Another item forwarded to me:

TODAYS TAXES

  • Accounts Receivable Tax
  • Building Permit Tax
  • Capital Gains Tax
  • CDL License Tax
  • Cigarette Tax
  • Corporate Income Tax
  • Court Fines (indirect taxes)
  • Dog License Tax
  • Federal Income Tax
  • Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
  • Fishing License Tax
  • Food License Tax
  • Fuel permit tax
  • Gasoline Tax (42 cents per gallon)
  • Hunting License Tax
  • Inheritance Tax
  • Interest Expense (tax on the money THEY paid tax on already)
  • Inventory tax IRS
  • Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
  • IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
  • Liquor Tax
  • Local Income Tax
  • Luxury Taxes
  • Marriage License Tax
  • Medicare Tax
  • Property Tax
  • Real Estate Tax
  • Septic Permit Tax
  • Service Charge Taxes
  • Social Security Tax
  • Road Usage Taxes (Truckers)
  • Sales Taxes
  • Recreational Vehicle Tax
  • Road Toll Booth Taxes
  • School Tax
  • State Income Tax
  • State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
  • Telephone Federal Excise tax
  • Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
  • Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
  • Telephone Minimum
  • Usage Surcharge Tax
  • Telephone Recurring and Non-Recurring Charges Tax
  • Telephone State and Local Tax
  • Telephone Usage Charge Tax
  • Toll Bridge Taxes
  • Toll Tunnel Taxes
  • Traffic Fines (indirect taxation)
  • Trailer Registration
  • Tax Utility Taxes
  • Vehicle License Registration Tax
  • Vehicle Sales Tax
  • Watercraft Registration Tax
  • Well Permit
  • Tax Workers Compensation Tax

Tax Telephone Federal , State and Local Surcharge Ttaxes Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax Telephone Recurring and Non-Recurring Charges Tax TelephoneStateand Local Tax Telephone Usage Charge Tax Toll Bridge Taxes Toll Tunnel Taxes Traffic Fines (indirect taxation) Trailer Registration Tax Utility Taxes Vehicle License Registration Tax Vehicle Sales Tax Watercraft Registration Tax Well Permit Tax Workers Compensation Tax COMMENTS: Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago and our nation was the most prosperous in the world, had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world and Mom stayed home to raise the kids. What the heck happened

COMMENTS: Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago and our nation was the most prosperous in the world, had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

What the heck happened?

McDonald’s is testing remote call-center operations for fast-food drive-through order taking. The pilot program has call-centers that take drive-through orders from various MacDonald’s locations hundreds of miles a way. The person in the car placing the order usually has no idea of the new technology being tested. If the call center can be hundreds of miles away, why not thousands? When you get laid off from your IT job, even your “temporary” fast food job can be outsourced!

I guess I’m behind the times. I just got around to reading The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams. It’s a satirical book on dysfunctional corporate culture that’s eerily accurate, and explores the following principle:


The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — Management.


When I saw Office Space, I remarked that “it’s not a comedy, it’s documentary.” The same applies to The Dilbert Principle.


The book came out in 1996. Ten years ago! I got my copy for $2 at a used book store a couple weeks ago. Defintely an enjoyable read.


The kicker for me, though, and the reason for the blog entry on a 10 year old book is that just this moring I was reading the chapter on “Leadership.” In it, Adams says:


Leaders spend their time concentrating on “visions” of the future. This can involve have lunch with other leaders, attending golf events, or even reading a book.


Ha, ha. What made this even funnier to me is that the front of the business section of my paper had the following story, which I read minutes later:


Birdies, bogies and building business

Golf has become as integral to business as the boardroom. On the course, executives cozy up to customers, and junior employees build paths to the corner office.


Sigh.

I don’t watch Fox News, but somehow I doubt Bill O’Reilly will be covering this story:

Former first lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil.

I did search on the Fox News web site, and found a single entry in their search archive, but it’s an AP wire story that was probably automatically fed in. No Fox commentary on it.


Better let this one die from the silent treatment, Rupert.

