gwax's rumblings

My cell phone has this won­der­ful lit­tle game called Falling Numbers that I play occa­sion­ally when bored. The basic con­cept is that dig­its fall from the top of the LCD and you have to push the cor­re­spond­ing but­ton on the phone. If you push the cor­rect but­ton, the num­ber goes away and you get some points. Fail to push the cor­rect but­ton and the num­ber will fall to the bot­tom, where it will explode and you will lose a life or some­thing. Push the wrong but­ton and you lose a life. Lose two lives and its game over, input your score and you’re done. Also, every so often you will com­plete a level and then the num­bers will fall faster. Eventually you hit a level where the num­bers are falling ridicu­lously fast.

Now that you under­stand what Falling Numbers is, let me explain where the Zen comes into things. When you start play­ing you kind of fum­ble around until you fig­ure out where all the num­bers are then you start fid­dling with hand posi­tion and things like that until you find the opti­mal way to hold the phone and push the but­tons. After you’ve got the logis­tics fig­ured out, the mind game starts. When I first started to get the hang of things I was iden­ti­fy­ing the dig­its for the num­bers they rep­re­sent, then say­ing them in my head and, finally, push­ing the cor­re­spond­ing but­ton. It turns out to be very dif­fi­cult to bypass this iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem and get to a style of just push­ing the cor­rect but­ton as soon as you see the digit on the LCD. If you can not find a way to bypass this sys­tem of think­ing, there is no way to man­age the higher lev­els of the game. It is not easy to explain how I man­age to bypass the think­ing occa­sion­ally but I can tell you that it can increase my scores from ~15000 to over 20000 con­sis­tently. One of the things that seems to help is to focus on my breath­ing while I play (took this from Zen and the Art of Archery).

I’m pretty sure that the con­cept behind Zen is this sort of removal of the think­ing stage from all aspects of life, and oh man that would be fuck­ing awesome.

I’ve been read­ing some of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism And Freedom and, although I dis­agree with a lot of what he says, he does have a few good points. In read­ing some of his sug­ges­tions for a good sys­tem of tax­a­tion, I have got­ten a few ideas and come up with a sys­tem of tax­a­tion that I like:

	T=(I-C1)*C2

It’s a very sim­ple sys­tem, (T) is how much money you have to pay in taxes annu­ally, (I) is your annual income, C1 and C2 are con­stants to be deter­mined by some­one more under­stand­ing of eco­nom­ics than myself. In essence, you can earn up to C1 with­out being taxed and then any­thing beyond that is taxed at rate C2. Key issues with this sys­tem are that is must be taken as it is exactly and there must be no excep­tions made; it does not mat­ter where your income derives from, how many chil­dren you have or any­thing else, just your annual income.

One could also con­sider a dif­fer­ent approach to the under C1 realm and use a neg­a­tive tax scheme where indi­vid­u­als are paid a frac­tion of the amount they need to reach C1. For exam­ple, take C1 to be $50,000 and C2 to be 50%: indi­vid­u­als mak­ing more than $50,000 are taxed half of what they make beyond $50,000 and indi­vid­u­als mak­ing less than $50,000 are given half of the dif­fer­ence between their income and $50,000.

I would say that the sec­ond inter­pre­ta­tion is a more “lib­eral” or “social­ist” approach and can be taken or left based on that fact alone but that the first inter­pre­ta­tion would make for a very good tax scheme that would be well liked by quite a few peo­ple. Personally, I’d like a C1 of $200,000 and a C2 of 50% but that’s just me.

It some­times seems as though I never have free time when I want it and I never want free time when I have it.