What the hell is the matter with people that they want to tell other people what to do with their money all the time?

Take Bill Gates for example. Very rich man. His dad reckons he should pay more tax. Can’t have all these rich people keeping their money when they could be paying tax, after all.

But hang on a minute, what exactly do rich people do with all that money when they’re not paying tax? There are really only two things a person can do with money: spend it or invest it. By spending it, he transfers it to other people. By investing it, he lends it to other people who then spend it. Either way, you’re helping other people out, boosting the economy, creating jobs, allowing other people to earn a living. It’s not as if rich people put their money under the matress and then go about jeering at poor people. Even without deliberate philanthropy they actively improve the lives of others.

All taxing rich people achieves is a change in who decides where the money gets spent. Quite apart from the moral argument that the person who rightfully should make that decision is the person who earnt the money through their own hard work in the first place, isn’t it a bit of a leap of faith to suggest that governments somehow spend money “better” than private individuals?

Bill Gates seems to have ideas about how he can use his wealth to make the world a better place. Good luck to him, I say. It doesn’t stop busybodies whinging and complaining. Take Dr Mercola for example, who, on learning that Gates is investing in pharmaceutical companies, says, “Great, just what we need. The richest man in the world is now supporting one of the richest industries in the world. Does this make any sense?”

Does Dr Mercola make any sense? What does he think the drug companies are going to do with that money? If they’re not spending it on research into new drugs that will make sick people healthy, or using it to improve their bottom line so that they can charge less for the same drugs, then what?

Do we really want the likes of Dr Mercola deciding where money gets spent? Because it’s exactly that type of person who works for the government and decides where the tax extorted from rich people gets spent.

Sidenote: I’m well aware that I’m linking to stories that are a year or two old. However, I was inspired to write about Bill Gates after hearing about his recent KBE.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 10:28 PM EST

1 Comment »

Rob Hinkley, of the amusing and insightful Semiskimmed.net, has brought my attention to The Brick Testament. It’s the Bible told in Lego, and it has to be seen to be believed (as it were). The gently mocking humour can’t help but raise a smile.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Imaginary Friends, Links at 10:07 PM EST

1 Comment »

Usually I’m pretty happy to be a bloke. All things considered, I think we get a fairly good deal. Sometimes, though, it can be a distinct disadvantage. Consider the following disheartening advert in Loot:

Chiswick, huge double room with own shower in friendly luxury flatshare. Garden, private parking, ch, washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, cable tv, broadband, balcony with river view, 2 secs from tube, flatshare employs naked nymphomaniac brazilian cleaners. 25p per calendar month inclusive of utilities. Professional female only.

Aaaargh! A good 50% of adverts read like this. So now you know: if you’re looking for somewhere to live in London, it’s better to be a girl.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 8:47 PM EST

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In 2001 Nasa stitched together satellite images to create a true colour picture of the Earth with a 1 square kilometre per pixel resolution. This was called the Blue Marble image; and the data is freely available (along with an explanation of how the image was created) on the Earth Observatory website.

A great way to look at the images is with the Blue Marble Viewer. This is a GPLed (read free as in speech and beer) piece of software that uses the Open Scene Graph graphics library - a high level library that sits on top of OpenGL - to render a 3D rotatable and zoomable model of the Earth.

It’s quite a download; over 292MB which then extracts into 2.3GB on your hard disk, but it’s well worth the wait. When you fire it up, press D to disable demo mode then C to disable the clouds. This gives you a clear view of the Earth. You can rotate the globe by dragging with the left mouse button and zoom by dragging with the right button. The full controls are given on the web site. The program works by using textures of varying levels of detail depending on how zoomed in you are, so you’ll find that different viewing distances look sharper than others. Experiment.

If you like this sort of thing you’ll probably also enjoy Celestia and XPlanet.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 12:43 AM EST

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There’s not a great deal you can do about spam SMS messages, which is a shame because they’re even more annoying than spam emails. Especially when you’re driving and you pull over to read that important message you’ve been waiting for and instead it reads:

You have 1 new voicemail. Please call 0871 712 9652 to listen to it

I’ve received three of these in the last twenty four hours. A quick search on Google to find out what it was about revealed that there is something that can be done. As an Orange customer, I can forward spam SMSs to 7726 for free, and presumably they will do something about it. Notice that the number spells out SPAM on the keypad.

Orange now have a page about spam on their website.

If anyone knows about the other mobile companies; post a comment here.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 1:07 AM EST

73 Comments »

Speaking of women, I read in today’s Southern Daily Echo the usual story of an MP (this time Liberal Democrat for Test Valley, Sandra Gidley) getting all hot under the collar about pay differences between men and women. (Couldn’t it just be that women, on average, choose lower paid jobs?). It was pretty run of the mill stuff about firms doing pointless jobs audits, and people taking “action”, but I had to do a double-take at a remark by Catherine Wright, head of public affairs at Southampton Chamber of Commerce.

Catherine Wright, head of public affairs at Southampton Chamber of Commerce, said the city suffered from having too few senior management positions because of the make-up of business in Southampton.

“We are a service-based economy but we do not have many company headquarters in the city. Women tend to be doing the lower grade admin jobs and working for the city’s main employers like the council and NHS - and these tend to be lower paid jobs,” she said.

The council and the NHS are the city’s main employers. Isn’t there something wrong with this picture? What’s wrong is that it’s people like me who are paying the salaries of the city’s main employees.

Thankfully, I’ll soon be moving to a city that is (I think) mostly made up of producers, not moochers.

Update: I’ve now figured out how to link permanently to stories in the Echo, and have fixed the link.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 11:32 PM EST

6 Comments »

In a nationwide driving theory test conducted about half an hour ago, 42% of men passed and only 40% of women passed. Something must be done! Ban women from driving immediately! How can the government let this continue? The test must be biased against women! Clearly we need to increase the opportunities for women to pass this test!

I’m told you can take the test yourself, but the website is currently very slow.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Driving at 11:14 PM EST

6 Comments »

I meant to link to the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog when I first discovered it a few months ago, but I forgot. A recent email discussion with some friends reminded me of it. Clayton Cramer, who runs the site, also links to Operation Self Defense which similarly monitors the US media for stories about guns used in self defense.

These sites show that, in the right hands, guns can be used for good.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links, Self Defense at 10:05 PM EST

7 Comments »

The Libertarian Alliance recently released a press release explaining why plans to de-regulate rail fares are a good thing. In short, it will, “create an environment in which well-run train companies thrive and the poorer ones go to the wall.” The press release also confirms what I had previously suspected; the railways were never privatised. At least, not in any meaningful interpretation of ‘private’.

If you can’t decide how much you can charge for your service, in what sense do you own your business? And since rail operators work under a short term franchise system; they might very well not own their business in a few years’ time, so how can they be expected to invest in the future? There are also, apparently, controls that prevent operators from buying the track their trains run on, leaving them at the mercy of unreliable tracks.

The benefits of a free market only become apparent when the market is free. I suspect that the alleged decline of the British rail system since privatisation is a myth; what we are seeing is the continuation of the decline that started in 1948 when the rail system was nationalised. As Patrick Crozier says: “Fare control is very much a recent phenomenon. Before nationalisation in 1948 there were very few fare controls and very few complaints.”

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 10:00 PM EST

5 Comments »

You probably have to have used IRC at some point in your life to appreciate this one. Thanks to the Toast Meister for the link.

Cerebros points out this highlight:

Jehova: you just singlehandedly slaughtered 1/4 of #Earth’s population

Posted by Rob Fisher as Imaginary Friends, Links at 12:42 AM EST

4 Comments »