All About Income Tax

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Cindy

Income tax is a form of taxation that has been the subject of great debate between political parties for ages. Some politicians want to raise the income tax, and some want to lower it. Some want to allow special favors for certain groups, which may or may not be a popular decision for the people that it affects. Income tax comes in various forms, depending on the individual or body of people being taxed. For example, an individual who works one or more jobs is taxed personal tax. Basically what they do is earn money throughout the year and a portion of their paycheck goes towards the taxes they owe to the government for the basic civil services the government provides for everyone. It is popular for people to do their taxes using the IRS e-file service because it makes the process very painless and simple. Then at the end of the tax year, corrections are calculated and the individual will either pay more to the government to make sure they pay their full fair share, or if it is found that the individual has overpaid through the course of the year, then the government will actually refund them some of their wages that were previously contributed to the government through their taxes. Tax refunds from the government are of course always very welcome and exciting things to get. Many people like to go on a little personal shopping spree with their tax refund checks, and use it on things like an unexpected vacation, a big sports game, new toys like a Playstation 3 or Xbox, a really nice and fancy meal, and so on. A tax refund from the government is a pleasure for many people to spend on themselves because it is money that they earned and did not have access to previously in the tax year.

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Shakespeare in Society and Near Your New Apartment

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Cindy

When asked who their favorite writer is, the chances that a person will say William Shakespeare may be relatively small. With that in mind, if say to that same person, “to be or not to be” they will most likely respond with “that is the question” and even if they don’t they are sure to know what it is from. Aside from the Christian Bible, Hamlet is the most quoted and known piece of literature in history. Many of the play’s quotes have become popular phrases, such as “to thine own self be true” and “there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.” This phrase is also commonly adjusted to fit any city or situation in which something foul has taken place, it doesn’t usually affect available apartments for or the inhabitability of that town. And while much of the play’s story, themes and lines have ingrained themselves into popular culture and remain there today, not all of them are immediately attributed to this iconic tragedy. In fact, while the majority of people might be aware that Hamlet was melancholy prince who was torn between action and inaction and spoke the famous line about the perils of life and that choice between such and a nightmarish afterlife, not everyone is actually even able to attribute the line or the speech itself to him. In fact, that can be a fun social experiment, setting up on a street corner and interviewing people about which quotes from Hamlet, or any other Shakespeare play, they can name and place.

This is one of the interesting aspects of Shakespeare’s works. His characters helped to define humanity, according to Harold Bloom and other critics, and his words are part of common speech and randomly quoted in various forms of literature and in film, Shakespeare himself remains something of a mystery. Frequently people will hear a line from one of his plays quoted and recognize what they hear, and maybe even quote him themselves, while not fully understanding even what they’re saying. What does this say about society, Shakespeare, culture and history, if anything? And is it more of a testimony to his greatness, or the apathetic nature of society. Do his words ring any differently in modern ears than do common wives tales and simple rhymes from history? Regardless of whether you yawn, scream, faint or smile when you are told Shakespeare will be on the semester’s reading list, you are most definitely more likely to hear him quoted, and also to see one if his shows performed, than any other writer in history, save those who contributed to the Holy Bible as was mentioned before. And whether you’re looking an appartement montreal or moving anywhere else, most likely you will find one of his plays onstage in that city sometime during the year.

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Drug Addiction Recovery in California

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Cindy

About a hundred years ago, drugs in the United States weren’t usually regulated. Over-the-counter pills, such as aspirin and cold remedies, contained heroin and cocaine, with the responsibility for safety placed on the consumer’s shoulders. If you weren’t careful, the medicine you took to cure you could also kill you. In 1914, however, the Harrison Tax Act, limited the sale of heroin and went on to restrict cocaine sales, too.

In a little over two decades, Federal health regulations were overseen by the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938; eight years earlier, the United States created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Even as Prohibition was repealed, the laws against using certain drugs became tighter, creating the Boggs Act of 1951, which provided on a federal level a mandatory minimum sentence for the possession of opiates, marijuana, and cocaine. President Eisenhower then called for a war on drugs in 1954 when he created the U.S. Interdepartmental Committee on Narcotics.

As the society’s war on drugs heated up, often caught in the cross-fire were people who found themselves addicted to drugs. Eventually, programs across the country to aid in recovery began to arise, from NY Drug Rehab programs to CA Drug Rehab . Today, in California alone, there are over 1,600 drug rehab programs, with over 400 of them located in the major cities, such as San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

These programs are dedicated to treating everything from narcotics to alcohol abuse, from in-patient to out-patient programs. All of this can become overwhelming pretty quickly as one tries to sort out a place to go. Often, when people decide they need help, they aren’t in the best shape to make decisions. Sometimes, in the case of alcohol poisoning and drug overdose, these decisions are made for the addict, starting with a trip to a hospital. However, if you suspect you or someone you know may need help, it’s best to start searching earlier, when your mind is clear as possible to find the organization that can help. Searches on line for such sites as
Drugrehabcomparison.com can help in aiding recovery.

A California study about seventeen years ago, in 1994, suggested that drug treatment should be viewed as an investment that the public makes rather than an extra cost. Apparently, the public saves seven dollars in health care for every dollar it spends on treatment. This study, known as the California Drug and Alcohol Treatment Assessment, found that drug abuse cost the state 3.1 billion dollars each year (with 70 percent of that tied to crimes). Nearly twenty years later, those figures can only be higher.

If there’s one thing that all the history of the war on drugs and studies demonstrate is that drug abuse is an expensive, painful and damaging proposition at the level of society and the individual, and it will take efforts from both to gain in the battle for recovery.

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A Quick History of Quick Divorces in Reno

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Cindy

While Las Vegas may be thought of as a place to get married quickly, nearly a hundred years ago Reno, Nevada, already had the reputation as a place to go for divorces. In 1910, the city was considered the divorce capital, allowing residency requirements in the city to be shortened, and therefore allowing divorces to be as fast as possible.

Known as the Biggest Little City, Reno today may be known more for the Comedy Central program, Reno 911. However, this comedy doesn’t begin to explore the history of this small place and the need its citizens and tourists may have for a bit of Reno Law.

Quickie divorces have been available in Nevada even earlier than 1898, when lawyers of more populated cities, such as New York, discovered that the divorce laws in Nevada had not changed since the state was a territory. It wasn’t until 1913, when social movements to reform morality across the United States forced the hand of state representatives and caused them to change the half-year residency requirement to a full year, which was the same requirement of every other state. If a married couple wanted a quick divorce, they could no longer go to Nevada to do it.

Business owners and those representing the desire to again reduce the requirements to six months began lobbying the state legislature, and three years later, in 1915, their wish was granted. Reducing the wait for a divorce to six months allowed revenues to increase so much that there was another push for the residency laws to be changed to a three month wait in 1927. In 1931, the residency laws changed again. Now only a six week wait was required.

Because of these changes, the Nevada six week requirement allowed 517 divorce suits with 331 decrees to be declared in the first month that the new requirement took effect. No longer were people turning to lawyers in Los Angeles and cities in other states, but to Nevada.The number of divorces began skyrocketing: In 1926, there were 1,021 divorces; in 1927, 1,953 divorces; in 1931, 5,260 divorces! By the time a decade had passed, in 1940, Nevada was carrying out 49 out of every 1,000 divorces in the United States.

This raked in a good deal of money, bringing in an estimate of about five million a year to Nevada’s hotels, restaurants, merchants, and casinos. Because of its proximity to California and Hollywood, there were a great number of celebrity divorce cases filed in Reno as well, including such people as Jack Dempsey, Mary Pickford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., and Estelle Taylor.

Today Reno is no longer the center of divorce the way it once was a hundred years ago. People may head for Reno to enjoy its natural settings more for its proximity to Lake Tahoe or to see its local museums, such as the National Automobile Museum or the Thermal Sky Sports. People may even just want to see where the exteriors for Reno 911 were taped. Still, it may yet be another 100 years before Reno’s legend as a divorce capital fully becomes history.

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Historical Look at Internet Speed

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Cindy

Many of us use our PCs, Macs or even cell phones to access the internet every single day. But have you ever thought to ask yourself how it all works? The Internet started as a small internetwork of military computers. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense, laid the foundations for the modern Internet we know today.

