ViperMan

I would do it. Or I would do something like it. In fact, I am currently looking for a "retirement" gig that will let me keep doing military aviation in a part time capacity. I'm figuring out how to min run the airlines, and am winding up with a lot of free time on my hands. May as well do what I like, get paid retirement, get paid min guarantee, and then make extra money chasing clouds. That said, I'm aware of things like Drachen, etc. I also don't want to fly perma red air. For some reason I'd rather do something IFF-like or straight UPT. Maybe I'm crazy. Not gonna be able to do the part time (non-retired) gig after I'm retirement eligible - I just can't make working for free make financial sense.

You didn't respond to the point I'm making though. I'm not disputing these things: Property tax may be an unethical manner for states to tax inhabitants - I have not challenged this in my previous post. California (and most other governments) absolutely misallocate their funds on social projects, climate "justice," saving the fish/squirrels, et al. They do this to the massive detriment of other, more important spending - like infrastructure. So on those topics we can agree - or at least not disagree directly. No, my point is that prop 13 has been a boon for certain property owners to the detriment of others, which is why it has become so entrenched. And the unintentional side effect of this has been to create a massive deficit in CA's budget, one which is mostly hidden, because people who don't live there don't understand how CA's unique property tax exclusions work. And others don't understand how much more expensive it would be to live there if tax burdens were equalized. For instance, take two properties and compare them side-by-side. They're neighbors in San Francisco. 45 Liberty 23 Liberty Google street view If you compare them on google maps, you'll see they're effectively the same property. One of them pays a yearly tithe to the state of $50,400. The other pays a yearly tithe of $1,800. That differential, of $48,600, accumulates over time, but it never shows up on any balance sheet. This is the actual, real, deficit I'm talking about. In the next 10 years it'll amount to a half a million dollars (more with interest) - and that's just between two neighboring properties. The aggregate effect of this massive, marginal under-taxation, is to generate insurmountable, unimaginable debts. I bet if you integrated a function like that, the total, hidden, debt would be in the hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars over the last number of decades. These are the type of debts that insurance companies can't pay. The type of debts that lead to increased insurance premiums for people who don't even live in California. The type of debts that lead to the cost of eggs tripling and people wondering 'why'. The type of debts that lead cities and towns to make system level choices when it comes to allowing their infrastructure to collapse. The type of debts that bankrupt states. In essence, CA has been writing checks its politicians couldn't cash. Yes, CA budgets their money incorrectly. It is also true that prop 13 has turned the state into a real estate cartel. One in which long-term owners are the ones pocketing property taxes that would otherwise go to fund the state's infrastructure, or would otherwise operate to prevent people who live in CA currently from living there because they can't afford its actually cost thereby preventing the debt from accumulating in the first place. // Break // I am not arguing that taxes need to increase in CA. I am not arguing that property taxes are fundamentally 'fair' or 'unfair'. Those are separate discussions. I'm pointing out that the property tax system in CA is fundamentally and uniquely different than in every other state I'm aware of wherein people who own similar properties pay massively different (10X or sometimes 100X) tax bills. See the above for proof. So no, prop 13 is not ethical - it's one of the most insidious, discriminatory, and unethical laws in operation in our society, and we're witnessing it bear fruit right now. But because it has complex, hidden effects, grants certain people massive (and legal) $ arbitrage, it's simultaneously a very easy law whose effects are easy to obfuscate and also one that gets a lot of people to stand in defense of because they benefit from it directly. It's also a reason I scoff when people say that CA contributes more to the federal tax base than any other state. Yeah, right, so long as you ignore the enormous hole they dig themselves deeper and deeper into year after year by passing and keeping laws like prop 13.

I don't disagree, but focusing on what's listed on paper is missing the point. I'm sure if I looked through their books the majority of their expenditures would be misallocated. That doesn't address the collection problem, however, or the actual deficit that is reflected in the way this disaster has unfolded. Much of CA's property tax base winds up in the pockets of private owners due to prop 13. No other state I'm aware of has a property tax policy which directly and systematically under funds their government quite like this one does. That has consequences over the long run - ones we are seeing right now. The point I was making was more along the lines that if you design a tax policy around not collecting taxes from the people that live in your state, you're going to eventually run into the consequences of said tax policy. In this case I'm just pointing at prop 13 as having the largest / outsize impact on creating a massive accumulated deficit CA has avoided contending with. They may have had a "surplus" on paper for numerous years. Maybe now they have a "deficit." Politicians may have touted said surplus and maybe even some of them felt pretty good about themselves and got some kudos from their voter base. I bet it felt good to them. Maybe they had a $100 Bajillion dollars surplus in their Excel sheets or PowerPoint slides. Cool. It's an illusion. It's a number on a piece of paper. It means absolutely nothing. Reality keeps the actual balance sheet. The truth is that there is a real, actual, physical, literal deficit buried in the ground, reflected by their crumbling infrastructure, empty reservoirs, ineffectual government, understaffed agencies, man-made drought due to policy choices favoring industries over citizenry, etc, etc. It took many 10s of years to create a problem this big. Running California properly costs a lot more than they spend. Too many people live there who "tax" the system without paying into it. That's what I'm talking about. That's the deficit that builds and builds over decades due to tax policy like prop 13 and which allows the party to continue right up until the balcony collapses. This is that kind of deficit. Or, if you like, you can look at it like this: all the insurance money and construction costs that are going to be incurred over the next number of years "rebuilding" CA was the actual deficit they weren't carrying on the books. At a minimum. Now start doing that math on all the other mismanaged forest or grassland in CA that's all still waiting to go up in smoke. You'll start to get an idea about how far behind they truly are. *Note: nothing in this post should be construed as desire to increase taxes on "us" - we all pay too much as it is.

