Take the Subway to the High Life

Anyone living in and around New York City knows that a metro transit strike is imminent. Why? Subway workers want to get paid more, a lot more. How much more? The Wall Street Journal offers the following summary:

...New York's poor, downtrodden transit workers, who earn an average of $55,000 a year and have gold-plated health and other benefits, [are] demanding 8%-a-year raises for each of the next three years and [a] lowering of the age at which a worker can retire with full benefits to 50 from 55. No wonder New York is sometimes called the City of Dreams.

State law prohibits strikes by public employees, but never mind. New York's 38,000 subway and bus workers are poised to walk off the job at 12:01 a.m. Friday, one minute after their contract expires. That's nine shopping days before Christmas. The city estimates it would lose $440 million to $660 million a day in forgone business and up to $12 million a day in tax revenue.

Happy Holidays! If you see a transit worker sitting on their tails collecting $50,000 per year and retirement benefits at 55, feel free to extend your best wishes to them. It's as though these people couldn't be replaced by any unskilled laborer who can MORE efficiently and effectively clean the platforms for minimum wage. I, for one, plan on using the old-school method of commuting: my legs. Indeed, I may do so from here on out just to send the message that I can't stand greedy, lazy people.

Cast the Realist Party's vote in favor of management standing up to the striking workers!

How to Tax the Upper Class, Finally and Fairly

The quest for a flat tax has basically come to a complete end since George Bush's administration has tabled tax reform for the foreseeable future. It's unfortunate because most of the people that would finally have come under the 'jurisdiction' of a flat tax are those who are supposed to pay taxes under the 'progressive' system but invariably pay none at all, thanks to tax credits and deductions of every kind.

Essentially, when one demographic does not pay their fair share (the upper class), and please note that 'fair' and not 'excessive' is mentioned, it becomes the obligation of the other demographics (the middle and lower classes) to make up for the difference. Sadly, if you have been tracking our federal deficit at all-time highs approaching $500 billion, then it's clear to that the middle and lower classes are not doing such a great job offsetting the diminished efforts of the upper class. Of course, one could very rationally argue that our government should stop spending at such an outlandish pace, but that's a discussion for another day.

No, what we're here to do is determine why the flat tax is so vehemently hated by citizens in this country. The answer may surprise you: it's the rich that really hate it. Unfortunately, the voting public seems to think that the upper class will pay less, rather than more, under a flat tax, though it's already pretty hard to pay less than near zero. You see, a flat tax of %20 (substantially lower than all progressive income tax brackets beginning at 28% and rising to a high of 35% for the rich) imposed on the general population would actually require the upper class to pay more than they are paying now (which is to say essentially nothing, though more accurately, David Cay Johnston from the New York Times has estimated that number at 17.5% using IRS annual data). What with mortgage deductions, car deductions, trust and estate planning, lowered rates for capital gains and dividends, the rich rarely pay taxes on anything. A case in point: John Kerry's wife only paid 3% in taxes last year, while he himself only paid 13%. So, it's no wonder he is against the flat tax; he would have to pay MORE each.

Accordingly, it's clear to see how politicians really aren't concerned with leveling the tax playing field, instead prefering to protect the purse strings of their financial base. Indeed, just look at what they are doing apropos the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which is beginning to impact more and more workers each year...i.e. - nothing. Fixing it would mean minimizing the amount of money received from it, which helps to offset the reduced taxes that the rich (who are growing richer every year) pay to the government. That's right, the upper class' accountants long ago figured out ways around the MAT, and they're the very people for which the AMT was designed. However, Gene Sperling (Bill Clinton's top economic adviser) over at Bloomberg has some good ideas on how to fix the problem. You might not like the solution offered, but it's interesting to consider some of his statements...excerpts highlighted:

The president's own Tax Reform Panel estimates eliminating the AMT would cost $1.2 trillion in revenue over 10 years. To put this in perspective, that's enough to cover almost all Americans without health insurance or make Social Security solvent. Instead, Congress should figure out a way to reform the AMT that doesn't add to the deficit.

