So VW recalled the September 2010 manufactured Beetles with ones made in August. The difference? None, except that they had to comply with different NHTSA regulations.
Full Article at autoblog
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year Everyone!
Happy Holidays from Limelight Networks and EyeWonder!
MySQL 5.5 installed
I updated MySQL to 5.5.8 on this box and recompiled PHP 5.3.4 against it. Everything is now updated.
Benefits of owning your own server
I already have an up to date LAMP stack 🙂
Why raising taxes on the rich results in lower tax revenue, part II
Someone I know (very liberal) wrote:
Good point, assuming keep 90k doesn’t turn into keep 80k (which would demonstrate the liberal assumption). However, most of the outrage is about business execs., entertainers, etc. who make millions/year. It is unfortunate that the small-business owner gets caught in this category (collateral damage).
You let the tax cuts expire, you lose some jobs; you make the tax cuts permanent, you add $700bn to the deficit (which we can’t afford). Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
The problem is that most of the people in the category (and the vast majority of the $70 billion per year) ARE business owners — there isn’t that many millionaire/billionaire executives, entertainers compared to millionare/billionare business owners.
50% of American workers work for small business
44% of US payroll
99.7% of small businesses
Most new jobs are with small business
All non-corporate small businesses with more than $200,000 in annual revenue ($250,000 for married owners) would be subject to higher taxes meaning less new jobs overall.
Also, for non-business owner millionaire and billionaires, they’d be investing that money into tax-deferred investments, which would also result in lower tax revenue.
It’s been proven that increasing the taxes on the rich results in lower tax revenue, and decreasing taxes on the rich results in higher tax revenue. It’s called supply-side economics, and has been proven to work in several administrations:
1. Harding
2. Kennedy
3. Reagan
3. George W Bush
Look at tax revenues before and after tax decreases during all of their administrations. Notice how tax revenue went up after the tax decrease, thus lowering the deficit. Only the CBO has been able to predict a revenue increase, and the CBO is legally forbidden from assuming behavior changes, even though common sense states that behavior does change. Also, look at break down by income earner. After tax decreases for the rich, notice how the rich actually end up paying a higher percentage of the taxes!
How is this so? When taxes are lower, and you have a lot of money, you tend to invest more of it into riskier investments that result in higher returns (to get even richer). You get rewarded with higher returns. The government then taxes those returns, but you still get a higher overall return. Now when the taxes go up, you shift to tax-free investments, which are safer. But because taxes are free on these investments, they have a higher overall return than the riskier investment with the higher taxes.
Further proof: look at Canada. Their current GST is 5%. A few years ago, it was 7%. When they lowered the tax rate to 6% and then to 5%, both times, they saw HIGHER revenue. Why? People spent more, so more money was subject to tax.
By rewarding spending and investment, you get more spending and investment, which results in higher overall tax revenue.
Why raising taxes on the rich will actually result in a decrease in tax revenue (and potentially higher unemployment)
Remember, the Congressional Budget Office has to assume that people will not change behavior as a result of tax changes (i.e., fire or hire employees), when people obviously will. My guess is that raising the taxes will result in LOWER tax revenue, not higher (seeing as when the rates went into effect in 2001, it resulted in HIGHER tax revenue).
My reasoning:
A small business owner makes $300,000 a year. Of this, $200,000 was in cash and $100,00 was capital gains, of which $50,000 was short-term and $50,000 in long-term . He wants to keep $90,000 of cash for himself and use the rest to pay for employees. Let’s assume he pays each employee $30,000 a year, including all benefits and taxes
2010 tax rates:
Cash: $200,000 * 33% = $66,000
Short-Term Gains: $50,000 * 33% = $16,500
Long-Term Gains: $50,000 * 15% = $7,500
Keep: $90,000
Employees Hired: 4
Remaining: $0
Total Tax Revenue: $90,000 + $17,000 ($4,500 per employee) = $116,000
2011 tax rates:
Cash: $200,000 * 36% = $72,000
Short-Term Gains: $50,000 * 36% = $18,000
Long-Term Gains: $50,000 * 20% = $10,000
Keep: $90,000
Employees Hired: 3
Remaining: $20,000 (which means he increases his take home pay to $110,000 and can then blame it on Obama when he fires that 4th employee). Because he fired that employee, the government will now make less in taxes than they got.
