Month: May 2013

Nobody Likes the Tax Man

As it turns out Apple isn’t the only organization that avoids paying taxes. Another well-known organization is actively trying to avoid the tax man but it’s not a greedy capitalist private enterprise, it’s a benevolent egalitarian public organization called the National Security Agency (NSA):

Under a bill the 2013 Utah Legislature passed, the National Security Agency’s new Bluffdale data center might be taxed on the millions of dollars of energy it is expected to consume, providing a potential windfall for an obscure state authority.

The NSA is protesting the possible tax, even though a Utah attorney said he informed the agency about HB325, and the top U.S. electronic spy agency voiced no opposition until an official emailed Gov. Gary Herbert’s staff weeks after Herbert signed the measure.

“We are quite concerned [about] this,” Harvey Davis, NSA director of installations and logistics, wrote in the April 26 email, obtained through a Utah open records law request.

In a follow-up email Davis sent 31 minutes later, he explained: “The long and short of it is: Long-term stability in the utility rates was a major factor in Utah being selected as our site for our $1.5 billion construction at Camp Williams. HB325 runs counter to what we expected.”

You see, when an evil private enterprise that provides goods and services people voluntarily buy tries to keep its wealth it is an evil plunderer that the state sees necessary to destroy. When an evil public enterprise that spies on the general populace and backs up its existence at the point of a gun attempts to keep its ill-gotten booty the rules change. Suddenly exceptions must be made so taxes can be avoided.

This story demonstrates succinctly that there are different sets of rules. One set of rules applies to non-state agencies and another applies to the state itself.* When non-state agencies fail to pay taxes they are persecuted and told that they must pay their “fair share.” When a state agency is faced with a tax bill it protests, screams, and files official complaints to avoid paying them. Somehow they don’t have a “fair share” to pay. One thing is certain, nobody likes the tax man.

*There is also a third set of rules that applies to us lowly serfs. Fortunately it is a simple document that only contains one rule. Unfortunately that sentences is, “You are the slaves, we are the masters, and you must obey every one of our decrees or suffer whatever punishment we see fit.”

Blogger Burnout

While I seldom involve myself in the great gun blogging community shenanigans there are events that do occur that I feel are newsworthy. One of my favorite bloggers to read, Linoge over at Walls of the City, has announced that he’s ducking out of the game. I will miss his writings but I understand his reasoning:

Now that we have gotten the stuff you do not care about out of the way, on to the things you might care about. As you may have noticed, I did not update this site for over a week, and, honestly, you had better get used to it. In addition to typing being a literal pain, I do this whole “weblogging” thing for me, not you, and, frankly, it has stopped being fun. I am tired of defending my Constitutionally-protected human rights from people who do not give a damn about my rights, me as a human being, or anything except their need to feel good, acquire power, or both. I am tired of watching my country be actively destroyed, knowing that nothing I can say or do will realistically change the outcome. I am tired of dealing with the passive-aggressive frakwits, back-stabbing, elitist prats, and/or self-appointed, petty gods-in-their-own-minds who seem to be infesting the gunblogging community these days… which, probably, was inevitable once it started moving from “community” to “industry”.

I went through this same phase some time ago. There is only so much one can say regarding guns and gun rights until they begin repeating themselves. At one point you eventually counter every argument advocates of gun control can bring forth (they seldom develop new arguments after all) and are left regurgitating the same stuff you’ve written 100 times before whenever some zealot who hates your guts for the sole reason that you disagree with their belief slithers across your path. Repetition sucks the fun out of life, especially when you’re repeating unpleasant encounters with people who hate you because you’re you. Such annoyances are amplified when people who claim to be part of your community begin moving against you.

Unless you’re being paid to write the burden of repetition eventually becomes greater than the joy attained from writing. Reaching this point, along with gaining a new understanding of statism, is what caused me to shift my focus from writing primarily about guns and gun rights to writing material about anarchism, alternatives to statist environmentalism, online privacy and security, etc. I enjoy writing but I don’t enjoy many of the side effects of writing about guns and gun rights. Between gun control advocates who want us dead and infighting within the gun rights community it can be a pain in the ass to blog about guns.

I’m surprised the blogger burnout rate isn’t higher in all honesty. There are some downright nasty individuals in the gun control movement and many very opinionated individuals in the gun rights movement. In such an environment stress can build quickly and fun can cease to exist. Did I mention that the pay sucks?

Why the Unions Succeeded in Minnesota

It’s time for another installment of Politics 101.

Last night was the last night was the deadline for political matters in the State of Minnesota. During the final hours a bill was passed that will allow unions to force daycare providers to unionize. Obviously most people who identify with the “left” side of the political spectrum are cheering while most people who identify with the “right” side of the political spectrum are calling foul. Political matters don’t interest me but it’s worth pointing out why the bill passed because it’s the same reason any bill passes.

