Joshua Napoli

I never really understood why capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than income from regular income. It does seem like adjustments on the limits on IRA contributions should provide the government enough influence over increasing or decreasing savings. OK, taxes probably don’t bother entrepreneurship. Taxes probably don’t bother lottery players either. Low tax rates or “refundable” tax credits demotivating the less inspired end of the spectrum seems more plausible, but I’m not sure how to check this. 32% of tax filers already pay no federal tax.

Expanding this group or giving extra refunds seems like a strange goal. It distorts the labor market, subsidizing low-value jobs. The rebates given earlier this year were supposedly not very effective; it seems
like refunds would have a similar level of effectiveness. Anyway, it seems that income tax is a pretty blunt tool for moving wealth between different groups.

The “rule of law” benefits people in direct proportion to their income and accumulated property. It’s not clear to me that diminishing marginal utility for income is a good reason to tax richer people at a higher
rate. It seems like there should be a better way to enrich people who have lower incomes right now.

The news around the UAW highlights a better way for getting more wealth to lower skilled people. Through the union, auto workers have clearly captured more more of the value that they produce (and we can’t give

the UAW too much blame for the collapse of the auto manufacturers, since the German companies prosper despite higher compensation rates).
Unionization also provides a nice consistent structure where the legislature where the courts and legislature can make more predictable adjustments to the balance of power between labor and management.

Perhaps “broad” employee ownership would align everyone’s interests and give better results than unionization, but I don’t know the examples. Maybe ownership is too always easy to lose… not even “management” can hold on to it.

The minimum wage should be another way to help low skilled people capture more income and also to nudge people into more productive activities. A marginally higher minimum wage is not incompatible with
the most productive state economies. A gradual increase in minimum wage would increase unemployment somewhat, but on the whole it could be beneficial to economic growth. Lower valued positions are priced out, making workers more readily available for relatively higher value positions.

Minimum Wage versus Per-Capita State GDP

Sources for the plot: US Department of Labor and Wikipedia.

I don’t support changes to the income tax that raise the marginal rate (neither the earned income tax credit or the deduction increase). I posted this comment on bluestategroup, but I’ll copy it here, just in case:

We’re simultaneously seeking “fairness” and “positive social outcome”, but the two concepts don’t necessarily point to the same solution for state revenue collection. Progressive income tax produces a desirable social outcome: moving wealth to lower-income families. However, this is at the expense of fairness: tax burden is moved onto a smaller portion of the population and lower-income families still don’t end up with any more leverage to capture the social wealth that their labor is generating.

I would regard a fair taxation scheme to be one where everyone pays for the services that they use. The load that each person and each piece of property makes on the state resources is probably pretty consistent, so a low marginal tax rate will probably be more fair than a progressive tax system with a higher marginal rate. Fairness is important to avoid creating a economic distortion that discourages entrepreneurship and creates incentive to “game the system” (leaving the state or disguising income). On the other hand, becoming less progressive would have a negative overall social outcome, since a lot of people cannot currently afford to pay “their fair share” in this sense.

We can try to keep both the fairness of a non-progressive income tax and also the social benefit of increasing the wealth of low-income families by taking other measures to increase their wealth. If someone works diligently and still cannot afford to pay rent, tax, food and heating, then he or she is not being paid fairly for their work (or else we have unrealistic expectations for quality of life for Massachusetts residents). Strengthening unions, increasing the minimum wage, preferring economically depressed areas for new public assets (trains, universities, government offices) would all encourage increases in the wealth of lower-income people by giving them better leverage to capture the wealth that their labor is actually creating.

Like the authors of the Massachusetts constitution, I believe that everyone should pay their fair share of state taxes. A dramatic increase in the deduction and the income tax rate erodes that principle. Such a change is currently being discussed among state legislators. Instead of inventing tax schemes to redistribute wealth, we should focus on ways to make it easier for low-income families to increase their income. For example, we could double the minimum wage. Property tax (which disproportionately burdens middle-income people) could be lowered by allowing towns to add a percentage to the local income or sales tax rates.

