Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Tax Time Edition

My buddy Grant Lawrence over at Bodhi Thunder posted this mind blowing graph which solidified a few things I had been thinking about:

Original Source trueslant

I’ve heard a lot of Conservatives (Most who make less than $50,000) complaining that under Obama’s tax policy half of the US population, those making under $50,000 a year, won’t pay any federal income tax. Their complaint seems to be that taking the section of the US population that has 2.5% of the countries wealth off the tax rolls turns this country into a “secular, socialist machine" in the words of Newt Gingrich.

The federal income tax on the bottom third of the country has from the beginning been a social engineering tool, you pay in a small percentage of your wages and then get it back, so as you move up the economic ladder to the point you do start paying in it’s barely noticeable. Obama has merely pushed this up so the bottom half, instead of a third get all their money back.

How this is part of a “secular” machine is beyond me, but as far as the “Socialist” complaint I can address that.

Taking 2.5% of the nations wealth off the tax rolls won’t do jack to affect the Federal Budget, even if they were taxed at 18% that would still only send less than half a percent of the nations wealth to the federal government, a raise of 1.3% on taxes on the top 1% would more than cover it.

The top 1% of the nation will be paying their fair share because they get more benefits from the government. Besides the direct corporate welfare in the form of subsidies to industries, businesses in America get a lot of benefits, like stability, a fairly educated workforce (although that has been under attack) and cheap oil.

Having the bottom half of the country not paying Federal Income Tax so they can spend more on things they need (and not revolting) is not socialism it is a way to balance out who pays for the benefits of our society.

So to all the people upset about Obama’s tax cuts for the bottom 95% of the country and making it so the bottom half don’t pay any federal taxes at all, especially those making under $50,000 a year, I say, “Shut-up Stupid, putting money in the hands of people who need it most helps the country to be stronger.”

Fantastic Future Friday: Swarm Intelligence

In a lot of my writing I like to look at engineering projects of vast scale, like placing the planet Mercury in the shadow of a 10,000 square kilometer solar panel placed at the Lagrange point between the Sun Mercury.

Projects on this scale are beyond human’s ability to do using current construction management techniques. The details and logistics would either simply overwhelm the planners or slow the project down to the point it would take generations to complete. So in order for it to be done in a reasonable time, a new way of getting things done needs to be developed.

Like most things nature has already beat us to the answer. If you take the common ant that crawls along your kitchen floor it's pretty retarded. In the movie Antz they showed a fairly realistic depiction of an individual ant’s intelligence when a line of ants were walking through the forest and a leaf fell down breaking the line in half. The first ant that came to the leaf screamed out, “I’m lost!”

As retarded as these ants are as individuals they manage to build incredible colonies that are as complex as some of our greatest cities. They do this through something called Swarm Intelligence.

Instead of the Central Planning models that humans use they have a very simple pattern of “If-Then” commands that they use. If they run across a path laid down by another ant they follow it. If that ant has found food it will leave a stronger path as it moves back and forth between the food and colony. This attracts more ants to the path who follow it to the food making the path a stronger attractant, getting more ants to follow it to the food. This feedback continues until the food source is swarmed and no more ants can get to the food. At this point the second set of If-Then statements kicks in and the newest ants see they can’t get at the food and resume scavenging for more food. All of this is done with no central planning just individuals carrying out some very simple instructions.

This same concept could be used by humans to do huge projects, like strip-mining the Moon, on a very short time scale.

With 3-D printing, the ability to take the raw molecules and place them molecule by molecule on top of each other to build complex machines, and simple computer chips the Moon could be strip mined in a generation.

A small ship could bring a 3-D printer and crude refiner, and the raw materials to build a few explorer/mining robots. These robots would look for the raw materials to build more explorer/mining robots. When one of them found a rich source of materials the others could follow mining it and bringing it back to the refiner that would turn the raw ore into material to make more explorer/mining robots.

When the refiner got a backlog of raw ore it would trigger the 3-D printer to make another refiner, then go back to making explorer/mining robots. When the amount of refined material became too great the 3-D printer would make a carbon copy of itself that the explorer/mining robots would take along with a refiner to the richest source of raw ore. This process would continue without any human intervention.

As they built more and more copies of themselves they would spread across the Moon turning the raw ore into highly processed materials that could then be used by humans, without humans having to take part in the mining process.

This idea of Swarm Intelligence could be modified to practically any massive scale engineering project and transform the entire Solar System into a playground for humanity. That will lead to a fantastic future.

Author vs. Writer

I foolishly thought that being a Writer and being an Author was the same thing. I have found out they are very, very different things needing almost opposite skills.

As a writer you envision your own little world and move in, totally ignoring the real world around you. You need to be happy being alone with your thoughts in order to get those thoughts on to paper. The very definition of an introvert.

As an Author you have to sell your book to everyone you meet, shamelessly self promoting yourself to strangers and friends alike. The very definition of an extrovert.

I’ve sold other peoples stuff in the past and had no problem, but when it comes to pushing my own novel I feel like I’m being pushy. I’ve read from other authors that they feel the same way.

One effective way that I know of to promote yourself without being pushy is with a business card. Nobody minds getting a business card, at worse they’ll just toss it in the nearest trash can, but if they are interested they have a way to find out more.

So I put together a cheap card and I’ll start handing them out to everyone I meet. Hopefully it will get some people interested to look at my book. If not I’ll have wasted a whole $5 and people will wonder if I’m the real life Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.

I’m trying to come up with other low cost ways to promote my book, without being obnoxious. If anyone has any ideas please let me know.