Firefox for how large part of the viewport the space bar should scroll down, with the default at today's 95% or whatnot. This seems to be controversial for whatever reason, but there's fortunately a work-around:

Download the keyconfig extension and add two new keyboard shortcuts (I've mapped them to ^D and ^U for half-page scrolling up and down, respectively) with the following code:

/* Down */
window.content.scrollBy(0, window.content.innerHeight / 2);

/* Up */
window.content.scrollBy(0, -(window.content.innerHeight / 2));

It's possible to bind these directly to space and shift-space as well, but unfortunately they don't seem to work on 100% of web sites, so I kept the standard bindings around as a backup.

Update: ^U seems to be a popular keyboard shortcut for sites to hog, so I went back to overriding space/shift-space - there's always PgUp/-Dn when those fail.

Update II: Found a better way to do this that seems to work on most sites as well as non-HTML pages.

McArdle's Voice

Megan McArdle has a great post up on all the obstacles to leaving poverty, which pretty much blows away a lot of my previous annoyances with her all too frequent streaks of business school arguments.

My self-observed metric for the journalists I end up following seems to be mostly underdog-based. I picked up my Dave Weigel habit after the Washington Post fired him over the journolist scandal (although I'm still lukewarm on Ezra Klein), Moe Tkacik after she got in trouble for "outing" the women accusing Assange of rape and Mac McClelland based on the completely hysterical overreactions to her self-biographical piece on PTSD and violent sex.

Another way to put it is that I really like to follow journalists who bring their own voice and personality to their work (which is one reason I'm sad to see the demise of Bloggingheads), and I'm definitely beginning to discover that in McArdle.

The Limits of Deterrence

NPR's excellent Planet Money show on software patents is a great primer on how absurd the patent system has become. Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures comes off particularly bad, looking like a mafia-style protection racket.

I think there's an even more damaging conclusion to draw, though, if one accepts the model of patent portfolios as the equivalent of nuclear arsenals:

"All the big tech companies have started amassing troves of software patents -- not to build anything, but to defend themselves. If a company's patent horde is big enough, it can essentially say to the world, 'If you try to sue me with your patents, I'll sue you with mine.'

"It's mutually assured destruction. But instead of arsenals of nuclear weapons, it's arsenals of patents."

In that kind of world, Myhrvold's essentially assetless company is a stateless actor with access to weapons of mass destruction. That is a potentially very unstable situation.

S&P's Real Bet

Moe Tkacik nails it on the S&P downgrade:

Standard & Poor's real bet here is that the US government is too gridlocked to come together and extend a firm few fives-across-the-eyes to the ratings agencies for talking shit. Permanently reviving the SEC's "experts" rule seems like as good a place as any to start, and I'm sure it would leave plenty of room to escalate.

Now, if this is a winning bet, what are the odds the other agencies won't pile on eventually? And what are the odds that their recommendations for US policy will be any less idiotic than S&P's focus on government deficit reduction during a depression?

Senator Warren?

The current speculation is that Elizabeth Warren, now no longer a candidate to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she created, will run for Scott Brown's US Senate seat. Ezra Klein provides the relevant horse-race context, which I think is right -- a Senator clearly trumps an appointee.

If Warren did run and win, though, the bigger victory would be for financial sanity. As it stands, there is a distinct lack of "outsiders" among Senators that specialize in financial issues. Far too many Democrats and Republicans alike are quietly on the side of Wall Street interests. A Senator Elizabeth Warren, free to weigh in both publicly and legislatively on a variety of financial issues would be immensely welcome.

Besides allowing her a chance at addressing all sorts of financial issues and not only consumer protection, a Senate seat would also offer Warren a much greater public platform, which would play to the communication skills which make her stand out so among good thinkers on financial issues.

A friend offered the potential downside that to get through an election campaign, Warren could end up raising funds from donors that are rather comfortable with the status quo on Wall Street, which could in turn cause her to self-censor her views. I think this doesn't really match what we know about the influence of political donations. From what I understand, a candidate's basic ideology and opinions is usually what attracts donors in the first place, who then stand to benefit after an election victory. Outright conversions seem to be much more rare.

McArghle

I have conflicting views on Megan McArdle. On the one hand, she's frequently wrong (two recent examples, but it goes on and on). She's also generally in the "government must be wrong" camp, at a time when deregulation has gone far too long, with plainly disastrous results.

