Subheading: how globalization killed low taxes.

One of the strongest arguments for having low taxes has been that it helps business thrive and when people get rich they will spend money and eventually some of this money will trickle down and generate jobs and salaries for the middle and lower classes. This may have been true in the past but today in the global economy this is less and less true.

What happens now is that rich people and large corporations will hire illegal immigrants (who send their surplus out of the country) to do their house work, they outsource unskilled work to other countries which means that both money and jobs are leaving the country.

The bottom line is that both tax revenue and jobs are trickling down and out of the country. This leaves the middle and lower classes poor and leads to an increase in unemployment.

People will say that increasing taxes will lead to even more jobs leaving the country - but not if there is a corresponding increase in import tax. I am sure that some smart economics professor can figure out how to balance the two taxes so that less jobs will leave the country.

I hope that we can do something about this to stop the spiral effect caused by globalization.

About 2 months ago I got a brand new Maxtor OneTouch Raid external backup "solution". The external case contains 2 x 500 GB hard disks and can be set up as either RAID0 - 1 Terrabyte or as RAID1 0.5 Terrabyte. Since I got it as a backup and security was my main concern - I set it up as RAID1. This (in theory) means that every piece of data is contained on both drives - so if one fails there is a backup on the other drive.

After about a month of usage I had gathered about 400 GB worth of data and then the trouble started. The drive stared to sound funny and when I went to use the maxtor backup tool it gave an error message. A little concerned I started to test if I could read some of the files stored on the drive. This resulted in some "file unreadable" errors from windows. Pretty upset with the prospect of this so called complete solution failing so soon after me starting to use it I gave Maxtor a call. I told them of my trouble and they told me that they would be happy to replace the drive. However, I did not pay $800 for a drive - I paid for a reliable backup solution. Turned out that they had no idea why I could not get files off the drive or why seemingly both drives failed. It is pretty upsetting to loose 400 GB worth of data, having to pay to send the faulty drive to Maxtor and then get a new drive that now I am not sure I can even trust.

Training for a marathon has just become a little easier. In previous years I have kept track of my marathon training by keeping notes on pieces of paper or on excel spread sheets. Usually what happens that the paper gets lost or thrown out by my wife and the spreadsheet is never on the computer that I am using at the moment. It is also a pain to tabulate the marathon training program for what ever date the marathon is this year. But now I just use www.logyourrun.com. They have training programs for both half and full marathons and they will let you sign up for these for $FREE. The nice thing is that the training program is automatically tabulated to fit the date you enter and they will email you updates each week saying how far you are running the following week and if you use their online running log they will let you know how well you followed the program in the previous week.

Other features include keeping track of the mileage you have on your shoes - great for figuring out when to buy new shoes, measuring and sharing running routes, blogs and articles.