The Petty Man

"The petty man ... is utterly disorderly but hates for people to criticize him. He us utterly unworthy but wishes for people to consider him worthy. His heart is like that of a tiger or wolf, and his conduct like that of beasts, but he ates for people to consider him a villain. To those who flatter and toady to him he shows favor, those those who would admonish him he keeps at a distance. Those who try to be correct he considers laughable, and those truly loyal to him he considers villains." Xunzi c. 310—c. 220 B.C.E. Quoted from Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy by Ivanhoe and Van Norden

Meritocracy or Aristocracy?

When the estate/death tax was being publicly debated some years ago, I had a politically active cousin ask me with wonder why I think it's a good thing. My answer at the time was because I don't believe in having an American aristocratic class. My cousin countered with asking why someone shouldn't be able to pass their hard earned assets on to their children. I responded with the that I'm not worried about their children being rich, I'm worried about their great grand children being rich through no virtue of their own, that I prefer we live in a meritocracy where people have a chance to get ahead. Neither of us saw a belief conversion that day.

My answers haven't changed and, while I don't agree with everything, this article lays out the argument better than I can. I think it makes much more sense to give everyone a their first three or four or five or six or times the poverty rate (or some other number that makes sense) dollars tax free and to tax all other income above at the same rate. And by all I mean everything. Interest, long and short term capital gains, income from all financial devices, salaries, inheritance-- any situation where someone ends up with money or assets counts as income to me.

Why? Without something more fair than what we have now, there will eventually be violent revolution in our future and I don't want anyone, especially my children or grandchildren, to live through that.

Pot Prohibition

“Using a drug to put your brain in an altered state is not recreation. That is self-destructive behavior and escapism.”

Reading books, video games, music, or movies spring to mind as common forms of recreational escapism. Pretty sure when you are experiencing them, your brain state is altered. What about roller coasters and water slides? Outlaw those too?

What about emotions in general? Why not forbid weddings or death? Certainly that would prevent changing brain states and even some self destructive behavior.

I don't use marijuana. When exposed to it as a young man it put me to sleep in minutes every time. Even so, I find this kind of intolerance for how other people want to live their lives offensive. Who the hell is Scott Chipman to try to tell me or anyone else how we should live our lives?

Ubuntu Brightness By Command Line

From:

user@laptop:~$ ls /sys/class/backlight/
acpi_video0
user@laptop:~$ cat /sys/class/backlight/*/brightness 
1
user@laptop:~$ cat /sys/class/backlight/*/max_brightness 
7
user@laptop:~$ sudo su -c "echo 7 > /sys/class/backlight/*/brightness"
user@laptop:~$ cat /sys/class/backlight/*/brightness 
7

Linux Search PDFs

Thanks Stack Overflow.

find /path -name '*.pdf' -exec sh -c 'pdftotext "{}" - | grep --with-filename --label="{}" --color "your pattern"' \;

Tuesday: Blizzard flight woes peak; 8,000 cancellations since Sunday

My expectations were about a World of Warcraft story where Blizzard angered a ton of customers when I opened this link. Turns out, no.

Stadium Sales Tax Surplus Refund

I appreciate the intentions behind Mayor Schmitt and others who think some of the money should go to a new baseball stadium and outdoor events center downtown. That sort of thing can make a positive impact on the surrounding areas and I totally understand why the Broadway stakeholders are pushing for this!

I very much appreciate the straight forward and politically shrewd proposal from Alder Vander Leest where he proposes splitting the refund equally between each parcel bill equally. Slum lords aside, it is even a little bit progressive but it's a one time thing.

Aldler Moore has a very good idea that will definitely help people in a very meaningful way with his idea of assisting folks with lead service lines for water. Though, I wonder if block grant couldn't be used for that with a zero percent lean on the home or some other one time mechanism.

When I heard that this money was coming to the municipalities, I immediately thought it should go toward phasing out of special assessments for street resurfacing and reconstruction. The current system is absurdly stupid and arbitrarily unfair. The baseball stadium will have an ongoing impact but this-- this would be a serious improvement and a shift toward fairness for all landowners in the city that would never end.