Actually, we don't need Mitt's tax return. When he said he paid only 15% he did himself a lot of damage. And I'm sure Mitt has that right. He makes his money by selling stock or cashing in stock options, rather than taking a salary. And selling stock is perfectly legitimate capital gains. I ought to know, I spent plenty of time in the past figuring capital gains on my stock sales. A guy like Mitt shouldn't be paying more than capital gains rate (15%) unless his tax accountant is brain dead.
Mitt would have done better to just release his tax returns without comment. Few newsies are intelligent enough to read a form 1040 or schedule D and they might not have noticed that most (perhaps all) of Mitt's income was from capital gains.
A better public debate would be about having capital gains at all. Why not tax money made by playing the stock market the same as money made any other way?
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Heard on NPR
"Or perhaps the voters won't accept anything (Newt Gingrich's ex wife trashing him on ABC) from sources that they don't like. "
"Don't like" isn't the issue. "Don't Trust" is the real issue. I was surprised to hear that staid old NPR has finally realised that the MSM has a credibility problem. Dawn over Marblehead.
"Don't like" isn't the issue. "Don't Trust" is the real issue. I was surprised to hear that staid old NPR has finally realised that the MSM has a credibility problem. Dawn over Marblehead.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Looks like SOPA/PIPA is dead
Or at least seriously wounded. We should not allow injured animals to suffer, we need to follow the bloodtrail and finish them off.
Then we could have another go on copyright revision. The last copyright law extended the life of copyright to "life of the author plus seventy years" which is forever for all practical purposes. We ought to set copyright to a flat 17 years. All the serious money that is going to be made is made in the first 17 years. Stretching copyright beyond 17 years is welfare for lawyers, and red tape to overcome for libraries, websites, and people who need one more copy of an out of print work.
If we limited copyright to 17 years, then most music downloading would become legal. I never hear anything but "goldy oldies" on the radio. Few of my children's CD's have any artist that wasn't popular when I was in high school. Most of what is downloaded is older than 17 years, because stuff younger than 17 years mostly sucks.
Then we could look at the Constitution which only empowers Congress "To Promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Not a word about music. Music is not one of the useful arts, it's a fine art. And it certainly isn't a science. In short, the plain language of the Constitution does not allow copyright on music at all.
Losing copyright on music would infuriate the RIAA and the labels, but it wouldn't make much difference to the artists, who mostly survive by doing live gigs for cash. Few of them get much royalties from the labels. In fact the labels have been suffocating the artists, which is why there is so little good new music out there. We would have more good new music if we didn't have the labels.
Then we could have another go on copyright revision. The last copyright law extended the life of copyright to "life of the author plus seventy years" which is forever for all practical purposes. We ought to set copyright to a flat 17 years. All the serious money that is going to be made is made in the first 17 years. Stretching copyright beyond 17 years is welfare for lawyers, and red tape to overcome for libraries, websites, and people who need one more copy of an out of print work.
If we limited copyright to 17 years, then most music downloading would become legal. I never hear anything but "goldy oldies" on the radio. Few of my children's CD's have any artist that wasn't popular when I was in high school. Most of what is downloaded is older than 17 years, because stuff younger than 17 years mostly sucks.
Then we could look at the Constitution which only empowers Congress "To Promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Not a word about music. Music is not one of the useful arts, it's a fine art. And it certainly isn't a science. In short, the plain language of the Constitution does not allow copyright on music at all.
Losing copyright on music would infuriate the RIAA and the labels, but it wouldn't make much difference to the artists, who mostly survive by doing live gigs for cash. Few of them get much royalties from the labels. In fact the labels have been suffocating the artists, which is why there is so little good new music out there. We would have more good new music if we didn't have the labels.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Maybe we can get union guys to vote Republican?
Obama put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipe line yesterday. This was a privately financed shovel ready big project that would employ thousands of dues paying union members, give us oil from a friendly neighboring country, and keep the price of my furnace oil down.
Obama claims he needed more time to "evaluate" the project. The paper work has been in for two years already. Then he claimed that a piece of Nebraska prairie was "ecologically sensitive". This bit of prairie already has 25,000 miles of pipe buried in it, but for Obama a few more miles was unthinkable. Pipelines are the cleanest, safest, most accident free way of bringing in the oil that fuels the country. Without the pipeline, the same oil comes in by tanker, and tanker accidents are really messy. There has never been a pipeline accident as bad as Exxon Valdez.
In a way, this might help elect a Republican president. Union guys have been known to vote Republican now and then. Where as the lefty greenies who want to stop the pipeline would cut off their fingers before pulling the voting machine lever for anything but Democrats.
