Today the Telegraph had an article claiming that “the top one per cent of British earners are now paying almost 30 per cent of all income tax.” It’s then painted as a bad, unexpected revelation. But I’m not sure that should be the case. In one of my mini-Ben Goldacre moments, I think it’s one of those areas where your intuition and the numbers don’t necessarily align.

This post isn’t about politics or fairness or even, really, taxes. Instead it’s about maths, because what the story fails to say is that you would absolutely expect a small number of high earners to foot most of the bill.

Let’s make some silly assumptions and see how the numbers work out:

• Everyone pays the same 20% tax rate. We’re ignoring the tax-free component so that should work out to be considerably less than the rich pay but more than almost everyone else
• We’ll say that 90% of people earn £20000. The national average is higher than that, but there are a lot of people who work part time and pay no income tax at all
• And we’ll say the last 10% earn £60000. I don’t know how realistic that is as an average, but it’s nearer high-rate tax band cut-over than it is the millions that some CEOs and bankers get and it’s still a long way from the 50p tax rate

How do the numbers work?

The people on the lower income each pay £4000 in tax and the more comfortable pay £12000. But there are nine of the average people for every one of the rich, making the total take £4000 * 9 + £12000 * 1, or £48000.

So the high earner pays £12000 of the complete tax take of £48000, which is 25%.

(If you increase the tax rate on our hypothetical higher earner to 30% he ends up paying a third of all income tax.)

As I say, I don’t want to get into the fairness of it all, but a little maths, some wild assumptions and no research shows that, actually, the rich probably should be paying a reasonable percentage of the total income tax bill.

Apparently the movie studios are placing further restrictions on rentals in order to promote the purchase of shiny disc. Marco Arment says this won’t work because:

If I’m adding a movie to my Netflix queue, I’ve already decided not to buy the DVD. I’m adding it because it looks mildly interesting and I’d like to watch it sometime.

I take the opposite approach. I am unlikely to buy a movie unless I have previously rented it. Why would I buy it if I don’t know whether or not I like it?

I don’t mention this to suggest that Marco is wrong. Quite the opposite. What I’m saying is that I can’t think of any use cases where this strategy would work. Whether you’re not buying it because you don’t want to buy it or not buying it because you don’t know whether you’ll like it, the common thread is that no purchase is involved. The studio would make more money in both these anecdotes if they allowed rentals.

But it’s not really about making money, as bizarre as that might seem. It’s about control.

Movie studios look to the music industry and are trying to learn from their mistakes. Unfortunately they’re taking completely the wrong lessons. Rather than seeing customers buying music instead of taking free copies from P2P networks, they see Apple being in control and able to dictate “unfavourable” terms to them.

To an outsider, “unfavourable” is an odd word as it mainly seems to involve more people paying for more content.

In this battle between the studios, the content providers (Amazon, Apple and NetFlix) and consumers there are no winners. Consumers either miss out on seeing films they want to see or end up making illegal downloads. Amazon, Apple and NetFlix all have to disappoint their customers with seemingly arbitrary additions and removals from their catalogue. And the studios continue to leave money on the table.

Personally I see that as the most “unfavourable” outcome, but what do I know?

You’ve almost certainly seen that Wikipedia is kinda-sorta offline today protesting a proposed US law that would effectively give copyright holders the ability to blacklist pretty much any website without judicial review.

While rights holders do have legitimate concerns over people taking content without paying for it — I don’t like to call in piracy or theft — this really isn’t the answer. Wired sums it up nicely:

SOPA and PIPA represent a legal strategy that focuses the attention of business leaders on stopping losses rather than promoting innovation and building new products. It obfuscates the fact that piracy is, in the long run, an unavoidable cost of doing business, one that should be bearable provided the fundamentals of the business (say, customer satisfaction) are sound.

If there’s one thing that the iTunes Store taught us, it’s the people will actually pay for convenience.

