Stuff You Find In The ‘Tubes’
I was anticipating a rant from a ‘winger neighbor on Tax Day, so I double checked my standard response to anyone down in here in South Fundistan about taxes:
Romans 13:6-7 [KJV]
For this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.
Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.
It doesn’t convince them, of course, but they have to consult their current preacher to find out why they could ignore it.
I happened to see a New York Times article, Professor Cites Bible in Faulting Tax Policies, in the results and checked to see if it would cover the response from the neighbor, but it definitely didn’t.
Susan Pace Hamill is a professor at the University of Alabama law school focusing on tax law, business law, and ethics. In addition to her law degrees, she has a degree in divinity from Samford University, the same program that produced Albert Mohler of Focus on the Family, so you can assume this is not a place noted for teaching “liberation theology”.
The NYT article was covering her contention that “the state and local policy of thirty-one states grossly violates the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics” when it comes to taxes. Essentially she argues that the teachings of the New Testament support progressive income taxes, and a moral duty to assist the less fortunate.
You have to wonder why she isn’t a regular guest at Democratic events, or on media shows …
11 comments
I decided to post this because it might make you & bt (and anyone whose ever been a sys/db admin) feel a bit better (whilst at the same time sympathizing with this poor guy!) 😉
It’s a blog I read now and then called “i void warranties”. (and kudos on the title!) 😉 😀
RAIDers of the lost archives
The previous post it fairly typical also, and I’ve been there!
Throwing hardware at the problem
Sounds like major problems with the power. I would have probably put a voltage grapher on the line to check for fluctuation and see if a voltage regulator was required. High end, true UPS’s deal with that, but too many people say UPS when they should say battery back-up.
Shouldn’t complain, it keeps admins employed.
Oooh, love those silent failures. Reminds me of the time I happened to check /proc/mdstat and noticed my brand new mirrored 2 terabyte RAID array had failed. Checking the logs, it’d been failed for three days. I was supposed to get email. I checked the email queue. It whined that the certificate for my upstream email server had expired and refused to flush. Whiiine! So now I get an email to my mail server from my file server every single day saying all is well, just to prove that I can get email from my file server. Siiiigh! (The problem, BTW, was a SATA cable that apparently I hadn’t fully pushed in, which apparently had vibrated loose due to all those freakin’ fans that server manufacturers insist upon putting into their servers nowadays despite the fact that modern server hardware makes no more heat than server hardware Back In The Day did, but hey, if they have *twelve* fans instead of just *eleven* fans that’s a marketing checkmark, right?!).
One piece of advice: If you are currently running RAID5 on multi-terabyte hard drives, *DON’T*. Seriously. Don’t. Throw sufficient hardware at it to run RAID6. Seriously. I’m not joking. Running RAID5 on multi-terabyte hard drives is just *asking* for a fatal disk error, because RAID rebuilds often push another marginal drive into failure. And two drives on RAID5 = RAID toast. It’s not worth it. (And if you *really* have surplus budget, throw another drive in there as a hot spare, eh?). And if your server is running some primitive OS that can’t do RAID6… well. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is looking pretty good right now, I’ve found a few bugs around the edges but the core server stuff is rock solid.
– Badtux the Geeky Penguin
Gee, Badtux, everyone knows that fans don’t use any power or generate any heat or noise on their own.
When I have the time I mess with the cases and customize the cooling systems to reduce the noise and the heat at the same time. If heat is a problem, there are a lot of solutions out there.
RAID is as much art as science, and you really need to think it through, and then be ready to admit you screwed up after it goes live and you see how things are really working.
I used to watch people installing ever faster processors to speed up data bases and ignoring the fact that the processors were generally sitting idle while the disk drives were flogging themselves to death. Larger caches and faster drives aren’t nearly as “sexy” as raw processor speed.
ROFL on the disk drive deal. Won’t go into details but definitely informs some design decisions for storage systems at work, people ask why we do some things that are clearly not CPU-optimal, well, you got two quad-core Nehalems or better in a box, CPU is *not* going to be your problem :). Rather, pumping all that data to hard drive’s going to be the problem.
At one prior employer I wrote the sensors code for our OS and the moment we got one of our new 48 drive systems in from the supplier we’d outsourced the design to, I ran the sensors code and all hell broke loose. Two of the CPU’s in this quad-CPU system were running at 90+C even at idle, two banks of the hard drives were running at 65C, in general the cooling was a freakin’ mess despite the fact that the thing had so many fans that when it started up, it sounded like a friggin’ 747 at idle. Getting *that* one right required lots of playing around with cardboard and tape to create baffles to direct airflow to the things that were getting hot, entirely different fans for the front two CPU’s (which were being partially blocked by hard drive controller boards) which had a lower profile and higher flow, and otherwise delayed shipping of the machine by close to four months between getting the airflow design fixed in-house and getting the supplier to actually make the changes to the real live box they were stamping out. Not that it really mattered, by that time we’d already missed our ship window by twelve months anyhow, dooming the company because competitors with more mature reputations and more mature products had noticed what we were doing and were already coming out with products that did what ours did, except better. Outsourcing was supposed to be the secret sauce that let that company do things better and faster than the established incumbents. Instead, doing things via outsourcing proved to slow things down so much that even hoary old EMC, which moves at the speed of turtle, managed to beat us to market with an equivalent product…
Boeing is discovering the joys of outsourcing with its newest airliner – the parts don’t fit together even though they are manufactured to specifications. The problem would seem to be that everyone went with the same side of the Plus-Minus, and things won’t line up for assembly. They are also discovering that they can’t get spare parts from some of the older types, because the sources can’t or won’t make the parts.
