Mayor Cieslewicz Comments on Doyle’s State Budget Signing

Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz:

“Contrary to what some have claimed, this is not a ‘fully-funded freeze’. Such a freeze would have increased shared revenues to reflect the rising costs for providing basic services, and account for inflation in the freeze formula itself. This budget does neither. Adjusting for inflation, this year’s budget effectively cuts our shared revenue payment by 6%, on the heels of a 16% shared revenue cut in the prior budget.
“While city government continues to tighten its belt, property taxes rise faster than inflation because more of our budget must be borne by the property tax. Fifteen years ago property taxes made up 54% of Madison’s budget. Today, thanks to continually eroding state aids, property taxes make up almost 70% of our budget. In other words, what is truly driving property taxes is not increased spending, but cuts in state aids.

Schools, Quality of Life, Jobs, Economic Growth and Globalization

Yesterday’s property tax bill (including not small increases in local and school taxes) along with recent articles on the China Price and Milwaukee’s loss of unskilled labor jobs serve to remind Wisconsin residents of the real issues facing our state:

  • Encouraging the formation of more new businesses. I don’t believe the formation of yet another quasi-government organization is the answer. Rather, let’s simplify (and reduce) the paperwork that any organization must support to operate in Wisconsin.
  • Broadband: Wisconsin is stuck with SBC, a telco that has done nothing to offer true, 2 way broadband (100X the speed of today’s rather slow DSL/cable services) to Wisconsin residents. I have not seen any indication that our state’s political leadership has boarded the cluetrain on this one.
  • Biotech certainly has great promise for Wisconsin, however, historically the benefits have generally gone to out of state firms. Perhaps this will change somewhat over time.

Without a strong, growing tax base, we’ll continue to see substantial increases in local property taxes. I don’t believe this is a sustainable strategy.

Bear Creek’s Bill Lorge on Campaign & Media Reform

Bill Lorge (LorgeforSenate@aol.com) email his list of Political & Media Reforms (a very useful list it is):

  • Campaign Reforms
    • $100 Limit
    • Eliminate $1 Check-Off
    • Matching Grant Money
    • State Contractors Cannot Donate
    • Eliminate PAC’s
    • Ballots mailed out with Tax Forms (timing challenge, I think)
    • Online Voting (more challenges)
    • Term Limits
    • High School Seniors can vote
    • Eliminate the State Elections Board
  • Media Reform
    • Balanced Print Media Reporting (! – I like this: “A better solution would be to have the State put legal ads on the Internet and avoid putting them in the papers altogether. This would save a ton of taxpayer money and lower our local property taxes; As one Town Board Chair once told me his biggest expense is paying the local weekly paper for legal ads.)”
    • We (the public) own the airwaves and should be free to use it.

I’m not sure my synopsis did justice to Lorge’s document. Print and read it yourself here: 155K PDF. Or read it by clicking below…

(more…)

Paradise off Highway 10


The Hertz airport shuttle brought a must unexpected surprise today. The inquisitive driver asked if I was flying to Denver. No, I said, San Francisco was my destination. “It will be 40 degrees cooler there than it is here in Phoenix.” I replied that it was 107 last night, when I landed.
“My place is wonderful, and cool. I have cottonwoods on my property which provide a very pleasant shade. In fact, during June, I put up a hammock under the cottonwoods, setup a fan and slept outside at night with my three golden retrievers. Beautiful.”
Where might this paradise be?
“50 miles west of Phoenix, 2 miles north of I-10, the other side of the White Mountains. I bought the 10 acres 50 years ago for $250.00 (!). I bought it and planted those cottonwoods.” My annual property tax bill is $60.00. Those golden retrievers keep an eye on the property during the day.
How’s the commute?
“I drive 65 (the I-10 speed limit is 75). I arrive before all those people flying past me.”
I asked if civilization has encroached on his paradise?
“There’s no one within 5 miles.”
With that, I continued my journey to San Francisco.

Wisconsin School Finance Reform Proposal

The Governor’s Task Force on Educational Excellence is evidently poised to suggest that the state fund schools by:

  • Increase the state sales tax to 6% (from 5%) and reduce property taxes by 20% (I’ll believe that when I see it)
  • Eliminate the QEO (Qualified Economic Offer)
  • Increase Class size reduction funding to $2,500 per child
  • Reimburse school districts at a higher rate for educating high-cost special education students.

Amy Hetzner summarizes the proposal.
I think that school funding should include:

  • Sales tax reform (newspapers, advertising – are currently not taxed)
  • Increase in annual vehicle fees, reflecting the cost of a auto and the fuel efficiency
  • Increased Federal Funding via reform of the Social Security tax so that all wage income is taxed, not just the first $87,600.

