What a brilliant article. Someone is finally pointing out that, in America, the rich are more wealthy that they have ever been, and paying less taxes on top of it. And all of this over the top spin that the richest one percent are unduly having to support health care is just a load of bollocks — the figure in question is not even nine tenths of one percent of the Bush tax cuts. And we have all witnessed the job (mythical) job creation that goes on when you give more money to the ultra wealthy during the Bush regime (ie NONE).
According to government figures, 1-percenters’ share of America’s total income is the highest it’s been since 1929, and their tax rates are the lowest they’ve faced in two decades. Through bonuses, many 1-percenters will profit from the $23 trillion in bailout largesse the Treasury Department now says could be headed to financial firms. And, most of them benefit from IRS decisions to reduce millionaire audits and collect zero taxes from the majority of major corporations.
[Emphasis added]
The article concludes with a simple message that I have found is completely lost on the right (particularly those who profess to be very religious):
For his part, Obama has responded with characteristic coolness — and a powerful counterstrike. “No, it’s not punishing the rich,” he said. “If I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that’s part of being a community.”
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dubious, politics
politics
Hard to believe that the average self-important New Yorker would give Cincinnati a second thought, but I am glad that the New York Times did the write up that they did on visiting Cincinnati.
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cincinnati, travel
travel
Interesting research and demos of wearable computing and speculation that it might ‘blow mobile phones away’. While the demos are cool, I think the practicality of it remains to be seen. It seems that just like voice recognition was going to make it so much easier to interact with desktop computers (it didn’t) that a lot is being invested in these gesture-based systems that probably will struggle to work outside the lab in ‘real world’ conditions (variable light, no fixed background, uncontrolled contrast, etc).
It will be fun to see how this develops over time but I am not anticipating anything useful in the next few years.
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gadgets, internet, interfaces, mobile, ui, usability, wearable
gadgets
I guess with tattoos and piercings becoming increasingly common, you have to look elsewhere for a new way to disfigure yourself. In Japan, this can be achieved through saline injections. Warning: the photos can be quite disturbing to some.
Picture the scene: five people, each with hideously distorted heads, tubes sticking into their faces. Reminiscent of a medical experiment gone hideously wrong, you’d be forgiven for thinking they had a gross infection or disease. They look like alien abductees, fresh from invasive research by their interplanetary masters. But these are Japanese club kids, otherwise known as bagelheads, deliberately disfiguring themselves by experimenting with saline inflations.
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badideas, random, strange
misc
Here is a creative use of Twitter: creating a visualization of air travel by tracking tweets with the text ‘Just landed’. The original idea for this came out over beers as an alternative way to create transmission models to track things like H1N1 flu virus spread.
Technorati Tags:
innovation, mapping, twitter, visualization
misc
