Exit polls are wonderful. They cut through all the speculation and inuendo and simply ask the actual people who voted what their opinions are on a variety of issues.

The exit polls for the 2004 election are available here.

Here, without commentary, are some of the results:

Overall: Bush won 51% to Kerry's 49%. Bear this number in mind.

Men: Bush: 55% to Kerry's 44%.

Women: Kerry 51% to Bush's 48%.

Income is less than $15,000: Kerry 63% to Bush's 36%.

Income is greater than $200,000: The reverse.

Do you WORK full time? Bush gets 53% to Kerry's 45%

Did you drop out of highschool? Kerry 50% to Bush's 49%.

College Graduate: Bush gets 52% to Kerry's 46%

Did you go on for post graduate study? Kerry gets 55% to Bush's 44%

Are you an atheist or agnostic? Kerry wins by 67% to Bush's 31%

Are you a Protestant? Bush wins 59% to 40%

Have you served in the military? Bush wins by 57% to 41%

Married people went for Bush: 57% for Bush to 42% for Kerry

Do you have children and are also married? Bush by a larger margin: 59% to 40%

Are you gay OR bisexual? Kerry wins by 77% to Bush's 23% (note: 4% of the population identifies themselves as either Gay or Bi-sexual).

Do you think the tax cuts were bad for the economy? Kerry got that by 92% to 7%

The government can do more to solve your problems: Kerry 66% to Bush's 33%.

I'll put commentary in the comments area...

Over the years I've gotten to see first hand how people make decisions that make them financially successful or financial basket cases.

The sad thing is, it's not very hard to be financially successful. It takes no luck. It takes no particular skill. All it requires is a sense of DELAYED GRATIFICATION.  A sense that, sadly, most people don't have.

Becoming financially successful is the simple matter of building assets that appreciate in value over time at a greater rate than inflation.

That's it.

And yet most people don't do it.  Most people are consumers. They take their earnings and use all of it to consume things -- music, TVs, stereos, cell phones, video games, consoles, dinners out, lunches out, clothes, vacations, etc.

In a recent demographic study, most people defined as "poor" (family of 4, household income less than $30,000) owned at least 1 cell phone, owned a car, had a DVD player, had at least 2 televisions, had one computer game console (the study was a couple years ago so it doesn't say what console they had). And near majorities had a computer, had an Internet connection.

In other words, the poor are generally consumers. What they make they spend on consumables. 

I see it all the time first hand. People who make relatively little still manage to have new cell phones, iPods, nice clothes, a console, a better car than they really can afford, etc.

Companies can offer 401K plans, even with matching funding, and still most people won't make use of it.  They can't, they say, because they have debts.  But if one looks closely at those debts, you'll find an expensive hobby or expensive consumption of other kinds going on.

Consider this:

If someone at 25 puts in $2,000 a year into a matching 401K, by the time they hit 55, they will have about $600,000.

Even if the person only puts in $1,000 a year, a trivial amount (less than the average annual raise people get), they'd still have $300,000 or so at 55.

But people won't. Because they have no impulse control. No delayed gratification. They want stuff now...

..and many of them will bemoan the minority of people who do actually build assets and end up letting compounding interest make them financially successful.

One last thought to consider:

You have two young men, both are 25 years old and make say $45,000 a year. Not a bad amount of money.

Person A blows it all on going out to eat every night, having the latest greatest gadgets, etc.

Person B spends pretty good too but eats out a bit less, replaces his cell phone and computer once every other year, etc.  And instead puts in $3,000 into a matching 401K.

Time passes. Person A is 55 years old and has nothing to show for his consumption.  Person B has $900,000 in the bank! At 65, if he continues forward, he has $2.2 MILLION.

I try to hammer this home to as many people as possible.  Most people know they should be doing this but they don't.

That's why I ultimately say "oh boo hoo" when I hear people complain that there's a "shrinking" middle class. The answer is, yea, you have some people who invest (a small %) and most people who consume. And there's your single biggest difference.

Hi all!

Those of you who have a MySpace account, post here if you'd like and maybe we can add some friends to our networks.

My account is www.myspace.com/draginol

What's yours?

