Faith based initiative

I'm on Greg's mailing list, you know Greg, the one who researched and whistle blew the Florida voting scandal in 2000 - likes kick up a stink over voting fraud and political shenanigans, that's right, Greg Palast. Unfortunately the US media didn't report it until way too late (doubting the credibility of your electoral system is unpatriotic right?) so only the Brits got to hear about it while it still could have made a difference to the 2000 election.

Anyway, Greg is like a dog with a tasty bone and just wont let go of anything in the least bit related to Bush, Republicans and the whole screwed up nature of this country (which is probably a relief for other countries he might otherwise have time to criticize). Hi latest little tid bit was Bush's boner for cutting inheritance taxes (wrongly labeled "death taxes"). A few years ago I heard a talk about this lead by Bill Gates Senior, just Billionaire Bill's dad. He had joined forces with several other very wealthy people and stood against Bush's tax cut plans. Unfortunately it didn't work.

Hence Greg's latest bash against Bush goes like this: Congress' vote last week would eliminate only 74% of the taxes on America's wealthiest. Our President is not satisfied. Mr. Bush will not rest in peace until we emulate one of the only nations on the planet without any death taxes, Saudi Arabia. There, our president could point to the example of the billionaire bin Laden family, whose scion, Osama, unburdened by estate taxes, has donated his entire inheritance to "faith-based initiatives."

Its typical Pallast writing, hold no prisoners, punch bellow the belly, etc. But my point is nothing to do with inheritance taxes - Greg just gave me the most extreme example of a faith based initiative. I mean flying a plane into a building because you want to hang out with a bunch of virgins in heaven - that really is putting your faith ahead of everyone else's right to live and believe whatever they want to (or not) to the point of exclusion of all others.

I'm going underground!

Thanks to John Ottesen for a link to London Underground History which has a lot of cool subterranean photos that reminds you of American Werewolf in London (which in turn reminds me of Jenny Agguter getting her kacks off...)

When my oldest brother was a college in London he got together with some people who did some underground exploring of their own. They had maps of many underground passages in central London and did all kinds of exploring - I think I heard only the half of it. I doubt if such things go on now - if you were caught they'd probably send you off to Guantanamo as a terrorist or some other exotic destination for "rendering".

Still, my bro' will have some cool "when I were a lad" type stories to tell when he's about ninety and college kids wont even be let out of their virtual reality dorms for a pee. Exploring underground tunnels in London will sound about as far fetched as "licking road clean with tongue". Aye lad, them were the days!

An open letter to the Internal Revenue Service

Dear Internal Revenue Service (aka "The Man"),

For many years now I have been electronically filing my taxes via the Internet, in fact I believe I've been doing it since this option was first made available, even though it typically costs me some money. It saves me time, you money and a whole bunch of trees every year - that's a win-win-win right? Yes, a win, win, win - that's as American as apple pie!

However in April 2005 you decided to block my electronic filing - you had instantaneously determined that my tax return contained an error, apparently someone had already claimed on of my dependents as their dependent. Because of this I had to print a big stack of paper and run to the post office (I agree that's my fault for procrastinating).

Fast forward to July 2006 when I receive a fat envelope from the IRS. That's someone no one wants to see, and even though I've never had one before I knew it was bad news. Imagine my surprise, and mostly shock, that you said I made an error by not reporting sale of a stock and you wanted me to pay you over $15,000 including over $2,3000 in penalties and $1,200 in interest payments for the 15 month period since my taxes were filed.

How is it that when I come to file my taxes you can instantaneously check my return for accuracy, yet it takes 15 months to tell me something that could ultimately net you a windfall of $3,500 in interest and penalties???

Guess what, you included a handy list of Frequently Answered Questions - gosh, you guys are really with it, maybe next year you'll just put "FAQ" then I'll know that you truly are a hip and trendy Internets friendly organization. And guess what the number one questions is "Why did it take IRS so long to contact me?". Hmmm... Well you claim "Tax years generally end of December 31, be we may not receive complete information from employers, banks, businesses, and other payers until much later".

I say "Hooey!"

It turns out all the institutions involved in your dispute had filed their information on time and well before I even filed my taxes. There was no late filing of information by institutions and you could easily have checked my return at the time of filing or before you paid me my 2004 refund (which you did).

I say you guys deliberately let this one slide for an extra year so you could pick up another $1,200 in interest in a year when tax receipts are down yet again from Bush's projections. I'll be willing to bet that it was IRS mandated policy to be as tardy as you damn well please with this kind of notice and its been sitting in a computer file for at least 12 months. In fact I'll wager you had flagged my file back when you first wrote me my 2004 tax refund. Nothing like giving a guy a refund to make him feel like everything is copasetic with "the man", then sticking it to him a year later with a $15,000 demand.

