Thursday 13 – third world county

June 19, 2008June 19, 2008

T-13; 2.X-repeat: 13 Things to Hate about the IRS

This is an easy one, except for the part about limiting it to thirteen things…

1. The taxpayer is always guilty until proven innocent.

2. Withholding. See #1 and add in, “Where’s the interest on the money stolen before it’s really due on April 15?”

3. The forms, the forms… *arrrrrggghhhh!*

4. About #3… I’m sure the IRS can make the print smaller and the paper of crappier rag, but I’m unsure whether they chose the ink for its ability to cause an allergic reaction leading to total mental breakdown or if that’s just a psycosomatic reaction…

5. “Advice” from the IRS. First, can ya think “Conflict of interest”? Then, go ahead: ask the same question of three (or four) folks with the IRS. You’ll probably recieve four (or five) contradictory answers, most of them designed to cause you to get a nastly letter down the pike from someone else (or sometimes the same dumbasses) saying you are in error for following their counsel. Catch 10648 (that’s Catch 22 cubed).

6. Following on 5, if the IRS makes a mistake, IT IS YOUR FAULT. Remember that one: IT IS ALWAYS YOUR FAULT. It’s a simple corrollary of number 1.

7. Paying the borg for the priviledge of being financially and mentally raped. Thank you, Mr. Revenooer… We pay the IRS’s wages, exhorbitant operating expenses (and screwups associated with “updating” the RS’s antiquated computer systems, etc.). So, naturally, as with other feddle gummint bureaucracies, those who pay the costs are the slaves of the servant. Figures. (See the Kipling cited in “Read more here” below *sigh*).

8. The lies I. The taxes you pay to the IRS on or before the April 15 deadline every year reflects your effective tax rate to the feddle gummint, right? Nope. That’s a baldfaced lie. You also pay ALL the taxes on ALL the goods and services (added up all down the supply chain to the end user/consumer) of ALL the businesses producing goods and services you purchase (on those goods and services you purchase). Your effective tax rate is really more like at least double what you see on April 15 every year.

9. The Lies II: Pictures like this at the smarmy IRS website:

Instead of the more honest:

10. The very thought of IRS drones feeding at the public trough. Just think: if even half of them worked at productive jobs instead (while the other half went on the public dole), we’d be far, far better off.

11. Tax courts. See #1 again.

12. Damned snoops! (And I think I may well be using the term with theological accuracy–*heh*) Even friends of tax collectors get their own place in Dante’s Inferno, IIRC…

13. The ultimate indignity: being forced, by a monstrous tax code, to pay one shark (or more!–tax lawyer, accountant, TurboTax *spit*, whomever) to snatch a small portion of one’s carcass from the jaws of a bigger shark.

I could rail all day, but then I’d probably be singled out (may well be already) for harrassment by the IRS.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Pink Flamingo, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Allie is Wired, Democrat=Socialist, CORSARI D’ITALIA, and Pursuing Holiness, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Continue reading “T-13; 2.X-repeat: 13 Things to Hate about the IRS”

January 31, 2008July 14, 2015

T-13; 2.03: Thirteen Health Benefits of… Coffee

Coffee, THE number one Holy Brew has a bad rap among the twittering masses. Here are a few of the many ways coffee is a blessing:

1.) Lowers risk of diabetes¹

2.) Lowers risk of Parkinson’s¹

3. Lowers risk of colon cancer¹

4.) Mood enhancer¹

5.) Headache treatment¹ (“…a single dose of pain reliever such as Anacin or Excedrin contains up to 120 milligrams” of caffeine. *heh*)

6.) Useful as a paliative in Adult ADD/ADHD² (medicating children out of their right minds is another issue entirely *sigh*).

