I have tried filing for STAR, or School Tax Relief. Filing for any sort of "relief" conjures up images of refugees dressed in dirty rags, but please try to ignore that. Any family making less than $500,000 is "probably eligible". Probably eligible? Well, eligibility may depend on any number of factors including income and residency. You see it's all very complicated. At least that's what they tell us. So let me ask a stupid question. If I file taxes every year, doesn't the state already know my residency and income information? Why don't you make the rich people fill out a form instead of the vast majority of people that are "eligible" (not entitled, mind you) for relief? Obviously, if you don't know about the form or don't take the hours it takes to complete the form, you don't get any "relief". Why hours? The form must have a copy of your deed and proof of your primary residence attached. But one piece of evidence doesn't necessarily prove that your home is your primary residence. There are an unlimited number of things you may need to provide to the tax assessor. And as anyone who recently bought a house may know, you no longer get a copy of the deed at closing. That is filed safely away at the county clerk's office. But you must physically go down there with some weaker form of proof, and a copy of the deed will be readily furnished for a $2 fee. So you have to go to one county office on a day off from work (but don't go during the one hour lunch break in the middle of the day) to get a copy of a document (don't worry, the original is "safe" in government workers' hands) so you can send this copy to another county office in the same building. This is the government we have chosen.
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President Obama is planning to propose a set of short-term and long-term measures in an attempt to avoid falling back into recession and to solve America's solvency issues. I for one welcome this belated push for necessary changes. If Obama proposes sensible changes and shows some leadership, I'll call my congress-person everyday to encourage action because action is long overdue and therefore every opportunity to combat inaction must be seized.

I was reading about the riots in Britain last night, and it's not far fetched to think that could happen here in the States. With wider and wider income disparity, poor prospects for the future, and less and less moral restraint due to an increasingly secular culture, young people are prone to become restive and violent. I think the only way to combat this is with a healthy and growing economy that continues to be innovative and exciting so as to entice new generations to continue to sign our social contract. (As an aside, growing secularism in my opinion has overall been more helpful than harmful, but it's hard to argue that it has not dampened moral restraint.)

This biggest threat to our country right now is party politics and party thinking. It is the biggest and a growing impediment to change. Republicans won't support anything the President proposes because they want him defeated. This is their number one priority by far. In this latest debt-ceiling debacle, they have absolutely demonstrated they could care less about whether their position is good or bad for the country. Far too many people will believe anything Rush Limbaugh tells them, and he's on the radio everyday saying how Obama is an idiotic socialist and he's ruining the country. Simultaneously, on the left, although they seem generally less extreme, they ridicule conservative ideas in the popular media and promote class warfare at every turn without themselves putting forth any credible solutions.

The only way out of this trap is for independent-minded, thinking people to get engaged, to stop feeling disenfranchised and indifferent, and to forcefully promote the center position. We need more people to be emotional and enthusiastic about the practical center. We need radical cetrists. We need a return to honest debate aimed purely at forging the best path for the future and a willingness to take that middle path. I want politicians to feel ashamed to mention the name of a political party in a policy discussion. We've let the extremists grab control of the dialog and now we must wrest it from their damned-dirty-ape hands.

After all are we that different from Britain? Could it be that this time next year, we might see the streets of Soho or Georgetown in flames?

There was news recently that Mark Zuckerberg has recently become obsessed with "sustainable" eating and thus killing his own pigs and goats and boiling live lobsters. He is quoted as saying he thought it was "irresponsible" to not want to think about where your food came from.

First of all, it's cliché to say you don't want to know where your food came from. Almost anyone that lives in an urban area will say this predictably if you were to start talking about the animal you're eating. This response is especially predictable among non-thinkers.

Secondly, the idea that raising and killing your own livestock is somehow more "sustainable" is among the most idiotic ideas of the decade. If everyone actually did this it would destroy our economy. Anyone familiar with the concept of comparative advantage would dismiss it out of hand. Perhaps if Mark had finished his Harvard education, he'd be spending more time running the company people have mistakenly entrusted him to lead instead of wasting it slicing pigs' throats.

