For some reason, it really pisses me off when someone argues that corporations aren't paying enough in taxes. And it really pisses me off when someone argues that there's these large tax shelters or loopholes. For a few days I couldn't figure out exactly why it ticks me off so much. I debate tons of issues on this site and none of them get me mad. Heck, sometimes I take up the opposing point of view just for a good debate. But on taxes, something about them really irritates me. I ha...
A reader writes: And would you agree with a prevailing opinion (and not just from Democrats) that America's higher moral position has been eroded under the Bush presidency - circa WMD, acting without more European/World support, prisoner abuse scandal, etc. Seems like to me John Kerry would have to shave his head and proclaim himself surpreme leader of the white race to do more damage internationally than Bush has. Sorry for the mental picture of John Kerry that way. But I am curious to know s...
Luckily, most vile people on this earth don't pick up on an ideology. And of those that do, few of them are well spoken enough to gather any attention. Unfortunately, that still leaves us with a number of vile human beings that manage to get their despicable world views broadcast to the world. And most of these vile creatures tend to be from the far left. I don't pretend to know why most of them are left wingers. Maybe it's because there are simply fewer nasty creatures on the right tha...
Good parenting theory is the first thing that gets thrown out the window when you have kids. When my boys do something wrong, I know I need to discipline them. But how much? How often? In what cases? It's always very tough. I look at their sweet faces and it's so hard to discipline them when they do something wrong. But I know, deep down, that the most important factor for success in life is having personal discipline. Talent and intelligence can take you some of the way but withou...
Recently finished John Stossel's Give Me A Break . John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC's 20/20. It's his segments I have traditionally enjoyed the most because he's always struck me as being fair. He goes after companies, organizations, and even the government if they fit a fairly simple criteria: Are they ripping off Americans?Stossel has been under fire recently which is something that took him a bit by surprise. He started out as being the guy who exposed all those seedy big corporations. The p...
One of the things that always bugs me is when people say things like "the truth is somewhere in the middle" between two parties. I hear that kind of moral equivalence argument all the time. But where the heck does it come from because while technically true, in spirit it is not. In my experience, when two parties disagree about some issue and have different versions of events, odds are that one of the parties accountings of events will be predominantly true and the other party's predomi...
People who know me personally know that I'm rarely serious. In person, I tend to crack jokes and be jovial. I'm rarely serious about things -- at least on the surface. But one thing I do take seriously is friendship. There is little I won't do for my friends. And my capacity to forgive slights (real or imagined) is pretty big. It takes a lot for a friend to get me upset because all actions performed by my friends tend to be filtered through my rose-colored glasses. The downside...
Tonight I'll be on CNBC's "Bullseye" show. It's on at 6pm EST (my segment will be on around 6:30). I'll be driving into Detroit for the satellite hook up. With the political season ramping up, it's going to be pretty exciting to see how things turn out. Things are so close and could go either way. Perfect timing for the game. The Political Machine is a strategy game in which players take on the role of a campaign manager of a US presidential candidate. &...
The Political Machine's statistical model is not poll based. When we designed it, we concluded that since ultimately it's a video game, we should only concern ourselves with the macro-based statistics. That meant not worrying about day to day fluctuations in polls. Instead, the goal was to use data (political party registrations, exit polling, census data, etc.) that was publicly available to get a clear understanding of the people who live in the states. From there, we then look at the...
The GUI Olympics is an inter-website user interface design contest to see who can come up with the best skins and icons for Windows. On the skins side in 2004, the tools are WindowBlinds (to skin the Windows GUI) and Winamp 5. The icons are packaged with Stardock IconPackager . Week 4 results: EVENT: Best Pseudo-OS WindowBlinds visual style (skin that one could imagine coming with an alternative OS) Author Skin b0se Vecto...
JoeUser.com is unique in the sense that it is, the first (and to my knowledge) only blog site that integrates all the blogs together into a single meta blog community. There are plenty of free blog sites out there. BlogSpot for example is vastly more popular than JoeUser.com is and in all likelyhood ever will be. But JoeUser bloggers get a few key advantages: Every site promotes every other active site/article/post. The blogger on Blogspot or some other blog is not li...
There's been an interesting discussion regarding the War on Terror. Simply put, the discussion revolves around what the causes of 9/11 were, did the US "deserve" to be attacked and does the US really need to understand the "root causes" in order to win. Opinions vary on this, of course. But I will submit that historically speaking, WHY rarely, if ever matters. Nation states don't ask why something happened to them. They react instead to what actually happened. We may not like this. We may w...
Today is the 10-year anniversary of the day Debbie and I got married. I can't believe it. It's been such a fun and wonderful time for us. Looking back on those 10 years.. Once upon a time… When I met Debbie, it was explosive. Literally. We were in EE 221 lab together at Western Michigan University. We were building a power supply. My power supply would have worked perfectly except for one crucial misstep: my circuit didn’t include a resistor which, coupled with 110 volts created a small fi...
Terrorism, by definition, is the act of performing random acts of violence towards a civilian population for the express purpose of creating fear and uncertainty and is performed by persons with no definitive origin. Al Qaeda wasn't targeting some person in the world trade center. They were simply murdering as many people as they could in the most arbitrary way to instill fear and panic amongst their enemies. Moreover, if a military aircraft from country X wrongly bombs a building full of ...
I remember now why I don't like doing GUI Olympics/Championships . The horror...the horror. There's always someone who thinks their entry is the end all be all and wants to make everyone miserable for not being given their kudos. I'm used to the WindowBlinds community or more specifically, the WinCustomize community. The world's largest skinning community that is also one of the most friendly and mature. It's a fun place to hang out with. A place where the skinners are more diplomati...