Interesting thought on whether it makes sense to "fight the

In an article Is A Police State Worth Fighting For the author makes the comparison to Rome and the people who saw the coming police state and left versus the ones who stayed to "fix" the system and ended up suffering a police state. It is hard for me to accept that we're in a similar situation, and even so I feel like the Tea Party gives some hope that some of the problems are going to get fixed. But an interesting idea.

75% of public transit costs paid through subsidy

Was just listening a Cato forum "The Future of Public Transit: What Are the Roles of the Federal Government and the Private Sector?" and was struck by the following statement:

"Today only about 20-25% of all funding for transit comes from transit fares. The rest of it comes from various federal, state, and local subsidies."

The problem is partly then the public transit is trying to please government, the major source of funding, rather than riders.

Disincentive to Produce

One of the problems we have in this country (in my opinion) is we have a disincentive to produce. At some point it makes no sense for a rational person to try to earn more because there is not enough return on their work. I know of people who were on welfare and it was hard to make the choice to work because their standard of living went down once they weren't receiving all the freebies. They made the choice to do it because they believed at some point they'd be earning enough that they would be better off, but for now it would be a step back. Someone else running into this due to the AMT wrote about their Disincentive to Produce. They were going to be losing so much of any additional money they earned, it didn't make sense to work harder or be more productive. Just seems like there is a problem when we don't reward people working harder. They make the comparison of a hourly worker who when working overtime gets time and a half, but the tax system tends to reverse things, that you earn less for your 60th hour worked than you did for your first hour worked.

Interesting thought.

The Self Sufficient Gardener

http://theselfsufficientgardener.com/

I often listen to podcasts while working and have enjoyed listening to this podcast. You can find it in iTunes or directly at http://feeds.feedburner.com/http/theselfsufficientwaycom/feedpodcast .

The War on Small Business

This was an article I wanted to bookmark.

http://dailyreckoning.com/the-war-on-small-business/

"Kauffman crunched a data set from the Census Bureau covering the years 1977-2005. In all but seven years during that period, existing businesses cut an average 1 million jobs… while firms in existence for a year or less created 3 million."

The Myth of government sticking it to the big corps

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/when-will-liberals-stop-falsely-claiming-to-be-battling-big-business-98765764.html

True for both parties.

Solution to an auto update problem on WordPress

Not my normal topic for this blog, but a website I run for a friend uses WordPress and the auto-update wasn't working. This article at http://www.big-webmaster.com/wordpress-automatic-update-with-1and1/ fixed the problem I had, just needed to make a .htaccess file with the line:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Now the auto update works again.