The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?
“A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives.” -- Charles Wheelan, "Naked Economics"
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Despite success creating magnificent supercomputers in Oak Ridge, the NSA realized they could not decode strong encryption in real time. Two responses followed:
1- They are creating an archive in Utah to duplicate ALL traffic on the internet for deciphering selectively at their measure.
2- Work to modify the infrastructure to allow real time manipulation in case of emergency.
Problem is that they are collecting your emails (all of them) and only admit to "interception" when they go back and read them. All without political discussion of the propriety of this policy.