By 1992, the network bandwidth of the Internet had increased 20 million times the bandwidth seen in 1964. In November of 1992 Delphi was the first commercial online service offering Internet access, and by May 1995 AOL, Prodigy and CompuServce came online.

Dial up Internet access started the modern Internet speed revolution. It was the only method of Internet access in 1994. Dial up allows a user to access the Internet through an analog modem and traditional telephone system. Dial up speeds began at 0.1 kbits per second. One kbits is equal to 1000 bytes of information per second.

Over the next few years Dial up slowly increased speeds up to 56 kbps. Did you know, in the 1990’s U. S. Federal Law limited Dial up Internet speeds to 53 kbits per second? The U. S. Government feared Hackers could breach U.S. Government networks and disappear before they could be traced by the proper authorities.

Dial up still depends on phone lines for the transporting data, and is used often in rural areas today. Soon dial up may become obsolete and will be replaced by Broadband Internet Access. A broadband connection allows for the transfer of data at a much higher rate than through analog.

Broadband is generally defined as data transfer rates greater than 256 kbit per second. There is not an official minimum bandwidth for broadband. Broadband internet access can range from 64 kbits per second up to 4.0 Megabytes of data per second.

Internet speeds continue to increase to meet customer demands. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are building faster networks with the development of new technologies. By 1996 the first mobile phone had Internet connectivity, and not long after in 2008 studies showed that more people accessed the Internet via mobile phones than PCs. The development of 4G networks, which set peak speed requirements at 100 Mbit/s, help users connect to the Internet at speeds never before seen with a mobile device.

Looking back at the history of internet speeds we can see just how far we’ve come since the 1960’s. Where do you think data speed transfer rates will be in 5-10 years?

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The origins of the American flag

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Cindy

Before the stars and stripes was adopted, the colonies and militias in America had many different flags including the famous Rattlesnake flag with the motto, “Don’t Tread On Me.” Another interesting navel flag had a white background and a green pine tree and the motto, “An Appeal to Heaven.”  However, many of the flags used were actually a version of the British Union Jack.  Obviously, as the colonies prepared for war against Britain, they needed a new flag!

So what are the origins of the American flag? No one really knows for sure, but many historians believe the story Betsy Ross told her children about sewing the first American flag. She said three members of the secret Continental Congress, George Washington, Robert Morris and George Ross, came to visit her in late May 1776 and asked her to make them a new flag.  Since she sat next to George Washington at church and was married to George Ross’ nephew, it shouldn’t be a surprise they chose her. As a widow with an upholstery business, Betsy had made many flags before.

Apparently, when the three men visited her, George Washington showed her a design with a six-pointed star that had been designed by Congressman Francis Hopkinson.   However, Betsy whipped out her scissors and showed the men how she could fold a piece of cloth and cut a five pointed star with one snip.  Impressed, the committee agreed she could do the flag.  Her story is that the flag was finished by June and then flown when  the Declaration of Independence was read at Independence Hall for the very first time.

Betsy would be widowed two more times during the war, along with having the British take over her house to quarter soldiers.  When the British left, she joined the war effort by weaving bags to hold gunpowder for the soldiers in Washington’s army.

When the war was over, the Continental Congress declared on June 14, 1777, that there would be a national flag with 13 alternating red and white stripes and 13 white stars on a blue background.  The Congress hoped the American flag would unify the country since the end of the war had once again brought out the differences between the states.

How did the American flag get the nickname “Old Glory?” When those divisions led to the Civil War, a very large 10-by-17 foot American flag, owned by a Massachusetts sea captain named William Driver, got the nickname “Old Glory” because it survived several attempts by Confederates to destroy it. Afterward, the flag flew over the Tennessee statehouse as a memorial of the undivided Union.

How did the American flag come to look like it does today?  From 1777 through 1960, Congress added stars and stripes to show the new states added to the Union.  However, the current design of the American flag was actually done as a class project by a 17-year-old high school student named Robert Heft.  His teacher did not like his project and gave him a low grade, telling him she would only raise his grade if he got it accepted by members of Congress.  Hess took that as a challenge, and his design was accepted in 1959.

