Sorry he's not sorry about working 'round the clock to get this business off the ground. A Bronx man who runs a fish farm in his 14th floor apartment is being sued by his landlord in a building where neighbors claim the tanks leak and stink up their homes. The landlord claims Christopher Toole, 47, is violating his lease at the Riverdale building by illegally breeding fish and running the Society of Aquaponic Values and Education from the home...He has "refused to refrain" from making noises and causing odors, the lawsuit says. Neighbors say Toole is responsible for several large leaks and drags his fish farming materials across the floor through the night. “It’s irritating because you hear noise all the time. It’s 3:30 in the morning, and you hear him dragging his aquarium or whatever it is across the floor. It has changed my life,” said resident Roch McDowell, who lives directly below Toole...Toole formerly worked at Morgan Stanley and served as a vice president for Sovereign Bank. He now teaches kids about fish farming and sells his tilapia. He told the New York Post he was not aware of the suit, but said "any publicity is good publicity." Apartment Fish Farm Stinks: Suit [NBCNY]

In fact, he encourages it.

"The only way to finance a big European-style state is to have it paid for by massive taxation of everyone, mostly the middle class. Right now, we are avoiding honest debate on this fact...The first truth is that the current tax rates cannot support the promises made to middle-class Americans. The most unaffordable items in fiscal projections are Social Security for everyone and government-sponsored health care for the middle class. You cannot preserve these even with Draconian slashing of military, infrastructure, welfare, education, and other expenditures. The second truth is that you cannot pay for the Life of Julia, or any vision of a cradle-to-grave welfare state, without massive and increasingly regressive middle-class taxes. The poor don't have the money to pay for a European-style welfare state, and the rich, rich as they are, don't have anywhere near enough. Not only that, it's easy to tax middle-class assets and transactions — things like payrolls, sales, and real estate — but soaking the rich means taxing investments. Investments are complicated and can be restructured to minimize taxes. Also, investments are the lifeblood of economic growth. Raising significantly more taxes from the rich also requires higher marginal tax rates — and their rates are already quite high. High marginal rates distort the economy and yield less revenue than anticipated because they increase the rewards for legal and illegal tax avoidance...to achieve anything like the European-style entitlement state they advocate, we need to tax everyone a lot more, not just the 1 percent. Despite all the drum circles protesting the inequitable distribution of resources, the wealthy just don’t have enough. The middle class and even the poor must step up to carry more of the burden if this is our desired endgame. [The American, related]