I recently wrote this paper for my English 102 class. It’s supposed to be a satyrical guest column with the readers of the State Press (ASU’s newspaper) as the audience.
FairTax Act(tually?)
On days when I’m not thinking about alliteration, I often ponder preposterous paradigms. When those days come, probably in the late afternoon when a Monster Energy Beverage assumes optimal control over my brain, I find myself learning a great deal of information and look towards an optimistic future in my First Year Composition course.
My most recent ponder has been on taxation and reform proposals. Like many ASU students, I don’t make enough money (a taxable income) to know that my instate tuition is partly covered by taxes. But what else didn’t I know? I didn’t know that the FairTax Act is (…as I look at synonyms for “narrow” before typing the next phrase to sound more smart…) limited and unwise.
The “Submission of Americans for Fair Taxation on the FairTax Comprehensive Tax Reform Proposal to The Presidents Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform” does have a huge name, but the AFFT (Americans For Fair Taxation) redeemed themselves when naming their Act. They masterfully combined 2 words, ‘Fair’ and ‘Tax’, into one word, FairTax, but continued to capitalize each individual word to lessen confusion. Unfortunately, the squiggly red line under FairTax doesn’t know that it’s actually a word, balancing out my lost confusion.
Apart from the proposal’s perplexing presentation, there is a proffer that may waste (proportionally) as much space as it’s pretense. AFFT Chairman, Leo Linbeck Jr. states, “The FairTax Act intends to do away with income taxes and other taxes imposed by the Internal Revenue Code, and enacting a single-rate tax on new goods and services.” The AFFT basically wants to create a national sales tax, eliminating income taxes. Like the Communist Manifesto, this submission only looks good on paper. At least Karl came up with a shorter name.
American’s for the FairTax act focus on the pie slice, ‘when their money is taken from them’ rather than the whole pie, ‘their money is taken from them,’ and have come up with a fine proposal according to those tiny spectacles they see the world through. Fortunately, most economists wear soft contact lenses and can see the whole pie for what it is. This would explain why both liberal and conservative economists believe that the real tax rate would end up even higher. Sorry to say, it is not the EFFT, and if it were, it would probably be the EFRT (Economists For Rational Taxation).
Let me show you another slice you can “chew on.” I can by all of my goods offshore. Even if the US government decided to tax the money before it was dropped into an account, I can open an offshore bank account and make all of my purchases through it. Unless the FairTax Act decides to limit many of my financial freedoms (which is opposite of what they’re getting at), you’ve gone roundabout to a reasonable form of taxation.
A suggestion for the AAFT: Acuvue 2 contacts are cheap (a little extra for colors). And, if you like what you see, possibly upgrade to the Night & Day brand.
Me.dium is a plug in for Firefox that tries to make surfing the web a more social experience. Once you sign up for me.dium, which is now public, you then download the plug in which adds a sidebar to your Firefox browser. In this side bar you will see personalized map of the Internet based on where you are, which will change depending on where you visit. You can then see, meet, and chat with people that are doing similar things that you’re doing
“Me.dium brings you all the contextual and social value you get from being around people in the real world, to you online world for the first time… Me.dium brings to you to that hidden world of people and activity behind your browser.”
Everyday millions of people search the Internet looking for answers; who is Deep Throat? How did rock band “The Killers” get their name? What exactly is a Libertarian? For the most part, these people’s priority is placed in the justification rather than the jury and they will accept any popular response as valid. Google, showing Wikipedia as a top contender in many search results, and Alexa web traffic rakings would tell you that Wikipedia is very popular reference on the Internet. But when does 2+2=5?
I first discovered Wikipedia early in high school at a time when learning was a forced activity. After my discovery, I found my self going through embedded links like nobodies business; first outer space, then Jupiter, then Jupiter’s moons until eventually I realized that learning can be fun. Since then I have been visiting Wikipedia everyday to read the featured article. I consider this increased interest in learning a good thing, but I am not the only one doing it. Wikipedia has created an entire culture that can easily find answers to curious questions, and is doing it daily.
Unfortunately though, like with many newfound abilities, people find a need to boast or present and will stand behind their name. An example could be shown like this: I have a piece of information that I don’t see presented to the public anywhere else. I then get more satisfaction in the thought of me showing this information to people rather than the information being completely flawless. Next, I quickly publish my information using the easiest medium to do so. When doing more research on other published information, I find it to imply my information has flaws. “If only I could edit their information and show that my label is ‘completely true’.”
