Some minor cleanup this morning, mostly just a retuning of filters, updating links, and dropping some journals from which there hasn’t been a post in months (or in some cases, years, and even a couple that turned out to have been deleted). If you feel you got dropped or refiltered by mistake, let me know.
(Some minor tweaks to style went in last night, too.)
States have figured out that people are spending money to buy digital “goods”, and naturally they want “their” share.
Including Mississippi, at least 18 states claim they have the authority to collect taxes on digital goods, and more are likely to join them.
On March 12, a bill was introduced in the North Carolina general assembly “to modernize the sales and use tax statutes by treating music, movies, books, and computer software that are delivered electronically the same as those that are purchased in a tangible medium.”
A digital goods tax measure was also introduced in the Minnesota House of Representatives in late March. The bill could raise the state more than $8.2 million in 2010 through 2013, according to the Minnesota Department of Revenue (PDF).
John Lott on 20/20’s latest disinformation:
Gun control advocates look desperate. Last Friday night, on April 10, ABC aired a heavily promoted, hour long “20/20” special called “If I Only Had a Gun.” It is ABC’s equivalent of NBC’s infamous exploding gas tanks in General Motors pickups where NBC rigged the truck to explode.[...]
No mention was made of the actual multiple victim public shootings stopped by people with concealed handguns nor did they describe who actually carried out such shootings. Instead, ABC presented a rigged experiment where one student in a classroom had a gun. But sometimes even the best editors can’t hide everything the camera sees.
The experiment was set up to make the student fail. It did not resemble a real-world shooting. The same scenario is shown three times, but in each case the student with the gun is seated in the same seat –- the center seat in the front row. The attacker is not only a top-notch shooter –- a firearms expert who teaches firearms tactics and strategy to police -– but also obviously knows precisely where the student with the gun is sitting.
Each time the experiment is run, the attacker first fires two shots at the teacher in the front of the class and then turns his gun directly on the very student with the gun. The attacker wastes no time trying to gun down any of the unarmed students.
In short, the fix is in from before the start in ABC’s “experiment”. They decided in advance on the conclusion they wanted their experiment to show, then rigged the test to show the desired result — just like NBC did with the “exploding gas tanks” that wouldn’t cooperate and explode, a problem that NBC quite unashamedly solved by using explosives (which the “factual exposé” somehow failed to mention to the audience).
ABC never mentions a simple fact: all multiple victim public shootings with more than 3 people killed have occurred where permitted concealed handguns are prohibited. Rather than studying what actually happens during these shootings, ABC conjured up rigged experiments aimed at convincing Americans that guns are ineffective. Unfortunately, ABC’s advice, rather than making victims safe, makes things safer for attackers.
There’s a particular bureaucratic phrase that applies here: “Does not serve the public interest.” And when it not only ignorantly repeats, but blatantly manufactures, deliberate misinformation like this, ABC News is not serving the public interest. If they can truly do no better than this, their FCC license should be revoked.