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January 28, 2008
3 more names to add to the roll of honor.
Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut
The Soviet Union collapsed because, well, when you get really good at keeping secrets, you eventually start to make decisions based of bad information. The fact that the whole world knows the names of every American who died trying to reach space meant that eventually America would prevail.
Nonetheless: humanity-- all of humanity-- owes a debt to those who gave their lives attempting to push back the borders of ignorance, to enlarge the principality of human knowledge. Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov. Remember them.
Posted by Andrew at 08:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 02, 2008
Tax Incentives.
So, a Wisconsin lawmaker wants to help shore up the juvenile court system. Worthy goal. Unfortunately, he's trying to do this by placing a tax on art. Not a luxury tax, mind, but a tax on mass-cultural pop art:
"The idea being that this is kind of a kids-kids thing, in other words, if we're going to do this for kids maybe this would be a good way to go about it. And if it's not the best way, I'm open to any other way."
The tax would apply to video games, and would be rather small-- only 1%. I'm a bit torn. The legislator is demographically wrong-- Games are played mostly by adults. It also seems bizarre to tax art in just about any form. And yet...
An extra 50 cents on a US$50 game seems like a small enough price for a rather important goal. So... thoughts?
Posted by Andrew at 08:57 AM | Comments (1)