Reading Fred Wilson’s post about tax rates made me want to share my (incomplete) thoughts on taxation.

I’d like to see a Flat Tax on income with only a few tweaks to remove some of the inherent unfairness in that approach. I’m not sure if this is a model already proposed by someone else so I’ll immodestly call it the Schafer Tax Plan until I’m (inevitably) told this is not an original idea.

My goal here is to increase transparency, simplicity, compliance and fairness. I’d love to hear thoughts on ways those goals are not met with these proposals as well as suggestions on increasing them beyond what I’m proposing here.

Of course this is a “Clean Slate” approach to taxation. Other than starting a new country and applying these concepts I have no idea how this would implemented without financial chaos ensuing during the transition. Would a “big bang” approach (“everything changes January 1 2015″) be possible?

The Schafer Tax Plan

1. No corporate taxes.

Corporations aren’t people. Tax the companies’ shareholders as they earn income from their investments.

2. No sales, consumption or usage taxes.

These are all mechanisms of double taxation that obscure the taxation rate by hiding it in purchases of goods and services. This process also adds massive complexity to commerce and tax collection.

3. No welfare, child tax credits or old age security.

Don’t worry, I’ll deal with this in point nine below.

4. You are an individual if you are alive during a year.

Yes I’m radically suggesting that babies and old people are individuals for tax purposes. I’m not sure how to deal with cross-border income or transnational individuals.

5. A flat income tax of x percent on all individual’s income without regard to source or amount.

This becomes the only tax the government can collect.

I have no idea what “x” might be. Ideally we’d equal current tax the government collects less the savings from shuttering almost all of the income tax collection function of the government.

6. Income tax is deducted at source.

Income seems to be the easiest thing to tax other than consumption which I feel is regressive, complex and has compliance issues.

7. There are huge financial penalties for incorrect source deductions.

Compliance could be a big issue once taxes are collected through a single channel so a “big stick” is needed.

8. Individuals are not required to file tax returns.

The government already has your money. There is no need to report anything.

9. Individuals with annual income below y dollars may apply for a Cost of Living Credit if they wish.

This becomes the only means of redistribution of income to the needy.

I have no ideas what “y” would be. It would be nice if we could bring every individual above the poverty line with this credit. Not sure that is a good or reasonable idea. I’m also not sure how to deal with the credit coming after people need it (assuming you’d apply for the credit annually you’d only start getting the credits after your year of hardship).

Babies and old people can apply for this too. That ideally gets rid of the need for child tax credits or social security.

One potential downside is that this might make having babies economically advantageous. I tried to avoid having any concept of “family” in this approach. Maybe individuals under 18 get a different type of cost of living credit. This also means the kids of rich parents would get the Cost of Living Credit which doesn’t seem quite right.

Last year I published my Top 30 Albums of 2010. I quite enjoyed that project and decided to do the same thing again this year and to make it a bit of a tradition each year.

For me 2011 was a fantastic year for music. Tons of new artists and some great new albums showing the old dogs can still learn a few new tricks.

Note these are in alphabetical order. I could never rank these absolutely – it would change daily.

• 21 by Adele
• Parallax by Atlas Sound
• El Camino by The Black Keys
• Bon Iver, Bon Iver by Bon Iver
• The People’s Key by Bright Eyes

• Wit’s End by Cass McCombs
• Little Hell by City and Colour
• Instrumental Mixtape by Clams Casino
• Cults by Cults
• Zonoscope by Cut Copy

• The King Is Dead by The Decemberists
• Kaputt by Destroyer
• Build A Rocket Boys! by Elbow
• Metals by Feist
• Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes

• Torches by Foster The People
• Nostalgia, ULTRA by Frank Ocean
• The Harrow & The Harvest by Gillian Welch
• Kiss Each Other Clean by Iron & Wine
• James Blake by James Blake

• Diamond Mine by King Creosote & Jon Hopkins
• Wounded Rhymes by Lykke Li
• Hurry Up, We’re Drowning by M83
• Let England Shake by PJ Harvey
• The King Of Limbs by Radiohead

• Days by Real Estate
• Ashes & Fire by Ryan Adams
• Bella by Teddy Thompson
• Bad As Me by Tom Waits
• House of Balloons by The Weeknd

I’d love to know what albums we have in common and which ones you think should have made my list but didn’t. Use the comments people, don’t be shy!

