Wednesday, June 04, 2003

PERMALINK

Cleaning up behind the bleeding edge "Bleeding edge" is the label for people ("early adopters") who buy new technologies so early that they have to deal with all the bugs and problems that the technologies' creators failed to solve in their rush to market. I have always tried to avoid the bleeding edge, but I'm also interested enough in new technologies that I itch to toy with them. Usually, I grab semi-new technologies a generation or two after their introduction, once there's been a little time to iron out the glitches and bring the prices down. (On the same theory, I will never buy a computer with the fastest processor -- you can always save money buying one two or three notches slower than the fastest around, and you'll never notice the difference.) I think this puts me at the trailing edge of the bleeding edge -- the scabby edge, perhaps. So it is that, a year or two after the 802.11b/WiFi revolution took all geekdom by storm, I have finally joined the bandwagon -- with a little help from a book I'm happy to recommend, Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman's "Wireless Networking Starter Kit." (Engst's "Internet Starter Kit" was the book I used to put my Macintosh on the Net back in 1994, so this all felt right.) What has amazed me, as I added wireless to my existing home network with its DSL connection, is how absurdly cheap the hardware is. I got a perfectly good Netgear wireless router box for $70 with a $20 rebate (and I see that in the two weeks since I bought it its price has gone down another $10); the PC card for my laptop was even cheaper -- $80 but with a $50 rebate. OK, I know all this 802.11b gear is being dumped because a new generation of faster, backwards-compatible 802.11g wireless equipment is coming on the market and the manufacturers are unloading the less desirable old stock. I don't know how any of these companies are making money, but in the meantime, there are tons of amazing bargains out there. The wireless equipment doesn't cost much more than the ethernet cabling and hub you'd use to build a wired equivalent. comment [] 4:34:45 PM | permalink

More fast talk on taxes The recent Bush tax cut offered a child-credit rebate to lots of Americans, but not to millions of low-income taxpayers. Now Congress is squabbling over attempts to restore this tax break, which attempts to spread just a handful of the billions being handed out to people who actually need it. Tom DeLay isn't buying it. This is his explanation, in today's N.Y. Times: "To me, it's a little difficult to give tax relief to people that don't pay income tax." DeLay would have you believe that the Democrats and moderate Republicans who are pressing this $3.5 billion tax-cut handout -- and who have suggested that the Republicans goofed in leaving it out while pushing for tax cuts for investors that cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- are being illogical. What? Give tax rebates to people who don't pay taxes at all? But note that insertion of the little word "income." People in the bracket under discussion -- roughly $10,000 to $25,000 a year wage earners -- pay plenty of taxes. But they pay it in payroll taxes, which typically swipe about 8 percent of income. The Republican tax-cut architects have always done a deceptive shuffle with the language here: Payroll taxes count as taxes when these legislators want to tally up the onerousness of the tax burden on American citizens. But the same taxes magically disappear when they want to keep low-income people off the gravy train that they are loading up for their high-income constituents and campaign contributors. All of which is a shame -- not only in the broad moral sense that helping people who are struggling on low incomes is a social good in and of itself, but also in the pragmatic sense that when you put a $400 tax credit in the pockets of low-income wage earners they are more likely to spend it and help boost the economy. comment [] 1:01:45 PM | permalink