Today’s flag has seven red stripes alternating with six white ones.  These 13 stripes represent the original 13 colonies.  There are 50 white stars for the 50 states on a background of blue.  The red on the flag symbolizes valor, while the white symbolizes purity and the blue is for justice.  The American flag is the most recognizable symbol of the United States.

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The Origins of Language

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Cindy

The origin of language is perhaps one of the most contested histories in contemporary culture.  It’s not simply a matter of lack of information, where it’s impossible to go back and find out when and where people first started to articulate in a recognizable way.  It is also related to the complicated notion of history itself.  If history begins with a record, then the possibility of finding a record of sound and utterance is not possible with the available tools.  Despite the impossibility of finding a fixed origin, or perhaps because of it, the arguments and studies of origins of language are fascinating.

 

A dictionary definition of language will speak to the complex system of signs that people use to communicate ideas, events, abstractions and concrete realities.  The word’s origin is connected to the tongue, like many words that refer to language and have roots common to the English toungue.  Of course, there is much more to it than that.  With approximately 5,000 spoken languages in the world right now, the metaphor of Babel is still one that plays itself out in everyday moments that suggest an impossibility to communicate clearly.  Perhaps no language, and no speaker, is really capable of expressing something perfectly, since language is always a representation.

 

People have been speaking for a very long time, and there are many resonances between human languages and animal languages.  This suggests that where there is a need to communicate something, biological creatures have been able to find ways of communicating.  The question, or the mystery, is in investigating when it could have begun.  The human and animal relationship is one that is essential for most linguists, where some argue that human language comes from the same developments in animal speech.  Others will argue that human language is entirely unrelated to animal language, and belongs on another level entirely.  This is the kind of argument that lead the Linguistic Society in Paris to ban all discussion of language origins in 1866.

 

Today, the most public figure speaking against a relationship to animal language is probably Noam Chomsky, who argues that human speech comes from reason rather than instinct, and, as such, is something that is entirely unique in the world.  It’s hard to use language to argue origins of language, but most people would agree that it begins with the tongue.  From here, it reaches in multiple directions, where it seems that every utterance takes us further from the starting point, and the origin is always vanishing further into the horizon.

 

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History Through the Eyes of Shakespeare

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Cindy

When looking at history, one of the interesting perspectives to take on is considering various historical figures in the context of today. For instance, could you imagine what Aristotle might have though if he’d had access to Galileo’s telescope, at the very least, and the technological advances that have occurred throughout the centuries? Where would his mind have taken us from this point forward if he’d had all of human history to contemplate, rather than only the early years of Greek civilization. In addition, can you imagine what Shakespeare would have written and for whom he would have written it, if he were writing for today’s stage? And for that matter, would he be writing for the stage or for the screen, or for both? Perhaps he would have been more comfortable with the novel, which wasn’t nearly as popular as the Elizabethan stage. And it’s also interesting to wonder if Shakespeare, Aristotle and others would be Marlabs customers today, or what types of software and database management sources they would use.

Looking at the contributions Shakespeare made to the world through his writings can be a good place to begin a study of the impacts he may have had on today’s world. Of course the question includes the implication he was living in today’s world, because he does continue to effect it, profoundly, though he lived four hundred years ago. And discussing which medium he would have chosen if writing today, as well as to which audience he would have been catering is a popular topic of discussion for many academics and Shakespeare fans alike. According to literary critic and professor Harold Bloom , Shakespeare is largely responsible for the invention of the human. This means that the basic archetypes that form our personalities today were constructed by none other than Shakespeare himself, and it was his view of the humans and our world that determined to a large extent the direction in which society evolved.

That’s a pretty large thesis, and it’s not my intent here to argue or support it, though I admit to being both a Bloom and Shakespeare fan. However, with that idea proposed, it puts a new twist on what effects Shakespeare may have had on our society, as without his writings four hundred years ago, we would not be the individuals, cultures and societies that we are. That’s a difficult thing to quantify in any objective fashion, though a couple of things are very likely. One is that Shakespeare would most definitely have taken advantage of the technological resources available today, and a professional software company like Marlabs offices should be effective at calculating the effects removing Shakespeare from the sixteenth century and repositioning him here.

