Happy Halaloween Everybody !!!It's one thing to believe in bad policy. It's quite another to push it on others. But Mr. Gates Sr.—an accomplished lawyer, now retired—and his illustrious son are now trying to have their way with the people of the state of Washington.
Mr. Gates Sr. has personally contributed $500,000 to promote a statewide proposition on Washington's November ballot that would impose a brand new 5% tax on individuals earning over $200,000 per year and couples earning over $400,000 per year. An additional 4% surcharge would be levied on individuals and couples earning more than $500,000 and $1 million, respectively.
Along with creating a new income tax on high-income earners, Initiative 1098 would also reduce property, business and occupation taxes. But raising the income tax is the real issue. Doing so would put the state's economy at risk.
To imagine what such a large soak-the-rich income tax would do to Washington, we need only examine how states with the highest income-tax rates perform relative to their zero-income tax counterparts. Comparing the nine states with the highest tax rates on earned income to the nine states with no income tax shows how high tax rates weaken economic performance.
In the past decade, the nine states with the highest personal income tax rates have seen gross state product increase by 59.8%, personal income grow by 51%, and population increase by 6.1%. The nine states with no personal income tax have seen gross state product increase by 86.3%, personal income grow by 64.1%, and population increase by 15.5%.
It's striking how the high-tax states have underperformed relative to those with no income tax. Especially noteworthy is how well Washington has performed compared to states with no income tax.
If Washington passes Initiative 1098, it will go from being one of the fastest-growing states in the country to one of the slowest-growing. And passage of I-1098 will only be the beginning. Just look at Ohio, Michigan and California to see that once a state adopts an income tax, there is no end to the number of reasons that such a tax could be extended, expanded and increased.
Over the past 50 years, 11 states have introduced state income taxes exactly as Messrs. Gates and their allies are proposing—and the consequences have been devastating.
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The 11 states where income taxes were adopted over the past 50 years are: Connecticut (1991), New Jersey (1976), Ohio (1971), Rhode Island (1971), Pennsylvania (1971), Maine (1969), Illinois (1969), Nebraska (1967), Michigan (1967), Indiana (1963) and West Virginia (1961).
Each and every state that introduced an income tax saw its share of total U.S. output decline. Some of the states, like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, have become fiscal basket cases. As the nearby chart shows, even West Virginia, which was poor to begin with, got relatively poorer after adopting a state income tax.
Washington's I-1098 proposes a state income tax with a maximum rate higher than any of those initially adopted by the other 11 states. In one fell swoop, Washington would move from being one of the lowest-tax states in the nation to being one of the top nine highest. It's economic suicide.
The states that have high income tax rates or have adopted a state income tax over the past 50 years haven't even gotten the money they hoped for. They haven't avoided budget crises, nor have they provided better lives for the poor. The ongoing financial travails of California, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan and New York are cases in point.
Over the past decade, the nine states with the highest tax rates have experienced tax revenue growth of 74%—a full 22% less than the states with no income tax. Washington state has done better than the average of the nine no-tax states. Why on earth would it want to introduce a state income tax when it means less money for state coffers?
What's true for those states with the highest tax rates is doubly true for the 11 states that have instituted state income taxes over the past half-century. They too have lost huge sums of tax revenue.
A final thought for those who want to punish the rich for their success: As the nearby chart shows, those states with the highest tax rates, and those states that have introduced state income taxes, have seen standards of living (personal income per capita) substantially underperform compared to their no-tax counterparts.
If Mr. Gates Sr. and his son feel so strongly about taxing the rich, they should simply give the state a chunk of their own money and be done with it. Leave the rest of Washington's taxpayers alone.
1. Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joy ride.
J.C.R Licklider
Licklider was first interested in computers when he worked at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Lincon had a model TX-0 computer where a man named Wesley Clark worked, Licklider studied the computer and became interested in the relationship between man and computers. In 1960 Licklider wrote a paper called "Man-Computer Symbiosis" where he wrote about the computer and mans dissimilarities which often benefit from each other. He gives an example of a Fig tree and a insect Blastophaga grossorum. The insect pollinates the fig tree and the and the fig tree houses the insect, both cant live without each other, but are completely dissimilar organisms. In the "Man-Computer Symbiosis" Licklider explains the Symbiosis of man and computer to come:
In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluation. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.(Licklider, 1960)
Licklider was the first to believe that computers could be used for more that just large calculators but instead they could perform scientific thinking(Licklider p1). A copy of the paper "Man-Computer symbiosis" can be found in appendix 3..