7.) Some research indicates drinking coffee helps prevent dental caries³

8.) Helps in asthma management.¹

9.) Enhances athletic performance. ⁴ (Of course, for me that means the ability to walk briskly to the network closet to reset a router… :-))

10.) Coffee with milk daily=less childhood depression.⁴ (But of course! Who wouldn’t have (had) a better childhood with a daily dose of The Holy Brew #1? *heh*)

11.) Oops. Left out lowers risk of breast, liver and rectal cancer.⁵

12.) With over four times the active anti-oxidants found in tea, coffee is better at providing the heart-health benefits often touted for that beverage.⁶

13.) Despite what you may have heard (even from so-called medical professionals) the evidence is that coffee does NOT cause elevated blood pressure and poses no risk for those who have high blood pressure.⁵. Oh, and coffee is no more diuretic than plain old everyday water.⁶

I could go on, but I think you get the point,

O Blessed, Holy Caffeine Tree!

Midi File:

Mp3 File (Courtesy of the Morning Coffee and Afternoon Tea Singers):

Go ahead; sing along. 🙂

(This mp3 is a lower-sampling-rate version of trhe one at the Morning Coffee and Afternoon Tea link above.)

Oh, and here’s another verse, not included in the verses above:

O Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree,
In gratitude I sing of thee,
For all the ways you give life zest,
O Caffeine Tree, you are the best!

N.B.–The graphic above has a word-switch in the second verse that I need to get around to editing. First one to spot it gets two brownie points, redeemable for absolutely nothing but a pat on the back and a hearty “Attaboy/girl!”

🙂

If you wish to use this song for your personal amusement, just print it out and/or download or record the MIDI file. Do NOT remove the copyright information and do NOT reproduce multiple copies for use by a group unless

1.) You credit me and
2.) Notify me of its use in a group/choral setting and
3.) Provide me with a recording of any performance

Do NOT download or otherwise reproduce the mp3 recording Christine of Morning Coffee and Afternoon Tea made without contacting HER and asking HER permission to do so.

Do not use this material in any way to produce income or for sale or distribution without my permission. Period. Ever. Clear?

If you have any questions just email me at mnmus@thirdworldcounty.us

Noted at The Thursday Thirteen Hub and Trackposted to The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, The Random Yak, Right Truth, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, Big Dog’s Weblog, Cao’s Blog, Leaning Straight Up, The Pet Haven, A Newt One, Conservative Cat, Adeline and Hazel, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

January 17, 2008

T-13, 2.02: A Love-Hate Relationship

(*heh* Bet you were expecting something about politics. Nope, politics isn’t a love-hate relationship for me. *sigh* You work it out… )

Regular readers probably know by now that I have a love-hate relationship with Me$$y$oft’$ products: I kinda love to hate ’em. *heh* Oh, I use Me$$y$oft’$ products pretty regularly (in fact, I’m writing this post on a Windows 2000 machine–that’s one of only two versions of Windows I don’t habitually think of as “Windoze”), and I do like some features of more than a few of Me$$y$oft’$ products, but… there are more than 13 things to hate about Me$$y$oft’$ products and practices. In no particular order until the last:

13. Feature creep. Oh, every software publisher does it, but with Me$$y$oft’$ products it’s a major element of every “upgrade”: how many unecessary “features” can be added to clutter up the interface and contribute to

12. Bloating. Example: Windows 95 could comfortably (safely, with the full needs of the OS considered) be installed on a hard drive with as little as 100MB free space (by contrast, my first Win3.1 system only had a 100MB hard drive and only about 1/10 of that was the OS). Windows 98 needed 2-2.5 times as much space for a comfortable installation and Win2KPro, nearly 10X as much! XP? 2 gigs of hard drive space is just about right. Have the OSes been 10X-100X better? Nope (although THE sweet spot, Windows 2000 Pro, was many, many, many times better than the old Win 3.1 or Win95 OSes, IMO). The same applies across the board to M$ applications, for example…

11. FrontPage. Vermeer FrontPage 1.0 was pretty good. Nice interface, decent web page output, etc. Bought by M$ and “twiddled with” to brand as M$ Frontpage 1.1. Still pretty good output, easy WYSIWYG editing. Not all that bad. Then M$ began to “tweak” it and add features. By the time FrontPage 98 was out, it was full of “features” that bloated the product and…

10. Fixed things that weren’t broken until they were. Yep. M$’s goal seems to be to remake the web in its own image, and so FrontPage, by FP98, was putting out all kindsa non standards-compliant gibberish (just the kind of thing M$’s non-standards-compliant browser likes). Pretty much ditto with M$ Office: M$ kept adding “features” and changing file formats (probably just to frustrate folks who were using other companies’ products that’d learned to “play well” with M$ Office and inconvenience users of those products). Result: bloatware that did NOT play nicely with others.

