Taxing the Rich

It's election season, so the various candidates pull out their go-to rhetoric and we hear vague truisms about very complex issues like taxations shouted at us a lot. I found a very interesting breakdown for 2005, the most recent year for which breakdowns are available.

Before you check it out, ask yourself if you can answer some basic questions about the current tax structure in the US:

1. What percentage does the average American pay in federal income tax?
2. What percentage of Americans filing income tax returns didn't end up paying any?
3. Are you rich?

This article hits those points, and plenty of others, and it's interesting stuff. The 2005 answers to the above questions are 13.6%, 32.6%, and you're rich if you made 61,055 or more (if you define rich as the top 25% of Americans).

I don't know about you but my target income is above 61K, so remember next time you vote to soak the rich that it could be you and me.

Medical Arrogance and Butterfly Collecting

Wired is a technology magazine, and this essay takes an interesting perspective on the need for the medical profession to use technology to enhance our knowledge of human wellness as opposed to human illness.

If you had died 50 years ago, your body would have stood a pretty good chance of serving science. In the 1960s, autopsy rates at US hospitals exceeded 50 percent. Pathologists weren't necessarily looking for what killed people — they were taking advantage of the fact that a body was available and ready for inspection. There was still much to learn about normal human biology, the thinking went, so every corpse was an educational opportunity.

It turns out that autopsies are now comparatively rare now as modern medicine is much more confident about its current body of knowledge. However, it seems that in medicine (as other fields such as in spying) our capacity to gather information has exceeded our capacity to understand it.

In heart disease, for example, CT screening tests can spot abnormalities in arterial plaque — but no research exists on whether that information is actually predictive of heart disease or stroke. "We need to know normal variation," says Pat Brown, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. "It's really underappreciated as a part of science." In too many areas, Brown argues, we're too quick to jump at any blip without understanding whether it's a true red alert or just normal background noise.

I believe that alternative medicine has something to offer in instances where conventional medicine doesn't have answers because conventional medicine tends to discount things in areas that are considered well-understood. Instead of ignoring apparent red herrings, the medical community should focus more on better understanding of normalcy (and thus a better understanding of abnormalcy).

It seems like it would be easy just to step back and survey the broad picture. But research costs money, and studying what's normal is generally considered trivial, dismissed as mere butterfly collecting. At the National Institutes for Health, for instance, all grants are given a "priority score," an indication of a project's novelty, originality, and "scientific merit." Normal need not apply.

Very interesting stuff.

OK, OK, More Posts!

Carlos, an Official Brother-In-Law of The Brink, took some of his valuable time to harangue me this morning about the age of the posts here at the Brink of Normal. He's right, new entries have been few and far between here. Unbeknownst to him, I have been considering channeling some of the results of my regular net-surfing into this space to ensure that we have at least five new posts per week. So, with his goading, we'll try that this week.
I'll try to make them short and sweet for ease of writing and ease of reading. Leave some comments when you visit to let me know what you think.

"Nice Stolen Car!"

An internet posse of Canadian gearheads used an online forum, Facebook and Google Maps to take down what might be the world's dumbest car thief -- and posted video of the arrest on YouTube.

The thief took a tricked-out Nissan Skyline GT-R for a test drive in Calgary and never came back. The owner, Shaun Ironside, 27, called the cops but figured the car was headed for a chop shop, never to be seen again.

Desperate, Ironside posted a thread at Beyond.ca, an automotive discussion forum with 46,000 members... The thief would be easy to spot, Ironside wrote in the post, because he's missing the middle and right fingers of his left hand. The car was pretty unique too -- a right-hand-drive model imported from Japan. The thread languished until the following afternoon when forum moderator James Lynch happened to spot the stolen Skyline and snapped a picture of the suspect behind the wheel -- waving his disfigured hand.

"I pulled out my camera, but I wanted to see his hand, so I did the rock out sign," Lynch, 22, told Wired.com, referring to the splayed finger gesture that's ubiquitous at heavy metal concerts. "He did it back and I saw his hand. I rolled down my window and yelled, 'Nice stolen car!'..."

Read the full story for more...

Flying Penguins

This amazing BBC video shows penguins that fly.




Unbelievable? Yes. But it's on the internet, so it must be true.

Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico

I can't exactly explain why I found this headline so funny. I think it's the idea of a riot breaking out over something like the style of music the kids are into today. Plus it features quotes like these:

"They're organizing to defend their right to be emo," wrote Daniel Hernandez of LA Weekly on his personal blog, which has provided stellar coverage of the whole affair.

