January 2009 – A Rubble of Bits

Garlic!

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

The garlic bagel is a food object of tremendous power. However, my wife has been pointing out just how unhealthy white bread bagels are, so I have, sadly, cut way back.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It turns out that my local shop, a branch of Finagle A Bagel, will make bagels to order. I called up at 6:15 this morning and a dozen multi grain with garlic bagels were ready at 7.
I am a happy boy today. I am safe from vampires, but my colleagues are advised to keep back.

Making laws

As a followup to the post about delivering the tax code in source form, I think that congress should be required to use a revision control system for bills. Such a system could help us figure out who added what provisions. You know how when a provision benefiting some group is added and noone seems to know how or when it got in the final bill?
I am most familiar with cvs and svn, but there are many others. All of these systems track revisions and permit the user to go back and check out any previous version. Good ones can show you the changes between any two versions, … and who made those changes. Svn has a feature called “svn blame” which produces a listing of a file with every line of text annotated by its author. So you want to know who added the earmark giving a billion dollars to Halliburton? Svn blame!

Tax ideas

Is anyone not offended by the complexity of tax forms?
The tax code is Congress’ fault. Congress is our fault. Therefore the tax code is our fault. We should all choose to elect a congress to fix it, but in the meantime, here are some modest proposals.

Congressmen must do their own taxes. On paper.
All congressmen will be audited. Their mistakes get put on a web site.
Tax law must be delivered in source code form

And yes, I was recently trying to figure out whether I owe any estimated taxes.
(Ideas from conversations with Win.)