Policymakers must first focus on providing relief for those making $150,000 or less who the AMT was never intended to affect. It's hard to justify passing on hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to the next generation just to make sure that the AMT doesn't take a bite out of Bush's tax cuts for some high-income taxpayers.

One change to consider is to no longer allow capital gains and dividend income to be exempt from the AMT. (This is the clause that basically exempts everyone with investment income from the AMT, or in other words, the rich. -EBO) That money could be devoted to providing relief for the middle and upper-middle income families hurt by the AMT.

Simply repealing the AMT without offsets would be another deficit-exploding tax cut tilted toward those with the highest incomes, paid for in higher interest costs for the next generation or in cuts to programs for children, workers, and the poor.

The point is, why not just go to a flat tax across the board? That way, everyone pays their 'share' and the rich don't get access to fancy tools to avoid paying taxes at lower income earners' expense. Sadly, Bush's resignation to sit idly in office and simply pass egregious spending programs sent up to him from the Hill means that I will be very carefully watching the voting public's reaction next year. Perhaps it's time that someone who knows how to balance a working man's checkbook had a turn at the wheel.

The Earth Is Indestructible, or How to Destroy It

For a long time in my arguments with environmentalists and tree-huggers, I have urged them to modify their rallying cry from "Save Earth!" to "Save Humans!" in order to more accurately reflect their position. Sadly, my words are often ignored, or worse, met with a vehemence that would make a member of the mafia blush. You see, what most environmentalists are arguing for is keeping the Earth exactly the way it is so that we can continue to dominate it and maintain our cushy little lifestyles. "Would you kindly pass the butter for my steak au poivre?" It's not a save Earth campaign; it's a save humans campaign, or better yet, keep humans in charge campaign.

How do I know that we don't need to worry about saving Earth as all the tree-huggers suggest? Simple. Earth is largely indestructible. It has taken a lot worse than we humans in its 5 billion year existence. But, not to be completely obstinate in arguing my position, I did manage to come across a wonderful paper on Sam Hughes' website that details just what would be required in order to obliterate the Earth. It's an extraordinary read, the gist of which I have taken the liberty of highlighting below (for a more detailed analysis, go to his web site). It should provide irrefutable evidence that the Earth isn't going anywhere, though humans may or may not be:

PREAMBLE
Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

MISSION STATEMENT
For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to change the Earth into something other than a planet. Any of the following forms could represent success: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a dust cloud; a more exotic object such as a quantum singularity. But the list does not end here.

CURRENT EARTH DESTRUCTION STATUS
Number of times the Earth has been destroyed: 0

METHODS FOR DESTROYING THE EARTH
To be listed here, a method must actually work. That is, according to current scientific understanding, it must be possible for the Earth to actually be destroyed by this method, however improbable or impractical it may be:

Gobbled up by Strangelets
You will need: Some strange matter.

Strange matter is a phase of matter which is even more dense than neutronium. It's theorized to form in particularly massive neutron stars when the pressure inside them becomes just too great for even neutronium to exist: the individual neutrons comprising the neutronium are instead broken down into strange quarks.

Some theories suggest that a lump of strange matter ("strangelet") could remain stable outside of the intense pressure which created it. It's further theorized that the gravitational field of a microscopic strangelet would be enough to gobble up anything it comes in contact with, turning it into more strange matter.

Method: Hijack control of a particle accelerator. I suggest the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create a strangelet large enough to remain stable. Once created, your job is done: relax and wait as the strangelet plummets through to the Earth's core, where it will eventually swallow up the entire Earth.

Earth's final resting place: a tiny glob of strange matter, perhaps a centimetre across.

Feasibility rating: 2/10. Evidence for the existence of strange matter is sketchy at best; there are a few neutron stars which look too small to be made of neutronium, there are a few earthquakes which might have been caused by a microscopic strangelet passing through the Earth at high speed, but that's about it. And even if it were possible that small stable strangelets could exist and swallow matter up in the manner described, the odds of forming one in a particle accelerator are pretty much zero.


Sucked into a Microscopic Black Hole
You will need: a microscopic black hole.

Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest.

Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.

