Daily Archives: April 18, 2005


What Henley Says!

Jim Henley nails this:

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

Heck, if this does nothing more than get us to reread the dusty volumes that have been sitting on the shelf untouched for years it is monumental. That there may be recoverable complete or near complete new works is thick frosting on a tasty cake.


The Downside

The Economist editorialized in glowing terms about The Flat Tax Revolution. They left out, though, any discussion of the biggest downside of implementing a simple, deduction free flat tax system: the massive unemployment of tax lawyers, accountants, congressional staffers, lobbyists, tax pundits, and everyone else involved in supporting the current US tax system. But, over a few years, they will all retrain and find jobs in the new opportunities spawned by the redirected spending or savings of the prevously wasted money.
Also, Drum is correct that a flat tax rate does not require the elimination of deductions but, really, why wouldn’t you do it right and combine the two as long as you were redoing the tax system? His hammering of The Economist on this point no more lame than the editorial. They do combine the two into one proposal but they do not seem to confuse the two.


Concerns About Flash Player Security

Have you all updated your Flash Player configuration to stop marketing folks and others from using it like cookies? Modulator reported on this back on April 1 and it was not an April fools joke!
Last Friday Internet Week wrote:

Macromedia’s Flash media player is raising concerns among privacy advocates for its little-known ability to store computer users’ personal information and assign a unique identifier to their machines.

Read the article. Fix your Flash settings!