Journal: tax & toast

Thought I might see what Slashdot's journal system is like. Doesn't seem like anything special.

Still working on that digger project. Got to be in on Friday. Mostly there. Main problem at the moment is working out how to juggle UI events, sleeping on the control socket, and, if the socket handling is done in a different thread, how to communicate effectively with it. There's some hints in the GTK api ref about using g_main_loop_* instead of gtk_main(), which I think would let me add the socket fd as an event source some how, in which case data on the socket would be just another event to which I could attach a callback. That would be a good way to do it: it's probably best to avoid using more threads than are necessary, and I think it would be fairly clean and simple. However, I can't find any specifics as to how it's done.

Sleep patterns have been all over the place recently. I realised a few days ago that I hadn't been to any lectures at all last week, and I haven't been to any this week yet either. This is bad because going to lectures makes passing the exams a lot easier.

I'm out of money again. I don't know where it all goes. I think my shopping is fairly frugal. I don't go out drinking. I don't go anywhere that means spending money. I did spend some money on the bike recently, but that was only 4ukp for a new inner tube + 9ukp for a pump. (This was after several weeks of going over to the garage and inflating my front tire from the air pump every few days.) I don't smoke. My rent is paid for me. I suppose train tickets take a fair chunk of money. At least I have my Youn Person's rail card.

A couple of things I've been thinking about recently:

Which should be taxed more: individuals, or corporations? If you tax individuals more than you tax corporations, then

• corporations' revenues are taxed less
• corporations might be able to pay their employees more
• individuals might have more income due to increased salaries
• individuals might have less income due to increased taxes

In this case, whether individuals are better off or worse off depends on how the corporations use the extra profit. If you tax corporations more than you tax individuals:

• individuals' income is taxed less
• individuals might have more money to spend
• corporations might have more revenue due to increased custom
• corporations might have less profit due to increased taxes

There's lots of swings and roundabouts, and a lot of "might"s too. I suspect it boils down to which you'd rather be able to choose where money goes. In which case it's a political, rather than an economical question.

Toast cools quickly because it lack moisture. It lacks moisture because it has been toasted. If you add moisture to a piece of toast, it might be able to stay warmer for longer. However, if the moisture you add is itself cold (or at least, colder than the toast), it might make the toast cooler sooner. So, how does spreading butter on toast affect its warmth over time? Butter usually comes from the fridge; what if it's at room temperature? What if, instead of butter, a butter substitute is used?

Deep questions indeed.

Hmmm, back to work.