Understand this, I'm not a survivalist libertarian who hates government - I had until this time been pretty cool about paying my taxes, in 12 years I'd only once filed late, and have never had an error against me. I even cough up for nice software and e-filling to make it easier for you to process my returns. Paying taxes is paying the man, and "The man" is myself I told myself ergo paying taxes is good (thanks Josh Kornbluth for teaching me this).

So dear IRS - next time you even suspect there may be a huge error in my tax return, just tell me ASAP okay? I don't care if you're waiting on some institution for information to positively confirm this - just call me okay? You have my number, you know where I live, heck you even know who I work for so its not a problem. If someone is late filing their institutional information let me go kick their butts and make sure they send it to you. After all, anyone who is 15 months late filing their information is someone I don't want to do business with anyway.

I suspect this year you have sent similar demands to thousands, if not millions of American tax payers. I expect not all were as fortunate as me to discover this time the IRS had made an error, consequently you are now sitting on a very substantial pile of interest payments because you just took your own sweet time to let them know. I expect the person who decided to add a few months here and there (maybe years - who knows how long you guys stretch it out - you might have socked this one to me on my death bed for all I know!) will get a big fat raise and maybe a promotion from his boss this year.

Let me remind you of one thing - you guys are the man but you also work for the man and guess who "the man" is? Yeah, that's right - its us, you work for us. So just be careful because sooner or later enough of us are going to notice this late payment interest penalty boondoggle and do something about it. It may take us years and years because sometimes institutions do not provide complete information "until much later". Yeah, you know how those freedom of information act filings can take forever to get fulfilled - sometimes a whole presidential term comes and goes... But when they do you, and we find there was a systematic policy of sending demands as late as possible, well, lets just say at the very least you guys may be getting a very large demand for return of late payment interest and oh yes, interest on that interest!

Yours faithfully,

A tax payer (aka "A man")

Wal and Peace

The title is a jibe at how long the article The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart is, although it appears to be full article from Harper's so I'll excuse you for experiencing ADD after hitting Page-Down a few time. However the meat of the article is interesting and at least now I know what monopsony and the waterbed effect are but I wont tell you - you'll have to read the article to find out.

I especially liked the little twist right at the end, clearly designed to sell bringing anti-trust actions to the libertarian and republicans, however I doubt many are reading Harper's or would make it to the end of the article. The jibe about Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott's efforts to use anti-trust against other companies is even funnier... I guess they'd love to do that until they are the only Mart in the world.

Reading this article, I realized it does not mention anywhere Wal-Mart's recent efforts to paint itself as a "green" company. It's not really relevant to the title but I got to wondering if this monopsony effect applies to its green (or green-wash, depending on your perspective) activities. I could only conclude it must do. I just wonder whether that is a good or bad thing for the eco-market. Probably, since the move of a 600lb gorilla move into the market will inevitably dictate and squeeze supplier profits (I give in, that's monopsony) it will stifle innovation and investment in this area preemptively. Furthermore Wal-Mart will be able to dictate which green ideas flourish independently of their worthiness or eco-friendly qualities. So if hydrogen power is dictated as the be-all and end-all of power sources by the Republicans, then Wal-Mart will surely jump on that wagon and by its might alone dictate that to be a market winner, regardless of its dubious credentials as a green energy source (when generated via fossil fuels vs. renewables).

Peak Peak Oil?

No, that's not a typo, I really did mean to type "Peak Peak Oil". For a while it seemed that the media chatter about "Peak Oil" theory had calmed down a bit (or maybe I wasn't pay as much attention). Anyway, I recently came across this rather level headed Australian documentary called Four Corners that is a good primer for all those who have not already got their head around this concept.

One consequence of Peak Oil that I haven't heard in a while is what happens when every nation starts ramping up home grown, often synthetic alternatives to oil as mentioned in Four Corners - like synthetic bio-oil, coal liquefaction etc. etc. and selling that on the world market, if they have any to spare that is. Are those countries really going to want to keep selling it priced in US dollars, an increasingly weak and poorly managed currency?

They day they decide "No" will be the day the US gets a double whammy from the Peak Oil effect that will have even more impact on our country than dry gas pumps - it'll be dry greenback pumps as foreign investors pull out their massive and cheap supply of investment capital. Spiraling interest rates will follow as the country futilely tries to maintain the flow of dollar investment and that ain't gonna be pretty at home. As Four Corners points out, a 1930s depression, or worse could easily be just around the corner as the entire global economy takes a "correction" for its last 50 years or so of massive over extension.

Finally, the other thing I didn't hear was that oil is used for far more than for driving and flying our fat globe-trotting asses all over the shop. No, actually a huge amount of that oil is turned into plastic, fertilizers, and any number of chemical products that our entire society has become dependent on, even more so than oil. Switching our cars to electric or electric-hydrogen systems is a no brainer, but we should really be doing RIGHT NOW regardless of whether there is oil still left in the ground because when there isn't, synthesizing all those plastics, and other petro-products from corn and cow poop is going to be a darn sight harder and expensive than using an electric motor to power our cars right now. Of course you could just argue we can ditch plastic all together and go back to wood which would be rather nice for our little carbon-dioxide problem.