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A City on Sandstone

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Cindy

If there’s ever any doubt that there’s no longer a relationship between people and the earth they walk on, just ask anyone in Sydney about sandstone.  What is now conceived of primarily as a building material, at least in public discourse, is in fact the foundation of the city, in more ways than one.  And any lengthy discussion about sandstone in the city will invariably lead much further into the past than more tourists and travelers have time for.  It is terribly interesting, however, and well worth the long hours it would take for any reasonable introduction.  There are plenty of tours for tourists, and there are histories included in a number of local attractions.  As if that isn’t enough, the Australian national character is generally one given to friendliness, the kind that can lead to long conversations.

However one gets their Sydney history, it’s probably necessary to take it just like anything else.  Small doses at first, until the curiosity becomes unbearable, then it’s time to dig in and really get one’s fill.  Any story of sandstone will necessarily need to place it in terms of its usefulness to human beings, and that would lead to the first known human uses for it.  In Sydney, human occupation goes back at least 45,000 years, and there is evidence of sandstone in carvings from 30,000 years ago.  The Aboriginal people in this area of the world are the Eora (the usual story here is that the name means, “from this place,”), and people of the Dharug, Dharawal and Kuringgai language groups.  The stories of the Dreamtime are also in this region, so any discussions of Sydney’s history would have to center here in some significant way.

Most of the information available in the city, however, will relate to the material and its relationship to European settlements from the 18th century forward, and its uses today.  From any perspective, commercial uses for sandstone are rather sumptuous, making it a very useful and pliable material.  History of the European settlement of the area shows that there were some very strong opinions about the quality of sandstone in certain areas, dividing these into three zones called Paradise, Purgatory, and Hellhole.  These were so called for their range of usefulness, in terms of softness.  This is just one example of how the sedimentary stuff could affect how people viewed the world, but also gives weight in time to how people today perceive themselves in Sydney.  The connections between people and stone are stronger than one might think.

Photo from wiki commons: Torridonian sandstone shows strata of arkosic sandstone laid down around 1000 million years ago. Photograph taken in July 1972 {{Geograph|7666|Anne Burgess}}

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History Speaking through Cornices

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Cindy

One of the more uncanny experiences in any kind of historical work comes when the correspondences between past and present become closer than one could have possibly suspected.  That everyday household objects have connections to a deeper past can come as no quiet shock, because there is a tendency to take what’s best from the past generation and repeat it.  But when small connections between things, like window  blinds and the walls of an ancient theater, become obvious, then history takes on a whole new dimension.  One can often feel like walking backwards and forwards in time, and there’s no sure resting place that says this is the present.

It is these kinds of experiences that historians love, and the kind that they always hope to impart on their students, but the most significant of these can’t happen in a classroom; they have to be experienced, and then reflected on in solitude.  It’s no small matter that this reflection is one of the hallmarks of a classical education, so there are historical circles within historical circles, and it can be dizzying or intoxicating.

So it can happen, then, that looking at the ancient architecture of the Greeks and the Romans can start to show through, where the layers of time melt away to reveal that not all that much has changed.  The cornices around the windows of a contemporary home have an unusually pleasant effect, giving it a look that is altogether harmonious and even soothing.  Moving backwards in time, it becomes more interesting, and this only helps to heighten its aesthetic appeal.  The cornice is an architectural piece that has been around for a few thousand years at least, and its origins speak to the same sense of function that they have today.

The theaters of ancient Rome had cornices on the walls of the scenae frons, called the geison, which ran along the top of the aedicula.  These terms all have an interesting history of their own, and refer to the time when theater was an event that was addressed to a pantheon of Goddesses and Gods, just as much as it was meant to appeal to human spectators.  These cornices were originally meant for the part of a building that housed shrines to the deities, and connections to the theatre’s most obvious God, Dionysus.

Not that there’s anything obvious about Dionysus these days.  However, it is remarkable that the piece that is meant to frame the window was once given a more sacred space.  It isn’t far-fetched then, to imagine that the view out the window of one’s home is also meant to be elevated, where the connection between the outside and the inside is not only beautiful, but also essential for a harmonious life.

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