Sunday: How did this happen?

I have the option here to either write like four separate blog posts, or stick them all into one.  I'm going to do the second one, even though the result is going to be a short set of links.

Part 0: This little guy.

I stepped out of my apartment, and saw something on the hallway railing.

This little guy.

It's been rainy all day, so I assume Mr. Butterfly was just taking a break and drying his wings.  I was able to get that picture, but I scared him off:

See the out-of-focus blur in the upper-left corner of that house?

Somewhere in here.  I could see it with my eyes, but I guess the camera couldn't.

Part 1: The regular weekend stuff.

Sushi time.

I was just about to ask for a soy sauce dish when one magically appeared for me.

They had really good ahi today.

I think I've mentioned these squirrel branded nuts before, but I had lots of time waiting at the deli.

Part 2: The story from yesterday that I totally forgot about.

Yesterday when I went to get the burrito, I got stuck at this intersection, as usual.  I have to go this way to get to H-1, and it's designed such that the east-bound Wilder traffic gets a full light, while the west-bound traffic (and me) get's a forward-only green, and has to wait for a green arrow once the east-bound traffic is stopped.  It's a sucky intersection, and can't be the best solution.

In any case, the car I'm behind is painted like this:

My car drawing is too small, so just pretend that's all on the back side of the trunk lid.

It's the company car for some private security guard service.  Ok.  Fine.  Then I got to the right side of the car. "Special Ops."  WTF?  I couldn't stop laughing.  What kind of special operations do you need to have to make sure people don't break in to or vandalize buildings?  Do you have some sort of tactical cell phone for calling the actual cops?

So I'm laughing to myself about what kind of special operations this guy must go on.  We turn, drive on, wait at the next light, and then I find out.  What kind of special operations you call Guard Security for.  First, you need to see something, so I'll just crop it out of google maps:

That's my post office, it lives under H-1.  See the "one way" and "do not enter" signs?  They're there because the lot is set up to funnel people from Lunalilo Street in, and then out onto Pensacola, with drive-through mail boxes (as you can see).  If you're on Pensacola, you park on the other side of the street and walk over.

Unless, of course, you're part of the Guard Security Special Ops Team.  Then, you use your incredible Special Ops training to Special Ops your car through that one-way exit.  To secure things.  However, no degree of Special Operations could possibly prepare this guy for his arch-nemesis: Dude Who Just Wanted to Mail a Fucking Letter but Now We're Both Trapped You Jackass.  Yep.  He made that turn, and very nearly rammed into a guy using the mailboxes.  I drove past, continuing to laugh to myself, so I never saw how this epic Special Operation was resolved.

Part 3a: The economics of Minecraft as compared to the real world.

I found this link in the RSS today, which points out that the Minecraft characters have absurd carrying capacities, because it's a game and games should be fun.  Their final number is 44.519e6 kilograms of gold, if that's all you're carrying.  Cool.  But then I remembered this other thing that showed up a few months back, which does info-graphic-y things to show you how much gold has been mined on Earth.  In ever, is their claim (and I'm not going to try to verify that, so we're going with it, because they have shiny graphics).  Their number?  166500 tonnes, which is a unit no one uses, so I had google turn that into kilograms.  166.5e6.  Therefore, in Minecraft, you can carry a little bit more than a quarter of all the gold in the world.

Part 3b: Walmart.

I was watching Olympic throw yourself down a mountain, and a commercial for Walmart came on.  In it, they claim that they're going to spend 250e9 dollars buying made-in-America products over the next ten years.  I googled a bit, and found this thing about how the Dirty Jobs guy is associated in this story somehow, but is less progressive about labor relations, and blah blah even I don't care about this sentence anymore.

Anyway, $250e9 over 10 years.  That's $25e9 per year.  That's: "Revenue (ttm): 474.88B"...um...like 5% of their revenue?  Ok, great, thanks, but that's kind of approaching the rounding error level.  This isn't really much of anything.

Finally, the punchline as to why I looked into this at all:  In their advertisement pointing out how they're going to start buying more American goods for their stores, they have the song "Working Man" playing in the background.  By Rush.  A Canadian band.

...

Part 3c: Inequality and taxes.

I made this plot as a result of thinking about this Krugman article about how fair the tax system is for the top 1%.

f(x) is a simulated income distribution curve, defined as  f(x) = (100 - x) ** (-1/0.3).  g(x) is a simple ramp down: g(x) = (100 - x)/100.0.  It's plotted in log-space because otherwise nothing is visible.

The red curve shows an initial income distribution, f(x).  Let's put a flat tax on everyone of 20%.  That yields the blue curve.  That has effectively zero effect on the inequality of the distribution: the top earner still earns 1e7 times as much as the poorest.  Next idea: ramp up the tax rate as the income increases.  That gives the purple curve.  That's somewhat better, but since the distribution is a power law, it's basically a battle between the index of the income distribution and the tax progressivitiy.  You can see that with the brown line, which has an index of 2, and that's still a pretty wide range.  Only when you fully balance those indices (yellow line, 3.33333) do you get a case where the tax has eliminated the income inequality.

Now, back to the Krugman article: the article it's countering points out that the top 1% paid on average 33.8% in taxes.  Ok.  Fine.  Do you want to know what the top tax rate in my yellow simulation is? Something in the ballpark range of (1 - 1e-7)%.  99.99999%.  That is the full communism, all money is stolen by the government, "there's no point in working hard because all your effort is stolen in taxes" solution.

There are some details (this doesn't model marginal tax rates, it ignores any actual incentive issues, reduces the problem to two variables, blah blah), but the conclusion remains essentially the same: pushing up the top tax rate is not going to instantly create a communist gulag.

Part 4: The remaining links.

• I never thought of Eeyore like this.
• Finn and Jake.