Brian Gongol
(6.21.2005)
How Americans Save in Their IRAs
As of 2000, 43.1 million taxpaying Americans had IRAs, out of a total 179.6 million taxpayers. More than $2.6 trillion was invested in IRA plans at the end of 2000, with only 15.1 million of us putting anything into those accounts that year.
(6.21.2005)
Large Share of American Households Don't Pay Federal Income Tax
On one hand, it's reasonable that many of them -- 90% or more have incomes under $30,000 a year -- don't have to pay huge shares of their low incomes in tax. But on the other hand, they still have the right to vote, giving them proportional power to distribute other people's income to themselves in the form of government benefits. 42.5 million tax returns came back saying "$0" on the tax liability line, an increase over recent trends that show 25% to 30% of all returns having no tax liability. Even assuming that as many as a third are under the age of 18 (well over the actual figure), that's still at least 28 million voters who don't pay. That's out of about 220 million adults in the entire country. It's a pretty big figure, one way or another, especially if you consider that group as a voting bloc. Remember: President Bush won the popular vote for the White House by a margin of only 3 million votes. The 2000 election was even tighter, and it's worth considering that due to the Electoral College, it's not even a matter of swinging a huge national bloc to win -- small swings in some states can have big consequences. That doesn't even take Congressional elections into account.
(6.21.2005)
PrimeMinister.ca
A site that's a lot like this one, only Canadian
(6.21.2005)
EPIC's List of Gmail Privacy Problems
The trouble is, of the big three webmail providers (Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail), Gmail's spam filtering is vastly better than the other two. Hotmail has a reasonably good "whitelist" function, but its spam-filtration technology is atrocious. Yahoo's is worse than atrocious; it's laughable. And it's just not safe to use anything other than a webmail client unless you have a full-fledged IT department, and even then things still get past. There's just no optimal solution right now.
(6.21.2005)
Spoofing Again a Prospective Problem for Web Browsers
MSIE, Firefox both at risk
(6.21.2005)
Google Maps Now High-Resolution for Ireland and UK
(6.21.2005)
Trouble in Zimbabwe Now Comparable to Darfur
(6.21.2005)
When You Have Thousands of Dollars Burning a Hole in Your Pocket
Why not build a 1/10-th scale model of a C-17?