As we’ve just had income tax time in the U.S., I’ve been hearing a bunch of silliness associated with it. I thought I’d talk about two of my favourite (well, for some value of “favourite”) tax fallacies.

It doesn’t pay for me to get a raise! It’ll just put me in a higher tax bracket, I’ll pay more taxes, and in the end I’ll wind up making less than I did before.

I haven’t worked out every possibility, and maybe there’s really a way that can happen, but I can’t imagine what it could be. The “tax brackets” in the U.S. are marginal — you only pay the higher tax on the portion of your income that put you into the next bracket.

I’ve often written about technology that will help us do everyday things, and I almost always advocate technology that helps, while leaving the choices with us, the control in our hands. Mostly, I think that’s what works best.

But what about when the technology is meant to improve safety in cases where we, ourselves, fail? The very point, there, is that our own choices are faulty, and the technology must fill in for us. Where’s the line between “manual override” and preventing us from casually defeating important safety protections?

The New York Times “Bits” blog carried an item a few weeks ago about electronic coupons, sent to your mobile device at appropriate times:

How many times have you heard the prediction that one day, businesses like coffee shops will send us coupons on our mobile phones when we walk by?

That has long been the dream of mobile marketers. Still, only 9 percent of people have received a coupon or discount code on their phones based on where they were standing, according to new data from Compete, a Web analytics firm.

This could be the year that changes.

The New York Times recently published an article about bias against women and minorities in science fields (and schooling). I’ve written about this before, in my regular blog, and that was about a study from 2004. We’re not getting much better at this — or, if we are, it’s not fast enough.

In days of old, when knights were bold, and they kept their data on large reels of magnetic tape, the tapes were stored in a central tape library, and were mounted by request on mainframe computers. Each tape in the library was given a volume serial. One requested a tape by its volume serial, which was six characters — letters and numbers.

Once in a while, one might need a fresh tape to write information to, which one would then read back in the same program, and the tape would not need to be kept in the library afterward. These were called scratch tapes, and the volume serial “SCRTCH” was reserved for such requests.