November 20, 2006
Class 11/21 - BRING YOUR OWN COFFEE
Bring your own coffee (or tea, or whatever) to class on the 21st. We're being a bit wild and crazy. :-)
Posted by lpowner at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)
How Does the LLAP Affect States' Decision-Making? Or Is It Just a Scholarly Device?
The Law of the Least Ambitious Program (LLAP) is primarily a scholarly device used to simplify conclusion-making under some fairly common assumptions like unanimity voting. The LLAP says that under unanimity voting, the 'least ambitious' program -- the one that wants to do the least, on whatever the issue is -- will be the outcome. Unanimity voting is the most common form of decision rule in international organizations, whether de jure (by law) or de facto (in practice), so on its face this 'law' would help us predict a lot of outcomes if we know states' preferences.
Since unanimity is the default rule, and states are familiar with this, they recognize something like the functional equivalent of the LLAP. It's a generally accepted tenet of interstate bargaining that the biggest holdouts or most reluctant parties will need some inducement (via side payments or whatever) to get them to agree to anything besides their most preferred outcome. Thus there is bargaining advantage to be had from being a preference outlier under unanimity voting.
Posted by lpowner at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
"Anthropogenic" Greenhouse Gases
'Anthropogenic' seems to be the word of the day for the last couple lectures. It means "caused or produced by humans," according to www.dictionary.com. Essentially, it's differentiating from animal-produced GHGs (e.g., the methane produced by livestock digestion [cow farts - don't laugh] and nitrates produced by animal waste decomposition [rotting cow poop]) and other naturally occuring sources. Humans are by far the largest source of GHGs, though in some developing countries the livestock component is almost as large.
Posted by lpowner at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2006
Class on Thurs 11/16
As many of you probably remember, I wasn't feeling too hot on Tuesday. By the end of section 5 on Tuesday, my voice was going downhill fast, and it has continued to deteriorate since then. What you don't know is that I had a 6-month period of 'catastrophic voice loss' last year - my winter '05 class described me as sounding like "a teenaged Darth Vader crossed with a chipmunk." I'm sounding nearly as terrible now as I did then. As a result, I'm going have to go on voice rest (i.e., shut up as much as humanly possible) for a few days. Thursday in class I will likely have my laptop connected to the projector, and I'll probably give some instructions and answer some questions by typing responses onto the screen. I will also have a small microphone and speaker setup to allow me to speak at least a bit.
The good news of this is that you don't need to bring a computer for Thursday's presentations; just email me (or yourself) the ppt or bring it on a USB drive or CD.
I will also probably have my laptop out at office hours today to answer some questions via writing. I will then email you the document with my comments as a bit of compensation for having to have a bizarrely half-written, half-spoken conversation with me. But PLEASE do not avoid office hours because of this. I've done this before and know that it won't hurt me - I spent 6 months of last year doing this, actually. :-) It's a little awkward but there's no reason for you to avoid coming.
Posted by lpowner at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2006
How Do All These Economists' Models of Trade Differ?
We've talked about three models of trade: Hecksher-Ohlin, Stolper-Samuelson, and Ricardo-Viner. The first two together (sometimes summarized as HOSS) produce one set of predictions, about factor-based cleavages; Prof. Sprinz discussed these models in lecture. The second, RV, produces predictions of sector-based cleavages, and we elaborated this as "Model 2" in section. Let's walk through the logic.
Land, labor, and capital are the factors of production. All goods and services in an economy are made from some combination of these three. A state's factor endowment is its holding of these factors relative to one another and to the world economy. In any economy, some factors are relatively more abundant than others. Canada, for example, is relatively well endowed with capital and is very well endowed with land, but is very poorly endowed with labor. Bangladesh is very well endowed with labor - at least, with unskilled labor - but capital and land are both scarce. Following the general law of scarcity, scarce factors can demand a higher price. For labor, this is wages; for capital this is interest rates or rates of return. Abundant factors, on the other hand, before trade can demand a very low price. Any holder of that factor who tries to demand a high price will not find buyers; buyers will just search for one of the many other holders who is asking a lower price.
[Note on Terminology: By definition, any state that is poor or developing is scarce in capital. Capital is what we commonly understand as 'wealth'; countries that lack capital lack wealth.]
