Since today is April 15, the infamous “Tax Day” here in the USA, Stephen Gordon over at the LP Blog has decided to declare an open thread for this weekend so that we could discuss various tax-related issues. Perhaps not surprisingly, much of the debate thus far has centered around the so-called Fair Tax, a proposal to replace the current income tax scheme with a uniform national sales tax.
This past week has seen two major acquisitions take place in the corporate world. One of these, Google’s bid to acquire DoubleClick, has possible implications for users of AdSense and/or AdWords.
This is an essay that describes how federalism is supposed to work according to the standard “civics book” kind of definition. It is interesting to consider this, and then note how much the balance of power in the USA today has shifted in favor of the federal (or national) level of government in actual practice.
One of the nice benefits of doing paid surveys is that in addition to getting paid for the surveys themselves, sometimes you also get to sample new products for free (and have them shipped to you free also) before they become available to the general public.
Many companies will spend a surprisingly large amount of money to have people “secretly” test their products and give them honest feedback so that the companies can determine whether or not their new product is likely to be successful in terms of actual sales. After a significant sampling of people have tried the product and answered a follow-up survey on it, the companies can use the survey results to “tweak” their product so that it is more likely to appeal to people that might be interested in buying it.
Zero Votes Cast in City Council Election
If you have ever wondered what would happen if we had an election where no one actually voted, we will no longer need to wait for the result.
This situation became reality yesterday in the town of Missouri City, Missouri when none the 35 registered voters in Ward 3 — including the incumbent himself — bothered to go the polls and vote. Ward 3 incumbent Joe Selle, who apparently forgot that there was an election yesterday, will still be allowed to serve another term on the city council even though no one voted for him due to an archaic city charter that was originally approved by the Missouri state legislature back in 1859. According to the charter, the incumbent gets to keep his office unless “another party is successfully elected and qualified”.
Interestingly, this same charter requires that the city’s mayor be a “free white male”. However, the City Council, citing modern civil rights legislation, decided to override this requirement in 2001 when the town elected its first female mayor.
Meanwhile, Michael Hampton at Homeland Stupidity made an excellent point a few days ago about how a small party or even a single person can still make a difference when it comes to elections and politics. In this particular case, all that was required for the removal of this incumbent was for one person to write in the name of another legally qualified resident of that district. These are the kinds of situations where we Libertarians can rack up some easy victories and begin to make a real difference at the local level if we can learn to recognize these opportunities and put forth a small amount of effort.
Yet at the same time, I also wonder about the folks who see voter apathy and intentional non-voting as a viable strategy for reducing the power of the State. After all, if we have reached the point where politicians cannot even be bothered to vote for themselves, do we really need these politicians?
UPDATE 8/27/08: It seems that the original story from KMBC-TV has been deleted, rendering the original link useless. I have managed to find a truncated version of the article from Associated Press here.
Building backlinks to your website for SEO purposes is usually a good thing. However, from the perspective of search engines, not all backlinks are created equally. For example, getting a one-way link back to your site is usually treated as a higher quality link than a two-way link that is acquired through a reciprocal link exchange.
Andre Chaperon has produced an excellent video tutorial on how to create an XML compliant Google sitemap for your site.
Yesterday, while checking out one of my regular blog sites, I ran across a link to a short (about 2 minutes long), humorous but scary movie apparently titled “Pizza” and produced by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).
After using it for almost two years, I have found that Firefox, an open source browser published by Mozilla, is generally more secure and easier to use than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser. Aside from the enhanced security and user friendly interface, however, what really gives Firefox the edge over most other browsers is its amazing versatility, including the ability to customize Firefox through the use of a wide variety of extensions, or “add-ons” as they are also called. Some of these extensions are particularly useful for bloggers and Internet entrepreneurs, so I will briefly describe a few particular extensions that I have found the most useful below. If you do not already have it, you can download Firefox from the Mozilla site by simply clicking on the relevant text in this sentence.
Although President George W. Bush called on Congress to reduce the size and number of pork barrel projects (known officially as “earmarks” in Congressional terminology) in his last State of the Union address, the actual costs to taxpayers of pork-related Congressional spending are not really being reduced.
Pork barrel projects are pieces of legislation that are inserted into larger bills and “earmark” federal dollars for various local projects and personal interests that are unrelated to the actual subject of the bill. Although much of the American public remains unaware, the true purpose of these earmarks is to allow politicians to “bring home the bacon” to their local Congressional districts in order to curry favor with voters and increase their chances of being re-elected.
In an apparent move to appease government watchdogs and other concerned members of the public, Congress has pretended to do something about the increasing costs of pork barrel spending by having the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) create a federal database of earmarks that is now being made available to the public. On the surface, this looks like a good thing for those of us who are concerned about the increasing costs of pork and its contribution to the national debt. But then we get to the last two sentences of their latest report:
Although the agency has denied it for years, recently discovered documents confirm that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the Secret Service and other government agencies with much more specific information on Americans of Japanese descent than was previously thought.
In an encouraging development for libertarian feminists, the Libertarian Party of Wake County, North Carolina held their annual convention last Thursday and elected women to fill all four of the officer posts (chair, vice-chair, secretary, and treasurer). Interestingly, my local (formerly male) LP county chair in Nueces County, Texas has also been replaced by a woman (Pamela Heisser). It appears that women who are developing an appetite for liberty are finally becoming fed up with the (mostly male) “armchair quarterback” Libertarians who like to sit on their butts and complain about the current state of affairs without actually doing anything to advance the goals of the party.
Kudos go to Susan Hogarth at HammerOfTruth.net for reporting on this story.
UPDATE 8/27/08: The link to Hammer of Truth now resolves to a domain parking page, so I have had to remove it. The Libertarian Party of North Carolina is still alive and well, however.
The Internet world has experienced some interesting April Fools Day jokes over the past two days.
I received emails from two different family members yesterday about a new service that was being launched by Google called Gmail paper. This new service would allow Gmail users to request paper copies of their email messages and have them delivered to their address free of charge. This “service” turned out to be a hoax, but one of my brothers was temporarily fooled by this. Other Internet users from around the blogosphere called the joke “lame”, while my mother emailed, “This makes no sense!!!!?”.
As we enter the second quarter of 2007, the paid surveys market seems to be picking up steam. This morning, two more paid surveys arrived in my email and I was able to successfully complete them both. Each of the surveys netted $5 and took 10-15 minutes to complete.
The first one was actually pretty interesting; they had us sample several different greeting card ideas and rate them according to how funny we thought they were, whether or not we would buy them, etc. We were able to see the front of all of the cards displayed on the screen as if we were actually shopping for them in a store. By clicking on one of the cards, we could get a closer view of it, open it, and read the message or “punch line” inside. Some of the cards were actually pretty funny while a few others tried to be funny, but did not seem to target my sense of humor very well.
If you have ever tried Coca-Cola Blak, then you probably know that it has a certain coffee flavor to it and is also rather expensive. I happen to have some special experience with this particular product; I was one of a small group of people who had the opportunity to sample this beverage approximately six months before it was ever available for sale in the stores by participating in a paid market research survey.