Former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, Robert Reich, has written his view on how taxes should be done. It really puts in very stark terms how American liberals really view the concept of property.

To liberals, you have no property. It all belongs to the government. Therefore, it's just a matter of deciding how much of what you earn they should let you keep.

So how much do Democrats think "the rich" should be taxed?

What's fair? I'd say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich (earning over $500,000 a year). Plus an annual wealth tax of one half of one percent on net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets.

WOW. Not only would some people be expected to hand over half of what they earn to the federal government, but we would essentially pay a rental tax to live in the United States of 1.5% a year! And the "very rich" are now $500,000 a year. Remember that term "very rich" for later.

He then invents his own strawman argument:

You say the rich will leave the country rather than face a marginal tax of 50 percent? Let them, and take away their citizenship.

No, they won't leave the country, they'll just eliminate expenses (i.e. jobs). Taxes are simply another cost to "the rich". If taxes go up, something else has to get cut and the most obvious thing to do would be to cut jobs. That's what I would do. Not because I'd want to. Not because I demand having a fancy car or something, but because to keep my business intact, I'd have to make up for those new expenses in order to keep investing in growth of my business.

And most of the top 1% (as Reich partially admits) are "CEOs". Note how he uses the term "CEO" generically. There's only a handful of mega corporations, so the vast majority of those CEOs are simply small business owners. I'm a CEO – I founded my own company. But by referring to people like me as simply CEOs he gives the unwary the impression that he's really talking about "those big corporation fat cats".

To defend his argument he writes:

Taxing the super-rich is not about class envy, as conservatives charge. It's about the nation having enough money to pay for national defense and homeland security, good schools and a crumbling infrastructure, the upcoming costs of boomers' Social Security (the current surplus has masked the true extent of the current budget deficit, but it won't for much longer), and, hopefully, affordable national health insurance. Not to mention the trillion dollars or so it will take to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is now starting to hit the middle class.

Please. Of course it's class envy. Why else would you insert so many strawman arguments. For instance, we have enough money right now to pay for national defense, homeland security, good schools and infrastructure. In fact, we have so much money that we are now debating whether to provide health insurance to middle class children. Here's a link to Encarta's general table on where federal outlays go. Ask Reich to explain in detail was "Health" and "Income Security" are. Ask him to go into detail where "Other" goes to. So spare us the nonsense that we don't have enough money for the basics.

Liberals use class envy in order to enable the government to gain more power. The more money it has, the more dominating of society it can become.

Reich explains that these things have to be paid for:

If the rich and super-rich don't pay their fair share of this tab, the middle class will get socked with the bill.

Now also note this: In the course of a single essay he has already expanded the reach – now it's "super rich" and the undefined "rich". Remember, he defined "super rich" as any house hold that makes over $500,000 a year. So who are "the rich"? Who knows. But if history is an indicator, "the rich" usually end up being nearly everyone who holds a job.

Mr. Reich is concerned that "the rich and super rich won't pay their fair share of the tab". Except that "the rich" and "super rich" are already paying for nearly the entire tab right now.

Last year, 43 million Americans paid zero in income taxes. You want to talk about "fair share" of the tab. How about every adult American having to pay some token amount of taxes into the system? When 43 million Americans are paying squat, one can only imagine the needed mental gymnastics to reach the conclusion that the super rich aren't paying their fair share. The rich bastards, how dare they work, create jobs, and new opportunities.

Right now, the top 1% (the people who make $500,000 or more) are already paying for 40% of the income taxes.

Let's sum that up: 1.3 million Americans are paying for 40% of the tab right now. 43 million Americans don't pay a cent. Who's paying their fair share, Mr. Reich?

But Reich has an answer to this. He says it's a specious argument:

First, most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes; in addition, state sales taxes have grown faster than almost any other form of taxation. Both payroll taxes and sales taxes take a much bigger portion of the paychecks of lower-income Americans than of higher-income. Viewed as a whole, the current tax system is quite regressive.

Unbelievable. Payroll taxes are where Social Security and Medicare come out. And in theory, these are taken out and set aside for that person. This means that Reich explicitly believes that you are supposed to be taking care of other people's retirement and healthcare. So much for the illusion that Social Security and Medicare were part of your "personal lockbox".

