Year: 2003

Borrowing Massively to Cut Taxes for the Best Off

But first this time saver . . .

Alan Silver: ‘Ever get tired of typing ‘www.’ or ‘http://’ or ‘.com’ when entering a URL in the Internet Explorer Address Bar? If so, just type the core address and press CTRL + ENTER. The http://www. and .com will appear automatically.’

And now, as Congress prepares to pass another of the President’s massive tax cuts, largely for those who need it least . . .

TAX CUTS DURING WAR – OR AN ‘ADOPT A SOLDIER’ PROGRAM?
By Matt Miller

Let’s get this straight.

Currently, 250,000 brave U.S soldiers are poised to strike Iraq; it’s likely war will have begun by the time you read this.

The White House is sending an emergency spending request to Congress to fund the war and its aftermath that could come in at $80 to $100 billion. And that’s just a down payment.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 250,000 Americans – who earn, on average, more than $1 million a year – are waiting for a huge chunk of the $440 billion in tax cuts the top 1 percent of taxpayers are slated to receive in the next few years.

Plus, our commander in chief says it’s essential that these wealthy Americans get the bulk of what Citizens for Tax Justice estimates to be another $2 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, on top of the $440 billion.

All this while the budget deficit is soaring to record highs, which, depending on war and reconstruction costs, could soon close in on $400 to $500 billion.

Does anyone else think something is terribly wrong with this picture?

How we finance this war, and the rebuilding of Iraq afterward, will speak volumes about our national morality, and the relationship between our citizens and our government. For this reason it is useful to zero in on the 250,000 troops and the 250,000 highest income taxpayers.

At this historic crossroads, President Bush’s differing expectations of these Americans is shocking. I know the tax cuts are about GOP political positioning. But suddenly, with our troops moving, what was merely awful, cynical economic ‘policy’ now shines in neon as something worse. The president’s tax plans, given the challenges we face, simply can’t be squared with honorable notions of democracy.

It’s simply wrong to cut taxes for the best-off while we fight a war and run up huge budget deficits. It’s even more irresponsible to do this on the eve of the baby boomers’ retirement, for which we already face $25 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

It’s a measure of the detachment, or perhaps the cynicism, of Republican leaders that only John McCain seems to have the decency to say what’s fiscally and morally obvious. ‘Not now,’ McCain said on the Senate floor this week, about more tax cuts. ‘Not until Congress and the administration have a better understanding of the costs of war and peace.’

Common sense, right? Not to Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, who continues to spout the standard talking points on behalf of a tax package crafted without any consideration of the costs of war and reconstruction.

These tax cuts corrosively mock the president’s noble positioning of our effort in Iraq. Bush is offering a perverse fiscal twist on Churchill’s inspiring refrain.

‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight on the fields and in the streets,’ Churchill said.

‘We’ll borrow to fight them in Iraq. We’ll borrow more to rebuild Iraq. Then we’ll borrow even more to cut taxes for the rich,’ President Bush is effectively saying.

I have a better idea.

Say that Bush asks Congress for $80 billion for the war for now. Dividing $80 billion by 250,000 troops comes to a cost of $320,000 a head. Let’s ask the 250,000 highest-earning Americans to forego this much of the tax cut they’re supposed to receive in the coming years. Call it the Adopt-A-Soldier program.

You get the idea. We’ll need to revisit broader tax policy soon enough – that’s what the 2004 election will in part be about. But for now, to fund the war without adding to the deficit, let’s do this one small thing. My guess is that the vast majority of the nation’s 250,000 highest earners would vote in favor of this idea in a heartbeat.

Will the president have the decency to propose it?

If we’re lucky and if we do it right, liberating and rebuilding Iraq could be among America’s finest hours. Sticking our kids with the bill for Iraq in order to cut taxes for the wealthy would guarantee that it won’t be.

Columnist Matt Miller is a senior fellow at Occidental College in Los Angeles and host of ‘Left, Right & Center’ on KCRW-FM in Los Angeles.

© 2003 MATTHEW MILLER

Buying Uranium from Niger

Alan Light: ‘Watching these war protestors in the major cities I can’t help wondering how many of them voted for Ralph Nader. Sigh.’

☞ The assumption Alan is making, of course, is that if these folks had been thinking – at least in swing states like Florida, where Nader got 97,000 votes – Gore would have won and there would have been no war to protest.