Hecksher and Ohlin reached the conclusion that since the abundant factor is cheap in a given country, that country's comparative advantage will be in products that use the abundant factor extensively. Because labor is cheap in Bangladesh, labor-intensive products are relatively cheap to make there - particularly compared with their cost to make in, say, Canada. This will lead Bangladesh to specialize in exporting things that are labor-intensive: it can produce labor-intensive goods and services more cheaply than many other states, even once the cost of shipping the products is included. Once Bangladesh starts to trade, demand for its labor-intensive products comes from both the domestic market and also from the world market. This higher demand for the abundant factor - which is nowhere near as abundant on the world market as it is in Bangladesh - translates into higher prices for Bangladeshi labor-intensive goods on the world market than in the domestic market. They can sell the goods for higher prices abroad because even with the mark-up (over Bangladeshi domestic prices), the goods are still cheaper than the importing countries can produce for themselves.
Canada, on the other hand, has an abundance of land - particularly land that is good for farming. Farming used to be labor intensive, but since the early 1900s developments in technology have allowed Canada to substitute capital for some of the labor needs: tractors and combines replace people. Since capital is abundant in Canada as well, it too was cheap. The combination of cheap land and cheap labor-replacing capital has given Canada one of the most efficient (read, least expensive) agriculture sectors in the world. If Canadian farmers tried to sell all their wheat in the domestic market, they would only be able to get a very low price because they had so much of it available. By selling some of their wheat on the world market, they can boost the price they get on the domestic market and also get a good price on the world market, where countries with less efficient agriculture sectors go to buy wheat and other products more cheaply than they can grow them for themselves.
After World War 2, Stolper and Samuelson added to this by noting the logcial extension that if the price for the abundant factor's goods was increasing, then the income to those who own that factor would increase as well. Those who hold the abundant factor (or whose incomes depend on using that factor intensively) would benefit from trade because trade increases their incomes; they would thus band together to promote free trade. On the other hand, those who hold the scarce factor (or use it intensively) find that they are now competing with foreign holders of the same factor, where it may not be as scarce. For example, think about Bangladeshi farmers. Before trade, the price of agriculture products in Bangladesh was rather high: land was scarce, so the amount of agriculture was limited, and the scarcity of agriculture products brought their price up in the markets. When Bangladesh starts trading with Canada, though, Bangladeshi consumers can choose to buy Canadian agriculture products, which are substantially cheaper (and so the consumers can buy more of them). Less business for Bangladeshi farmers at their old prices leaves them the options to lower their prices, or else to close. Either option lowers their income, which makes us expect that land-based or intensive land-using individuals would protest free trade in Bangladesh. The HO-SS model thus predicts that we should see cleavages (social/political divisions) based around factor ownership. Holders (or intensive users) of plentiful factors will profit from free trade; holders (or intensive users) of scarce factors will suffer from free trade. [Note for Memory: Match the P's and S's to recall who benefits and who is harmed. The two S's in 'scarce' and 'suffer' remind us that it goes with the Stolper-Samuelson model.]
A very key assumption from the HO-SS model, however, may or may not hold in practice. HO-SS assumes, as was reasonable through much of the early 20th century, that factors were in general mobile across sectors. Mobile factors can change industries (i.e., move between sectors) easily and at very little cost. Unskilled labor in an assembly line, for example, can pull a lever, push a button, or tighten a screw in a car, a toaster, a sewing machine, etc., with very little retraining time or cost. Cash is a mobile form of capital. Other forms, though, are substantially less mobile: recovering one's investment in a steel mill to invest in another industry, for example, requires selling the steel mill to someone else. An assembly line used to produce stereos today cannot begin producing cars tomorrow. Labor that is specific to a particular industry, like most forms of skilled labor, is usually stuck in that particular industry.
Viner noticed this. He built on Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage to produce a prediction that when exposed to free trade, less-efficient industries (those which depend heavily on factors that are relatively scarce) will be under pressure to produce more cheaply. Unless they can lower their costs to meet those of producers where the same factors are abundant, they will eventually be pushed out of business. For example, US steel producers in the 1970s were faced with competition from the developing world. Labor there was much cheaper, since it was substantially more plentiful (lower cost of living plus labor is the relatively scarce factor in the US). Capital was more expensive, so the plants cost more to build, but the newer plants used much more efficient technology than the older US plants. As a result, foreign steel was substantially cheaper than American steel, so many firms (in the US and elsewhere) bought their steel from non-American producers. US producers were unable to reduce their costs: labor costs were high and fixed as a result of union labor contracts, and shareholders were not willing to pay the high costs of investing in newer technology. As a result, a large share of US steel firms were uncompetitive; they couldn't sell their goods and so they had to close.