Oh, yes, outsourcing is the magic answer.
That sounds like the original IBM-AT that was shipped with the drive ribbons blocking all air flow over the motherboard. The cables were certainly neat as opposed to earlier IBMs, but if you didn’t install longer cables and re-route them the motherboard was toast. IBM consistently installed the longest boards next to the power supply that was providing the ventilation. It meant the dealers either had to open every box and move things, or be prepared for a lot of returns.
I’ll never forget the “custom box” that one client had that trapped all of the dust inside. The filter was on the outlet instead of the inlet. I assumed that they had made a last minute design change and no one thought it through, or the fans were installed backwards.
Mr. Duff, once again you are repeating the lie by exclusion, implying that the income tax is the only tax that is paid, and ignoring the FICA tax which now generates as much revenue as the income tax, and is only paid by wage earners.
You are also paying homage to the “Revelation of the Cocktail Napkin of Laffer™ – as tax rates approach zero, tax revenues approach infinity” which has been thoroughly disproved by a record of thirty years.
The middle and working classes have watched their tax bills increase while all of the breaks go to the top 1%. We have watched our deficits balloon because of this tax policy and the absurd military spending.
I covered this lie by exclusion less than a week ago – do try to keep up. I used the real numbers from the US Treasury and the Congressional Budget Office,
Mr. Duffy, the reason why income tax revenues have gone up as a percentage on the upper class is because the upper class here in America have experienced a skyrocketing income — the average 1%’er today makes FOUR TIMES as much money as the average 1%’er even twenty years ago made — which of course is going to result in more income tax being paid. We have experienced an enormous transferral of wealth from the workers to the investor (leech) class here in America. The leech class are truly useless, building nothing, constructing nothing, consuming little — the rest of us manufacture the things whose profits they steal at legal gunpoint, the rest of us provide the services whose profits they steal at legal gunpoint, and so forth — they literally OWN us, or at least our labor, same thing — then they whine that We The People want to take back some of the ill-gotten loot that they stole from us at legal gunpoint by owning us? Oh cry me a river, Mr. Duff. I have no — ZERO — sympathy for that viewpoint. Workers, not looters, create wealth. Larry Ellison has not written a single line of code for Oracle, has not provided customer support to a single Oracle customer, has not constructed a single Oracle database appliance with his own two hands, and I should feel bad about We The People taxing him in order to transfer some of the wealth he stole at legal gunpoint from the people who did actually create that wealth back to the people? Oh puh-LEEZE. Larry would be *NOWHERE* without the actual programmers and support people and salesmen and manufacturing technicians who created his actual product, because he knows how to do nothing except loot and steal other people’s wealth.
Do I have sympathy for the plight of the looter class? No. None. ZERO. For better or worse humans are hierarchical and follow leaders, and for better or worse the looter class ends up having to exist as a convenience for balancing supply and demand via moving money around. But they have no fundamental human right to the wealth they’ve looted at legal gunpoint, and I detest the fact that you defend their legal right to loot, Mr. Duffy.
No slack on that stupid framing, Mr. Duff, as Badtux, I, and anyone else who understands how the world really works, will raise the taxes on those making more than $250K/year and watch tax revenues increase, as has always happened. You increase the rates, and you take in more money. That is how the real world works, unlike the fantasy world of Ronnieland.
Uhm, and I point out that taking a smaller slice of a bigger pie caused by the consolidation of wealth into the top 10% of the population to a point not seen in America since the 1920’s will naturally result in more money than a bigger slice of a smaller pie, and your response is…. (crickets). And I point out that in 1950 30% of American taxes came from corporations (which are largely owned by the top 10%, i.e., it was an indirect tax on the top 10%) while today 7% of American taxes come from corporations and your response is… crickets.
The real story is the utter impoverishment of the lower 90% of the American population, who now don’t make enough money to pay sufficient taxes to make up for the percentage that the upper classes are not paying anymore, combined with the shifting of taxes from corporations (which are owned by that top 10%) to the working class. The working class, the bottom 90%, being the people who actually make and sell the stuff that the investor class loots rents from, without whom the investor class would have nothing because the investor class knows how to build nothing, knows how to fix nothing, knows how to design nothing, they’re literally leeches on the sides of commerce, only useful because we need a class to move money around because the actual workers who create wealth are more interested in making and creating than in the boring work of moving money around. Well fine. But your defense of their right to loot a disproportionate amount of the wealth created by the rest of the population is noted. If the looter class is letting too much wealth stick to their hands, why NOT tax the excess away? You never answered that question and you never will, because you sympathize with the looter class… why? Because you are one of them? Or because you simply wish you were one of them? Curious penguins want to know!
– Badtux the Worker Penguin
30% of a pie is a lot more than 40% of a tart, and in the decade between the 1999 budget and the 2010 budget the income tax shrank from almost half of revenues to to just over 40% – the transition from pie to tart.
To equal the minimum wage of 1979, the current minimum wage would have to be increased by $2 per hour from $7.25 to $9.25. A major portion of the American working class no longer make enough money to qualify to pay income tax. They do, of course, still pay the FICA taxes which are leveled on all wages up to the cap at around $106k for Social Security, and everything for the Medicare portion.
Your arguments Mr Duff, make no more sense than this graph to anyone who actually pays taxes in the US and can do long division without a calculator. They resemble nothing so much as the con games banks play with credit cards to suck in the unwary.