‘Sure he would have won,’ some will say, ‘and then where would we have been?!’ This crowd assumes that if Gore had been President on 9/11 he would have surrendered to Al-Qaeda and, separately, allowed Saddam to develop a full arsenal of atomic bombs.

I don’t believe that.

Indeed – given the January 7, 2001 CIA briefing at Blair House, where the incoming President and VP were told that Osama Bin Laden represented a ‘tremendous’ and ‘immediate’ threat – it’s evident that the prior administration was at least paying attention and felt urgency to act. Whether Gore/Lieberman might have made enough progress by September 10 to avert September 11 is anybody’s guess. But I doubt that, post 9/11, any president would have failed to take strong action.

As to Saddam . . . his potential nuclear capability was a key argument for preemptively attacking another nation without broad backing from our allies. (With broad backing, relatively few would have protested the war.) But just how real was the Iraqi nuclear threat?

Needless to say: I don’t know. This is way above my pay grade, and probably yours. We just have to trust the President. But then you read stuff like this and it gives you pause . . . even as we all, unquestionably, detest Saddam, hope for the liberation of the Iraqi people, are impressed by the care and intelligence with which we are pursuing the attack, support our troops 110%, and pray for their swift success and speedy return.

Tuesday: Matt Miller on the Tax Cuts

A Hopeful Prediction

Someone way smarter and better informed than I believes this war will be over in five days or less. Very few Iraqis, he believes, want to die for Saddam.

The market is probably headed further down, but may rally strongly first if my friend is right. More to the point, the loss of life may not be as terrible as many of us have feared. That would be welcome news indeed. Until it is over, I am just going to keep my fingers crossed, which makes typing further columns impossible.

Now: will you please send Colin Powell over to talk with the North Koreans?

Did My Florida Tax Today And a Word About the Market

There are compelling reasons for us to go into Iraq and compelling reasons for us not to. The only two things I feel sure of are that (1) the timing of the debate, for Labor Day through the mid-term elections, was deeply cynical; and that (2) we could be doing this with far more international support if our general attitude these last two years hadn’t been one of near contempt for the rest of the world’s concerns and sensitivities. As more than one commentator has inquired, how did we ever lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein?

Once it starts, one can only hope the war will wreak the least possible carnage and the best possible outcome for the Iraqi people, which will in turn lead to the best possible results for us.

But until it starts, and after it is over, we should not forget our own peaceful but important struggles, such as the struggle to reduce the tax burden on those who are already best off at the expense of those who are least fortunate.

I was thinking such thoughts when I mailed in my Florida Intangible Property Tax today. As long-time readers know, this is a tax that only those Floridians who are best off even know about. Shortly after he took office, Governor Bush cut it in half. (He left the sales tax and the property tax unchanged.) Instead of a very small tax (two-tenths of one percent of assets above $100,000, not including real estate or retirement plans or bank accounts or Treasury securities or Florida municipal bonds), it is now half that (one-tenth of one percent).

Governor Bush saved me some money. I didn’t ask for it, I don’t need it, and it’s one more reason so many kids in this state are poorly educated in desperately overcrowded classrooms; one more reason drug treatment programs have been eliminated in 51 of Florida’s 55 prisons.

This is the Bush way of helping the poor and middle class, as valid in Florida as it is on the national stage (yesterday‘s column).

Is the idea to build a country of rich and poor, with machine guns guarding our gated communities? I’d rather pay the tax.

Finally, a word about the market. It’s nice that it’s spiked up the last few days. It might spike up some more. But best-case scenario, with all going reasonably well, where are we at the end of this war? Won’t we be more or less where we were, but with an extra $100 billion in debt on top of all the rest? Are we that much better off, with that much brighter prospects, than we were December 5, 1996, the day of Greenspan’s ‘irrational exuberance’ remarks, when the Dow (now 8140) was 6500 and the NASDAQ (now 1392) was 1250?

How About a Lamb Chop on Your Head?

The estimable Alan Light: ‘It’s too bad that on the entire Worldwide Web, you can’t find a site devoted to the wearing of hats made out of meat. Oh, wait. You can.’

The equally estimable and considerably less whacked out Paul Johns (as if I am anyone to knock a bit of occasional wackiness): ‘Could you publish this link to a six-point plan to avert war?’