While this was happening, US steelworkers and US steel plant owners banded together to lobby for protection. Because steelworkers lacked skills to do anything other than work steel, and steel plant owners were unable to use their factories to produce anything other than steel, both factors had a vested interest in the health of the industry. When we relax the assumption that factors are mobile and allow them to be specific to a particular industry (immobile), then, the result is that we expect to see sector-based political coalitions.
Posted by lpowner at 11:50 AM | Comments (2)
November 09, 2006
Admin Update, 9 Nov 2006
A few bits of administrative updates.
1. If you have arranged for a powerpoint projector between now and Thanksgiving, please cancel your reservation. I have arranged for a projector for the three remaining classes (globalization, global environment, European environment) and will have it available for both classes. You must, however, arrange for your own laptop computer to connect to the projector.
2. Use the drop box for paper drafts; submit them no later than Tuesday 14 November. My initial FAQ handed out in class incorrectly said to email it to Hyeran.
3. Please turn in your presentation papers in hard copy in section. I will ensure that they reach Hyeran.
Any other questions, my email is LPowner@umich.edu. Please feel free to submit questions for the blog that way as well. I can't know what questions to answer unless you ask. This is a totally anonymous way to ask; no one will know who asked except me, but everyone gets to benefit from the answers.
Posted by lpowner at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2006
What's the Difference Between 'Mobility' and 'Liquidity'?
'Mobility' is a term used to refer to the ability of factors of production - land, labor, and/or capital - to switch between uses in different industries (sometimes called 'sectors'). Land, for example, is a particularly immobile factor. Land used for farming can be used for a parking lot only after paying substantial costs to pave it - assuming that it's in an area where anyone might want to park, since agriculture usually occurs in rural ares. Unskilled labor is fairly mobile; sweeping floors at McDonald's (in the restaurant sector) is not a lot different from sweeping floors in a hospital (in the health care sector) or in a bank office (in the financial services sector). Most forms of skilled labor, on the other hand, are not particularly mobile. Their factor of production are specific to a particular sector. Gym teachers cannot easily become brain surgeons; investment advisors cannot easily become automotive engineers. These factors would incur a substantial cost to shift from one industry to another. As you might guess, then, mobility is a continuous variable - factors can have different degrees of it - rather than a yes/no variable where a factor totally is or totally isn't mobile.
Like labor, different forms of capital also have different degrees of mobility. Cash is the ultimately mobile form of capital - it can be moved from investment in one industry (through stocks or bonds) to investment in another sector's stocks or bonds with very little cost. Other forms of capital assets are also fairly mobile, such as computers or office buildings (the same office building that currently houses a law firm might tomorrow house a group of accountants, a small software firm, or the like). Some forms of capital are highly immobile: once you invest money in buying a steel plant, that money is not available for investment elsewhere until and unless you find a buyer for the steel plant, nor can you easily use the resources in the steel plant to produce, say, semiconductor chips. Railroad cars are another immobile asset; owning a bunch of railroad cars can't help you produce higher education services, health care, etc.
A Note on Terminology: When we refer to 'mobile' factors, we normally mean mobility between industries within a particular country. The exception to this is financial capital (cash), where references to 'capital mobility' normally refer to the ease with which capital can cross national borders in search of the highest rate of return.
'Liquidity' is refers to the ease with which a particular capital asset can be converted to cash. It too is a continuous variable, with some forms of capital more or less easy to convert than others. It is not the same as mobility - mobility refers to ease of conversion between use in different sectors of the economy - but the two are related. The most liquid forms of capital are, in descending order, cash, stocks and bonds and other forms of portfolio investment, precious metals, and then physical and fixed assets (machines and buildings). The first few things are highly liquid because you can always find buyers for them who will pay you a rate fairly close to what you paid for the asset in the first place. The further down the list you go, the less likely you are to find a buyer for it, and the more likely the price offered will be substantially below what you paid for the asset in the first place.
