This is floating around emails on the net. I didn't write this. So to whomever wrote it, good job.

Father-Daughter Talk

A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat and was for distribution of all wealth. She felt deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch Republican which she expressed openly. One day she was challenging her father on his beliefs and his opposition to higher taxes on the rich & the addition of more government welfare programs.

Based on the lectures that she had participated in and the occasional chat with a professor she felt that for years her father had obviously harbored an evil, even selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his. The self professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father

He stopped her and asked her point blank, how she was doing in school. She answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain. That she studied all the time, never had time to go out and party like other people she knew

She didn't even have time for a boyfriend and didn't really have many college friends because of spending all her time studying. That she was taking a more difficult curriculum.

Her father listened and then asked, "How is your good friend Mary doing.

She replied, "Mary is barely getting by". She continued, "She barely has a 2.0 GPA", adding, "and all she takes are easy classes and she never studies." "But Mary is so very popular on campus, college for her is a blast, she goes to all the parties all the time and very often doesn't even show up for classes because she is too hung over.

Her father then asked his daughter, "Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your 4.0 GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0." He continued, "That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA."

The daughter visibly shocked by her father's suggestion angrily fired back, "That wouldn't be fair! I worked really hard for mine, I did without and Mary has done little or nothing, she played while I worked real hard!"

The father slowly smiled, winked and said, "Welcome to the Republican Party."

I recently wrote an article explaining how John Kerry's proposed tax hike on "individuals" making $200,000 or more would cost jobs. In a nutshell, the reason is that most "individuals" filing their tax returns as making $200,000 or more are actually small businesses, not individuals.

It didn't take long for people to get confused about that. That's because many people really don't understand the tax system of the United States. Not that it stops them from yelling loudly about "the rich". It's not very complicated once you get over the basic hump of confusion that there are many different types of companies and they get taxed differently.

Let's start with Joe Entrepreneur.  Joe wants to start a company selling pet rocks. He calls his business "Joe's Pet Rocks". Simple enough. Legally, he files in his state as a DBA (Doing Business As). So at this point, Joe's Pet Rocks is, the company, is just Joe.

And Joe's business prospers. It does so well that Joe hired 3 people to help sell the pet rocks. His business makes $150,000.  He pays  his 3 employees $30,000 each. He also has $30,000 in expenses (rock procurement). And that leaves $30,000 left.  He's not paying "himself" as much as he's simply keeping what is left.  After all, Joe's Pet Rocks is just Joe Entrepreneur still.

At tax time, Joe's business is taxed like any other individual because he is just an individual still. In 1991, I founded Stardock Systems. It was a DBA of Brad Wardell. The money it made was part of my personal income tax return.

The United States has millions of "companies" that are just DBAs of individuals. They often have employees. Many of these companies make more than $200,000.  The owner of the company is taxed just like any other individual.

Continuing...

So one day one of Joe's customers is unhappy with his rock. He threatens to sue Joe. Luckily, Joe is able to avoid a lawsuit. Because as a DBA, Joe has no real protection. If Joe were sued, all his personal assets (his house, his car, his furniture, his clothes) are on the line.  But Joe is still wary so he decides to become a "real" company. He has 3 options:

1) He can become a Limited Liability Company (LLC). LLCs are nice because they're very simple. They're quite new. LLCs can file for bankruptcy and the person running the company isn't going to lose their house and home and other non-company related assets.  However, income to an LLC is treated just as it was before -- as the individual income of the owner.

2) He can become an S-corporation. This is similar to an LLC. It's designed for slightly bigger companies because it's easier to do partial ownership. But ultimately, the income is still treated as the income of the principle owner of the company. The income flows into the 1040 forms of the owners.

3) He can become a C-corporation. This is the "big" company type. This is where the company actually files as itself. It becomes a new entity. If you're a guy, this probably the closest you'll ever come to literally giving birth to a new individual. These new entities have their own tax structure. So when you hear politicans talking about "Taxing corporations" this is what they're talking about. Big business.

Most businesses, in the United States, are DBAs, LLCs, or S-corporations. This is important because the income they bring in goes directly to the individual's 1040. It has nothing to do with how much money the "CEO" makes.

Let's use Joe Entrepreneur's example.

Joe's Pet Rocks becomes "Joe's Pet Rocks, Inc." It's an S-corporation. He now has 5 employees and his "company" brings in $250,000.  Just like before, he pays his 5 employees $30,000 apiece and has rock procurement costs of another $30,000 and misc. expenses now of say $30,000.  That's $210,000.  He pays himself a salary of $40,000 per year. But tax-wise, it's dealing with the income of the company. Not his personal salary.

Like regular individuals, he has deductions. They don't take on gross income any more than you get taxed on gross income. But the important thing here is that Joe is being taxed based on how much "Joe's Pet Rocks, Inc." is netting. not what he pays himself.

So let's say Joe's Pet Rocks, Inc. nets $201,000. Under John Kerry's tax hike on "rich individuals", this "company" gets taxed. What do you think Joe is going to do? He could lower how much he pays himself. And most entrepreneurs will try to do that because, contrary to what people who have no business experience claim, most entrepreneurs are very ethical, compassionate people (I borrowed on my own house to avoid laying off people at Stardock when the OS/2 market collapsed in 1998 -- and I'm typical). But at a certain point, he's going to have to lay someone off.