You see this a lot in Wikipedia; people changing controversial dates because their politically active middle school history teacher pounded one into their head. Vandalism, such as pornography, random pictures, profanity, etc. is easy to spot. What’s not easy to see is the majority of the errors; the ones dealing in opinion. I think that because Wikipedia and its users are young they have a hard time understanding how this whole, “publicly created database” idea works, since it hasn’t been done before (at least to this magnitude). As time goes on and people read more articles like this one, Wikipedia will become more stable. In the future people might decide to add a “citation needed” tag at the end of the sentence instead of quickly altering it to what they know correct. But until then, I have raised a stake on the current controversy.
Having researched the reliability of Wikipedia and having understood the viewpoints of all stakeholders, I have created a quality opinion on the controversial issue. I look at Wikipedia simply as an organized version of the Internet. Users will visit the webcity in search of information and will find answers, but should use the same precautions they would when doing any other Internet research. Wikipedia is a great place to curiously stroll through, learning various things, but like most primary research, I would not stamp my name on something who’s creation has been principally created through the Internet.
I obtained a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 and began doing my school work. Saving the document multiple times, I began to think. Why doesn’t it always save? I then thought of multiple instances where things would be better if they were relatively “live.” My Segway checks 100 times per second to make sure that it is balanced upright; how come my web browser requires me to manually check (yeah bandwidth issues but why not). How come my Gmail only updates every minute or so, and every five minutes for Outlook on my phone. How come on I don’t see topics moving up and down on my favorite forums? Is it all really just a bandwidth issue. I thought about this also when using my Mac, where most of the settings are live. When I change my font on Adium, I don’t need to hit “OK,” as goes for most setting in Macintosh system preferences. Vice versa, why don’t I need to save my World of Warcraft character every so often?
I know that the internet is heading this way. Look at XHTML, Atom/RSS feeds; they’re all live.
I thought about this once when they released the 80gb iPod, and now I feel the need to write about it since the release of the 160gb iPod. From what I hear, most people think that it is a ton of space and no one uses it unless they have movies like nobodies business. Right now, unfortunately that is true. Unless you have your torrent clients running day and night downloading movies, or you’re a true audiophile and have heard of “better quality music,” then you would never fill that space. Let me shed some insight:
Right now there is a war going on between Bluray Disc and the HD-DVD. Every few years, we upgrade our media and redo everything. The same thing is happening right now with audio. There is a war going on between the Super-Audio CD (SACD), and the DVD-Audio. People do not know about this because everybody listens to mpeg-3, which is really too bad. Mp3 format is even lower quality than WAV, which is what is on a regular CD. Ipods are nice because they allow you to play most any file you want, including WAV, but with that it takes a memory toll. With 160gb, this is completely fine. One problem, iTunes only sells .mp3 (quality) which was outdated 5 years ago. Everybody only sells .mp3.
I almost wish that the iPod touch didn’t come out at the same time the 160gb did. I think one of the reasons Apple has not decided to upgrade their music is because their main product only has 16gb memory now. Does anyone else think 120kbps is a little obnoxious?
Like every kid I always wanted a cool pet, but unfortunately, like you, I was the kid who only had 2 goldfish. In recent years, I have not liked pets so much and I thought it was because I didn’t want to take care of them. Then someone gave me a better reason not to like them. “Most animals intelligence quotients are so low that rather than doing things for other beings, they do everything for themselves.” They like you because you give them food and water, because you keep them in your climate controlled house, because you scratch them, et cetera. Perhaps it hit me harder than it will hit you because I loved to feed fish when I was ten. I really do not think that most animals have certain emotional capabilities, including love. Am I too harsh?
::Update::
Since writing this, I have learned about the limbic system in mammals, which is responsible for emotion. I am now agnostic towards the idea of pets and their ability to feel love.
Every single time I withdraw money from an ATM machine I have like a nanosecond of frustration when I realized that what I withdraw has to be a multiple of the 20 dollar bill (or 50). I quickly throw it to the back of my brain when I tear my receipt. Finally, just recently, I stopped for a second and gathered that nanosecond of deep realization that things didn’t have to be this way.
Why can’t I get my money in multiples of tens, fives, or why not oven ones? Why can’t I withdraw 13 bucks? The technology to do this has always been available. It’s because the same company (Diebold) owns the majority of them. I would even go as far to say that big business usually cares more about business and less about innovation. Every time I go to The Home Depot I always get 10 dollars cash back because… well I can, and should be able to. It just reminds me how there are so many little things that could be made, or presented better.