Highly liquid assets are fairly mobile; once I've turned it into cash, I can invest that cash in any sector that I choose. Highly mobile factors, on the other hand, may or may not be highly liquid. A personal computer is a highly mobile capital asset - the same laptop I use in the higher education sector can be used in the healthcare sector, the public services sector, the business world, or elsewhere - but it cannot be converted to cash as easily as a stock or bond can be, and the cash value I would get for a used laptop would be substantially below what I originally invested in purchasing that asset. Likewise, an office building that can be used for many different sectors of economic activity can't be converted into a hospital, chemical plant, or police station without substantial costs or investments.
Posted by lpowner at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)
Economics Vocabulary
These terms are not be in alphabetical order. Many are discussed further in related Q&A entries. Use the "find" command on your browser to look for particular terms on this page, or use the "search" box at right to search the site. This will also locate related entries.
exchange rate - the price of one currency in terms of another. When one unit of my currency becomes worth more units of your currency - it takes more of yours to buy one of mine - we say that my currency has appreciated vis-a-vis yours and that yours has depreciated vis-a-vis mine. When one unit of my currency becomes worth fewer of yours - it takes fewer of yours to buy one of mine - we say that my currency has depreciated and yours has appreciated.
interest rate - the price of borrowing money. This same rate is also the rate of return (profit) for capital lenders. If you borrow $100 at 7% annual interest, and let's say you take a year to pay it back, you would pay back $107. The person you borrowed from gets back his/her original $100, plus the $7 in interest. The $7 you pay in interest is the price you pay for having the money (and spending it) now rather than having to wait until you accumulate that much money yourself to spend it.
factor - land, labor, capital. These are the factors of production - all goods and services produced and/or traded in an economy are composed of some combination of these three resources.
sector - an industry.
current account - the 'national checking account' of goods and services coming in and out of a country (it also has a couple other minor components but we can ignore them). States that export more goods and services than they import have a current account surplus; states that import more goods and services than they export have a current account deficit.
capital account - the 'national savings account' of investment that comes into and out of a country. States that attract more investment than they themselves send abroad have a capital account surplus; states that send more investment abroad than they attract have a capital account deficit.
exports - goods and services produced in my country and sent to your country. Costa Rica exports bananas to the United States.
imports - goods and services produced in your country and sent to my country. The US imports bananas from Costa Rica.
tariffs - taxes placed on imports to raise their price to a level comparable with domestic products. This protects inefficient domestic producers, whose costs are higher than the exporting country's producers'.
Leontief Paradox - the observation that, in the immediate post-World War II era, the United States - a clearly capital-rich country - imported capital-intensive goods and exported labor-intensive goods. This clearly contradicts the Hecksher-Ohlin theorem's expectations.
Hecksher-Ohlin theorem - states that a country will export goods which use intensively the factor(s) which are abundant in its economy, and will import goods which use intensively the factor(s) which are scarce in its economy. This assumes that factors can move costlessly between sectors of the economy.
Stolper-Samuelson theorem (political implications) - "a rise in the relative price of a good will lead to a rise in the return to that factor which is used most intensively in the production of the good, and conversely, to a fall in the return to the other factor." (Wikipedia) In other words, as a state trades and specializes, the price of its relatively abundant factor will increase, and this will trickle down to the owners of that factor. Likewise, the price of the relatively scarce factor will decline, and that will decrease the wages of those who hold or use that factor intensively. When combined with the Hecksher-Ohlin theorem, this leads us to expect class- (i.e., factor-) based political cleavages
Ricardo-Viner theorem (political implications) - under conditions of at least partial factor immobility, we expect to see sectoral (industry-based) cleavages emerge to seek protection. Because labor and capital are unable to move between industries, we expect that they will band together to seek protection for their particular industry.
reserves, official or currency - holdings of a hard currency by a central bank, used to defend fixed exchange rates and also to cover short term deficits in the balance of payments (current account).
non-tariff barriers (NTBs) - any barrier to trade besides tariffs. Health and safety regulations, environmental regulations, labelling and other forms of regulatory requirements, quotas, voluntary export restraints, etc.
mobility, of factors - degree to which a factor of production can shift costlessly between different sectors of the economy. Highly mobile factors can shift easily between industries with little or no costs or loss of value. Immobile (sometimes called specific) factors incur great costs to shift between industries.