But sadly there's actual violence with punks and metalheads beating the emo kids, targeting them as homosexuals due to the culture of their music:

Gustavo Arellano, the author of Ask a Mexican and an editor at OC Weekly, said that the sexual ambiguities cultivated by emo fashion helped set the group up for targeting by more macho groups.

Anyway, it's actually pretty sad. I'm always surprised at what people will riot over, so I guess we can add emo to that list now...

The Truth about NAFTA

I've linked to an interesting (and short) article in the Wall Street Journal that compares the two big states that had primaries yesterday, Texas and Ohio. Democrats have been decrying NAFTA and promising manufacturing jobs in Ohio, but that hasn't come up in Texas because it has greatly benefited from that trade agreement. This article makes it clear that NAFTA isn't the culprit behind Ohio's problems--it's more about high income taxes and very pro-union laws. Apparently, the manufacturing jobs leaving Ohio aren't all heading overseas, but to pro-business states like...Texas!

By the way, the practice of blatantly lying to voters and telling them what they want to hear in order to get their votes is one of the main reasons people hate politicians. There has been talk that Obama and Clinton will try to "renegotiate" NAFTA, but it's obvious given the facts in this article that that will never happen. It was all theater to make it seem like the Democratic Presidential candidates could fix a problem that is actually caused by Ohio corporate tax laws designed to "soak rich corporations" and by other Ohio laws designed to protect unions (which are of course themselves supposed to protect their members).

Ah, politics.

Liberals and Self-Loathing

Michelle Obama, wife of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, made some waves a couple of weeks ago when she said "...for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country..." It wasn't an accidental slip of the tongue; she said the same thing in two different speeches, so it seems to have been part of her prepared remarks.

This fits with a theory I've been developing: it seems that self-loathing is an important part of the liberal mindset. The above statement implies that Mrs. Obama, an American, has spent her entire adult life ashamed of America. In fact, today's liberal is ashamed and outraged about America's treatment of countless groups, including: Native Americans, African-Americans, women, homosexuals, illegal immigrants, suspected terrorists, and blue-collar workers.

But America isn't the only target of liberal loathing. Radical environmentalist rhetoric expresses shame on the part of the entire human race (of which radical environmentalists, of course, are part) for our treatment of the planet; rich liberals decry "big business" while at the same time profiting from it; and incredibly, liberal thinking is even ashamed of Western distrust of "conservative" Islamic political organizations (like Hamas) and governments (e.g. Iran), in spite of the fact that those groups' attitudes on points like women's issues, homosexuality, and free speech (to name just a few) could not be more disgusting to the liberal mind.

Now let me be clear: as a conservative American, I do not believe that our country has done right by all of the groups mentioned above. There are plenty of shameful decisions, policies and incidents in our past and present. However, I believe in my country, and I love it in spite of it's flaws. I believe that we should work to change those things that are wrong, but I also believe that we should celebrate the great good that is also part of our heritage.

So I'll say it this way: I'm proud to be an American, and that is regardless of whether my candidate is winning or not.

Electric Car, by Teenager

My last post was about the bazillion-dollar efforts of a multinational corporation to build a new kind of hydrogen-electric car; this one is about a sixteen-year-old who built a plug-in electric pickup using 20 regular car batteries, an '88 Mazda, and $6K from his part-time job.

Taken together, I think that this is just another thing that's great about America. You've got a backyard do-gooder kid contributing to this effort (to create cleaner cars) because he believes it's the right thing to do, and a giant company doing the same thing--not because some government bureaucrat came up with an appropriate incentive to induce them to do so, but because it will be good for their bottom line. That's the kind of green innovation I like to see.

(thanks for the link goes to Carlos, the Official Brother-in-Law of the Brink)

GM's Hydrogen Car

Today's automaker produces tons of models, and each model may be available with several combinations of transmissions and engines; plus there are countless electrical, mechanical, and computer systems, each with thousands of parts; making each different model means combining tens of thousands of components together; each model then has to be tested, etc. This is all very difficult and expensive.

