They’re a fact of life, like telemarketers and snotty-nosed kids who sneeze on your pants. I’m talking about tax evasion, er, settlement commercials, the bane of late-night TV.
These commercials always bug me. I mean, just seeing the people on there going “I can’t believe the government is threatening to take away my house because I have huge tax debt!” makes me want to hit something. Uh, hello? Why are you in tax debt? Whose fault is it? Honestly.
Your finances are your own responsibility. There are consequences for mismanaging them. This applies for credit cards (I can’t even count the number of people who I’ve heard complain about their credit card debts as they wax their fancy car, listen to their brand-new iPod, and surf around on their shiny laptop). Taxes are even more important, considering there are even bigger consequences than falling behind on loans or credit cards. Failing to pay taxes can result in jail time. If you can’t keep up, it means you’re buying too much stuff without the means to pay taxes on all of it. In other words, if you have a minimum wage job, you shouldn’t be buying a new house. And I don’t care if you think it’s unfair to pay taxes. Either you pay taxes or your roads fall into disrepair and you’ve got Mr. Johnny McFeely in your elementary school “teaching” your kids. That’s only a slight exaggeration.
The thing that really bugs me about tax settlement commercials is the idea that people can avoid paying all the taxes they owe. It’s an easy out, which results in people paying less than they really owe. It just doesn’t seem fair to the people who pay their taxes on time and in full. Heck, I don’t even see how this is legal. No wonder the government is in such debt if they allow their own citizens to get away with paying a fraction of their taxes…*grumbles*
Whatever the case, debt is always avoidable. People would do well to remember that and avoid buying what they can’t afford or pay off in a reasonable amount of time. It’d mean less annoying commercials about “unfair” wage garnishment and foreclosure when I’m watching TV.
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This is a most tech rant, so some of you probably won’t care about it at all. But it’s also a privacy rights rant, so I suppose there’s something for everyone. I might even mention kittens. All right, I just did. Moving on…
There’s a service on the Internet called Whois. You can think of it like the phone book for the Internet. Basically, it stores the registration data for owners of millions of web domains (like mine). This can be a very useful tool for various reasons. Since it lists things like phone numbers and addresses for domain owners, it can be useful for tracking down pirates, spammers, and other problem-causing website owners. The IP address side of Whois has helped me many times identify the people who spam my blog so I could report them to their Internet service provider.
But there are some out there who want to do away with Whois entirely. They call themselves privacy advocates, but I have a feeling most of them just don’t like the idea of the law being able to track them down for doing illegal things. Privacy advocates can be like that sometimes. Anyways, the whole thing annoys me. A large group of these people are pushing to remove the Whois requirements placed on domain registrars (the companies you pay to get a .com, .net, .whatever) so people don’t have to put their contact info on a publicly accessible database. This will make it much harder to find the owners of illegal websites, as you can no doubt guess. What torrent site owner is really going to put his name and phone number on the Internet if he doesn’t have to?
Continue reading ‘Internet privacy’
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Being sick sucks. I mean, really. It’s awesome when you’re a little kid and missing school doesn’t matter because the only things you ever did in class were pick your nose, eat glue, and maybe learn about numbers. Maybe.
But when you’re older, being sick is a huge hassle. It started in high school, when teachers began telling you to make up work you had missed. What? What happened to the pat on the head and “Oh, that’s all right, you don’t have to do this assignment” of elementary school? Big bummer there. College is even worse. Some professors might not even let you make up an assignment, especially if you’re sick on a test day. You have to tell them you’ll miss the test in advance. That’s right, Professor. I’m planning on being sick Thursday. I was thinking the flu, but it might be AIDS. I haven’t decided.
Why the sick rant? Well, I’ve suffered a rather nasty cold/flu thing over the past weekend, which has caused me to miss most of class Friday (including a review session which could have really helped on the test I dragged myself out of bed for today) and two days of work. I thought I was getting better, but no. Mother Nature has to make it worse. Damn you, Nature. Now I’m not sorry for that one incident in the woods. That tree deserved it. You know what I’m talking about.
Anyways, the older I get, the less I like to miss school or work. It’s probably a result of having actual penalties for missing things. Whatever the case, I don’t like being sick. I just thought I’d let everyone know.
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You may have noticed a rather large jump in the number of posts here at Mad Rants. I don’t know how you might have noticed such a thing through a casual glance, but hey, it could happen. Anyways, I broke down and paid for a premium Xanga account so I could import all my old posts (back to September 2004) to this blog. Looking back, I don’t know why I bothered. Most of my posts were rather meaningless and certainly not anything like the things I write about now. Well, I suppose it at least gives me credibility for having an active blog for so long (”I was blogging when blogging was still the realm of people who had nothing to talk about!” …wait, that still holds true…), and I suppose the posts are fun to read through. I had a strange sense of humor three years ago.
Anyways, please bear with me as I go through and categorize, tag, name, and cleanup all the imported posts. Permalinks may be broken for these old posts, so don’t go Digging them just yet. I only wish I knew why some of the later (more recent) ones are lacking names and links for the comments. Very odd.
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I upgraded my laptop memory from 1 GB to 2 GB, and I have to say I’ve noticed a huge increase in performance already. Word to the wise: if you get Vista, don’t stick with the bare minimum of RAM.
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