9. Active X. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I could do a T-13 just on things to hate about Active X. Start with the security nightmares and extend on to and through its sluggishness, memory footprint and on and on. Hate it.

8. Internet Exploder: the world’s crappiest browser (and that’s exactly how any copy of IE I install or manage is branded: “Internet Exploder, the world’s crappiest browser” *heh*). Heck, I even like Lynx better, and it’s command line only. At least it is pretty safe to use, unlike–still!–Internet Exploder. And is there ANY other modern browser that’s LESS standards-compliant? No. (Yes, I keep copies around just so I can help the poor benighted souls who still use it regularly.) Even in its latest “Me Too!” interation, it’s at least a generation behind modern browsers in both features and standards-compliance. Crappy browser, simply crappy.

7. OS “activation”. Can you say, “We think ALL of our customers are crooks, thieves and liars”? Does it stop piracy? Nope. Scemes to avoid activation abound. All M$’s activation scheme has done is inconvenience ethical users. Hmmm, seems M$ has finally (after what, seven or so years?) twigged to the fact that its activation scheme is stupid: WinXP SP3 will relax it a lot and when Vista shipped, it offered a way to avoid it altogether… Still, it’s a pain in the neck (although my real opinion is that the pain is actually located somewhere south of there) and a slap in the face to millions of honest users.

6. Sloppy code. It’s a well-earned meme: buying M$ “gold code” final products is simply buying “shrink-wrapped betaware” complete with a plethora of bugs and traps and security holes, Oh! My! Only fools (and folks who test software until it breaks on purpose) buy the first iteration of a M$ product version “upgrade,” because it WILL break something on your machine. Count on it. Shrink wrap beta. Wait for the first few patches to come through. Patch one will fix security holes M$ is willing to admit they know about (but not willing to admit they already knew about before they shipped the product, even it it’s true). Patch two will fix the things patch one broke, etc. *heh* Maybe.

5. Speaking of which, how long does it take to fix all those security holes? Take Internet Exploder, for example. Dozens more known security holes uncovered every year and M$ almost always takes months and months and months to get around to patching the damned thing (now, that wasn’t a theological assessment of the thing but a fervent wish). Other browsers, maintained by more ethical support and development staffs, usually plug security holes within a day (or days, maybe in extreme cases weeks) or so of discovery. M$ products in general vs. products from other sources: pretty comparable time scale on plugging security holes. Why? M$ just doesn’t seem to care until and unless enough poressure’s brought to bear to force it to patch its products. See #1

4. Crappy websites. M$-run websites. *sigh* Active X. See #9. Buggy, broken, messy non-compliant html and xhtml. (Yeh, I’m not much better any more, but their coders do this stuff for a,living. You’d think they’d at least try to get it right! Instead of doing it the M$ way. *heh*)

3. Cluelessness. Vista. Need I say more? The most useless downgrade of OS I have seen since Windows Muppet Edition (ME). Extravagant resource hog. Almost all the real feature upgrades promised by M$ missing (cos M$ couldn’t implement ’em and make its marketing schedule for milking the cattle of more $$). And Vista’s just the most recent example oif M$’s cluelessness. For a company with so many really smart people involved, dumb, really dumb.

2. A lot of the above boils down to the fact that M$ does things three ways: the right way (surprisingly often. Seriously), the wrong way and the M$ way. The last two are prevalent enough to seem almost overwhelming, though. *sigh*

And number 1?

Attitude: arrogance. It’s the “Do things the M$ way or screw you,” attitude that really chaps me off. It’s almost as bad as Apple that way. Not quite, but almost. *heh*

Tracked back to the Thursday Thirteen Hub and Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, Celebrity Smack, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Big Dog’s Weblog, Leaning Straight Up, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, and Adeline and Hazel, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.