A different way to look at Taxes

(This has been sitting in my to-be-edited file too long. I'm just going to hit post.)

I just got done with taxes a few days ago. I honestly do not mind paying for the government services that I receive. (I do take exception to the percentage of our national wealth that we are spending on war in comparison to other things but that is for different longer blog post.) I really think that we need more government not less. We need more money spent on education, more environmental regulation and management, and more publicly funded science. I'm less convinced about other things such as social services but I generally think of them as a good thing but I need to be convinced on an individual basis.

However, I think that our tax system is perversely constructed. If I were running things I wouldn't tax income, I'd tax consumption. I wouldn't give tax breaks for building/buying houses or having children. In other words, I would tilt the tax system toward consumption of resources and environmental things, not toward things that are ultimately bad for the environment. However, I would still dole out tax breaks. Social service would probably be my biggest tax break. If you provide something that benefits the society and furthers the society's values then society recognizes it with a writeoff. e.g. some of them would be pretty obvious teacher, doctor, foster care provider... That way society could reward people who benefit the common good and tweak the tax break on a yearly basis to modulate demand. Some would be less obvious, like serving in environmental restoration projects. For example a non profit project might be granted X number of social welfare credits and they would be able to grant those out to those who participated in that project. If a lawyer decided to do pro-bono work and defend an indigent defendent they would get social welfare credits. If he decided to come into schools and teach people about how the legal system works, that would be some credits.

I think that I would make tax credits for businesses work a bit differently. A large portion of it would be the:

sum of for each employee (a function based upon employee wages relative to the mean or median + provide healthcare bonus + provide retirement bonus...)

Thus employeers would find that their tax was = tax on resources consumed - epsilon employees f(employee). In other words they would find it beneficial to provide as many good paying jobs as possible and use as few resources as possible.

I think that the big thing is that it would force people to look at things from a different perspective, one where they evaluate things based upon the social good that they are creating. If they are only doing something for themselves, then there is no tax advantage in it. As Jesus said regarding the rich person who blows the trumpet to call attention to his big offering to the church, "He has his reward."

What is Loneliness

I've been meaning to write this down for a long time. It is short and sweet. I wish I had some scientific backing for this idea but I wonder if the feeling of loneliness is part of our evolutionary legacy. We are basically a obligatorily socially species. We really don't do very well as an individual out in the wild by ourselves. We are heavily dependent on other members of our social organization as well as our cultural legacy and all the things that our species has learned over the millennia. Even my house cat is better equipped to survive in the wild than I am. He has claws and teeth and a lot of instincts which help him find, and kill food suitable for him.

So since our species can't survive without being part of a social organization, maybe loneliness is kind of an evolutionarily programmed psychological prompting that something is wrong that will impact our ability to survive. In the wild, if we are cut off from our social organization we are unlikely to survive. Therefore, natural selection has provided a warning signal to us, that our survival chances have been reduced.

I doubt that a solitary creature such as a tiger feels loneliness. We on the other hand, can feel exceedingly upset and depressed to the point of wanting to commit suicide even when we have enough food and other resources needed for our survival, when we are cut off from a social network.

Hiking, lawns, pets, and environmentalism

Thought for the day: I wonder if people's desire to go hiking, their desire for lawns, a love for pets, and environmentalism all have a common source buried deeply within our 'firmware' or instinctual evolutionary preferences.

I have not read anything about this and I haven't done a literature search to see if anyone has done any work in this area. To some extent this blob post hopefully will serve as a reminder for me to go back and see what is known about this subject. Feel free to post comments if you know of any work in this area.

It stands to reason that, part of the evolutionary legacy that is born into us is some sort of preference toward environs which will would make good habitat for a species such as us. It would be a sort of subtle psychological prompting that would help an individual or a troupe recognize a good habitat. In much the same way that even bacteria move away from toxic substances or plants grow toward light or our predisposition toward symmetry in our conception of beauty, we would find ourselves drawn toward environments which would make suitable habitat.