Paying to Keep Green Space

Peter Maller writes about P. Richard Schumann’s efforts to purchase farmer’s development rights while they continue farming:

Schumann is preparing an advisory referendum for the November ballot asking residents in the Town of Hartford if they are willing to pay higher property taxes to fund such purchases of development rights.
The goal is for the land to remain undeveloped.
“I think we have very strong support,” said Schumann, founder and president of the community’s newly organized Town Preservation Committee. “Keeping the style of life we have, preserving farmland and green space, is very near and dear to people’s hearts.”

Milwaukee’s School Budget

Raquel Rutledge writes:

Its name remains unchanged: Elm Creative Arts Elementary School. Young students still walk the halls, with violins and saxophones swinging at their sides.
At first glance, it looks very much the art school its name reflects. Colorful papier-mache and art projects of all kinds decorate the hallway walls and dangle from the ceilings.
But ask the principal and parents what’s going on here, and the story is anything but joyous. Some parents cry as they talk about it.
Students at this specialty art school on Walnut St. risk losing their art teachers. Budgetary woes have already claimed three art specialists in the last few years. The remaining four are in jeopardy.

Interestingly, she includes some other viewpoints on school spending:
Rep. Luther Olsen (R-Berlin): “Look at the amount of money spent per student. “Wisconsin is number eight in the country. . . . The answer is not dumping more money in because we don’t have the money.”
Mike Birkley, of the lobbying group Wisconsin Property Taxpayers Inc.: “Our tests scores are going up. Our SAT scores continue to be among the highest in the nation. Our dropout rates are down. The quality of education has not suffered.”

Madison Schools Budget – 10m Gap

Lee Sensenbrenner writes:
“The shortfall is caused by costs – mostly tied to staff contracts – that have increased faster than state law allows school districts to tax, officials said. It’s a phenomenon that’s been repeated since 1994, and assistant superintendent Roger Price predicted that the district will face $6 million to $7 million shortfalls every year.”
Great to see this article online; this morning’s Wisconsin State Journal interview with School Board Candidates Shwaw Vang & Sam Johnson is not…. [Ed: it’s 2004, is it not?]
This is a real opportunity for the board & community to start developing alternative sources of revenue – other than the property tax.
Learn more about the April 6, 2004 election & school board candidates here.
Vote!

3.10

Damn right! How does rule of law and press freedom help all those starving kids in Canada, Sweden or New Zealand? See how North Koreans all worship the Kim Dynasty for ‘delivering full stomachs‘.

However, the spokesperson for the Elkanns said “there are categorically no missing paintings, these artworks were the personal property of Marella Caracciolo Agnelli and at her passing they were all fully accounted for in her estate by the Swiss court-appointed administrator”, adding that Margherita seemed “determined to inflict emotional pain on her three eldest children”. With seven legal cases under way that will take years to conclude, friends and relatives say the chances of a settlement are slim and the family is “unlikely to find peace” soon.

5) The Left feels barring Trump from the presidency is worth destroying 235 years of American jurisprudence.

$4,335 at “Nathan’s Luxlifestyle” on Martha’s Vineyard last August? Mmm hmm.

This is the story of Osborne’s spectacular rise and fall. It is based on contemporary articles in publications such as the New York Times, Business Insider, Infoworld, Dr. Dobbs Journal,and Byte; published accounts from those who were there; books such as Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and Fire in the Valleyby Michael Swaine and Paul Frieberger; and, finally, on the words of Adam Osborne himself.

I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train.

Now while you’re doing your taxes online, there are AI chatbots on the right side of the screen to answer your burning questions.

High efficiency raw—is because the still side is using a compression algorithm originally intended for the video side. 

Hear firsthand how 5 FBI assets—Dan, Steve, Jenny, Mark, and Red—accelerate the vague plot in Sept 2020 and push their targets to do something before the election. As I’ve written many times, straight up election interference again by the FBI. Also more confirmation Whitmer and her team were aware of the operation.

The affiliate claimed BlackCat/ALPHV took the $22 million payment but never paid him his percentage of the ransom. BlackCat is known as a “ransomware-as-service” collective, meaning they rely on freelancers or affiliates to infect new networks with their ransomware. And those affiliates in turn earn commissions ranging from 60 to 90 percent of any ransom amount paid.

