Here, here. I second that salute.
My one finger salutes are always meant in a positive, uplifting way as well.
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LOL. “Hey Seattle - you’re number one!”
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South eastern Vancouver Island on high well-drained mostly clay loam. Stocking density has no application as it is "high May/June and 0 July/August and sometimes September. Temps 25’ to 35’C. with relatively low humidity. No “useful” rain from end of June to mid or later September. You need either irrigation or low land. Lots of manure would help but I don’t have that. So I buy beef as long as I afford to do so.
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In Amherst Mass the property tax scam has flourished under the flag of building a new library. The beautiful old building with plenty of room in the stacks had to come down and be replaced with a whole new 140 plus million dollar structure because the beautiful old skylight above the main room was leaking. Kinda like buying a new car because you have a flat tire. State matching funds !! Yippie. Who knows what it will really cost? They’ve been selling off all their books for two years in a pay what you want sale. My library is now extensive and includes rare hard to find works, some of which would be a couple of hundred dollars. These were the library’s only copies. The stacks were only about half full anyway.
My writer in residence position had lasted for quite a few years, but writing about the Covid scam definitely met with disapproval from the trustees. It also shut down some of my business relationships in the world of performing musicians. I understand the fervid righteousness of the people in western amass but the most ideologically committed seem to never lose money for their beliefs. Think of the syndrome as prosperity gospel for atheists.
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As an ex-Washingtonian I will join your salute if you don’t mind.
Seattle is where I learned about bad government.
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The 4.4 acres where I live had the top soil removed and sold before this idiot from the city bought the land.
We struggled with sparse growth for years. It was not until I applied dolomite lime that we saw a change. A couple years ago a neighbor and I went hallvsoes on a large spreader for my tractor. Several of us neighbors pool together to buy the lime and fertilizer at bulk pricing and one neighbor uses my tractor so spread on all of our properties. The difference is amazing. The variety of plants I have in the pasture is no even more diverse, the soil is improving much more rapidly now.
There are more pollinators than ever, and fireflies, and other flying insects. Best of all I have an even greater variety of birds at the feeder outside my kitchen window.
I let segments of my property go to flower and let it reseed in succession each year. The wind helps mix things up.
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The same happened to us in North Georgia. We bought land and put it in conservation, and property taxes were under $500 per year. Once we built a house, it shot up considerably, although still reasonable compared to many folks down in metro Atlanta. Now fighting with the county because they have ramped them up to over $10k per year. Property taxes are a SCAM!!
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Im so happy to hear you covering this. I have spoken about this many times, but i had no idea how absolutely despicable it is.
I just knew it to be wrong. Way worse than i couldve ever imagined. Im starting to lean toward Michael Malice as anarchy as the answer. Ive leaned conservative for smaller government reasons. But no matter who is in i never see smaller government happen. Its just all wholesale disgusting. Federal, state, local level. DISGUSTING
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Sorry for the spam, @cmartenson just curious on your thoughts about this, with the memory gaps. In the video this backend coder who formally worked for Netflix goes over an MIT study of brain scans of people that heavily use AI vs people that don’t.
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School bond debt is but a pittance when compared to the long term maintenance liabilities of roads, sewers, water pipes, electrical grids, sidewalks, highways, tunnels, bridges, flood control, and sanitation.
Strong Towns has been addressing this issue for over 10 years with educational material and local strategies to build up resilience and financial stability in Americans towns and cities.
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I don’t understand, is our feldspar not cost competitive?
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That “vaccines as National Security Asset” story was covered as being a hilarious example of bureaucrats getting high on their own supply. But Im more concerned.
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What happens when you try to FOIA information about tests run on National Security Assets?
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What happens to people who attack National Security Assets?
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What happens to people who leak otherwise secret information about National Security Assets?
This may be less about about a ham-fisted PR campaign and more about a move to make RFK into a domestic terrorist.
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I know RFK jr. is being nice and diplomatic, but Trump is definitely a narcissist. He is extremely self absorbed, uses people and can’t take any criticism. The example of him liking music and sports doesn’t preclude him from having narcissistic traits. Look at all the self absorbed, narcissistic Instagram influencers. These people have hobbies and other interests besides looking at themselves in the mirror and taking selfies. Narcissism exists on a spectrum. Trump might not be the most pathological type of narcissist, but he most certainly exists on that spectrum somewhere.
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The “Why We Vaccinate” campaign to be tested in DC. I know the answer already.
Pharma and Doctors “Because it makes us money, not just from vaccines, but from ‘treating’ the damage.”
Patients and Parents: “Because you’re vulnerable to our propaganda”.
There, done!
