One of my local free papers–the Philly City Paper–recently ran a sort of bitch-fest story about the city sending a $300 bill to a local blogger, Marilyn Bess, after Marilyn, presumably, registered her blog as a business on her federal tax return. The $300 bill is a business privilege tax and it applies to blogs like Marilyn’s because, according to the city:
Therefore, for federal income taxes, an individual who claims these earnings as a business can receive deductions for their computer or web hosting as a business expense.
I assume this is a true and accurate statement, because, uh, the government would not lie to me, no sir. I file my taxes online every year, utilizing whatever free service I can find, and go for maximum speed, deducting nothing. I assume I make so little that whatever errors I render won’t cause the IRS to beat me too handily in the event of an audit. So even though this blog does not carry advertisements and it certainly costs me money (thus firmly qualifying as a hobby), I wonder: what kind of discount could I have gotten on this here MacBook? And how much can I get reimbursed for my Interwebs hookup and my GoDaddy bill? Anybody out there have a clue?
According to the City Paper, the actual point of the article was “to question the propriety of making people who earn practically no money have to pay a $300 fee just because they chose to report those earnings to the IRS”. I do wonder, though, if what you’re doing earns you practically nothing, but your reporting it gets you slammed with a $300 business bill, well, you’re probably doing it wrong.
The latest in the long line of astonishing TED talks is David McCandless’ presentation on the numbers we hear in the news. Pretty much everything he displays in interesting or infuriating or simply eye-opening, but 2:35 particularly got my attention.
A quick statistic that is simply and well visualized in the talk:
The more I think about it, though, the more I think that this must be some sort of clever p.r. strategy. I’m actually almost desperate to believe that this is a conscious strategy on Goldman’s part because if this really is what it looks like — if these people really are that blind and stupid — then that makes their exalted, entrenched position as mega-oligarchs endlessly lording over us truly horrifying, in a the-universe-is-random, black-comedy sort of way. It’s like making it all the way to the end of The Wizard of Oz and finding out that the Wizard is a hospital patient on a Haldol drip pushing a mop down the corridor of a cranial injury ward.
That’s just too hard for me to accept, for the moment anyway. So I’m choosing to believe they’re doing this on purpose, [...]
I spend what I feel is an enormous amount of time pondering vaccination and the anti-vaccination movement. Maybe this time simple seems enormous because it’s a subject that has almost no direct bearing on me. I have no children, nor do I interact with any children with any regularity. I am not in medicine, nor do I desire to be (though the Red Cross is giving me track marks from all the blood I give them). I guess it’s my general interest in Why People Do Stupid that keeps my ear to the vaccination-ground (not to mention my nose to the vaccination-grindstone and my eye on the vaccination-ball. Do cliches become new again if you use enough of them? Can you lap around?).
Anyway, for those of you in the dark because you, like me, aren’t parents nor pediatricians, here’s the skinny: vaccines are given to adorable babies so they don’t die. Some people believe that, while the not-dead babies are still adorable post-vax (vax is vaccination-nerd slang for you, free of charge), they’re not exactly as autism-free as they were. That is, more clearly: vaccines apparently cause autism. This is patently untrue, of course. But no one is quite sure what does cause vaccines, and since we’re talking about children and scared parents, we’re talking emotions. And when the fight is Science+Facts v. Emotions+SickBabies, well, you can guess who wins.
Above is Joe Albietz, a pediatrician in Denver, CO, making the case for vaccines. His numbers are simple, few, and deliberately affecting. There are already too many easily-cured diseases out there killing people, we don’t need to bring back the old ones.
For a long time in America, atheism has been long associated, rather unfortunately, with hedonism and anarchy. To be atheistic is to be evil, to hold no values, to be young and crass and cruel. The word itself is negative; it is merely the word theist with a privative a attached indicates an absence or a negation of the root word. Atheists believe in the absence of a god, but this reality is taken to an extreme: they believe against a god.
The response by the atheists has been to look for a new word to describe themselves. Some have declared agnosticism, a word which connotes either a lack of thought on the matter, or the belief that, even if there IS a god, that god cannot be known, for certain. Some prefer non-believer, but that carries the same baggage as atheism. Many have taken humanism (especially secular humanism), and that term received a shout-out from the President at the National Prayer Breakfast this year.
It would seem the newest term to gain the minds and preferences of the un-religious is “Nones”. Or maybe that’s just “nones”. This usage seems to stem from survey question that goes something like:
Religion?
A. Christian
B. Jewish
C. Muslim
D. Hindi
E. Other
F. None
Today, the proportion of Independents who are Nones has leaped from 12 percent to 21 percent; and the percentage of Democratic Nones has doubled from 6 percent to 16 percent. In stark contrast, the GOP share has fallen from 8 percent to 6 percent. I’d say that’s a function of the GOP becoming an essentially Christianist fundamentalist party; and the Democrats having lots of Irish, Jewish and Asian supporters, who are the strongest groups in the None cohort.
The Nones are not wealthier than average, but they are more male. Almost 20 percent of American men are Nones, compared with 12 percent of women.
61 percent of Nones find evolution convincing, compared with 38 percent of all Americans. And yet they do not dismiss the possibility of a God they do not understand; and refuse to call themselves atheists.
But that’s “none”, as in “Religion: none”. If “a-theists” don’t like being defined as against a God they don’t believe in, “None” is worse still. An atheist is, truly, someone without belief in God. Though the Trinity study says most “Nones” are not actively hostile to religion, the name makes it sound like “Nones” believe in nothing at all. I’m sure most “Nones” wouldn’t appreciate that. Or perhaps, consistent with the name, they just don’t care.
Personally, though I am not one, I’ve often been more comfortable with people who self-identify as atheists (or one of its many synonyms) than I have with the religious.
From 2009’s TED conference comes a Dutch architect whose buildings are so interesting and so pleasant to behold, and yet, so simple, I must ask: why doesn’t everybody do it this way?
I have worn glasses for the past 22 years, roughly, since the age of three or so. I received my first pair of bifocal lenses at the age of eight. Finding they did little for me that holding a book at a somewhat greater distance couldn’t do, I dropped the bifocals, and have endured increasingly more severe prescriptions ever since. My vision has yet to stabilize, and every new pair of glasses I receive becomes obsolete within a few months of reception. I am ever-squinting, and likewise frustrated.
This has left me deeply sympathetic to anyone else who can hardly see. A British physicist, Joshua Silver, has been developing a cheap pair of glasses that can be made by anyone. Glasses without the need of optometrists. They currently run about $19. That price will have to come down, since they are trying to get glasses to people who make less than $1 per diem. Here he is explaining his work:
My friend Julia has a deep and abiding love for Central America. Her love is for Honduras in particular (with this business causing her no small amount of distress), but it extends in personal way to, essentially, all those poor who live and toil in the Spanish sun. Anyway, she and some of her talented friends were in El Salvador filming a documentary on the after-effects of the El Salvador civil war (which ended in ‘92), when the news of the disappearance of Marcelo Rivera came out. The civil war documentary was put on hold, and they filmed this short film on Rivera. It’s 8 minutes long, and is both infuriating and compassionate. Tell your friends.
