Advogato: Personal info for kelly

kelly is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Kelly Martin
Member since: 2000-02-03 01:20:39
Last Login: 2008-06-20 00:54:28

Homepage: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kelly_Martin

Notes: My bio here was out of date and I'm too lazy to update it. About the only thing interesting is that I'm no longer an administrator over at the English Wikipedia, but I am an administrator on the Wikimedia Commons, which is so much more cooler. I don't put much into my journal here. You'll find my real journal on LiveJournal (except I don't post there much, either). A more likely to be interesting place is my blog, which is mostly about Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and related topics.

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Contributor on Wikipedia

Recent blog entries by kelly

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11 Aug 2008 »

Sunday evening 2m observations

While waiting to pick up someone tonight, I poked around in 2m FM for the hell fo it. Here's the observations, all taken in gridsquare EN61BV at around 7:40 PM CDT on August 10, 2008:

145.700 - Brief QSO, probably simplex, did not hear any callsigns. About S6.
146.640 - Definitely a repeater, heard an automated voice ID starting W9. PL 107.2 on TX. Could not hear anyone on input. Signal variable and choppy, S3 to S5. Might be W9SRC out of Blue Island, which would be consistent with observations.
146.120 - Brief QSO, did not copy any callsigns. Not long enough to check for PL.
147.330 - Probable repeater, PL 107.2 on TX, could not hear anyone on input. Heard QSO between K9OZY and N9QOB. Signal around S5. I've heard K9OZY on the W9DUP 2m repeater lately and if I get a chance I'll ask him about it sometime. No listing at k5ehx for a repeater at this frequency.

Syndicated 2008-08-10 15:28:00 (Updated 2008-08-11 01:30:28) from Kelly Martin

10 Aug 2008 »

John McCain and Ham Radio

I've noticed recently, on my Google Webmaster Tools reports, that the third most common search that actually reaches my blog is "McCain ham radio". Now, I haven't blogged about this, and frankly I don't see what McCain has to do with ham radio, so I'm quite curious about this phenomenon.

As far as I can tell, McCain is not a ham. When I first started seeing this, I searched ULS for any evidence of him being a ham. And I didn't find any. Neither did WikiAnswers, who concluded conclusively that he was not a ham. And while he was Navy pilot (which, according to Monk, is sufficient basis to conclude that Cindy McCain would know Morse) that doesn't make him a ham; while a lot of hams were in the military a lot more weren't and there's no reliable correlation. And apparently McCain's campaign considers ham radio ops a "target audience", if the reports of McCain ads on eHam are any indication. (I've also had reports of McCain ads on my blog; his campaign is apparently using Google Ads quite aggressively.)

So, why is McCain's name being associated with ham radio? I found a New York Times OpEd that mentions in passing something about Letterman joking about McCain's membership in a ham radio club. Is this simply because McCain is older than Jesus, and only old people are involved in ham radio? I guess people generally believe that ham radio is all about telegraphy, which everyone knows is a 19th century technology and no modern individual would be involved in that.

I don't recall McCain himself talking about ham radio, although I've stopped paying a great deal of attention to the election noise (I made up my mind on who I was voting for at least two years ago), so I'm reduced to one of two conclusions: some pundit made a joke about McCain and ham radio, or people are just organically associating McCain with ham radio because both are "old fashioned". If there's more to this than that, do please let me know.

Syndicated 2008-08-10 15:16:00 (Updated 2008-08-10 15:16:57) from Kelly Martin

30 Jul 2008 »

Splat, or where did I leave my repeater?

A persistent itch bugged me enough today to do something about it. As a result, a bot is currently merrily churning along creating articles in my ham radio wiki for each of the repeaters on k5ehx's list. For why I'm doing this, see the Repeater Footprint Project.

Syndicated 2008-07-30 04:53:00 (Updated 2008-07-30 04:53:58) from Kelly Martin

17 Jul 2008 »

Reducing energy consumption: shopping via train

I left off a couple weeks ago talking about breaking our dependence on fossil fuels. While some of this is accomplished by finding other energy sources, much more of it is accomplished by reducing overall energy demand. This post will discuss one way to do this: enabling consumers to shop via mass transit.

There's several parts to this. One is for mass transit providers to provide routes that go to, or at least through, shopping centers, so that people can shop without having to drive to the shopping mall. For example, in Chicagoland, that would mean extending the north end of the Blue Line to Woodfield in Schaumburg, and extending the south end of the Blue Line to Oak Brook Terrace, or even all the way through Lombard. As both Schaumburg and Oak Brook/Oak Brook Terrace are already home to several large employers this would also help with moving people to their employment. Another idea is to extend the Yellow Line to Old Orchard.

I recently heard that Skokie is offering deals to try to get people into its "downtown" area. Here's what I find interesting. Skokie has several shopping districts: the aforementioned Old Orchard is an upscale boutique mall that seems to be doing quite well despite the present economic depradations. There's also a modest but apparently doing-pretty-well shopping area on Dempster near the north terminus of the Yellow Line. However, that's not the "downtown" that Skokie is talking about. They're talking about the area around the intersection of Oakton and Lincoln -- which is almost deserted these days. Why? It's hard to get to. There's not a lot of parking, the roads in that area are congested and hard to use, and there's no good mass transit options. Ironic, when you consider that the Yellow Line crosses Oakton about a thousand yards away... it just doesn't stop there. Adding a stop on the Yellow Line near Oakton would do wonders for Skokie's downtown, but despite the CTA and others talking about doing this for years it hasn't yet happened. So not only would this help reduce energy usage by having people use the Yellow Line to get to Skokie's shopping district instead of their cars, but it would boost Skokie's overall economy, to boot. If there's a downside here, other than the expense of building and maintaining the station and the extra five minutes it'll take for the trains to pass through because they have to stop at the station, I don't see it.

