Read it.

How could they not? Under the existing American Crust regime, invertebrates moving slowly down the sidewalk are a tax target.

S corps have one key tax advantage. The general partners of a partnership are subject to payroll taxes (that is, Social Security and Medicare levies) on all their earnings. So, too, are taxpayers who run their businesses as unincorporated sole proprietors and report their earnings on Schedule C of their individual returns. By contrast, folks who own and run S corps must cough up payroll taxes only on their salaries, not on what is passed through to them as profits.

This is how people like John Edwards can afford a McMansion the size of a football field.

Read it.

Which, of course, we needed desperately.

ELECTROMAGNETIC pulses (EMPs) are usually associated with warfare. The idea is to use a blast of energy to fry the enemy’s computers and telecommunications gear. One common way proposed to do this is with an atomic bomb. In a less extreme fashion, however, EMPs have peaceful uses. They are already employed industrially to shape soft and light metals, such as aluminium and copper. Now a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, has found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through industry’s metallic heavyweight—steel. This could transform manufacturing by doing away with the need to use large, heavy presses to make goods ranging from cars to washing machines.

Read it.

Geek chic. If you find this article interesting (as I did), you probably need to Get A Life.

If you work with text files in any capacity — and what programmer doesn’t — you should know that not all newlines are created equally. The Great Newline Schism is something you need to be aware of. Make sure your tools can show you not just those pesky invisible white space characters, but line endings as well.

Indeed — got bit by that just yesterday; if you’re doing any kind of text matching, that can be one of the hardest bugs to track down because all that crap looks like a space in your normal viewing tools but it’s not a space.

Read it.

The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.

Read it.

Now — if only believing you can get richer would make you richer….

Read it.

Eighteen months after being laid off, Judith Lederman, a 50-year-old divorcee who lives in Scarsdale, N.Y., is ready to consider jobs paying half the $120,000 she earned as a publicity manager at Lord & Taylor. That’s mostly because she’s desperate, but it also makes sense when you consider how this country punishes work effort. While the first $60,000 of her income would be lightly taxed, the next $60,000 would be hit with what is in effect a 79% tax rate. Given a choice between a part-time or easy job paying $60,000 and a demanding, stress-ridden job paying $120,000, Lederman would be wise to take the former. In the tougher job she would be contributing twice as much to the economy. But she wouldn’t be doing herself much good. It would make more sense to take it easy and spend more time with her high school senior daughter, Casey.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves to your money.

Work isn’t the only middle-class virtue that is getting punished. The system penalizes savings, too–not just through taxes, but also through programs that reward debtors, the profligate and college families that show up at the financial aid office with empty pockets. Yet another series of tax and benefit rules penalizes marriage.

Read it.

Your shoelaces will never be the same.

Of course you could do what I do, and not wear shoes with laces. But that’s me.

Read it.

More evidence that TSA stands for “Terminally Stupid Agency”.

The airlines will tell you the higher scrutiny lists come from TSA. They’ll insist there’s nothing they can do about it. All you can do is write a letter requesting a review. And now that a family whose kid’s name somehow ended up on a list is getting some media attention, TSA condescendingly tells them it’s the airlines’ fault. As if that solves the family’s problem.

Yet more reasons Not To Fly.

Read it.

And hasn’t had it since the 1930s: Angle.

Layers of money managers that don’t bear the brunt of losses but walk away with big payouts when things go well have turned the US economy to a type of “ersatz capitalism,” Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University professor and Nobel laureate, told CNBC Tuesday.

Hey, don’t leave the government off the hook. This wouldn’t be possible without them.

Read it.

Well, they’ve got to do something – it’s not as if the world’s navies are doing squat.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A shootout between rival Somali pirate gangs over their biggest ransom ever threatened to turn an oil supertanker and the 28 hostages aboard into a massive fireball until bandits begged the international anti-piracy force for help.

Truly, you cannot make this stuff up.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked. I think there’s one of these in my community.

Read it.

Hint: They’re all going up. (Hey, you expected something different from Democrats?)

Read it.

The Sun appears to have got the shock news from blinkbox.com, which suggested that the $1bn box office barrier acts as a trigger for movie-based sprogbranding. A spokesman offered: “Past the $100m barrier, the chances of a film’s star lending their name to a child increase.”

As the gene pool slowly degenerates….

Read it.

Russians are almost as strange as the Japanese.

Read it.

Who needs strings when you can have buttons?