I do think that an increase in the gas tax to compensate the current budget shortfall is a good idea. For example, a 35 cent per gallon tax increase (to a total of 56 cents per gallon) should close the $1B budget gap. The price of gasoline will stay low throughout the recession. The tax should keep pressure to move towards lower carbon output and lower oil imports. However we should plan on the price of gasoline to naturally rise as we exit the recession in a year or two.

A gasoline tax scheme that periodically adjusts to achieve target gas price (say, $3 per gallon) could both solve our current budget crisis and also provide price stability. Price stability will make it easier to budget for transportation costs and it will increase the certainty of economic reward for investment in more efficient transportation. This “counter-cyclic” tax should also help keep the state income more consistent. When economic growth declines, income and sales tax revenue will fall, but so will the price of gasoline. A “price target” gasoline tax would automatically offset some of this decline in state revenue.

The book begins with a diagram… a mishmash of squares, circles, dots and dashes and crisscrossing edges: something to inspire another Tufte book. The difficult diagram sets the tone for the rest of the work, a careless presentation full of circular and square nodes, and edges coded with several variations of dots and dashes. In fact, the graph is planar.

Planar

Sarah Lacy takes the fundamentally captivating and unexpected story of the founders behind the second wave of internet innovation and makes it inexplicably dull and confused. She demonstrates a lack of critical thinking and cannot afford to criticize the folks she is reporting on, since the future of her career depends on maintaining their trust.

My wife’s encaustic paintings (made of beeswax) are hanging in Boston at The Brant Gallery (on the 3rd floor of South Building at Mass Art) until May 30. She was also chosen to have a solo show at Medallion Gallery. Hopefully she can get some exposure at the next opening and get to the “next level”. The exhibitions are part of Naveed Nour’s Photo Emerge project. He is trying to promote fine art photography in Boston. Both of my parents are also artists, but they live in Florida. There are more buyers down there and the art scene seems to be closer to a meritocracy. My impression is that in Boston, art is more of an academic pursuit where overcoming obscurity is governed by a certain clique.

Selling fine art on the web is undoubtedly a challenge! Perhaps it is possible for well-known artists where markets for their work are already established. For emerging artists, I think that the sense of exclusivity of ownership of the product is important but difficult to communicate through a web site. Perhaps there is a way to accomplish this with a very interactive application that learns something about the potential patron.

On Saturday, I went to BarCamp. I skipped out on the Sunday sessions, since the weather was too nice to spend the day nerding in a high-school basement. CEOs from places like diet.com, mypunchbowl.com and pixily.com (online OCR document processing) were slapping stickers on anyone who stood still for too long. The event seems to have been too much for poor babbledog: their web site has been down since then. One item that stood out was Many Eyes. While Many Eyes does not appear to have been substantially updated in the past year, they are looking for a contract developer now. They probably want to make some new charts types with the new Flash 10.

Up to this point, if you need a perspective projection of a raster image on a web page, you’re pretty much stuck with a Java applet or browser extension. Scalable Vector Graphics, the HTML “canvas” element, Silverlight and Flash 9 are all limited to affine transformations. A common problem is to combine two photographs in a perspective-correct way. The image of the painting needs a perspective projection to match the background image. Alexander Zadorozhny has written a Flash demo illustrating tessellation of an image to approximate a correct perspective projection. While good quality and reasonable performance can be achieved, there is a large impact on the complexity of the application.

Soon there will be a couple of new options for 3-D rendering in a browser. Flash 10 has pretty complete GPU-accelerated rendering functionality. Webkit is also possibly introducing a 3-D perspective transformation property into CSS. Perhaps this will be taken up by the new standard.

Be careful what you feed your stock-trading robot. For years, Yahoo Finance has published easily downloaded historical prices derived from Commodity Systems. It would seem to be a good place to start… but beware: their “adjusted prices” have errors. Aside from the obvious problem of rounding to the nearest cent, Yahoo fails to account for some stock splits. Here is an example of an artifact around a reverse split of DARA. Yahoo’s data downloadable stock history seems to be fairly widely used. For example, Mathematica’s FinancialData function uses Yahoo as a source and it propagates these artifacts. Google also gets their historical data from CSI, however they appear to give more reliable adjusted prices.