Here are some details that contributed to this idea. Many people like open places such as parks or wilderness. A good habitat might be unpopulated like wilderness and open spaces are. Wilderness generally has more intact ecosystems with various living things occupying different ecological niches. Intact ecosystems may not be as economically productive as developed ecosystems but they are more productive in biomass than developed land. Developed land is more sterile and devoid of life. A richer more diverse ecosystem is more likely to provide the various resources that an omnivorous species such as ourselves might need to get through a whole year.

Lawns and parks tend to be watered and are green and lush. Lush ecosystems support more and various life. Again a trait that leads to better habitat. As I understand it, unlike our relatives in the pan genus, we evolved not in the jungle but out on the savanna. Could it be that our preference of habitat is the grass lands that resemble a savanna and consequently we like lawns and parks.

When we bring a pet or even a houseplant into our habitat, our home, we are adding just a little bit of the wild back into our extremely sterile environment. Could this be we are tricking this deeper part of our aesthetic preferences by placing more life around us. Could it be that the low resolution pattern match that this evolutionary preference triggers off of picks up on the fact that there is more life around and concludes that this environ is able to support this life and therefore it is 'OK' to live here.

Much environmentalism seems to operate on people more on an emotional level than on a rational level. If my hypothesized connection between habitat preference and psychological prompting really exists, then part of the emotional drive for environmentalism might come from a desire to maintain "good habitat" for ourselves.

Colorado 400t Review

(version 1.3 4/26/08)
This entry is going to be a place for me to put all my notes about my new hiking GPS the Colorado 400t. Usually, when I first acquire a piece of gear, I think most clearly about it. I see its strengths and limitations. Then after I've used it for a while it is harder for me to regain that fresh perspective.

Overall this a great unit. It acquires position very quickly and seems to hold onto it fairly well. The user's guide seems more like a quick start guide than a comprehensive discussion of the features and user interface. The boot up time is a bit longer than I would like but I wouldn't consider that a real problem.

New firmware

It seems like Garmin has radically redone its firmware for the Colorado. I've had a succession of Garmin GPSs from the GPS 16, to the eTrex Legend, the GPSMAP 60CSx as well as having used other people's Garmin GPSs from time to time. All the GPSs from the GPS 16 up through the 60CSx seemed to have different evolutions of the same basic firmware. The colorado seems to be notably different. Like it evolved from a different origin. This new firmware is a bit green and is still a bit buggy. The device came with firmware version 2.2 or 2.3. I was using the 2.4 version of the firmware until recently just upgraded to the beta 2.51 version of the firmware.

1. Information regarding street navigation became spontaneously unavailable. I had to re-download the maps to get it back. This led to the error: "Route Calclulation Error: No roads near starting point."
   
2. The unit has frozen to the point where it required battery removal several times for no obvious reason.
   

New UI

I've used it several times now and though there are many things that I like about it. I can't say that I'm extremely fond of it. It seems to have more button presses needed for most things than the older versions. It lacks the trim efficiency of the older units.

1. In the previous version you hit "page" and it moved through a set sequence of pages one direction and if you hit "quit" it would move you back through the list of pages. Now you have to hit the "shortcuts" button then spin the control wheel, to find the icon you want, then hit enter. If I were doing the UI, I would use clicking the two buttons as move through the pages forward and back and holding the button brings up "shortcut" or "options".
2. Sometimes the pages that you want aren't in the loop of shortcuts, so they are down under a toolbox icon called "others". This is fine because it makes an easy way to hide the things you are not going to use out of the way. However, it does take some time to organize everything where you want it in the various "profiles" that the GPS can have. It would be nice if there were a GPS configuration program sort of like mapsource that would allow you to set this up without spending hours moving through the devices user interface.
   

Furthermore, in the reimplementation of the firmware, they seemed to have lost a large number of really useful features and niceties that had accumulated over the years in the previous versions.

1. Other units allow you to configure the number of data fields that you have on the page. This one it is basically static.
2. The Edge and the Forerunner 305 both give you two pages similar to the Trip Computer.
   
3. A data field isn't just a data field, the list of items that you can put on a particular page varies from page to page. So some data fields are only available on the Map, others are only on the Elevation Plot, and others are only available on the Trip computer page.
   
