Posts by Paul Campbell
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remember only 140,000 odd people get to get into "Jehovah Witness heaven" - I've always wondered why they come door to door angling for more converts - if they were smart they'd keep quiet about it .....
Maybe it works that as better candidates arrive along those who are a little less worthy get booted downstairs ....
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wait, you mean it's not a sexual reference .....
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I lived under prop 13 for 20 years - it has a bunch of real flaws that are largely political: firstly it can't be repealed without 2/3 of the citizens voting for it - secondly it locked in very low property taxes (rates) for people who owned property at that time - that makes it pretty much impossible to repeal it since older people who are the ones owning the property are much more likely to vote. Valuations were expected to normalise eventually - but haven't because later laws allowed people to move and keep their pre-prop13 bonanza - commercial property was also included and of course companies never die.
It resulted in a lot of structural inequity in the property tax system - my old boss, a pre-13 tax payer owned a home worth 10 times mine - he paid less than half the tax I did.
In CA schools/police/fire/etc used to be largely paid for by cities through property taxes - post prop 13 the state is responsible for funding a lot of these things - that's good for poor cities which used to have much worse schools than richer cities - post prop13 things are better but schools in general are worse off than they were, the CA education system now really sucks - we ponied up the money and used to spend $20k a year to send our kids to a private school. State income tax in CA maxes out at 10%, that's not something they can increased (federal tax is a further 33-35%)
Note: in NZ your rates are set by a city looking at how much money it needs and then apportioning it between rate payers depending on the valuations of their properties. In CA property tax is fixed to a limit of 1% of the property's actual valuation and valuation increases are limited to 2%/year (unless a property is sold) - even though inflation is usually much more than that.
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Ah - I see this is obvious ACT propaganda being inserted into AirNZ safety videos, how insidious ....
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Tables are a relatively recent innovation - only provided since the end of the 6 o'clock swill - 'last drinks' used to be at 5:50 ....
The inter-tidal zone between the dance floor and table space provides endless entertainment - from afar ....
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I bet the "ladies bar" was originally carpeted, and maybe the corridor used to keep that out of sight too ...
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I'm generally in favour of legalisation and the occasional legal medical toke - it certainly helped a friend of mine though his recent radiation and chemo - he came close to wasting away even then - trouble was he had tongue cancer from years of non-legal/non-medicinal poking smot - roll on the legalised safe substitutes ...
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And in late breaking news researchers have found spots on chromosomes 6 and 22 which appear to be responsible for some 30% of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - which may point to new treatments
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Back in the day when beer was a live brew in one big tank it the cellar and delivered by the tanker load from the brewing monopoly .... the story about the upstairs bar at the Cook was that once the band was done and everyone went home they would get out one of those big rollers they use on cricket pitches and run it up and down the carpet a couple of times to squeeze all the unused beer back into the tanks in the cellar .... as good an explanation for why the beer tasted the way it did as any .....
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Even in a circle. With handbags in the middle.
I think that's what the rugby players are doing on the telly when they 'scrum' - comparing handbags