Earlier this week, the Kansas City Star had an article about a test project being done at the University of Iowa to examine the practicality of having a vehicle tax based on the number of miles actually driven: The year is 2020 and the gasoline tax is history. In its place you get a monthly tax bill based on each mile you drove " tracked by a Global Positioning System device in your car and uploaded to a billing center.

The BBC's News Magazine has an entertaining article on the results of a comparative test of old and new technology. The Sony Walkman was introduced 30 years ago, while Apple's iPod is, of course, relatively recent. The magazine persuaded 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a week, to try out a Walkman.

When Chris Anderson's "Free!" article appeared in Wired at the beginning of last year, the financial crisis was still shallow enough for his thesis to look bold but almost plausible: "anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. There's nothing new about technology's deflationary force, but what is new is the speed at which industries of all sorts are becoming digital businesses and thus able to exploit those economics."

It seems a little odd to get caught up in the celebrity hype of the moment, but I do think Michael Jackson's passing requires a pause for thought. Much about the man can be said to be somehow special, different, or down right weird. But to be honest, much of it was downright tragic, and put the guy in a lose/lose situation.

The headlines in today's job report were gloomy: Nonfarm payrolls fell by 467,000 in June, more than expected and more than in May. The unemployment rate increased to 9.5%. That gloominess is confirmed if you look deeper into the numbers.

On Friday, the House of Representatives passed its climate change bill by a slim margin. The bill's key feature is a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. That system would set national emission limits and would require affected emitters to own permits (called allowances) to cover their emissions. The number one thing you should know about this bill is that the allowances are worth big money: almost $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and more in subsequent decades.

A few weeks ago, I posted some charts showing that Americans are increasingly reliant on government transfers as a source of income. Friday's data on personal income for May confirmed that the trend is continuing.

This evening, I ran across a post by George, over at Decrepit Old Fool, called "Is Change Even Possible?" It's a good post that raises a vital question. The changes in human cultures that have come about in the past 500 or so years are exceedingly remarkable, but they are not the human norm. Change is for the most part resisted by humans. Any attempt to change us is an uphill battle.

India slipped 15 points on the Global Peace Index (GPI) ranking, from 107 in 2008 to 122 (out of 144 countries) in 2009. Whether one gives any credence to these rankings or whether one accepts the definition of peace as stated by them, what I can say from my personal experience is that as a citizen I have perceived a deterioration of "peace" over the past two decades.

The best thing anyone can do to continue making the Internet more closed, restrictive, and prohibiting is to use Adobe Flash as it exists today. The Internet was created to allow for the open and unconfined infrastructure to share information; yet, it is being used today for the opposite purpose: to stop this information torrent.

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