Posts

Here’s a real political issue that you won’t see discussed much this year, but that in actuality is very important to the future of this country. The issue is whether the tax burden should fall upon capital or upon consumption. For many years, I’ve felt like taxes on capital gains should be just as high as the taxes on wages for reasons of fairness. I’ve never understood why rich people who earn their money by investing should pay a lower tax rate than working people who earn their money by going to a job that they probably hate. That just strikes me as fundamentally unfair. What conservative economists will tell you, though, is that taxes on consumption are much more efficient than taxes on capital. So, overall, people are better off if capital is taxed at a lower rate (or not at all). The fact that this policy is horribly regressive is a side effect. It’s an interesting question, and not one that I’ve ever seen an elected official discuss. ...

The New York Times brings up something that’s been bugging me for weeks, that Bush’s bumper stickers are better designed than Kerry’s. Unlike me, they can point out the exact reasons why that’s the case. What’s particularly troubling is that the rumor is that Kerry had a major role in the design of his campaign logo. I can’t imagine that President Bush had one thing to say about what his bumper sticker looked like, and he’s certainly much better off for it. John Kerry has better things to do than pick out the font for his campaign logo, he should have left that to the experts. One thing the NY Times graphic doesn’t mention is the color selection. Bush is much better off there as well. Update: Cameron Barrett posts about his logo-related work at the Clark ‘04 campaign. The Clark logo that Cam used is a heck of a lot better than the Kerry/Edwards logo. ...

Being the type of person who sits around and surfs the web most of the time, I wasn’t at the Web 2.0 conference that everybody was blogging about last week. I did note with interest that one of the new startups that made some noise is a company called SpikeSource, which features on its management team Ray Lane, of Oracle fame, and Kim Polese, of Sun and Marimba fame. (Remember when people thought Marimba was going to come out with interesting products people would use? Their product was so hyped that computer book writing rock star Laura Lemay published a book about it.) Anyway, SpikeSource is going to be offering IT services based on an open source stack of products. To be honest, it doesn’t sound like a very inspired idea. All sorts of IT services companies are using open source products, so I guess these guys will have to differentiate based on execution. On the plus side, looking at the technology stack that SpikeSource feels pretty good to me. The only component that I don’t have real experience with is JBoss. I’m still doing my best to avoid EJBs, and have been completely successful so far. One thing I do find odd is that there’s no mention of career opportunities on the SpikeSource site. You’d think that an IT services provider would need manpower, so why aren’t these guys hiring yet? The other question you have to ask is what kind of coders these guys are bringing on. JBoss has been snapping up open source project leaders left and right to do consulting for them, and the Spring Framework guys have started up their own consulting concern as well. You’d think that SpikeSource would try to establish some cred by hiring the people who’ve built the products in their technology stack. I haven’t seen any mention of that yet. Update: A reader mentions that any SpikeSource job openings will probably be posted in Asia. ...

Sun has paid $92 million dollars to Kodak to settle a bogus patent infringement suit that they surely could have won eventually based on prior art. I guess it’s a business decision, but it’s still crap.

One of the attacks the Bush campaign frequently makes on John Kerry and John Edwards is that they were bad Senators, and attendance is usually the basis of attendance. The most important question for voters when weighing this charge is how their attendance compares to that of other Senators. Is this a valid charge? I haven’t seen it covered in the media. If you have any hard data, please email. ...

Andrew Brown devotes his column this week to extraordinary rendition, or, if you prefer, outsourced torture. Two debates down, still no questions about torture. I guess the moderators are afraid to ask the really tough question. A simple, “Would you sign a bill making it legal to render terrorist suspects to foreign governments for interrogation with the knowledge and expectation that they will be subjected to torture?” would do nicely. Obsidian Wings remains the definitive resource on this topic. ...

I’ve been moving for the past few days. Moving really, really sucks.

Bruce Schneier has a weblog now. It’s about time.

I’m finally trying to get my email in order. I looked this morning and saw that I have over 1400 messages in my inbox. For just one of my email addresses. Looking through them, I see that a fair percentage of them are emails from readers who probably would have liked a response. Often I get such an email, tell myself I’ll get back to it when I get home, or the next day, or whatever, and then forget to reply. It gets buried under the emails from the next day or two, and the next thing you know, I never even see it again (until days like today when I realize my email is out of control). So I’m trying to come up with a better system. My two spam filters were starting to fall down on me a bit, so I finally bit the bullet and stop forwarding every email to any of my domains to my inbox. The big problem here wasn’t spam, it was bounced messages. Spammers and viruses are always appending random email addresses to my domain names, those emails are being rejected by the receivers’ email server, and my inbox fills with bounce messages. No longer. I’m diverting all that stuff to a separate mail box, and once I can make sure I’m not missing important stuff, it’s going to /dev/null. The other change is that I’m diverting the email addresses where I usually get feedback from readers to Gmail, which I’m generally better at keeping a handle on. We’ll see how that goes. I think that next week I’m going to upgrade my SpamAssassin install to version 3.0. In any case, with these changes, hopefully I can be better about getting back to people who I should get back to. And I apologize to anyone who I’ve slighted over the past year or so. ...

My experiment with influence purchasing on the smallest scale continues. The DNC called my wife and asked her for a donation for $2004 the other day, knowing that the easiest people to get money from are those who have already donated. We declined to donate that much, but we did kick in another $100.