Radley Balko has Greenpeace dead to rights on their anti-nuke demogoguery.
Equal Opportunity Politicizing
And you thought there was a Republican war on science? Check this out. Iain Murray has more thoughts.
Tax Thoughts for the Year
Every year, I do an annual column on taxes. It is a little later this year than last year and all I can say in my defense is that I filed an extension and that Austin is in the hurricane affected areas (at least according to the IRS).
I have a surefire way for taxes to be reduced. Republicans claim to be for low taxes. Democrats should be. Do Democrats really want Republicans to spend more than $2 trillion every year that they are in power on their own things?
Here’s the three point plan:
1. Express tax owed as a percent of the dollar you get to keep as opposed to the last dollar of “gross” income. I put gross in quotes because for most people everything beyond net goes straight to the Government in the form of payroll deductions. In my book, if you don’t get it, it’s not income.
In the top tax bracket (ignoring various phaseouts), if you take home $0.65, you pay $0.35 in income taxes for the privilege. That’s a 54% tax rate if you look at it like sales tax. If you add in medicare, it’s a 57% tax rate. You and your employer pay $36.45 for you to take home $63.55.
Government expenditure can be reported as 25% of private GDP instead of 20% of the economy.
Living in a city where more than 50% of property taxes leave the jurisdiction, I can say from experience that people get real mad when more than 50% of anything is going away (or more than 100% of what stays in the district). Framing it that way will reduce taxes.
2. Report employer “contributions” toward social security and medicare as a percent of net take home pay and lump it together as a sum. Paying 16.6% of take home pay seems more like a crisis than 6.2% and 1.45% of “your share”. I put “contributions” and “your share” in quotes because an employer considers the entire cost of an employee. If that money was not paid as taxes, that could be paid as salary and the employer would still be hiring.
3. Have all people file quarterly tax returns and write a check for their taxes. Dick Thaler has done research showing that the more often people consider their st0ck market portfolio, the more unhappy they become even if the daily fluctuations even out and people make a bundle. They turn out to be extra sensitive to small losses and become more unhappy frequently they consider them.
This can be turned to advantage for tax cutters if people are forced to consider the burden of taxes more than once a year. If instead of direct payroll deductions, taxes were put in a notional federal checking account and taxpayers had to write a big check every quarter instead of be pleasantly surprised by a small refund, we would see a lot of unhappy people.
Ahead Of Schedule?
Bigelow Aerospace seems to be making good progress in developing private orbital facilities (a key component of a spacefaring infrastructure). Alan Boyle has more.
Fedora Update Update (Part N)
For those few of you who are fascinated/horrified by my computer travails, here’s the current status.
After removing Open Office and a Fortran compiler to resolve some otherwise unresolvable (at least by me) dependency issues, I finished the upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to Core 4 via yum update (at least I think I did–how do I know?). I rebooted, and it rebooted. I haven’t attempted to reinstall Open Office yet, so I don’t know if that will work, but flush with seeming victory over the machine, I decided to push my luck and go from Core 4 to Core 5.
Fight! Fight!
Scott Burgess dismantles Johann Hari on the subject of Bjorn Lomborg and global warming. I share Scott’s take on both issues. And it’s another demonstration of scientific ignorance, innumeracy and illogic, and agendas over reality, on the part of some (too many) members of the press.
Keeping Up To Date
The new New Space News is out.
Big Fat Law Suit
I hope you’re sitting down, so you won’t fall down in amazement when I tell you that Michael Moore has been accused of using an interview out of context. The interviewee is unhappy to the tune of eighty five megabucks. It should be an entertaining trial. Unless, of course, it’s settled out of court.
Revisit
On the occasion of Peter Diamandis winning the Heinlein Prize, I thought some of my readers might want to reacquaint (or introduce, if they haven’t had the pleasure) themselves with some of the great man’s books.
And yes, if you’re wondering, I do get a cut (assuming that enough people purchase some to get me to the minimum). Think of it as an alternative means of tipping me, while getting in some good SF.
Missing Dependencies
Latest update on the Fedora upgrade saga:
Error: missing dep: libebook.so.8 for pkg openoffice.org
Error: missing dep: libedataserver.so.3 for pkg openoffice.org
Error: missing dep: libdb_cxx-4.2.so for pkg openoffice.org-libs
Error: missing dep: /lib/security/pam_loginuid.so for pkg openssh-server
Error: missing dep: gcc for pkg gcc-g77
Why is yum telling me this? Why doesn’t it just go out get the packages and fix it?
[Update about 11:15 AM EDT]