Herman Melville

Remember when I was readying Tom Jones?  It was in January, which seems like a lifetime ago, but it was when I was trying to be proactive towards completing goals set back before time seems to existed.
Anyways, we have a shelf of books we didn't send to Half Price Books and they're things I intend to finish or re-read. I took a slight reading hiatus after Dale Carnegie, but I did read some Block books from the library in March. I read all the time, but it's clutternet stuff that means nothing, but thankfully the shelf is in a location that begs exploring.
I started to read Thomas Malory, but my Middle English is rusty, so I've gotten to The Confidence Man.
Never read Moby Dick, but after reading the editor's preface to The Confidence Man, I might.
Confidence Man is rather short in the sense that I had it for a class that included these three: Tom Jones, Vanity Fair, and The Life and Times of Tristan Shandy. I know I finished it back in the day and that I wrote a paper on it, but much of it is vague to me in that I know I liked it, but I don't recall why.
Anyways, I'm reading the editor's comments and finding myself feeling like writing my own novel. It's been years since I had the bug to write, but I find myself in a position of having a mindless "job" that clears the mind of clutter (perfect recipe).

Cybertrash

Remember Myspace? Did you leave it formally, or did you just forget to logon indefinitely?
I read the headline about Lady Gaga having 71% of her Twitter followers being "fake accounts." When you are talking about millions of unattended accounts, it makes you wonder about cybertrash. It's in Twitter's best interest to have as many unique users as possible for valuation of the company and its marketing reach, but a deluge of redundant content makes searching the internet feel like the pre-Google days where everything  seems to be garbage when you use Google to look up a roommate you have lost track of 10 years ago.

I tell people if I can't find you on twitter or Facebook, then you may as well be dead. Google seems to index those two locales more than anything else.

Trivial thoughts. When I die, I will be abandoning at least 10 email accounts. Spam finds me, so I suppose that I  must exist in some plane of reality, regardless if I'm alive or not.


Is it possible to destroy the internet? What if an EMP  somehow wipes out all digital knowledge, would that throw the world back into the dark ages? 

Sad to think that "57 channels and nothing on" meant something when 57 channels was a lot of channels. Imagine if there was no television from all the satellites becoming somehow fried. Scary, huh?

Should tax evasion be a capital crime?

I was thinking the other day that blatant disregard for paying one's taxes is rather evil when given that taxes fund lifesaving government entities in addition to libraries.  

So it got me to thinking if legally it could be construed as a capital crime. 

Capital punishment is reserved for murder, but murder is a legal term that can easily be redefined.

For example:

Charles Manson was convicted of the murders through the joint-responsibility rule, which makes each member of a conspiracy guilty of crimes his fellow conspirators commit in furtherance of the conspiracy's objective.^[4][5]

^{Just looked up some words on dictionary.com.}

tax evasion

noun

the nonpayment of taxes, as through the failure to report taxable income.

mur·der 

noun

1. Law . the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder),  and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder).

2.Slang . something extremely difficult or perilous: That final exam was murder!

3.a group or flock of crows.

verb (used with object)

4.Law . to kill by an act constituting murder.

5.to kill or slaughter inhumanly or barbarously.

6.to spoil or mar by bad performance, representation, pronunciation, etc.: The tenor murdered the aria.

a·fore·thought

adjective

1.thought  of previously; premeditated (usually used predicatively): with malice aforethought.

mal·ice  

noun

1. desire to inflict injury, harm, or suffering on another, either because of a hostile impulse or out of deep-seated meanness: the malice and spite of a lifelong enemy.

2. Law . evil intent on the part of a person who commits a wrongful act injurious to others.

pre·med·i·ta·tion

noun

1.an act or instance of premeditating.

2.Law . sufficient forethought to impute deliberation and intent to commit the act.

Does Jeff Bezos hate libraries?

Just want to re-hash my dislike for Amazon. I looked up Jeff Bezo's Wikipedia entry and found the below:

Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 after making a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way. He initially set up the company in his garage.[9] He had left his "well-paying job" at a New York City hedge fund when he "learned about the rapid growth in Internet use", which coincided with a "then-new U.S. Supreme Court ruling [that] online retailers don't have to collect sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence"; he had headed to Washington because its relatively small population meant fewer of his future customers would have to pay sales tax.[5]

An actual Jobs Bill

So I have a blog, I technically produce content to share with whomever stumbles upon my random commentary on simplicity of life and the happiness found within it.

I live in Ohio, so I am a target of unsolicited political calls, mail, email, radio ads, television ads, and web ads. I cannot avoid a national election, let alone a statewide election.

This election is being framed as a popularity contest as they normally are, but I've never been much about hype. I look at the issues that concern me and think of the long term goals of the candidates.

I always pick the lesser of two evils.

What are the issues that effect me most?

Only one is on my mind, for I'm unemployed. I've had a hard time keeping a job after being laid-off a couple times. My industry was never outsourced to a third world country, but the funding essentially was hijacked by the same sort of  circumstances that made sending jobs overseas practical from business standpoint.

"Loopholes" are blamed for outsourcing.

Is it a "loophole" that Amazon does not have to charge local taxes when it ships merchandise across state lines?  Yes, they deliberately look for tax loopholes and monitor threats to them. Supposedly, the sales tax loophole will end this year, but I haven't seen much about congress fixing the problem of late.

I haven't heard anyone bash Jeff Bezos in a while, but I hear about nameless Wall Street types or anything related to Wal-Mart. 

Amazon is worse than Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart supposedly destroyed small businesses, but Amazon went further and took revenue away which paid for Police Officers, Fire Fighters, and School Teachers.

If Commerce Law was implemented to make the market place fair for bricks and mortar storefronts vs virtual entities, then a lot of the tax funding problems we see will be addressed.

More funding for local governments directly related to consumption would been seamless since the price differences aren't going to jump for local merchants, while online retailers can find other ways to squeeze their profits to offset shipping costs. People will still buy stuff if it saves them time.

Seems too simple, but more local sales, means more salespeople needed locally. More people working locally along with more local sales means more tax revenue. More tax revenue means more funding for public entities, which allows for more employees which can buy more things beyond sustenance levels. Another benefit is that there is less need for the generation of tax revenue from other avenues.

Destroying Amazon's loophole will benefit all. Amazon will survive because people like Amazon for reasons beyond the sales tax aspect..

News coverage from major networks chooses to ignore these facts because they are sponsored by CORPORATIONS that exploit these tax laws and their viewers in kind purchase online to avoid taxes.