Maybe in 50 years time everyone will be rushing to replant the Amazon Rainforests to make a quick buck? One thing is for sure, as we rush to push land back into natural production of materials powered by that big-ole free energy source in the sky known as the sun there will be quite the rush on real estate and squeeze to pillage our national parks to make a buck. Lets hope sanity will win the day and people will finally figure out the way to solve the supply and demand problem is not more supply but less demand. Yes folks, less growth, even decline can be a good thing. For once economists have to learn to start fearing increases in demand, increases in output, increases in consumption and lets face it, increases in population. Remember folks - being child free is patriotic - we're saving the world one less consumer at a time!

And finally finally (again intentional because I already had a "finally...") if you want a bit of balance from someone who thinks there is no impending doom you can read Confessions of an ex-doomer at Peak-Oil Debunked. Actually I never said there is going to be an impending doom, a long hard recession is hardly doom, even global war over resources is hardly the end of the world (in an extreme peak-oil scenario do we even have the cheap oil to afford anything other than lobbing missiles around?), but lets face it, just like with global warming without some vision of impending doom to galvanize the population, the switch to alternative and more energy efficient technologies will take a lot, lot longer. Some people will argue its all market driven - ie. no matter how much doom mongering people will just follow the dollar and buy everything while its cheap. I'm sure that's partly, even mostly true - high prices have certainly kicked off all kinds of expensive oil production schemes, but I happen to believe that doom mongering has helped create a market too as Bush has shown more than adequately in their selling of fear and loathing via the never ending fight against doom also known as "war on terrorism" (because lets face it, the "war on drugs" just didn't cut it for oppressing an entire nation, only 2% of it). For once its nice to think a story of doom might be working for the good of the country...

Remember kids, as I mentioned already: "Sovle the oil crisis - reduce demand - wear a condom", its the ultimate act of patriotism.

Six degrees of separation debunked?

The latest reports flying round seem to be saying that "six degrees of separation" theory has been "debunked". When I read the original BBC story I have to say I was less than convinced. Basically the new chatter is based on the fact that theory was tested by getting people to try and communicate to a distance person via a chain of mailed letters, and that very few of those letters (less than 10%) ever reached their target.

Big deal.

I'm going to call Foul! on this supposed debunking because the test of the theory was a pretty lame one and prone to errors. For instance what if the person just doesn't bother to send the letter? My high-school statistics seems to indicate that if just 1/3 of people receiving a letter didn't bother to mail it on then with a chain of six that would yield only a probability that only 8% of letters actually reached their target.

More important, think about if someone was connected to another by one and only one chain of six people - the test presupposes that each person in the chain knows the ideal person at each step to contact. The likelihood of that being true is unimaginable. What actually happened, I expect was people just forward to someone in another city closer to the target person and by chance the connection was found - there was certainly no rigorous exploration of connections. All things considered a success rate of 10% or even less seems very high to me and I would actually guess that the results point to people being even more connected, on average, than one might imagine - maybe only three or four degrees in many cases.

I hope someone else is able to point this out - I doubt if anyone will notice my protests. But perhaps by the theory of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things mine will reach someone with enough clout to quash the debunking theory. As far as I'm concerned there are people out there like Google, Friendster, Yahoo and others (even phone companies) who, by using their databases to analyze social networks and patterns of communication could easily measure with much greater accuracy the n-degrees of separation. In fact I would be willing to guess that the CIA and others have already done this - they just aren't telling us about it yet.

Dance

You know I knew there was a reason for me to run into John O again... a little dance therapy does wonders for the soul.

Tea

Here's an entertaining tea-time rap courtesy of a couple of lads from the UK... Narnia

PS. Jack and Chicken, you guys are so busted!

Another faux-steak in the wall

There's another article about lab grown meat in Alternet today, this time its a little fish fillet they breaded up and did a smell test on. For whatever reason they didn't actually eat it, but I'm sure someone has done. I don't know where all the characterisations of this as ghoulish and nightmarish come from, sounds like a bad place to start marketing this.

Is it because they are culturing cells in the lab? Well if its plant cells being cultured then no one blinks an eye.

Is it because they are cells someone might eat? Well if its bacteria in yoghurt, or for other macro-biotic brews then no one blinks and eye.

Is it because its actual animal cells being cultured? Well if its a skin graft then no one blinks an eye.

So what is it? Beats me - shut up your whining and eat your meat!

Seriously though, the only qualm I have about this is just how much energy it might take vs. pasturing an animal out on the range, and just what the unknown consequences of giant mono-culture meat labs could be. Could they end up causing a virtual extinction of the domesticated animals we currently eat - like sheep, pigs and cows? Could they also be the perfect host for some new super virus that, because there is no genetic variety in the food system any more, will wipe out all the meat cells in no time at all?