Yearly Archives: 2005

The Downside

This entry was posted in Taxation on by

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

This entry was posted in Marketing Privacy Technology on by

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!

Tax Time Humor

This entry was posted in Humor Taxation on by

The Internal Revenue Service sent an auditor to a
synagogue. As the auditor reviews all the paperwork,
he turns to the Rabbi and says, “I noticed that you
buy a lot of candles.”
“Yes, we do,” responded the Rabbi.
“Well, Rabbi, what do you do with the candle
drippings?” He asked.
Read the rest below the fold… (warning: language may be offensive to some)

(more…)

Operation Falcon: Scam the Public?

This entry was posted in Law Enforcement on by

Plastered all over the news the past few days were stories of how unprecedented cooperation between US law enforcement agencies led to 10,000 fugitives being arrested in Operation Falcon. This sounds impressive and did impress people. For instance, Law Pundit noted:

This is a sign of government law enforcement agencies working together effectively for the interests of the people and represents a modern landmark in law enforcement cooperation in getting the criminals off the streets.

This prompted me to remember the question I had asked myself when I read this in the morning paper yesterday: What is the normal rate of arrests?
Well, I did some checking via the The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 2002 and found some interesting numbers:

  • Arrests for Violent Crime: 620,510 or 11,933/week; Operation Falcon 10,000 including some non-violent crimes
  • Arrests for Murder: 14158 or 272/week; Operation Falcon 162

No drug arrests in the above but apparently included in Operation Falcon!
My suspicion is that they simply reported business as usual (in some cases less than usual) and by giving it one of those magic labels, Operation Falcon, and publicizing it they have tried to make us think something new and wonderful is happening. Well, welcome to the world of marketing and government BS.
Oh, and if this really was a real coordinated effort, then we did not get our money’s worth (surprise) as they appear to have failed to meet even average arrest rates.
Update 4/18: More on this at Marginal Revolution and the Washington Post.

March’s Top Referrers

This entry was posted in Modulator on by

This post is way late so I’ll keep it over a bit next month.
On the right side bar is the updated roll of Modulator’s 21 top referrers for the month of March. Numbers 20 and 21 each produced 25 referrals compared to 20 for numbers 20 and 21 in January.
December churn: 6 blogs dropped and 6 new ones added compared to 9 and 9 in February.
Overall traffic was down about 7.7% from February and up 211% from March 04 (no I do not expect the year to year growth to continue at that rate).
Top Referrer: Pharyngula. Thanks, PZ!
Top search phrase/word: live strong
Most popular post: Live Strong
Statistics are culled from AWStats running on Modulator’s server at Hosting Matters.
Again, thank you one and all!
Also, I’d like to acknowledge referrals from some of the blogosphere’s ‘service’ sites: Technorati, weblogs.com, blogrolling.com, MovableType, Blogdex, Bloglines, blogoshpere.us, Sitemeter, NZ Bear’s Ecosystem, Bloogz and Daypop.
All of the blog rolls are ordered by most recently updated so be sure to ping weblogs.com or blogrolling.com to push to the top of the rolls. These are certainly the sites I tend to look at first and visitors will see you at the top of the roll as well.
For a brief discussion of Modulator’s blog rolls look here.