liquidity - degree to which an asset (i.e., some form of capital) can be converted into cash; can range from highly liquid to semi-liquid to illiquid.
fixed exchange rate -when the price of a currency is determined by the government or central bank of a country; involves a public statement that the central bank will guarantee the value of the currency by promising to exchange it at a certain fixed rate. In the modern world, this then means that the central bank or government must intervene in global currency markets to ensure that the rate at which the currency is fixed (or pegged) is near to the market's value for the currency. Otherwise the state risks a speculative attack on the currency.
floating exchange rate - when the price of a currency is determined by the forces of supply and demand in international currency markets.
hard currencies - currencies that retain their value over time. The low fluctuation means that denominating trade or investment in these currencies will reduce the chance of losses from exchange rate shifts or inflation. This property makes them desirable as reserves and for international transactions. The key hard currencies are currently the dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and the euro; prior to the euro's introduction, the German Mark was also a popular reserve or international transaction currency. (Opposite: soft currencies. Soft currencies are often not convertible, which makes them unattractive for trade.)
convertibilty - the ability to exchange one currency for another. Nonconvertibility can be either the result of a government policy which refuses to exchange the currency, or the result of market pressures, where no one wants to buy the currency because they don't believe it will hold its value.
balance of payments - refers to a specific component of the current account which includes only the values of imports and exports.
exchange rate risk - a risk inherent in international trade or investment that the value of a currency will change between the time you sign the contract to buy foreign goods (or make an investment in a foreign country) and the time the goods are delivered (or you go to withdraw your investment). If the loss from a shift in exchange rate is high, then this could conceivably wipe out the gains from trade or investment, so traders/investors are usually unwilling to do business in places with high exchange rate risk. Conversely, the existence of exchange rate risk is what allows currency speculation to be profitable.
Posted by lpowner at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)
What are the Current and Capital Accounts?
Together, the capital and current accounts make up a state's 'balance of payments.' These two accounting devices show us the total flow of funds into and out of a country.
The current account is like a 'national checking account.' It has four main components: trade in goods, trade in services, dividends (interest), and foreign aid and remittances. Dividends (interest paid by us to foreigners and also interest paid by foreigners to us) is a rather small amount; remittances and foreign aid can be rather important for some smaller, less-developed states. The first two elements, trade in goods and trade in services, are by far the largest components. Think of exports as 'credits' on the national current account (+), since they're money paid to us by another state, and imports as a 'debit' (-) since we pay some other state for those goods. So, the current account looks something like:
(exports of goods - imports of goods)
+(exports of services - imports of services)
+(dividends paid to us - dividends we pay to others)
+(net of remittances and/or foreign aid)
current account balance
If the current account balance is positive - in other words, we have more funds flowing into the country than out of it in a given year - we have a current account surplus. If the current account balance is negative - in other words, more money is flowing out of the country than into it in a given year - we have a current account deficit.
The capital account consists of investment coming into and out of a country. (Note: This is the value of the investment itself, not the returns on the investment. Those are in the 'dividends' category of the current account since they're paid regularly, whereas the investment itself is a one-time thing.) This includes both portfolio investment (stocks and bonds) as well as foreign direct investment (building factories, etc.) As with the capital account, if the net balance is positive the capital account has a surplus and if the net balance is negative the capital account has a deficit.
The reason it's called the 'balance of payments' is that the capital and current accounts must balance. A surplus in one must be offset by a deficit in the other. Why? Because my currency isn't of any use to anyone outside my country. If I'm sending a lot of goods and services abroad (i.e., have a current account surplus), I've got a lot of foreign currency that others have paid me for my goods, and since I can't use it, I invest it elsewhere. A state like the US can only finance its enormous current account deficit by attracting investment to cover the gap between its hard currency coming in from exports and its hard currency going out from exports and investment abroad.
A state usually preserves a bit of any hard currency coming into a country beyond what is needed to balance the accounts and puts it into the central bank's reserves. The reserves are a sort of a rainy-day fund which can be used to cover short-term shortfalls in the balance of payments. This isn't sustainable in the long run - a persistent negative balance will eat away at the rainy-day fund until it's gone - but it can cover for a few months if a short slump occurs. The reserves can also be used to make small interventions in international currency markets in defense of one's currency. For states with a fixed exchange rate, that pool of reserves directly governs (through some proportional formula) how much of its own currency it can issue. As the gap between the surplus and the deficit sides of the balance of payments grows, the reserves increase as well, and the state can issue more currency. In this way, the promotion of exports (or alternatively, the attracting of investment) allows the state to expand its money supply over time and grow its economy.
