D. Black

Personal Expense Accounts

2005-10-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

One of the most glaring exemplars of the need for wide-ranging tax reform in the US is the existence in the tax code of "Personal Expense Accounts." These accounts work as follows: before the beginning of a new year, you decide to withdraw a fixed sum of pre-tax money from each pay check and move it into a special account, typically handled by a consulting firm specializing in these accounts. Then, whenever you have health care-related expenses (doctor co-payments, prescription co-payments, glasses/contacts, etc.) you fill out a form and submit a claim against your own money contained in your expense account. Since this account was funded with pre-tax money, the net result is that any expenses which are paid via this circuitous expense account system end up being exempt from personal income taxes. So far, so good. BUT, if you fail to spend all the money in your account by year end, that money is forfeit and goes directly to the IRS!

So instead of simply making medical expenses tax-deductible, Congress has set up this ridiculous system which purposefully creates inefficiency (consulting companies aren't free) in the hopes that, since you can't predict all medical expenses that might befall you in the next year, you'll simply lowball your expenses and then be forced to pay for medical expenses with post-tax dollars. But of course if the year is nearing its end and you haven't yet exhausted your account, there's then a huge incentive to seek out semi-necessary medical treatments so that your money doesn't simply go straight to the IRS.

If medical treatments are tax-deductible then they should be treated as any other tax-deduction. If they are not, then they should not qualify for regular tax-deductibility. But to create this monstrous, inefficient regime, which penalizes people for not being able to predict the future while simultaneously creating incentives for wasteful spending, is patently absurd.

Why Americans Hate $1 Coins

2005-10-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

By any rational standard, Americans should have switched to the $1 coin decades ago; The arguments for and against this switch have been discussed so often that I won't bother to reiterate them here. But I think the real reason Americans haven't switched has nothing to do with weight or shape or patriotic duty. It has to do with guilt. America has become a tremendously rushed nation, with Drive-Thrus and Do-It-Yourself express checkout lanes at supermarkets commonplace. We are so rushed, in fact, that we feel disdain towards the person in front of us in line who deigns to have selected an item which necessitates a price check, or who holds up the line by a good 30 sec when she chooses to write a check instead of using her ATM card, or who values the time of the people behind her in line so little that she takes 10 seconds to fish for exact change in her pockets. That person, the person who wants to use coins as a means of payment for her cous cous, is clearly so cheap and stingy that her personal religion of frugality is worth more to her than the caritas of the people whose time she is so callously wasting. Clearly, she must be above guilt and shame. Clearly she believes herself better than all others. Clearly, her use of coins is meant as a direct insult to every single person waiting on her to count out 97 cents.

Clearly, Americans need to chill the fuck out.

Apple under Jobs

2005-10-18T14:26:00.000-07:00

As long as Steve Jobs remains CEO of Apple, Apple will never make inroads into the business market segments. For Steve Jobs is almost pathologically fixated on secrecy and fanfare and big tinsel-lined product announcements, to point of suing his own customers for leaking information and ruining the surprise. And businesses hate this. Businesses plan purchases months or years in advance and need to know exactly what their suppliers' plans are for those time frames. As long as Steve Jobs remains CEO of Apple, then, businesses will continue to forgo purchasing Apple products. If Apple shareholders are content to let their property continue to appeal only to consumers, then this is fine. But given the meteoric rise in Apple's share price, I think Apple shareholders will demand that Apple branch out into new market segments to justify the astronomically high P/E of AAPL. In the long run (5 years), either Apple's stock price will fall, or Steve Jobs will once again leave Apple.

Video iPod is all about music

2005-10-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

With much self-aggrandizing fanfare, a 10 foot-tall projection of Steve Jobs's face announced the Video iPod and, more importantly, a deal with ABC to provide certain popular TV shows, comercial-free, for download for $2 from the iTunes music store. With this announcement, the hopes of music executives for a price increase from the current $1 flat rate for their music on this same store died an unceremonious death. Steve Jobs had previously called these executives greedy for pushing for these increases. And now that 3 minute music tracks will compete side-by-side with 60 minute video files for consumers' entertainment dollars, it is clear that such an increase would make their greed both glaringly obvious and financially disastrous. Apple Computer does not produce its own entertainment content and so has always been at a something of a disadvantage when negotiating pricing terms with the music industry. To play the music industry against the television industry, then, was a stroke of absolute genius on the part of Jobs and lays bear the tunnel-visioned, greedy, unimaginative thinking of the music industry executives who had been completely unable to comprehend the notion that they were competing for entertainment dollars, not simply music dollars. This lack of vision, which, much more than piracy, has been at the root of the decline in music industry profits, will now force them, finally, to price their entertainment competitively with other forms of entertainment. No longer will they have monopolistic pricing power for digital downloads. Steve Jobs's face, overnight, made them look like chumps.

