] Opponents say such a system would not be in the best
] interests of the poor and the middle class who would pay
] the same tax rate as the wealthy even though they have
] less disposable income.

I saw this meme floating around last week but I ignored it because I felt it was unlikely to materialize. The President saying "thats interesting" doesn't, in my mind, make it any more realistic that this will happen, but everybody is talking about it, so its worth some commentary.

People, in general, seem to be responding to it very thoughtlessly. "Yeah, get rid of the IRS!" is about as mindless a response as those on the other side who are always screaming bloody murder over "low" corporate taxes without having a basic understanding of how accounting works.

What really bothers me about this proposal is that it seems to be defended with gross generalizations rather then hard data.

Sure, elmininating the income tax code will save some money, but how much exactly? There is a lot more to corporate accounting then income taxes. Its not like the accounting industry goes away. Most of those guys are collecting data for the benefit of investors, not the IRS. Nor is it like the government won't need a revenue organization. We know exactly how much it costs other countries to manage national sales taxes versus their income taxes. Why don't the proponents have this data?

Another assertion is that rich people will pay more taxes because they spend more money. Thats asinine! Any wealthy person who spends a proportionate amount of his income versus someone in the middle class is a fool who will not be wealthy for long!! Where is the data about the change in middle income tax burden? Most western countries have federal sales taxes. The information is available. The fact that advocates of this plan haven't collected it makes me very suspicious.

What this will do is make it really easy to save money for retirement. You no longer need tools like IRAs and 401ks. You can save as much as you want and spend it however you want. There is real freedom in that. Freedom for a Social Security system that is absolutely doomed. Of course, there are middle steps that can be taken toward that, such as raising the bar on Roth IRAs.

The other thing that it will do is make it basically impossible to raise taxes outside of a war context. Today small tax increases can be made in particular areas where political opposition to a tax increase is related to support for the item being funded. Under this system there will be only one tax, and so you've got to get everyone's permission in order to fund any new program. If a new program isn't unanimously loved its not going to run. Period.

Look at Tennessee. They are a sales tax state. Most states with a sales tax have a supplimental source of income, like tourism. Tennessee doesn't. Tennessee has huge revenue problems. They can't raise taxes. They can't afford proper schools. They'd can't afford their medicare program. They've nearly declared bankrupcy recently. They closed all the public parks in the state two years ago.

Thats how we're talking about running the federal government. Sure, its a great way to control government spending, but the results are less then pretty.

Bush says national sales tax worth considering - Aug. 11, 2004

] "DVD Jon has just announced that he cracked the
] encryption in the Apple AirportExpress.

Well, no, he didn't, but he did manage to extract the public key from itunes, which you can use to encrypt a stream and send it to this device. Whats entertaining is that every device has the same private key in it. I'd much rather have that. Then I could stream music to any device.

Slashdot | Johansen Cracks Airport Express Encryption

] Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Hopkins, Minnesota, admitted
] "intentionally causing damage to a protected computer"
] before a federal judge in Seattle yesterday as part of a
] plea bargaining arrangement. He faces between 18 to 37
] months in prison for his crime instead of a maximum
] sentence of ten years in jail. Parson may also be ordered
] to pay a fine, which could run into millions of dollars,
] according to Assistant US Attorney Annette Hayes.

He plead down to 37 months and millions in fines? The guy took an active worm, changed its tag (to his name!), and re-released it. This does NOT set an example for "worm writers." Parson didn't write a worm, and the people who did were never caught. Parson put his name in the worm. Any idiot could have caught him. The actual impact that adding his name had on the spread of this worm was zilch.

The only message the government is sending here is that our laws are unjust and our police are incompetent. Once again, the smart people get away scott free but the unlucky and dim get squashed like bugs for no good reason.

Blaster teen pleads guilty

] As most /.'ers know all to well, Copyright is
] increasingly being used as a means to suppress free
] speech these days. And the trend has not been lost on our
] 2004 US Presidential candidates. Both George and John are
] using copyright law to 'vaporize' information considered
] embarrassing or harmful to their campaigns.

This is Copyright Maximalism.

Slashdot | Using Copyright To Suppress Political Speech

] Bush criticized Kerry's plan to eliminate the tax cuts
] for those making more than $200,000 a year, saying that
] the "the rich in America happen to be the small business
] owners" who put people to work.
]
] Bush also said high taxes on the rich are a failed
] strategy because "the really rich people figure out how
] to dodge taxes anyway."