Posted by lpowner at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2006
What are 'Beggar-thy-Neighbor' Policies?
'Beggar thy neighbor' policies are manipulations of international economic policies with an intent to shift the costs of domestic economic adjustment to one's trading partners.
Answering this requires backing up a step. When countries are in recession - that is to say, their economies are shrinking or at least are not growing fast enough to keep up with growth of the labor force and other stuff like that - the country's economy needs to adjust to alleviate this. Adjustment is costly, though. Some part of the economy will need to be restructured - some people will need to find new jobs, some industries might close, etc. This adjustment occurs internally through a process of "creative destruction." Less efficient firms close and their workers need to find new jobs (presumably in more efficient industries). As you might imagine, this is politically costly to politicians who rely on those workers (or on owners of capital in less efficient industries) for electoral support.
Beggar-thy-neighbor policies refer to a class of strategies for adjusting one's economy by displacing the costs of adjustment onto one's trading partners. By putting up tariffs, for example, a state can protect its less efficient industries from international competition. Tariffs are taxes that raise the price of imported goods until those prices are similar to the prices domestic producers must charge. Those inefficient domestic firms are able to remain in business longer than they "should." What happens, though, is that firms in your trading partner's country are no longer able to sell their goods in your market, and so because they have nowhere to sell their goods, they close. So instead of YOUR workers in that less competitive industry being out of work, your PARTNER's workers in that industry (which is presumably more competitive, which is why they were successfully exporting to you), are now out of work. The costs of adjustment (or perhaps, rather, non-adjustment) in your economy are being paid by your trading partner.
This is a bad thing by itself, for one country to do, but when a bunch of countries do this, total trade drops. Now, we're both losing: we lose both export markets (and the jobs those create), and we lose the specialization created by trade. With the decline of trade, some things that we had previously imported from more efficient producers abroad now must be produced at home by our less efficient producers; this means that they'll produce less stuff for more cost, and GDP will decrease. So everyone in a country is made worse off, overall, by beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism - even if some individuals benefit from the protection.
Similar effects occur from devaluing a fixed exchange rate. A lower exchange rate - where one of my currency buys fewer of yours - means that imported goods are no longer as attractive. Let's say the US dollar was fixed to the Japanese yen at a rate of US$1 = Y100. Before the devaluation, my $1 bought a good worth 100 yen. If the US devalues now, so that my US$1 is now only worth Y90, I can't buy as much of the foreign good as I could before. Buying the same Y100-valued good would now cost me $1.10 instead of $1. So what would a consumer do? He'd buy a domestic good instead - the price of the domestic good hasn't changed. What happens to the Japanese producers, though? They lose market share in the US export market, and so they pay the cost of the US government's steps to increase domestic economic activity. Trade shrinks as a result of this, too.
This was a hugely popular way of increasing domestic economic activity (or trying to, at any rate) headed into the Great Depression. States defected from the classical Gold Standard left and right, trying to stay one step ahead of their trading partners. What ended up happening is that these frequent devaluations scared off international investors and traders, who had benefited from the stability of the fixed rate, and so trade and investment dropped even more. After the competitive devaluations, the net result was that both sides had paid the other's adjustment costs (loss of export jobs, etc.), trade had dropped as a result, and the investors were spooked. Everyone was worse off than they would have been had they resisted the urge to protect.
Posted by lpowner at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
Welcome to the 160 FAQ
I will use this blog as a place to answer any questions that you may submit that we don't get to address in class. I will also post helpful information related to the readings and administrative stuff related to office hours, classwork, etc., on here. If you have additional questions, you are welcome to post them on here (anonymously or with identification) and I'll get to them as I'm able.
Accessing the Blog:
If you have Firefox, you can click on the orange logo at the end of the address URL line to create a "live bookmark" of this site. Then, you can look for new entries by simply looking in the bookmarks file of your web browser. Other popular blog systems and RSS aggregators also support this feature, but as I don't know how to use those I can't help much.
Posted by lpowner at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)