In 1964 J.C.R Licklider left ARPA but not with out changing ARPA’s main focus from war game scenarios to research into timesharing, computer graphics and computer language.
http://www.securenet.net/members/shartley/history/licklider.htmMs. Warren was born in 1956 into a Russian immigrant Jewish family in Van Nuys, Calif., the third child of an insurance salesman father and a homemaker mother. Obsessed with listening to the radio, at age 7 she pointed to "the name in parentheses" on her older sister's albums and said, "That's what I'm going to be—the songwriter."
"If I didn't have the outlet of my songs, I'd be dead, homeless, crazy," Warren says.
Those parentheses have included the name Diane Warren on more than 1,500 songs, including hits like Céline Dion's "Because You Loved Me," Toni Braxton's "Un-Break My Heart," LeAnn Rimes's "How Do I Live" and Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing." Her songs have been recorded by Roberta Flack, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Ringo Starr, Cher, Rod Stewart, Patti LaBelle, Barbra Streisand, Tina Turner, Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston, Gloria Estefan, Christina Aguilera, Carrie Underwood, Mariah Carey, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw and Mary J. Blige, to name a few. She was the first songwriter in the history of Billboard to have seven hits, by different artists, on the singles chart simultaneously.
Here's a playlist of some of her songs
http://www.amazon.com/Some-Songs-Diane-Warren-Songwriter/lm/2SDK8RTLJNTTJ
She works at the studios of Realsongs,
her publishing company, which she started in 1986 in one small room. The company now occupies the entire floor, but that room, which she still works in occasionally, has remained unchanged and, apparently, uncleaned for 25 years.
Ms. Warren admits to a certain superstition about the "Cave." Cassettes are piled on the floor, tables, chairs and piano in dangerous disarray. "I like cassettes for playback," she said. "I can take the cassette out, and I know the song is there. If it's digital, I don't know if it's there. I'm old-school: My writing tools are a notebook, a pen and a cassette. If it sounds good on a cassette, it's good."
Songs come to Warren from anywhere and everywhere. "They can start with an idea," she explained, "a title, or the chorus or a good drum beat. 'Un-Break My Heart' came to me as a title. It popped into my head, and I thought, 'I don't think I've heard that before, that's kind of interesting.' I started playing around on the piano with these chords and did a key change, and then I knew, 'OK, this is magic.'" The song went platinum in seven countries.
Ms. Warren doesn't read music and snoozed through the one music theory class she ever took. She considers her lack of formal musical training to be a source of freedom. "I'm always doing things you're not supposed to do musically, but, hey, I don't know any better!" She said the writing of a song is "like being in a really cool place in the forest, and figuring out how am I going to get out." She writes one a week.
"I don't ever write lyrics first and then the music. They come together." She composes on a piano, various synthesizers and sometimes a guitar, the first instrument her father gave her as a child. In the Cave she still occasionally uses her original Yamaha DX7 synthesizer from 1985.
Though Ms. Warren is most famous for her ballads—songs that center around the romantic notion of one love forever—she has been single her whole life. "I write the most intimate songs, some of the biggest wedding songs, but I know nothing about intimacy. But I feel it, the yearning," Ms. Warren said. "In real life, I'm afraid of it. I haven't been in a relationship for 20 years. If I didn't have the outlet of my songs, I'd be dead, homeless, crazy."
In the larger of her two recording studios, Ms. Warren asked a couple of engineers to play a new Cher single called "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me" from the upcoming film "Burlesque." Everyone sat except Ms. Warren, who stood, eyes closed, in a black T-shirt that reads "Traumatized by Mediocrity," tight black jeans and black-lace up sneakers studded with rhinestones. While she beat time with her foot, her body moved with the song, clearly inside it.
In her newer writing room at Realsongs, the carpet is purple with a green border, and there is a gold throne with daggers criss-crossing for legs next to one wall. Ms. Warren sang two songs, one she finished last week and one she's still working on. Her voice is classic rock, beautiful and warm, operating at a lower decibel level than some of the huge female voices like Céline Dion and Whitney Houston that are associated with her songs.
