Anyway, some of what I’m running across in said surfing.. Oh My Weirdness.

Below is the advertisement that introduced the world to the original Apple computer, in 1984.

This ad pays homage to the sci-fi novel 1984, and the film adaptation of it, in which Big Brother, mythical/quasi-real figurehead of the totalitarian state Oceania, is betimes represented on giant, uh.. telescreens. Obviously, this represents Apple shattering all that Big Brother.. whoever he is/was in real life.. embodies. Then, presumably IBM; later Microsoft.

(Other reading today: Google as Big Brother. Scroll down to the list. After a read-through, I think one must admit it is at least a bit scary, or else one must be declared, possibly, slightly careless. Maybe I don’t care. But I probably do. I am at least delighted and entertained, conceptually, by many of the things posted at google-watch.org.)

My take: anywhere that technology does things against your will, or affects you in ways you might not choose, without informing you, it’s Poorly Conceived technology, and is probably working in some ways Against You. Combine this with attempts by those who produce the technology to have the means of creating or delivering the technology entirely closed and proprietary, forever, insofar as they can assure.. and you have Technological Oligarchy.

This model still holds the day [citation needed], and perhaps it will, in its scope, forever.

I’m not really a fan of the model, but I think going toward an open-standards, open-source, free-everything approach can tend to an opposite extreme. I’m not sure where information-technology democracy is embodied or idealized, or even if it can or should be, and I’d offer snarky or ranting comments for or against this or that, uh, technological thingie, but mostly, I think.. I’m getting by.. I never really attended any of the screeds for or against this or that technology at this or that Hate Week in this or that Oligarchy. But if any of these pretentiously conceived technological oligarchies causes me duress, I may, uh.. let you know..

I’m setting up a 3D render farm at home for hobby work, and installing Windows 7 on new hardware as a base for farm nodes.

As part of installing Windows 7 on these “nodes”, I’ve examined remastering tools, like RTSe7enLite, that allow you to (theoretically) drastically reduce the installed size (and therefore make more efficient the loading and running) of Windows 7. (I’ve had mixed results with RTSe7enLite, and I’ve mostly given up on it for now.) This has led me to discover that a certain folder in Windows 7, \winSxS (for “Windows Side by Side”) takes up almost half of the installed operating system (Windows 7 lands on your hard drive at a whopping ~10 Gigabytes; this is an operating system? No, it’s a cow that ate the whole pasture and is ready to die and/or explode!), all for the sake of managing compatibility with applications and operating system components I will most likely never use on a render farm.

(More interested in Linux now. Linux can be very, very lean and mean..)

There are mixed reports that you can harmlessly remove or drastically reduce the size of the winSxS folder, so I’m looking into that. This led me to a web page which directly quotes from two different Windows technical developers:

• Windows Server Core Team Developer #1:

All of the components in the operating system are found in the WinSxS folder – in fact we call this location the component store.. The WinSxS folder is the only location that the component is found on the system.. Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance (or full data copy) of each version of each file in the OS, and that instance is located in the WinSxS folder.

• Windows Server Core Team Developer #2:

In practice, nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to.. files elsewhere on the system—meaning that the files are not actually in this directory. For instance in the WinSxS there might be a file called advapi32.dll.. however what’s being reported is.. the actual file that lives in the Windows\System32..

They’re talking about slightly different things: the former, Windows Vista, and the latter, Windows 7, but these two operating systems have largely (or entirely?) the same architecture.

So are you still with me? Are we still speaking the same language or did your brain fill up with mud? Technical Developer #1 is emphatic that all “components” in the system reside in WinSxS; says he:

“Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance.. of each.. file.. and that instance is.. in the WinSxS folder.”

.. while Technical Developer #2 explains how WinSxS points to files in many different places:

..nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to.. files elsewhere.. the files are not actually in this directory.

Which is it? Are the files in the folder, or not? Says Developer #2:

The fact that we make it tricky for you to know how much space is actually consumed in a directory is definitely a fair point!

It’s sounding like users aren’t the only ones for whom it is tricky to determine what is actually used and where..

I love this application, but what in the world is with this? I finally tried the obvious, duh approach to finding a solution: google it. I quickly found a page with a proposed fix (from a user with a serious chip on his shoulder).

