Aint it pretty?
Posted on 9 June 2010 | 9 responses
I have no further comment at this time.
performance bonuses – they, uh, don’t actually work?
Posted on 1 June 2010 | No responses
I’m not terribly sure where I found this video, I think someone posted it on Twitter a while ago. Interesting food for thought though – is it a bit of a challenging notion that once people are paid enough to be comfortable and not be stressed about money, they don’t actually produce better work when financial reward is the motivator.
I hope nobody from work sees this and gets any bright ideas. I rather like my bonus, thanks very much. A lot of what’s here really rings true though… what do you reckon?
i went and bought wot.is
Posted on 26 May 2010 | 2 responses
In celebration of the ongoing ash cloud menacing europe, and also because I can’t control my geeky impulses, I bought an icelandic domain name. Pretty cool, huh? Predictably, I can’t think of anything terribly useful to do with it, so I’ve loaded YOURLS onto it and am using it as a custom URL shortening service.
Fancy! Feel free to point out what a sad geek I am.
You’ve been disturbed by BigDog – Now time for LittleDog!
Posted on 23 May 2010 | No responses
I’m amazed at how… alive the movement of this little robot appears. Between that and the donkey-sized BigDog, it seems autonomous legged robots will get a bunch more creepy looking in the near future.
Trickle-down ore-anomics
Posted on 17 May 2010 | 2 responses
Imagine if income tax worked like this. First, there’s a flat rate of tax based on how many hours you spend at work. It doesn’t matter how much your earn, you’ll pay this tax just for having “productive hours”. Next, on any income you make beyond the flat “hours tax”, you pay a flat rate of 30%.
Now, let’s imagine you’re in a job paying somewhat less than the average wage, but somewhat higher than the median wage. You make, let’s say, $45,000 per year gross. The flat tax that you pay for the privilege of turning up to work to be productive is $9,900. Once that’s subtracted from your gross income, you pay a 30% tax on the remainder. That’s a total of $20,430 in tax, an effective marginal tax rate of 45.4%. You bring home just $472.50 after tax every week.
But under this system, your neighbour next door (let’s call him Clive Palmer) is in a really nice high paying job. He earns $126,000 each year and is well into the high percentiles of earning in Australia. Just like you, Clive pays $9900 for the productive opportunity of turning up to work. On the remainder of his income, like you he pays a 30% flat tax. In total, Clive pays $44,730 in tax and comes home with $1562.88 in his pocket after tax each week – an effective marginal tax rate of 35.5%.
To me, this system looks very lopsided. It’s not hard to see that if your income were much lower, it’d hardly be worth working at all – you might as well go on the dole. And for some reason, the more you make, the lower the proportion of your income that you contribute as tax. It’d be a bad way of encouraging people to get into the job market and it wouldn’t fairly recoup tax revenue from those who earnt a lot of money.
I didn’t pull these figures out of thin air. You might want to take a look at this chart. It contrasts the current taxation situation on mining projects with that which would occur were the RSPT to be in place:
Today, the mechanism I described above is used to tax mining companies in Australia. If the mining project you embark on isn’t terribly profitable, you pay quite a high percentage of your income as tax. On the flipside, if the market is going gangbusters and your profits are high, you pay a declining proportion as tax.
When disgusting snorting billionaire mining magnates get on the television and cry poor, I can understand. Nobody likes to see their potential wealth decreased, even if you’re already filthy stinking rich. What I can’t understand, is why the Australian public are being conned into supporting the status quo, when what appears to be a much fairer alternative is on the table.
Take a look at that chart again. Unless you’re Clive’s personal yacht builder, do you really think his wealth will trickle down to you?
Eye-ya, Fya’-la, Yer(t)-kull
Posted on 16 May 2010 | 2 responses
I spent all this time finding out the right way to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull, so I’m secretly glad that it’s continuing to stay topical and erupt. Here, I spotted this very pretty time-lapse video on Gizmodo of billowing ash clouds rolling skyward and toward the jet engines of Europe. Enjoy.
Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.
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random gallery photo