November 2007 Archives

Given the overhead for sales taxes, income taxes, etc etc, it takes about 2 hours for me to earn enough to buy one hour of the time of labor from someone who makes the same salary as me.

Let's assume someone makes $20 / hr. Let's assume that he works for someone who makes something I want. It costs $20 for parts, overhead of the facilities, tools, etc. It takes 1 hour of the worker's time. So they have to pay the worker $21.60 to cover their share of the employment tax. Adding in 8.5% tax on the 41.60 gives a total price you would have to pay of $45.14 for this item. How much does the worker take home? Using number from my actual check stubs, he loses 19% to federal income tax, 7.65% to his half of the employment tax, and 7.4% to state income tax, so the worker takes home $13.19. So the worker has to work for two hours to be able to buy back his original one hour of labor ($45.14 - $20 (materials/overhead) = $25.14 just under $26.38).

Note that I've assumed taxes make no contribution to the cost of the raw materials and overhead. If these were included, the worker would be losing even more to the government.

If half of my labor goes to the government, do I get half of what I use from the government? Not even close.

(Title inspired by Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson)

I'm guessing that either this place recently changed ownership, or just that the completely incompetent work the weekend shift. Mangiare was completely empty this Saturday morning, and it's no surprise since the service is the worst I have ever received. There were eight of us. The first person to receive his food was about 20 minutes after we ordered (at the register). The last person received her food about a half hour after that. They got two orders completely wrong -- Jenny had to send hers back. Samantha got the wrong order, and when she pointed this out to the cashier he had the audacity to argue with her about what she had ordered. She decided to take it and eat it anyway, since she was hungry and at this point everyone else had already finished their breakfast.

No one got the right kind of toast. Apparently they were out of everything but rye and onion bagels so decided to replace sourdough with a random selection of either.

My food was okay. The potatoes were slightly undercooked and the butter was a little foil packet still at refrigerator temperature, but it was okay.

Is service normally this shitty? Or is the abysmal service just a clever strategy to make money off the $.50 they change for coffee refills while you are waiting for your food?

In good news, I can still run 3 miles in just over 21 minutes, and Samantha came in under 27. This was supposedly a 5k, but I think they just rounded down based on a few GPS readings I saw.

When I got my ballot pamphlet a few weeks back, I was disappointed to see that they were moving to electronic voting. I think the chain of reasoning here is pretty clear:

1. Senile idiots in Florida can't figure out how to operate paper.


2. Electronic voting systems are even harder to use for easily befuddled retirees.


3. Electronic voting systems cost a lot more and make more money for government contractors.


4. Clearly we should move to electronic voting systems.

They list all sorts of ways I know that my vote is secure, like "rigorous logic and accuracy testing", and "stored in four physically separate locations for backup". All of this is smoke and mirrors. In fact, all established methods of testing make the assumption that the person producing it intends for it to work as described. The problem with the security model they are using to evaluate these systems is that electronic votes behave like pieces of paper. That is, they assume that the system accurately records the vote cast, that the system will not change the vote without malevolent outside intervention, and that the system will accurately count the votes. None of these types of controls will do anything to prevent an insider (someone at the manufacturer) from adding code to switch votes to a preferred candidate.

There is mention that the source code was audited by an outside source. Even assuming that it was feasible to do this audit in the time provided (a separate issue), and that an audit can find flaws in a short period of time (it can't generally find security flaws, but it should prevent intentional vote manipulation by insiders), there is a remaining problem. We will assume that the source code was audited, and the auditors found no problems because there were no problems to find -- the source code was perfect. (this wasn't the case) The remaining issue is, how do I know that the source code matches what is actually running on the machines? It's a long process to go from source code to the actual machines sitting in polling stations. Nothing guarantees that the source code didn't have malicious bits purged before giving it to the auditors. Nothing guarantees that the machines won't get a "more up-to-date version" of the software. Nothing guarantees that someone in the manufacturing plant doesn't replace the software with something of his own design. Even if the audit was perfect, all we get is that some source code looks like it works right, but this tells us nothing about the machines that are supposedly running that software.

But they have a voter verifiable paper trail. And this is all that saves the process. Computers are a great way to produce something which is easy to read. They make it easy to catch spelling errors, and so on. So the eSlate is a thousand dollar machine to make sure that the paper ballots are readable. All the security features are a waste of tax dollars.

So close -- one second per mile and I would have been sub-4:00. It's close enough that I'm satisfied for now though. I don't plan on running another marathon for quite a while.

I did my training better this time around. I was following something similar to the FIRST Training Program, but I wasn't as strict about the pace of my workouts. I did MWF bicycle, TThS run, with Tuesday being intervals (1/2 mile with 2 minute rest), Thursday temp (6-8 miles at about 8:15 pace), and Saturday long run (with 3 20-milers, 7 weeks, 5 weeks, and 3 weeks before the marathon). I was a little rushed, because I jumped into training right after recovering from San Francisco, so I think I can do better if I do another full proper training cycle, starting from a good base without any injuries or recent overtraining.

Samantha did her first marathon in 5:32. Ted took first in his age group at 3:15. Frances took second in her age group for the half at 1:57. Annie finished her first half marathon at 2:17.