GM is trying to revolutionize the auto industry with their hydrogen projects, and I've been keeping my eye on them for several years now because the whole concept is so cool. The idea is this: instead of the situation above, you can produce a single chassis that looks like a giant foot-thick skateboard and contains the motors (small electric motors near the wheels), the fuel storage (it runs on hydrogen), and the fuel cell (to convert the hydrogen to electricity). The steering will be electronic so there's no need for a steering column connecting to the wheels, so pretty much all of the working parts are in the chassis--to choose between a sedan, a pickup or a minivan you simply bolt the body you want on top. Since it's electric there's no transmission, so there are extremely few moving parts (which means very few possible things to break down). Theoretically, the cost and time required to develop new models could be a fraction of what it is currently; cars might eventually begin to last much, much longer as airplanes do (small planes routinely last for decades--they have very few moving parts outside of the engine).

Of course, there have been huge obstacles to overcome, some major ones being the safe storage of notoriously unstable hydrogen (remember the Hindenberg?), the efficient operation of the fuel cell (especially in cold weather), and fueling issues (consumers expect to be able to fuel quickly and to be able to carry enough to drive 300 miles on a fill-up).

Anyway, it seems that things are getting fairly close to production now, as apparently GM is still planning to have production models on the road by 2010. Below is a video of a British show driving GM's second-generation hydrogen vehicle the Hy-Wire.



And here's a link to photos and info on the third-gen vehicle, the Sequel, which is pretty obviously less futuristic and more acceptable to today's consumers than the Hy-Wire, which incorporated more futuristic ideas like controlling the acceleration and braking on the steering wheel instead of via pedals.

If you'd like to geek out about this stuff like some people, check out these links: Here's a blow-by-blow of the engineering and politics behind the beginning of GM's hydrogen projects between 2000 and 2003; here's a 2004 road test review of the Hy-Wire; and finally here is a science/engineering-heavy look at the Hy-Wire from HowStuffWorks.

Other auto companies, notably Honda and Toyota, seem to be advancing rapidly with similar technology, but info on them seems much harder to come by. I don't know if they're behind or if they are way ahead and are just waiting to spring their cool new stuff all at once. Honda's new FCX, which is supposed to enter limited circulation this summer (to the rich and famous?), seems to focus more on the hydrogen but still uses a more conventional setup with a large single motor and a transmission; still cool, but not the quantum leap in manufacturing simplicity and flexibility that GM's initiative promises.

Sleep in a Bottle

As I attempt to return from some months of overwork and undersleep, this article is of particular interest. It seems that DARPA (the Department of Defense's Research and Development arm) might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness. The military has long been interested in technology to help keep humans awake, for obvious reasons--they gave pilots amphetamines as early as WWII.

This new stuff, still in early testing, is a nasal spray and seems to pretty well mimic natural sleep. Of course science doesn't seem to understand sleep very well at all, so who knows how this will turn out. These kind of things never seem to work quite as well as you'd think, and I speak as someone who has ingested way more caffeine than is really healthy of late.

Soviets Politics in America

Finally, in the last of three random posts in a row: A former Soviet spy says exactly what's been on my mind, but better than I ever could.

Here are some quotes:

Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler--as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink...

Competition is indeed the engine that has driven the American dream forward, but unity in time of war has made America the leader of the world. During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to defeat Nazism, but their country of immigrants remained sturdily united. The U.S. held national elections during the war, but those running for office entertained no thought of damaging America's international prestige in their quest for personal victory. Republican challenger Thomas Dewey declined to criticize President Roosevelt's war policy. At the end of that war, a united America rebuilt its vanquished enemies. It took seven years to turn Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into democracies, but that effort generated an unprecedented technological explosion and 50 years of unmatched prosperity for us all.

Great article. Here's a bonus quote on Soviet propaganda on the Vietnam War:

During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.

Here's a question: how much of the news we hear today is actually propaganda..? And a followup: how can you know for sure? Hmm.

The Mysterious Legoman

Here's a weird thing: A giant lego man washes up onshore in Holland. No real details, except that, oddly, "the toy was later placed in front of the drinks stall."

I hereby call for an investigation.

Google: The Right Call?

OK, I'm super-busy, but I've got several items to post here before I lose them, so here goes:

Google has announced a new, free, 411 service. Yep, you can call on your phone, talk to a pretty smart computer, and have it read to you from the phone book. It's pretty smart, and very interesting.

Now I like Google--their stuff is innovative, often best-in-class, and usually at a price that can't be beat (read: free). And they've figured out how to make a ton of money at those ridiculous rates. But as they keep dominating every industry they decide to enter, they are starting to scare me a little. I mean, 411 services, for crying out loud! It's pretty far afield from web search (which they'd argue, as their stated goal is to organize the world's information--but my point stands).