☞ Sure. I can’t imagine it’s not too late, but why not? Or try this one-point plan . . .

From Tom Friedman in last Wednesday’s New York Times: ‘ Despite all the noise, a majority of decent people in the world still hunger for a compromise that forces Saddam to comply, or be exposed, and does not weaken America. So, Mr. President, before you shake the dice on a legitimate but audacious war, please, shake the dice just once on some courageous diplomacy. [Emphasis added.] Pick up where Woodrow Wilson left off: fly to Paris, bring the leaders of France, Russia, China and Britain together, along with the chairman of the Arab League summit, and offer them any reasonable amount of time for more inspections – if they will agree on specific disarmament benchmarks Saddam has to meet and support an automatic U.N. authorization of force if he doesn’t. If France still snubs you, the world will see that you are the one trying to preserve collective security, while France only wants to make mischief. That will be very important to the legitimacy of any war.’

AND NOW FOR THE MONEY SIDE OF THINGS . . .

From Sunday’s New York Times front page: ‘The Bush administration says it is planning major changes in the Medicare program that would make it more difficult for beneficiaries to appeal the denial of benefits . . . In the last year, Medicare beneficiaries and the providers who treated them won more than half the cases – 39,796 of the 77,388 Medicare cases decided by administrative law judges.’

☞ That clearly won’t do. The government has to be able to deny frail old people health care. By eliminating their right to appeal, the taxpayer saves two ways: first, they don’t have to defend their actions in court; second, they don’t have to pay up in the 53% of the cases when they lose. In the real world, you have to make tough choices, and these savings are required to help reduce the tax burden on people making $1 million a year.

From Sunday’s New York Times lead editorial: ‘In a sorry effort to protect President Bush’s tax-cut mania, the Republican leaders of Congress have unveiled proposals for slashing the most basic government programs for years to come … The G.O.P. leaders endorse the next chunk of detaxation despite Congressional findings that two-thirds of the deficits running through the decade will be caused by the Bush tax cuts, not simply the failing economy. [Emphasis added.]  The estimated shortfall of $2.7 trillion could have been an $890 billion surplus but for the Bush proposals, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The president’s next $1.4 trillion cut, geared to the affluent, will average $90,000 a year for millionaires, according to the Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. You would think a sense of embarrassment might strike the Republicans in blessing such a boon for a fortunate minority while taking a cleaver to programs vital for most taxpayers, notably a woeful $12 billion cut in food stamps. But they seem intent on ideology trumping responsibility.”

☞ ‘Tis a grand time to be rich and powerful in America.

Oh, Yum!

CALORIE-FREE

Dana Dlott: ‘It’s not really true the dressing you wrote about has zero calories. The imitation bacon bits have calories. The FDA has some legalistic rules about labeling that allows the company to say zero. I believe you don’t count calories from the spices. However it is close enough to zero for government work. Salad dressing is supposed to be oil, vinegar and spices. Vinegar has few calories and the spices are defined to have zero calories, so the oil which makes it creamy is the problem. This stuff is an example of modern food technology. If you take sugars, starches or oils and turn them into long chain polymers, they become difficult to digest, and if you do it right they can taste good but being indigestible have no calories. In this stuff the creamy texture is provided by a cocktail of ingredients including cellulose gel (cellulose from wood or grass is a starch polymer that is indigestible by people but yummy to cows), other starches that are also modified, and some other polymers such as modified alginate which is extracted from seaweed. I notice they are using sucralose for sweetening, which is a polymer of sucrose (table sugar) that is also indigestible but which tastes more like sugar than most other artificial sweeteners.

‘If you asked 10,000 scientists, only 10 of them would say there is anything to worry about in this stuff. Of course these 10 are in the news all the time. The two main concerns, they say, are eating this indigestible stuff can cause some kinds of stomach distress. Of course eating a lot of fat also does this. Also they say this stuff can stick to various vitamins and carry them out of the body. That is the kind of stupid thing that somebody desperately searching for a reason to not like something might say. So eat up, be happy. If the stuff upsets your stomach don’t eat it any more.’

Dan Critchett: ‘Aw, c’mon Andy, you know why food sellers whose product ISN’T fat-free, calorie-free, or carb-free get away with saying that their product IS: they make their serving size small enough so that it contains fewer calories, fat, or carbs PER SERVING than the FDA requires them to disclose. My favorite is Pam, the cooking spray: it’s 100% oil, 100% fat, but advertised as totally ‘fat free.’ How? Because a serving size is a one-second spray. (Try it some time, see if you can really spray it for only one second. Impossible. What a scam.)’

