Jesus & Mo

theferrett reviews webcomics on Fridays. Today's review is Jesus & Mo. Jesus & Mohammed, rooming together - but that's not the real blasphemy ... It's also fun when Moses comes to visit. Altho some of the puns are scary, the use of logic is superb.

I like the atheist bartender too, and not just because of the civil union/surrogate mother thing.

It's no Finding Home, but it's good.

Fun with Math (US 401(k) edition)

(I did the initial workup of this for a comment elsewhere, but thought it worth having around. So.)

The money in a 401(k) or 403(b) is pre-tax. What does this mean?

Example: An employee in the 25% marginal income tax bracket*, tho not maxing out the flat payroll taxes**. If she wants to put the last $100*** she earned to paying off a credit card, it works out like:

Earned	Minus income tax	Minus payroll taxes	Payment
$100	- $25	-$7.65	= $67.35

But if she puts that last $100 she earned into a 403(b) or 401(k), then there's an extra $25 available:

Earned	Minus income tax	Minus payroll taxes	401(k) contribution
$100	- $0	-$7.65	= $92.35

Now, you may be thinking, "I don't want to reduce my paycheck by $92.35". Well, you wouldn't be. Remember that you normally only get the after-tax $67.35. Putting $92.35 into your 401(k) only reduces your after-tax paycheck by $67.35. To put it another way, you aren't going to have that $25 in hand anyway. You can send it to the Treasury, or to your 401(k). Which would you prefer?

Yet another way to look at it: Taking the $67.35 out of our example's paycheck and putting into her 401(k) gets an immediate $25 return. Yes, taxes will probably have to be paid when the money is withdrawn, but in the meantime the investment proceeds grow tax-free - which means you get more capital to invest. Yay, compound interest.

Where would one not want to use a 401(k)?

• If all the investment options suck. If the choices are employer stock, an annuity, and a money-market fund, I'd pass.
• If you need the after-tax income more than the tax savings. You should not plan on using your 401(k) money until you're over 59.5 years old****, so make sure you have other savings for more immediate emergencies.

Suppose our example person spent that last $100 on something subject to sales tax? Then it would work out as:

Earned	Minus income tax	Minus payroll taxes	Minus sales tax	Spending money
$100	- $25	-$7.65	- $5.50	= $61.85

Ain't math fun?

( notes )

Alec won't be at Mount Vernon

May be a dupe to those of you on alexanderfans, but FYI, Alexander James Adams won't be at the Highland Games in Mount Vernon. Per Kore, he has to take care of things at Fae Hollow this weekend.

On the bright side, I'm importing Vitus Dance as I type this. :)

Funny coding language

On INTERCAL:

This ridiculous esoteric programming language was designed as an unpronounceable satire of FOTRAN and COBOL (yes, it's old). Everything about the language is absurd. From the form of the manual, which contains a "tonsil," as explained in this footnote:

"4) Since all other reference manuals have Appendices, it was decided that the INTERCAL manual should contain some other type of removable organ."

The language also uses modifiers such as "PLEASE," which if not used frequently enough is rejected by the compiler as insufficiently polite, and if used too much is rejected for being excessively polite. More frustrating still, was the fact that despite the existence of this feature, it was undocumented in the manual.

As a practical language, INTERCAL is Turing-complete, meaning it actually works. But if you're planning on actually trying to use INTERCAL you should first check your sanity, and you should be prepared to wait a long time. A Sieve of Eratosthenes benchmark, computing all prime numbers less than 65536, was tested on a Sun SPARCStation-1. In C, it took less than half a second; the same program in INTERCAL took more than 17 hours.

- from Ghosts in the Machine: 12 Coding Languages That Never Took Off