Forgive me here if I take a position against taxes, but as you may know, it’s a bit of a favorite American pastime. It’s OK for everyone else to pay taxes, just don’t raise mine, and just don’t ask me to pay any more than my fair share. By the way, if I can figure out a way to avoid paying some of those taxes, don’t begrudge my deduction.
It’s admittedly a tough position to take knowing that lower tax dollars may mean that our men and women in green may not have enough armor, that the shuttle is built by the lowest bidder, our school teachers aren’t paid sufficiently, and on and on, all the way down to the pothole across the street that is now big enough to swallow my left front end if I don’t swerve in time to avoid it.
But I better stop before I talk myself out of complaining about taxes. Who hasn’t heard of the $400 hammer, after all?
This article about the IRS prosecuting lawyers who come up with tax shelters did more than strike me. It’s just plain wrong. Think about it. Congress passes laws that require us to pay taxes. Once you establish the rules and write them down, it’s up to the lawyers to figure out the loopholes and the way around them. The tax code fills up 24 megabytes of space on my hard drive, which on my iPod leaves only enough room for Stairway to Heaven and The Long and Winding Road. There really isn’t much difference between the songs and the code anyway, but I digress.
So, when enterprising lawyers go out there and successfully figure out how to shelter money from taxes, the IRS takes aim and prosecutes the lawyers for being smart enough to figure out what they did wrong when they wrote the code. I’m not sure if the lawyers are being prosecuted because they showed the ________ (fill in your own word) of the IRS and Congress to the rest of us or because the result of their work actually means less dollars in the government’s hands and more money in our hands.
Sure, there’s another way to look at it: the lawyers actually did something illegal that was precluded by the code, and they should be punished. As you can see just from these paragraphs, however, there’s no such thing as black and white in the Internal Revenue Service code. To prove that, all you have to do is look up section 61 that defines income and see what a mess the whole thing starts with.
If the IRS wants to collect money from us, how about making it simple? You know, just like it was when we were kids and dividing up the spoils from the lemonade stand: “One for you and two for me, one for you and two for me…”
A Homecoming for Bart Starr
For the man who will stride to midfield for the coin toss before the Super Bowl next weekend, it will be something of a homecoming.
Bart Starr, one of football’s greatest quarterbacks and the most important player of the Green Bay Packers dynasty in the 1960s, stepped away from the game and the public eye in 1988 after a family tragedy. Kickoff of Super Bowl XL will see his public reunion with the National Football League. And after the game he’ll be presenting the Lombardi Trophy, named after his old coach, the man with whom he won five NFL championships and two Super Bowls.
Glosoli in HD
Sigur Ros; Glosoli from Takk in HD (gorgeous photography).
IBM on the Future of Television
Our analysis indicates that market evolution hinges on two key market drivers: openness of access channels and levels of consumer involvement with media. For the next 5-7 years, there will be change on both fronts — but not uniformly. The industry instead will be stamped by consumer bimodality, a coexistence of two types of users with disparate channel requirements. While one consumer segment remains passive in the living room, the other will force radical change in business models in a search for anytime, anywhere content through multiple channels.
Via Terry Heaton.
Interesting that IBM is chatting about this game. Large changes are underway….
Reshaping Broadcast TV Revenue
JPMorgan Chase analyst Spencer Wang says the earliest signs of this fundamental value shift is the sharp contrast between the languishing stock price of traditional media companies (representing an estimated loss of $31 billion in collective market capitalization) and the meteoric rise of so-called new-media stocks (reflecting an aggregate $69 billion gain in market cap).
More directly, evolving new business models are gradually redefining the value of content in the digital age: what distributors and consumers are willing to pay, what it costs to produce and how much revenue and profit is generated as compared to traditional ways of doing business.
State Electronic Surveillance Laws
National Conference of State Legislatures:
Electronic surveillance is also examined in a brief
that is part of NCSL’s series, “States
Respond to Terrorism,” which surveys states’ efforts to protect democracy
from future terrorist attacks.Electronic Surveillance involves the traditional laws on wiretapping–any
interception of a telephone transmission by accessing the telephone signal
itself–and eavesdropping–listening in on conversations without the consent
of the parties.Following the tragedies of September 11, there is growing
support to give law enforcement agencies more power to tap into private
communications to thwart further acts of terrorism by monitoring private
electronic communications. State and federal policymakers face the challenge
of balancing security needs via electronic surveillance against the potential
erosion of individual privacy.
Requiem for Core Weekly
Core Weekly, whose “only reason for existing was to make money” according to Bill Lueders, is gone. Local discussion roundup:
- Kristian Knutsen on the Life and Death of Core Weekly
- Jesse Russell: For Core, it’s the pits
Zawodny: Has Google Lost its Soul?
We all knew it was a matter of “when” not “if”, but it’s surprising to see that it had to happen this way. Over on Google Blogscoped, I see that Google Removes Its Help Entry on Censorship: The page which used to say: Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results.
Now simply 404s. It’s gone. Well, except for the cached copy in Google itself.
Rather than using that page to explain how and why they’ve compromised their corporate philosophy in China, they’ve removed it entirely with no e
Read the comments for a rather troubling look at Google’s censorship.
Ethanol Study
About one out of every 40 cars and trucks in the United States can now run on a commercial mix of gasoline and ethanol, mostly made from corn. And the federal government is backing the renewable fuel industry. But does ethanol really reduce dependence on fossil fuels?