..You must launch regedit (ALT+R or START->RUN and type regedit and press enter) and go to:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32]

and change NoFileMru from 0×00000001 to 0×00000000

Registry hacking? Oh, brother. However, it worked. Problem solved. Application running normally again.

Since that person’s post saved me grief, I’m paying it forward. You can do the preceding registry hack much faster by using a .reg file. Download the following text (.txt) file, rename the extension to .reg, then double-click it. If Windows doesn’t report successfully importing the information into the registry, try right-clicking the file and then clicking “merge”. These instructions are for a Windows XP account with Administrator rights; Vista users may need to disable User Account Control or run it as an Administrator or whatever.

Registry Fix file (.txt to rename as .reg)

How (technically) did it happen?

By default, Facebook allows all of the following information about you to be shared by your friends:

• Personal info (activities, interests, etc.)
• Status updates
• Online presence
• Website
• Family and relationship status
• Relationship details (significant other, looking for, etc.)
• Education and work
• My videos
• My links
• My notes
• My photos
• Photos and videos I’m tagged in
• About me
• My birthday
• My hometown
• My religious and political views

“Shared” means publicly available for harvesting by facebook applications, or now, apparently, facebook partner web sites (read on). If you’re logged into facebook, here is the link to the friends privacy settings page where you can uncheck all that.

That isn’t the only place with related settings, it seems. This page has a setting for whether “select partner” web sites (which evidently includes CNN) can “personalize your experience” by use of such information.

Even if you disable that, and you have a facebook account and have “added” any reasonable amount of people you know, the following is true: anyone can find your profile page, and from that page, they can learn all the following: your name, gender, “networks”, friend list, and Pages. This (minus a few things you can withhold, like a profile picture and your city) is all defined by Facebook as “publicly available information“.

All of this bothers me. About their “publicly available information” policy, I agree with this blogger – this search of his blog pulls up three posts about it at this writing. The report he links to from the EFF is alarming, and frankly damning. And I never thought I’d agree with the ACLU on any point

It seems to be the most common attitude of social media engineers; that there is no ethical problem in manipulating people into disclosing as much about themselves as possible, and making this information boundlessly and permanently available. They declaim: we respect your privacy. Rubbish! Their bottom line is advertising, and that means the more information about users they can harvest and exploit (with or without your knowledge and express consent), the better their bottom line. End of story – and all the evidence in the ongoing story supports it.

Google Buzz is also terrible with privacy. Here’s the revision as of this writing, of the Wikipedia entry’s section on privacy concerns over that service. Most notable and alarming there is the report that by using Buzz, a woman was found by her abusive ex-husband, because it shared her contact and work information without her knowledge or consent.

This page relates how to disable the service in gmail, or at the least curb what it discloses about you.

Other readings – a blogger who was creeped out by Buzz’ initial release – Google quoted as officially stating “there is no complete privacy” – a blog post that may be fairer to Google. Still, the release of Buzz was recklessly dismissive of (or even contemptuous toward) privacy concerns.

I’m kinda puzzled, though. The newest relevant blog article I can find on it (and here are two previous – 1 – 2) relates that Buzz hasn’t disabled default sharing of your “following” and “followed by” lists, but; in my own test of Google Buzz, after I joined, activated my profile, and logged out, I viewed my public profile link, and it didn’t display who I’m following and who I am being followed by. (I’ve suddenly just imagined a strange and tasteless modern retelling of Jesus’ arrest and mock trial, in which Peter is accused by those around him of following Jesus’ twitter account, and denies it thrice before, erm.. the google cache reveals it.. and Peter goes out and weeps bitterly.) It also said there wasn’t enough information to be indexed, so maybe that’s why. Regardless.. it’s well enough for me to be part of Google’s Brave New World via the search engine and gmail. Sigh – and YouTube.

WARNING: very foul culture exposed in the first link to follow – avoid if you’d rather not know.

[link 1 - link 2 - link 3.]

