Take Me Higher V6

[Fortun Bawa]

I need to take a screenshot of a website as it would appear on a very high resolution monitor... say 4000x3000 pixels. My laptop's screen has a native resolution of 1400x768. Basically, I need to simulate having a monitor resolution much higher than my monitor and video card actually supports. I want the screenshot of the site to look pretty much how it does when you hit CTRL MINUS (zoom out) in Firefox repeatedly, but without any loss of pixels due to scaling. How can I do this? Is there some way to use virtual machine software to simulate a super-high-res display? If not, is there some way to open a browser window bigger than the screen, and then capture its contents as a PNG somehow? Anything else that might work?

Add a new size, 4000 x 3000. check "Resize the viewport" if you want only the page content to be 4000x3000. If you don't check it, the complete window of Firefox (with toolbars, menu, ...) will be set to this dimension.

Once at the correct size, go to Tools - FireShot - Capture Entire Page and ... .Select an action, like Save for instance. It will save the page content that has been set by Web Developer to the desired size.

That will bring up this view, which will let you choose from a set of presets as well as enter any desired resolution and directly save a screenshot in PNG format to disk with one click:

Well, with a Linux (or X Window System setup of any flavor) you can set a virtual desktop that is larger than your monitor. You scroll around in it, but I would think you could then maximize your browser and screen shot it.

I was visiting the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, a 23-island archipelago in Lake Superior, when suddenly I found myself pining for Stockholm. Why? Because standing on the boat dock in Bayfield, Wisconsin, I realized that the 23,000-island Stockholm archipelago is more accessible to me, an American, than my own 23-island national park.

It seems that Americans would rather have inaccessibility to public places and crumbling infrastructure than pay more in taxes, right? After all, every American seems to know that taxes in Sweden are high and that they want nothing to do with high.

My wife and I have been dividing our time between jobs in Sweden and Wisconsin for the past dozen years, and I'm here to tell you that taxes in Sweden are not that high. To my surprise, I found that there are lots of things to love about the Swedish tax system. Swedish taxes are easy to pay, rational, and efficient. Best of all, rather than take away opportunities, Swedish taxes expand them.

And you get far more for your taxes than you do in the US. In Sweden, college is free and students get a housing stipend. A colleague's daughter, Kerstin, just completed a five-year dental program. Her family paid nothing for her education. The Swedish government gave her $340 a month to live on when she was in school and the right to borrow $700 more a month, which she did. After five years, she graduated with a debt of $37,153.

Our US federal and state forms tax forms were more than 30 pages long last year, downloaded completely blank. During the two weeks we'll spend in Wisconsin this summer, our main job will be to get our taxes done.

Tax-preparation services cost American taxpayers more than $32 billion per year. My wife, Betty, and I each have a PhD, but that's not enough to understand IRS instructions. Finally, with a great sigh of relief, our marriage still intact, we'll sign the forms and send them to the IRS.

Of course, despite our great efforts, we don't know whether the IRS is going to be happy or not. We might get audited and have to dig up all this stuff again, because the government has three years to check and revise our returns.

In Sweden, the four-page tax form comes in the mail already filled out. On a Saturday morning, Betty and I take our coffee to the couch and review the forms. Seeing they look reasonable, as they always do, we "sign" with a text from our phones. In 15 minutes we are done. We don't have to hire a tax consultant, and we avoid fights about whether a print cartridge bought at the drugstore is a business expense or not.

The Swedes expect their government to be efficient, and the tax authority is. Only 11 percent of the Swedish taxpayers say it is NOT easy to fill out their forms. I can't imagine what a similar survey question would show in the US.

Property taxes go back to the founding of the United States. They are administered by local governments and most go to pay for schools, local roads, and other services. They range from a high of 2.38 percent in New Jersey to a low of 0.28 percent in Hawaii. Property taxes hurt older citizens, whose incomes are not going up but whose property taxes are. In our great American tradition of making taxes hurt, Wisconsin property tax bills come in a lump sum just before Christmas. The envelope might as well say, "I am from the government, and I am here to make you miserable."