Ms. Warren may be "missing the intimacy gene" for her own kind, but she is clearly passionate about the more noble beasts. She gives vast amounts of her considerable fortune to various animal charities. Her eyes well up talking about a photo she was sent that morning of an abused German shepherd. Ms. Warren has a special love for the massive grey pachyderms who, like her, are vegetarian. "Elephants fall in love for their whole life, and they cry," she said. "They die of a broken heart."
A handy guide... avoid these insipid office buzzwords and euphemisms.In transition. A change from one state of being to another; recession variation: collecting unemployment compensation. Example: “Since the downsizing, I’ve been in transition.” Synonym: doing some consulting.
Brand. Put a good face on. Example: “Okay, so we polluted the groundwater by failing to follow those finicky safety regulations. How should we brand it?”
Space. Industry or field. Example: “I’m in the manufacturing space,” “I’m in the waste disposal space,” “She’s in the adult film space,” or “He’s in the space exploration space.”
Go offline. Pester me about this after the meeting — or preferably never. “Jones, could we go offline to discuss the $10 underpayment of your expense account reimbursement?”
End of the day. Formerly 5 to 5:30 p.m., now defined as an uncertain point in the future when everything magically turns out okay. Example. “At the end of the day, the pollution in the groundwater may just drain into the earth’s core and become unnoticeable.”
Transparent. Open about the facts, but not to be confused with honest. Example: “We’ve been totally transparent about the 15% fee; we disclosed it on page 37.”
Can’t Wrap One’s Head Around. Unwilling to get into the details or deal with the facts; intellectually lazy. Example: “I can’t wrap my head around all this recycling business; Let’s throw everything in the dumpster behind Home Depot and let them deal with it.”
Bandwidth. Money, staff, computing capacity or other resources. Example: “She lacks the bandwidth to compute compound interest.”
KPI (Key Performance Indicators) Important measurements, usually of the immeasurable. Example: “The American Psychological Association recently established KPIs for marriage: the weekly incidence of sexual intercourse plus the number of hours spent watching the same TV shows, minus total minutes bickering over the proper loading of the dishwasher.”
Low-hanging fruit. Easy to get, though in the end, often not worth the effort. Example: The Taliban might be low-hanging fruit for our production overrun of beard combs.”
Human Capital. Human Resources, previously Personnel. Example: “Human Capital is on the fifth floor.”
Skill set or Fit. Qualifications, generally modified by the words “wrong” or “bad,” and most often used by Human Capital staffers as an excuse for not hiring somebody. Example: “His inability to speak in tongues obviously makes his skill set wrong for the litigator position.”
Knowledge economy. An environment in which a person has run up $150,000 in student loans to pay for a law degree only to see jobs exported to India whose citizens are apparently very knowledgeable about the U.S. legal system. Example: “The best job in the knowledge economy is plumbing because nobody with an advanced degree knows how to use Drano.”
Throughput. Not your conclusions, but the mind-numbing numbers and facts you chewed over to get there; information generally demanded by a micro-manager who won’t believe that you did the work. Example: “Don’t tell me what you’ve decided about the Taliban beard-comb project; I just want your throughput.”
Footprint. Impact, formerly ecological, but now applicable to anything. Example: “Auntie Meg’s rear end had a significant footprint on our sofa.”
Impactful. Having a large footprint. Example: “Auntie Meg’s rear end had a very impactful effect on our sofa.”
Two of my favorite bits of jargon come from a reader in the U.K. who says he made them up. The first: is “failure cascade”, which he defines as a “sequence of bad stuff happening.” An example might be: “The knowledge economy seems to be in a failure cascade.” “Bus factor,” he says, is a measure of how much the company would suffer if person X got hit by a bus. Example: “Billy has a really high bus factor.” He reports that both phrases seem to be catching on.
Such inventiveness should be an inspiration to us all. If you don’t love the gobbledygook you’re with, then create some gobbledygook you’d like.
In an audacious experiment last year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration slammed a spent-fuel rocket into a lunar crater at 5,600 miles an hour, and then used a pair of orbiting satellites to analyze the debris thrown off by the impact. They discovered that the crater contained water in the form of ice, plus a host of other resources, including hydrogen, ammonia, methane, mercury, sodium and silver.
NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and its Centaur booster rocket crashes into the moon in this artist's illustration.