John Kasley: ‘Here’s a link to a page that answers your question about Walden Farms. (What a great name for food which is totally artificial.)’

I DON’T KNOW – WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING TO YOURS?

Pieter Bach: ‘Oh, Andy, WHAT have you been doing to your rhubarb! I hope someone told you the green part at the bottom is POISONOUS (no government program on this one, just trust me, I come from farmers) and that you have to COOK it with a little sugar – brown is actually better than white, here – to get it to taste good. How’s your stomach? Rhubarb was for centuries part of the physicians’ natural remedies lists, and was prescribed as an emetic. ‘Prescribed’ and ’emetic’ are important terms to note. It is high in oxalic acid, and the vitamin and mineral content is released by heat, the same as spinach. It used to be an important part of the spring tonicking, along with castor oil. It is combined with strawberries in pies because the iron content of strawberries (quite high) is made more available by the oxalic acid; you could, of course, combine strawberries and spinach, but I don’t think that would bake up very tasty. Think of rhubarb as a vegetable that is not improved by salt, and class it with shchav, French sorrel, and what we used to call ‘sour grass’ (Argentine oxalis), in terms of minerals. It goes well with goose and duck, because in culinary terms it lightens the fat content of the meat and makes it more digestible.’

☞ Only a man of true dedication to his readers would poison himself with frozen rhubarb chunks and then struggle to his post to tell the tale. (The truth is, I took one taste and tossed it. And as Charles will tell you – he has seen me eat food five years past its expiration – I don’t toss food lightly. Stick with the frozen sour cherries.)

Food for Thought

Well, I can tell you this much: rhubarb is certainly overrated. It tastes nothing like it does in the pie.The bags of sour cherries that you get frozen at the supermarket, on the other hand – and the frozen blackberries and frozen mixed berries – are the perfect Cooking Like a Guy™ snack. Just open and eat with God’s own chopsticks, your index finger and opposable thumb. The trick? The veritable ‘je ne sais quoi’ of the frozen sour cherry snack? Do not defrost. You can let them thaw a little, but beyond that you are making a mistake.

I can also report that “dried plums,” as they are now cleverly being marketed – a plum assignment! handled with such aplomb! – taste an awful lot like prunes.

The really interesting food to discuss for a minute – well, there are radishes, but radishes deserve a whole column (see, for example, November 11, 1999, “Underappreciated Vegetables,” which also lacked room for the radish) – is the Walden Farms Fat-Free Sugar-Free Hot Bacon Salad Dressing. Not only is it fat-free and sugar-free; it is cholesterol-free, carbohydrate-free, and calorie-free. You see what I am driving at? How is this possible? Calorie-free? It is a thick, creamy, flavorful, imitation-bacon-bit salad dressing. What could it be made of? Smog?

I’m expecting answers from you, people.

FIXED LINK

Ron Goldthwaite: “The link in yesterday’s column was mangled. Since it’s an interesting article, it’s worth fixing.”

☞ Oops. Click here for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory report that discusses the effectiveness of plastic sheeting and duct tape in preparing a residential safe room.

AND ONE MORE THING TO WORRY ABOUT

Ed Biebel: “In addition to my regular working life, I am also a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician with my community’s local ambulance service. Hazardous Materials Awareness and Operations has been part of our basic training since I became an EMT 10 years ago. My point in mentioning this is that a lot of the current buzz about chemical attacks sticks in my craw. True Emergency Management is “all hazard, all risk.” That is to say that terrorist attacks are not the only vector for exposing a population to deadly chemicals. Tanker trucks full of lethal chemical agents regularly travel our highways. In our region, we have had accidental chemical releases from nearby plants, derailed freight cars carrying chemicals, natural gas main breaks involving evacuation of numerous city blocks . . . and the list goes on. These are risks that occur every day. Yet the agencies that should be protecting us and reducing our risk are being gutted. State agencies struggle with budget cuts and if there is money trickling down from the Feds to help, I’m not sure where it is going. Sure we want to check to make sure that the driver of a chemical truck isn’t a terrorist. But don’t we also want to make sure that the brakes on the truck work and that the tanker is properly inspected and that the company is observing all of the regulations for transporting deadly chemicals?”

