We kind of throw a big Thanksgiving here at Three Meadows.  Mary says there were 47 guests.  Only 31 spent the night (counting the five Williamses).  And four of those were in their own RV, so don’t count.

It was delightful.  I’m glad the weather was perfect, so we could eat outside.

It’s good to be way overcapacity from time to time.

The women put on ballgowns, the men put on minidresses.  There was Twister, and bodyshots, and seemingly more desserts than people.

Life is good.

After World War II, the top tax bracket in the US, for those making over a million dollars a year, was over 90%.  Ouch!  That would really annoy those Wachovia execs who get a hundred million dollars in bonus pay for driving a large bank into bankruptcy.

It’s absolutely true that this punitive tax pretty much kept people from taking ridiculous salaries, or from issuing instant bonuses, because if they did, the government would just take it all.  You know what they did, instead?  Issued themselves lots of stock and stock options.  These didn’t get taxed until they sold, so instead of getting $20 million right now, and having Uncle Sam swipe 18 of it, they’d arrange for $20 million worth of stock in the company they ran — and then run the company such that they could trickle as much as they wanted from it for the next 100 years.

So an odd side effect of those ridiculous taxes was that companies were run to make profits next decade, instead of next quarter.

Tod pointed out Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as an example of a future in which there is so much wealth that the whole concept of money and employment have become archaic.  People instead make the world better to boost their reputation scores, and a high reputation gives clout and power. It’s thought-provoking.

Another book in a similar vein is Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain. In that future, a few people (known as mules) work to run the world, while the vast majority have the “job” of voting for the mule who they think will deliver the greatest welfare program for them.  Sounds dystopic from a Republican point of view, but in a world of sufficient plenty, it’s hard to complain.  Also thought-provoking.

Lots of political talk centers around creating jobs, but that shouldn’t be the goal of government any more than it’s the goal of any individual corporation.  In general, our goal is increased productivity, meaning more useful output per person.  Usually this happens with machines and automation, though it can also happen with infrastructure improvements or simply smarter methods.

If we wanted to create jobs in the US, we could just outlaw tractors. Employment would skyrocket as millions of people were needed to plow fields.  Hooray for high employment!  Obviously this would be a disaster, as food production plummeted and costs skyrocketed.  Food production is about 100 times more efficient than it was 200 years ago.  We’ve lost millions of agricultural jobs, but the quality of food is up while the cost is down — and the people who used to farm have been freed up to do other things.

If there are two ways to do something,  and one way is cheaper, but the more expensive way uses more people, which is better?  The cheaper way!  Period.  The money saved can be used to do other stuff, or reduce the price of the output, or both.  Efficiency is king.

I’m not opposed to big government infrastructure projects, and it turns out they do create jobs.  We should just remember that the jobs are a side effect, not the goal.

The day after we adopted Ratlet from the park, I heard Lyra Meadow shrieking in the yard.  “There’s a mouse in my shirt!”

Apparently one of the cats was carrying a mouse, and when Lyra went to investigate, the cat dropped its prey, which immediately ran to perch on Lyra Meadow’s foot, just as the rat had for me the day before.  Apparently it wasn’t satisfied with its safety there, so it hopped up into her pant leg, scampered all the way up her pants, all the way up her shirt, and when I got there it was peeking out of her collar.  I put out my hand, and it ran up my arm to perch on my shoulder, as far away from the cat as possible.

Williamses are apparently known friends to all woodland creatures.

The other day I was jogging the dog at the neighborhood park at dusk, and I noticed a white piece of trash fluttering in the grass.  As it fluttered closer, I realized it wasn’t a piece of paper.  I stopped, and it ran up to me, hopped on my sneaker, put its paws on my leg, and stared up at me — a very friendly rat.

The dog was confused.

I picked the rat up, put him on my shoulder, and walked home.

Upon my arrival, I shouted to the house, “I brought a little friend home from the park!” Mary says her very first thought was that it was probably a rat.  Am I that predictable?

World of Goo is an innovative and delightful game loosely based on the “springs and balls” physics simulations we’ve all done, but turned into a quirky game.

It seems rare to see fresh games any more, and it’s great to see a tiny independent game with such fantastic zero-budget production values.

I’ve been giving Lee grief recently in the comments, mocking him for saying inanities like “Gay marriage pushes morals on straight people” and “Many people voted for Obama because they were afraid of riots if he lost.”

Twenty-some years ago, I was flying back to Alaska from LA for Christmas.  Trying to, anyway — Seattle was fogged in, and I was trapped at LAX.  For days.  Every flight for Seattle was canceled, time after time after time.  I spent a couple of nights in the airport (joy!) and ran out of snacks, money, and enthusiasm for travel.

On the third day there, Lee somehow found out about my plight.  Though we barely knew each other, he drove up from Orange County, picked me up at the airport, took me home, gave me a home-cooked meal, a shower, and a soft bed to sleep on.  It’s hard to overstate how important that spiritual lift was to me.

He saved the day.  

I eventually made it home, but without his help I might have ended up like Tom Hanks in The Terminal. It felt like it at the time, anyway.

So just because I think Lee’s politics are sometimes ill-conceived doesn’t mean I don’t know he’s a good guy.

Thanks, Lee!

Not even in office yet, Obama has already met with an unpopular, warmongering world leader without preconditions.

California, in addition to the unconscionable constitutional amendment to eliminate gay rights, passed lots of propositions to issue bonds for massive new state projects.  I vote against all bond issues on the principle that an established state like California should be able to pay for its infrastructure as it goes, instead of passing the debt on to our grandchildren.

Anyway, this prompted a friend to post about how California has one of the highest tax rates in the nation.  Does it really?  When I divide the spending ($144 billion in 2008) by the population (36.5 million) I get less than $4,000 per person in spending, which seems to be in the bottom half of the states.  Considering that California’s median family income is 13th in the nation, one has to wonder  whether California’s spending is as out of line as it seems.

To be fair, California’s maximum income tax rate is over 9%, which is among the highest.  That just tells us that a higher percentage of the taxes are coming from income taxes, and a lower percentage from other stuff, especially property tax.

California’s maximum tax rate starts for individuals making less than $50K per year, making it a much flatter tax than federal taxes.  Personally, my state taxes are always much higher than my federal taxes, even before you count  property and sales tax.

The states with the highest spending — over triple what California’s is — have no income tax at all.  Of course, Alaska and Wyoming are both low-population resource-rich states that have external sources of revenue to waste.

California’s Gross State Product is something like $1.8 Trillion, making state spending about 1%.  Doesn’t sound back-breaking.

I’m a big believer in balanced or surplus budgets except in exceptional circumstances,  and California has borrowed to fund improvements for decades.  Now we’re paying the price — but we can pass a lot of it on to our children, as our parents did to us.  Hooray.