Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl
  • The Death of Horatio Alger – Paul Krugman writes about income distribution trends and decreasing income mobility in the US

    According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez–confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office–between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they’re not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

  • Business Week: Waking Up From The American Dream – editorial that spurred Krugman’s
  • Tour of the US Income Distribution, “The L-Curve” – 99% is about $300K, 99.9% is $1M
  • INEQUALITY.ORG – recent article entitled Homer Gets a Tax Cut which explores why the average American supports really bad financial policy that only benefits the rich:

    What in the end is going on here? Most Americans, Bartels suggests, “support tax cuts not because they are indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely fail to connect inequality and public policy.”

  • In the Ownership Society, Were All Equal (But Some Are More Equal Than Others)

    Whats the solution? Give everyone access to a 401(k) plan and make it easier to save? Nah. Thats what silly Democrats would say! Since some are more equal than others, the sensible thing is to create a new category of tax-favored accounts with higher contribution limits ($7,500), so that the affluent, who already max out their retirement contributions in 401(k)s, can save more without being taxed. Not only that, they get a bigger break for doing so, because their marginal tax rate is higher. Perfect!

  • What if Bush is a Nixonian Liberal? – interesting analysis of Bush policies
  • EPI: JobWatch – Bush Administrations tax cuts falling short in job creation
Posted on by lhl

Year end contributions:

Sappy new year’s resolutions:

  • be more productive, less lazy
  • work on stuff that matters
  • push myself more
  • be less risk averse

Less sappy resolutions:

  • call old friends
  • say no to refined sugar
  • work on organizing site, apt, life
  • finish projects
Posted on by lhl

If there was ever a language that needed object introspection, it’d be AppleScript. Also, screw what the ad copy says, this thing is confusing as fuck. Part of it is that it’s just so haphazardly documented. It took me 20 minutes of searching to finally find that GUI Scripting can only be done via the System Events object. The other part is that it’s bass-ackward… and the examples suck and don’t have any comments. (Come on, I want to know simple things, like file loading and file properties)

Hmm, a recipe-book wiki would be quite cool. Can I invoke the lazyweb?

[quoted in MacSurfer, woo]

Posted on by lhl

Avoiding paying work by doing some… web design (wow, last time I did that was… …a long time ago). Also, mulling over SQL representation of potentially cyclical graphs: using a cluster table to restrict tree building and then baking all the nodes (beats writing a servlet and caching all the nodes I think)

Related: check out Marc Canter’s current blog design – the Laszlo widgets I couldn’t care less about (sorry), but the WebOutliner (especially the inline quoting) and K-Collector integration is hotness.

Posted on by lhl

mathowie gives a shoutout to philg. photo.net was one of the first web sites I went to. I actually remember reading Travels with Samantha and going through the photo resources before happening on WTR. Like Matt, Philip’s writings really shaped a lot of my thinking on web community and development. For a while, I would use familiarity with Philip’s work as a way to judge a developer’s savviness/background. As time went on, I got more and more blank stares… Nowadays I doubt more than a few percent of developers would recognize the name. But a lot of the pre-dotcom webfolk would, I suspect.

Unlike Matt, I did get a chance to thank Philip personally one of the times he came out to Caltech (’98 or ’99?). I had answered a question during the presentation, and when I mentioned I had done the problem sets afterward, I got an off-the-cuff job offer, which was quite amusing. While at the time working at ArsDigita seemed like it would have a dream job, I never followed up. Looking back, maybe was a good thing (see also). He seemed like a nice enough person, and I’m glad that’s how I remember him as. Anyway, thanks Philip, for all you’ve done for the web.

Oh, and I’m so glad I no longer write TCL.