Archive for January, 2008

Chris Rock has a line about how we don’t pay income tax—they take it. The method with which tax is calculated, how much you owe and the various penalties and benefits you are eligible for is so sophisticated that the US IRS Tax Code is a whopping 54,846 pages long. 54,846 pages! It’s so complex that CPAs specialize in various fields, much like doctors and lawyers.

I’ve grown up with this system and have accepted it as part of American life. Color me surprised when I find that many of the Republican candidates for the 2008 Presidential election are proponents of something called Fair Tax. In a nutshell, Fair Tax would get rid of income tax, disband the IRS, and all government taxation would be derived from a 23% sales tax. You keep your whole paycheck, and the government gets theirs from what you purchase. From Americans For Fair Taxation: About the Fair Tax:

The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with an integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a prebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar federal revenue neutrality, and, through companion legislation, the repeal of the 16th Amendment.

Whoa! I might have my head in the sand, but I really didn’t see this coming. What a fascinating idea! There’s apparently a New York Times bestseller written by Neal Boortz called The Fair Tax Book which fleshes out this idea in greater detail.

To make it more fair to folks earning less, the government hands out “prebate” checks every year, so people near the poverty line won’t have their income drowning in taxation. From CNNMoney.com: Behind Huckabee’s radical ‘Fair Tax’:

But the sales tax plan would partly offset this effect by sending every household in America, from the family of a poor single mother to Warren Buffett, a check to cover the taxes on their spending up to the poverty level.

Factor in that cash from the government, and each family’s net tax burden goes down, so that the Fair Tax looks more progressive.

For example, a family of three earning $30,000 a year and spending all their income would give 7% of their pay to the government; one earning and spending $125,000 would pay a net rate of about 19%.

At first blush, this seems pretty brilliant. At the very least, it’s a fresh new look at an existing problem. There are many things to consider—decreased consumption and spending, for one—but on the other hand it would start drawing tax from people that have successfully avoided them in the past (think: illegal immigrants, drug dealers, etc).

That Boortz’ book made bestseller is evidence itself of the interest in something like this; let’s see where this goes in the coming months.

I more or less fell into Web development. Leaving undergrad, I wanted to be a copy writer for an ad agency. Living in Chicago, there were plenty of big names to talk to, but almost no jobs. And those few jobs came with almost no pay.

Around this time my friend Chris was having success working at a dotcom start-up and got me interested. I was never a hard-core tech guy—I studied Sociology and Economics in college. But I studied HTML for a weekend, made a demo site and took an interview. Goodbye advertising, hello interwebs.

I tell you this so you understand: I’m not a brilliant coder. I have no pet language that I’ve learned inside and out, wrote books on, spoken at conferences. I can’t tell you about developing mainframe applications. I will never write my own linux kernel. I know a handful of different Web scripting languages—PHP, ColdFusion, JavaScript—and know my way around CSS and (X)HTML. I know SQL. I’ve poked around in Java. I’ve used frameworks. I used to be handy with Flash and ActionScript.

Having spent the last 3 years in a ColdFusion shop, I began to get nervous about the future of the language. I probably have more professional experience and deep knowledge in ColdFusion than any other (scripting) language, and have worked with people on pretty sophisticated applications. I started feeling that maybe it was a dead-end. ColdFusion gets more badmouthing than probably any other server-side language this side of ASP2.0. It developed an ugly reputation in the dynamic Web’s early days, and unfortunately some of the developers with 9 years experience were doing some of the same code that earned ColdFusion a bad name (spaghetti <table> mark-up, ugly inline SELECT * queries that pulled a thousand rows, etc).

Folks like Ray Camden and Sean Corfield are doing great things with the language, and keeping the community alive. But still, looking down the barrel of a career change, I got nervous.

Enter Ruby on Rails. Yep, you guessed it—everybody’s favorite fanboy framework.

My previous boss became very interested in Rails when the first screencasts came out, but we as a department had too much invested in ColdFusion to up and change horses. And frankly, I avoided RoR for the same reasons I initially avoided Incubus—it seemed like something “the kids” were into. Uber trendy, un-tested, super hyped.

Around Rails’ 1.2.3 release I finally got around to kicking the tires. And frankly, I really liked it.

Having worked with architect/developer types that love to invent their own undocumented frameworks, I found Rails’ strict adherence to convention really comfortable. Again, I’m not one of those guys that has to build something from scratch myself—I want to use the tools that already exist and make something cool or useful. And, I think I finally gave into the hype.

