Drunk_Engineer

Unless the property is sold, Prop 13 caps the increase at no more than 2% annually. So if you have owned a home for more than 10 years, the tax basis is probably way lower than market value -- particularly in a place like Marin County.

LOL..."Highest Tax Rate" in the country. This is the state which passed Prop 13 -- locking property tax rates at 1970's levels. The decline in property tax revenue is why parents are having to self-fund school programs.

You are right to be cynical. I'm looking at the CPUC "Proposed Middle Mile" network that would be funded in California -- and it largely overlaps existing service. The Metropolitan Bay Area would be well-funded with this project, while entire rural areas are not included at all.

https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e17e4e...

In the US there are no pedestrian safety regulations.

YMMV. Google map estimates for cycling are very inaccurate in my experience.

The US has one of the worst road safety records of any modern industrialized country. The reason is that other agencies have actually not solved the "common reproducible" errors at all.

The problem is that NTSB has a bizarro prioritization scheme. They have spent huge efforts investigating things like hot air balloon crashes, and even Harrison Ford's crash landing a vintage airplane into a golf course. The crazier the incident, the more likely they investigate -- which is completely opposite of how they should be prioritizing. The result is that the common, everyday rear-end car crashes are just written off.

Interestingly no mention of NPR's role in the disinformation campaign:

https://fair.org/home/public-radios-pro-fracking-spin/

Many cities in CA have designated "truck" routes, as defined by vehicle weight. For example, Redwood City municipal code states:

"The following streets are hereby declared to be truck traffic routes for the movement of vehicles exceeding a maximum gross weight of three (3) tons, hereinafter called 'trucks', and the City Manager is hereby authorized and directed to designate such streets by appropriate signs as "truck route". The streets are specifically designated as follows:..."

and:

"No person shall operate any truck having a gross weight in excess of three (3) tons on any street in the City except on those streets specified in the preceding section..."

Any road not designated a Truck Route.

Many of those doctors were nothing more than "pill-mill" outlets. Building a criminal case would have been easy.

Because higher-ups in Congress, the DEA and DOJ were almost certainly paid off to ignore the Sacklers. So if the Sacklers were prosecuted, they would bring down other powerful insiders.

Here is a 60-minutes interview with DEA agents who were inexplicably taken off cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd-43K-rdQA

There was absolutely nothing "trailblazaing" about the BART engineering, rather they were just completely ignorant of the world around them. The St Petersburg metro had ATC and platform screen doors way back in 1961. The spread-spectrum radio research project was also a gigantic waste of taxpayer dollars (radio-based signaling was a common off-the-shelf technology by then).

Keep in mind that everything in Spain is much less expensive compared to the US. Especially in a place like Toledo, which has 20% unemployment. They are a family business, with just one guy working in the "factory", so probably minimal employee overhead. Material and tooling costs for making a sword are pretty cheap anyway, even in the US.

Toledo used to be famous for its sword makers, but now all the other shops just import cheap knock-offs from China. So that's why he is called the last master sword-maker.

Mr. Zamorano is a real gem. Despite showing up unannounced, he let us explore the workshop, and we learned a tremendous amount about the craft.

The technical term for this is Risk Compensation:

"Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to perceived levels of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected."

Target has been reducing hours of employees throughout the country.

Incandescent light bulbs are generally illegal now.

It is hilarious that Timoty Geithner, of all people, would write this editorial -- given his own problems with failing to report income to the IRS.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=6704526&page=1

California and NYC have a declining population.

Thank you. Had to scroll to the next page to find this comment. The lab leak theory never made any sense, because it does not fit the timeline of the viral spread. Nor does it explain why some countries already had T-cell immunity to the virus.

SF just has fewer trucks, which is why you probably don't recall too many incidents. Nationwide, increasing number of SUV/trucks is a major problem in ped safety.

The "negative" impacts of CAFE standards were entirely by design. They were written that way to benefit the domestic auto industry, which is very uncompetitive in the small and midsized vehicle segments. By making smaller vehicles uncompetitive (or simply unavailable), it eliminated some serious competition.

You failed to take account for the fact that cars are two orders magnitude heavier than bicycles.

And whenever a city in the US proposes some improvements to the ped/bike experience in a shopping area, the local small business owners will cry bloody murder. As someone who also prefers to walk to nearby stores, I feel no guilt whatsoever about buying stuff online instead of a local merchant. Amazon, for all its faults, has never showed up to a local planning meeting in my town to lobby against a sidewalk or bike lane improvement.

There is no obligation to "support" a for-profit corporation like some kind of charity. Certainly VW deserves no such charity. It is a recidivist emissions violator that has been caught doing defeat devices on multiple occasions. It treats customers with the same contempt as it does the EPA.

It is good though that you got your vehicle on lease. If it is like my first-generation A4, everything will start to fall apart after 3 years.

As a former Audi owner, I would never ever buy anything from VW (certainly not after the dieselgate scandal). But good luck with your $45k purchase!

Wait until you hear about California's Prop 13...

Private companies don't have to be corporations at all. If investors don't like the "double-taxation" problem, then drop the incorporation and use a different entity. Of course, they would loose the benefits of incorporation (i.e. limited liability) -- clearly many investors find that benefit worth the tax cost.

If a corporation doesn't want to pay corporate taxes, it always has the option of going private.