On the radio today there was a short blurb about the CTA contemplating building grocery stores inside CTA stations; this has also been covered in the Chicago Tribune. This is a great idea for enabling consumers to do daily commerce without additional transit expenditures, although, of course, there's the difficulty of getting the groceries home afterwards. And that's actually one of the main obstacles to pedestrian shopping: getting your loot home.

There's a solution to this, of course, and it's not a new one. It wasn't that many years ago that you'd go to the store, pick out what you want, and the shopkeeper would bundle it up and have his son (or some other employee) drop it off at your house later that day. Of course, this was before everyone had a car. Well, we need to go back to this model, or one like it. Go to the mall, buy all the stuff you want, then when you're done, if you have more stuff than you can carry home on the train, you go by the delivery services center and, for a moderate fee, they'll dispatch it to your home on whatever timetable fits your schedule and your budget. Yes, you will pay a bit more for it, but on the other hand if such services were pervasive, you might be able to get by without even owning a car. The IRS now allows a deduction of 58.5 cents per mile for business use of a car; that suggests that owning a car costs about $7000 a year, or $19 a day (assuming a relatively typical 12,000 miles per year). That leaves quite a bit to pay for delivery services, even after mass transit fares. And the delivery service can achieve economies of scale as well as logistical advantages that you can't. We could even eventually build a robotic delivery service that can take packages and deliver them to our houses for us, depositing them in a secure receptacle so that even if we're not home nobody will be stealing our stuff.

Syndicated 2008-07-17 22:27:00 (Updated 2008-07-17 22:27:28) from Kelly Martin

20 Jun 2008 »

Ebay sellers use FUD to fight against paying taxes

So today I got dinged from I think three different people about a Congressional effort to compromise our privacy by requiring eBay, Amazon, and all other online retailers to report our purchases to the government as part of Chris Dodd's proposed mortgage bailout bill. Now, this didn't seem like a Chris Dodd sort of thing to do, so I set to reading a bit. Let's start here, with a press release from some entity called "FreedomWorks". They make it sound as if this provision is going to affect "nearly every credit card transaction in America" and that it's horribly intrusive.

It's not. Quite simply, they are lying. Here's what the provision (S.AMDT. 4983 to H.R. 3221; see pages S5902 et seq of the Congressional Record) actually requires:

Each payment settlement entity shall make a return for each calendar year setting forth--
(1) the name, address, and TIN of each participating payee to whom one or more payments in settlement of reportable transactions are made, and
(2) the gross amount of the reportable transactions with respect to each such participating payee.

In other words, what this does is require "payment settlement entities" (basically, credit card processors and alternative payment processors such as PayPal) to report, for each person who receives funds as a result of processing transactions on behalf of that person, a report to the IRS of the total amount of funds received (over the year) as a result of such processing. It does not require any reporting of information about payors or about individual transactions. Nor does it require any online merchant to report anything except insofar as such an entity might also provide payment clearing services. Payees who receive less than $10,000 in any year and participate in fewer than 200 transactions are excluded from mandatory reporting.

Anyone who has worked as an independent contractor, or has operated a business, is probably familiar with Form 1099. Any business who hires another business to provide services for an amount greater than a certain threshold (which used to be $400 but I believe has gone up in recent years) has to file a Form 1099 with the IRS attesting to the gross amount paid to that other business for those services. The purpose of this provision is to make it harder for self-employed individuals to conceal revenue from taxation. What Chris Dodd is proposing is the same thing, for professional eBay sellers. And he's doing it to raise the money required to pay for the mortgage bailout he's proposing. Since this represents taxes that are legally due and payable but not being paid because the people who are supposed to be paying them are not reporting the income, I consider this perfectly fair and reasonable.

And that's why the eBay sellers are up in arms over this. This doesn't invade anybody's privacy. What it does do is make it far harder to collect money via PayPal or other alternative payment handling methods and have that income be undocumented. Right now, if you're selling stuff on eBay to the tune of $25,000 a year, it's entirely possible that you can conceal most or all of that from the IRS because it's undocumented. Dodd's proposal documents it: PayPal will be required, at the end of the year, to send a note to the IRS that says "Joe Ebay Shark received, via our service, a total of $25,126 in gross payments". And if you don't file a return that reflects that, the IRS will start sending you increasingly nasty little letters asking for their share of that $25,126.

If all you ever do is buy stuff, you won't ever have to deal with it. If you only sell things once in a while, again, you won't have to deal with it (unless you sell really expensive stuff). The only people this affects are people who make more than $10,000 a year selling stuff on eBay, and a handful of companies like PayPal. And, obviously, the people who need a mortgage bailout, to be paid for by collecting taxes already due and payable on tax-evading eBay sellers.

I gotta hand it to FreedomWorks. They took a perfectly ordinary income-reporting provision, and one that is not even all that invasive, and turned it into a vile invasion of online privacy. Too bad they had to lie to do it. I suppose we can't really blame them; the CRO is estimating that this reporting provision will generate $9.8 billion in government revenue over ten years. That's a lot of unreported income.

Please, call Congress at 1-866-928-3035 and tell them that you support requiring professional eBay sellers to pay income tax.

Oh, and go thank Slashdot for uncritically picking up the story and running with it as if were actually true.

Syndicated 2008-06-20 21:23:00 (Updated 2008-06-20 21:39:37) from Kelly Martin

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