Rain Tax !

[Mega]

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...-based-weather

They just can't stop stealing..........

[dcarrigg]

Re: Rain Tax !

Yikes, I remember not so long ago when zerocred stuck more or less to business and financial news. Haven't been over there in a while. They're just full blown screaming at the moon about socialism and sanctuary cities and shit now, huh? They're down to like 10% or 20% of stories even remotely related to markets. Guess politics must sell ads better.

[Mega]

Re: Rain Tax !

Watching the end of the DNC is most enjoyable...............AOC will be the last straw

[dcarrigg]

Re: Rain Tax !

Anyway, looked into it a bit. Here's the bill. It looks like it lets cities/townships/counties charge a fee for use of the storm drain system, like a sewer fee. Then it lets the state take 5% of that fee up to a max of $50,000 per town per year and build new stormwater drains with it. It doesn't require local governments to do this, it just allows them to. Some states already do this. The average monthly fee is like $5 per home. It's pretty common in coastal states. Mass does it. I think the Carolinas do too. I'm kind of surprised Jersey didn't.

To be honest, I think it's easier if you just build this type of stuff into a single levy property tax and don't make 100 different bills that nickel and dime everyone. It sucks to have to write a $4.78 check every month. I'd much rather just pay the damn town one lump sum per quarter or whatever so I don't have to do as much BS fussing about it. But at the same time, it doesn't seem like something to get all worked up about either. It's not like water and sewer bills are strange unheard of things in America.

Anyways, I found a map by state that lists the number of municipalities that have stormwater utilities which charge fees. Here you go:



The only way a bill this boring could get your blood pressure up is if you believe that public services should be delivered for free. Then you might start screaming "RAIN TAX!" "THEFT!" "SOCIALISM!" But it's the most boring thing in a world. It's assessing charges for the storm drains. They don't build and maintain themselves. And they're not sexy. But they are important. I'd be more worried that they're going to be creating more quasi-public entities with bonding authority. New Jersey being New Jersey, somebody's liable to get it in their head that some small town needs to go into significant debt to build the Cadillac of stormwater systems. And local citizens often don't pay close attention to the finances of these little authorities and utilities. And the death of the local press really leaves a gap there. I don't even really keep up myself. Best I can do to keep up myself is keep an eye on bondview, but it's not really a proactive way of doing things.

[Mega]

Re: Rain Tax !

I look forward to walking across the cold dead body of the DNC........they should have picked a great leader!

He was better than AOC & his plan to save the Earth made more sense!

[Mega]

Re: Rain Tax !

[dcarrigg]

Re: Rain Tax !

It's funny, Mega, only b/c AOC and her fans hate the DNC even more than you do, and they'd love to see it die. They're organizing with DSA outside of the DNC party structure. They pay dues. It's the party Michael Harrington started. But US is a 2 party system and they know that, so they try to infiltrate the Democrats. But they hate each other. DSA people really hate the Clintons, maybe more than Trump people. AOC knocked out the 3rd highest ranking Democrat in the House. The DNC spent millions trying to defeat her.

Anyways, it's why it's funny to me that you think AOC is the leader of the Dems. It'd be almost like saying Nick Clegg was the leader of the Tories back after the 2010 election because of the con/libdem coalition.

[seobook]

Re: Rain Tax !

They're down to like 10% or 20% of stories even remotely related to markets. Guess politics must sell ads better.

more politics = more rage = more reflexive sharing across social media sites = more traffic.

it is not that the CPMs are higher for overstated political garbage, but rather that it has a genuine visceral response that virtually guarantees sharing among some subset of the population.

p.s. Trump is the most _____ of all time, in fact one time he even...

[dcarrigg]

Re: Rain Tax !

more politics = more rage = more reflexive sharing across social media sites = more traffic.

it is not that the CPMs are higher for overstated political garbage, but rather that it has a genuine visceral response that virtually guarantees sharing among some subset of the population.

p.s. Trump is the most _____ of all time, in fact one time he even...