Let’s look at the two sides of this debate. On one side we have the unions. For the most part modern unions are big businesses. They purport to defend workers from their bosses but most of the higher ups in the major unions are bosses themselves. The two unions involved in this fight were the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Being high up in the AFSCME has its benefits as does being high up in the SEIU. Any organization able to offer six-figure salaries tends to have plenty of resources to throw at politicians.

One the other side we have the daycare providers and anti-unions activists. Many of the daycare providers are independent entities operated by a handful of people while the anti-union activists are primarily there because they don’t like unions (or, at least, the unions involved in this fight).

Neither group has a great deal of resources at hand compared to their competition, which is why they lost. Politics is the art of initiating force en masse. The initiator of force, the state, exists solely through expropriation. In order to accomplish something politically you must have something to offer the state. The AFSCME and SEIU, being major corporations, have a lot of resources that can be transferred to friendly politicians. Major campaign contributions, jobs as lobbyists and consultants for politicians exiting politics, and even some information that is of value for insider trading can all be provided by the two unions. Meanwhile the daycare providers and anti-union activists have little to offer. Since most daycare providers are small organizations they cannot offer major campaign contributions or jobs for politicians exiting politics and since they’re generally private entities they have nothing for politicians to trade on the stock market. The same goes for anti-union activists.

In order to succeed politically you must have sometime of value to offer the politicians. The reason the gun control advocates lost this year is because they had nothing to offer while gun rights advocates could offer plenty of headaches for politicians who voted for gun control. When one side is offering nothing and the other is offering headaches politicians tend to give the side offering headaches what they want hoping they’ll go away. The battle over daycare providers is slightly different since one side has nothing to offer while the other side has a great deal to offer. In such cases the politicians will almost always align themselves with the side offering the riches.

It doesn’t matter how many protests you perform or how many people you get to support your side at the Capitol, if you doesn’t have a sacrifice to offer the politicians you’re not getting anything from them. Democracy isn’t about the will of the people, it’s about the will of the decision makers and the decision makers can be bought.

Of course there is a solution but it would require daycare providers to join the “underground” economy. That is what I suggest all people do but, for some reason, many people believe that the “legitimate” economy is where they should conduct business.

Business Opportunities are Everywhere

Smokers of Minnesota are up in arms over the increase in cigarette taxes:

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – Outside downtown office buildings, many smokers didn’t want to talk about the possibility of a tax that will push a lot of cigarette packs into the $8 range.

Dan Jones says the tax may be the push he needs

[…]

The state says it has built the expected drop in smokers into their revenue projections. The current tobacco tax pulls in $423 million, and the state is predicting the higher tax would pull in $618 million a year.

The tax hike isn’t surprising since Mark Dayton stated plundering from smokers was one idea to subsidize billionaire Zigy Wilf’s stadium. What is surprising is the reaction many are having to the news. Many smokers are pissed, other smokers are thinking about quitting, and small government advocates are rightly pointing out that smoking is an activity enjoyed by many poor individuals so a tax on cigarettes is a burden on the poor (to enrich the top 1% no less!). I guess, to borrow an old marketing phrase from Apple, I think different. A tax increase on cigarettes in Minnesota is a business opportunity! Anybody willing to buy cheaper cigarettes out of state, deliver them to Minnesota, and sell them to people addicted to nicotine stands to make a tidy profit.

Tax increases, while depriving some portion of the population of wealth, generate business opportunities for smugglers. Increasing the tax on cigarettes makes the unprofitable enterprise of buying cigarettes in one state and selling them in another profitable. In fact, depending on the tax difference between the state cigarettes are purchased in and the state they are sold in, the profit could be very high.

One of my goals in life is to show people how statism can be exploited for personal profit without resorting to the statist tactic of initiating violence. Smuggling cigarettes into Minnesota is looking to be one of those wonderfully exploitable endeavors.

Another Battle in the State’s War Against the Homeless

While the hearts of many self-proclaimed progressives are in the right place they tend to go about their stated goal of helping those in need in the wrong way. Asking the state to help those without resources is an exercise in futility because the state is an agent of expropriation and is only interested in providing assistance to individuals who actually have something to steal.

The state’s war against the homeless is pretty overt at this point. It seems that any organization that attempts to provide food, clothing, or shelter to those without means are shutdown by whatever municipality they are operating in. Manchester, New Hampshire is the latest battlefield in this twisted war:

MANCHESTER — City officials have told a church group that it will no longer be allowed use Veterans Park to serve a free hot breakfast to the homeless.

