posted by perkiset on Oct 30

I’ve been going back and forth with Lupus about how America and taxes are like a gun in your face – the Federal government is essentially a thug that is extracting your money “by force” and “with a gun in your face.” Although I agree that our current administration IS a bunch of thugs and essentially a crime family, the notion that the federal government is the cause of our woes is just laughably silly. So I’m coining a new phrase just so you’ll know what I’m talking about: “Lazitarians.”

Argument: We pay too much in tax.
No, YOU pay too much in taxes. I pay an amount that is close to 11% of our family’s gross annual revenue and have for the last 20 years. Completely legit, pristine white and 100% legal tax preparation. What I don’t do, is sit around and let them tell me what I will pay.

Here’s what you don’t understand: a tax return is essentially a negotiating framework. It first off requires full disclosure ie., this is what I made last year so that we have a basis to start negotiating, but from that point on it’s up to you to figure out what you’ll pay. If you simply take the 1040EZ and pay what they list then you’re both foolish and lazy. Essentially you are purchasing the right to not have to be smart. You’re saying, “Well, I don’t really want to have to work, think, keep records or figure out what is NOT the government’s share, so I’ll just pay this instead.”

Thanks, by the way, for paying the lion’s share of the money the fed receives each year – you’re certainly paying more than me. But hey – you also get more time on the couch to watch Desperate Housewives and such. Good for you. But I digress.

Lazitarians and the like are more comfortable complaining about the way things are then doing anything about them. Screaming about taxes is certainly a lot easier than doing something about them. Little known fact: a child, working in the home for a sole-proprietorship pays no income tax (up to a certain amount). So what do we do? Form a sole proprietorship to manufacture breast cancer awareness jewelry. The money the kids make, since they are still under 18, is under our control – so we apply it to their private school costs. Presto – earned income goes towards private school. Wow, that was tough (and an oversimplification, but you get the point). Clearly, the children need to for-reals work and there’s no funny business here – but we personally would rather they learn to work than watch TV, so our home is centered around understanding income and a work ethic. Again, this is beyond most folks that would rather pay a post-tax allowance to kids so that they aren’t taken away from Grey’s Anatomy.

How about this: C Corps can pay health insurance for their employees. So we have a C Corp for one huge aspect of what we do here. Because the board has decided that this makes a great benefit, all medical expenses, including optical and dental are a benefit of working for our C corp. Presto – medical costs are pre-tax.

Here’s the deal – PinkHat’s and my life with accounting is neither simple, easy or quick. We both spend on average 10 hours per month on our accounting, reconciliation and book keeping - as well as the sum we pay a *very professional EA* to make sure we’re doing it right – because if the government decides it wants to check up on us then we want to make sure we have our ducks in a row (thank GOD for PinkHat who does this stuff brilliantly). But when we look at the amount of money we save by spending this combined 20-ish hours per month, it makes EXCELLENT financial sense. In fact, the way I see it, it is a revenue opportunity. I have a cost of business at 38%. But by working 10 hours I can reduce that by a profound amount and put a huge amount of money in my pocket. And by doing it the right-right-right way, the money stays in my pocket all year long and the government gets there piece after the year is over. Presto – I’ve even made interest income on the money that I am going to pay them.

So please – stay dumb about this issue because you’re making my life really easy. There’s a couple GREAT new shows on channel 12 tonight…

Argument: Private entities (companies / corps) are better suited to do things because they have an incentive – profit – rather than the government, which has no incentive.
Well, OK – you kind of have me on that one if you take it on face value – private corporations do have an incentive to do well – it’s called profit. But here’s the rub, and why that sentence always stops right there: Private corporations have incentive to do well FOR THEIR SHAREHOLDERS. Employees are a necessary evil, and if they can get it cheaper, do it cheaper, sell it for more, the board is happy. Lazitarians do not understand that corporations have no conscience nor any reason at all to be concerned with my health, welfare or wellbeing – except so long as I have a dollar to spend on them. IT is for this very reason that “un-incentivised government programs” are often of such value – in fact, you’re benefiting from them RIGHT THIS SECOND.

The Internet was thought of, prototyped, developed and made ubiquitous because of government, military and academic programs. The argument that “private industry is better” is simple horseshit because if they COULD have done it they WOULD have. If there was so much to be made and private industry would be so much better at this, believe me they would be. The amount of people that profit directly or indirectly is a DIRECT result of this research and development and, yours and my tax dollars. The benefits to health from the space program are innumerable. The capability to simply drive from state to state pretty easily on federal highways is marvelous.