A little more insight about getting cash back. If you need to, and you are at a gas station, Wal-Mart, or something of the sort, you can always buy something, then get cash back from the cashier. You shouldn’t have to pay $2 to withdraw YOUR OWN money. At least when you get cash back at one of the aforementioned places, you get something for your 2 dollars.
I was reading a music based entertainment magazine the other day and it was talking about music leaking before it is released, and how its pretty much impossible to stop it from leaking early (as of now). One of the artist went on to say that leaking is only a bad thing if your album sucks.
If you think pirating is a problem, then these days, it is a really big problem. Last December, The New York Times revealed that there is an average of 22 iTunes songs per iPod.
The price in music has always had a downward trend, so why today when music is so cheap, and you only need travel to your computer chair to obtain it, is piracy so high. Maybe that’s just it, obtainability. What if piracy is so high because people want it in the most convenient matter, cost aside? Then you say “Keith, once you put your information in on iTunes it could actually be easier to pay for music then steal it.” June 1st, 1999 Sean Fanning created the first way to obtain music on the internet. Sean Fanning created the easiest way to obtain music. Sean Fanning created Napster, and it wasn’t legal. Napster spawned an entire generation who at first, were geared towards accessibility. Now millions of people have it hardwired in their brains to pirate music. Whether they don’t think it’s wrong, or they know it’s wrong, the first time they downloaded a song on the internet, was illegally. So The Shins new album is leaked 3 months before release date, cost aside, we resort back to our instinct, our first, our built nature of obtaining music through our favorite p2p client. If there would have been an iTunes released on the same day Napster was, the ratio of stolen music on the internet to bought music on the internet today, would be at least the same, most likely lower. Because we didn’t punch in our information on iTunes the first time we bought a song, for our generation it will never be instinct.
I also think that people steal music, because it’s easier to obtain higher quality music. ITunes will sell songs with a bitrate of at most 192kbps, which isn’t even CD quality. I’ll post later about how we should have higher quality music.
This post will mainly be an insight on my newly purchased T-Mobile Dash (HTC Excalibur). Although I do not own a Pearl, many of my friends do and I have used them extensively. At first glance out of the box the Dash is beautiful, more beautiful than the pictures. Small thin body, metallic front, and rubber back makes it a nice hold in hands. Then for the boot up (a little long) I find a colorful Windows Mobile 5. With that, I go to T-Mobiles website to get WM6 (free of coarse). After I download it I search endlessly on forums and websites to find info on Mac integration. I could only find one easy to use program called Missing Sync, that will run you a whopping $40. But wait, even if you think that’s not good deal for Macintosh integration, it only works with WM5 (for now)… so as soon as I download it, I will only be able to use it once to transfer WM6, which you need some sort of syncing program to do, then I am stuck not being able to transfer music, documents, etc.
On to the software… windows mobile 6 is great, I finally got over it and just used my PC partition through boot camp to transfer files. Windows Media Player is disappointing in that it can only play .mp3, wma, and wmv. So for my .mp4 and .avi, I had to download various media players. With the Dash’s not-so-fast processor, playing movies of great sizes/resolutions was impossible. Terrible fps. Short clips played and looked beautiful with the Dash’s Huge screen.
Along with the slow boot up, the whole WM6 interface was pretty sluggish, not because of WM6, but because of the low processor speed, and small amount of memory. With the more programs I had opened, the slower everything moved, to eventually it was saying I couldn’t open any more programs for there was not enough memory. Overall the operating system seemed great, but it’s hardware could hardly support it.
A week after purchase, I was packing up for California. Got in the car, pulled out the Dash to listen to some tunes and realized that there were dead pixels forming. I called up T-Mobile on the drive up only to find that it was a “pressure crack” aka “physical damage” that would not allow me to return the phone in during the 14 day test trial, and was also not covered by the warranty. By this point I was extremely upset. Through the course of my trip, the dead pixels formed a huge black ink blot the rest of the screen was a clean white of more dead pixels. I had just purchased a brand new phone hardly used it, never dropped it once, took extremely good care of it, and it was virtually worthless. It would be 2 weeks before I would come back to Arizona (today) and talk to a representative. They confirmed in was a pressure crack on the internal workings of the screen, and with a thin, larger display, you can’t have it in your pocket because any sort of pressure can damage it. The representative reassured me that they can’t do anything about it, except give me the number of the third party insurance company they use (and I did buy insurance.) With the decision already in my mind that I no longer wanted this phone because of it’s breaking in such a short amount of time (ridiculous!) I called the insurance company to see if I could claim for a Blackberry Pearl. They said the only way I could get a phone of equivalent value (Dash and Blackberry cost exactly the same) was if they were out of stock of my model. The insurance company was so crappy they couldn’t even tell me how long I have insurance with them. (To see if I wanted to call back when they were out-of-stock). I just said that I would cancel the claim and call back later. So I called T-Mobile back convinced that this was a manufacturers defect, and a screen should not break this easily without any physical trauma whatsoever. So tomorrow I will send it in for them to check if there was a defect. If not, the insurance will make me pay half the cost a sluggish fragile phone that I don’t want anymore.