Maybe Get a Little Duct Tape After All?

WHERE DO E-MAILS GO?

Mike Baute: ‘Cool column. Now tell us where Regular Mail (snail that is) goes!’

BECAUSE THEY ATTACKED EVERYTHING HE SAID?

Anne Speck: ‘Why do you suppose Al Gore bungled so badly on communicating that he had presided over the biggest contraction of government bloat in U.S. history? I find it very amusing that it is the Democrats who shrunk the government and the Republicans who are now expanding it and making ever-more intrusive decisions about the lives of Americans.’

RELAX – IT’S JUST PLAGUE (A CONTRARY OPINION)

Michael Axelrod: ‘The article by Easterbrook in the New York Times you quoted last month is in places misleading and in other places incorrect. I think he knows very little about the things he writes about in this article. For example, the ‘tape and seal’ protective strategy for chemical warfare attacks on civilian populations originally comes from NATO (1983) and Israel, not the US Department of Homeland Security. This ‘expedient sheltering’ idea is not for ‘psychological benefit.’ In 1991 Israeli civilians used ‘tape and seal’ in anticipation of chemical attacks from Iraq. You can find a report prepared by Oak Ridge National Laboratory here that discusses the effectiveness of plastic sheeting and duct tape in preparing a residential ‘safe room’ against chemical and biological attacks on cities. There is no intelligent basis for Easterbrook’s claim that a chemical attack on an American city would have a small effect, and that your chances of harm would be ‘a million to one.’ This kind of statement is irresponsible, and the New York Times is irresponsible for printing it. The experiments and calculations for assessing this risk are current research. But, let’s go on to bio-terror where Easterbrook really demonstrates his ignorance.

‘The 1971 smallpox outbreak at Aralsk in the (then) Soviet Union is a particularly troubling incident because the index case likely caught the disease from smallpox that was both weaponized and aerosolized and retained its infectivity for 15 kilometers. The index case would have become infected while aboard ship in the Aral Sea when it passed near the Soviet bio-warfare testing ground on Vozrozhdeniye (Rebirth) Island (actually a peninsula). In other words, the smallpox virus did not require human contact; it was carried by the wind to its victim. For details, see the report by Zelicoff at Sandia Labs. Easterbrook doesn’t seem to take this incident very seriously, completely missing its significance because he thinks it requires person-to-person contact to spread smallpox.

‘Easterbrook gets some of the important facts about the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk in 1979 wrong. There was no explosion at the bio-warfare facility in Sverdlovsk, and the quantity released was not necessarily large. The Soviet defector and scientist, Ken Alibek, covers this incident in his book, Biohazard. A missing filter caused the anthrax release. According to Alibek, the Soviet Union was planning to deliver anthrax warheads by ballistic missile to the US. He says an anthrax warhead is as deadly as a nuclear weapon!

‘Easterbrook also doesn’t seem to understand the effects of nuclear weapons either. The Hiroshima bomb exploded at about 5,000 feet, which is the optimum height for damage. The effects of a surface detonation would be quite different.

‘In short, don’t rely on the New York Times, or any other newspaper for that matter, to get accurate and complete information about this complex topic.’

The Boss Speaks

‘You try not to be cynical, but without the distraction of Iraq [people would notice] that the economy is doing poorly, and the old-fashioned Republican tax cuts for the folks that are doin’ well will seriously curtail services for people who are struggling out there. I don’t think that’s the kind of country Americans really want.’ – Bruce Springsteen interviewed in the February 28 Entertainment Weekly

‘The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you.’ – Rita Mae Brown (as quoted at the end of our condo newsletter)

And now . . .

. . . at long last . . .

. . . Where DO e-mails go?

[Warning: Curiosity may not have killed the cat but merely put him to sleep. Feel free to stick with the Springsteen interview.]

John Kasley asked this question February 24: ‘I occasionally send myself an e-mail with a URL in it, as a reference to something I may want to investigate later. I just sent myself such a note, and it took 9 minutes to get back here. I’m on a cable connection. Where did the message go and what did it do? I hope it had a good time. Your readers seem to know everything in the world. One of them will surely know this.’

