Vandals and Burglars and Salesmen!

Posted by Eric

Sometime late last Friday night, or rather early Saturday morning, someone went through my neighborhood slashing tires. Apparently they mostly focused on cars parked on the street, so my vehicles were not affected. I’m not certain of the final count, but a rough estimate from my doorstep puts the count to at least six cars, probably ten. I gather that someone also had sugar dumped in their car, though stories vary as to if it was in their gas tank or just their front seat. And at least one house is said to have had their phone lines cut, a la preparation for burglary.

One of the cops who responded suggested that it was likely either just kids being morons, or some sort of low level gang initiation (which falls under ‘kids being morons’ too). By and large this is a good neighborhood and town. Low crime, quiet, even boring. But we’re pretty close to Aurora and Joliet, both of which have significant crime problems. And no doubt even Plainfield has its share of delinquents who think randomly trashing private property is somehow fun. So, the cop’s explanation seems reasonable enough.

One thing that sort of struck me as odd, though…

On the Monday after the vandalism occurred, we had a guy (“I’m not a salesman!”) from a home security provider going door-to-door. He had a nice shirt with the name of the security company embroidered on it, and a metal clipboard – you know, the usual guise of someone who wants to look like an official representative. He seemed to know the whole story about the vandalism, and was asking each house if they had a security system, and if so what brand it was, and if they would be interested in becoming a ‘demo house’ for his company.

If I had Spidey senses, they might have tingled. I don’t, but I did find it in mildly bad taste that they would be using this situation as a sales opportunity. I told him we’ve got a system already, and no, I won’t divulge who with.

My wife and I talked about it later, and we wondered some things…

  • How many homeowners blithely respond that “No, we don’t have a security system”?
  • How many of those also indicated when their house would be unoccupied? “No, the appointment would have to be in the evening as I don’t get home before 5pm”.
  • And how many of those said “Sure, come on in (read: have a look around, see if I have anything valuable)”?
  • How would a home security system stop someone from slashing tires on the street?
  • Who the heck buys a home security system from a door-to-door salesman, anyway?

To anyone of a cynical nature (me!), the circumstances & timing were just a tad suspicious.

Amazon Tax Law

Posted by Eric

A friend of mine pointed out this article to me. It discusses the recently passed “Amazon Tax” law in New York. The general idea behind the law is that online retailers who get business from “click-through” affiliates on the web have a de facto physical presence in New York state, because some of those affiliates will inevitably reside there.

Even as a layman, I see some real problems with this law.

The whole thing is built on the concept of Internet affiliates living in the state. It is not at all clear to me that a click-through affiliate constitutes a physical presence for the retailer. That’s like saying that a 1099 salesman represents a physical presence – even though he is not in any legal sense an employee. I do occasional freelance work writing software for a company in California. Does the fact that I live in Illinois mean they have a physical presence here? I don’t think so.

The article notes that there are “more than 7,400 state and local tax codes in the United States”, which, while technically true isn’t particularly relevant – states and large cities might attempt to enact similar laws, but it’s very unlikely that every taxing body in the nation would follow suit. Still though, if/as more state governments enact similar plans, it really does place an increasingly unreasonable burden on online retailers to track the tax laws potentially affecting every order.

This tax is not going to level the playing field for brick-and-mortar stores, anyway. I don’t buy online to save money on taxes – I buy online because the basic price is usually much less than what a local retailer charges. Even if you add shipping costs and remove local taxes from the equation, the online shopping is still often cheaper.

Further, it’s an administrative nightmare not just for the affected retailers, but also for the state. There will have to be an entirely new government office to (try to) discover and keep track of which retailers are affected. How do they even determine which click-through affiliates are in their state? Surf every web page for a click-through link, and do a whois to find out if the owner is a state resident? And what about someone who lives in New York, but has a web site that’s hosted in Texas? If Texas enacts a similar tax law, might they not reasonably claim that the “physical presence” is in their state, not New York?

Once the state has figured out which online retailers to pursue, how will they then determine how much business they’ve done in the state and the extent to which items are taxable? After all, many taxing bodies apply different rates for different kinds of goods. Most companies are probably not going to be keen to voluntarily turn over the necessary records. It many not even be possible to force them to do so.

The bureaucracy alone will easily eat half of the anticipated tax revenue. The other half will be eaten up in court disputes. And if, by some great misfortune this law does eventually pass legal muster, one possible outcome is that an affected online retailer will simply cease their affiliate program. And who will that hurt most? The affiliates who happen to be residents and taxpayers of the state.

A Trip Down Memory Lane… BBS

Posted by Eric

My wife is out of town this week and so I’ve taken the time to at least get started on a long-overdue project. As I have mentioned before, I’ve got a huge tub of old CD ROMs and similar junk that needed going through, which is how I spent many hours the past few days.

What an incredible load of junk! The commercial stuff was easy to deal with – if it’s older than a version I’m currently using, it’s gone. If I’ve never used it, it’s gone. If I can’t even figure out what it is, it’s gone.

The CDs I made myself are a bit more problematic. I’ve backed up important stuff at various times over the years, as well as a ridiculous amount of drivel. Rather than just tossing all those discs, I loaded them all onto my hard drive so that I can sort through them. Probably only a freak like me would actually look forward to reviewing and cleaning out 40,000 files. I have a feeling when the project is done there will be only a thousand or so files left – which will probably all fit on a single DVD.

As I started the sort project, one of the first things I ran across was this advertisement for my old Bulletin Board System…

The Aircrash Bureau BBS

3500 files! 3.8 Gigabytes of storage! That was a huge amount back then, but now for $30 you can get a microSD card with more capacity and which could easily be swallowed. My BBS was never a raging success with individual users – I was a bit late to the game for that. It was however a very active file distribution hub, often moving 100 megabytes a day, which was no small thing in the days of dial-up modems.

Sometimes I miss the title of SysOp.