But the first word, and therefore this final word, goes go to TheOatmeal, who makes the point better by using an analogy involving kittens and flamethrowers. You should watch the whole thing.

I’ve not been quite so active blogging this year due to a number of factors. A case in point: it wasn’t until December that I wrote about my holiday in July and a friends wedding in August!

This meant that the most popular articles were actually written in previous years:

1. Sophia Smith
2. Eight Best Computer Books
3. Installing Oracle 10g on CentOS4
4. Minolta Dual Scan II
5. iPhone Dev: Saving State

While I appreciate people visiting, I am continually surprised by the appeal of some of these. Oracle 10g and CentOS 4 are, in software terms, ancient! And the Dual Scan II is more than a decade old — I bought it with my iBook G3 in 2001!

The most read articles that were written this year were:

1. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company
2. Do Apple take 40% in the EU?
3. Programming is Hard
4. Why you need a crash reporter

Kind of surprising that they were all about iOS development.

And here are a few blogs that I liked writing but, it turns out, people didn’t enjoy reading…

• Dear Companies House. A cathartic rant elicited a response from the target
• Programming is Hard
• Your most important customers
• The Trouble with eBooks
• A new CEO for Yahoo?

I’m 75% of the way to becoming a dad for the first time. What better way of displaying that progress — for a programmer at least — than as a Mac application? (Not currently available in the App Store.)

Today the Daily Mail is complaining about a joke that was broadcast on the News Quiz in October last year. (Is it still considered news six months after the event?)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading the article, so, to summarise:

1. Broadcasting a joke that implies, but doesn’t use, a swear word is bad
2. But printing the same joke in a newspaper is okay
3. Broadcasting scantily clad women dancing is bad
4. But printing pictures of the same is okay
5. Putting quotes around a word to indicate disdain is good writing
6. A single complaint represents The Silent Majority
7. Mob rule would be a good thing
8. Potentially causing offence is grounds for severe sanctions
9. (But see bullets two and four for exceptions)
10. Knee-jerk liberals — whatever they are — are a wide-spread problem
11. Knee-jerk tabloids are okay
12. Personal responsibility is good
13. (Unless we have to exercise it ourselves)
14. Your opinion is wrong
15. Mine is right
16. Banning stuff that we don’t like represents freedom
17. Stating things as fact makes them true
18. Black is white
19. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia

I may have veered off target a little at the end but I think that’s pretty close to the core of the article. Did I miss anything?

It was nothing like as dramatic as my iBook dying one evening, but there was no getting around the fact that my nearly five year old MacBook was no longer up to the tasks that I was trying to throw at it. Developing applications, even for resource limited devices such as the iPhone, needs a pretty substantial piece of Mac software called Xcode. My photography pushed me towards getting Aperture to manage all my pictures. It’s great, but it did have a tendency to grind to a halt when it was least convenient.

Anyway, long story short I just got one of the shiny new MacBook Pro’s. I went for the 15″ since I have the iPad for portability and I liked the idea of a quad-core, eight-thread CPU and the discrete graphics card would be a good thing for Aperture. The increased screen resolution, for me, is just gravy.

I was a bit concerned about upgrading from my old machine. In the olden days you could use the Migration Assistant to copy files from your old machine (put the old one in “Target Disk” mode and plug the machines together using FireWire). These days there’s an added complication, in that you can also use a Time Machine backup. Which is the best, quickest option? I didn’t get a great answer from the guys at the Apple Store but in the end I had to use the Time Machine since I don’t have a FireWire 400 – 800 cable.

I picked the default options and I was pleased to see that it was pretty quick; only a couple of hours. It dropped me into a very familiar looking desktop (my old one). Upgrading a Mac can be so much of an anti-climax — everything the same but faster.

Things changed after that. I clicked on Tweetie in my Dock. Nothing. The same with Aperture. Activity Monitor did start, but it just told me that the other two apps were not responding.