Secondly, sales taxes are hardly regressive. They're amongst the fairest taxes there is. The more you consume, the more you are taxed.

Reich also fails to make the case as to why it needs to be Federal Government that needs all this money. Schools, infrastructure, police, fire, and nearly all the other government services that normal people make use of are provided by their state and local communities.

The fact that Reich would prefer to see the money transferred to the Federal Government instead of letting states and local communities decide what they need done and taxing as needed belies the underlying liberal goal – power concentrated in a powerful central government.

IT IS HERE!

The first beta of the second expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II was made available today.

The new expansion pack, Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor

will give all 12 major civilizations their own unique technology trees which include new weapons, new planetary improvements, new civilization abilities, and more. In addition, players will be able to construct the star destroying "Terror Star". The graphics engine for the game has been updated and Stardock is overhauling the textures and other elements in the game to make use of the update engine.

The expansion pack is due for release by Christmas but users who pre-order it can get the beta immediately.

An extremely abreviated "what's new" is available in the journals for what's in this beta.

There are plenty of bugs in the beta. I know, I've seen them and some of them are mine. (like the Terran Alliance tech tree not having plasma weapons tied to lasers -- doh!). We will be releasing additional updates to beta 1 this week as we work through such buglets.

One of the things you'll notice are the planetary textures. Right now, we're just testing the new system so the planets generally have the same planet textures. But by release, there will be plenty to keep it unique.

Not only do planets look better but they use a fraction of the memory. When complete, we should be able to double the number of planets on "abundant" over what we have now for users of Twilight of the Arnor.

One of the big stories with Twilight of the Arnor from a technical point of view is that the new graphics look so much better while using so far less memory.

Example:

BEFORE (Dark Avatar) and AFTER (Twilight of the Arnor)

The second screenshot uses around 1/4th as much memory.

Now, if you're worried about running into bugs, then don't bother with these betas. There will be bugs. Lots of them. That's why we have the betas, to let players help us balance.

It's going to be an exhilarating ride! We're very excited to develop the game with you guys! To join the beta, simply PRE-ORDER the game. You get the beta and the final version.

More Screenshots:

[PRE-ORDER and JOIN THE BETA]

Windows Vista has a lot going for it that most people don't really hear about. It's understandable because marketing some of these new features would essentially be tantamount to saying "Oops, XP had some problems". 

What makes Windows Vista a much better experience aren't due mainly to the  major new features. Instead,  it's the hundreds of barely documented improvements to the OS that users notice but quickly take for granted -- at least until they have to go back to using Windows XP for awhile.  The big features like a new security layer, integrated search, game & DVD exploring, DirectX 10, backup, Aero, kernel overhaul, better audio handling, Windows Event logging, WDDM, SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyDrive support, WPF, WCF, and on and on (thousands of new features).

But what about the end-user experience that people may not have heard of? Below are 10 improvements in Windows Vista you probably haven't heard about.