Flash forward 10 months: Zed Shaw, the man who wrote Rails’ major Ruby server Mongrel, unleashes this post on the world. If you’ve made it this far in the post, then you’ll probably go and read his whole entry anyway, but let me summarize in case you don’t:

• Mongrel and Rails destroyed his career
• Rails is profoundly, fundamentally unstable
• We’ve been lied to by the Rails community
• A community which (he believes) is full of jerks
• He’s ready, willing and able to smack the crap out of anyone that wants to confront him about this

Holy Crap. Let me say that again: Holy Crap.

Here’s an excerpt:

Now, DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson—the guy that essentially invented Ruby on Rails) tells me that he’s got 400 restarts a mother f***ing day. That’s 1 restart about ever 4 minutes bitches… If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average.

Wow.

In a nutshell, the lingering doubts I’ve had about Rails (slow response, server resource usage, occassionally arcane or esoteric deployment techniques that feel a lot like ornate workarounds) may very well be true. It bothered me that, when looking for code or resources online, most of the Rails guys sites were unresponsive or—far too frequently—down. The Ruby On Rails site itself seems to be painfully slow or wholly unresponsive. And now I find myself creeping back to PHP (like this here WordPress site).

Thankfully, the sites I’ve deployed with RoR have caching in place, and essentially amount to a simple static HTML site for Apache to spew out (courtesy of this post).

Also, Zed Shaw… When someone’s riding high, you can take some of his swagger with a grain of salt. When they’re down, it becomes harder to swallow. I gotta believe that his blog is really hurting his career. I’m squeamish enough about saying what I think in this blog, and it’s milk toast in comparison. I don’t know him, but I wish him well.

Sorry Patrick Swayze, but if Baby decides she wants to vote in a caucus she’ll have to stand in the corner. Well, that’s if the candidate she wants has their group meet in the corner.

Really? Caucuses? C’mon now, we can completely wipe the earth clean with nukes and the best we can come up with is standing around in clusters staring at each other in a farmhouse while someone counts heads and then that decides the who you want to lead the US of A? But yep, it’s true. Been that way since the first President: President Hanson. (Look it up.)

Anyway, with all the advances in technology, it seems stupid that we have any state decide who they like for President this way. Black and white movies suck mostly for the exact same reason. We have better ways of displaying images now. And to have this antiquated way of voting dictate the “momentum” of a campaign is stupid.

Hey Iowans, I know you’re backward and in general probably don’t even know what the word “blog” really means, but try this cool new thing called a voting machine.

Ok, I’ll admit it: I *like* Hooters. Or, more specifically, I like Hooters wings. My wife and I have wandered over to Hooters, ordered 20 hot and drank a few pitchers of beer many, many times. More times than I care to mention.

They’re good wings, and frequently the only choice available.
But god, they’d really do well to rethink their whole schtick. Sure, “hot” girls—I get it. I get the deal. But let me tell you, nude pantyhose and tight orange nylon shorts are *not* appetizing. And, worse, they’re not attractive.

What you’re trying to do here is create a place branded for young guys that will come in, get drunk and spend money. Maybe not even young—there’s plenty of lawnmower salesmen that guiltily raid Hooters when traveling to Chicago or Minneapolis for their annual sales conventions. Theoretically these guys will come in, drawn to be in a room full of captive women who *have to* flirt with them. Plus there’s beer and greasy bar food.

That’s easy. Easy enough. And Hooters, you’re messing it up.

Your style guidelines are painfully dated, making the overall experience feel like watching a car accident in slow motion. You got the beer and fried food part right; now it’s time to fix everything else.

1. New uniforms.

Seriously, *anything* would be better than the nylons-shorts-and-tanktops thing. I have yet to go to Hooters with anyone that hasn’t been grossed out by the shorts. Why not jeans? Women have been looking in great in jeans since the 70s. And it would allow your wait staff to have their own variation in dress. It would be a profound transformation.

2. Music

This is really geared to be a guy’s bar/restaurant, no? Then tailor the music to male taste and get rid of the Village People schtick. The people whose wallets you want open do not like giggly girl music.

3. Silly Routines

Ok, this one is probably my own personal axe to grind, but: do you *have to* do all the Hooter Girls dance numbers and routines? The “How Many Hooters Girls Fit In The Hula Hoop” one particularly drives me nuts. Now, I understand that some people probably go to Hooters intentionally for these routines. Every time I’ve gone some poor pimple-faced kid is getting spanked on his 14th birthday. But me, I could do without. It’s almost as bad as the dancing waiter thing at Joe’s Crabshack (which is *truly* painful to watch).

Hooters management, I swear to you: rework your schtick. You could go from a mass-market niche to a much larger chain restaurant presence overnight.