Philadelphia Mayor Proposes 435% Tax on Sugar

Let the Carbon Taxes Begin

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports today that Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter proposes a 2¢/fluid-ounce tax on beverages containing sugar. That would add 24¢ to the cost of a can of soda from the vending machine, $2.40 to the cost of a six-pack of 20-oz Pepsi bottles and $1.35 to a 2-L bottle of Mountain Dew. The city is in desperate need of cash, so sure... why not randomly add a quarter to every can of Root Beer and $2.56 tax to every gallon of chocolate milk sold within the city limits.

I don't have a degree in mathematics. But I do have a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics, a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry...Maybe I can use my 3rd grade arithmetic to muddle through the sticky math -- although I assure you it is not sticky due to sugar.

So the Coca-Cola company reports their 12-oz can of Coke Classic contains 140 Dietary Calories (that's 140 kcals for those in the know).

• The American Crystal Sugar Company claims 1 gram of sugar contains 4 Calories

• If we divide 140 Calories in 12-oz Coke / 4 Calories per gram of sugar we calculate 35 grams of sugar in a 12-oz can of Coke Classic

• Dividing 35 grams of sugar per can / 12 oz per can we calculate 2.91 grams of sugar per ounce

• The proposed tax of 2¢/oz leads to a calculation of (2¢/ounce)/(2.91grams of sugar per ounce) which equals 0.69¢ tax/1 gram sugar

• Sugar is commonly sold at the store in 5-lb bags. Given 5-lbs equals 2,268 grams, (2,268 grams/5-lbs sugar) * (0.69¢ tax/1 gram sugar), simplifies to $15.65 tax/5-lbs sugar

• A 5-lb bag of sugar typically sells for $3.60

• Calculating the ratio of Tax/Item, ($15.65 tax/$3.60)*100% = 435% Tax per 5-lb bag of sugar

Why stop there, Mayor Nutter? Why don't you propose a 650% tax on coffee and a $20/oz Sewer Usage Fee to dispose of it?  The city's reputation as the Cradle of Liberty is going down the drain anyway... might as well tax it.

It Just Works

Ubuntu Karmic Koala and Happiness

As I described in my previous post, I have kludged together a rag-tag collection of spare and cannibalized parts to create a "computer" system I refer to as the Jalopy.

It is based on a Dell Dimension 8200 I inherited from a relative who had no use for the dusty beast after an upgrade to a newer system. In its day, the 8200 was top of the line and sports a 2.4 GHz P4 with Hyperthreading (HT) technology and 512 MB of system RAM. I received it without a hard drive but had an even older Dell system that I use for spare parts and grabbed it's massive 12 GB Maxtor Fireball.

The Jalopy had no problem booting from the Karmic CD and the system partitioned and formatted the Fireball in ext4 format and installed the OS in around 20 minutes. Working with the the late Beta of Ubuntu 9.10, I went all out and also grabbed the latest development release of Google Chrome for Linux and it runs nicely.

On day two of enjoying blazing speed, nifty graphic effects and 100% free software the integrated network interface circuit on the 8200 motherboard stopped working. At first I thought perhaps our network was down, but after some port swapping and verification with the other systems in my office, the network looked fine. The interface displayed a solid red LED rather than the standard amber so I figured the old network interface had breathed its last breath.

Not be dissuaded from all of the Karmic goodness I ran down to my "junk pile" and grabbed a rusty (no exaggeration) 3COM PCI 10/100 network card, shut down the system and inserted it into an available PCI slot in the 8200. Given my experience with older, less developed operating systems, I fully expected the scenerio to go something like:

• Install the new PCI network interface card
• Reboot and have the OS inform me it cannot find drivers for the new device
• Reopen the case and try to find a model number on the NIC
• Use a different computer to surf the web for the NIC drivers
• Download the zip file onto a USB
• Move the USB over to the Ubuntu system, copy and unzip
• Install the new drivers and reboot
• Realize there is only about a 50% chance it will work on the first try

So I put on my best frown, slid the case back under my desk, hooked up all of the connections and pressed the power button. Instead of the above senerio it turned out like this:

• "New PCI Detected"
• "PCI resourse conflict - resolving..."
• "Username:"

I'm sorry, what? After logging in my connection to the Internet was restored and all systems back to normal.

What a concept... The machine discovered a problem, resolved a resource conflict, installed the proper drivers and connected to the Internet... automatically.

Good Karma indeed.

Happy Happy, Joy Joy

Flitting Among the Clouds

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had a slew of reasons to leave my MS Windows-controlled hard disk drive behind and cross-over into the Ubuntu Linux cloud.

Things are, well... Awesome. I actually enjoy sitting in front of the laptop again now that I don't have to stare at the system tray wondering how many files are being fragged, how soon before I will need more virtual memory, when the next virus or Trojan attack will happen or why the heck the MS File Indexing tool is taking up so much system memory while I'm not running any foreground applications or changing any files.

Crossing over wasn't easy. Not that it was the fault of Ubuntu. Microsoft knew I was sprinting off on my Logan's Run and did its best to prevent it. The largest problem was getting an iso copy of the Ubuntu OS. I knew that Ubuntu had recently released the beta of 9.10 Karmic Koala so I figured I would give it a spin.

I used one of the Lenovo ThinkCentre systems at work sporting an Intel Core 2 VPro chip running MS Vista and an RW-DVD drive to create the bootable Karmic CD. I located the iso image file at Argonne National Laboratory Public Software Mirror and downloaded the 700 MB file in under a minute. Things were going well. I planned to simultaneously install Ubuntu on a Toshiba Tecra laptop running a 1.66 GHz T1300 Centrino chip with 1 GB of RAM and a jalopy desktop I kludged together at work that is based on an old 2.4-GHz Pentium 4HT with 512M of RAM.

The jalopy doesn't support booting from the USB so I needed to burn a bootable CD containing the iso image. After my elation of the quick iso download, I was brought down to earth quickly. The Vista system presented options for creating an audio CD or a File Manager formatted data disk, but no iso burner. So I downloaded a copy of Alex Fienman's ISO v2 burner and installed. I send my continual thanks to our IT department for promoting my network account to Admin or I would have been dead in the water.

The next portion of the saga is something I could have avoided with 20/20 hindsight, but suffice it to say my cardiologist will have some more damage to repair on my next visit. Long story, short, the Vista system only created an error-free iso burn on the fourth try. I didn't expect this shinny new Core 2 VPro Vista system to have any problems burning a CD-R. It looks like the classic "This system is about to create files on the writable CD. Please do not run any programs during this operation. Even mouse interrupts can cause errors in your copy." disclaimer of the early-1990's is still in effect in 2009. Ugh.

After I obtained an error free disk, the sun started to shine and the heavens began to sing. Inserting the CD into both systems, answering five configuration questions, including boot sector options, and they were on their way. Both systems took around 20 min to be reborn as a 9.10 Karmic Koala Ubuntu system running from a freshly formated ext4 hard disk drive.

Karmic includes Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3 for Ubuntu and on the laptop it takes 30 seconds from cold boot to login screen and 20 seconds to launched browser after password. Wow... I'm impressed. Neither system required me to troll virus-laden device driver websites to get everything working. It just "works".

Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be in official release at the end of October. If this late-stage beta is any measurement, it will be awesome.