The article at the first of that group of links explains how easily you can locate any stranger’s house by connecting, as an example, geotags from a flikr account to an individual. But this foursquare service provides all that in one glance, in addition to time information in one glance, for anyone to look up. Any burglar (or worse) who wants to find a target doesn’t even need their name. Time and location is enough.

mindlesstweeter plane landed! did u see my tweets about my new expensive electronics? pls burglarize me!

goods4me @mindlesstweeter: in ur house raiding ur expensive electronics! u cannot find me my accnt is behind anonymus proxy hahaha

Among the 3 million people this census variation is being (apparently) sort of tested on (hey, will they put up with this?), any one of them could be fined $5,000 for failing to answer questions like the following (I summarize):

How many people live in your home? Are any of them Hispanic? Are they citizens? How big is your home? What is your education level? Do you have difficulty making decisions or climbing stairs? Are you able to bathe, dress, or shop alone? How much do you pay for your sewage system? Are you married? What industry do you work in? What is your precise job description? What’s your rent or mortgage payment? Do you own an automobile? Are you covered by health insurance? What type? Are you on food stamps? How much money do you make?

I am not making this up. (Could I? I am not Ray Bradbury, and our world is not yet a Fahrenheit 451 world.) Here is a direct link to the publicly available .pdf form for the questionnaire, which is available from the Census web site here.

Apparently the Census Bureau “rarely” seeks fines for failing to answer. So what? What on earth caused any government official to think it is okay to compel everyday citizens to disclose such excess of private information? In regards to an everyday citizen, so much private information is not the Government’s business. (The puzzled administrative personnel respond: what is private? What exactly do you mean by this term?) Unless your government has evolved much closer to Communism than you may realize. So maybe I’ll make that statement more accurate. Evidently, as things are, precisely such information of everyday citizens is the government’s business – but it should not be.

“..the Web browser has become one of the most critical and trusted relationships of our modern lives – with nearly perfect knowledge of everything we do.”

Um, no.

.. And I’m thankful for the Mozilla Foundation, and search engine optimization, and my search engine ranking, and Firefox plugins.. and please bless that Google will stop nagging me to opt-in to Google Wave..”

The ‘net is great (even arguably crucial), but this sounds like.. actual worship. Wrong god. Idol Fail.

(I actually am thankful for the Mozilla Foundation, though.)

You may find this useful as the days get warmer. Click the image for a much larger version. Here is the original Photoshop format file for you to mess with, and here’s a .pdf version for easier printing, too.

[The header of the concluding section of that article says: "That Was Painless". Um, if you're used to following, say, 42-step technical processes in your everyday work, maybe, in comparison.]

This should be a three to four step process:

1. Click the RSS icon in the address bar of Firefox.

2. Select “Subscribe Using Thunderbird”, which should be available by default (if you want Thunderbird to even be in the equation – which, even if it is, Firefox doesn’t tell you in the subscription button – it assumes you just know). Since this is not available by default, you have to follow a 5 step configuration to make that available.

3. Thunderbird comes up with a window, asking “If you want to add [title of RSS feed] to your Thunderbird RSS Subscriptions, select the account and folder you’d like to add it to.” – providing drop-down menus to select the account and folder.

Theoretically, it’s possible to get it down to such a three or four step task (and that page only got me heading in the general right direction). I haven’t gotten it to work. And this is in lieu of many more hacking steps I’d really rather avoid.

I thought these two applications were kinda cuddly friends? My exploration of the idea doesn’t find any proof..

I’ve become fascinated and very impressed by public-key encryption, which I’d never understood, but have now read up on at Wikipedia.

With this setup, you and you only hold a private decryption “key”. You also have a public encryption key. Anyone can encrypt anything with your public key, but anything so encrypted with your public key can only be decrypted with your private key. Your public key can therefore be completely public.

The only drawback is data duplication: if you want to send an encrypted message to many people, you have to encrypt it for each person.

But, apparently, there is no known way to crack PGP public key encryption. I’ve read that if they build largely usable quantum computers (they have done simple computations with quantum particles!), they maybe could crack it. Meanwhile, it’s invincible.

I’m paranoid that so many millions of people using public email services have all that personal data stored at servers they do not directly control, and that any insider to that server who has ill will could (maybe with effort, depending), hack into their email. If an insider hacks into it, where is your privacy? Bye-bye. (Not to mention the identity theft and fraud possibilities.) Most emails are sent completely naked hopping across so many servers anyway. Sent in plain text. Can be spied on at any server along the way. Moreover, the US Federal Government has a history of attempting to coerce service providers into leaving an open door into any user’s data, should they find cause (and how do you guarantee they won’t do that without cause – never mind without your knowledge?)

Also, if that server you can’t control goes down (and you store messages online), where is all your data? Bye-bye.