Lucy and I were watching “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” tonight and we started talking about movies we were happy to watch repeatedly. Here’s a quick list I made.

• (500) Days of Summer
• 24 Hour Party People
• A Simple Plan
• Almost Famous
• American Graffiti
• Anchorman
• Back To The Future
• Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
• Die Hard
• Do The Right Thing
• Elf
• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
• Fight Club
• Goodfellas
• Groundhog’s Day
• High Fidelity
• Monty Python & The Holy Grail
• Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
• Out of Sight
• Pulp Fiction
• Rushmore
• School of Rock
• Stop Making Sense
• The Big Lebowski
• Wizard of Oz
• Zoolander

What movies do you watch whenever you get a chance? Any idea why some movies bear up to  - or improve with – repeated viewings?

There is an old saying, meant to shame those of us working on websites into acknowledging that we really don’t care about other human beings.

“The only two industries that call their customers “users” are software developers and drug dealers.”

This raises the question of what the appropriate collective noun is for a group of people who visit and interact with a website. If not “Users” then what?

The most common alternative to “Users” is “Visitor”. That’s a bit more promising as to be at your site they had to visit it in a metaphorical sense, but “Visitors” is, for me at least, too passive. It has a “take it or leave it” feel to it. Is someone who relies on your site as a part of their life and who might use it multiple times a day really a “visitor”? This to me diminishes the importance of the person using your site.

I want to think of you as much more than a passing ship in the night, so I reject visitors for general use.

The saying suggests we call them “Customers”, but this seems problematic to me for two reasons.

Many people using websites aren’t actually customers. Most sites aren’t even looking for customers. You are not a customer of my blog for example. Calling people who visit my blog “Customers” just seems wrong. Even if you do have paying customers, you still have to build your site to deal with non-customers such as prospective customers, job hunters, or teens looking to a school report on your industry.

I therefore reject “Customers” as too narrow a view of who might use your site.

Interestingly enough I also reject “Customers” as too broad.

There is a movement to replace “Consumers” and “Users” with “Customers”. But people aren’t generally “Customers” except in the context of a commercial interaction. Yes I accept that my Acura dealer thinks of me as their customer and I appreciate them treating me well as their customer. But after the few days of interaction with them as a customer, what I really want is a car that is designed for “Drivers”. You might be a customer of Williams-Sonoma but you are a “Baker”. You are Amazon’s customer but you are a “Reader”.

If I was designing the Acura or Williams-Sonoma sites I’d definitely want my team thinking about Customer Experience, but I’d also want them very aware that the people using the site are Drivers and Bakers.

So what do people do on a site. They use it. The person using your site might be a a baker, or a driver, or a student, or a job hunter or they may idly followed a link to you and think of themselves as just visiting. But the common thread is that they are at your site, and they are using your site.

To me, User is to Web Site as Driver is to Car. As Reader is to Book.

So for me, “User” is the perfect word for what we are on the web.

When I was young (in the sixties) my parents weren’t really in to music. But we had the radio on all the time. We listened to Easy Listening stations. This naturally drove me crazy. But it also embedded these songs in my head.

This BBC 4 documentary (below in six parts) is well worth watching if you’ve either never really heard of Easy Listening or if you (as I did) simply dismissed it as irrelevant.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Here we see a very young me (I’m pretty sure I’m four years old) with my sister Karin (who would have been 23).

Don’t we look young and happy and (at least in my case) sun-stroked?

I love this John Stossel segment with one of my heroes, Michael Shermer. He presents a funny, articulate and relatively non-condescending world-view, arguing that reason, logic, and science will serve us better than superstition and the opinions of the famous.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I almost forgot to mention that today is the 15th anniversary of schafer.com.

I registered the domain for personal use back in 1996 and it’s had something on it pretty much ever since. It’s been a resume for me, a list of links, a corporate site for while I was self-employeed for many years, and since 2001 it’s had a blog attached to it (my first blog post was July 4th, 2001).

Interestingly enough, and entirely coincidentally, today is also my fourth anniversary on Twitter.

I wonder what the Internet will look like fifteen years from now?

When did you buy your first domain name and what did you do with it when you first started out online?

