Busy as a Bee
Hey, I've got this thing, a blog! Right on! Quite a hit of the last couple of years in Slovenia, this blogging. Except with the politicians. If you were to say to one of them: "Hey, minister of Moneymaking and Citizens Abuse, I have a blog!" I'm quite sure the response would be: "Oh, I'm so sorry... Why don't you go to a hospital?"Yes, this government is going from bad to worse with each hour, not just each day. A week ago the new law about media taxation became effective. Every CD, DVD, hard disk, floppy, RAM of any kind, device working with the before mentioned type of media is taxed as follows: 8 SIT for every first gigabyte but not more than 4000 SIT per media or device. That's 0.0333973449 Euro for every first gigabyte per media but not more than 16.69867245 Euro. So I don't get stack of 25 Verbatim DVD+R for 2500 SIT anymore, now I get them for 3500 SIT. 1000 SIT goes to the Association of Scrupolous Artists. Which makes me a pirate by definition. Even if I only buy a camera to take some nice photos of the landscape in autumn. You see, that was the excuse for the law: a big, overwhelmingly huge, super-duper piracy which makes artists poor. I won't even go into details and explain every aspect of wrongness and lack of any rightness, as there's already plenty of that all over the web and no government cares about it. The only other European country I know that has a similar law is Spain; they got it somewhere in the first half of this year. And today I hear the European Union Commission published an opinion stating governments should not adopt general taxes on media and should instead solve the royalty payment in some other way. I guess there is still some hope.
I ask myself when are they going to tax paper? I mean, there's a lot of photocopying of books, Xerox machines all over the place. Aren't the bloody artists going to ask for some money from each piece of paper sold? And don't forget to tax newspapers and publications in general! I can still scribble something on it, thus copying a piece of a book...
And now I should apologise for not contributing to my blog for so long. The usual excuse applies: no time. I took a couple of credits for 30 years as banks in Slovenia still don't offer mortgages and bought a small flat. I still don't have a broadband connection because the telco is screwing me like I'm a miss of the world bimbo with a liver where brains should be, and the cable is too expensive for my current financial state. I still work a lot, perhaps a bit more than before, because I don't meddle with blogs anymore. I should probably be renamed to Guru Workalot.
I decided to build my own custom book shelves. I'd design them, take the dimensions for boards to a local hobby shop and wait for them to be delivered. The assembly shouldn't be difficult. And then I'd have perfect-fit shelves. Chipboard should be the cheapest, but I hear it causes cancer, so I probably shouldn't choose that material for shelves. Anyway, it's been a month since I decided this and I still haven't even designed them. Well, at least I decided on the design tool: QCad.
posted by AlesS @ 10/31/2006 08:01:00 AM
2 Comments:
Dude that sucks. Any form of media and /or memory? Wow that's going to raise the price of almost every tech toy out there in Slovenia-land!
I pity you man. Maybe some people will find out how to store data in DNA, then the government can tax your DNA as well!
Well, I'm already taxed for my existence. They should just raise the tax on food than to come up with a tax on DNA. But of course, they couldn't sell that to the people, so it's not such a far-fetched thought, this DNA tax.
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