I love Disney like I love the Soviet Union. Mainly it's because the company clawed its way to the top by taking advantage of obscure aspects of copyright law, and then the company bought enough Congressmen to close up the doors they used to get where they are today.

But I read something today about Disney that I found interesting.

So the idea of a national sales tax to replace the income tax comes up again, and this time it gets some consideration, or at least some air time.

The usual people are howling about it: Sales taxes are regressive, and regressive taxes are unfair.

Here's a fair way to fix that.

"If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter." -- Thomas Jefferson

Today, half of U.S. high school students surveyed believe newspaper stories should require government approval. Pravda, anyone?

OK, so this is a bit late coming, and I haven't really been able to think this through as well as I should, so I hope some other people will think through it with me. The problem: Our trade deficit is up.

The solution is to devalue the dollar. Supposedly.

Arstechnica is reporting that RFID chips for humans have received FDA approval. The question for me is, what benefit do we get from this?

Dan's aging documents how-to really should have been required reading for CBS.

Found on Dvorak's blog: Ebay listing for RARE IBM Selectric. Of course it's rare. On Ebay, if it's something no longer available at Target or Wal-Mart, it's rare.

Cringely has written eloquently about the effects of outsourcing to India.

Outsourcing hurts more than just IT.

I read an interesting story today on several sites, quoting an article that originally appeared in the New York Times about misspellings on eBay and people who get bitten by them--and others who exploit them. (This particular link is registration-free.)

Executive summary: A lot of people can't spell, and that means items sell for much lower prices than they would otherwise, if they attract any interest at all (one has to be able to find them, after all).

I found a link to a six-week-old story by Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) about an adventure at an airport.

I spotted an editorial in the Washington Post this weekend: