CAT | gimme-five news
16
Independent Study
7 Comments | Posted by gimme-five in Environment, gimme-five news, School
Well, my Labor Market Economics class got entirely canceled for the semester, due to the professor having an illness. So I got placed in an independent study in the economics department at William and Mary. I’m actually pretty excited about it, because I can basically study anything I want.
If you read this blog regularly, you probably know that I’m interested in doing something related to environmental economics. I’ve come up with a few ideas of topics to focus on, but I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to decide. So I thought I’d post some of the topic ideas I had on here and see if any readers think they’d be interesting for me to study. Of course I will post what I learn on gimme-five.
1. Economics of Climate Change in General, in particular, in relation to the discount rate. (a large discount rate means environmental damage in the future doesn’t matter so much today in terms of present value, for example)
2. Comparison of Environmental incentives used to reduce CO2 emissions or improve ecosystems (i.e. Gas Tax v. Permit Trading)
3. Feasibility of international enforcement of climate regulations from an economic context.
4. What are the costs and benefits of accounting for nature’s services in our accounting practices? For instance, count trees as more than just lumber; they also count for ecosystem services like protecting species and sequestering CO2.
5. Economics of plug-in hybrids.
These are just a few options, I’m not really sure what I want to do at this point. But if anyone on gimme-five thinks one of these topics looks really interesting and something where a lot of information and data exists out there, please leave me your suggestions.
Please welcome gimme-five’s newest author, Klives. I know very little about Klives, except that his email address implies he is somehow associated with Kilgore, one of gimme-five’s former authors. He plans to write a few investment columns for the site.
Anyways, I hope everyone enjoys his writing. Sorry I haven’t been very active on the site lately. I’m taking the LSATs on September 30th and studying for those along with school stuff has really taken a lot of my time. I’ll write somewhat regular articles starting in October.
Featuring an interview with George’s girlfriend, Jessica, on the topic of childhood obesity in the USA today. This was not recorded in pristine quality (I’m working on it…) so bear with me…
What the heck? That’s right, gimme-five has a podcast.
I know what you’re thinking: don’t you need visitors to your website before you start a podcast? Ideally, yes, but keeping with gimme-five’s traditional status of “worst website of all time,” I’m going to go against the grain here. Since I am leaving to go to Nebraska with my beautiful girlfriend through this Sunday the 13th, I will be unable to write articles. But that doesn’t mean I won’t use my cell phone to spew worthless blabber on the internet! Prepare to listen to my boring voice rant about boring subjects that I would normally type about! Just check back on this page over the next couple days and hopefully I’ll call in. Woohoo!
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gimme-five is back online, at least for the time being. Here is a timeline of what happened:
Friday Afternoon: Everything is ok, I leave work to meet Jessica at the Austin City Grill. We eat Mexican food and it is delicious. The waiter winks at Jessica, but luckily my anger is offset by the fact that the restaurant is entirely powered by wind energy. Cool!
Friday Night: Jessica and I leave Washington, DC to return to Herndon, VA, where we go to see the Da Vinci Code. Readers of gimme-five were right, I didn’t like it very much. But then again I hadn’t read the book. Jessica had read it and she did enjoy the movie.
Friday Late Night: I check gimme-five, as I always do before I go to bed, and notice it is down.
Saturday Morning: gimme-five is still down. I check my webhost, Blazernetwork.com and notice that only their front page on their website works. I try calling them but get redirected to an answering machine.
Saturday Afternoon: gimme-five is still down. I write a few emails to Blazer Network and get no response. I have come to expect a lack of response, however, since every time I’ve had a problem in 2006, I have received no response from them. Oh well.
Saturday Night: I have a bit of fun. At night I check gimme-five and notice it’s still down before bed.
Sunday Morning: I try calling Blazer network yet again. Now I get an answering machine that tells me an “emergency management team” has been hired to “set things right.” I call BS and leave a message asking them to give me permission to transfer my domain. No response.
Sunday Afternoon: I ask Doug, one of gimme-five’s founders, if I can use his webserver to host gimme-five, he says yes. I do some research and find that gimme-five’s domain is registered through ENOM.com. gimme-five comes back online for about 10 minutes and luckily in those 10 minutes I backed up every file I had.
Sunday Night: I do nothing gimme-five related.
Monday: I try looking at Enom to see if I can transfer the domain. They say I must do it through Blazer Network. Blazer network has still not responded to any of my emails or calls. Great. Also, I find that no emails sent to my address at gimme-five.com have gone through. Wonderful.
Tuesday: I call Enom and get a great tech support guy who transfers my domain very quickly to godaddy.com. I change the nameservers and point them towards dreamhost (Doug’s web server). gimme-five goes back online tuesday evening. Thank goodness.
Blazer Network sucks. DO NOT BUY HOSTING WITH THEM. They provided me one year of good service, and for the first four months of my second year, gimme-five has been down for a total of about 9 days, 7 of which were consecutive. This happens despite the fact that they guarantee 99.9% uptime. BS.
I’m going to try to get a refund, and I will keep you all updated about how that goes. Sorry that this post is just a rant, but I’m just informing you all what happened.
The moral of the story is to do some research before you invest money in a web hosting service. A good place to find these is www.webhostingstuff.com . Do not just google their name, because you will get a lot of good “reviews” that the web host paid for. Find real people to give you real opinions.
That’s all now, goodbye.
