Design Idea: Kickstand for Watering Wand

 Beth bought a nice watering wand recently. Mostly it is meant for hand-held use, to shower small and medium-sized plants. However, it has been so dry this summer, that I need to water a newly-planted tree. I don't want to stand there for 10 minutes by the tree. Instead, I tried to set the wand on the ground, upside-down, to provide a nice, distributed shower to the tree near the drip line. It didn't work great, though, because the want wanted to flip over, and bury its nozzle in the grass.

The idea that gave me is that the wand should have a simple kickstand bracket attached, to allow it to better lay upside-down.

Probably too niche a use case to be very marketable, but would be a nice improvement.

My Personal Dating of Climate Change "Tipping Point"

A nexus of events this summer makes me feel like climate change is upon us, and from this date onward, the world is in the "after times". Once in a millennium European floods, floods in Henan China, a(nother) very bad U.S. wildfire season underway, combined with my own personal experience of the hottest, driest summer in my 20 years in MN all adds up to this feeling.

Of course my impression is somewhat subjective, anecdotal and personal, but the climate has been building toward this for a while. I think it is a good bet that, 25 years hence, if I am there to look back, I will agree that this is the point at which climate change became undeniable, and not distant, based not on science and modeling, but on personal experiences.

Billionaires and Income Tax Rates

There has recently been a major controversy about the amount of income taxes paid by the ultra-wealthy. This is based on data leaked to ProPublica. There has been something of a backlash, with many commenters (including those in agreement with the billionaires-pay-too-little spirit of the article) pointing out that income taxes are based on income, not wealth. While technically correct, these comments often miss the point--are the ultra-rich paying their fair share of income tax?

I can think of a few angles to look at when assessing this question:

• Capital Gains rate is ~half of the rate for ordinary income.
• Richer investors can borrow against investments with substantial accrued capital gains. This allows them to have their cake and eat it too, by getting present liquidity, at low interest rates, while preserving the long-term deferral.
• Tax-lot harvesting can allow investors to greatly reduce realized gains.

But most significant is deferral of capital gains. This amounts to a "loan" from the IRS, for as many years as a taxpayer holds an appreciated asset. In the dozen or so conversations I have stumbled across, none of them have examined possible modifications to the tax code that would "correct" for this phenomenon.

The term is "Lookback Taxation" of capital gains. Basically, it makes certain assumptions about the accumulation of capital gains, and when they are finally realized, it retrospectively applies taxation, to offest the benefit of deferral.