I decided to go for the Windows solution and rebooted. Not, it turns out, a good idea. I got the white screen with the Apple logo, a pause and then a black screen. The sleep light came on.

Um, hello?

I think what happened is that it restored a little too much from the Time Machine backup, over-writing some video drivers perhaps. I reinstalled the OS and all was good in software land.

I played around for a while and was very happy with what I found. It really is very much quicker. iTunes actually launches fast enough that I don’t think twice any more. Aperture doesn’t stutter. And the geek in me loves to see a build in Xcode using all eight (virtual) CPUs. I kept Activity Monitor running for a couple of days just so I could see what it was up to. It really is a thing of beauty in hardware terms, too. I’ve poked around with the unibody models in the Apple Store before but even there you don’t get the impression of just how solid they feel.

Eventually the high — maybe it’s the chemicals in the incredibly minimal packaging — started to wear off and I began paying attention to some of the details. Such as, well, take a look at the picture above. There’s a horizontal line of non-operational blue pixels all the way across the screen. One row higher and I probably wouldn’t have noticed and, even now, it’s quite subtle. But now I know it’s there I can’t not see it.

I think this is the first Apple hardware product that hasn’t been perfect out of the box (not including some of their software!) so, while disappointing, I’m confident they’ll replace it and I’ll get a good, fully working model without too much fuss. And if that lasts as long and works as well as my old MacBook, I’ll be very happy.

The back-story to this post is that I’m the secretary of the company that owns the freehold to my flat. In the UK, Companies House keeps records of all the companies in the UK. One of the documents they keep on file is called the Memorandum and Articles of Association. This ream of legalese describes what a company is allowed to do and how it should go about doing it.

it was my task to make two minor alterations the Mem & Arts, one simply correcting the post code in an address and the other increasing the number of people required to be present at an Annual General Meeting. Nothing significant or controversial.

It’s taken me months so far — I started in November last year — and we still don’t have the documents filed. This letter, that in reality I dare not send to Companies House, explains my frustration.

Dear Companies House,

Thank you for your recent letter in which you, again, reject my updates to my companies Memorandum and Articles of Association.

Before we get to the crux of the matter, let me recap our previous conversations.

First I sent a form saying that we were going to change the Mem and Arts. Immediately after you replied — six weeks by my count — I sent you a complete copy of the updated document. This is where things started to go wrong.

After another three weeks you replied saying that I had not sent a “Company Resolution for Filing.” As far as I know, I did. I sent it with the form some time previously. Maybe you meant something else, but you didn’t say. So I reply with another copy of the resolution that we voted on at the AGM. As a form of official documentation, I want to avoid changing anything in the resolution that was passed, so in the letter I note that the resolution was passed and the date that it happened.

Another three weeks pass.

Another rejection.

This time because I didn’t say whether the resolution was passed and, if so, when it happened. Except, as I mentioned above, I had. Apparently you had a specific format in mind but didn’t want to share this information with me.

I took the resolution, I took the exact wording I’d changed, I took the date of the meeting, the number of people present and the way that each person voted and produced a single sheet of paper summarising all of the information that you asked for and returned that.

And now, three weeks later, I get another letter telling me that you rejected it again. I won’t get into the details for this rejection — it’s not important — but suffice it to say you never mentioned this as a requirement until now.

The frustrating thing here is not that you rejected the filing. I’ve not done this before; I fully accept that I have made errors in the process. However…

• There’s clearly a process that you’re expecting me to follow. Why not tell me what it is?
• Why tell me about a single mistake in each message? Why not tell me all your requirements at the beginning? Your first message could easily have said I need x, y and z before we can finish
• When I give you a piece of information, please don’t tell me a didn’t in the very next message. If it’s not in the right format, please tell me what format you want to see it in. Being vague is not saving anyone time
• If there’s a standard format, why not provide a form? The practical effect of demanding a standard format but not telling anyone what it is is frustration for both of us
• Live in the 21st century. Even with all “my” mistakes, we could have tied this up last year if you used the email address I included in the header of each letter. Or, hell, let’s move into the 20th century with the phone number I’d included

This should have been a simple process, even with my inexperience. All you needed to do is tell me the process that needed to be followed, either explicitly in your letters or by referring to a publicly available document that I can read. But you did neither. If you reject my (real) letter I may have to fall back on primal scream therapy because I’m seriously running out of patience here.

