M|Welsh Design

I hate powerpoint, and this is one of the reason to hate it…surveys and studies fail on many levels by their very nature and methodology. They ruin, in general, the very thing they want to understand…grains of salt…

Maybe not odd but interesting, have you ever read the terms and conditions of apple’s software? Here’s the section I found very interesting and hilarious, Section H. FAA Notice, you know you think your OS is awesome when you need to put an FAA notice in it….

Life is full of them. Acknowledge and move forward they are what are change them or live with them be there and deal. Future isn’t here, past is done, right now is the gift, that’s why it’s called the present. Be here. Now. I can only act now ever.

Anyways setbacks or really annoying but a fact of progress.

God closed one door and opens a window. Thank God for that. Just have the ‘presence’ of mind to see it.

Just a thought

The new iPhone 3gs is great. I had the 1 at gen phone and this one is much faster and can do more. That said the battery crap is driving me nuts. So here’s what I discovered and tried with some success at least until there is an update to address the shtty battery life(bl from here on)

1. The 3.0 update changes the way fetch and or push work so on 3g it stays connected nearly all the time.

2. Multiple email Accts incl gmail, me, and my work exchange account are 3 times the push and fetch. Stop that. 2 email acct , 1 fetch and 1 push is enough. So figure that out for yourself.

3. Wifi and bluetooth one or the other at a time not both. I went with no wifi and if you do turn of ask to join netwrks.

4. Location services, shorterm shut that off. Only turn it on if needed. I have it on but I tested the bl before and after and impact is small

5. Brightness turn that down to the lower 1/3 u can see fine. Do use auto brightness.

6. Lock timer and actively pressing te lock button at the tip of the phone. This will make big impact

7. Apps. Prune the crap u know u don’t need most of the crap u dnld. Free memory and for power consumption less is more.

8. Common sense. Play with the settings and monitor the usage to see of you are getting more between charges. You should see and increase

9. Fetch manually or hourly. Don’t fetch calendar or contacts but once. Do that when syncing with iTunes. Don’t buy audiobooks or big downloads from stores.

10. Cycle the phone when you wake up just to kill apps and start the day fresh. There are some who may disagree with this last on thinking the power consumption in a reboot is significant but it is predictable and controlled by u.

Taxes on who, and how much. History teaches much about swinging pendulums. Except recently.

Excerpt from recent nytimes article on the budget from President Obama. The bolded section is true and not due to the 1% working harder than the other 99%.

“…That agenda starts with taxes. Over the last three decades, the pretax incomes of the wealthiest households have risen far more than they have for other households, while the tax rates for top earners have fallen more than they have for others, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

As a result, the average post-tax income of the top 1 percent of households has jumped by roughly $1 million since 1979, adjusted for inflation, to $1.4 million. Pay for most families has risen only slightly faster than inflation….”

Another point about the rich getting richer model.. there is no correlation to the rich getting richer and any of them working harder, smarter than those in the middle class. Below is an excerpt from the most recent article about a report done on the 1%ers and everybody else… and by everybody else i really mean everybody else. 1% of 390 million people is 3.9 million people. That’s about half the population of NYC. Or exactly the population of the West Bank and Gaza. Also 3.9 million acres of land in Alaska set aside for drilling…in July just before Sarah Palin was picked to be VP. Serious 3.9 million people make most of the money, but actually pay the least amount in tax… that is actually the hard reality relative to income growth.

What the hell is wrong with people…27.6% nearly a 3rd of all federal tax is paid by 3.9 million people. Not correlating to working or anything just taxing. While 386,100,000 or so paid the other 75% or so in federal taxes. SO what would be fair… take away percentage points from the 1%, reduce their tax and plop it on the 75%, whose income and ability to pay is much less…but whose additional share would be small. How much would you take off– 1% so the top one percentage could pay 1% less and we’d make it up by taking the amount that represented and dividing it up among the 386,100,000 people? Problem is those people have had their healthcare go up by 10% or more every year for almost 10 years…

“…

On average, incomes for the top 1 percent of households rose by $465,700 each, or 42.6 percent after adjusting for inflation. The incomes of the poorest fifth rose by $200, or 1.3 percent, and the middle fifth increased by $2,400 or 4.3 percent.

The share of all federal taxes paid by the top 1 percent grew, but only slightly more than half the rate of their growth in incomes because of the tax rate cuts. The top 1 percent paid 27.6 percent of all federal taxes in 2005, up from 22.9 percent in 2003, while the share paid by the middle fifth of taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 10 percent in 2003.

…”

Ok what is wrong with the paragraph above? If you say nothing close your browser. I’m not suggesting there is anything inherently unfair, the 1% of hard working successful people deserve to make more than everyone else…not a question…the problem is the relative differentials. Seems inconsistent that historically this seems more of an anomaly than simply, 1% worked harder and were more successful.  Clearly there is a fundamental sense of fairness, common sense that would tell you that say 20% more than everyone else is really good but when difference seems like night and day there is something wrong with the system we all operate under… Capitalism wasn’t intended to do this to an operating society, was it? Here, look at it like this(mostly cause I’m an idiot, forgive me):

• you make 100 dollars
• you pay 31.9% tax on it in 2003 so $31.90 cents
• so you kept $68.10 cents to buy, save or invest (to make more money-presumably tax sheltered)
• you make 142.6 dollars in 2008
• you pay 31.90% tax on in 2009 so $45.49 cents
• so you kept $97.11 cents to buy, save or invest

Anyway, I am not sure what point i wanted to make when i started writing this post… My gut tells me something doesn’t add up. Yes, the 1% pay alot of taxes but relative to the income growth it seems reasonable…and they’re rich. Yes the cost of everything has gone up while the same middle class has not had a over 40% increase in income and yet they pay nearly 20% of all taxes paid. What’s odd to me is that the increases in taxes and potential tax code rewrites would allow most of the rich to take advantage of additional benefits and opportunities to shelter money and lower taxable income in many ways not available to the middle or lower income. Besides that the wealthy tend to ‘live off the interest’ and have been able to get past the hand to mouth stage most of the middle class is trapped in. Not because they are lazy, dumb or not hard  working just the burden should be relative, if income is not increasing than tax shouldn’t increase non-relatively…or in other words if the economics screw the middle then we’re all screwed..

Article from ‘04 on bush tax cuts

Article on the CBO report

Article on the Obama Budget

One man’s opinion, I could be completely wrong.