[ Sweet tapdancing baby chimps. What the fuck?!

Does anyone else feel like they're in fucking Sliders? Pushed through some bullshit portal and ended up in this version of America? Seriously, is that an OK thing to say?

I thought I'd reached outrage overload, but damned if I don't keep finding reserves... great pools of untapped fury, buried deep, accessible only by application of such fathomless inanity as this. -k

p.s. bold mine.]

Bush campaign holds rally in Va.; Dems sense weakness

There were 10x the total number of downloads over the lifetime of the project in a single day.

/. Effect of Stripe Snoop homepage (jpg)

] These songs are posted for evaluation purposes only. We,
] the contributors, love and support well-made music, and
] make every effort to support the artists we love by
] purchasing their work (it is our policy only to post what
] we own). Through this site, we're simply trying to share
] good music with others, who will also hopefully continue
] to support these artists.

Interesting MP3 blog.

music (for robots)

This is neat. You can upload any photo and out pops real, honest to goodness U.S. postage stamps affixed with your picture. Memeing through boingboing because I think their examples are better then the ones on the real site. In particular, I'm a fan of the Bush Daughter Stamp. Unfortunately, these custom stamps cost twice as much as the real thing. I wonder what is in that 2d bar code. I wonder if I could write software that does this myself and save some cash...

Boing Boing: Print real US postage stamps with your own photos.

] The Federal Communications Commission voted 5-0 last week
] to prohibit businesses from offering broadband or
] Internet phone service unless they provide police with
] backdoors for wiretapping access. Formal regulations are
] expected by early next year.

This is in direct violation of the deal the FBI struck in Congress to get this law passed in the first place.

FBI wins VOIP wiretapping debate

Rattle wrote:
] Maybe this is the year we rollerblade around the con. I mean,
] all hackers can rollerblade after all. From the title, I'm
] thinking Skate or Die reference. Looking at it, I'm thinking
] Tony Hawk PS2 games. None of which has anything to do with
] hacking, and only the most vague connection to the
] techno-apocalypse.

Obviously you were never a skater. Skateboarding is not at all anything like roller blading. Roller Blading is an extension of roller skating, which is something that 12 year old girls do at birthday parties. It started as a way to practice hockey in the summer time, which is about as mainstream as you can get.

Skateboarding is a subculture that, like graffiti, seeks to repurpose the utilitarian urban landscape for a creative, artistic endeavor. Hacking is very similar is its purpose. In fact, Goldstein once wrote that he figured out that hacking was cool when he realized how similar it was to skateboarding.

Skateboarding and hacking both fit into a zone of moral ambiguity. They are neither "good" nor are they clearly "evil." Baby Boomers, on the whole, are very abstract in their thinking and they like moral absolutes. They like things to be either right or wrong. ("With us or against us.") Our generation latched onto things like skateboarding and hacking when we where going though our rebellious stage of personality development because they put us in places that adults had difficultly fitting into their world view. These are subcultures that perfectly exploit a weakness in the dominant Baby Boomer conceptions of how things work. They couldn't support skateboarding, but clearly it was wrong to oppose it as well. Moral ambiguity is not something that Baby Boomers can parse.

I refer you to one of the best links that has ever been posted to this site:

http://www.urbanstructure.com/urbanaction/ps.html
http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid4869/

] Has the Nashville scene gone skater chick? I kinda think it
] would be cool if it did, but otherwise this does not really
] say "hacker con" in any way.

Its subtle. You missed it. She is rail sliding down a phone cable over a barbed wire fence.

] The main reason the old ones worked was due to the fact they
] featured babes with data ports, buttons, wires coming out of
] them, and even the occasional alcoholic beverage.

Those big breasted, scantily clad (if at all), totally objectified "cyberbabes" that have adorned various forms of hacker art including our conference are a big turn off for most of the women that are in our scene. If you're at a party with 50 guys and 3 girls, the fastest way to get the 3 girls to leave is to tack up a Playboy centerfold. The women in the hacker scene are intelligent and they want to be thought of as contributing to the culture, not as sexual objects. They are (in general) just as uncomfortable hanging out at a screening of "HaXXXor" as you and I would be hanging out at a screening of various films from gaymagix.com...

RE: PhreakNIC Pictures :: PN8 :: hack_or_die_final