Stephen

Typing that was cathartic, but messages of support would be appreciated. Or links to the documentation I couldn’t find would also be welcome. And if you’re the secretary of a company, I hope you have better luck than me.

I first saw this on Seth Godin’s blog and thought it was a good idea in principle:

This might be a useful exercise. Doesn’t matter whether it was a hit or not, it just matters that you shipped it. Shipping something that scares you (and a lot of what follows did) is the entire point.

It is, however, quite hard for people who don’t live life in public in the same way that Seth does. I’ve spent a lot of the year doing pre-sales work either with clients that don’t like being named or for deals that we lost (and therefore not something a lot of people would want publicised). And now, in my new job, one reading of my contract means that I can’t even send out press releases.

But that doesn’t mean that I’ve not had a pretty productive year. By stretching the definition of “shipped” to include stuff I’ve completed, a quick list for 2010 would be:

• Two major versions of Yummy and two minor versions
• One major and one minor version of www.cut
• A photo-book of a wedding I was photographer at
• Painted the bathroom¹
• A whole heap of custom demos for the Day Job
• Delivered training courses and workshops with the Day Job
• An AGM for our freehold management company

Please let me know if I forgot something!

I think that’s a pretty good list for stuff I mostly did in my “spare” time. The list of deliverables for the Day Job would be pretty long if (a) I could list them; and (b) I could remember them all!

1. I can’t claim all the credit for this of course. [↩]

I didn’t think that I had blogged very much this year, but now that I look back over it seems that I’ve done quite well. There have only been a few PhotoFriday challenges that I’ve missed and I’ve managed a fair few travel and even the odd technical blog.

None of this years blogs have done especially well in terms of page impressions but here are a few that I liked for various reasons.

In terms of travel, I had more than my fair share of problems. A trip to Turkey was cancelled at the last minute due to the infamous ash cloud. A strike very nearly meant that we didn’t get to New York for a wedding. And a heavy work schedule and a new job meant that my annual November trip was in jeopardy.

• Salisbury. Not quite as glamorous as Istanbul, but given the lemons of the ash cloud I thought we did pretty well with the lemonade of Wiltshire¹
• Paris. I spent quite a lot of time in Paris this year so I had to include the post about it
• New York. Like Paris, I’d been to New York before. There’s something to be said for “hanging out” in a city that you (vaguely) know

For me there’s a thin line between “photography” and “travel” blogs but I do occasionally post images that are not directly connected to a trip.

• Early Snow. This year has been book-ended by heavy snow. I should be getting good at taking pictures of it by now…
• Corked. I like this because it’s very simple but effective, and not the kind of thing that I normally do
• The Perils of Working from Home. As with the above, I often get ideas but don’t find the time to actually implement them. This one took longer than you’d imagine but I thought it was quite funny. Yes, I should probably get out more

And, finally, there were even some slightly more technical posts.

• What is “polish”? I wish more people would understand that there’s more to a good iOS application that pretty icons and slick animations
• Delicious Debrief. This five part post allowed me to vent my frustration over Yahoo!s handling of some changes they implemented late last year
• Communication. I had this post in draft form for several years, but I couldn’t figure out how to finish it. I’m not sure this is the best post I’ve ever written but I include it here because I did eventually get it out the door!

I’d also like to add honourable mentions to my Sleeping Japanese and Saving State posts. And, finally, a big thank you to you for reading.

1. Not sure that works but you know what I mean. [↩]