I just finished the implementation of a new design for my wife’s web page. She’s an artist, so the layout took a lot of customization. It needed to be vertically centered, a surprisingly difficult detail to get working. And I’ve added a customized back-end so that she can edit the pages herself. Web work always drives me insane. It is so frustrating that the layout can be achieved in Photoshop or Word in a tiny fraction of the time it takes to get it working on a web page (unless we just make everything one big PNG file).

There is nothing wrong with HTML itself. Meaning is built from characters with a temporal ordering and cross-references. Unlike Postscript, the meaning is static; the cost of interpreting a document is easily predicted from its size. Unlike file-systems or Gopher, the cross-references mixed with the content in HTML draw context with an arbitrarily large universe. HTML is just enough to get to a some basic leverage for a person or software system to begin integrating abstract ideas beyond the individual contributions of a particular page. XHTML is (supposed to be) composable. XSLT lets you filter and recombine documents any-which way. There may be some problem in practice. While everyone implemented XSLT, XINCLUDE was only implemented on IE. This makes it was hard to actually reference the second URI from the first XML page. But if you could figure out how to reference a second page, it could be combined any-which-way. It is hard for me to understand why anyone wasted their time implementing XSLT without XINCLUDE in a browser.

The frustration arises when it comes time to map a document onto a two-dimensional screen for a person to read. CSS is supposed to define this mapping, but the expressiveness of CSS is sorely lacking. CSS has a couple of fundamental problems. First, it is not orthogonal to the semantic structure of the page. The “containing”, “before” and “after” relationships in the HTML document should be reserved for encoding the meaning of the text. CSS conscripts these relationships into layout duty. CSS cannot create a layout graph that is different from the HTML logical graph. Layout boxes A and B can only be positioned and sized relative to each other if HTML elements A and B are related by adjacency or containment. There are plenty of applications for independent layout and logical graphs. A simple example is to create newspaper-type columns (when defining the printed media style for a page). A more complicated example is defining rules for tying inline illustrations to the corresponding text. Ideally, the client would be responsible for filling web page templates. There might be little resemblance between a screen layout structure and an XML report from a database query. Ideally we would have the ability to arbitrarily map HTML sections into an independently defined hierarchy of layout “boxes” on the screen.

The second fundamental problem is that CSS is that it is highly asymmetric. Rather than building from a concise set of box position and flow principles, it is really just a hodgepodge collection of effects. Many capabilities that would seem to be spanned by its feature-set are actually impossible. CSS can format the first and second characters of the content of an element differently, but the second and third are always the same. It can prefix or postfix stuff onto an element, but cannot add anything in the middle. Boxes are positioned and sized relative to their containing and preceding boxes, except for a “float” which affects other boxes based on screen-position, rather than document structure. Since CSS does not provide a granular basis of fundamental principles from which to build the more complicated layout effects, it turns out to be nearly impossible to do things that were overlooked by the writers of the original specification. For example, it is impossible to vertically center some content using only CSS 2.1. The relationship between the formatted content and the window in which it is rendered, (a seemingly crucial aspect of any layout) is almost completely uncontrollable through CSS (at least in the vertical direction…).

CSS 3 appears to be on a course to reinforce the design flaws of its predecessors. Its development seems to be guided by the perspective of the naive web designer that complains that old-style html tables seem to be more expressive for specifying page layouts than CSS. It adds back some ability to chop the viewport into boxes containing different segments of content, but doesn’t offer any new means to define a layout structure fundamentally different from the semantic structure of the document.

Evidently Flash, Silverlight and Javascript formatting engines can expect bright futures. Luckily we’re starting to get some design leverage outside of Flash and Silverlight. Safari already generates the continuous stream of events that allows a size-sensitive layout generator to smoothly update as the browser window is resized. Safari and Opera now support embedded fonts through the “@font-face” CSS rule. Firefox seems to be the laggard in this area, supporting embedded fonts only through SVG.

After a weekend of cutting up the ceiling, pulling wire, refinishing and generally making a huge mess of our kitchen, Julie and I finally said goodbye to the kitchen nipple-light and finished installing the first part of ceiling light sculpture.