After speaking to a smaller-than-usual crowd on Tuesday morning in Florence, S.C., Mitt Romney took questions from the press and said that his effective tax rate was about 15 percent.
Its probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything, Mr. Romney said. Because my last 10 years, Ive my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past, whether ordinary income or earned annually. I got a little bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away.
Mr. Romney added: And then I get speakers fees from time to time, but not very much.
In fact, in the most recent year, Mr. Romney made $374,327.62 in speakers fees, at an average of $41,592 per speech, according to his public financial disclosure reports.
The vast majority of Mr. Romneys income this year came in the form of investment income, whether dividends or capital gains on mutual funds and retirement accounts, or his post-retirement share of profits and investment returns from Bain Capital, which would be subject to the same 15 percent tax rate.
You may remember he hit his head while training for the Olympics and went into a coma. He had to re-learn how to walk, eat, see, and balance. -hendred the awed
Stanford has added a bunch of free online classes. jm and I have been taking the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning classes this fall, and they were pretty good. They were based on their introductory graduate classes. The AI class was pretty watered down, in the sense that there was no actual programming involved, just learning algorithms conceptually. The machine learning was a bit more rigorous, although I suspect it was still a bit watered down since the amount of coding required was limited to filling in some linear algebra, although this was not always easy. The lectures are well done (and done specifically for the online versions of the class, not just recorded in lecture halls), and I would think of it as a reference to various potentially useful algorithms. In terms of time commitment, the lectures take awhile to get through, so I wouldn't recommend doing more than one at a time, along with a full time job. Here are a few more that are coming up for the spring:
There are other available classes listed at the bottom of each one. Not sure if anyone else around here would be interested, but wanted to put it out there. -decker
am i a xenophobe?
From polega: this op-ed captures a feeling that I've head for a while -- that the work-for-visa system in this country is wicked broken. While I have seen H1B visa abuse professionally, I really don't think that the problem is going to get any better by making all those H1B into another type of visa. I do agree with the editor that the main problem is that companies don't want to pay competitive salary.
There's spirited discussion here, if you're so inclined.
Capitalists Don't Like Capitalism At it's peak, the Fed made $1.2T in secret emergency loans to banks in need. Meanwhile, the banks were insisting that everything was fine and lobbied against further regulations. They made an estimated $13B in profit off of the loans as well. I'm not a big fan of regulations as the solution, but you gotta let 'em fail if you're not gonna regulate them heavily. And claiming there were almost no losses on the loans (as the Fed does) still does not make them a wise decision, if you are trying to shape future behavior. -decker
1) Sebastian Vettel isn't human. The in-car camera of his eyes proves it. I half-expected a lizard tongue to come out or his eyelids to blink from the sides. Seriously. It looked like he was watching an uninteresting TV show.
2) The Speed guys usually annoy the crap out of me, but they had some good lines this weekend - check out the comments linked
3) If anyone needs a reason to move to alternate energy sources, just show them the coverage of this race.
4) You know they've got you hooked when you're paying attention to 6th place in the constructor's championship. Buemi's out? Oh no. They'll never make up those points to Force India -hendred
We stopped by the former speaker's farm, to ask him about the land deal, but he was off in Washington where he now works as a lobbyist.
I did like shows where the joke would be that somebody got shot or fell out of a window
All Bean: Profile of George Meyer, arguably the most important writer/producer to put time into creating Simpsons episodes. A small glimpse into the source of his humor. I laughed out loud at most of this. Note that this was written in 2000. I found this link on a page from Jeopardy Ken's blog that Hendred shared. Speaking of, Ken commented about the current Tournament of Champions, which I decided to watch last night. Holy Schneikies! do they ramp up the difficulty on the material for these. But it was kind of nice to watch the genii struggle...it was like watching the world's best golfers get eaten up at a U.S. Open.
It's just like a MacBook Air, but with an unstable OS This Lenovo Ultrabook looks pretty sweet. Although, as I'm typing, my 6 month old personal laptop is going through the Windows Recovery Manager for the 2nd time in a month due to a display driver problem, so I'm wondering if I'll even want a Windows laptop by the time I'm ready for a new one. The Lenovo has a 20 second boot and 7 second shut down, 0.59" thick and under 3lbs. -decked
And DTS is the poorer for it Google Reader is doing away with the Share functions Instead they're going to be linked to Google+. Decked was the only person I got regular Shares from, but if he shared something and I found it interesting, it almost always made it to DTS. Also, the boxes on the side are populated out of our Shared items, and it's not entirely clear how those will fare. So relish the contrast between them while you can. -hendred, who fears this change
Dear Apple
Why the F is it that when I download a podcast directly to my iPhone, I cannot find that podcast until I power it off and back on, at which time all of my other music and podcasts are made unavailable to me until the next time I sync with my laptop? This has been going on for what seems like a year. Plus that podcast that I tried downloading in October 2010 that had problems downloading, you can take it off my downloads list now, because you have given me no way to remove it. Thanks.
Sincerely,
decker
Fantasy Buggy with a $250 prize
From Swift: I don't know what the mood on buggy is around here these days, but we designed a fantasy buggy game and we've got a $250 "win yourself a ticket to carnival" prize. The game is open from now until next friday, with winners determined based on rolls during homecoming (Oct 29th). It's not as easy as it sounds, you've got to pick either a freeroll or backhill segment from each org rolling.
Confusing Stocks and Flows
I think I've discovered a cognitive error regarding the NBA lockout. In a recent BS Report, Blake Griffin speaks to Simmons about the lockout, and makes an anology about the NBA's position. He claims it's like someone came into your house, stole all your stuff, and is offering to give back only some of it. But it's not like the NBA is trying to repossess the salary that's already been paid out.
I wasn't going to point that out, but I heard David Alderidge, a reporter, make a similar claim on Tony Kornheiser's show: "It's the fact that they [the owners] want to take back a lot of the money that they've given these players". I wonder if these are just poorly worded phrases and anolgies or if they really think of it this way. -decker