Most of what I transmit in email I wouldn’t *terribly* mind being stolen and/or lost. (Never mind that any email can be traced back to its originating location – a whole other problem – unless drastic misdirection/concealment measures are taken. If anyone with enough resources had cause to trace it back to your location, they could.)

However, when I think of emails that actually are private, yet hosted at servers not controlled be me, and crackable by any insider, and sent in plain-text to begin with – and that this is the situation for the vast majority of people’s email addresses – all that makes me squirm. It is for these reasons I consider the following tools marvelous, and their creators heroic.

1. From the creator of PGP: Why you need PGP.
2. Gpg4win, a port of GnuPGP (fully PGP compliant) to Windows. This will allow you to encrypt any data and be sure that nobody can crack it – if you’ve obliterated the pre-encryption remnants scattered on your hard drive’s unused space, that is Don’t lose your private key, or you won’t get at your own data, either.
3. FireGPG, a Mozilla Firefox plugin that uses item no. 2 to add PGP encryption/decryption facilities to the gmail web interface. Create your own PGP key pair, send the public one out, and others can send you messages and be absolutely sure that you and you only can read them. (This is of course fabulous for concealing all kinds of sins – if you’re into all that. Although there are such things as good secrets.)
4. A tutorial on how to -
5. Use this Thunderbird plugin, which also uses Pgp4win to encrypt/decrypt email – in client mail (which is my personal preference).

(I believe I read there is also a port of GnuPGP to the Mac, which would then render Firefox and Thunderbird to have the same facilities on a Mac.)

I’m frankly baffled at why none of this is part of email infrastructure to begin with. And unfortunately, while with work you can get any of the above going, it’s not necessarily easy to grasp at first. This should be built into everything with near transparency.

But all this said, if you should ever wish to send me a secret message that is absolutely un-crackable by anyone but me, here’s my public key (which I tie to my various email addresses, which you’ll be able to look up at a key-server if you install any of the above).

—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32)
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=494Z
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–

I’ve spent more time reading, listening to and watching the advertisements and arguments of the movement I disagree with (No On 8 ) in order to grasp their point of view.

Items:

1. Disappointed “No on 8″ voters protest outside the walls of the Los Angeles Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS or “Mormon”).

One thing at least the protesters aren’t happy about is that, leading up to the Ballot vote, the LDS Church had urged its members to contribute to the cause of the “Yes on 8″ campaign – and it worked.  Wikipedia cites mercurynews.com that about 45 percent of out-of-state donations to “Yes on 8″ came from citizens of the state of Utah (which is mostly populated by Mormons and where the LDS Church is headquartered).

The following YouTube video, about 10 minutes, is footage of the protesters shouting “Go back to Utah!” – “You wanted Armaggedon?” – “SHAME ON YOU!! SHAME ON YOU!!” – and “TAX THE MORMON CHURCH!! TAX THE MORMON CHURCH!” – or that’s everything I picked out.

Slanderous, hate-filled messages on signs (link – Flikr gallery) from protesters condemn Mormons and/or their Church.  The hypocrisy of these signs is well-described at this post at the One Thousand and One Parsecs blog, here.  I would only add that the Flikr gallery evidences vandalism on Temple walls, vandalism of sacred grounds, from people preaching “love” and “tolerance.”

The source of the protesters’ ire?  If, as they believe, they’ve lost a civil right, this is freedom fighting.  What is a slap in the face when you’ve lost your human, your civil rights?  That’s the morality of it, from their vantage.  But this has started to go beyond slaps.  Some apparently felt justified in physically attacking – beating to the ground – an onlooker who, out of pity for the sacred grounds, proceeded to remove the offensive signs – as reported at Meridian (link).

Granting what I think is a radically far stretch, that these beliefs justify such measures (the Democratic process is still very open! – I’m not out slugging Obama supporters because of my disappointment!) – how good are these protesters’ arguments?  Well, I think the aforementioned blog post also dismantles that.

