Thinking Inside a Bigger Box

I am so sick of reading about the poor economics behind arguments when it comes to tax cut. Being a Norwegian citizen, I am used to taxation levels that would make an American faint. And I don’t know if it really hurts us at all.

What I miss in the discussion goes back to the basics of economy: I am not an economist, but this is how I understand it:

Money ain’t real! Money is only a representation for the right to a certain share of the resources in society. What then happens if everyone gives half of their money to the government? Will you have to work harder to afford a house? Will you have to work harder to afford food? How can redistributing money within society result in there being less resources to go around? How can redistributing money result in there being less work performed by people (all other things being equal)?

Paying more taxes will not result in people as a whole having less. The only result can be that the relative distribution between people change. If you’re asking for a tax cut, you are saying that you feel everyone else should pay more. Of course, I would not object if it happened to me, but it is not “fair”. If you give a tax cut to the rich, all you are saying is that everyone else should shoulder a bigger burden.

Can redistribution lead to a macroeconomic improvement?

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Composed with Newz Crawler 1.4 http://www.newzcrawler.com/

A is for Apple You may have already known that A is for Apple. But did you know that O is for O’Reilly? Check out what Google reports for single character queries. (From Ward Cunningham’s Weblog)

This book talks about the role of a tester in an XP project. So it is about acceptance testing, not unit testing (see Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck for that).

The long and short of it is that I would really like to run an XP project with people who have read, understand, and become excited about this book. My experience is that a project suffers from not having someone who’s job is 100% quality. Programmers (myself included) will sadly have too much at stake to be effective at testing their own code. Having someone who is dedicated to acceptance testing on the team will also be a good way of keeping the iteration cycle short while delivering software of good quality.

I did notice a few weird things about the book, though. The choice of webART as an example of a web acceptance testing tool seemed to me to be a bad one. My impression from the book is that webART is a rather verbose language. The book also suggest estimating down to hours (and in some cases, below that). Personally, I don’t have enough predicability in my progress to do this, but I guess your milage may vary.

All in all, a very good book. I hope to get a tester who works with the mindset the book describes on my next project.

The best thing to happen since the inceptions of C#: “anonymous methods” are .NET delegates cum closures. Finally we can write syntax like:

addButton.Click += new EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) {

list.Add(new ListItem());

}

Even better: Anonymous methods will be closures, so you can use variables from the scope. This is a much needed amendment. Why was it not there from the start? (whine, whine)

Very noteworthy quote:

“I think that in the long term the larger code generation efforts, the “application generators,” will become a thing of the past. They are there because the underlying technologies and architectures don’t yet support programming at a high level. ” (Pragmatic Dave Thomas)

Truer words were seldom said.