Total Tax Revenue: $100,000 + $13,500 ($4,500 per employee) = $113,500. The government just LOST $2,500 in revenue even though the rich guy was taxed an extra $10,000
or Employees Hired: 4 at a reduced total package of $27,500. This might mean he doesn’t pay for their health insurance, or reduces their pay outright.
Total Tax Revenue: $100,000 + $12,375 ($4,125 per employee) = $112,375. The government now lost even more ($3,625) in tax revenue, even though the rich guy was taxed an extra $10,000
This is simplistic example, but it works. Basically, you won’t be taking the money from the rich. They’ll figure out a way to keep the same amount of take-home pay. Based on the liberal assumption that rich people are just greedy (the reasoning for increasing their tax rate is to make it more ‘fair’), then you also can assume that they’d rather just fire an employee or cut pay based on an increase in their taxes so as not result in a lower take home pay.
Fluendo ftw
I listen to a radio station here in Atlanta called 99X. Their website has a listen live option using Silverlight AND Flash. Now, I use Linux (specifically openSUSE), and openSUSE has a great media player called Banshee which uses gstreamer as its media backend. Because 99X’s stream is ASX, it can play it, but it doesn’t understand the codec.
Fluendo to the rescue. For EUR19 a year, you get access to the latest and greatest proprietary codecs that work great on openSUSE and Banshee, legally :). Thank you Fluendo!
The people have chosen!
The American People have chosen Small Government, Less Taxes, and More Liberty on Election Day, with the Tea Party backed Republicans picking up a sizable majority in the House of Representatives. Today is a good day to be proud to be an American.
Why HTML 5 can’t replace Flash just quite yet…
So Colin Waters thinks that Flash should be deprecated today. I disagree.
Why do you ask? Advertising. Plain and simple. It pays the bills at many websites, and HTML 5 simply isn’t capable of replacing Flash just quite yet in advertising. An ad using a simple animation with maybe some content expansion on mouseover with a video (with audio off by default) has a few technical issues that are easily solved by Flash and not by HTML 5:
1. Not easy for the designer to build, especially with all of the integrated reporting functionality. AdWonder for instance allows the designer to drop a VideoScreen instance onto the Flash stage, and it gets automatic detailed reporting, can use streaming or progressive with a simple change in the backend system, integration with controls by name (all which can report on the interactions and the video they were interacting with)
2. No streaming option for video. It’s expensive for both the hosting provider and the end user for a video to be served over HTTP. RTMP, while costing more per byte, is cheaper, since we don’t have to send the full content file at the user’s burst bandwidth, but instead at a much lower rate of whatever the video is playing at.
3. Browsers strain when dealing with animations currently. The animations used by ads today are normally not all that complex, maybe using of Robert Penner’s easing code, or using a Flash motion tween, but browsers strain with the same content in HTML 5.
4. Typography — no consistent way of specifying a custom font face, especially with a limited set of the character set. With HTML 5, you have to resort to using images. With Flash, it can embed the specific characters of the font you are using.
UPDATE:
5. Accessing content on different domains. And no, the HTML 5 stuff doesn’t work. That requires both sides be able to do this. What if you need to access an XML file from a different domain? Flash can do this by having that different domain provide a crossdomain.xml file granting permission. There’s no equivalent in HTML 5 for this.
Yes, Flash gets some security vulnerabilities every now and then. Then again, so does your browser. Maybe we should deprecate browsers to! Chrome automatically updates Flash for you. Firefox lets you know when your version is outdated. Flash Player has a built in automatic updater.