Tax Reform

Everyone hates taxes. There is nothing about my financial situation that pisses me off quite as much as getting my paycheck and seeing exactly how much money the government has dug out of my pockets. Not only that, but in the US at least, taxes are a pretty complicated procedure. I have no clue how to do anything with taxes except pay them and seeth with impotent rage about it. So I'd be pretty open to the idea of tax reform.

Apparently, Mike Huckabee has a plan for this. He has embraced the idea of a national flat sales tax of 23%, instead of the current system. Now I don't know if 23% would be enough to support the monster that is the federal and state governments of this "free" country, but it occurs to me that the adoption of such a system would have one major bonus: the dissolution of the IRS and all related government organisations. There wouldn't really be any way to commit tax evasion; there's no income to lie about or tax returns to file. I'm not sure how much it costs to run the IRS, but I'd bet it's a hell of a lot of money. It would take a more informed man than me to figure out how much that would offset the much larger total budget, but in theory, it seems preferable.

Such a system would also remain progressive - people with higher incomes would still pay more taxes. Not because they have higher incomes, exactly, but because they would (theoretically) be spending more. The percent of thier income that is taxed might be less, but the absolute amount of the tax would be increased. This would mean that everyone would always retain the incentive to make more money; there would be nobody bent on making no more than $49,999 so that they stay out of the $50,000 tax bracket.

The article mentions that this system would be an incentive for people to save money, since it is a tax on spending and not on income. This makes sense to me, but I am under the impression that our economy improves by increasing spending, not reducing it. Rampant spending and lots of debt fuel the fires of the US economy - more spending means more income and more GDP. Not to say there's anything wrong with saving, exactly, but I wonder if excessive saving would save us from the credit failure we're supposed to be entering, only to plunge us into a completely different kind of recession, where people just don't spend enough money.

Seriously?

I just saw a very disturbing video on the Philosopher-King's sheeple-liberating friend's web page, although probably not disturbing in the way he intended most of those videos to be.

In this video, some psychologist guy designed a zombie-shooting game intended to put the player into a "catatonic trance." When they finally get someone to play the game and they pass out (still standing, by the way - a little suspicious), the psychologist comes out of hiding, puts the player onto one of those hospital beds, and wheels him over to a set designed to look exactly like the video game. They leave him (again standing up with a paintball gun in his hand - even more suspicious) and blow a horn to wake him up. After the subject runs around for a little bit trying to find his way out of this creepy place he's woken up in, doors around the room open, and people dressed as zombies come out, walking in the zombie fashion and groaning for brains. Shockingly enough, the dude freaks out and eventually starts shooting them with the paintball gun.

I'm not sure if this was supposed to be surprising or something, or if we're supposed to be shocked at how easily this guy started shooting at people, but come on... what would you do? If you woke up in a strange room surrounded by deformed people who looked like zombies and kept coming at you while groaning for brains, what would you do? Most people would be freaked out if a single hobo came up and tried to touch them. I don't think his reaction was surprising at all...

What was surprising was what happened afterwards. Eventually the psychologist dude came out and put the subject into a trance again (by putting his hand on the guy's face and saying something - also suspicious), wheeled him back to the video game machine, and woke him up again. The subject looked around at his friends and said "awesome game!"

His friends, by the way, didn't try to stop this at all, but actually helped the psychologist do all this crap. Which is also suspicious, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't let some random dude do this to anyone I know...

So basically, I have two questions for everyone. First, isn't this illegal somehow? Second, what would you do if you woke up in a room surrounded by zombies?

Genius!

Facebook is a pretty popular network these days. Personally, I don't use it very often, but whenever I do log in, I usually have 10 or so invitations to various groups or events, most of which I ignore without reading. Sometimes, however, a group catches my eye as intriguing: 1,000,000 Strong for Colbert, for instance, or I bet I can Find a Million People who Dislike George Bush. I was reading through the discussion board of the latter group, chuckling to myself at all the comments, when I came across a link that I just could not pass up - a site called Kill Bush.

I imagine you can all figure out the agenda of this site without much help, but what I found really funny (besides the fact that sites like this exist) was a clever grammatical device they used in one of their stories. It's pretty apparent that whoever made the site is not exactly a grammarian, as the majority of the text is wrong in some way or another. However, a phrase that I noted immediately was the figure they cited as the number of people Bush has killed, or something like that: "tenths of millions."

This is pure genius.

I actually didn't even notice when I first read it what it actually said, until, a few sentences later, it occurred to me that the entire population of Iraq is something like 30 million. I admit I haven't been keeping up on the death tolls, but I think I would have heard about it if a third of the country had died. The author of this article has come up with a way to inflate figures without actually inflating them: use fractions that sound like big numbers. The next time I complain about my tuition bill, I'm going to say that I'm in debt by hundreths of millions of dollars. Maybe I can get a tax break that way.

Either that, or the author actually meant to say "tens of millions," and just sucks so bad at writing that he/she didn't notice that they used the wrong word. That's probably more likely.

"So what are your opinions on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the precipitation of World War I?"

I imagine if the Treaty of Berlin had remained inviolate ad infinitum, the entire issue might have been avoided. Alternatively, I suppose if the July Ultimatum was never sent, the fallout of the assassination, while still throwing Austria-Hungary into chaos, would have been significantly alleviated for the rest of the continent.

I never actually expected someone to respond to that question...

Well, I suppose in any case it's better than "would you believe me if I told you I was black from the waist down?"


Sometimes I wonder...what do normal people talk about?

I am an Idiot.

