The subject pretty much sums up yesterday. I had big plans for getting stuff done, and while I managed to keep all my appointments, I was thwarted in just about everything else. It started with a threatening letter in the mail from the State of Minnesota’s Unemployment Insurance division of the Department of Employment and Economic Development. Apparently, I needed to sign up for their new system, even though I do none of my own unemployment insurance handling. I hired Paychex to do that, and for the past six and a half years, they’ve been doing a good job of isolating me from nonsense from the state. Apparently that’s an unacceptable situation, since if I didn’t “activate” my account, Minnesota would stop accepting payroll information from them, making me non-compliant. And the beauty of this is that they needed my State of Minnesota Unemployment Insurance ID, a number which I handed off to Paychex when it was first assigned to my company, and haven’t thought of since. And no, they couldn’t use my State of Minnesota Revenue ID (used for sales tax and payroll withholding) or my Federal Employer ID, even though their database already has both of those and it’s all cross-referenced. But no, somehow this magical third ID number provides extra security, or so I’m told.
And people wonder why I hate dealing with government. What should have been a simple matter of faxing the form off ended up eating my entire morning. As John Marshall said: The power to tax is the power to destroy.
Well, at least I won’t have to pay as much in taxes this month, since I didn’t make any money yesterday.
The afternoon? Not a whole lot better. I have work to do for two clients, due Really Darned Soon. But I’m missing critical bits of information from those clients, and can’t start until I get that information. In both cases, I was promised that I would receive these missing pieces on Wednesday. Still haven’t seen ’em this morning, so I’m going to be late in delivering things to those clients.
It makes me wonder why I bother running a business at all. After a day like yesterday, I find myself thinking that if there was any way to move into the black market without getting thrown under the jail, I’d be all over it, but I don’t think that’s possible today. It may be time to start working on the Taoist approach, though: Whenever there is attachment there is bondage.
- The US House extends Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act was an effort to answer the most difficult question a democracy faces: How much freedom are we willing to give up to feel safe?
Apparently the answer from the House isall of it.
[strib] - In more local news, the City Pages’ The Hit Parade Revisited takes a look at the Minneapolis Police Department’s record of beating the stuffing out of people. The interesting thing is that while the department is complaining of not having enough money to hire officers, the settlements paid out last year would have paid the salaries of about 30 additional cops.
- Just another shill for big agri-business: Pawlenty urges House to expand production of renewable fuels. Remember the study I pointed to recently? To make a gallon of renewable fuel from corn, it takes 1.29 gallons of gas. Even the government’s Biomass R & D Initiative says that it takes 72000 BTU to produce a gallon of ethanol, which gives about 76000 BTU (so a gallon of ethanol only takes 0.94 gallon of gas to produce). That makes it better, but still not terribly efficient. And if making ethanol from corn is such a good deal, why does it need a government subsidy in the first place? But hey, it’ll be great for Cargill and ADM. [strib]
- Next Monday at Midway, Allergic fans safe at home as the Saints will set aside the top two rows of section K as no-food rows for kids with food allergies. [press-patch]
- CNET lists the Top 10 Web fads. Seems like a pretty good list to me. [fark!]