Read it.

As everyone knows, in response to the Northwest flameout, the Obama administration has adopted policies that are almost exactly the same as those of the Bush administration, turning the flying experience into a political advertisement for all the wonderful things that the president is doing to fight the war on terror.

Why people put up with this shit is just beyond me.

Read it.

As America hopes for recovery, Michigan needs whole-scale reinvention. It may be 15 years before the state returns to prosperity

This is what years of tax-and-spend gets you.

Read it.

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it. And laugh, as I did.

The Islamic Solidarity Games, designed to strengthen ties among Muslim nations, have been cancelled after a dispute between Arab countries and Iran over the name of the waterway dividing them.

Jack Shafer is pretty dyspeptic these days. But here’s the fun part:

Haitian Nitpicking Bonus No. 1: Why the goddamn hell is Barack Obama writing the cover story for next week’s Newsweek (which, like Slate, is owned by the Washington Post Co.)? He doesn’t know anything about Haiti outside of what his aides may have told him. He won’t even write it! If the piece is worth publishing, Newsweek should give the byline to its true author.

Read it.

A twelfth-century poem newly translated into English casts fresh light on the origin of today’s Francophobic stereotypes.

Things haven’t really changed that much.

Andrew Stuttaford pulls no punches.

The myth that all religions are basically the same—and basically benign—is a nonsense that could only flourish in a society that has little knowledge of the past and, for that matter, of the nature of religious belief. Naturally it’s an idea that is being actively peddled in both Europe and America today.

Read it.

Yeah, that government-run health care in Britain is miles better than what we have in the U.S.

Read it.

Venus to follow presently?

Read it.

Soon to be a best-selling novel by Dan Brown.

Read it.

Everything bad is good for you.

Peter Suderman has the goods.

Last month, I noted the possibility that health care reform could give states an incentive to withdraw from Medicaid. Health care reform legislation currently includes approximately $25 billion in unfunded state Medicaid expansions. But many states are in terrible fiscal shape and would have a tough time coming up with the cash to pay for the expansion. Now, the governor of Nevada is saying that his state’s response could be to simply drop out of Medicaid—a voluntary program—entirely.

Of course, the response of the federal government will be to make the program mandatory.

Read it.

Markets show up even when you don’t want them to.

Read it.

The World Food Programme has said that its warehouses in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince have been looted and that it would have to restock in order to provide urgent food aid for 2 million people affected by the deadly earthquake.

It would appear to me that they’ve already got all the ‘urgent food aid’ that they ought to get.

Read it.

If Apple does a tablet, I’ll probably want it. I may not buy it, but I’ll almost certainly want it. *sigh*

Read it.

Read it.

Not to mention the apparent innate human desire to dick around with something that works perfectly well as is.

Read and Heed.

Read it.

How much aid have destitute Muslims received from the West? Lots.

How much aid have destitute Westerners received from Muslims? Zero.

That tells you all you need to know about Islam.

Read it.

Read it.

An actress was doused with petrol in Paris in an attack thought to be related to her role in a feminist play she wrote about Algerian women.

Your future under Islam. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

Read it.

This ornate weapon of antiqued cast metal and high carbon stainless steel could pass for either sidearm or spaceship.

I defy any human being to carry this more than 30 seconds without cutting himself. More of an AlGore knife than a Bowie knife.

Read it.

‘I’m sure it’s fun as a networking device for teenagers but there’s something undignified about adults using it.’

My thought exactly.

Read it.

The guys who run the plant must not be from around here.

Seth Godin understands the dialectic.

If the industry can’t make money selling what you’re selling, why will they help you?

I especially like this one:

Governments don’t like buying at retail. They prefer custom stuff from high-touch organizations that can bring them the mountain, instead of the other way around. They’d rather pay 10x for an office supply that’s customized just for them, instead of modifying what they want to match what the market sells. It gives them something to do. And all those salespeople! The trips, the bribes, the attention…

Read it.

But bear in mind, there are lawyers who would actually take that case.

Read it.

And as long as we have government-run schools, what will be taught will be a political question and fought out in fora such as these.

Read it.

Check it out.

How to be a success in any job.

Read it.

And why is this so? Because their sacred texts tell them it is a good and holy thing to kill as many infidels as possible. Convert or die is the rule for the rest of us. May it be a choice you are never required to make.

All the dancing and handwaving in the world can’t get around that simple fact.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

George Will lets ‘er rip.