#1 A truly multithreaded explorer.  In Windows XP, if you opened a file dialog or a window that had to connect to the CD/DVD drive or to the network the whole shell would hang while it did its thing.  Not so in Windows Vista.  In Windows Vista, that all is done in a background thread.  Getting around the OS is always a very fluid experience.
#2 Wireless networking is much improved. The built in wireless networking in XP was pretty awful. Most users ended up having to a user a kludgy or bloated third-part wireless network manager instead.  The one in Windows Vista is not only better looking, it "just works".
#3 Incredibly good plug & play. While it is true that video driver support for Vista at launch was spotty (and not to say "I told you so!" but...read this article from over a year ago). The reality is that most things do work and work extremely well. If I buy a brand new device today and plug it in, odds are it'll work without me having to do anything. And Vista has a nice little progress dialog that you can check to see how your new device is working. On XP, you just got little pop up messages during every stage.  And how many times on XP did you run into something just not working when you plugged it in with no real explanation? That won't happen on Vista. At the very worst case, you'll be able to see where things went wrong in the progress dialog that you can look at.
#4 More polish. Polish matters. If it didn't, we wouldn't be talking about the iPhone all the time. A good user experience matters.  Look at the screenshot to the right here.  Don't be afraid.  This is one of the reasons why Jenny Lam is my hero (her team at Microsoft really did a great job on this).  This kind of improved experience throughout the OS makes Windows Vista much more pleasurable. While there are plenty of people who use our software to make XP look a lot like Vista, there's no substitute for the real thing.
#5 More information about your system. A lot of us have big giant cases under our desk. In fact, in the age of the monitor having the USB ports, the case is getting farther and farther away from us. So the days of being able to simply listen to the hard drive crunching are long over.  On Windows XP, if my system was slow, I'd bring up the task manager and check CPU. And if the CPU meter wasn't pegged then I'd go and look at the case to see if I could hear the hard drive crunching.  On Vista, the task manager will tell you how much of your hard drive bandwidth you're using up and tell you what process is accessing the disk.
#6 Much higher tolerance for handles.  On Windows XP, if your system runs out of handles, programs won't launch and weird things start to happen. There's no warning message about it. Almost nobody knows what a user handle is. On Windows XP, users would just reboot their machine.  People who know what handles know how to kill them off. I wrote an article "How to keep Windows XP stable" that goes into this. On Windows Vista, the system seems to do just fine with high handles so far. This means a much more stable experience.
#7 Assessments. If you're reading this, you're probably the person who people call with computer questions. On Windows XP, you might ask them "What kind of computer do you have?" and the likely response was "It's a Dell." or HP or Gateway or Toshiba or whatever. On Windows Vista, you instead ask them what their performance index is which they can get to very easily. This instantly lets people see how fast their computers really are.
#8 Better thumbnails. Windows Vista has "Windows Photo Gallery". But 99% of the time I'm going through photos in Explorer.  In Windows XP, my choice was "thumbnails" which topped out at 128x128 thumbnails.  In Windows Vista, I can have them as large or small as I'd like which can make for very handy viewing of lots of pictures at once.
#9 Better Laptop experience. In Windows XP, I didn't ever know for sure if my laptop was really going to come back from sleep or hibernation. Some of my laptops still run XP and it's a difference between XP and Vista I am constantly reminded of. In Windows Vista, my PC is definitely coming back from sleep. I know there are still people who complain, I'm not saying it's perfect but it's a lot more reliable for me than XP was (or OS X Tiger was) in this regard.
#10 Usability improvements. There are so many tiny touches in Windows Vista that you won't see mentioned anywhere. For instance, in Windows Vista, if you click on the system tray clock, you get a nice calendar dialog. By contrast, in Windows XP, I would double-click to get the date and time properties and it was slow (the Vista calendar pops up instantly).  It's just a nice small but useful touch. The home folder is a really nice touch that wasn't in XP in a meaningful way.

Me on a Sunday night.

And what am I doing? I'm going through and cleaning up my mistakes in the XML.  And it's been frustrating.  The technology tree setup is very complicated because you have base technologies and inherited technologies.  That is, a given race can have their own spin on a particular technology. So for instance, Warp Drive might be cheaper for humans and have a different description. This is very cool from a game point of view but can be a bit of a headache from an XML point of view.

There is also a lot of grunt work putting in all those planetary improvements that are unique per race.

We're getting there!

Often in debates you see Demcorats argue that we need to raise taxes in order to help society.

Hillary Clinton said it best:

“We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

This is the kind of thinking one would expect from people who don't have the foggiest understanding of real-world economics.

First, some facts to begin with:

1. The wealthiest income earners 10% pay the vast majority of the taxes (nearly 3/4ths of it).
2. The wealthiest income earners work harder and consume far less than their means than on average. (see this Washington Post article for specifics)
3. Our tax system punishes earned income while ignoring investment income and the "idle rich". (hence, we call it the "INCOME" tax).

According to Democrats running for President, we should confiscate the earnings of the most successful Americans and have the government spend it instead of them.  That's precisely how taxes work. We take earnings from one person and then have the government decide how those earnings will be spent instead.

The result is that we are left with a stark choice: Who do you think will make better use of a dollar?

It's a subjective question and I invite you to invest all of your subjective prejudices to the question. Who do you think will do more to benefit society with that dollar? Who do you think will generate the most properity with that dollar? Who do you think will help the poor most with that dollar? Who do you think will create the most jobs with that dollar? And so on.

