All posts by Jack

Geek Stuff

Investigating

As I begin to investigate the components of my Mythical TV I suspect that I will go for an nVidia graphics card, a pcHDTV card for OTA HDTV, a Seasonic or Enermax Power Supply, a couple of Samsung 160GB Hard drives, and either a Hauppauge PVR350 or a Twinhan TH1022 . And that’s just for starters.

I need to see how I will feed the 4DTV into the MythTV box. Since 4DTV is Motorola proprietary, and they don’t have a PC card, I will probably need to add a video capture card and feed the component video into the box. Still to be investigated. And I need to see if there is an MPEG2 4:2:2 receiver card I can can get, instead of the PVR350 or the Twinhan (I think they are both 4:2:0 receivers.) I think the 4:2:2 decoders run into $K. But I will keep on looking.

So, it looks like I will need at least 6 5v PCI slots to support the cards I am looking at. And I still haven’t looked at the sound card yet. I was planning on feeding the audio into my home stereo, but I still need to support 5.1 audio.

And at least a 2.4 GHz CPU, preferably 3+ GHz. And that’s going to generate a lot of heat, so I need to see how it will be cooled. A lot of factors to consider.

Geek Stuff

MythTV

MythTV
All right, I’m going to go for it. I will build my own Linux-based PVR that can support my two satellite receivers (4DTV and MPEG/DVB) and OTA HDTV. Now it is just a matter of getting the right gear to make it happen.

Politics

Tax Reform

I understand that Tax Reform is scurrying around the Hill once again. I have a simple proposal. The Federal Income Tax is equal to (10%+(.0001% x AGI)) AGI. Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) equals the post tax-free income (IRA, 401k, etc) minus the Poverty Level for your situation. At the national level, a family of four PL is about $20K, a single is about $10K.

So, if a family of four earns $50K, then their AGI is $30K and they would pay 13% of that: $3900. A family earning $100K has an AGI of $80K and would pay 18% or $14,400. I expect that the rate should cap out at 30%, so a family making $400K would have an AGI of $380K and pay 30% tax on that, or $114,000.

A single earning $50K would have an AGI of $40K and pay 14%, or $5600. A single making $11K would have an AGI of $1K and pay 11%, $110.

There is only one deduction, the Poverty Level; no Mortgage interest deduction, no charity deductions, no withholding deductions. After thinking about this some more I can see one more modification that needs to be added and that is for catastrophic medical payments. I don’t think taxing major medical treatment should be allowed.

What do do if a family earning $50K faces a medical bill of $250K or even $5K? I think that here we will reduce the AGI by an amount equal to anything in excess of 10% of the premed-AGI, so, in the example above, if the $50K family has a $5K medical emergency they could reduce their $30K AGI by $2K and pay 12.8% on $28K, or $3584.

The numbers can be played with, but the basic focus of this proposal is to use the poverty level as the baseline deduction. This is the value that we measure for basic sustenance. I expect one major change would be to use the local poverty level instead of the national poverty level as the deduction. I expect that poverty is defined higher in NYC than in Milledgeville, TN.

I was just looking a the US Poverty Guidelines and they differentiate between HA, AK, and the lower 48.

PS. I tie all this together by making Representative salaries 5 times the national Poverty Level for a family of four. So, if they try to play games with the poverty guidelines, they will notice as well.