4. For example Total Ascent is not available on Trip Computer. It is currently only available on the Elevation Plot. This means that if you want to see your total ascent you have to switch over to the Elevation Plot view and possibly reconfigure the data fields that you have there.
5. Another one, is you can't view the temperature on the pressure plot. Only on Trip Computer.
   
6. Older units kind of gave you more flexibility with Tracks, you could save them based upon time when they started and you could view what tracks you had stored. With the Colorado you really don't know what you have there.
7. On my old 60CSx the list view of the active route gave you a bit of a summary which told you the time to the destination as well as the distance to the destination. Now the active route page only tells you the turns to make and the distance to those turns. You can allocate one of your data fields on the trip computer to these pieces of information but that means if you are following along in the active route page you have to click over to the trip computer to see how far and how long until you are where you want to go.
8. The older 60CSx had a really nice feature which was effectively "get a really accurate waypoint" where it would collect multiple samples to refine its notion of exactly where the waypoint was. This feature seems to be missing from the Colorado.
   

Other Features

Here are some other features that I'd like to see in an all around outdoor unit

1. Sunset alarm. The ability to have the unit wake up if necessary and warn me when it is getting close to sunset.
   
2. Multiple alarms. Sometimes more than one alarm is very useful. For example an alarm to wake you up and an alarm of when you need to leave camp and head for the summit both set the night before when you went to bed.
   
3. Online help information. This unit has enough memory and is complicated enough. There should be some provision in the UI to explain what a particular setting does or read through a form of the manual stored in the unit.
   

Weather

They have alarms and some weather features but not as many as I would like. Giving some indication of the barometric trend could help give a clue of what the upcoming weather might be like. The Colorado does have an Altimeter setting where you can say that you are at a fixed elevation and it will graph the barometric pressure. It seems to me like the crosschecking the barometer with the GPS is what really adds value so that you don't have to tell the GPS that you are at a fixed elevation. What you want is insight into the long term change in the calibration of the GPS altitude to the barometric altitude over a long time. I'm not sure that when you are on the move if it works well enough to give you warning.

1. Weather alarm. What you want to know is if the pressure falls suddenly and it is not due to you gaining altitude, then you might have a storm coming. Since the GPS will track pressure and position, you can warn if there is a sudden change in pressure.
   
2. On the pressure graph it would be nice to also plot the temperature. In the morning you can look at your GPS in the morning and say, "overnight the low was 21F and the pressure is falling and it is currently 29.80 so a low pressure system is moving in. Therefore, we need to be aware of the weather today and pack our rain gear near the top of our bags."
   

3D View page

1. Show waypoints in 3D view mode.
2. When you use the left and right buttons to rotate which direction you are viewing, in the sky part of the display, put the current compass direction and the direction that the view is facing. So that you can say something like, "that is facing south 30 degrees to the right of what I'm currently facing".

Elevation plot page

1. Show waypoints on your current track on the elevation plot.
2. When you double back over the same terrain, have an option to put you as a dot on the previous elevation plot. That way you can flip over to the elevation plot and as long as you are on the same track, you can see what you have to overcome to get to where you are going.
   
3. When you have an active route, show the elevations that you will go through on that route ahead of the dot that is you on the current profile view.
   

Fitness product kind of features

With the support for ANT and HR monitors and the Cadence monitor, the Colorado has the ability to do some things that the current generation of the fitness products cannot do. In particular the Fitness products have internal batteries and constrained screens. This is fine but sometimes you need to go longer or farther and charging the internal battery is impractical. That is where the AA batteries for the Colorado are great. They just need to add a few features to make it so that you can use the fitness like features with the Colorado:

1. Training Center support -- adventure racing, backpacking trips, longer cycling events than Edge can do.
2. Basic support for courses
3. Average HR support
4. Workouts are probably not as important.
5. Power will ultimately be nice. With the large screen and the very advanced processor you could really do a lot. This is not something you would race with but it could be a nice platform to provide more information during training and maybe a good platform for computerless analysis.
6. The Stopwatch page seems to have some features of the fitness products but it seems like a half-baked implementation and there doesn't seem to be any way to record the data.
   

Things to test:
Load route for race.