20 Jul 2007
Bush Administration Fighting New Cigarette Tax Hike

Well, you would probably expect an unrepentent smoker such as myself to be mighty upset over this, especially given that we in Indiana have just raised cigarette taxes for the very same reason. But I'm not - and I'll tell you why.

First off, I'm not sure the Senate can override a veto on this, even though Bush the Idiot is opposing it for all the wrong reasons - this has nothing to do with "government taking over health care". Second, because this offers a perfect opportunity to teach my non-smoking (or non-drinking, non-gambling) friends how raising "sin" taxes is really just a ruse for a general tax increase: one that "non-sinners" will ultimately pay.

When Indiana raised it's cigarette taxes recently, the legislature commissioned very careful studies - how many smokers would actually quit because of the new tax, and how much money would actually be raised. Once this estimate was in hand, they funded programs based on the numbers.

But, of course, now come the Feds, bound and determined to do the same thing. If this new Federal tax is imposed, the number of smokers in Indiana will drop much further that the Indiana legislature predicted, leaving our State cigarette tax funded programs with a serious shortfall.

Does anyone seriously think the legislature will pare those programs back?

The shortfall will be made up from general tax revenues, and will either contribute to a deficit or a general tax increase.

And since the professed goal of sin taxes is to reduce sin, ultimately all sin taxes are general tax increases - unless they fail to work, which kinda defeats the professed purpose, eh?

A new tax on cigarettes, that would be used to fund children's health insurance, is opposed by the administration, which fears insurance costs will pass to the government.

(link) [Wired Top Stories]

06:35 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Checkers Solved, Unbeatable Database Created

Years ago I monkeyed around with AI and game design, mostly for fun but also looking for faster ways to solve certain switching and prediction problems. Ultimately I concluded that the most efficient way to solve these sorts of problems was a database lookup, because memory was a much more important factor in human intelligence than we generally believe.

At the time, however, silicon memory was quite expensive, and the average hard disk was 20MB, so there was no way for me to really run through a test of any scale, especially considering that it probably would've delved deeper into game theory, and the boss might've looked askance at that.

But this seems to back up my thinking - nice to know I was at least on the right track.

A story on the Nature site announced that a team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta has solved checkers. From the game's 500 billion billion positions (5 * 10^20), 'Chinook' has determined which 100,000 billion (10^14) are needed for their proof, and run through all relevant decision trees. They've set up a site where you can see the proof, traverse the logic, and play their unbeatable automaton. Jonathan Schaeffer notes that his research has implications beyond the checkers board. The same algorithms his team writes to solve games could be helpful in searching other databases, such as vast lists of biological information because, as he says, "At the core, they both reduce to the same fundamental problem: large, compressed data sets that have to be accessed quickly."

(link) [Slashdot]

06:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link