I’ll let you in on a secret: If you’re going to do a “Best of…” list, wait until the year is over so you can see what everybody else thought was the best and add to your own list.

This is not cheating. No one can keep up with all the music, books, movies and what-not that we clever mammals produce each year. I keep a running list of my favourite albums and add and delete from that list as the year goes on. But then I see other people’s end-of-year lists and realize that I missed a ton of great stuff. So, while I completely ignore retrospective news stories and generally turn my nose up at “what’s going to happen next year” commentary, I find “Best of…” for media a great way to grow and learn.

So, having digested a ton of other people’s lists and thought about my own favourites from 2010, here are my top 30 albums for the year.

Note these are in alphabetical order. I could never rank these absolutely – it would change daily.

• Good Things by Aloe Blacc
• The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
• Teen Dream by Beach House
• Belle & Sebastian Write About Love by Belle & Sebastian
• Crazy For You by Best Coast

• Brothers by The Black Keys
• The Way Out by The Books
• Broken Bells by Broken Bells
• Swim by Caribou
• The Lady Killer by Cee Lo Green

• Subiza by Delorean
• The Drums by The Drums
• Total Life Forever by Foals
• There Is Love In You by Four Tet
• Lucky Shiner by Gold Panda

• Plastic Beach by Gorillaz
• El Turista by Josh Rouse
• Harlem River Blues by Justin Townes Earle
• July Flame by Laura Veirs
• Gorilla Manor by Local Natives

• Twin-Hand Movement by Lower Dens
• Big Echo by The Morning Benders
• High Violet by The National
• goodbye, killer by Pernice Brothers
• Cling To A Scheme by The Radio Dept.

• How I Got Over by The Roots
• I Learned The Hard Way by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
• Volume Two by She & Him
• Five Ghosts by Stars
• Contra by Vampire Weekend

Well there you go. Lots of great music. I hope you take some time to really dig in and find some new tunes.

As an added bonus, here is my 8track mixtape featuring one of my favourite tracks from each of these favourite albums:

Let me know what you think! Leave a comment below and tell me what I got right, where I blew it, and suggest your own top albums.

I’ve been really happy with my Hug Bunny experiment and now that I’ve got a better handle on WordPress, I’m moving my personal blog (this one) over to WordPress (hosted at Page.ly) too.

One clear result of the rise of Twitter and Facebook is the ever-growing number of abandoned blogs out there.

Blogs have always had a high abandon rate. It's "cool" (well it was) to have a blog and it's dirt simple to start one. Much harder is the task of keeping it fed.  Coming up with interesting topics to post about and then adding in images and links to make the "story" feel fleshed out is a lot of work.

Twitter on the other hand requires less than 140 characters, and if you don't have time to type 140 characters 3 or 4 times a day, you've got bigger problems than your posting schedule.

For many people blogs are/where a way of pointing at interesting articles. Much of the verbiage beyond the link and maybe some quoted text from the original was just through clearing, filler or "I agree with this" commentary of little value.

Twitter makes that kind of post seem terribly outdated. If I want to POINT to something now I just post it to Twitter and add a short, (hopefully) pithy reason why I think the link has merit and I'm done.

That means that "blog posts" now end up feeling like work.  They are "longer" and "original".  And that's a tall order for many of us.

This blog, my first one, (although it's lived on Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress and now TypePad) is still what I officially call home online even though I don't visit very often.  My first post was over eight years ago now. In that time I've done a fair number of those "long format" posts interspersed with lots of stuff that now seems better suited for other social network channels, particularly Twitter.

Why blog then?

I'm not giving up on this blog yet as I figure I WILL have more to say than will fit in 140 characters at some point, but I doubt my close identification with my blog will ever return.

Paul Graham just wrote a wonderful overview of how to disagree. Go read it. I’ll wait.

My guess is this was spurred by a mildly controversial post he did a few days earlier called You Weren’t Meant To Have A Boss which was widely commented on.

I don’t disagree with Paul. In fact I whole-heartedly agree with him.

And that’s my problem. Paul didn’t tell me “How To Agree”. As he points out:

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.

Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.

This post is an attempt to “agree and say something” but it is, frankly, work.

What I’d love to have is a way of saying “+1″ or “I agree” or “count me in” or “what he said” or what have you.

