KPAO by Dave Cortright

Why all the consternation around estate taxes?

I thought most rich people who had enough money to care about estate taxes were savvy enough to establish a trust, thus avoiding them. I suppose there are some out there who are rich but not savvy.

Actually the people who really are impacted by the estate tax are the beneficiaries of the estate. So ultimately, the estate tax is a tax on the sons and daughters of rich, stupid people.

And now we can see why Republicans care so much about this demographic, since it's their voting base. :-)

How the US military is treating Pfc Bradley Manning

Pretty poorly in my estimation.

• Not allowed to exercise in his cell; will be physically restrained if he attempts to do so.
  
• No sheets or pillows or clothes during the night; just 2 blankets.
• No napping allowed during the day.
  
• Verbal check-ins every 5 minutes to make sure he's OK. (suicide watch)
  
• Woken up if the guards think he might be dead.

I'm surprised he hasn't gone on a hunger strike.

A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning

The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention

Why Google Maps are Better

This is a fantastic article analyzing all the design detalis that add up to the most-readable online map compared with Yahoo and Bing.

The most interesting technique for me was the buffer ring that Google place around major metropolitan areas (shown here at the left). This "white space" on the map make these metro areas stand out more.

Google can be hit an miss when it comes to design, but whoever is doing the map design for them is consistently nailing it.

My driving video camera

I blogged earlier about getting a Muvi micro video camera to mount in my car and record my driving. I installed it on the stalk of my rear-view mirror. It's not visible from within the car, and captures the action from an excellent viewpoint. The only downside is that I had to mount it upside-down in order to get the camera lens at the bottom of the the mount for a better angle. But this is minor; it's pretty trivial to rotate video playback in VLC and iMovie.

Having used it for a few weeks, I do wish it were a bit more hands off. It'd be great if it simply recorded while the car was running. Also it'd be nice to have it work like a DVR and automatically use a FIFO scheme to delete old video making room for new. And of course it'd be ideal to hook the power into the car's power system so I don't have to remember to take it out and charge it.

But for a 1.0 system, it works pretty well. Here's a short clip of me driving, set to Make You Smile by +44.

The Grinch was a terrorist...

He stole all the Christmas presents. And when the Whos down in Whoville found out, their response was perfect. They did what they had always done before the terrorist incident: they kept singing.

I wish America was governed as well as Whoville.

The root problem of the TSA

This article by Robert P. Murphy is the best analysis I've read on the problem with the continuing TSA escalations (aside from the hilarious satire that is the Airport Security game). From the article:

It's possible that the "efficient" number of terrorist incidents — for the rest of US history — is not zero. In fact, no matter what procedures are implemented, it's always possible that wily terrorists will still manage to beat the system. In real life, we can never guarantee safety. This is why so many pundits' discussions of airline travel miss the mark completely: they assume that there is some objective answer of "the right" amount of security, when this is a complex economic question.

Short answer: the world is a dangerous place, and no amount of precautions can guarantee safety for all people at all times in all places.

So here's a proposal: let's back off the government sponsored security measures and crowdsource the solution. If everyone knows that their fellow travelers could be terrorists and takes a little bit of responsibility for this, collectively we can do a lot better than a centralized agency like the TSA.

Of course the other way to fix this is to stop giving foreigners a reason to hate us enough to want to terrorize us. Last I checked, there were well over 100,000 reasons someone might want to kill a whole bunch of Americans in Iraq alone.