In light of the anniversary, it’s worth spending some time to ask yourself “what has America done to make them hate us so much?” Consider the recent imperialist unjust wars fought in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and the illicit actions of the CIA around the world, or the hundreds of military bases we maintain in other countries. The aid dollars we dole out to dictators to preserve the status quo, our arbitrary tariffs and immigration policies that alienate foreigners, and the eroding of Americans’ own civil liberties in the name of “freedom” and the “war against terror.”

America was once respected as a nation of justice, wisdom, and opportunity. Perhaps over time the Obama administration can repair America’s reputation.

“So, let’s imagine how [the September 11th attacks] could have been worse for example. Suppose that on September 11, Al-Qaeda had bombed the White House and killed the President, instituted a murderous, brutal regime which killed maybe 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured about 700,000, set up a major international terrorist center in Washington, which was overthrowing governments all over the world, and installing brutal vicious neo-Nazi dictatorships, assassinating people. Suppose he called in a bunch of economists, let’s call them the ‘Kandahar Boys’ to run the American economy, who within a couple of years had driven the economy into one of the worst collapses of its history. Suppose this had happened. That would have been worse than 9/11, right? But it did happen. And it happened on 9/11. That happened on September 11, 1973 in Chile. The only thing you have to change is this per capita equivalence, which is the right way to look at it. Well, did that change the world? Yeah, it did but not from our point of view, in fact, who even knows about it? Incidentally, just to finish, because we [the U.S.] were responsible for that one.” — Noam Chomsky.

The story now becomes interesting when Judge David Harvey bans online mention of the accused’s names. No one is sure why print media (which is searchable, through interfaces like Lexis Nexus) gets special treatment here. I certainly disagree, and I’m free to publish whatever I’d like, as a journalist, including the names of the accused.

Anytime anyone wants to suppress totally free speech, I say RESIST!!

Illegal Wiretaps We Can Believe In

We are all disappointed, Obama. TechCrunch, in Barack Obama Breaks Promise, Flip Flops, and supports Telco’s, says it best:

In voting for the bill, Obama acted in direct contradiction to his earlier statements. In 2007 Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman, said “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

Update: BoingBoing just posted the same thing a little late to the game!

Our young example is a 23 year old woman working for Citigroup. As an entry level programmer working in straight-through-processing, she might make $100,000 a year in taxable income (it’s a round number, not a real one). She is single, and will not be claimed as a dependent. Now let’s run the numbers for NY:

- $100,000 taxable income
- 6.85% state tax
- $1,706 plus 3.648% of excess over $50,000 NYC tax
- $7,500 standard deduction

So the total NY taxes she’ll pay is ($100,000 – $7,500) * .0685 + $1,706 + ($50,000 – $7,500 ) * .03648, which is $9,593 in taxes to New York. The New Jersey tax works slightly differently:

- $100,000 taxable income
- 6.37% state tax
- $2,126 post-tax deduction

In NJ, she will pay the following taxes: $100,000 * .0637 – $2,126, which is $4,244 in taxes to New Jersey. This is $5,369 in taxes she gets to keep in her pocket, an extra $450 post-tax dollars a month of savings. Please note that I am not a tax accountant or lawyer, so these figures should not be taken as advice; they may very well be wrong. But to me, they provide real evidence that living in NJ has substantial tax benefit.

For comparison’s sake, an average movie download is 700 MB (5872025600 bits), and would take 8.16 hours to download under the old broadband definition at 200Kbps. However, at the new faster rate of 768Kbps, an American with basic broadband will be able to download a movie in just 2.12 hours.

Broadband reporting is a problem for America, because up till now we could only point to useless studies indicating that 12.5% of internet users are still on 56.6k or worse speeds. Once politicians and the industry realizes how bad broadband penetration in the US really is, we’ll see better internet service and connectivity.