I do this right now in subtle and ineffective ways. I bookmark a link on Delicious or Twitter it or send it via email to people who might care that I agree. But it sure would be nice to have a centralized place where we could all saying “I Agree” and just link with (or without comment) to stuff we think is correct and of value.

My short-term solution to this problem is to create a Delicious tag called “I Agree” that I’ll try to use for stuff I find that I just agree with. I say “try” because it’s damn hard to introduce new behaviours – even self-imposed ones – so no promises.

(photo credit)

I hadn’t heard of Mary Barclay before stumbling across her obituary by the BBC.

While I know nothing about her other than what I read today I can’t help thinking she’d get a good laugh from the unfortunate juxtaposition of the headline and caption in her obit:

I’m sure it wasn’t overzealous Crossroads producers deciding to have a hit put out on the nonagenarian but that was my first thought.

A while ago I started collecting up all the old photo albums and shoeboxes of pictures and slides that have been stored at the back of closets with the hope of starting a scanning project to share these with family and (to a lesser extent) the world.

I did a test scan and post to Flickr of my in-laws wedding photo:

I’m pretty happy with the scan given I was using an old scanner and didn’t pay that much attention to my settings. I did a bit of cropping and tweaked the contrast.
And now that this photo is out there for the world to see, maybe someone can explain to me why they have a meadow full of flowers on top of their cake!

I just checked my calendar to see what my week was like and nearly fainted:

I never have weeks like this.

We’re not big on “standing meetings” at Tucows but I do like to make time to sit down with all my direct reports at least once a week. And I do the same with the Exec Team and Elliot. After that the rest of the week fills in pretty quickly with project-related meetings, sprint reviews, vendor discussions, customers time, and so on.

Loads of people are travelling on business or sick this week so my schedule is extremely light. Now, to be clear, this won’t last. By the end of the week much of it will have filled in.

But still, it makes me realize how little time I often end up with to “do” stuff instead of talking about doing stuff. I look forward to rolling up my sleeves and getting some projects of my own going this week.

Earlier this week I was reading a post on Fred Wilson’s blog and clued in to the fact that he’s been using Disqus as a substitute for the TypePad commenting system he used in the past.

I really liked the Disqus approach to commenting and, given that this blog runs on TypePad as well, I thought I’d give it a try.

If I did my template manipulation correctly based on Disqus’ very easy-to-grok walkthrough, we should now have a new and improved commenting system here. I’d love it if you could try it out and let me know what you think.

The experience is really enhanced if you add your pic to your Disqus account as it will automatically pop up beside your comment – here and on other Disqus enabled sites.

Feel free to experiment in the comment thread below.

Earlier this week I was quoted in an IT Business article about the possible acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft.

Here’s what I had to say:

The two main things going for Yahoo is brand and massive audience, said Ken Schafer, vice-president of product management and marketing for Tucows Inc.

Tucows began as a domain name registrar in the early 1990s but quickly transformed itself into a service and software vendor for Web hosting firms and Internet service providers.

“Yahoo’s problem is it has had a hard time in finding out how to leverage its main assets,” Schafer said. “Yahoo was not able to execute as quickly as people had been hoping it would.”

Schafer said Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo did not come as a surprise, as people in the online marketing industry had been talking about its possibility for years.

“Personally, I hope they manage to pull it off. Competition means innovation, and the more competition, the better.”

I’m not sure that history will prove me out. Right now it looks like Yahoo!’s board is prepared to put up a fight to keep the company out of Steve Balmer’s hands (or at least to make him pay dearly for the honour).

One of the things I love about Apple Mail is the way it integrates with Address Book to pull out a picture of the sender. Another is that I have installed a Plaxo plug-in that pulls up additional data and reminders from Plaxo’s social network.

To see this in action, I submit a recent message from Zoe:

This pic was taken on my iPhone which synced it to Address Book. Here birthday was two days away when I took this capture and Plaxo was nice enough to remind me of this (not that I needed reminding about my daughter’s birthday but you get the point).

The only problem I’ve had is that there is something, lord knows what, in David Crow’s Plaxo data that crashes the Plaxo Plug-in and Apple Mail along with it every time I try to open a message from him. The weird thing is that I have this incredible urge to contact David to get him to fix it instead of Plaxo and Apple. :)