Nice way to subsidize the son’s business and get a hefty tax write-off to boot. Sleazebags.


Also, I feel compelled to point out what a great job Think Progess is doing as a watchdog, keeping a great eye on the regular stream of sleaziness and untruthiness coming from the Bush, his administration and apparently his immediate family. Their feed alerted me to this story (“All in the family”) a few days ago. It’s a quality feed.


The thing that gets me about this story is how little regard it is getting in the MSM. Either the media or the general public just don’t care how brazenly dishonest this is! It’s got less that 200 entries on Google News, and almost all of them are the just different copies of the exact same AP story printed in different newspapers, and then shoveled online. Most of the links will be gone a a few weeks due to licsensing restrictions.


Where are the follow-ups? Where are the demanded apologies? Where is the announcement of the IRS investigation? How apathetic are we when such soulless corruption is openly practiced an no one cares?


sigh

I hate job listings that describe what the job might become in the future if the immediate project is successful. It seems inheritly dishonest to tempt people to apply for a possible good future job as a package deal with a current lower-paying, short-term job.

I’m not really looking for a work. I bitch and moan about my curent job a lot, but I know it’s a pretty good place. (That didn’t come from me ;-) I do, however, subscribe to the jobs.perl.org telecommute rss feed. Why? It’d be nice to find some part-time telecommute work to do on evenings and weekends. Maybe hone some new skills and bring in a few extra bucks at the same time. Not that I have a lot of free time, mind you – I’ve got two kids, and the wife and I are trying to paint the house.

Anyway, I see on a number of number of job postings, not just on perl jobs, some verbiage like this:

This is a part time job, but if the project works out successfully then we may be offering a more permanent position to the candidate.

One particular job listing listed many of the current technologies I’m well-versed in. I use them almost every day at my current job. But the listing had that little poison nugget in there that completely discourages me from looking further into the opportunity.
My reading of that kind of text in a job listing is this:
We’re going to trick you into to taking a lower than usual rate for the current project because you will be hoping that subsequent projects with us will be more lucrative. Of course, full-time work and well-monied future projects will never materialize, and we will string you along as long as we can to get cheaper work until you figure out the scam. We’re hope you are desperate enough to make this a long-term arrangement.

That’s how I interpret it. I hesitated linking to the specific listing above, because I didn’t want to imply that the particular listing is being duplicitious. There’s no real way to tell. I’m making a more general observation here.

I think I would be able to accomplish whatever they needed, however. It’s a part-time telecommute position, so I should be a good fit. Provided they don’t have real tight deliverables ($DAYJOB trumps $MOONLIGHTINGJOB in any crunch), I should apply for that position. But I won’t.

Mostly likely, I wouldn’t take the permanent position even if they offered it, but I can’t help but to be put-off by the attempted subtle manipulation.

I just don’t get the warm fuzzies from a listing that describes what the job might become if the current job is successful, holding that out as some kind of carrot. I want to know exactly what the job is and, only apply for that one, and deliver on actual expectations.

Employers should leave the speculation out of job listings. For better or worse, speculative job listings discourage me from seeking work from you.

In this story, note that two actors were detained for over an hour, and one was specifically asked if he planned to make any more “political films.”


Expect to see more and more of these types of events, then less and less. Once this practice becomes common, people will just keep quiet to avoid any hassles. That’s the intent of this sort of thing.

Two former Guantanamo Bay detainees from the West Midlands were stopped under anti-terror laws at an airport, according to a human rights group.

Reprieve said two actors, who play the so-called Tipton Three in a new film, were also held at London Luton Airport.

They were returning from the Berlin Film festival after winning an award.

Police said no arrests were made but four out of six people were “stopped” for an hour under the counter terrorism act, as they tried to enter the UK.

The Winterbottom-directed drama The Road to Guantanamo won a Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival.

[…]

Mr Ahmed claimed he was asked if he intended to make any more political films.

Reprieve legal director Clive Stafford Smith said: “This may be a farce, but it is an ugly farce.”