How about this one: private industry would still have us believe that “It’s never really been proven that cigarette smoke is bad for your health.” There’s your private industry: complete denial so that they can continue to profit. And yours and my tax dollars went to fighting them on this. Where is the benefit you say? Let people smoke and die? Well, first off – I don’t have time personally to research the health dangers associated with smoking, so I need to outsource that before I decide to light up. Second, since I pay for the health care of folks that can’t afford it, and those very same folks are the ones most likely to smoke, then I’d prefer that the government continues to fight the private industry that wants to profit AT MY EXPENSE WHETHER I SMOKE OR NOT.

How does the notion of Lazitarian fit in here? Corporations make a lot of noise and are actually at least as good, if not better at propoganda than our government. It’s a whole lot easier to believe the fascists and scream at the government than it is to believe that they (corporations) could really give a shit if my drinking water is safe or not. Why we want to scream at the entity that is TRYING to make water safer (the government) while we want to give free reign to the very entities that have polluted it (private enterprise) is amazing to me. But rather than learning, we’d rather see how Addison is doing on Private Practice (hey honey - did you get that on the Tivo?) and scream. Lazitarians.

Argument: The government controls me
No, you are a Lazitarian. Noone and nowhere does it say that freedom is easy or cheap. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to get smart and make use of the tools that this country provides for you to prosper – if you want to eliminate the government so that you can prosper, then you are a WELFARE MOTHER. You are looking for the government to hand you the worst entitlement of all: LAZINESS. If you can’t compete because it’s “just too tough to start a business” then you are LAZY. You want to cut everyone down to your level because you cannot rise up to the challenge. Get off your butt, turn the TV off and grab a book… make a plan about how you will take responsibility for your life, rather than screaming that the government has taken it from you. It has not – you have surrendered it willingly.

And by the way, thanks again- I love the lovely landscaping on the roads around here – certainly a gift from you and your hard work. Really, thanks.

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posted by perkiset on Oct 19

Lots of folks thind that Al Gore invented the Internet - they are wrong! It was Apple Computer!

OK, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration – but it is true that Apple, people working for Steve Jobs at both Apple and NeXT are directly responsible for the web as we know it. And I’ll tackle Al’s influence here as well.

Now before you go all spamieval on my ass, let me take a few moments to illustrate some facts before I go on to my conclusion.

The essence of everything: Hypertext
Hypertext is a notion that has been around since 1962, when Ted Nelson wrote about “Non-Sequential Writing” in his book “Literary Machines.” Later, Doug Englebart described what he called “Hyper Documents” at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968. The next big thing (and most profound change) came about when Ted Nelson created a project he called “Xanadu” which was about the distributed, hypertext-like storage of copywritten materials. Between the two of these primary researchers, the notion of human navigated documents interlinked by citation and reference became the future-tech du jour. Not a lot happened for quite a while, as people talked about this new notion and worked through a variety of projects – but in many ways, technology and the public in general were not ready for this new way of thinking/operating.

The first sea-change: HyperCard
In 1987, Bill Atkinson, working for Apple, released a little program he called “HyperCard” based on the hyper-text notions of Nelson and Englebart. The significant advances that lead to this were primarily the Graphical User Interface (the original Macintosh interface) and the speed of computers, which allowed for scripted languages rather than just compiled languages. Atkinson had been working on it since 1985 and it was a brilliant confluence of the Macintosh’s trademark ease of use and the awesome potential of Hypertext. But the world was not yet ready for Apple and Atkinson’s next prescient move: they released it for free with every new Macintosh. Unfortunately, this was an unheard of precedent and completely marginalized the HyperCard program and its progeny HyperTalk. Under the visionless eyes of utterly gray-and-IBM Amelio and Scully, the “Hyper” stuff that Apple was developing became immensely popular with Mac users and devotees, but suffered a cruel heat-death with the company and corporate users.