EDGE makes Catherine Zeta-Jones look dumb

2005-10-18T13:15:00.000-07:00

In every Starbucks, there is a "T-Mobile Hotspot," which I have a hunch has been great for business at all non-Starbucks coffee shops with free WiFi. I personally frequent only coffee shops where I don't have to pay a monthly fee for the privilege of posting a blog entry. And yesterday, I received my lovely new Treo 650 in the mail, which, with the help of PDANet and an unlimited-use Internet plan from Cingular, can be used to grant my Bluetooth-enabled ThinkPad a sub-DSL-speed IP address. The only reason I ever considered ponying up and paying for T-Mobile was when I was travelling and was either in an airport with T-Mobile or didn't know where to go for free WiFi. I only ever considered this when I needed *any* means of getting online. With my Treo, this need will never surface, and I will no longer even consider paying for T-Mobile. Go back to Wales, bitch.

The funniest shit ever

2005-10-05T13:31:00.000-07:00

Download the following link in eMule:

ed2k://|file|SHINING.FINAL.mov|99.../

It's the funniest shit since Gigli.

I ♥ H5N1

2005-10-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Scanned from the Southeast-Asian cookbook, Hot Sour Salty Sweet

Citizen Rove

2005-10-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove bears more than just a passing resemblence to the aged Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles's classic, Citizen Kane:

I would really like to see a ruined Rove, ancient and alone in a half-finished pleasure palace, disdained by the country whose love he tried to breed through hubris and trickery and sheer force of will. In Citizen Kane, C.F. Kane fabricates and lies and delivers America into a war with Spain out of sheer narcissistic Machtlust. Mr. Rove, well, we all know which baseless war we're now fighting because of Karl's will to power and because of his designs for the reforging of a world without the scourge of cultural relativism in all its shades of brown. K.R., like his fictitious lookalike, deserves a footnote in The Collected Works of Dante Alighieri.

Cell Phone Subsidies

2005-10-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

Of late, I've been trying -- in vain -- to continue to use SprintPCS as my cell phone service provider. The crutch of the issue is that I want to get a Treo 650, but want also to receive the $150-$200 susbidy on this otherwise too-expensive phone. I am willing to sign the necessary contracts, but Sprint is still unwilling to provide this subsidy since I am a current customer. Verizon, on the other hand, is perfectly willing to give me this subsidy, which requires only that I fill out a small phone-number-portability form.

Sprint really should learn about the role of (dis-)incentives in highly competitive markets with zero moving costs and perfect substitutability of their provided goods. And that one does not want to discriminate against one's current customers in those types of markets, since they will then likely become ex-customers. The financial model wherein cell phone subsidies are used to lure customers from other carriers, all of whom have identical subsidy regimes on an identical array of phones, is clearly vestigial from the time before the FCC phone-number-portability fiat, when moving costs were substantially higher (you had to get a new phone number). They should now be used as incentives to sign multi-year contracts, regardless of your current service provider.

As it stands now, Sprint is discriminating against its current customer base, who are given incentives by other carriers to switch to switch to those carriers. And since the costs of switching are nearly zero, this is exactly what economics 101 predicts all model customers will do, thereby receiving the $200 subisdy on the phone of their choice.

Dumb.

Cheese as a Proxy for Coolness

2005-09-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

Axioms: New York is cooler than St. Louis; San Francisco is cooler than Mobile, AL; Canada is cooler than the USA; John McCain Republicanism is cooler than neo-con Republicanism; Blue states are cooler than red states; Stanford graduates are cooler than Cal graduates.

Black's Law: In order to judge a given geographical region's level of coolness, it suffices simply to calculate the inverse of the expected distance to a purveyor of imported, overpriced cheeses.

Dowd Alert

2005-09-25T21:28:00.000-07:00

Marketing genius, by me:

NYTimes, as part of their TimesSelect bullshit, should include a USB-attached, flashing red "Dowd Alert," to let you know when to go to their site.

Also, they should create a konfabulator/dashboard widget, which is a map of Asia with an arrow pointing to wherever Tom Friedman is currently pushing his book to Asian school children.

(Addendum: EVK had the genius idea of replacing the arrow with a picture of Friedman's head)

Jeff Sachs

2005-09-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

While Prof. Sachs's goals in his latest mass-market tract, The End of Poverty, are certainly laudable, it is this reviewer's opinion that his arguments, regardless of their merits, will fall upon deaf ears. For Prof. Sachs, seemingly in an effort to place as much distance as possible between himself and academic rigor, opens his book with a forward by Bono, the rock star-cum-messiah.

My Favorite Drug

2005-09-25T20:17:00.000-07:00

Where Ambien is a gentle nudge into somnolence, Seroquel is a bitch-slap from a fat black diva in Chanel stilletos.

The messiah speaks

2005-09-22T13:19:00.000-07:00

Ten Questions for Bono

Anyone who takes themself this seriously is funny. Because they're a joke. Like Bono.

Nick Cage

2005-09-21T22:24:00.000-07:00

I think that Nicholas Cage is a fine, fine actor with skills for speaking and for making me suspend my disbelief and believe that he is the character. I think that his academy award was well-earned and will be followed by others soon. I think that his monotone voice, far from representing a lack of acting talent, makes him funny and personable in all films he inhabits, especially in those where his voice-overs dominate the entire film (Lord of War). I think he is super.

Just kidding.

One

2005-09-21T22:15:00.000-07:00

I am the first. I am the source, whence all to follow must spring. Ursprung, say the Germans, and Auf Wiedersehen.