Showers overnight and more coming today. We have fog right now which isn't surprising since the ground is still cold and the air is saturated. Tomorrow should be cloudy but dry so I might try to clean up some more outside. I didn't sweep the patio but I did uncover the clematis. I don't know if it survived yet. We'll see if anything sprouts. I have seeds to start set out: peppers, perpetual spinach, and malabar spinach to start with.

The argument over sales taxes and internet merchants is heating up again. Amazon, of course, has become the poster demon for the issue. And, given the fiscal conditions in most states, every state wants to tap that revenue. It can be a complicated issue. In my state, only the state levies a sales tax and reciprocal agreements with nearby states if residents make large purchases in those states. But in one of those states residents pay city, county and state sales taxes. I can see Amazon and other on-line retailers being hit up by cities and counties for sales tax revenues if the states are allowed to do so. Consumers would pay the sales tax but also increased costs for their merchandise as Amazon would have to spend more on the infrastructure to comply: computer capacity, programers, people to track any changes in tax levels in any jurisdiction, record keeping for all jurisdictions, and whatever else I haven't thought of. Yeah, brick-and-mortar retailers have to do some of that but for only the local taxing entities not for 50 states, gods know how many counties and cities.

This could be interesting.

I have seen stories about cities experiencing "ransom-ware" attacks. This is from Atlanta six days and counting from the attack. Evidently the city IT systems were audited last summer and warned of significant vulnerabilities. They were addressing identified problems as they could. Given the strains all government budgets are under these days I wonder where the money is coming from. IT systems and services are not cheap.

This is interesting for its implications. For some months now I have been reading articles examining the possibility of a "guaranteed basic income." The discussion started in Europe and has come over here. Yesterday I read an article on a contrary possibility: a "guaranteed job." Both have one big problem: they rely on government funding which is precarious at best. We don't just overestimate the short term effects of technology while underestimating the long term effects we also overestimate the benefits while underestimating the disruptions. How often have we been told that automation and AI would produce as many jobs as are destroyed and that only the drudge jobs would be eliminated while more "creative" jobs would be created. Both contentions are problematic.