2. There’s contradiction among “No on 8″ supporters in their condemnation of religious reasons for supporting Prop 8.  (There’s contradiction among Mormons, too, which is sad.  Your prophets make their occasional prophetic statement – in this case supporting something – you believe your prophets are prophets, you support it too.  That simple.  Unless you don’t believe they’re prophets.  Which admits complication.)  According to a KUTV report I saw, the “No on 8″ campaign does not support the infamous ad portraying LDS missionaries invading a lesbian couples’ home and shredding their marriage certificate.  However, that campaign has repeatedly singled out the Mormon church as antagonists to their campaign – their news section fairly frequently mentions the Mormon church and Utah, and scarcely mentions the wider religious coalition or other bodies opposed to their campaign.  Clearly the Mormon church is consistently in their sights – and meanwhile, many of thier associates, if not the “No on 8″ campaign itself – these protestors, and the producers of that vile commercial clearly condemn motives for supporting Prop. 8. that originate in religious motivations.  “SEPARATE CHURCH AND HATE!” reads a sign.  “Say NO to a church taking over your government”, says the ad.  Clearly many of these folks are opposed to the LDS church urging a yes vote. Confusing, in light of “No on 8″ often reporting that this or that religious institution urges you to vote no on Prop. 8.  Examples: [link 1]- [link 2] – [link 3, a video, clearly displaying the No on 8 campaign logo]. There was an ad from their campaign with a man clearly stating his church says to vote no – end of ad, final point (wish I remembered the link).  So how would it be not okay for the LDS church to religiously support the Proposition, while it would be okay for any other church to religiously oppose it?

Point to underscore: this is a moral question, often or usually founded in religious feeling. Religion is by definition irrational.  It explains the unexplained and cosmological.  (So does science, more often than we usually admit.)  Opponents to the proposition openly appeal to religion.  So do proponents.  Because, strictly, both are thinking irrationally – that is to say, religiously – they may never agree.  Therefore, appeal to religion has no effective place in discourse over state policy questions, which is what this question is. And we’re mixing those up.  Religion can have appeal to individual citizens’ right of conscience, and how the people collectively vote becomes law. Religion influences the State but is not the State. No religion’s reason dictates the law. That would impinge on the religious right, or right of conscience, of one religious group, while putting forward the other.  Which, as pointed out from my first link, has happened to churches. Won’t put kids up for adoption to gay couples?  Blam – you can’t put up any kids for adoption anymore.  Won’t marry gays?  Blam – out goes your tax-exempt status.  Meanwhile, gays in civil unions in California retain all the same legal rights as heterosexual marrieds.  Who is losing rights?  Whose religiously asserted right is impinging on the rights of others?

A very thought-provoking post at one blog got me, well, thinking:

“One post commented wondering if there was a way for both sides to get what they wanted. There probably is. It would be for the state to acknowledge that homesexuality [sic] is a faith based practice.”

I haven’t even begun to think through the implications of that.  But it made me stop.

Meanwhile, George Lucas.. disappoints me again.  As if the writing in Episodes I-II wasn’t bad enough (if largely redeemed in episodes III, IV and V), now Lucas buys the line that anybody is losing any moral-civil rights, and shells out $100,000 to keep the line going.

When did you not grasp the actual machinations that give rise to an Evil Galactic Empire?

I’ve got to end on a good note.  (That is, unless you disagree with me.) As a Mormon, I’d like to express a thank you to the people who said and created the following.

Subj: OPPOSED to H.R. 5889 The Orphan Works Act of 2008

Dear President Bush,

I am very alarmed by the so-called “Orphan Works Act” of 2008, which has twice very recently been “hotlined” by Senators and has now passed in the Senate.  It is a basic philosophical reversal of copyright law and could spell economic doom – not an overstatement – to the enterprises of countless artists.  If the bill also passes in the house, I ask you simply to veto the bill.  I suggest that your best source of opposition to the bill may be found in the ample resources and rhetoric of the Illustrators Partnership of America.

Sincerely,

Alex Hall

[My street address]

[My phone number]

show

I know health care is expensive. That’s why I’m focused not on making it more expensive, but on making it cheaper, and how you do that? You do it with conservatism! I’m by no means out of touch on this. If the health care industry were priced like every other industry is on the patient’s ability to pay, then we’d fix the problem, and that’s the direction we have to head in.