Yeah. I don't know the technical end like you do. But I know what my eyes show me. And the fact that "everything's becoming the same" tells me it's what works. Every page is now an endless feed. Scroll scroll scroll. Every news site is roughly more of the same, saying the same things, with the same general focus. I have no doubt it correlates to clicks and revenue. I only wonder what it does to real life when people let themselves be consumed by it. Getting off the big platforms is getting harder all the time. But my general rule of thumb is to avoid the places using scientifically-tuned methods to keep me engaged and locked in. If I'm gonna be manipulated, I'd like them to try a little harder than that. I mean, if you just look at everything from facebook to linkedin to twitter etc. it all looks increasingly identical. There's not one for planning and sharing with friends, and another for 140 text characters to the world, and another for professional colleagues. That's so last decade. Now there's just image macros and video clips and endless scroll and roughly the same memes and shouting wherever you go. No thanks.

[seobook]

Re: Rain Tax !

Yeah. I don't know the technical end like you do. But I know what my eyes show me. And the fact that "everything's becoming the same" tells me it's what works. Every page is now an endless feed. Scroll scroll scroll. Every news site is roughly more of the same, saying the same things, with the same general focus. I have no doubt it correlates to clicks and revenue. I only wonder what it does to real life when people let themselves be consumed by it. Getting off the big platforms is getting harder all the time.

Games are really picking up steam too. Nothing worse than sitting in line at a grocery store & person in front of you is playing some MMORPG while (not) checking out, as everyone else in line behind them waits longer and longer.

And all the big platforms are leaning hard into video / TV shows / movie streaming too.

Everyone will have some version of an addictive vice tuned to them.

There is still a bit of the older version of "different, but same" out there. Helping my diet today (as I threw up a bit in my mouth) was waiting for a to go order where a girl asked another girl who was standing in line (who perhaps looked foreign or exotic?) to hold her dog so she could upload a picture of her dog being held by someone else to Instagram.

So much effort for something almost nobody will see & even fewer will care about.

Guess my views make me an old curmudgeon, but then I am almost 40 now.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Rain Tax !

Games are really picking up steam too. Nothing worse than sitting in line at a grocery store & person in front of you is playing some MMORPG while (not) checking out, as everyone else in line behind them waits longer and longer.

And all the big platforms are leaning hard into video / TV shows / movie streaming too.

Everyone will have some version of an addictive vice tuned to them.

There is still a bit of the older version of "different, but same" out there. Helping my diet today (as I threw up a bit in my mouth) was waiting for a to go order where a girl asked another girl who was standing in line (who perhaps looked foreign or exotic?) to hold her dog so she could upload a picture of her dog being held by someone else to Instagram.

So much effort for something almost nobody will see & even fewer will care about.

Guess my views make me an old curmudgeon, but then I am almost 40 now.

Endless play is the worst. "Binge watching" is awful. It's even changing the nature of TV too, right? Because you can't do lighthearted episodic programming really well on the binge. The format only works well with long soap-opera story arcs with all the same old Days of Our Lives cliffhangers and suspense builders. They just apply it to different settings, space, comic universe, middle ages, rome, whatever. But a huge chunk of Netflix programming is a dark, heavy, moody soap opera set somewhere different. Always the same though. Dark filters on the camera. Antiheroes and villains, no actual genuinely good people. Melodramatic music in minor keys, mixed and engineered hollow to sound right on tinny phone and laptop speakers. Light beaming into a dark room from behind the actress. A single tear rolling down her chin for a full minute. Cut to the next terrible thing. End the episode right before we know what happens. Cue that music again. Now sit there and consume another one. It's more depressing than the news.

Even worse is the predictive programming. Better half has a hulu subscription. Any time you watch a show, it tries to get you to watch the Handmaid's Tale. I've got no interest in that, but damn are they trying to sell it. Another weird one is Toto's Africa on Youtube. I know several people who've noticed this. It's like Rome, all roads lead there. I can't understand why, either. I could be listening to anything from Chopin to Ella Fitzgerald to obscure hiphop, and Youtube's gonna autoplay Toto's Africa within an hour if I'm not paying attention. Doesn't matter where I am, whether I'm signed in, what browser I'm using, or if I'm even using my own machine. The goog loves toto. This is just another reason my summer 19 project is getting off the goog. But I reflexively just go to youtube to find random songs. Have had to re-train myself to get a whole album going and do things more deliberately.

You ever read Danny Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow? Seems like all these companies are betting the world on us thinking fast and being lazy. I'd rather think slow. So I'm doing my best to kick the habit. Shit can't be all that much healthier than cigarettes. And they're using a lot of similar techniques to keep people using and hooked.