Paying for healthcare by taxing the rich

I was thinking a bit about the proposal to pay for the new healthcare bill by "taxing the rich". The biggest problem with this scheme is that the rich have volatile income.

When you have to pay for a thing every year, without fail, you usually don't depend on a volatile revenue source.

Recently, Schwarzenegger vowed to fix the "boom-bust" cycle in California by spreading state taxes more evenly across income brackets. This proposal is a very conservative way to prevent volatile tax revenues. Unemployment hasn't historically risen above 10% for very long, and incomes for most people are pretty flat, so a scheme that depends less on a Tech Bubble and a Housing Bubble to meet its budgets is definitely a good step.

But the Obama healthcare proposal is the opposite. We intend to pay for healthcare using tax revenues that are extremely volatile.

To fix this (rather than going as far as Schwarzenegger's plan), maybe we should develop a spending policy based on a 10-to-15 year moving average of tax revenues, with some hedging to avoid over-committing during good times, and falling short during bad ones.

New Google Storage Prices: Big News

Google announced 25c/GB/year storage for photos today. That means they reduced the price of cloud storage by a factor of TEN. (And free bandwidth is included, too.)

https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage

I posted a few months ago about cloud storage prices, and how the cost of keeping machines on, ensuring redundancy, etc., was keeping prices about 30x higher than the incremental cost of buying a new disk.

This is no longer true.

Now I can get:

1. Redundant storage, offsite backup
2. Free bandwidth to access and share my photos
3. An image frontend that re-sizes images to any size I like
4. Full two-way sync and download capability with Picasa

All this for about 3x the price of local storage.

When I can store raw photos and other files, I think the battle will be over. But today is definitely the day it started.

You can mail a hard drive to Amazon to get them to put your data on S3.

So I think I need a name for the coffee shop that peers with Google over a DS-3 and has gigabit plugs for your laptop.

Suggestions?

Windows 7 Upgrade: Network Backup painfully expensive

If you have a bunch of computers, you can now buy the "Windows 7 Home Premium" upgrade for $149, for three computers. I almost did that, but!

...if you want to backup all three computers to a network drive, you have to buy the "professional" version separately for each machine for $199 x 3 = $597.

The upgrade to the network backup feature ($149) costs more than the entire OS ($49). This is if you don't really care about BitLocker, joining domains easily, or having an easy way to install XP in a virtual machine, which I mostly don't.

Why is keeping good backups such an expensive feature? People care about their data, and Microsoft should care too.

Single external USB drives are a huge point of failure, and people should be allowed to use their external RAID NAS device they bought for $300, without paying additional humongous sums of cash to do it.