You may have started hearing that several recent data thefts (like this one or like the relatively minor one at Sony Corp) were reportedly launched from systems hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Well, unsurprisingly, AWS doesn't give away computational resources to anyone with an AOL account. You have to actually pay to have your system run on AWS. The only way to do that is to have a valid credit card. So then, shouldn't it be easy to track down the criminals responsible for these thefts?

Well, you don't have to be a security expert to know that it's pretty easy to steal a credit card number. After all, these data thefts probably resulted in millions more stolen credit card numbers, some of which will undoubtedly be sold to other criminals looking to perpetrate yet more future crimes. Oh well, I guess there's nothing we can do about it. After all, there is no way anyone can ever come up with a better scheme than relying on the maintaining secrecy of a 16-decimal-digit number for a period of several years.

In case you have a broken sense of sarcasm, I mean to say this is bullshit, pardon my French. If stolen credit card numbers can be used to fund entire sectors of our underground economy, then it's worth finding a solution to this problem. I won't say credit cards don't offter better protection now then most people leverage. Most credit cards offer "disposable" credit card numbers, though I bet very few people take advantage of these. One type of "disposable" number is the one-time-use number. That's great if you don't mind generating a new credit card number for every single purchase you make. Then there are the "virtual" numbers that last for as long as you want. These benefit of these is that once you discover the number is compromised, you can still keep your original number and simply discard the "disposible" one. Except by then, the cat has already been stolen from the bag.

We really need to start demanding better from credit card providers. I'm not saying I know the solution, but despite the fact that I haven't given this a lot of thought, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is hardly an insurmountable problem. After all, my online email account is more secure than my credit card account. My Twitter account is more secure than my credit card account. Why, because of this super-advanced technology called A PASSWORD. Far be it from me to tell credit card companies how to do their jobs, but what if they let me pre-approve the businesses that could use my credit card. Don't make me generate a special credit card number. That's an implementation detail that I shouldn't have to know. I just want to be able to say, I pre-approve Amazon.com for no more than $100 per month. Anything more than that, and you have to contact me directly.

It's not as if credit card companies aren't trying to eliminate fraud. After all, it's costing them big money. But I think their attitude is that they would rather spend tons of money identifying and fighting fraud using law enforcement than do anything that might discourage spending on their credit cards. If you make it less convenient to use the card, people will tend not to use it. Lest we forget there is thing called cash that some people still use. That's why the driving force behind any change is going to have to be people and governments.

If we blame a cloud services provider like Amazon for those criminals that use a stolen identity to gain access to their systems, then we have to blame any service provider that allows credit card payment. Does it really make sense to spread the burden of ensuring a credit card number is not stolen across all businesses that accept credit cards? Or should this burden fall on the credit card provider? Our credit card provider may keep us happy by eating fraudulent charges, but it creates an externality. It's like pollution. Those stolen dollars that credit card companies write off are funding criminal enterprises and we are doing nothing about it.

I've spoken with several family members and friends about the recent happenings in the Middle East and everyone I've talked to so far has been either undecided or decidedly negative in their view of these events. They all made mention of the likely negative impact on American interests. Personally, I cannot help but feel extremely happy when I read about the absconding of the authoritarian President of Tunisia or the stepping down of Mubarak amid widespread protest demanding fair elections or the imminent fall of the evil Qaddafi. I even love to hear the tales of how the various leaders (some of which hardly deserve that title) attempt to cling to power and explain why their fellow citizens should be denied fundamental freedoms as well as any official ability to redress such crimes.

When our fellow human beings decide collectively that now is the time and they have finally had enough - enough of the fake elections without even the semblance of authenticity, enough of being beaten and tortured by authorities for expressing an opinion or sometimes no good reason at all, enough of being kept in utter poverty while those in power reap the benefits of their lands - how can any of us in the rich, democratic world look at this and say "this is bad". Not one of these protests has been to demand that Sharia law be enforced, or shown some other sign of fanatical Islamic revolution of which so many in this country are unduly fearful. No, they have for the most part demanded reforms of the government or a better ability to feed themselves and their family. This is much less like Iran in 1979 and more like the communist bloc in 1989.