Let's look at the "rich" and the government.  Make sure you've read the linked to article from the Washington Post. But if that's not enough, you can do your own research on the net as to the demographic info on "the rich" really is.  It's not unknown. Similarly, who decides how money is spent by the government is not unknown.

The case for the rich.  The highest income earners have already demonstrated the ability to take that dollar and turn it into many dollars. That is how their income is derived in the first place by definition.  They indisputably are able to generate wealth and use the money in ways that benefits society since their money must necessarily come from other people voluntarily purchasing a product, good, or service from them.  This creates jobs. Creates opportunities. Helps people across the entire economic spectrum.

The case for the government.  Congress decides where money is going to be spent. Congress is made up of 100 senators and 435 representatives.  Their qualification for making these vast decisions is that they were elected. Period.  Moreover, while the "rich" group includes millions of people making individual decisions based on very adapted circumstances, the government's arbiters number exactly 535 (536 if you include the President and his veto). Conservatives complain that politicians are incompetent and corrupt.  Liberals complain that politicans are bought off by "big business". In either case, there is absolutely no requirement that one of these 535 people have the slightest inkling of how economics works (as Hilary Clinton made obvious in her idiotic statement quoted at the start of this article).

If the rich make poor decisions with their money, they cease being rich.  If politicians make poor decisions with money, they simply ask for more money in the form of higher taxes.  In other words, one has an incentive to use money well, the other has an incentive to be wasteful with money.

So next time you see a politician argue that we need to take money from "the rich" in order to help society, think carefully about who is really helping society more.

Starting next week, we will be adding three new components for Object Desktop users! They will be:

• Premium Suites 
• Premium WindowBlinds Skins
• Premium Icon Packages

These 3 new components will be updated throughout the year with new skins, icons, and suites.

The first one we plan to deliver will be the Turbo WindowBlinds skin which will also be available as a $4.95 Master skin for users who don't have Object Desktop.  The next one will be the Quest theme which will be free for Object Desktop users but also be available for $9.95 for those who don't have Object Desktop.

To purchase Object Desktop or to upgrade from WindowBlinds to Object Desktop go here:

[Object Desktop Home Page]

Democrats, in general, are extremely ignorant about economics. It's difficult to even find a Democrat with any serious experience in running a business or having actually produced anything at all. Elected Democrats tend to be lawyers. At best, lawyers help honest business men and individuals settle a dispute. At worst, lawyers are parasites on society.

It is usually without irony that Democrats decry how much doctors make and how health care costs need to be controlled while ignoring that it is because of greedy lawyers and their lawsuits that have a major impact on the cost of health care.

I rarely hear Democrats complain about how much lawyers make. Democratic Presidential candidate, John Edwards had a net worth of over $60 million.  Consider that. John Edwards doesn't produce anything. He makes no products or goods.

And it is because Democrats are so rarely involved in producing anything that they have such a lack of understanding in economics.

For example, Democrats always seem to fixate on earned income when it comes time to "tax the rich".  Yet they seem oblivious to the implications of their policies. When you tax the earned income of the rich, you are really hurting the most vulnerable Americans. The "rich" who are earning their income simply pass on that tax to their least productive workers in the form of lost jobs and lower wages.

According to the New York Times (that right wing rag..) the richest Americans are:

• Mostly self employed
• Mostly run businesses

So what happens when you increase their taxes? You increase their expenses. And what happens if you increase expenses? You either have to make more money or cut other expenses. Most companies have "fat" they can trim -- employees whose employment are tenuous.  There's basically a layer of the American workforce that I'd say is only borderline employable. During the good times, they have jobs because their marginal productivity is still worth it.  But when times are tough, they're the first to get cut.

Raising taxes on the rich simply adds to the bottom line cost and it is those at the bottom that suffer first.  Yet Democrats never seem to get this even though it's been demonstrated time and time again.  It is one of the reasons why lowering taxes increases government revenue. It isn't due to "trickle down" economics but rather because the cost of doing business for the bulk of employers goes down allowing them to hire more people and invest more which in turn generates income at a greater rate than inflation.  It's not rocket science -- unless you're a Democrat I guess.