John Seiffer: ‘Emails (like everything on the web) exist on a computer somewhere called a server. When you send an email, your computer sends it to the server you’re connected to – owned by the place you get your internet account from, called your ISP, Internet Service Provider. That server then checks the address of where it’s going to and sends it out to the server that handles that address. Then, to receive email, your computer gets it from that server. It’s likely that – even sending to yourself – the ‘sending server’ and the ‘receiving server’ are not the same. It as if there were one mail carrier who picked up mail you sent and another who brought mail you received. It’s possible that in sending from one server to another, the message got delayed and parts of it had to get sent again till the whole thing got there. It’s also likely that when the message got to one or the other server it just waited in line for a while before it got sent out or before it got filed in the right place so some other software would know it was there (AOL used to be notorious for this). And it’s also possible that a person’s computer is only set to check for new emails every 10 minutes (mine is actually set to check every 30). This is something you can usually adjust in your email program.’

Peter Ludemann: ‘There’s a long answer, involving jargon such as SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, MTAs, etc. I’ll try a shorter answer. The Internet mail system was designed in the early 1980s. In those days, always-on connections were an unheard-of luxury. So, mail was sent by ‘store-and-foreward,’ which means that it would be relayed from one machine to another until it reached its destination (similar to how the real post-office sends mail between offices). Each relay would keep trying at intervals to connect to the next machine, until it finally had sent the message. Even the most trivial mail message requires:

1. send from your machine to your mail server
2. send from the mail server to the recipient’s mail server
3. send to the final destination machine.

‘This is necessary because otherwise both you and the recipient would have to be connected at the same time to send mail (as in Instant Messenger). In the case of sending mail to yourself, step #2 can be left out, but you still have an intermediate mail server. In some cases, there might be multiple intermediate servers (often called “gateways”).

‘There can be any number of reasons why things get delayed on a server … can’t connect from your machine to the server, the server is busy, it’s out of disk space and needs to wait for some mail to be delivered before accepting yours, etc., etc. (Even today this relaying occasionally fails and you get a message saying that the server tried for 3 days and couldn’t deliver the message.)

‘In the early 80s, if a message was delivered within half an hour, you were usually very happy. Often the mail didn’t get delivered at all and you got no notification of the failure. Nowadays, people assume that email is reliable and are amazed when it takes more than a few seconds to arrive.’

Erik Streed: ‘When you send an email from a program like Outlook or Eudora it typically contacts your mail server (something like pop3.mit.edu or mail.mit.edu in my case) and passes on the message. That server then looks at the To:, CC: and BCC: fields and figures out which other servers it needs to contact to pass the message along. It might also check for viruses, tack on some good legal voodoo disclaimer or toss back the message if it’s too big.

‘One of the more common rules of the system is . . . to wait. There are two reasons for this. One is that if the server accumulates several messages going to the same place (say aol.com) it can talk to that server once and everything is much more efficient. It’s kinda an artifact from when the ‘net was very young and your mail server might make a mail run once a day or once an hour by directly calling someone else on a modem. The other reason is bugs. Suppose you have a mailing list program. You send a message to the list address and the program emails everyone on that list. If someone’s email has turned sour and the message bounces, the entire list could be mailed (instead of just the sender). Most list servers are smart enough to figure this out (now, at least), but by delaying a message for a few minutes can change a devastating bug (or virus for that matter) into a minor nuisance.’

Turner Jones: ‘POP servers (Post Office Protocol) are busy, busy little bees. Every ISP (internet service provider) has to have one so that you can get your e-mail. These little bees are constantly opening the door, getting the mail, sorting and stacking, moving and storing, and opening the door again and sending the mail out. All day long. It gets to be too much some times and to top it off, some bees are smaller and weaker than other bees so they can’t do as much work as the bee keeper (ISP) would like them to. In fact, some bee keepers are just downright cheap and don’t really care how overworked the bees are. If you are interested, here is an informative link – hopefully, without the bee analogy.’

Brad Hurley: ‘Where do e-mails go? Answer: When you click SEND your e-mail gets chopped into pieces (called packets), which are then volleyed about from server to server until they reach their intended destination, where they are magically reassembled. Usually that process takes milliseconds, but sometimes things get held up. Traceroute, a command built into both the Windows and the Mac operating systems, lets you to see how many bounces it will take for a request from your computer to reach a specified server. It also shows you how long the request takes to get there. Instructions for Windows are here. For Mac OSX, here.’