I've got some legit questions for the "Elon's a Nazi" crowd: What are you concerned he's going to do? Is he expressing a desire to ethnically cleanse the country? Is the concern here more that he is "signaling" to a certain sub-element of our society? All of the above? I genuinely want to know. Best I can tell is he is a guy who is building electric cars, rocket ships, brain-body computer interfaces who is also pretty eclectic. I saw plenty of kids like that in public school growing up. They weren't Nazis. I can "get" that it wasn't a good look, but do any of you hold a serious concern out there that he's going to attempt to reboot the 3rd Reich? What direction are you concerned he's moving in?

From your keyboard to God's ears.

I watched it and I agree. I'll keep my eye on him going forward. Seems like one of those guys that has a true grasp of what the hell he's talking about. Which is surprisingly rare (and refreshing) these days. Talking to a family member, it's apparently the case that many of these home catch on fire from the inside. An ember will float into an air vent or the like and then ignite flammable material on the inside of the home and so on. I certainly agree that building codes and insurance have a big role to play going forward. As an aside, I can't help but also point at prop 13 as a contributing factor. This is perhaps one of the consequences of serially under-funding your state based on a property tax law that all but guarantees your local governments will be unable to fund basic services. The way I see it, this fire was a decades-long policy decision in the making.

The problem is that if it is the case that there are unstoppable fires, then we need not build in those areas. Ask me how much sympathy I have for New Orleans - you don't rebuild a city next to the ocean that is below sea level - or if you do, you accept the inevitable consequence of being underwater. Else, if the fire is stoppable, through preparation, forest management, etc, we should have been preparing for them. Said another way, the conditions that enabled this fire to happen should never have been allowed to manifest. It hearkens back to the Smoky the Bear commercials from when I was a kid: "only you, can prevent forest fires." It's almost like prevention has been on the menu for some time...hmmmm.

They'll probably do something along these lines, but it won't be available if you're over any reasonable income limit. See the following: https://www.ebikeincentives.org/eligibility/ They did the same thing with electric bikes, but they made sure that anyone who actually contributes to the tax kiddy isn't eligible. LOL. Someone who barely makes $45K per year ain't spending $2,000 on a bicycle, and hence probably doesn't benefit from the credit. It'll be the standard democratic "this feels and looks good" vs "it is good." True climate emergencies would necessitate removing all barriers to addressing "existential issues" - yet another reason (#69) why I don't take their "climate change" rhetoric seriously.

All the "could work" discussion begs an obvious question: why weren't we doing it before? Not to say that we can't do things better; we can and should. This is clearly driven by the times, however, and is yet another loop in the reactionary merry-go-round. I'm suspect for this, and this reason alone.

You can always "soft cancel" like I'm currently doing. Have some Fidelity accounts now and am slowly transferring a lot of my stuff their way. I'll probably just keep USAA to pay all my bills, and maybe some insurance products I've had for a long time.

VPN or not, isn't all your traffic encrypted while you're on https???

Pffffft. How could I forget lol. I remember it was only a couple of years ago the Dems were charging hard to codify Jan 6th as the second coming of Sept 11th. Nary a peep today. Maybe sanity still has a chance.

I've never been able to see the connection between term limits and resolving corruption. Am I to believe that a congress person can't engage in unethical behavior during their first term??? If anything, it just puts them under a time crucible to get all the goodies they're looking for run through as quickly as possible; it fast tracks whatever corrupt impulse is there in the first place. There's no inherent constraint placed on corruption by time. It may limit the time that someone has to become corrupt, but a good question to ponder is why don't we put 4-6 year term limits on officers? Why aren't we all corrupt by the time we're Lt Cols? I just don't see a connection there. The problem is lack of accountability and lack of transparency. When Nancy Pelosi was engaging in legislation that was going to benefit Nvidia and other tech companies while simultaneously purchasing stock options she knew would react positively to the actions she was taking, that all should have taken place within the public view. It wasn't classified. It wasn't secret. Basically I guess I'm effectively suggesting that congress people should be required to conduct all legislative business in full view of the public. I have no idea what that looks like, but body cameras would be a start. Drafting legislation? Put the computer screens on a YouTube stream. Meeting with a lobbyist? Have a camera crew there to stream it on X. Obviously this is ridiculous, but the core of the problem is our government is allowed to keep a lot of unsecret things secret.

I agree with you, but to be technical, Twitter changed dramatically. It mattered a lot who was in charge, and who was making decisions. Twitter got way fuckin' better. It's a clear example of how much modern organizational structure is literally useless / functions as a boat anchor. Personally I think we can extrapolate that same lesson to just about any organization you look at. Lockheed, military, government, McDonalds. You name it, there's probably a few departments of "workers" not contributing much. Probably the only orgs that don't suffer from that at some level are start-ups. The real tragedy is that all that wasted labor represents massive economic gains if it were to be rededicated towards actual productive pursuits.

Yet another misfire. No one has a problem with billionaires per se. We have a problem with certain billionaire's objectives. See the following: Bill Gates' climate / clean meat / no meat / spray vaccine efforts, etc George Soros' bank-rolling all manner of "grass roots" campaigns to modify society, wage lawfare, BLM riots, et al Peter Thiel and Elon Musk aren't trying to dismantle our sovereignty or take away any of our rights. See the difference? These conversations would be more productive if you'd come to terms with your oppositions' actual POV.