Don't misunderstand me; I'm a free-enterprise guy, and I don't think anybody should try to regulate them into little pieces or anything. I'm just saying that their seemingly unimpeded march through all in their path is making me a little nervous. I know their informal motto is "Don't be evil", but if they decide change their mind they could, I dunno... usher in the apocalypse or something.

All that said, if Google wants to buy any web properties from me, just a few million bucks could change my mind.

Life Imitates Art

Perhaps you've seen this Pepsi commercial, with a giant Pepsi logo ball pinballing playfully around a city:




Now here is a real-life version of this story, which is somewhat more scary:

MEADVILLE, Pa. — A 1,500-pound wrecking ball broke loose from a crane cable and raced downhill, smashing into several cars and injuring three people before coming to rest in the trunk of a car at an intersection Monday.

If it wasn't so scary it might be funny, but it's still too soon; at least it seems like the injuries were mostly minor. Some things seem like a good idea until you actually see them happen, I guess.

As always, click on the title above for the full story...

The Next Big Thing: Arranged Marriages?

You heard it here first, folks. Old is new, and the hot new thing looks a lot like...courtship.

The best way to find your partner for life could very well be the oldest: the arranged marriage, according to one trend expert.

“Today is the era of the arranged couple who fall into love around the birth of the first child," said Marian Salzman, co-author of "Next Now: Trends for the Future."

"It sounds traditional, but in some ways so much of the future is back to the past, turbo-charged,” she said.

...contrary to the "old" arranged marriage, in which children are forbidden from choosing their own partners, the modern arranged marriage is not about being forced into federation. It’s about relying on the matchmaking mastery of Mom and Dad.

“This is about picking a marriage partner — not about falling into bed for a world-class romance," said Salzman, whose trend forecasts are based on pattern recognition and what stylemakers are talking about.

Click the headline above to read the whole article...

"Governor, you had me at Roadkill"

It seems that "Late Late Show" host Craig Ferguson has applied for honorary citizenship to the state of Texas. Governor Perry responded and Ferguson reads the letter, which is humorous, self-deprecating, politically incorrect, and probably destined for the same kind of across-Texas appeal as George W.'s "In Texas, we call it walking" quote. Check it out...

A Strange Thought

Do you ever get the urge to do something really weird? For instance: find a sleeping person, sprinkle some spices on their ribcage, and then wake them up and announce "You've got thyme on your side."

No? Good, because that is bizarre. Me neither.

By the way, I keep talking to people who read the blog, but otherwise it's hard to tell if anybody is here. I even get emails sometimes--I even had a 20-email exchange/debate with a some people about this post--but zero comments. So, if you're reading this leave me a comment.

Thank you, that is all.

Money to Burn

You may know how I feel about bottled water from my rant from last summer, but the article above takes this to a new level. Called "Lamest 'Value-Added' Products" it features plenty of bottled waters of various provenance, but also "the most expensive vodka in the world" (which the reviewers extol as "the greatest new use for your surplus cash since the money bonfire") and even a whole new category--ready-to-freeze ice cubes (tag line:"Ice that's not frozen").

If these people are actually making money, I think its about time to dust off my "dehydrated water" scheme concept (tag line: "All the water you'll ever need in the palm of your hand").

Anti-murderer Bias

It seems that OJ Simpson was in a steakhouse in Louisville, Kentucky when he was approached for an autograph by another diner. The owner, who had had a picture of himself with Simpson among the celebrity photos on his wall before Simpson's wife and her friend were killed, asked Simpson to leave. Simpson said he understood and left quietly.

The owner later explained:

"I didn't want to serve him because of my convictions of what he's done to those families," Jeff Ruby said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "The way he continues to torture the lives of those families ... with his behavior, attitude and conduct."

He went on to say that Simpson's exit was the first classy thing he's done since 1994.

The patrons at the restaurant applauded the owner after Simpson left.

Incredibly, Simpson's attorney played the race card, thereby proving that just about anyone (who is a minority) can do so for almost any reason:

Simpson's attorney, Yale Galanter, said the incident was about race, and he intended to pursue the matter and possibly go after the restaurant's liquor license.

Finally, the attorney gives us a quote that gets my vote for "Absolute Worst Quote on Behalf of an Accused Murderer":

"He screwed with the wrong guy, he really did."