Washington Policy Center has a list of the “The ten things you should know about “roads and transit”. While they are all good I like the bonus point at the end:
Bonus: It would be cheaper to pay Sound Transit’s new riders $100,000 each to not drive. The impact on traffic congestion would be the same and taxpayers would save more than $8 billion dollars.
I know this may be hard for the Sound Transit board to understand, but we don’t want our money taken from us to create a massive Corporate/Union welfare program that will ingratiate those businesses/unions to our local politicians.
Some bad news from Slashdot:
“James Oliver Rigney Jr, author of the long-running fantasy series The Wheel of Time and better known to millions of fans by the pen name Robert Jordan, died on 16 Sept 2007 from cardiac amyloidosis. Jordan announced he had been diagnosed with the disease in March 2006 and vowed to beat the odds, but determination and gumption sometimes just aren’t enough in the face of a disease with a median survival time of just over two years. Jordan was in the process of writing the twelfth and final book in the Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light, but the book was not slated for release until 2009 and is still incomplete. While there is hope that the book will still be finished from Jordan’s notes, this is devastating news to all of us who have been reading the series since 1990.”
I have enjoyed The Wheel of Time — even though I think it became a bit too involved with too many plot threads — and I hope that the final book can be written according to Rigney’s plan and in a manner that would approve of. Authors like Rigney that can create entirely new worlds composed with such rich detail are a treasure. I have spent many hours exploring their worlds not only through their writing but imagining visiting them personally. James, thank you for the new worlds you have contributed to the universe.
So with some editing, I was able to get the MythDora script to pull Schedules Direct data for me. So now I’ve got TV schedule data through Wednesday September 26th. I still need to pay for the subscription…
So the garage work was light this weekend, neither the windows or siding had arrived. Instead of working on the garage on Saturday, I performed a motherboard transplant on Adam’s Macbook. This involved:
1) Taking apart his Sister’s Laptop to get its motherboard, which requires that the entire laptop be disassembled. This was pretty difficult since laptops aren’t really designed to be easily serviceable and Macs are at least 10x harder to work on than other brands.
2) Taking apart Adam’s laptop and removing its motherboard
3) Installing the new motherboard and reassembling the laptop — It is a lot harder to follow teardown instructions in reverse that you would imagine.
4) Making sure the laptop worked.
After 7+ hours, I only half heartedly did #4. I powered the Macbook on and checked to ensure that sound, the keyboard, and the touchpad worked and then powered it down. Thank god that’s over.
Later Saturday, I tried to update my myth boxes. Using an unused hardrive, I tried to install Mythbuntu on my backend because it looked like a cool distribution and I’m not really happy with Mythdora. Unfortunately, my attempts to install 7.10a4 were a complete failure — the install kept barfing. I see that Mythdora now has a script that uses XMLTV and should work with my install of version 3.2. This would allow me to update my myth install later and get the scheduling data for next week, without having to update Myth.
Sunday, we finished papering the exterior of the garage and installed the side doors. After that I spent the afternoon starting to excavate the area around the door to prepare to put in a small landing just outside the door, and level the ground near the garage. The area wasn’t too large, but the soil has a ton of clay (including one massive chunk I had to break apart with a maul) and I didn’t want to damage the new door or tar paper on the sheathing. I also had to transplant the rosemary and hens n’ chicks in the concrete retaining wall between us and the house to the East. Phil (our GC) bought the house and is fixing it up, which includes taking down the concrete block wall that is falling and rebuilding a section of the retaining wall that is bulging out.
Monday, I was fairly ineffective, though I did have to compose an new release of C&C’s version of RT for distribution to the eval server.
Not in physically, but on tax policy:
Today, Governor Mitt Romney Outlined His Middle Class Tax Savings Plan. Governor Romney’s plan will allow middle class Americans to save tax-free by changing the tax rate on interest, capital gains and dividends to absolutely 0%. By helping more Americans save and invest, we can meet the challenges of an aging population and ensure the financial security of America.
Governor Romney’s Plan Will Allow Over 95% Of American Families To Save And Invest Tax-Free. Any taxpayer with Adjusted Gross Income of under $200,000 would pay a tax rate of absolutely 0% on all of the income they earn from their savings, capital gains and dividends.
Simple, easy, and of huge benefit. The only complication that might make it better would be to have only capital gains on assets held for at least a year be taxed at 0% — we don’t want to encourage day trading.
There is one humorous point in his press release:
Following The Capital Gains Tax Rate Cut In 2003, Capital Gains Tax Receipts Actually Increased From $58 Billion In 2002 To $103 Billion In 2006.
Um, yeah… One key point of the Laffer Curve is that a tax rate of 0% is just as ineffective at raising revenue as a tax rate of 100%. It is possible that this change would increase revenue through more economic growth — but it will reduce capital gains tax receipts, because for an entire class of taxpayers there won’t be any tax paid to the incentives to realize capital gains created by the lower rate won’t be able to generate additional revenue. It doesn’t mean that this is a bad idea, just that this is a moronic point to argue when reducing a tax rate to zero.
I was looking at my Despair.com 2007 calendar that I put together last year, and was appreciating this month: Madness.
Madness does not always howl. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “Hey, is there room in your head for one more?”
heh heh heh…
Ug… I’ve been busy before, but I’m in a huge time crunch right now — and losing time this evening to diagnose and restore Vesta didn’t help. I was hoping to finally get a chance to perform a motherboard switch for Adam on a pair of macbooks tonight — I had hoped to do this earlier but some other priority has come up (such as working on the garage on Monday). Hopefully, I’ll be able to complete the switch tomorrow so I can return the computers to him Friday (or whenever we play D&D this weekend).
My weekends have been taken up with building the garage, which isn’t going to stop anytime soon. I have several improvement projects that have languished, and several that I need to work on soon. For example, I need to upgrade my myth boxes to 0.20.2 so I can use Schedules Direct since Zap2It no longer provides scheduling data for free. I have scheduling data until September 15th — and I won’t get more until I upgrade and start using Schedules Direct.
It isn’t helping that I am trying to get a reasonable amount of sleep too.
For a few hours Vesta (where just about all world accessible imperium.org services run), went down due to the failure of a memory DIMM. There seems to be no data loss or corruption.