8 Ways to Sunday

I don’t remember how I first received the No Gas Day e-mail in 2004. According to Snopes.com, this call to action has been circulating in some form since 1999. This year, it’s more popular than ever. The problem with No Gas Day is that, good as it sounds, it won’t actually hurt the oil companies or drive down prices.

I understand the frustration people feel about high gas prices, and why an idea like No Gas Day is popular. Even when you adjust for inflation, gas prices are nearing an all-time high. Unfortunately, the concept behind No Gas Day is inherently flawed. Staging a one-day “gas out” just means that people will buy more gas the day before or after the protest. Since the supply and demand of the product (gasoline) isn’t actually affected, the price won’t change. No Gas Day might send a message, but it won’t make the dent in oil company profits that people believe it will. The only way to truly fix the problem is to make gasoline obsolete.

The sad fact is that our country’s economy is completely dependent on oil derivatives like gasoline and diesel. Without the oil industry’s products transportation in America would grind to a halt, crippling our economy. In a way, they have the ultimate product — we can’t not buy it. The oil companies know this, and price accordingly. They also know that the supply of their product is finite. I don’t doubt that the current high prices are part of a strategy to weather the shortages that are inevitably coming.

A single day of abstention won’t solve our problems with high gas prices, foreign oil dependency, or global warming. No single solution will. Electric cars, hydrogen fuel cells, and ethanol will not save us. Oil has given us a long and happy spell of relatively cheap, plentiful energy. That’s going away, and it won’t be easy to replace. There is no magic bullet.

What we need is magic buckshot: a variety of simultaneously-deployed solutions that work together to meet our country’s ravenous energy appetite. We need a dedicated, multi-faceted research and development effort to make this happen. We need investment from both the public and private sector. And we need it now.

This evening I found myself on a political commentary site called The Constitutional Matters Project. CMP lets authors on both sides of American politics post articles, apparently the more far out and divisive the better. I usually avoid these name-calling competitions, but someone had pointed to this site as having a cleverly-implemented comment form. I was there to check it out as inspiration for a site I’m developing, and ended up reading an article about patriotism.

The article, written from the “conservative” perspective, was typical of the kind of Radical Right nonsense that’s practically self-parody. What motivated the article, however, was a fallacious far-Left argument that I’ve heard repeated ad nauseam. It makes me just as mad as it made the right-wing CMP author, but my reaction is very different.

This post started out as a comment on CMP about true patriotism and its incompatibility with blind party allegiance. It became almost as long as the original article, so I ended up posting it here. Warning: mild rant ahead. (more…)

The United States’ telephone excise tax was established in 1898 as a luxury tax to help fund the Spanish–American War. It’s been a very long time since we were fighting with Spain or phone service was a luxury item, and the IRS has finally caught up with the present.

The phone tax is being abolished in the new year, and American tax payers are eligible for a refund of their last three years of tax payments. If you’ve used traditional, cellular, or VOIP phone service in the last three years, you’ve got some money coming to you from Uncle Sam.

Here’s the catch: you only have one chance to claim this refund, by filing some special information with your 2006 tax return. Phone tax payments are rolled into your phone bill — much like how sales tax is paid at the same time you buy a candy bar or bag of grapes — so you’ll need copies of your last three years of phone bills to get the best refund. If you don’t have or can’t get those records, then you’ll have to make do with the IRS’s standard refund based on your number of exemptions.

The IRS has a FAQ on its website that gives basic instructions on how to claim your refund. More specific guides are also available for businesses and individuals.

(Props: Dallas Morning News)

I may be the last person on earth to learn about this. Back in late June, Senator Ted Stevens (R, AK) regaled the Commerce Committee with a nearly 11-minute rant about his opposition to a proposed net neutrality amendment to a communications bill. That may not sound very interesting, but it was Sen. Stevens’s… unique attempt at explaining the workings of the Internet that brought this otherwise obscure speech to public attention. (more…)

Discovered on Uninnovate, this video takes less than sixty seconds to cover some of the biggest problems with digital rights management (DRM) technology:

If you’re unfamiliar with DRM, it’s basically a kind of computer program that’s embedded in the media you purchase — store-bought DVDs, iTunes downloads, etc. — that keeps you from using your computer to create copies of that media or even keeps you from playing it on certain devices. The idea is to prevent Internet piracy, but the problem comes when DRM keeps law-abiding consumers from doing perfectly legal things with their movies and music. Unfortunately, that problem crops up pretty frequently.

The video seems to be the work of “Defective by Design,” a Free Software Foundation campaign against DRM. If you’d like to learn more about how DRM violates your rights, and what you can do about it, here are a few places to start:

• Here’s another video: ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind gives a more detailed explanation of how DRM screws you over, and suggests the technology be renamed Content Restriction Annulment and Protection (CRAP).
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent mini-site devoted to explaining the issues surrounding DRM.
• The Defective by Design website has a list of places where you can buy DRM-free media.
• Wikipedia’s article on fair use rights will help you understand what you’re losing by buying DRMed media. You can also get more background on the controversy over DRM in this article.
• The Digital Freedom website has some info about how DRM hurts artists and others, as well as consumers.

Updates

• 11/05/2006 @ 11:30 PM — Added a brief explanation of what DRM does for those who aren’t familiar with the technology.