General Electric Pays Negative Taxes

This makes me supremely mad. According to the New York Times, while the rest of us schmucks give an absurd amount in taxes every year, which go towards subsidies for profitable companies like General Electric, G.E. actually gets paid from the government and avoids taxes completely. How does G.E. reward America for this generosity? By shifting the majority of the G.E. workforce overseas.

Thanks to the administration of George W. Bush (and the blind-eye congress under Obama), corporate tax law was changed to create loopholes that companies like G.E. could use to avoid taxes. Not only that, the loopholes work only if companies fire Americans and hire Europeans instead. We were just too busy being scared about terrorism to notice. Wonder why we're losing jobs to other countries? Look no further.

Ironically, it was Ronald Reagan, Republican prophet, who closed the loophole to begin with. But these days, with both the Democratic and Republican parties comfortably in corporate America's pocket, awarding companies rights beyond those of ordinary people has become the norm.

I'm sure our founding fathers would be proud.

The Republican party line says that corporations should be given free reign because their output and profits benefit the nation. But due to the loopholes, G.E.'s output and profits aren't benefiting the nation-- they're staying overseas. Instead of merely allowing a corporation to retain most of its profits, we're actually providing a financial incentive to abandon America.

We're paying G.E. billions of dollars to leave us.

Does that sound like good policy??

Major League Jew Attempts A Comeback

Jewish ballplayer, and former New York Met David Newhan is attempting a comeback after a scary neck injury.

Mazel Tov, David! I could use a few more Jewish utility men on this year's Major League Jews fantasy team (coming soon).

The World's Last Unsecured Password

I want to apologize to all my family and friends (and assorted random contacts) for spamming them this week. My email was hacked. More specifically, my AOL email was hacked.

Yes, I can hear you laughing. AOL email??? What is this, 1998?

I moved onto Gmail a lifetime ago, but I still kept my AOL account around for the purposes of signing up for things. Everyone these days asks for your email address, and I didn't want my Gmail inbox stuffed with "Special Offers" and "Membership Information." My AOL account, therefore, became a haven for junk.

It was also very vulnerable.

Back when I created the account, sometime around 1996, people's awareness of internet security wasn't high. In 1996, celebrities accounts hadn't yet been hacked for nude photos and spam emails were still written using complete English sentences. When AOL prompted me to create a password, it didn't insist it be 8 characters long, including a capital letter, a number and a special character. It just asked for a password.

So I typed one in. Benf. Short for Ben Folds Five, a band I liked a lot in 1996.

According to mathematics, 456,976 guesses is all it would take to crack my password. From 1996-2011, it had gone uncracked. 15 years. But apparently, someone did it. I'm very careful not to click spam links, so I'm pretty sure I didn't give a spammer that way in. It was just a matter of time before my pathetic password fell victim to someone who undoubtedly looks nothing like Angelina Jolie from the movie "Hackers."

So R.I.P., last unsecured password in the world. You were a relic of a bygone era, when the internet was a much more innocent place. I'll miss how quick and easy it was to type you in, and how easy you were to remember. I'll remember you always.

Benf. 1996-2011

So I Guess That's The End Of The Mile-High Club?

The FAA has ordered all airlines to disable emergency oxygen masks in airplane bathrooms, for fear that terrorists may use the oxygen to ignite a fire.

This means that every time you go to the bathroom on a flight from now on, you'll be risking your life if the plane decompresses.

So add emergency lifesaving equipment to the list of things the FAA has made us safe from, which includes shampoo bottles larger than three ounces and nail clippers.

Unfortunately, the FAA has done nothing to prevent the obvious terrorist threat posed by obnoxious kids that kick your seat.

It's Time To Overthrow Our Ticketmaster

Tunisia, Egypt, Libya... the masses have finally risen up to overthrow their corrupt and heartless dictators. But there remains one brutal tyrant who continues to oppress millions of people, shattering their hopes and dreams, coddling the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class.

I'm talking, of course, about Ticketmaster.

I've written before about my frustrating experiences with Ticketmaster. If it was up to me, I'd never use the service ever again. But Ticketmaster holds, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly over the online retail of concert and event tickets. If you want to see the Yankees, Ticketmaster is the only place online where you can buy tickets at face value.

Ahem, I mean, try to buy tickets at face value. Because you won't be able to. Because Ticketmaster isn't designed to sell tickets. It's designed to force the majority of people to look elsewhere for tickets-- resellers TicketsNow (owned by Ticketmaster) and StubHub.

If that wasn't the case, why make it so difficult to see what tickets are available? Stubhub uses an easy system in which every ticket that's available is listed-- one can click on the section you want and presto-- a list of the tickets for sale in that section are presented.

Ticketmaster, however, uses a blind system. There's no way of telling how many tickets are left, or in what sections. You can be "waiting in line" for a few minutes, only to be told in the end that there are no seats available. And when that message "No Seats Available" pops up, you're not offered with great alternatives. You're given a choice of splitting your order (looking for one seat in one section, one in another section) or going back and restarting the (long) process over again.

How many times do I have to type in a complicated, non-English CAPTCHA before Ticketmaster accepts I'm a human being?

What benefit does hiding the available tickets provide? Nothing for fans. But for ticket resellers and powerful ticket brokers, the system is a boon. Let's say Ticketmaster wants to make a bigger profit. Will they make it by selling tickets at face value? Or will they make it by holding a bunch of tickets, then dumping them on their reselling site, TicketsNow, where they can charge scalper prices? If the system weren't blind, it would be obvious that Ticketmaster was withholding certain seats for resale or for powerful ticket brokers. The closed system helps Ticketmaster avoid scrutiny.

The ticket buying experience on Ticketmaster isn't anything like buying tickets at a normal ticket booth. If you wait in line at a ticket booth, when you reach the front, you're leaving with a ticket. This is not the case when you wait on the Ticketmaster website. You can spend all day on the site (which I can attest to) and even though nothing is listed as sold out, you still can't get anything.

The only way to easily get tickets is to put "Best Available" as your choice. You'll undoubtedly be offered the best seats in the house-- for tons of money. As such, the system rewards the rich, while those trying to be economical are madly scrambling to find the few available seats scattered in other sections.

I had this experience today, at 10:01 AM. Yankees tickets went on sale at 10:00. But everything except the worst of games (Toronto, 1:00, weekday) were already gone (though you wouldn't know it unless you tried, repeatedly).

Then I looked at the tickets available on StubHub and TicketsNow. Every section was available... for marked-up prices. Funny... I actually wanted to go to a game, not resell my tickets for profit. But I couldn't do it on Ticketmaster. I wonder how all these resellers got theirs? Did they snap up tickets seconds before me? Or did somebody give them a little help? I wonder???

As long as Ticketmaster keeps us blind, we'll never know.