Weekend reading #

– Amit – Saturday, November 13, 2004 – 0 comments

Education: what subjects should we teach? #

For a few years now I’ve been wondering what subjects I would have liked to learn in high school. I got very little out of Literature or History, but I love learning history from The History Channel. Typing was a great class. I hated it at the time but it has been quite a valuable skill. Physical Education (a.k.a. Gym) made me hate exercise. :-( I’m quite happy I took Math and English. Two subjects I wish were mandatory:

  • Personal Finance: Balancing your checkbook, keeping out of debt, the value of saving (compound interest!), the cost of borrowing (compound interest!), risk/reward, ways to keep and save your money (checking accounts, savings accounts, brokerage accounts, CDs, money market, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc.), ways to pay for things (cash, checks, check cards, debit cards, smart cards, credit cards, paypal), what insurance buys you (reduced risk), and so on. Marginal Revolutions has a post about educating people on these topics.
  • Advertising: The power of brands, strategies and tactics used in marketing (celebrity endorsements, infomercials, glamour/macho, misdirection, etc.), analysis of commercials (have the kids watch TV and then discuss the commercials), sales & bargains, price discrimination (name brands vs. generics, for example), fashion, seasonal pricing, sneaky deals (“sign this check for $3.00 and you agree to subscribe to our service ”), bundling, cross-product promotion (American Express promotes MCI, MCI promotes Continental, Continental promotes American Express), sales tactics/psychology, ways to compare products (UL, Consumer Reports, epinions, newsgroups), etc.

I think these two subjects would help people much more than most of the traditional subjects taught in school.

– Amit – Saturday, November 13, 2004 – 1 comment

Differential pricing for medicine #

When two prices are charged, people paying the higher price (often in the United States) believe that if the firm were forced to charge one price, it would charge the lower one. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Sometimes mandating a single price results in just choking off the small market, rather than lowering the price in the large one.

—from Leveling costs worldwide is not cure for drug prices (DemocratAndChronicle.com)

– Amit – Thursday, November 11, 2004 – 0 comments

Firefox customization: link customization #

Firefox 1.0 was released today.

One of the fun things you can do is alter the way Firefox (or Mozilla or Galeon) displays web pages by using custom CSS. Today I changed userContent.css to add these rules: 

:link:before {
  content: "\0025c7";
  color: blue;
}

:visited:before {
  content: "\0025c6";
  color: purple;
}

*[href*="=http"]:before {
  content: "\0021b7";
  color: red;
}

*[href^="mailto:"]:before {
  content: "\002709";
  color: red;
}

*[href^="javascript:"]:before {
  content: "\002707";
  color: red;
}

These will display a blue ◇ next to unvisited links, a purple ◆ on visited links, and a red ↷ on links that have another URL embedded inside (usually indicating a tracking redirect), a red ✉ on email links, and a red ✇ on javascript links.

You can pick lots of fun shapes and symbols from Alan Wood’s Unicode page (note: there are lots more pages on his site with lots more symbols). To use a different symbol, just put in its Unicode hexadecimal value in the CSS, with six hex digits (i.e., use a leading 00).

I don’t know if I will keep these customizations, but it’s fun to play with. You can put any text or the value of any attribute before or after any HTML element. Mix this with hover effects for lots of fun! Opera users can also have fun with generated counters (for example, to number all the links on the page).

– Amit – Tuesday, November 09, 2004 – 2 comments

Weekend reading #

– Amit – Monday, November 08, 2004 – 1 comment
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