2 Shipbuilders Get Big Breaks in New Tax Bill

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As always, the rest of us get to pay. Evidently our senators, Russ Feingold (Yes) and Herb Kohl (“Present”) support these very narrow non populist measures. Edmund Andrews:

Under the bill, Navy shipbuilders would be allowed to once again defer paying most federal income taxes on a project until the contract was completed. Because it takes about five years to build an aircraft carrier and three years to build a destroyer, the shipyards would be able to delay their tax bills for years, allowing more opportunity to offset taxes against future losses.
….
“This provision takes dramatic steps to remedy the inequity of how naval shipbuilders pay their taxes,” Ms. Snowe said in a statement last week, just after House and Senate negotiators agreed to include the provision in a broader bill that would shower $140 billion in tax cuts across almost every segment of industry.
But critics said the provision would not create jobs, the stated intention of the tax bill, because employment at naval shipyards is determined almost entirely by federal spending on ships and submarines rather than by tax incentives.
“We’re not going to buy any more war boats if we give them a tax incentive,” said Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research group here that has long scrutinized corporate tax practices. “We’re going to buy more boats if the government decides we need more boats.”

Disney reaps what it sows

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Cory Doctorow:

Disney’s being sued by a kids’ hospital that has the rights to the Peter Pan novels. The hospital says that the 1998 Sonny Bono term-extension (a law that Disney bought in order to ensure that its earliest cartoons didn’t enter the public domain) covers the Peter Pan stories and so Disney owes it royalties on a sequel that a publishing subsidiary put out. Disney says that the law doesn’t cover the Pan books — and that it should know, since it paid for that law! — and now they’re going to court.

Music and Math

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Richard Harris:

At 28, Manjul Bhargava has already won a coveted full professorship at Princeton University. An expert in number theory, the study of the properties and relationships of numbers, Bhargava is also a master of the tabla, a small Indian hand drum used to create music with rhythmic, precise patterns.
Number theory is the type of math that describes the swirl in the head of a sunflower and the curve of a chambered nautilus. Bhargava says it’s also hidden in the rhythms of classical Indian music, which is both mathematical and improvisational. He sees close links between his two loves — both create beauty and elegance by weaving together seemingly unconnected ideas.

SBC Bundles WiFi with DSL Service

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Wisconsin Telco Monopoly SBC launches an inexpensive, bundled WiFi option for their DSL subscribers:

SBC officially announces $1.99 per month unlimited hot spot services: If you subscribe to SBC’s DSL service at a rate as low as $26.95 per month for their cheapest service, you are entitled to unlimited Wi-Fi hot spot service for $1.99 a month with a one-year commitment — after receiving free service until April 2005.
This gives SBC a giant sledgehammer to wield against the cable vendors trying to encourage people to sign up for ever-slower cable service. I’ll confess that I’m biased against cable because of the pooled bandwidth/pooled network approach. Cable modem providers initially had no protection against entire neighborhoods seeing each other’s networks. Then they restricted upload speeds to 128 Kbps on most links to defeat “servers.” Because bandwidth is pooled, it means that each neighborhood on a cable head end has a finite amount of bandwidth–the more subscribers, the more frustration.

WiFi News
Keep in mind that US broadband service significantly lags systems in Asia in terms of speed and price/performance. Korea and Japan citizens have access to broadband at speeds up to 20X faster than services we can purchase.

Business School Professors “Pen” a note on the Economy to President Bush

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An Open Letter to the President
These folks raise some useful points. The problem is not only with Bush. Interestingly, last week, Russ Feingold voted FOR one of the biggest tax giveaways…. (Kohl voted present).
The tax system is a complete mess and ripe for reform. Thinking of a solution, go read Mitch Kapor’s recent piece on our current political situation.

Windows Spyware: Every 5th Dell Call is Spyware Related

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Time to moveon from Windows. Financial Express:

Spyware, code that allows outsiders to monitor computer activity, now affects about 90 percent of computers, he said.
?It?s not just an annoyance,? George said. ?Increasingly, it?s becoming more and more pernicious. It can degrade a system?s performance to the point of being unusable, it can block access to the Internet, it can prevent you from accessing e-mail (and) it can redirect your browser to some other home page.?

Fred Mohs on Property Tax Exemptions

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Fred Mohs:

The local papers have been full of troubling news about the budgets for the city, county and public schools. The sheriff needs more deputies, drug and alcohol treatment centers are left unfunded, park and sanitation workers are cut, West High School does not have money to put on its fall play, fourth grade strings are in jeopardy and fees for doing everything are up across the board.
At the same time, a growing number of Madisonians have managed to live in properties that are tax exempt. A report produced by the Madison Assessor’s Office indicates that the self-reported value of retirement home parcels is $25.1 million and that other tax exempt housing has a value of $64.3 million, for a total self-reported value of $89.4 million.

(more…)

Power to the “Wired” People – Mitch Kapor

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Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a principal in OSAF (Open Source Applications Foundation) has written a piece on our current political process:

Our nation is founded on the principle of self-government — a government “of, by, and for the people” in the words of Abraham Lincoln — but we know in our gut that this ideal is in such peril today that we have to ask whether self-government is even a meaningful concept in 2004 as it was to the Greeks who invented democracy 2,500 years ago.
Greek and Roman traditions inspired the Founding Fathers when they framed the Constitution and brought democracy into the modern world. But if you could reanimate Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or Alexander Hamilton in present-day Washington, they would be horrified. They would find a system both corrupt and dysfunctional, one that has 13 lobbyists for every representative, in which money buys undue influence and the real deals are made out of sight of the American public.
Now, it’s easy to look at this process and blame the politicians. They are certainly culpable. But let’s look at the other end of the Washington purse strings. Who buys the politicians? It’s the corporations who would rather game the system than create something of value in a competitive marketplace.