Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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“Pain is just weakness leaving the body… “

Yard work. Stepped in mole trace. Three loud POPs, excruciating pain… Yep. ACL. Again. Crawled back into the house. Ice packs, loads of ibuprofen and acetaminophen (they work well together and are safe in low, OTC doses), wraps and a cane. Manageable. In a few weeks, just the knee brace will be enough, and after a few months I’ll only wear the knee brace for yard work and such like.

Again. Oh. Well. I guess I ought to set my calendar by my Spring events, spaced every six years or so–just long enough for me to start being careless again. *heh*

The unkindest injury of all (the self-inflicted kind :-)).

Continue reading ““Pain is just weakness leaving the body… “”

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The FairTax: Is It Fair?

And would it work?

I’m not going to state my opinion in this post (although I’ve stated it elsewhere, earlier); rather, I’m going to put up two links for your review and come back to this topic later.

First is the 2005 President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform documents. It occasionally lapses into typically obscurantist bureaucratese from time to time, but I especially commend to your attention to page 14 (actual page of the pdf document) and following, wherein the panel reveals its bias up front, pages 55 (as numbered by the report) and following–a discussion of flat tax proposals, including the panel’s own model of a flat consumption tax (not the FairTax bill’s model). Following on through the report (it is in three pdf files for the report and another for the appendices), make sure to take note of the characteristics of the panel’s models, and do refer to the appendices for clarification of the panel’s sources.

Then, go here and read. The differences between the model of a consumption tax put forth by the 2005 President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform and the FairTax I leave for the discerning reader to see for himself.

(Yeh, I could have used the awkward and linguistically useless “himself/herself” but I don’t bend that way. If non-PC language offends you, tough. :-))

We’ll continue after homework’s done. (Or not, if the task isn’t one that appeals to anyone. C’est la vie.)

*sigh* TF points out in comments that, among other things, one of the resources I link to is quite lengthy, and just reading the first few pages got his blood boiling (my characterization of his comments–and I have to admit the document tended to boil my blood a bit, too). Trrue, it’s over 270 pages of material that is highly-laden with political bushwah, spiced with bureaucratese, but perhaps I can ameliorate the burden by pointing to this 36-page summary of the FairTax, at least. (Warning: pdf file) I don’t feel the bill’s actual language is really much of a barrier, but it is much longer and the summary is, in my estimate, a fair summary of the bill itself. There. Lightened the reading load, class, and all the other materials are there for your perusal if you wish as well.

My good deed for the day is done. 😉

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Energy Star Award: Gasoline-Powered Alarm Clock

Seriously.

As Jerry Pournelle says (at the link),

“Now the government that approves an Energy Star Certificate for a gasoline powered alarm clock will now in essence take over administering the Health Care System in the United States. Good luck, America.”

Be sure to follow the link to the NYT article from the comments at Pournelle’s site.

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Political “Discussions” on Facebook?

For the most part, notsomuch. I’ve found FB to be an OK way to keep current with real friends and family, but the extended-extended “friends” of “friends” of friends who sometimes enter into political “discussions” on FB entries mostly turn out to have comments and insights of about the caliber of today’s high school sophomores. If that.

Indeed, anything more meaningful than dumps of out-of-context, misapplied (and often not at all understood by the dumper) factoids gleaned from the first hit on a google search is a rarity in FB political “discourse”. Most folks don’t even take time to actually read (assuming they can read and comprehend) initial posts or the material linked, let alone engage their brain before they begin to type.

I can understand how some view “social media” as a way to communicate political ideas with immediacy, but, folks, it’s primarily a means of communicating surface factoids to people with short attention spans and little interest in doing their own homework so they can understand what’s going on.

Stick with real friends and family and what’s going on in your lives.

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Dumb Idea

The soi-disant “Tea Party Express” has come up with a stupid idea: raise $700,000 to offer to Bart Stupak to resign.

“If Bart Stupak is considering resigning then we want to do what we can to help him along in that decision. Exchanging your votes, principles and decisions for money seems to be the modus operandi for Bart Stupak. So how do we find $700,000 to get this corrupt and failed politician out of office, so that we can get a representative of the people, who respects the Constitution, to take Stupak’s seat?” asked Mark Williams, Chairman of the Tea Party Express.

I understand the thought, but it’s still stupid. Paying Danegeld only makes the “Dane” go away until he wants some more. Although Kipling was speaking of nations paying “protection money” to aggressors, the principle’s the same,

Danegeld

IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:
“We invaded you last night – we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:

“We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”

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Don’t Even Go There

I keep giving Firefox and Chrome (and even Safari–heck, I even give Internet Exploder the occasional opportunity to redeem itself!) a shot at my eyeballs, and they all consistently fall short, so don’t even go there.

It’s cross platform, so you have little excuse to keep using the kludgy, clumsy, dumbed-down browsers touted by sell-out tech writers and icognoscenti that require all kinds of add-ons just to almost reach Opera’s basic functionality. It used to frustrate the daylights out of me to work on someone else’s machine and be forced to use an antiquated, kludgy, insecure, clumsy, dumbed-down browser that didn’t even have built-in mouse gesturing, but now I carry a thumb drive with Opera Portable, so I don’t have to put up with other folks’ lack of good sense. *heh* Sadly, Opera Portable is still in version 10.51, but that’s not so very bad, since the 10.52 version I’m running (Build 3347) is a beta–a rock solid beta but still not an official release.

One of the less important new things (well, since 10.51) is the “O” tab in the “Tabs” bar that allows accessing most of what used to be in the menu bar by default. It allows those folks who’ve been seduced by the dumbed-down Chrome interface to have a less “cluttered” view, but still allows folks like me who like having a LOT of information and ready manipulations available to invoke the more informative menu bar.

But little things like making transitions easier for folks used to using a dumb browser are just lil candy sprinkles. The real improvements (even over 10.51) are in security and speed–particularly the java engine. Just download it and give it a run at your eyeballs.

BTW, not using Opera Mobile on your smartphone? Think the iPhone/Safari combo is top dog? Maybe not. (When my youngest nephew got his new Wii, several years ago, he was pleasantly surprised it came with an offer for a free web browser. Opera. And I stopped being surprised years ago that IBM/Lenovo included an imbedded version of Opera in a preboot environment. Just sayin’.)

BTW, brief not-very-techie note: Yes, Opera does seem to use “a lot of memory”. But note that the image above shows I have 30 tabs open. *heh* About average, especially since the first 10 are ALWAYS open and “pinned” so they cannot be accidentally closed. And “a lot of memory”–currently somewhere around 100MB with those 30 tabs open–is a relative term on a modern computer with 4-8GB of physical memory.

BTW#2–a not-at-all-techie note: My install of Opera looks a tad different to what you may download and install for reasons other than my affection for the more informative Menu Bar; I have for years skinned whatever installation of Opera I may have on Windows computers or on Linux or BSD computers differently so that I remember which OS I am browsing in. Yes, the OS makes that little difference (apart from how the scrollwheel works in Linux, but that’d be a whole post in itself). The “skin” in the graphic above is the current version of Tobs Theater Paper (TTT-Paper 7.2).

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Obama’s Pet Gerbil

The Ø! has a powerful deterrent against those who might seek legal means to depose his unconstitutional reign. This is what we’d get if The Ø! were removed from office:

Now, doesn’t that send chills of outright dread down your spine? A politician with the intelligence of a brain damaged gerbil and the ethics of a rabid squirrel in the oval office. A chilling prospect.