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]