WAT

I wanted to use a more OO approach to error handling in perl instead of just plain old eval, so I did some looking around. I wanted it to be easy, so I looked at these modules:

I also found this article on perl exception handling: Object Oriented Exception Handling in Perl. That sounded great and all, but what would I be giving up?

I don’t know that much about perl internals, but I thought that code installed as a $SIG{DIE} signal handler would be faster than eval handling. I was wrong. Check this out:

I have these three small test scripts (indentation screwed up with the post):

eval.pl
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use Benchmark qw(:all);;
use constant MAX => 150000;
my $code = sub {
  eval {
    die "this is an exception";

  };

  if($@)
  {
    #continue;
  }
  else
  {

  }
};

timethis(MAX, $code);
exception_class.pl
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use Exception::Class ('TestException');
use Benchmark qw(:all);

use constant MAX => 150000;

my $code = sub {
  eval { TextException->throw(error => "this is an exception"); };
  if (UNIVERSAL::isa($@, 'TestException'))
  {
  }
};

timethis(MAX, $code);
error.pl
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;</code>

use Error qw(:try);
use Benchmark qw(:all);;

use constant MAX => 150000;

my $code = sub {
  try {
    die "this is an exception";
  }
  catch Error with
  {
    #continue;
  }
  finally
  {

  };
};

timethis(MAX, $code);
exception.pl
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use Exception qw(:all);
use Benchmark qw(:all);;

use constant MAX => 150000;

my $code = sub {
  try {
    die "this is an exception";
  }
  except
  {
    #continue;
  }
  finally
  {

  }
};

timethis(MAX, $code);

How did these compare in execution speed?

  • ./exception.pl:

    23 wallclock secs (22.09 usr +  0.11 sys = 22.20 CPU) @ 6756.76/s (n=150000)
    
  • ./error.pl:

    9 wallclock secs ( 7.90 usr +  0.02 sys =  7.92 CPU) @ 18939.39/s (n=150000)
    
  • /exception_class.pl:

    2 wallclock secs ( 1.37 usr +  0.00 sys =  1.37 CPU) @ 109489.05/s (n=150000)
    
  • /eval.pl

    0 wallclock secs ( 0.41 usr +  0.00 sys =  0.41 CPU) @ 365853.66/s (n=150000)
    

Holy smokes! That’s a huge difference in speed. I’ll be sticking with eval for now, thanks.

Suppression of dissent is becoming all too common. The tactic of being called “unpatriotic” and “giving comfort to America’s enemies” for opposing Bush and his war has been recognized for its inherit absurdity, and no longer works to stop criticism of the Administration. Now it’s time to step up the methodology to outright intimidation – send in the goons:


VA Nurse Investigated for “Sedition” for Criticizing Bush

After the paper published the letter in its September 15-21 issue, VA administrators seized her computer, alleged that she had written the letter on that computer, and accused her of “sedition.”


Congressmen threaten probe of U.S. seaports deal
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle yesterday threatened a congressional investigation of a deal to give control of six U.S. seaports to an Arab company, while one key Republican said the Bush administration’s security reassurances were not adequate.


What does it matter? Congress has shown it doesn’t have the will to do anything beyond posture for the cameras before is rolls over for the Administration. If you want to “change things,” just change the color of ink used for your big rubber stamp, you bunch of spineless wimps.

I subscribe to the NYT Technology RSS feed. This morning’s feed had three stories grouped very close together:

Amazon’s Profit Fell 43% in Its 4th Quarter
Amazon reported lower than expected revenue along with much higher expenses, but blamed the profit drop on a reduced tax benefit.

Profit Drops 31% at Top Maker of Video Games
Electronic Arts, America’s largest video game publisher, reported significantly lower profit on Thursday and missed already downgraded expectations.

Net Income Declines 69% in Fourth Quarter at Comcast
The nation’s largest cable company sa
id profits slid because investment losses and a higher tax rate offset gains in its core businesses.

Interesting also that two of the three companies here attribute their profit problem to taxes.

I imagine stocks will take another pummeling today on this news. Interest rates are going up. Gas prices aren’t coming down. Worker productivity is slowing.

2006 is not looking good so far.