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The narrative that “Elon gets a lot of money from the government” has always seemed very stilted to me. His companies SpaceX, Tesla, etc. receive money from the government. They also are contracted to do some amount of business with the government. It would be like saying “The CEO of Boeing gets a ton of money from the government” because Boeing receives massive funds from DoD and the like. I’ve dug into the figures and non-contract funding received by Musk’s companies over their lifetimes is a pittance compared to how much a number of companies (Boeing) receive in just a single year!
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I wrote back to the county assessor this last month and got 40k knocked off my assessed value. Maybe you can do the same? I simply left a message asking why and for an explanation and within 48 hours I saw the taxes drop to pre 2020 for my house. Complain! They hate that.
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Regarding brain fog, I’ve had an absolutely appalling memory since mid childhood (before that it was actually very good). It’s an annoying thing, because it’s like an invisible disability. As I once heard a stand-up comedian say, people complain that David Beckham isn’t so bright, but they never complain that Steven Hawking was crap at football (i.e. soccer for North Americans). So similar to David Beckham, through my life, while people should have been helping me out with my disability, instead they were blaming me and getting annoyed for forgetting stuff.
In recent years I started seriously wondering if the bad memory was from the prolonged course of Phenobarbitone that I was put on because of a couple of seizures I had in early childhood. Both seizures occurred around vaccinations (my mum was dismissed and ridiculed for inquiring about a possible connection). Those seizures severely affected my confidence in things like public performances, because I’d always get the psychosomatic feeling that a seizure was coming on when I was up in front of people.
So now I wonder if the memory thing (as well as seizures, especially given that adjuvants then were often mercury, I think) was directly because of vaccines, or perhaps a combined effect of both vaccines and Phenobarbitone.
On a vaguely related point, it was interesting (and a bit unnerving) to note that when I got Covid (Omicron, I guess, according to when it happened), I had this heady dizzy feeling a lot of the time. Perhaps my brain/nervous system is somehow susceptible in some way.
Something also to note is that my memory doesn’t seem to have got any worse since COVID times, thankfully! Maybe there was nothing left for Covid to attack! 
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It’s not often I disagree with Chris, but this is one of those instances.
I don’t deny that property taxes, in many cases, are extortion rackets. They may be contrived as a way to keep people down whilst enriching the people who are out to enslave or destroy them. And no doubt in some cases, the funds are diverted to wasteful expenditures.
However, in perhaps the majority of cases, there is more to the story. The Youtube channel “Not Just Bikes” did an absolutely outstanding presentation showing that all of suburbia is an unsustainable ponzi scheme:
This playlist has the entire series about suburban development:
The thesis is that the low-density urban sprawl is FUNDAMENTALLY not financially sustainable, because the services - roads, water pipes, sewers, waste collection, etc - cannot be economically justified when people are spread out at such low density. Property taxes alone simply do NOT cover the cost of maintaining this living arrangement. Therefore, the way to keep perpetuating this unsustainable model is with perpetual growth, since this growth brings a temporary influx of tax revenue for as long as the growth persists. Suburbia, in order to survive, HAS to keep growing.
As for the corruption one sees with regard to increasing property taxes, it may be because the people in charge are trying to squeeze as much as they can from the average citizen to finance the unsustainable.
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I’m not sure. I just know right now, potters and commercial glaze manufacturers can’t get it from Custer. Maybe the processing or mining costs can’t compete with Chinese or Indian potash feldspars because the cost to mine isn’t worth it. A similar thing happened to gerstley borate which was used in glazes. It was inconsistent as hell but the boron acts as a flux and glass strengthener. Makes it more durable. The switch to frits for glazes was a welcome over gerstley for me. Those glass formers are very consistent and made glazes better. It didn’t take but a minute to transition my glazes to boron frits. I’m out of the biz now except for a yearly throwing gig in ND. I imagine for a while glaze manufacturers and potters will figure out the correct ratios of the foreign supplied feldspars in their glazes but the cost to ship will be a lot higher. The differences of molecular weight percentages of potash, etc in foreign feldspars is giving my glaze artist friend fits.
It’s the “peak feldspar” thing that made me wonder about its effect on the albeit tiny pottery and glaze biz, if it’s a thing similar to peak oil.
Replying to Shox -
Sustaining suburbia requires that those living in suburbia pay up on the cost to maintain: piping, roads, wire, etc. Instead of requiring a set aside of the amount of funding to maintain suburbia, the money is diverted. Hence, suburbia is not “sustainable”. California reached into the property tax revenues and ripped off municipalities leaving absolutely no allocation for city maintenance. My town relies almost completely on business taxes to fund city services. In short, state government itself can be considered the source of bait and switch (taxes) plus the no maintenance Ponzi Schemes.
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