Posts

Here’s what Warren Buffett has to say about the possibility of a flat tax and taxes in general: I wouldn’t support it. We have, in my view, a taxation system that’s much too flat already. If you look at the payroll tax—which is over 12% now, and that applies on the first $80,000 or $90,000 of income—Bill and I pay practically none of that in relation to our income. For the people that work for us, their tax rate in many cases is the same or even higher than my own, since the rate on capital gains and dividends was cut to 15%. What has gone on in this country in recent years is a huge benefit to the very rich and not that much relief to people down below. Frankly, I think that Bill and I should have a higher tax rate on the income we get. We pay less than half the rate that I was paying 25 years ago when I was making a lot less money. They have really taken care of the rich. ...

When TextDrive notified me that my site is a big resource hog and that they had to throttle my usage of MySQL, I asked them for the slow query log for my site. Whenever a database query takes more than two seconds, MySQL automatically logs it to the slow query log, so when you’re having database-related performance issues, it’s the first place to look. A TextDrive sysadmin copied the slow query log for my queries into my home directory – it’s a 700k file. ...

Today I got an email from TextDrive saying that this humble Web site is causing my server to spend 40-50% of its CPU time on MySQL rather than the standard 3-9% and that they had to put some limits on my MySQL use to solve the problem, at least until I fix my code. What’s interesting is that the only thing I’m running is an out of the box install of Movable Type 3.2. My Web site is probably a little different than most MT installs because there are bunches of entries, but that shouldn’t be a big deal. I run all of the archive pages dynamically, which is definitely the root of the problem (if all my pages were statically served, there would be no MySQL overhead). I’ve asked them to send me the MySQL slow queries log, maybe that will hold some clues. ...

Should blowing our noses into the processed remains of old growth forests trouble our consciences? I think yes. Greenpeace also has a paper products guide indicating which manufacturers are the most environmentally responsible in terms of preserving forests.

If you read one thing today, make it an obituary for Rosa Parks. Such nobility and courage are rare. Her mug shot is amazing as well.

Joel Spolsky has an interesting explanation of how fraudsters use fake blogs and zombie PCs to scame AdSense adverstisers. This problem isn’t specific to AdSense, it works for any cost-per-click advertising system that allows small Web sites to host advertising. Update: Niall Kennedy also has a post about how spammers and fraudsters are abusing Google’s services.

Dean Baker, whose argument on drug patents I linked to last week, has published a specific proposal. In last week’s post, I mistakenly reported that he wanted to do away with drug patents. His actual proposal, which he fleshed out this weekend, is more nuanced and is based on an actual piece of legislation proposed by Dennis Kucinich in the previous Congress. Rather than doing away with patents, he proposes funding drug discovery efforts with federal dollars and putting the results of that research in the public domain. Here’s how he explains it: ...

Since the election last year, I resolved to avoid spewing armchair political strategy here. I don’t know what Democrats need to do to win, and telling them what to do isn’t my problem anyway. I do still like to read political analysis, though, and for any liberal, George Packer’s analysis of what Democrats need to do to win strikes me as a good prescription: ...

The other day I saw a link to Bryan Caplan’s description of what he calls the idea trap, which seeks to explain why failing countries have a hard time enacting the policies that can lead them to success. I’ll let him explain: Good ideas lead to good policy, good policy leads to good growth, and good growth reinforces good ideas. The bad news is that you can also get mired in the opposite outcome. A society can get stuck in an “idea trap,” where bad ideas lead to bad policy, bad policy leads to bad growth, and bad growth cements bad ideas. ...

My Ning developer account is enabled. Time to play.