Bout of Context

squashed:travors:azspot

Researchers have developed a robot capable of learning and interacting with the world using a biological brain.

Dan, I wonder how such… advances… color your previous question about computing taxonomy? Or what biological-hybrid computing would do to the Chinese Room Argument, the Turing Test, the novelty of the RoboCop franchise, etc. 

peterwknox’s link’s a good warm-up skim for 538’s The Missing Million Dollar Tax Bracket.

It’s odd that tax brackets max out at roughly $370k in an era when some incomes skyrocketed into the millions. Why not steepen the progressivity further, adding brackets up the food chain? It would require complementary tweaks to capital gains tax, AMT scales - maybe even certain types of flow-through small business taxes - to lessen the rich-guy tax arbitrage escape hatches. Still, it may be worth the effort politically and financially.

Nate Silver’s footnote for people interpreting this as a sop to the merely rich is worth noting:

“To be clear, this is not necessarily intended as an argument against raising taxes at the $250,000 level, or some other sub-million dollar threshold of income. I’m merely stipulating that if that if the conversation stops at that point, we aren’t really using all the tools at our disposal to craft socially and economically optimal tax policy.”

After reporting the here-comes-trouble news that AIG protesters are taking bus tours o’ hate through the Connecticut neighborhoods densely populated with AIG execs [see also, NYT], HereIsTheCity reports AIG is having a little cosmetic work done:

AIG also arranged for workmen to take down the large ‘AIG’ signage from its downtown Manhattan offices over the weekend - part of a plan to change the firm’s name to AIU Holdings in order to distinguish ‘well-capitalized businesses’ from the rest of the group.

In somewhat embarrassing news, Vivek Kundra, the nation’s first Chief Information Officer, about whom I posted last week, took a voluntary leave of absence just days into the job “as he awaits details of a federal bribery investigation of one of [his former] employees in the Washington, D.C., Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO).”  Oops!

Kundra has not been implicated in the investigation. 

UPDATE [25 March 2009]: He’s back on the job.

Well, that didn’t take long. The unmerited AIG bonus tsunami that piqued Mr. Obama and drove a senator to openly call for seppuku hasn’t dissipated. Already on it’s heels comes matter-of-fact reporting on companies strategizing to skirt compensation limits.

I’m sure small armies of lawyers stand ready to bring each into compliance with the letter, if not the spirit, of whatever legislation calcifies from this fluid situation. Hopefully, these machinators at least exercise the good judgement not to divert loophole money directly to the very teams that exposed their improperly hedged flanks to lossy synthetic derivatives.