All of these uprisings could ultimately make things worse for the people of the respective nations and for the United States. That is one possible result. Each time there are uprisings of this sort, it is a roll of the die and my simple hope the die lands on democracy or at least a better future for my fellow man, even if it is "bad for US interests". That is just code for "bad for Israel and the ability of the US to purchase oil cheaply". On the Israel-Palestine issue, it's not as if we are on the verge or even the path of progress otherwise. As for cheap oil, haven't we moved past the idea that low prices can be sustained while simultaneously sustaining strong world growth? I won't pretend these aren't complex issues, but ultimately we must also remember there is precious little we can actually do to influence the course of these events.

Finally, I must address the horrible idea that the people of the Middle East simply "aren't ready" for democracy. Besides being unabashedly ethnocentric, this claim is belied by the fact that throngs in Egypt are DEMANDING democracy. This is analogous to a starving man begging and pleading with you to be fed, and you then responding "I don't think you are really hungry, you haven't thought this through."

There is nothing but good in this sudden turn of events in the Middle East. Compared against a fairly terrible status quo, change is ultimately all one could hope for. Even considering that change might be for the worse, I think it is worth the risk.

Bloomberg's worldwide headquarters at 731 Lexington Ave now sports a new "dramatic" curved staircase. (Yet we still don't have enough desks for everyone.) Here's my collection of photos. I call it "A study in stairs", which is properly accompanied by 10 year old scotch and Bach's Mass in B Minor.

Google is looking for a new exec to guide its social strategy. So what has Google done right, and what has it done wrong. What should its strategy be?

When I think of Google, its hard to see a social strategy at all. What I see is a hodge podge of social features. I am always impressed with Google's ability to innovate. It seems to understand better than many companies to need to experiment, and the requisite failed experiments, out of which truly original things can grow.

One example of this is the new Chrome OS under development. Google already has Android, but its not afraid to try multiple things. A lot of reasons can be supplied that would make this seem like a bad decision. But it seems the idea that experimentation can be fruitful simply has more weight at Google. That is my point.

So I can see Google has lots of social experiments - Buzz, Orkut, share/follow on Reader, Friend Connect, Profile, photo sharing on Picasa, document sharing on Docs and Spreadsheets, etc. But Google hasn't done a good job of packaging them into one social offering. Now Facebook is rolling out docs.com and its new graph api, and is probably steps away from an offering for online advertisers.

So that's the obvious threat. The question is, how should Google respond? What should be its vision for the social web?

When celebrities like Pamela Anderson were going nude to raise awareness of the evils of fur coats, that kind of made sense. "I would rather go naked than where fur." That worked. But the PETA nudity concept has now totally jumped the shark because when I see this ad, it just makes me want to to go on naked safari.

And get this: the chick wore leather boots to the PETA event!

Update: Figures PETA makes it difficult to link to the ad. The link keeps breaking!

Perhaps I missed some of the context of this, but I got the impression that the people on Stossel's panel were just regular Joes. First of all, he biases the group before asking them what they thought. Second, the first guy he goes to is Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie, a well-known Libertarian.

Watch for yourself:

Update: Okay, I just watched it again and Cavuto explicitly says these are "just regular folks".

 

Two things have become clear about Apple if you've been following the technology press recently: the company is set to unveil a new tablet device that will function as an e-reader, and the company is about to provide cloud storage for media content. The second point hasn't gotten as much press as the first, but I think is more exciting from a business perspective.

Cloud storage is a young industry that I think has a bright future. However cloud *media* storage has a much brighter future. Why? Because of one very beautiful economy of scale that only applies to media content. Only one copy of a media file needs to physically exist on storage to accommodate any number of owners of that content. So if you purchase a copy of Hamlet and I do as well we can both pull the same file from Apple's servers. In this way, media storage has zero marginal cost. Storage cost depend on the supply of content, but is independent of the number of users.

I'm no fan of Apple, but if I were a betting man, I would be betting on AAPL.
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