Archive for March 27th, 2013

Don’t be evil (part 2)

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes — and for free. You’d open up a pre-filled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone.

Great idea. Why don’t we have it?

One word: Intuit.

This doesn’t come as a great shock to me, but I stopped using Intuit products years ago: TurboTax was DRM infested, and the Mac versions of Quicken became steaming piles of crap. I haven’t seen anything that would make me want to go back to using an Intuit product again, ever.

Posted in Clippings, Politics, Stupid | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 27, 2013.

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

State Senator John Whitmire is the head of the Texas Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee. As head of that committee, it isn’t unusual for him to hear from prison inmates. Sometimes, those communications come in the form of death threats. (Sen. Whitmire was in the news a few years back over the whole “inmates with illegal cell phones” issue.)

Anyway, death threats aren’t unusual and aren’t generally worth reporting. But this one deserves notice. Whitmire

…was in no danger from the inmate, said Bruce Toney, inspector general of the Department of Criminal Justice. The inmate was a confidential informant who tried to recruit other people to devise a plot to kill the senator so he could report them, believing it could earn him cash or a reduced prison sentence, Toney said.

More:

The inmate’s name was not released, but Toney said he was a confidential informant “who in the past had provided information, some of it credible.”
“Once we started investigating, we found it basically was a scam he was working to try to get a bunch of ridiculous things for himself,” Toney said. “And we found he was the one actually trying to get other people interested so he could get them in trouble.”

Mmmmmm-hmmmm. It isn’t the “scam” part that gets me: if I was in a Texas prison, I’d probably do everything I could to get my sentence reduced. It’s the “some of it credible” part. Apparently they’ve used this guy as an informant in the past; now that they’ve established he’s a scammer, how do we know any of the evidence he’s provided is credible? And are they going to go back and review the other cases he’s been involved in?

Does the government have the legal authority to set a minimum price for goods? What if the goods in question are tobacco products?

…the second bill establishes a minimum price for cigarettes and cigarillos, or little cigars, of $10.50 a pack, the first time such a strategy has been used to combat smoking. The bill also prohibits retailers from redeeming coupons or offering other discounts, like two-for-one deals.

Posted in Clippings, Law | 1 Comment »