My arms hurt. Not really the arms so much as the muscles in my lower arm. It's like painful if I stretch them in certain ways. This started at least yesterday and maybe Saturday although I didn't notice. It's the kind of ache you get after lifting things all day, say when you're helping someone move. But I don't recall doing anything like that in the last few days. The only possible causes that I can think of are playing too much Unreal Tournament and watching What Lies Beneath. Throughout the whole movie I was tense just ready to explode, so maybe I hurt myself doing that...

I finally figured out that I don't have my robots.txt file properly set up. This is why Google has a lot of my web site mapped out. I finally got tired of random people finding my pages and asking me stupid questions. So I went to Google's site and after much searching around found the part of the FAQ that says that Google's robots obey the Robot Exclusion Standard (or whatever it's called). Silly me, I had the base directory set wrong. Now that it's fixed at least it'll stop other robots, but what Google has will probably stay there forever, since I didn't find a way to tell Google "please remove my site info from your database" (I can imagine that it would be quite hard to do)...

Here's an interesting site: Tax Foundation which is an independent organization that keeps track of tax statistics. What's on the site mostly disgusts me, as I'm not particularly for tax breaks. But here's a cool table showing the taxes paid by income level for 1987 and 1997: Income Tax Return Data. I think it's great that I'm in the top 25% (and almost at the top 10% mark) in terms of income. And if you include the stock options (and why not since it's taxed too) I'm in the top 5% (and within striking distance of the top 1%).

The reason I bring this up is that I was following this discussion about who should pay taxes and the second link was mentioned. It's amazing to me that 50% of the population (as of 1997) contribute only 4.3% of income tax collected by the IRS. 50% of the population earns less than $25k a year. And although I suppose that includes college students and people supported by their parents and whatnot, that's a lot of people earning less than I've earned since I was working part time after college. True, depending on where you live in the US $25k can go a long way.

But, it's seductive to think that if the top 25% were taxes a few extra percentage points, you could really start working on cutting our national debt. Of course that depends on keeping the federal budget under control, something that hasn't really happened in decades. Even though I believe that government and its institutions are a good thing, there is the disadvantage of any large organization: a lot of money is used to just keep the organization running rather than doing something useful. At my company we cut operating costs by $1 Billion last year, and I haven't noticed any decline in services. We're a commercial company, how wasteful is the government?

It's just sad if you think about it, how much money could be saved. And I'm not talking about cutting jobs. That's rarely a good move because it really kills morale and makes the rest of the workers not as effective. Keep the workers, pay them well, have them work better, improve operating efficiency. The federal budget is some $200 Billion and if they could save 5% that's a lot of money that can be used for other things.

As with anything, I can talk talk talk but if I'm not going to do anything about it, what right do I have to complain? Well, that's not quite right. I have a right to complain, but if that's all I do I'm not helping. Too many complainers, not enough people who *do* things in the world. And I'm not much of a doer.