So apparently the Boston Red Sox won the World Series sometime over the weekend. Through an unfortunate coincidence of assignments and exams, I somehow managed, despite living in downtown Boston, to remain completely unaware of this until today. I didn't find out until I walked into my Introduction to Philosophy elective at around noon, mentally running through everything we'd learned up until now, since we were supposed to have an exam today. I entered the room, only to find it empty but for the professor, who informed me that on account of the celebration in progress downtown, the exam was cancelled. Instead of administering the test, he handed out a couple questions and told us to do them at home and email our answers to him at our leisure, as long as he gets them by Friday afternoon. So rather than taking an exam, the class gets to go celebrate with the Red Sox. Well, except for me, of course, because I still had a road to design by 4:30.

Why the hell aren't I a philosophy major??? I'm fairly certain none of my engineering professors would cancel an exam so that the students could go get drunk before noon.

Question...

A few days ago I went to the library in an effort to follow in my more philosophically-minded brother's footsteps and read The God Delusion. I am interested to see what he says, as I have heard him described, albeit hyperbolically, as the greatest thinker of our time. Unfortunately, the book was checked out, and so I settled instead for another book by Dawkins, entitled The Selfish Gene. I am probably about 3/4 of the way through it, and so far it is interesting and I have had almost no major disagreements with what he says. He focuses on evolution with respect to the genes of an individual (his catch phrase is the "survival machine", manufactured by the gene to facilitate its replication), and appears to be able to explain the theory pretty well as far as I can see. I do, however, have one big question about evolution which I have not found in his book thus far, which perhaps someone might be able to help me with. Natural selection is pretty much a universally accepted principle nowadays, and it seems perfectly sound to me - using Dawkins' language, genes which produce flawed bodies would fail to reproduce themselves and become less numerous in the gene pool, while genes producing fitter bodies would become more numerous. Eventually the unfit ones would die out completely and the species could be considered to have evolved.
The problem with this is the enormous complexity that we observe in the world. Evolution can explain species changing, but it does not seem to explain them growing more diverse. In fact, Dawkins himself points out that genes which fail to replicate themselves perfectly would become less numerous in the gene pool. Natural selection does not account for variation, it should actually eliminate it.
Suppose an animal's (say, a giraffe's) habitat is suddenly changed in such a way that only by having a long neck could it survive. We are inclined to say that the species develops and "evolves" a longer neck, but this is not how it happens. In reality, giraffes with short necks die off and giraffes with long necks live. This is the essence of natural selection. While we could say that the species "evolves" a longer neck, all that really happens is that the average neck length increased, because you killed off all the animals with short necks. The genetic makeup of a giraffe did not really evolve; that's like saying a school gets smarter when the stupid students drop out. No individual student will get smarter - it is only the average which increases. In the same way, a giraffe's neck could not get longer because giraffes with short necks died out. The giraffe could only have developed its long neck if there existed, prior to the need for a long neck, at least one individual of each sex within the population with the long neck that we see today. After the change, all the other giraffes would die and only these relatively few would be available to "rebuild" the species in their own image, namely, that long neck. But that neck would not, barring extremely fortuitous genetic mutation, be longer in the next generation than it was in the previous.
Natural selection can take advantage of an existing variation within a population to change the average genetic makeup of that population, but it cannot actually perform a feat of evolution as it is purported to have done. Proponents of evolution then seem to be left with random mutations to provide this variation which natural selection can then choose between. It is my understanding, however, before reading Dawkins' book, that mutations are incredibly rare and random occurrences which are overwhelmingly more likely to harm an animal than help it anyway, and in addition, Dawkins himself seems to say that gene mutation should decrease through evolution, as it is only genes which replicate themselves to the most reliable extent possible that persist through the ages.

Anyone care to explain this discrepancy to me? I may not have much respect for Dawkins, but too many other learned people are staunch supporters of evolution for me to dismiss it readily. I feel as though I must be missing something.

Damn It, Ray!

So I've just watched the YouTube rendition of Ray Comfort's ABC debate with a couple atheists. I'll admit I only watched part of it (I got too pissed off to finish the whole thing), but one question struck me pretty quickly: Why are the people we see arguing for Christianity on television always so stupid? I know at least a dozen people who could have done a better job than Mr. Comfort in that debate, and half of them aren't even really Christians. I should mention that I'm not too happy with the atheists either (although I think one of them was at least smarter than Ray), but the burden of proof was not on them, so all they had to do was find out how Ray screwed up... a much easier task.
What really gets me is that I think Ray started out with a good point; the idea that when we see a building, we know there was a builder - when we see a painting, we know there was a painter. And then he does something really stupid. He uses this to say that since we "prove" the existence of a painter from the existence of a painting, we can "prove" the existence of a Creator from the existence of Creation. This is where he pissed me off. The atheist on the other end of the debate made the point that we can call the builder or the painter, while we cannot call the Creator.
Almost a good point, but this doesn't really prove that the builder built this or the painter painted this. Now what Ray could have done is said that it is reasonable to believe that the painter and the builder are not lying to us, and whatever documentation exists is accurate. We therefore take it on faith that the builders and painters we call are not lying to us, and that the documentation was not forged. We cannot prove this; but it is reasonable to believe it. By the same token, you could say that it is reasonable to believe in a Creator. You could say that we take things on faith every day of our lives - why are we so opposed to taking something like the existence of God on faith? But Ray doesn't do that. He continues to pretend that he can prove scientifically the existence of God, when really it is impossible to prove almost anything at all. Scientific proofs are not about what it true anyway, they are about what it is reasonable to assume is true. If people could see this, then they could make much more intelligent arguments.
People like Ray's biggest problem in these debates is the burden of proof; if they would stop thinking of it as proof and start thinking of it as reasonable belief, maybe they'd get somewhere. Or maybe they still couldn't go anywhere with it. I don't know. They might not be smart enough to ever get anywhere. I just wish we could start finding real intellectuals to consider intellectual.