Jobs, NeXT and Tim Berners-Lee
By 1987 Steve Jobs had exited Apple was on to bigger and better things. He founded NeXT, which was a Unix-based operating system and computer that was far and away the most powerful personal system available at that time. Unfortunately, if was not a commercial success even as it was raved on by scientists and researchers. In fact, NeXT’s NeXTSTEP operating system was the basis for the OS-X that we know and love today. Almost every cool thing that we see on the Mac today was at one time a research project or experiment on the NeXT platform. But far and away the most important thing that came from NeXT was built by a young gentleman working at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee. Taking advantage of the advanced rapid development tools of the NeXT platform, the inspiration of HyperCard and the most important thing, his academic connection to the then-infantile “Internet” – he created a little application that changed the world and called it “WorldWideWeb.” This application was first released into the wild in 1990 and it defined a new form of communications protocol called HTTP or Hyper Text Transmission Protocol. It was a way for information to be interlinked in a hypertext way between interconnected servers using their “Domain Name” or address. Occupying a niche in higher education and science is what got the NeXT computer into Tim’s hands – and CERN’s connection to the Internet was the piece he was looking for.

The World’s First Browser
At the same time, Pei-Yuan Wei at UC Berkeley was working on another system called “Viola” which was an attempt to bring the functionality of HyperCard to the XWindows (Unix) environment. Wei intended to interconnect in a way that was more akin to the HyperDocuments architecture by Englebart, but after seeing HTTP by Berners-Lee he adapted it to his XWindows app and created the worlds first modern browser, NCSA Mosaic. Wei was working under an initiative that was authored and advocated by then-Senator Al Gore - the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 - which funded the development of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative - which included the Mosiac Web Browser.

Connecting the Dots
Steve Jobs built on the Xerox-PARC research of a GUI and mouse and made it pop-technology. One of his employees, Bill Atkinson took the research of Ted Nelson and Doug Englebart and created HyperCard, which begat Hypertalk, which begat Javascript. Steve Jobs, free of the then-corporate-land-locked Apple formed NeXT and created the most powerful personal computer of the day – as well as the most sophisticated user interface the world had ever seen (So much so, that it was unthinkably complicated for the unwashed masses). Tim Berners-Lee, working on this brilliant new platform, used it to synthesize the notions of HyperText with the Internet. Pei-Yuan Wei used XWindows to mimic Hypercard, then in combination with Berners-Lee’s work created the genesis of browsers as we know them today.

Could someone else have followed this path and invented the web as we know it today? Of course! It’s also arguable that Louis Pasteur might not have figured out that boiling milk killed the viruses and other harmful creatures that lived in it – but the fact is, he did – and the line I just described created the Internet as we know it today. Did they build it from research gathered by others? Of course! Everything we know today has been built by standing on the shoulders of other great men. But again, the line I just described shows the brilliant minds that synthesized the then-existing data into a new and exciting frontier… and the capability for you to read this document in the first place.

So all you Apple-haters go ahead – hate and malign all you want. But while you’re doing so on your blogs, forums, wikis, websites and such – remember that the technology was brought to you by way of the very company that you are slamming.

Alright: Open season on Perk! Give it your best.

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posted by perkiset on Oct 8

In this month’s Discover Magazine, Burt Rutan is interviewed and is brushed as being a Libertarian a mile wide.

He made a comment in the interview which I find perfectly describes where the Federal government should, and should not be.

He said something to the effect of, “Space flights should not yet be controlled by the FAA. Passengers should sign a waiver saying that they understand the risk and that’s good enough. The FAA’s job is to protect the people on the ground that did NOT sign a waiver.” This is brilliant, and why I support drunk driving laws and such that a lot of Libertarians completely despise.

See, you choose to drink, fair enough. But it’s when you’re driving on a street that I am as well and you mash me, well then I had no participation in your choice to drink and have been unfairly insulted by your actions. This is the notion of society, and why such laws exist: They are there to protect the innocent even more than the choice-ee. Societal laws are not to stop you from making choices, they are to protect me from your choices.

It has been said (and I agree) that most Libertarians are Republicans that just want to smoke dope and get laid. From this perspective I agree 100%: if you want to smoke dope at home the government really has no business telling you not to. But the minute you step out that door then your choice potentially impacts me and I’m 100% fine with harsh laws that keep you indoors. Same with sex: WGAF what you do in your home, or between 2 (or 17 LOL) willing participants? But I don’t need CNN talking about sex the way that they do because I don’t want to have to explain to my young’uns yet what “Fellatio” is or what kind of stain ruins a blue dress. Keep that on pay channels and not the public airstream so that I can choose in or out FFS.

In many ways, this appropriate application of Libertarian philosphy is what created the GOP in the first place and they have fallen far from that tree. An anti-gay-marriage Constitutional ammendment? Are you kidding me? Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave!

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