Another trip to Shenandoah

My friend Tracey came into town for work, and so she and I hung out this weekend. Today we headed out to Shenandoah National Park to see the sights. Skyline Drive was very crowded, as the park was filled with visitors checking out the fall foliage. The trees were starting to turn yellow and orange, with a few glimpses of brilliant red. I didn't see as much wildlife as I had on my previous visit, but that is probably due to the colder weather and the large numbers of people in the park.

It is hard to believe that November is just around the corner. Thanksgiving and Christmas will be here before we know it!


Dark Hollow Falls, Shenandoah National Park

Shenandoah Excursion

I wasn't very productive on Saturday, and I spent this morning taking care of chores. This afternoon I decided that I needed to get out of the hous. My lungs still aren't quite back to normal after the bronchitis, so I figured that a long bike ride probably wasn't a good idea. Instead, I drove out to Shenandoah National Park to meander down Skyline Drive. With a few isolated exceptions, the leaves haven't started turning their fall colors yet. This was not unexpected, because the weather has been unseasonably warm until recently. What was unexpected though, was watching a bear run across the road about fifty yards in front of my car. Shenandoah is home to a significant population of Black Bears, and it was fun to see one in the wild.


Blue Ridge Mountains

Romance and Fibonaci

I found this in the archives of the xkcd comic strip. I wonder what this says about me - that I find it geeky and romantic at the same time...

Low key weekend

My long running cold started to subside, but my lungs haven't been happy for a several weeks, and I have been tired all of the time. I found out on Friday that I had developed a bad case of bronchitis. I was prescribed antibiotics, which I found a little bit odd. Because overuse of antibiotics has lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, the medical community has become more cautious about the use of antibiotics. Given that bronchitis can have both bacterial and viral causes, I'm suprised that the doctor didn't perform a culture test to determine the nature of the bronchitis, or an X-Ray to validate that it wasn't a low grade form of community-acquired pneumonia.

Anyways, my weekend has been rather quiet. My parents drove through DC today, so I got to have lunch with them. It was nice to catch up with them. I was thinking of going for a short hike along the Appalachian Trail this afternoon, but the lungs weren't quite up for it. So I stayed home, watched TV, and was generally a bum. While tomorrow is officially a federal government holiday (Columbus Day), I will probably work at least part of the day. I have to catch up on a lot of paperwork.

On a side note, I was happy that Michigan beat Eastern Michigan in football on Saturday. The last thing that Michigan needs this season is another game like its one with Appalachian State.

An intentional crippling of Michigan's economy?

When I first looked at the list of services that are subject to the new service tax, there didn't seem to be any rationale for why some services made it on the list. But upon closer inspection, it appears that many of the services may be on the list as a political bone to the UAW. The automakers utilize many of these services, including carpet cleaning, janitorial services, consulting services, landscaping services, office administration services, and industrial design services. Many of these services are areas where the automakers used to have their own unionized employees performing the services, but these are now outsourced to non-union shops.

Perhaps the UAW's lackeys in the state legislature believe that if these services cost the automakers more, the automakers will hire their own employees to do them. And of course, these employees would be part of the union.

Michigan stupidity

The Michigan Department of Treasury has released the NAICS codes for the specific industries affected by the new service tax. As it happens, my principal NAICS codes, 541512 and 541511 are not covered by the new service tax. But to show how aribtrary the new tax is, if I were to provide the exact same type of services, but with a focus on physics, I would have a NAICS code of 541690, which is covered by the new tax. Why should a physicist be penalized for performing the same basic service?

I have a suspicion that many companies that are on the edge of multiple NAICS codes will reorganize their operations so that they fall into an exempt service category. And others will move their offices to Ohio, where they can continue to provide services to southeastern Michigan customers, but remain outside of this service tax madness. I'm sure that the State of Michigan will have the same "success" with voluntary use tax compliance as they do with physical goods.

If you are a company seeking to hire a consulting firm to assist you with your process management (541614), are you going to outsource the contract to a company in Michigan that charges $106 per hour ($100/hour + 6%), or to a company in Illinois that only charges $100 per hour? After the company in Michigan goes out of business, the State of Michigan will face budget shortfalls, as those ex-workers will no longer be paying income taxes.

The death march of Michigan

As if the State of Michigan didn't have enough problems already, the State Legislature has made it much worse. The legislature has passed an interim budget that contains significant tax increases. While the legislature is still working on the details of the budget, the income tax rate rose from 3.9 percent to 4.35 percent. But far worse is the introduction of taxes on services. The new service tax will affect twenty-three categories of services. Included on that list of services are consulting and administrative services. While the details are being hammered out, it is likely that this will affect my company. I will have to spend hundreds of dollars (maybe even thousands) annually implementing compliance. Worse, I may have to lower my Michigan rates to absorb the new service tax cost to my commercial customers.

If Michigan ever wanted to do one thing to kill the budding services and technology industries in the state, they seemed to have found it. The state hasn't realized that the old monolithic corporate model (like General Motors) is a dinosuar. Instead, new industries are based on groups of smaller companies. Technology companies have payroll companies take care of their payroll, instead of paying someone to sit on staff and handle payroll. Industrial companies pay technology consulting firms to implement their computer networks. In general, the successful companies of the modern era focus on their primary business, and have other companies provide their non-core services.

Governor Granholm showed her true colors as being the ultimate tax and spend Democrat. The state government almost shut down completely because the Governor refused to sign any budget (even an interim one) that did not have massive tax increases. And rather than increase the income tax rate up past 4.4 percent, the state chose to split the taxes between the income taxes and the service taxes. My guess is that the legislature is hoping that this shell game ensures that people do not realize how much additional taxes they are paying. Personally, I hope that some of the new recall efforts (like Recall Granholm) are successful, and that the citizens of Michigan send some of these idiots in the state government out the door.

My fear is that this lunacy will start the death march for the Michigan economy. The old industrial sector companies are dying, and the new technology and service companies will be less likely to want to establish a presence in Michigan. Pretty soon Michigan will no longer be in the"Rust Belt". Instead, it will be in the "Nothing Belt".

As a side note, the salary for Michigan's governor is the third highest in the nation. If the state needs to cut budgets, perhaps the legislature can start there?