Each company is different. But what people need to understand is that most companies are taxed as individuals. Not as companies. So when you raise the tax on "the rich" you're really raising taxes on small companies. And more to the point, you're sucking out the capital of small companies. Capital that could have gone to hire more people.

I'm not saying you should never have taxes or never raise them. But there should be a bloody good reason to do it. Not simply because you don't want to cut the "Outhouse" budget of some national park or because you want to pass another entitlement.

Bush's "tax cut for the rich" was designed to help small businesses as well as provide more money for people to spend money on things. Bush has done a pretty bad job of explaining this stuff to people but I can see why. Even after having explained this, I'm sure some (sorry) dumb ass is going to comment on this without a hint of understanding of how most businesses are actually individuals.  If you want them to create jobs, you want them to have as much capital as possible.

This is still in beta but I want you guys to get an early crack at this:

http://www.blognavigator.com

Please let us know what you think of it.

The economy is a complicated thing. That is, as a general rule, I don't like politicians of either party monkeying around with it.  The average politician has virtually no understanding about economics. Often times, it's worse than no understanding -- often they have no common sense about it.

Let's use the minimum wage laws as an example.  To help those who make relatively little money, some people argue that we need to raise minimum wage.  So let's say we raise it to oh...$9. Now, I'm not going to bore you with statistics about the fact that most people who make low wages are employed by small businesses who would simply hire fewer people. I won't point out that such things help encourage outsourcing or hiring illegal immigrants. I won't point out that in the cases where it doesn't cost jobs it instead raises costs which are then passed on to us all in higher prices which put us back at square one.  These are all interesting but ultimately too debatable.

Instead, I'm going to use an example that most people, I think, can recognize the truth in.  Fast food.  McDonalds, Burger King, and other fast food restaurants employ approximately 12 million people. That's a lot of people. Most of them make between minimum wage and $8 per hour depending on where they live.

So let's say suddenly minimum wage jumped to $9 per hour. That's a huge cost increase for those restaurants. So what do you think they'd do? I'll tell you one likely solution: Kiosks. Been to a grocery store lately? Checkout lines at grocery stores were one of the first victims of the last minimum wage increases. At some point, a threshold is crossed and it becomes cheaper to have customers enter in their orders/purchases onto a friendly looking computer kiosk.

A typical shift at McDonalds consists of 10 people. Of those 10, half of them are dedicated to various degrees to taking orders.  Next time you're at a McDonalds, look at it again. How many of those people do they really need? I mean, how many could be replaced by a kiosk where people would simply enter in their orders, receive a print out of what they ordered and an order ticket, and wait for their order to be fulfilled?  I'd get at least 2 of those people could be replaced by kiosks. Probably 3 eventually as people become more comfortable with ordering via kiosks.

That's a 20% reduction.  Spread across the entire industry and you're talking 2.4 million lost jobs. Now, you might say that I'm over-reacting. But mark my words, raise minimum wage and that is what you're likely going to see. A wholesale movement to kiosks in the fast food industry.  It may happen anyway -- eventually. Like ATMs. Like what is happening at grocery stores (courtesy of the last increase in minimum wage). 

Minimum wage jobs are for entry level positions. Most of those positions are very low skill. Their competitors are other low skilled people but increasingly also from machines. Businesses will automate at the point where automation costs them less than hiring low-skilled workers. It's a very simple calculation for them.

Blog Navigator will be announced tomorrow but if you're feeling really frisky, you can try it out right now at http://www.blognavigator.com.

The free version lets you work over JoeUser.com pretty well. It will download what you list in the background. One feature that isn't apparent enough in the beta is the web search feature. Very useful. Just right click on the tree view area and create a new web search folder and it works like MS Outlook's search folders except here it uses various blog searching tools to find the words you're looking for.

The full version of Blog Navigator will work with any blog site out there that uses RSS. Blog Navigator is how we're hoping to pay for JoeUser.com.  So if you like it, we hope you upgrade to the enhanced version.

Stardock has revamped its Stardock Affiliates program. Now anyone with a website can sign up and start selling anything Stardock has available and receive a 10% commission on each sale.

The way it works is that after you create an affiliate account, you can generate a special sales link to the given product. When the user purchases that product, it goes into your account. You can even monitor your sales live!

Check it out!

One of the magical secrets Microsoft keeps on its website is Movie Maker.  Not the Movie Maker that comes with Windows XP. No, I speak of Microsoft Movie Maker 2.0. It is outstanding.

Normally, this would be a program I would complain about because it is so well designed, so good that it harms third party competition. But in this case, the third party competition for casual video creation is so terrible, so crummy that one can only imagine that Microsoft, feeling the need for Windows, as a platform, to be competitive in this field, had to roll up their sleeves and to it themselves.