Earth's final resting place: a singularity with a radius of about nine millimetres, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.

Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.


Blown up by Matter/Anti-matter Reaction
You will need: 1,300,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter

Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this will take some considerable time to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be possible - and much easier - simply to "flip" 1.3 trillion tonnes of matter through a fourth dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.

Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.

This, to say the least, requires a big bomb. All the explosives mankind has ever created, nuclear or non-, gathered together and detonated simultaneously, would make a significant crater and wreck the planet's ecosystem, but barely scratch the surface of the planet. There is evidence that in the past, asteroids have hit the Earth with the explosive yield of five billion Hiroshima bombs - and such evidence is difficult to find. It is, in short, insanely difficult to significantly alter the Earth's structure with explosives. This is not to mention the gravity problem. Just because you blasted the Earth apart doesn't mean you blasted it apart for good. If you don't blast it hard enough, the pieces will fall back together again under mutual gravitational attraction, and Earth, like the liquid metal Terminator, will reform from its shattered shards. You have to blow the Earth up hard enough to overcome that attraction.

How hard is that?

If you do the lengthy calculations you find that to liberate that much energy requires the complete annihilation of around 1,246,400,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. That's assuming zero energy loss to heat and radiation, which is unlikely to be the case in reality: You'll probably need to up the dose by at least a factor of ten. Once you've generated your antimatter, probably in space, just launch it en masse towards Earth. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein's famous mass-energy equation, E=mc2) should be sufficient to split the Earth into a thousand pieces.

Earth's final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun.

Feasibility rating: 5/10. Just about slightly possible.


Pulverized by Impact with Blunt Instrument
You will need: a big heavy rock, something with a bit of a swing to it... perhaps Mars

Method: The concept is simple: find a really, really big asteroid or planet, accelerate it up to some dazzling speed, and smash it into Earth, preferably head-on but whatever you can manage. The result: an absolutely spectacular collision, resulting hopefully in Earth (and, most likely, our "cue ball" too) being pulverized out of existence - smashed into any number of large pieces which if the collision is hard enough should have enough energy to overcome their mutual gravity and drift away forever, never to coagulate back into a planet again.

Falling at the minimal impact velocity of 11 kilometres per second and assuming zero energy loss to heat and other energy forms, the cue ball would have to have roughly 60% of the mass of the Earth. Mars, the next planet out, "weighs" in at about 11% of Earth's mass, while Venus, the next planet in and also the nearest to Earth, has about 81%. Assuming that we would fire our cue ball into Earth at much greater than 11km/s (I'm thinking more like 50km/s), either of these would make great possibilities.

Obviously a smaller rock would do the job, you just need to fire it faster. Taking mass dilation into account, a 5,000,000,000,000-tonne asteroid at 90% of light speed would do just as well.

Earth's final resting place: a variety of roughly Moon-sized chunks of rock, scattered haphazardly across the greater Solar System.

Feasibility rating: 7/10. Pretty plausible.

Comments: Earth is believed to have been hit by an object the size of Mars at some point in the distant past before its surface cooled. This titanic collision resulted in... the Moon. While the Mars-sized object in question obviously didn't hit Earth nearly as hard as we're proposing with this method, this does serve as a proof of concept.


Swallowed up as Sun Enters Red Giant Stage
You will need: patience

Method: Simply wait for roughly 5,000,000,000 years. During its natural progress along the Main Sequence, the Sun will exhaust its initial reserves of hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant star - swallowing up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in the process.

Earth's final resting place: Boiling red iron in the heart of the Sun.

Feasibility rating: 8/10. The problem here is that current scientific theories predict the Earth will probably survive. The increasing solar wind combined with the Sun's decreasing mass will result in the Earth gradually moving out to a wider, cooler, safer orbit.


Destroyed by God
You will need: God

Method: Far be it from me to dictate whether God does or does not exist, but if he did, and was omnipotent, then no doubt he could destroy the Earth at a mere thought if he should decide to. Of course, the question arises of how we persuade him to do this.

