Part of the appeal of wordpress is that it's so poorly written that your hackiest hacks never look out of place
PHP Confessions
Last night on twitter I started this series based on the hashtag #PHPConfessions
I’ve never gotten the order of arguments right for str_replace without checking http://php.net first
#PHPConfessions
I’m always afraid I’ll be seated with the Perl people at programmer gatherings
#PHPConfessions
I like PHP because I like always having the option to blame my tools
#PHPConfessions
Sometimes I go to github just to browse python repos
#PHPConfessions
Tax The Old
Productivity has skyrocketed in the past three decades, but all of the surplus has been captured by the top 1%. Wages have been flat. The workforce has lost a lot of leverage due to the cost savings of machines, labor competition with the third world and the migration of women into the workforce.
All of these extra workers are fighting for fewer and fewer jobs. The only solution is to create many more jobs or reduce the number of available workers. In the past that balance has been restored by things like disease, war, genocide and shipping people to Australia. Given our current sensibilities, we would probably do better to use the tax code.
Taxes are controversial. Conservatives argue against taxing income, saying that it is a disincentive to work. Liberals argue against taxing consumption as it disproportionately affects the net consumers – the poor and middle class. Libertarians argue against taxing anyone because they don’t understand math.
What if instead of taxing based strictly on income or consumption, we set tax rates based on age.
How it works:
From age 0 to 40 your tax rate is 10%.
Starting at 40, after a standard deduction at just above the poverty line, your tax rate is your age. ie. A 40 year old pays 40% of his income above the deduction, a 60 year old pays 60%.
Why Tax The Old?
Not taxing the young incentivizes them to work and to save. It’s the cheapest money you will ever get so it makes sense to sock it away now. It discourages the young from frittering away years in college. Instead they will want a degree or certification they can use now.
Taxing the old disincentivizes them to work. It encourages early retirement, except for the very highly skilled who can be compensated highly enough to offset their extraordinary tax burden.
It encourages job growth as it reduces the pool of workers, but reduces it at the top not the bottom. So young workers will be highly sought after as they are less expensive and more eager to work.
This also encourages older workers to leave the work force and spend their time creating value either by helping their working children with home life, volunteering or starting businesses that pay in equity and investment income, not salary.
If nothing else it will force the accumulation machines we call corporations to push profits back into the hands of the workers by tightening the labor market and raising the price of expertise closer to its true value to the employer.
Just so we’re clear: What is Satire?
Rummaging Around An Old Hard Drive
I couldn’t find any usb drives tonight so i brought out an old external hard drive. That picture is one of the first “mastheads” of muddylemon.com circa the late 90s.
I also found this poem from the same time period:
Different Person
i used to be a different person, I used to have different thoughts
I’m not sure if i changed characters, or merely shifted plots;
I used to be a different person, I was someone I once knew
I don’t remember changing, I doubt I really grew;
I used to be a different person, I lived in another place
I died, I disappeared, I barely left a trace;
I remember my former self, in flashes at times
I see myself speaking as if i’m reading lines;
I can’t remember my old motivations
I can barely sense those old sensations
I was who I would be, without knowing why
and now I wish I were who I was, or was it just a lie?
How To Do It
Perl
There’s more than one way to do it
Python
There is one way to do it
PHP
I found a way to do it but it didn’t work. I’m just going to do it in WordPress
ColdFusion
You can do that?
.NET
There is one way to do it, but you can do it in any language you want
JavaScript
I know how to do it in jQuery. Does it have jQuery?
Clojure
First let’s do math!
Ruby
This is the right way to do it. All the other ways to do it suck.
Objective-C
Just do it like you’d think Steve would want it
C
Already did it
C++
It’s done, it’s just compiling.
Lisp
Once you’ve done it like this you will never be the same
Ok, that’s what I came up with. Got any more? Tweet them @muddylemon or comment on this post.
Dreamhost is incompetent
This site was offline for three days due to the unbelievable incompetence of Dreamhost. There is no excuse for a company in the business of hosting websites to fail so miserably and so often. The reason for the outage is unclear, their infrequent updates would refer to different pieces of failing hardware. The backup server, which is oddly singular in their parlance, failed while restoring to a new server that failed for similar hardware reasons.
I’m off to the cloud!
Update: It took a couple days to move off of dreamhost due to more unplanned outages as well as a hacker accessing their authentication database requiring mass password resets. Srsly.