Whereas many of the most popular commercial video editing tools for Windows are gratuitously skinned (usually to look like some sort of DVD player) with controls scattered haphazardly, Movie Maker is a standard Windows program. That means radical concepts like having a menu bar. And a file save item. And other conventional interface concepts that allow users, like me, who have paid for third party video editing tools, to switch to Movie Maker.

In my case, what's really ironic is that I actually did purchase an iMac just to do video editing. Specifically, I have a video camera with a Fire Wire interface. iMovie is pretty decent on the Mac. But Movie Maker 2 makes it even easier. I just hook it up, and choose capture movie and it even offers to put my tape back to the start so I can "fire and forget". When you use Movie Maker, you can really tell that whoever is working on it actually uses this stuff. Someone at Microsoft got ticked off at how time intensive this stuff is and put in a few features that just save on lots of grunt work.

One of the big secrets of Movie Maker though is one that is not well known yet. It's not Movie Maker 2 per se but it's the Windows Media format (WMV). On my Mac, it's a pain to figure out which Quicktime format to use and for some reason, I can never get it to look good and be relatively small. Even if I set something Quicktime to be streamed, it still doesn't necessarily stream but instead wants to be loaded fully.  With WMV, it just streams anyway. I can point someone to a .WMV file and it takes care of everything.  And because they're so small, I can store a lot of home movies on my portable USB drives to make into DVDs later.

There are a few things I would like to see Movie Maker be able to do:

1. Record to DVD. I want to be able to take a collection of WMV files and burn it to DVD to be watched by the family.
2. I want it to be easier to save a .WMV file at the same resolution as the source material. For instance, I use WMV as a quick way to convert .AVI files. Many of my AVIs are at 800x600. But there's no easy way to do that. I have used another program (MS Media Encoder) but it's not quite as clean and simple as Movie Maker is. I just want an option to save something at the same resolution as the original.

That's pretty much it though. If you haven't tried Microsoft Movie Maker 2, I highly recommend it.

 

For reasons I can't quite understand, some people argue that we should take into account what Europeans think of Bush and Kerry. Why?

I think the reason is cultural lag. A seeming obsession to worry about what the "mother country" thinks of what we're doing. What's worse is that many Europeans seem to think that their opinions should matter to us. The whole thing is very selective too. It's not based on merit. It's not based on population. It's not based on economics. It's particular to Europe.

Let me give you an example: How often in these debates over Iraq have we heard about how France thinks about what we should do? Now, compare that to Japan. Japan has a larger population, a much higher GDP, and produces a lot more products and services that people use on a day to day basis. Yet France gets an incredible amount of attention. The US had Japan's support for its actions in Iraq. Japan has even sent troops there. But you rarely hear about that.

It's cultural lag. Many Europeans are unaware that individual European nations are not a major concern to most Americans. They don't go and pick presidential candidates based on what Belgium thinks any more than we're going to poll what Argentina thinks. But because Europeans believe their opinons should matter more to us than other nations, they chaffe at when someone like me points out that Americans don't care. Nor should they care. National governments are suppoed to do what is best for their own citizens. Not what's best for some minor nation state across the ocean.

It's not arrogance.  It's common sense. I wouldn't expect that someone in Belgium care what someone in Pakistan thinks of their leaders when voting. Despite the fact that Pakistan has a vastly higher population. Citizens in Belgium should only care what their leaders will do for them.  Same in France. 

BTW, do you think the French worry what we think of Chirac? Poll Americans and those who even know who he is are liekly to have a generally unfavorable opinion. But you rarely hear about Europeans worrying what Americans think. Many Europeans seem to demand that we listen to what they think of our leaders and take it to heart. But they seem to show no concern about what we think about their leaders. It's a one-way street.

We don't expect Europeans to care what we think when they vote for their leaders. Which is good because they've made it clear they don't care. Despite that, some Europeans expect us to care what they think of our leaders. And when someone points that we don't care, it's us that are called arrogant. Amazing.

I'm not speaking for Stardock. I'm speaking for myself.  I'm pretty disappointed with the GUI Olympics so far.

Not so much the entires. There are some outstanding entries so far.  But the quantity so far has been lacking. Not in terms of # of skins per skinner but the number of skinners.

Winamp: 11 skins. Most of which are classic.

IconPackager: 7 icon packages.

WindowBlinds: 45

The people participating are doing some great work. But I'm becoming a bit concerned about the number of skinners participating. Are there a lot of entries still in development? I hope so. Because I got all kinds of emails from people asking for another GUI Olympics. I didn't want to do one. It's a lot of extra work for me and Pat. But we went ahead and did it and managed to get a bunch of big name sponsors this time.

What I'd like to know is how many of you reading this have submissions that are pending still.  Because if we end up with the contest only having say 15 to 20 people total participating, then I'd say it was not worth it. Where are all the other skinners. Where are the Winamp skinners? Where are the WB skinners? Where are the Icon authors? Are they still working on stuff or is there just not that much interest in contests like these?

Nullsoft has made a clarification on the rules on Winamp skins: There are skinners that are submitting Winamp 5 Classic Skins, which are fine, but they're not skinning all the windows. I think for it to "qualify" they should be skinning the following windows: Main Playlist Editor EQ Media Library Video Skins that don't have these elements skinned will not be eligible to win.