When the conservative government, favoring lower taxes, came to power in Sweden in 2006 one of its first steps was abolish the property tax and replace it with a fixed fee. The real estate fee for services is 7,112 SEK per house ($825 at current exchange rates).

This is the same for everyone no matter what the assessed value of the dwelling. The fee is $12 a month for our co-op apartment in Stockholm. If we owned the same property in Madison, our taxes would be $18,000 a year.

Swedes and many other Europeans are grumpy when they visit the US, buy something for $10, and the clerk asks for $10.55. Just as we make our income tax process miserable and the property tax bill shows up just before Christmas, sales taxes are an add-on, which makes you notice them more.

It is true that sales taxes are regressive; poor people pay a higher proportion of their income in this tax. In the US, a 25 percent sales tax would have to be offset with some kind of subsidies for our many poor. But because Sweden has a narrower income distribution, its sales tax is less regressive than in the US.

One of the reasons US income tax preparation is so awful is that we try to reward certain activities by providing a tax deduction. If you do some good deed (like putting in a solar panel) and if you can find the receipt and documentation (I am thinking ahead to our summer "tax vacation" in the Wisconsin), then you can list a number on Form H, line 36, that will lower your taxes.

If the Swedish government wants you to do something, they give you the money. For example: Having children is good for the society and costs parents money. In the US, you get a deduction on your income tax for dependents. In Sweden, you get a check every month and you can use it to buy shoes. For one child you get $120 a month and up to $620 for four children. Every parent gets a check.

David Brooks, in a New York Times editorial, argues that if Americans paid European-style high taxes, it would "weaken the ability of members of the middle class to make choices about their own lives."

Maybe Brooks needs to live abroad. Guys like Brooks seem to be proud that tax revenues in the US are only 26 percent of GDP (the third lowest of all countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) while in Sweden they are 43 percent.

No matter how rich Bill Gates is, he cannot buy a hiking trail system in Seattle like those we take for granted in Stockholm. I get to use it for free and have more choices for hiking than I can ever enjoy in Wisconsin. The family of five I witnessed waiting on the dock to visit the Apostle Islands was powerless to see them. Our national park, accessible to the few but not the many, is but one casualty of our low taxes.

Another casualty? Our public transportation system. Betty and I used to live the village of Lodi, about 25 miles from Madison. This being America, I was free to travel to Madison however and whenever I wanted, as long as it was by private automobile. There was (and is) no bus service to Madison. Even though railroad tracks run right through the village, there is no commuter rail service either.

If this were a suburb of Stockholm or any other European city of 250,000, there would be train service and bus service several times an hour. These are the choices Europeans have that we don't, because they devote more of their income to collective goods.

If we value freedom, those of us who drive cars should pay higher gas taxes so that those who are old, infirm, too poor to have a car, or want to reduce their environmental impact can have fast and efficient bus and train service. Besides the moral issue of providing freedom of choice, there is a great economic value. If we had bus and train service to Madison, the value of all of the real estate in Lodi would shoot up, and our crumbling downtown would have a shot at a future.

The 33 million Americans who are still not covered by health insurance don't have much choice when they get sick, unless you think, "Your money or your life?" is a choice. Paradoxically it turns out the bloated, heavily lobbied, privatized US system spends more tax money ($4,437) per person than Sweden's socialized health care ($3,184).

I am not burdened by Swedish taxes. In fact, paying more allows me to increase my quality of life in a big way. That's why I believe that if we all paid higher taxes with less pain in the collection, more of us would be granted the American version of freedom we have been promised.

Tom Heberlein divides his time between Wisconsin and Sweden, where he is working on a book, Falling in Love with Sweden (One Mistake at a Time). He is a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

I have a serious dilemma and in need of advice. I currently work for a public university hospital. I love my coworkers it's a very good team. The benefits are the best I have ever seen. The problem they pay the lowest in my area and we have to pay to park. I left a clinic job full time to go PRN so I could work at Public hospital due to the benefits. So now I am working both jobs and burned out. Clinic offered me to come back full time and a promotion.

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