One suggestion - should Judaic mythology turn out to be correct - is finding and killing one or more of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, 36 righteous men whose role in life is to justify the purpose of mankind in the eyes of God. If even one of these is missing, it is said the world would come to an end. Practically speaking, it would probably be easier to wipe out humanity than to find one these individuals, who do not themselves know who they are.

Earth's final resting place: potentially any form, anywhere.


Allowing George W. Bush to Continue to Exercise His Will on the World
If you think this, you're completely missing the point. The power to destroy the Earth does not currently exist, and Bush's administration is not actively seeking to create such technology. Whatever Bush does, whatever the backlash from his policies on Iraq and oil and global warming, he cannot destroy the planet.

Whew! And there you have it. If you have the means, the Earth is toast.

The Beginning of the End for FDR's Legacy

Unions: as if they ever added any long-term value. Their contracts have been the downfall of this country.

First, Delphi entered bankruptcy protection and threatens to fire most US-based workers if they don't accept market wages of $9.50 an hour excluding benefits vs. the $63.50 per hour package that they are (were?) currently earning. Frankly, this seems fair since most workers were simply sweeping factory floors while Delphi's fully automated assembly plan poured out components for US-based automobiles.

Then, General Motors announced (in fact, this is a letter from CEO Rick Wagoner addressing many of GM's woes, including worker and healthcare costs; it's an exceptional and illuminating read) job cuts and plant closings impacting the lives (and jobs) of over 30,000 US workers. Specifically, it will cease production at 12 North American manufacturing facilities and eliminate 30,000 jobs by 2008; trim $1 billion in net material costs in 2006; and, in cooperation with the United Automobile Workers, reduce GM's retiree health-care liabilities by $15 billion, or about 25%, for an annualized expense reduction of $3 billion.

Now, it's Verizon's turn. The New York Times reports that Verizon is freezing the guaranteed pension plans of all its managers and restructuring their health care benefits program:

Verizon Communications, the nation's second-largest telephone company, said it would freeze the guaranteed pension plan covering 50,000 of its managers and expand their 401(k) plans instead. In freezing the plan, the company will pay workers the benefits they have already earned but will not let them build additional benefits. Verizon said that it would also contribute less to the health-care benefits of the managers when they retire. Over all, the company hopes to save about $3 billion over the next decade by taking the steps. The moves are part of a broader effort by Verizon to overhaul its pension and health-care plans to keep up with rival cable and technology companies that typically pay lower salaries and provide fewer benefits.

Verizon's 200,000 retirees and its 105,000 current union employees will not be affected by the change. But in cutting retirement benefits for about a quarter of its work force of 215,000, Verizon may be setting the stage for concessions it may hope to gain from its unionized workers in the next round of negotiations.

You can count on it. Verizon just started with management because they garner less sympathy from the public. But make no mistake, union concession requests will be next.

Indeed, is it now any wonder that FDR-style, New Deal era programs just don't work? Unions and bloated bureaucracies have hampered the competitive abilities of every major US manufacturer. For the past 10 years, the competitive disadvantage relative to foreign companies has grown to such a magnitude that now our greatest and mightiest industrialists are on the brink of bankruptcy (and as mentioned in the case of Delphi, already there). Egregious union bosses making seven-figure incomes bent management to their wills in order to impose cost pension plans, healthcare plans, minimum wage requirements, and production guarantees on corporations that simply could not endure these requirements in the long run. Under the burden of ridiculous costs, heavy debt, and the inability to hire and fire with economic cycles, our historic companies are now seeing their prowess at long last come to and end.

I say, it's about time. Kudos to Verizon for having the wherewithal to stand up for shareholders (read, the actual owners of the company) and enforce policies that add long-term value. Securing the lives of our aged by mortgaging the futures of our young is no way to survive in the global marketplace, or has no one noticed that everything is manufactured in China these days? Ask yourselves, my little Realists, why this is the case? Well, when you are playing $63.50 an hour to an employee to stand idly by and only occasionally sweep the floor while and automated machine works through the night, you have your answer...especially when that same person in China will accept 65 cents an hour.

The only way to compete is to get lean and mean. Strict action now is the only option left. Frankly, I say goodbye to unions. I knew them well....