But if we’re going to keep this notion that everybody’s entitled to have whatever they want medically paid for by their neighbors, then we are finished. We are finished as a country; we are finished as a society. You can talk about my wealth, but let me tell you something, sir. I don’t depend on anybody else for anything, and it was one of my objectives when I grew up. I didn’t want to be obligated. I didn’t want to be dependent. I didn’t want to owe anybody. I don’t buy into insurance plans because it’s a hassle! Now, I know a lot of people don’t have that freedom. I used to not have that freedom, either. But I do now because I worked for it — and if I can do it, a lot more people can do it than think they can, and that’s conservatism again. People are much better than they know. They have much more potential than they know. But when you’ve got a Democrat Party and a movement telling them they suck, telling them they can’t get anywhere because the deck is stacked against them and the people stacking the deck are Republicans and so forth, then you are diminishing the country; you’re diminishing the future, and you’re destroying people’s lives.
……
The health care problem in this country is getting worse, while people are voting on for people who are making it worse because they hear these people saying, “I’m going to fix it.” Well, the people in charge of fixing it have no interest in it getting fixed, because if it gets fixed, you don’t need them. You can rely on yourself. This health care debate is one of the most infuriating things I witness every day, because I get so sick and tired of people buying hook, line, and sinker a lie. “I’m going to get everybody covered. I’m going to make sure everybody gets health insurance in this country. We’re going to make sure it’s not just the rich.” It doesn’t happen, does it? When you have government telling private industry how to operate, this is exactly what you get, and it’s going to happen in energy. It’s already happening in a number of other industries, too. It’s happening in the auto industry…

I’ll add to this. I recently read that the top ten poorest cities in the United States have been governed only by Democrats for the past thirty years. Democrats repeatedly promise this and that measure to raise folks out of poverty, which never happenss, but the next time around folks think maybe it will. Lucy lifts the football every time and you still fall flat on your back. No one says what needs saying: your wealth is your responsibility, so go to work. Of course genuine misfortune can prohibit that. But many poor people work 8 or 10 hour weeks when they could work 40. I suspect lack of motivation generated by welfare dependency. Why work if someone else will pay the bill? I think it was on Bill O’Reilly’s radio show I heard this – kids who know they have a large inheritance don’t work and study as hard. (I would like at this point to declare my forgiveness toward my grandparents for dropping tens of thousands of dollars in my lap when I was only a kid. Yeah, the money didn’t stick around long – but I must also credit my own foolishness. Which I also forgive.) When kids don’t know they have an inheritance, they buck up and study and work harder.

If you are rich, stamp out any suspicion in your kids that you are generous by being a chore-driving pig of a parent. Well, be a nice pig and give them ice cream every now and then. By the way, the LDS church has one smart solution to welfare dependency: welfare recipients work in the orchards, canneries, farms and distribution centers that produce the goods they themselves receive.

State health care is welfare. Someone else gives you what you could earn yourself. It takes away working motivation, dragging workers out of the economy, producing less taxes from less work, giving the government less money to subsidize people’s laziness, and the vicious cycle goes downward until somebody thinks it’s a good idea to say that some people deserve taxes and some don’t, and heck, the rich deserve a lot more taxes – and what do you have? An economy that only thrives because America happens to be exceedingly ingenious despite all the retarded “equality” legislation that strangles everyone, and despite most of the middle classes seeing a whopping forty percent of their income go to government programs that do nothing for anyone other than exist as a mirage that something is getting done.

Who thinks universal health care is a good idea? Hillary Clinton is more religious about it than she is about defeating extremist Islam. Except that she isn’t religious about defeating extremist Islam. For all I know Barack Obama thinks state welfare is a good idea, but I’ve tried not to really pay attention to him or to Clinton.

I guess I have to now, because people swallow their balogna philosophies wholesale.

(12:27:18 PM) Alex Hall: “..Critiques commonly point out that socialist states, such as the U.S.S.R., have been able to derive revenues at a 100% tax rate, though they would have derived more if tax rates had been lower.”
(12:27:35 PM) Alex Hall: Oh, good. I’m glad communists can get higher taxes from rates lower than one hundred percent.
(12:27:42 PM) Alex Hall: !
(12:27:45 PM) MoD: hehe
(12:27:49 PM) Alex Hall: Can you believe that?
(12:27:53 PM) Alex Hall: Ah, Wikipedia.
(12:28:18 PM) MoD: Probably has something to do with people earning more or something
(12:28:47 PM) Alex Hall: Maybe. I haven’t investigated that. I think I’ll go home and see if MY LIFE produces any MOTIVATION which might produce any TAXES.
(12:29:01 PM) MoD: hehe
(12:29:11 PM) Alex Hall: LOL what a joke.