Over the past few weeks I’ve heard sound bites from Barak Obama’s presidential campaign on various new programs. The subject of Social Security reform has come up a few times, and Obama floated the idea of raising the Social Security tax cap. Tax cap!? This was news to me so I decided to do a little research.
Your average person pays 6.2% of their gross income to Social Security. This amount is matched by your employer. By this logic a person making $20,000 should pay $1,240 and someone making $20,000,000 should pay $1,240,000. But no, that person making 20 million dollars pays only $90,000 (or 0.45%) of their gross income. Basically, any annual income over ~$1,453,000 is taxed exactly the same: $90,000. I know what you’re thinking: what the fuck is that bullshit!?
Conservative groups will have you believe that raising or removing the tax cap would hurt the middle class by increasing their taxes (obviously, this is a lie; who said anything about changing percentages?) and hurt the economy by keeping spendable wealth from the super rich. Oh boo-fucking-hoo. This isn’t a tax hike, this is keeping things fair. If all men are created equal, why shouldn’t we be taxed equally? Why should the middle class be shouldered with the majority of the tax burdon, while the top 1% take the smallest hit possible? I understand people want to keep their money, but $1,000 hurts a lot when you don’t make much money while $90,000 is pocket change to the super rich.
Despite the fact that there has never been an act of foreign terrorism in the country, beginning November 20th Japan will require all foreigners (tourists and residents) to be fingerprinted and photographed every time they enter the country under the guise of anti-terrorism measures. The only exceptions to this new policy are diplomats, children under 16 and the Zainichi (generally Chinese or Korean brought to Japan during WWII). Many long term residents are furious, and wait times in the immigration lines are sure to increase to obnoxious levels. No word on foreigners with Japanese passports, though I doubt they would be affected. Residents were able to defeat a similar policy in 2000.
I’m hearing complaints from people who have been residents 20+ years, yet I can’t help but wonder why would be a resident of a country for such a long time and not become a citizen. Do you like renewing your work visa every few years? Is there certain benefit to retaining the passport of your home country? (Japan does not allow dual citizenship.) Very frustrating, I’m sure, when you’ve already got a gaijin card, but hopefully they’ll set up a system for people who travel outside of the country frequently.
The world is running amok with rapists, murderers and child molesters while the police are busy busting people for file sharing.
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A few observations made a while back that I never got around to posting. This kind of attitude I won’t miss at all.
Killing animals: OK; Gambling: bad.
Having children at the age of 14: OK; Using birth control: bad.
Intolerant nationalism: OK; Questioning your government: bad.
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Brian Lam throws his bag of Halo 3 swag off his apartment’s balcony, says Master Chief dies at the end, becomes my hero.
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I got pissed just reading this. I’m surprised we don’t hear all sorts of stories about “technicians” being stabbed or beaten to death.
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Comic Sans. Need I say more? Oh how I pine (pun intended) for the days of text only email. Back before the dullards of the world could show us they really do have a fun side by using custom fonts and lots of color. I’m sure a healthy portion of perfectly good bandwidth and server storage is going to waste because of this. Were I an IT exec somewhere, and my people were using seasonal colorings, floral backgrounds and “fun” or “playful” fonts like Comic Sans in business communications, there would be hell to pay. Sure, you may say I’m no fun, call me a party pooper or worse. But the fact remains that email was invented as a way to quickly exchange messages. Let me present to you a few reasons why I dislike HTML email.
The majority of individuals that use HTML email have no design sense or color coordination. Besides that, not every email client renders HTML email the same way, and the recipient may not be seeing it the way the sender intended.
Colored, obnoxious fonts and graphical or colored backgrounds do not help get your message across. When you write a letter to someone, do you write your message in crayon on colored construction paper?
It takes longer to get to the “meat” of the email. Granted it’s not as bad as it used to be, but there are times when HTML emails just don’t come through right and you are stuck wading through a bunch of tags and code, searching for the actual message.
One must remember that when you’re sending a business email you are representing the company. Would you like it if one of your coworkers made you look like an idiot to your customers? Give them the same respect.
Honestly, do you really need huge bright purple text on a floral print backdrop to tell me that you think your printer is broken? And people wonder why I set my mail client to strip all formatting…