When and if I receive a new Dash, I will probably sell it to some unsuspecting victim on eBay. At least the Pearl has a processor and memory that can definitely hold it’s own. The data plan on the Dash costs $10 more than the Pearl, and does not include international email like the Blackberry does. The main reason that I initially chose the Dash over the Pearl is because I live in Tempe Arizona, an area that is completely wifi. The Dash has a wifi card, and the Pearl does not. Direct push email does not work on wifi though, instead email checks every 5 minutes with WM6 and ever 15 minutes with WM5. I wish I would have originally got the Pearl along with the cheaper more extensive data plan. At first, the Dash was the phone of my dreams, but that’s the problem with Cnet reviews, they never show the “2 weeks later,” which leads me to wonder why it is the highest ranked smart phone on their website.
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Me.dium is a plug in for Firefox that tries to make surfing the web a more social experience. Once you sign up for me.dium, which is now public, you then download the plug in which adds a sidebar to your Firefox browser. In this side bar you will see personalized map of the Internet based on where you are, which will change depending on where you visit. You can then see, meet, and chat with people that are doing similar things that you’re doing
I obtained a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 and began doing my school work. Saving the document multiple times, I began to think. Why doesn’t it always save? I then thought of multiple instances where things would be better if they were relatively “live.” My Segway checks 100 times per second to make sure that it is balanced upright; how come my web browser requires me to manually check (yeah bandwidth issues but why not). How come my Gmail only updates every minute or so, and every five minutes for Outlook on my phone. How come on I don’t see topics moving up and down on my favorite forums? Is it all really just a bandwidth issue. I thought about this also when using my Mac, where most of the settings are live. When I change my font on Adium, I don’t need to hit “OK,” as goes for most setting in Macintosh system preferences. Vice versa, why don’t I need to save my World of Warcraft character every so often?
Like every kid I always wanted a cool pet, but unfortunately, like you, I was the kid who only had 2 goldfish. In recent years, I have not liked pets so much and I thought it was because I didn’t want to take care of them. Then someone gave me a better reason not to like them. “Most animals intelligence quotients are so low that rather than doing things for other beings, they do everything for themselves.” They like you because you give them food and water, because you keep them in your climate controlled house, because you scratch them, et cetera. Perhaps it hit me harder than it will hit you because I loved to feed fish when I was ten. I really do not think that most animals have certain emotional capabilities, including love. Am I too harsh?
Every single time I withdraw money from an ATM machine I have like a nanosecond of frustration when I realized that what I withdraw has to be a multiple of the 20 dollar bill (or 50). I quickly throw it to the back of my brain when I tear my receipt. Finally, just recently, I stopped for a second and gathered that nanosecond of deep realization that things didn’t have to be this way.
I was reading a music based entertainment magazine the other day and it was talking about music leaking before it is released, and how its pretty much impossible to stop it from leaking early (as of now). One of the artist went on to say that leaking is only a bad thing if your album sucks.
This post will mainly be an insight on my newly purchased T-Mobile Dash (HTC Excalibur). Although I do not own a Pearl, many of my friends do and I have used them extensively. At first glance out of the box the Dash is beautiful, more beautiful than the pictures. Small thin body, metallic front, and rubber back makes it a nice hold in hands. Then for the boot up (a little long) I find a colorful Windows Mobile 5. With that, I go to T-Mobiles website to get WM6 (free of coarse). After I download it I search endlessly on forums and websites to find info on Mac integration. I could only find one easy to use program called Missing Sync, that will run you a whopping $40. But wait, even if you think that’s not good deal for Macintosh integration, it only works with WM5 (for now)… so as soon as I download it, I will only be able to use it once to transfer WM6, which you need some sort of syncing program to do, then I am stuck not being able to transfer music, documents, etc.