The decision has left Do you know Him? Ministries without an outdoor location in the downtown area to serve the breakfast.

The group had been using Veterans Park each weekend since January 2012 until December when, due to the cold, it took the operation indoors at the Salvation Army.

When it sought to again serve the breakfast at the park, the group was told by the Parks Department that its permit would not be renewed.

Why wasn’t their permit renewed? In most of these cases the state claims health and safety reasons to block organizations from helping those in need but this time the justification was a bit more honest:

“There was some concern from area businesses who didn’t feel like it was the best fit, using park space to feed people,” Chief of Parks Peter Capano said. “We sat down to try and find another location to do the ministry and had a rough time of it.”

Obviously we can’t have a bunch of homeless people reminding patrons that some people have it better than others. If we allowed that some of those people may decide to help and that would mean resources would be going to those without means instead of the state and its cronies. Instead the problem must be swept under the rug.

In the end the lesson is the same: the state cannot be used to help those in need. If you really want to help people who have little or nothing then you’ll have to develop voluntary methods of doing so.

Adam Kokesh Arrested

Adam Kokesh, the man who has won some notoriety in the gun rights community for planning an armed march in Washington DC, has been arrested:

Former marine, radio host and political activist Adam Kokesh was arrested at a marijuana legalization assembly in Philadelphia today, according to video and Facebook posts.

In a video of the Smoke Down Prohibition rally, policemen can be seen entering a crowd of activists, and shortly afterwards emerging with Kokesh in tow.

According to his Facebook page, Kokesh was reportedly hauled away in a white Chevy Suburban, although he “hadn’t even smoked yet,” while “other protesters were actually smoking and released after arrest…”

When I discussed Kokesh’s planned march I mentioned the possibility of his arrest happening before the event. It’s no atypical for the state to begin harassing somebody who is publicly making a mockery of its power so it comes as no surprise that the man who is planning to lead an armed march on Washington DC has not been arrested. At this point the arrest could be pure harassment or it could lead to actual charges, which would make this entire situation far more interesting.

My YaCy Installation

I mentioned YaCy, the distributed search engine, yesterday and managed to get a working prototype server online. If you’re interested in trying it out you can do so by navigating your web browser here. As it currently stands I’ve only indexed this blog meaning most of the search results on the first page with be from here. Another thing to note is that crawling and indexing sites takes a notable amount of computing power so the search page becomes unresponsive during those operations (it’ll throw a “504 Gateway Time-out” error).

Feel free to play with it and let me know what you think. I’ll be tweaking it periodically throughout the week so it may be down from time to time. Also, I know the search results aren’t going to be nearly as good as those provided by Google or Microsoft but it’s a fairly young system and still growing. Right now you should just assume my setup is a prototype.

YaCy

I’m a big fan of decentralized technologies. In my quest to decouple myself from the major corporations that seem inclined to wage war on the Internet I’ve been looking high and low for a search engine not run by Google or Microsoft. My quest has finally provided some fruit in the form of YaCy.

YaCy is a peer-to-peer search engine that can be run on Windows, Linux, or OS X (technically, since it’s written in Java, it should also run on other platforms). Instead of relying on centralized entities to crawl and index the Internet YaCy relies on each peer. I’ve setup a test server running YaCy to see how well it works and so far it shows promise. Granted, the search data isn’t nearly as complete as Google or Microsoft’s data at this point but that will almost certainly improve overtime. YaCy doesn’t do as good of a job at ranking search criteria based on how useful it is (at least in the eye’s of whatever search algorithm is being used) but that is likely to improve in time as well.

With those criticisms aside, and considering the limited amount of time I’ve had to play with it, YaCy does have one major advantage over Google or Bing: there is no central authority. State’s rely on central authorities to coerce into removing data when they want to enforce their archaic censorship laws. If no central authority exists it becomes much harder to enact censorship, which is where my primary interest in YaCy derives.

I’m planning to make the search interface publicly accessible in the near future so you guys can test it out. While I won’t promise a replacement for Google or Bing I will promise an interesting technology that’s worth experimenting with.

Movies are Now Reality

John Tierney, a politician from Massachusetts, is introducing a bill that would require all firearm to be equipped with technology that prevents them from being used by anybody besides its owner. What makes this case interesting isn’t the legislation but Mr. Tierney’s justification:

A House Democrat inspired by the last James Bond movie has offered legislation to produce handguns with “personalization technology.”

The idea is to produce guns that can only be used by the gun’s owners. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) cited the latest James Bond movie, “Skyfall,” as inspiration for the bill.

Technology appearing in movies is now real? Awesome!

Seriously, my life is going to be so much better with a giant walking robot!