Taxes, Taxes, Taxes

Lisa Jackson, EPA head, recently asked to a Senate committee "Can anyone honestly say that the head of an American household would not spend a dollar a day to safeguard the well being of his or her children?"

I for one can say I don’t want to spend a dollar a day, since I don’t believe it will safeguard the well being of my children. Mrs. Jackson was arguing that carbon-cutting legislation would, well the article didn’t state how my children would be protected, somehow make my children safer.

The $1/day she is quoting could spell disaster for my children. Personally the $1/day would cost my family $5,475 (not accounting for any interest earned) from now until my oldest child enters college. This money could be used to help pay for her education, paying down the debt (national or personal), donations to non profits or other beneficiaries that would actually help safeguard her future. Collectively the nation will spend $41,452,320,000 per year (that’s $41.5 Billion, based on 113,568,000 households in America) which is just under the $45 billion budget for the Department of Education. Maybe that’s chump change to Mrs. Jackson, but I consider that cost a major drain on the nation’s finances.

This cost would be in addition to all of the other taxes I pay for. Using the Tax Freedom Day from the Tax Foundation, I calculate I pay around $63/day in taxes. I think I pay more per day since I live in a high tax State and it probably excludes the payroll tax paid for on my behalf. If feel this is already too much.

If anything during this severe downturn in the economy the Government should be finding ways to reduce costs on families not increase them.

Well this turned out to be more of a rant than a well thought of argument, but I thought I should stand up and say I won’t fall for empty threats against my children’s future. Especially when the Government can’t seem to get it’s financial house in order which would do more to safeguard my children’s future than any carbon-cutting legislation ever could.

Transferring Contour Labels

Jeff Mishler has a good way to transfer contour labels from one surface to a newer surface as described in this Discussion Group Post. This concept may also be used to transfer contour labels from drawing to drawing. Just label the surface in one drawing, explode the labels, copy and paste them into a new drawing. After that just add contour labels by selecting the lines pasted in.

This post is more of a reminder to myself than anything else.

Major Station Label - Eliminate End Station

Expressions let you customize the way labels are shown. One instance where this may be useful is if you don’t want the end station shown on an alignment.

 

The manual way is to use select the individual label using the CTRL key and deleting it. Using expressions will always hide the end major station label. To create the expression go into Toolspace, Settings Tab and then right click and choose new under the Major Station grouping. The expression checks to see if the major station is the end station, if it is it makes the value really small, if its not the end station then it sets the text height as 0.06”.

Now go into the Major Station Label you want to use, in this case I’m using the ShrinkEndStation label style.

So now the end label is really small and won’t show.

There is one problem with this expression in that if the end station is at an even interval we probably want it to show. For this case we need to check to make sure the end station doesn’t end an even major station and if it does show the label. The final expression is below.

You can download the Civil 3D 2010 file which contains the file from this page: http://style.civil3dreminders.com/alignments

Create Points with Elevation and Description

In a previous post I covered how to create a point with elevation. In this post I’ll create a macro that will prompt the user for a description and then assign it to the point. I called the macro CreatePointsWithElevDesc. The code highlighted below is the code changes.

So that's the basic code to get it to work. As with all my free stuff it needs some error catching, maybe a On Error Resume Next (not the best method). To save you some time, I've posted the code here.