On the other hand, unlike the majority of those who argue for the same things as McArdle, she at least acknowledges that arguments should rest on facts. Unfortunately for Megan, all this buys her is enough respect to receive qualified criticism. A lot of articulate individuals who understand that it would be futile to fact-check people a Beck or a Breitbart take pleasure in taking apart McArdle's arguments, since she appears as a person who might possibly acknowledge a factual mistake.

It's not the warmest of welcome to the reality-based community, but then I guess McArdle isn't the most gracious of guests, either.

Paris, June 29 & 30

At the Eiffel Tower:

Montmartre:

Arc de Triomphe:

Franklin D. Roosevelt Metro Station:

And Where is the Left in All of This?

If you keep up with global economics and tend to read people who tend to be right, you should by now have noticed that Europe and America are intent on starving themselves into a repetition of the 1930s, supposedly to pacify the financial markets (yes, those financial markets).

I suspect what's really going on here is a perversion of a political trend that was originally a positive development: the voters preference for competence over ideology. For years now, the trend has been to elect politicians who aren't necessarily very exciting, but do seem to be able to achieve some real social improvements. Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron (and Reinfeldt, closer to home) all ran on competence first and with the possible exception of Sarko they were also notably centrist (Obama's bipartisanship, Merkel's grand coalition wrangling, Cameron's and Reinfeldt's tack to the middle).

And competence is good, right. But right now, it seems that we've all arrived to the conclusion that the competent, responsible thing to do is to get national budgets back in balance. After all, we all saw what happened to Greece, and debt is pretty universally accepted to be a Bad Thing. Some voices protest that we still need spending to get out of the recession, but that sounds populist and a bit extreme. The competent thing to do here is surely to pay for all those past excesses with some good old belt-tightening.

Except it's not. I mean, really, really not. All serious, centrist economists with proven records are absolutely opposed to any form of austerity right now. The data shows that it won't work: the effect of drawing down government spending now will put budget balances far deeper into the red in the future by locking us into years or decades of little to no growth. The bond markets currently have no appetite for punishing budget deficits, nor has anyone found a reason to believe that austerity packages would signal anything but weakness to the financial market.

If there's anything to be done for the budget deficits, it's -- amazingly -- France who has it right in pushing for an increase in the retirement age and raising taxes on the rich, which will do long-term budget outlooks a world of good without shutting down growth in the short term. Amazing because France's government is by the looks of it the most clear-cut right-leaning one of the bunch.

Which brings us to the title and my amazement that the centre-left does not seem to have the slightest bit of appetite to take this on. Here we have a long line of centre-right governments who are about to let misguided ideology stand in the way of sound technocratic practice -- keep spending money to get employment up -- that would be good for both the economy and for the vast majority of lower- and middle-class workers. And the reason they give is that they're scared of the financial markets! And the centre-left completely bloody fails to call them on it!

Opportunities

Some have already made the charge that the Obama administration is letting a chrisis go to waste by not coming down hard on off-shore drilling in the wake of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but if there's one good use for accrued outrage over this, it should be to strengthen a forthcoming bill on global warming.

The global thirst for fossil fuels is, after all, the reason why BP can by many counts afford to pay for cleanup and compensation without going under as a company. The incentives for oil companies are all wrong, and that can't be sustainably remedied by national legislation to control drilling. The price of oil simply has to come down to the point where it's no longer profitable to go after it in places where the environment makes it expensive to drill (if not for fear of cleanup costs then simply because it costs much more to drill deep offshore, or tear up huge areas of oil shale, etc).

Wish List

Taking this off Amazon since their shipping seems shoddy.

• Animal Spirits by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller
• Born Again by Notorious B.I.G.
• Breeding Bio Insecurity by LC Klotz
• Economics by Paul A Samuelson, William D Nordhaus
• Economics by Paul R. Krugman, Robin Wells
• Living Weapons by Gregory D. Koblentz
• Macroeconomics by Paul Krugman, Robin Wells
• Microeconomics by Paul Krugman, Robin Wells
• Moral Dilemmas of Modern War by Michael L. Gross
• Ready to Die by Notorious B.I.G.
• Russia and the Arabs by Yevge Primakov
• The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman
• The Future of Islam by John L. Esposito
• The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine by Edward N. Luttwak
• The Korean War by Bruce Cumings
• This Time is Different by Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff
• Which Side Are You On by Thomas Geoghegan