Obama claims he needed more time to "evaluate" the project. The paper work has been in for two years already. Then he claimed that a piece of Nebraska prairie was "ecologically sensitive". This bit of prairie already has 25,000 miles of pipe buried in it, but for Obama a few more miles was unthinkable. Pipelines are the cleanest, safest, most accident free way of bringing in the oil that fuels the country. Without the pipeline, the same oil comes in by tanker, and tanker accidents are really messy. There has never been a pipeline accident as bad as Exxon Valdez.
In a way, this might help elect a Republican president. Union guys have been known to vote Republican now and then. Where as the lefty greenies who want to stop the pipeline would cut off their fingers before pulling the voting machine lever for anything but Democrats.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
MilSpec Semiconductors, Tax payer ripoff.
Defense Department procurement weenies insist that all military electronics be built with MilSpec semiconductors. Which cost ten times as much as commercial semiconductors. Are MilSpec semiconductors better than commercial semiconductors? No.
Many years ago I was on the design team for the anti ballistic missile radar at Raytheon. We were doing a big phased array radar for Mech Island in the Pacific. The contract called for a "brassboard" radar to be built and tested at the factory, and a second "deliverable" radar to go to Mech Island. To save money we built the "brassboard" using commercial semiconductors. We got the brass board working, and past the government acceptance tests. Then we started construction of the deliverable. Same circuit boards, same technicians, in the same shops, to the same drawings but all the semiconductors were MilSpec instead of commercial.
The deliverable didn't work. Argh. Trouble shooting revealed that the MilSpec semiconductors had lower gain, higher leakage, and could not withstand as much voltage as the commercial devices. It was so bad that we had to redesign some of the circuits to make them perform when built with lower quality MilSpec transistors.
Not only were the MilSpec devices lower performance, they had a lot of duds. I can remember going thru a brand new box of JAN2N5109TX transistors with a Simpson 260 meter and finding one in ten devices didn't work at all. That's 10 percent duds. For this we paid ten times the price of good commercial parts.
And, turns out, a fair number of MilSpec devices are counterfeit. The scammer buys good commercial parts, wipes off the commercial marking with solvent, and repaints the devices with the JAN-TX markings. Presto, chango, we turn honest commercial devices into pricey MilSpec devices. Several cases of this made the news over the years. In the last case, the defense department admitted that the counterfeit devices were as good as MilSpec and they had no intention of recalling the equipment (some of which was in outer space in satellites) to replace the counterfeits.
We could save defense money by scrapping the whole MilSpec semiconductor "thing" (boondoggle actually). Semiconductors never wear out. If the system powers up and runs and makes it thru high and low temperature testing, the semiconductors are good and will last forever.
It ain't like it was with vacuum tubes.
Many years ago I was on the design team for the anti ballistic missile radar at Raytheon. We were doing a big phased array radar for Mech Island in the Pacific. The contract called for a "brassboard" radar to be built and tested at the factory, and a second "deliverable" radar to go to Mech Island. To save money we built the "brassboard" using commercial semiconductors. We got the brass board working, and past the government acceptance tests. Then we started construction of the deliverable. Same circuit boards, same technicians, in the same shops, to the same drawings but all the semiconductors were MilSpec instead of commercial.
The deliverable didn't work. Argh. Trouble shooting revealed that the MilSpec semiconductors had lower gain, higher leakage, and could not withstand as much voltage as the commercial devices. It was so bad that we had to redesign some of the circuits to make them perform when built with lower quality MilSpec transistors.
Not only were the MilSpec devices lower performance, they had a lot of duds. I can remember going thru a brand new box of JAN2N5109TX transistors with a Simpson 260 meter and finding one in ten devices didn't work at all. That's 10 percent duds. For this we paid ten times the price of good commercial parts.
And, turns out, a fair number of MilSpec devices are counterfeit. The scammer buys good commercial parts, wipes off the commercial marking with solvent, and repaints the devices with the JAN-TX markings. Presto, chango, we turn honest commercial devices into pricey MilSpec devices. Several cases of this made the news over the years. In the last case, the defense department admitted that the counterfeit devices were as good as MilSpec and they had no intention of recalling the equipment (some of which was in outer space in satellites) to replace the counterfeits.
We could save defense money by scrapping the whole MilSpec semiconductor "thing" (boondoggle actually). Semiconductors never wear out. If the system powers up and runs and makes it thru high and low temperature testing, the semiconductors are good and will last forever.
It ain't like it was with vacuum tubes.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Nearly all 4200 passengers & crew got off safely
We should be thankful that so few died in such an enormous sinking. The survivors on TV speak of confusion and ignoble actions, but in the end, they got nearly everyone off alive. Not too shabby.
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