NASA announced its groundbreaking discovery of lunar water last October. Now, a more detailed analysis of the data—the subject of six research papers being published Friday in the journal Science—concludes that there is a lot more water on the moon than anyone expected.
"It's really wet," said Anthony Colaprete, co-author of one of the Science papers and a space scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. He and his colleagues estimate that 5.6% of the total mass of the targeted lunar crater's soil consists of water ice. In other words, 2,200 pounds of moon dirt would yield a dozen gallons of water.
The presence of so much water strengthens the argument for establishing a manned lunar base from which to launch other interplanetary adventures. Water is crucial because its components, hydrogen and oxygen, are key ingredients for rocket fuel.
Having a source of water on the moon is critical because the cost of transporting a large amount from earth would be prohibitive. On the moon, a bottle of water would run about $50,000, according to NASA, because that is what it costs, per
The U.S. likely won't be involved in manned voyages to the moon anytime soon. President Barack Obama recently canceled a NASA program to return astronauts to the lunar surface a decade from now. The agency, however, is working on the grander, longer-term prize of a manned trip to Mars.
But other countries are gearing up. China has pledged to land astronauts on the moon by 2025 and India by 2020. Japan wants to establish an unmanned moon base in a decade, potentially setting the stage for a manned mission later. Only the U.S. has sent astronauts to the moon thus far.
Cabeus is a cosmic trap. Any material from space landing there tends to stick. "There's almost no energy to warm up the molecules, so that they can't bounce off again," said G. Randall Gladstone, co-author of one of the Science papers and a planetary scientist at the nonprofit Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
Dr. Gladstone and others believe that Cabeus contains cosmic material that has accumulated over a billion years or more.
Scientists know that most of the moon is drier than the driest terrestrial desert. And while remote observations had suggested that water ice might be present at cold-trap regions of the moon, there was no direct evidence.
To settle the debate, NASA devised a clever plan and set it in motion on June 18, 2009, with the launch of a rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The rocket was stacked with an upper-stage rocket known as Centaur. Above it, sat the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, roughly the size of a Volkswagen Bug. Atop that sat another satellite, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO.
Soon after lift off, LRO separated and headed for the moon. So did the still-joined LCROSS and Centaur modules, but via a different route. On Oct. 9, the Centaur sped off on its own—aimed for Cabeus and trailed by a hurtling LCROSS.
Drained of fuel, Centaur was now the equivalent of an empty soda can that was 36 feet tall. When it slammed into the crater, it blew a hole some 75 feet wide. It also spewed at least 8,800 pounds of debris, dust and vapor into LCROSS's sunlit field of view. LCROSS by then was 373 miles above the lunar surface. Its instruments began collecting data about the quantity of water vapor and ice in the plume, then zapping it to receiving stations on earth. Four minutes later, LCROSS smashed into the lunar ground as well, becoming dirt.
The LRO satellite, meanwhile, orbited 31 miles above the moon. Its main task—which it continues to do today—was to create a three-dimensional map of the moon's surface. But it also collected data on the impact plume. One instrument aboard the LRO was an ultraviolet spectrograph that can detect various gases and substances. Many of the findings were unexpected.
About 20% of the Cabeus dirt is a mix of different elements and volatile compounds, including water. "That was a real surprise. I don't think anyone appreciated that it would be as much as 20%," said Dr. Colaprete. A lot of the remaining dirt is made from the typical components of moon rock, including feldspar and basalt.
The scientists also found molecular hydrogen in the soil. "That's interesting because if you want to make rocket fuel you could heat up the soil and hydrogen would come pouring out," said Dr. Gladstone.
In 1999, American scientist George W. Reed published a study arguing that lunar cold traps would likely contain significant amounts of mercury, which is toxic to humans. The paper was titled "Don't drink the water."
He was right: LRO's instruments detected sizable quantities of mercury—about 1%—in the lunar soil.
Researchers were also surprised to find compounds such as hydrogen sulphide, which are the result of a chemical reaction. But how could any reactions occur in such a cold place? Dr. Colaprete speculates that solar winds and cosmic rays may be providing minute amounts of energy, allowing such reactions to take place over hundreds of millions of years.
Is that also how the water got there? "No, that approach would only create small amounts of it," said Dr. Colaprete. "It suggests to me that water and some of the other elements were brought in by a comet. Cabeus is an old comet site."
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