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If you have 10 minutes to read (and cry quietly at your desk), I cannot recommend reading this enough.

Gotta love those fundamentalists.

A private school in Kansas has barred female officials from refereeing boys sporting events on the premise that females cannot have authority over males.

Unless the school has an all-male faculty, how long will it be until one of the students goes straight Cartman on his English teacher?

Has Kansas finally supplanted Florida as the national leader is off-beat news?

Here’s how I’m doing so far, in descending order of success:

Contribute $20 each month to a worthy, off-beat charity (See, moustache, Baraka). On track. See below.

• January: Hire Heros USA - Not-for-profit providing career placement assistance to wounded vets.

Get Master’s Degree. Doing fine. Three classes into my final course. On track to finish in May.

Pay off all credit cards and truck. Doing very well. Thanks to tax returns, bonuses (and Grandma), 80% of my credit card debt is payed off (despite buying a beautiful 52″ Samsung LCD). I should ice this one by the end of March.

Lose 30 pounds. Going OK. Down 7.5 lbs after a shockingly bad January 1 weigh in.

Live on a 60-10-10-10-10 budget. Not there yet. Right now I’m around 75-0-3-16-6. Once I get rid of credit card and truck payments and refinance the condo I should be home. I’m thinking April or so.

Get new, awesome, job. Not going so well. I got a nice raise, making my current job somewhat more awesome. Plenty of work to do here.

Break into the top 10 Google results for “Zach Fletcher“, “Zachary Fletcher“, or “Big Ern“. No luck yet. I was on the front page for “Big Ern” during football season, but have fallen off.

Write the computer code for the project I’ve been mulling for the last few years. Have done zilch. This may be replaced with another project I’m working on with my fellow villagers.

Create (and use) at least 2 of Digg, Technorati, etc.
Done zilch. Need to get off my ass. This one should be easy.

Become more active. Be able to complete 1 full week (7 days in a row) of CrossFit workouts. Again, very little done. Will (re-)join a gym in February. I may even go to it and work out.

Crush Elroy, ACom, and Electronic Vagrant in Villager page views. Not going well at all. Elroy’s Don & Mike post is an unstoppable juggernaut. I refuse to link to it. Need to get on the ball here.

Remodel bathrooms. Haven’t done anything yet. Once the fiscal projects are done, I can get into this.

Acquire at least 1 useful skill. Think carpentry or .NET design. Done nada. The year is young.

Past posts:
January

Listening to Don & Mike last night I heard the lovely folks from Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church will protest at Heath Ledger’s funeral (guess why). Bile rising, I wondered: “Is there anything I could agree with him on? Other than the value of a good comb over and (possibly) simple arithmatic?

The next, (hopefully) more interesting question: If you could sit down and have a conversation with some of history’s great monsters, are there topics on which you could reach a meeting of the minds? Did Stalin like baseball? Could Pol Pot extemporize on economics? Given the opportunity, would Hitler throw down on Guitar Hero [Insert “99 Red Balloons” or “This rock will last 1,000 years!” joke here).

The best Wikipedia reference posted in the comments by Friday, February 1 will receive $3 from me via Paypal. Entries along the lines of “we both like expensive cars” or “I wish I had a harem” will be read with interest, but probably not rewarded. References to obscure, especially nasty fellows will receive extra points in my (entirely arbitrary) rating system.

Alternate post title: “God is the Toughest Movie Critic of All”

It is basically a huge scam. Strangely, it’s only virtue (simplicity) makes it even easier to identify as a scam.

Situation 1: You make $25,000 per year. Your effective income tax is about 10%. You lose another 10% to other withholding (state taxes, medicare, Social Security etc). So, you save ~$2,500 per year. Because you are a poor scum bag, effectively all this money is spent buying things.

• Old way: $25k - $2.5k in taxes - $2.5k in other witholding - $5k in rent/mortgage = $15k buying power for the year.
• New way: $25k - $0 in taxes - $2.5k in other witholding - $5k in rent/mortgage = $17.5k buying power. However, everything you buy now costs your 30% more. So your $17.5k only buys $13.4k of pre-flat tax goods.

Situation 2: You make $75,000 per year. Your effective income tax is about 20%. You lose another 10% to other witholding. You’re a not-so-poor working stiff so maybe you save 10% of your income.

• Old way: $75k - $15k in taxes - $7.5k in other witholding - $15k in rent/mortgage - 7.5k in savings = $30k buying power.
• New way: $75k - $0 in taxes - $7.5k in other witholding - $15k in rent/mortgage - 7.5k in savings = $45k buying power ($34.6k adjusted)

Situation 3: You make $225,000 per year. Your effective income tax is about 27%. You lose another 10% to other witholding. You’re doing rather well and can put away 20% of your income.

• Old way: $225k - $60k in taxes - $25k in other witholding - $25k in rent/mortgage - $45k in savings = $75k buying power.
• New way: $225k - $0 in taxes - $25k in other witholding - $25k in rent/mortgage - $45k in savings = $130k buying power ($100k adjusted).

These are clearly estimated numbers and they may have some fundamental problems. However, the things I’ve ignored make the flat tax an even dumber idea for low- and middle-class humps. For example, deductions for children, mortage interest, or higher education can greatly reduce income tax on the middle class and virtually eliminate it for the lower class.

I’ve also ignored the fact that if I’m making $225,000 per year, I’m going to buy my Porsche/racing sloop/walk-in humidor in another country or online. So there are plenty of ways of avoiding the new tax burden.

So, at a glance we see that the poor guy gets rogered (10% less buying power), the middle class guy does OK if he’s smart enough to save some money (15% more power), and the rich guy makes out like a bandit (33% more buying power). ‘Twas ever thus.

Fortunately for the proponents of this plan, poor people can’t do teh maths, so they’ll probably jump in with both feet.

What else did I miss?

*Updated to correct typos/errors.

Happy 2008 dedicated readers! I hope you both got everything you wanted for Christmas, and are striding into ‘08 happy, healthy, and inexplicably curious about our mundane doings.

As this blog is mainly about self-improvement, vanity, and the public airing of our private business, my resolutions for the New Year:

• Lose 30 pounds.
• Get new, awesome, job.
• Break into the top 10 Google results for “Zach Fletcher“, “Zachary Fletcher“, or “Big Ern“
• Get Master’s Degree.
• Pay off all credit cards and truck.
• Live on a 60-10-10-10-10 budget.
• Write the computer code for the project I’ve been mulling for the last few years.
• Create (and use) at least 2 of Digg, Technorati, etc.
• Become more active. Be able to complete 1 full week (7 days in a row) of CrossFit workouts.
• Contribute $20 each month to a worthy, off-beat charity. (See, moustache, Baraka)
• Crush Elroy, ACom, and Electronic Vagrant in Villager page views.
• Remodel bathrooms.
• Acquire at least 1 useful skill. Think carpentry or .NET design.

I will be setting targets/measures of success for each resolution later this week. I will post updates on/about the first of each month. If other, not-so-new resolutions occur to me, I may add them.

Elroy, ACOM, EV, what will you be doing better this year?

*Fixed date to un-bury post.