The Japanese marque blames the phasing out of the UK’s 2G network as the main reason for dropping its Android and iOS NissanConnect EV app services, with some 3,000 Nissan Leaf and e-NV200 commercial vehicles manufactured before 2016 affected in the UK, according to the BBC. Much of the disappointment from owners surrounds the sudden loss of key functionality, such as the ability to remotely heat or cool the vehicle, as well as the option to set up charging schedules that allow batteries to be brimmed when energy tariffs are at their cheapest… all from the convenience of a smartphone.

This has been 100% wrong.

Verizon says the cell phone poles are needed to boost its Deer District signal. That’s especially important with Fiserv Forum hosting the Republican National Convention in July. Meanwhile, the Bucks are adding cell equipment for the same reason. The basketball club says Verizon can use its system ? for a $10 million upfront fee and additional monthly payments.

“The City Council affirms remaining a Non-Sanctuary City and asserts the City does not currently have the financial capacity to fund new services related to this crisis and demands that other municipalities and entities do not systematically transport migrants or people experiencing homelessness to the City.”

It must be noted that Milwaukee is home to the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum, which has produced bobbleheads of Biden, Harris, Trump and Republican former Vice President Mike Pence. Baldwin and Hovde have yet to make the cut.

Jonathan Kaplan, a major Dem donor, had no gov’t experience before Biden tapped him as US Ambassador to Singapore.

One nugget on a key swing state not voting today: @JoeBiden’s campaign is launching an effort to open 31 offices in Wisconsin by April.

PwC’s US election rules set limits on using partner meetings and electronic communications to campaign so that the race would not distract from the normal operations of the business.

“The aviation sector is massively undertaxed, and this long overdue change?.?.?.?it is the tax equivalent to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Matt Finch, UK policy manager at Transport & Environment UK, a non-government organisation

“the reason why Singapore spends so much less on health than other developed countries is its low hospital utilisation.” Instead, Singapore has invested in highly productive polyclinics and low-cost telemedicine. The result is that Singaporeans can visit their GP more often than English patients. In their polyclinics they also improve productivity by separating chronic and acute care.

The challenge with LLM-based code generation as described below is that it starts from a poorly defined natural language input.

Judgement day.

You’ll also hear Nilay try to convince me that the fediverse isn’t just happening but that it’s also going to be important and that we should be paying attention to it and that it is going to make the internet better. And I think I maybe even got a fediverse-related Verge scoop in here. 

The project was also a failure, at the highest levels of the company, to settle on one thing and do it. “There are a lot of roads you can take when you have a lot of really smart people and a very big budget,” says Reilly Brennan, a partner at the transportation technology venture fund Trucks VC. “But Apple never had the ability to make a bunch of specific decisions to lead them one way or the other.”

The U.S. military risks repeating history unless bureaucratic impediments are removed and the right organizations are empowered to make significant changes regarding the acquisition and distribution of small drones for infantry units — drones need to be proliferated, decentralized, and familiar to the units employing them. To do this, it must be made easier for infantry units to acquire and train with them. Failure to do so leaves the U.S. military unprepared for the modern battlefield.

Tuesday the FL Senate passed HB 1365 with DeSantis expected to sign. The main takeaway is that IF municipalities want to allow camping on public property, they have to follow certain rules, like providing 24 hr security and bathrooms. But it gets better.

When Trump raised the idea of using the National Guard, they called it tyrannical. When a Democratic governor now uses it, they call it a “public safety measure.”

For 100 years, the Nakoma League has put on an annual musical comedy revue for the neighborhood. This Saturday’s hour-long show at Nakoma Golf Club (sorry, it’s sold out) is the culmination of months of hard work and inspiration from over two dozen participants, most of whom haven’t sung or performed live since high school (and sometimes not even then).

“Tap the fuck in,” a message posted to a large crime-focused Telegram group chat in October read. The user included a photo of a Macbook Pro in a darkened room with a hand hovering above the keyboard. On the screen were blue and white boxes; a dashboard used by doctors and other medical industry professionals to order prescriptions. The panel displayed various pieces of information, such as the prescribing physician, the patient’s required dose, and the patient’s name.  In the middle of the screen read the text “oxyCODONE (oxyCODONE 5 mg oral tablet).”

Boeing isn’t an American company. They are a globalized, finance driven company focused on management team payouts and short term profits. That’s why they can’t make products that work anymore.

Your Doctor Replied to Your Email. That’ll Cost $25.
More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

This site explains how to travel comfortably & affordably by train or ferry where you might think air was now the only option. Select an option below…

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock: If you’re in a country where you’re fearful of your government and maybe this is one of the reasons China has banned it, if you’re in a country where you’re fearful of your future, fearful of your government of you’re frightened that your government is devaluing its currency by too much deficits, you can say this is a great potential long term store of value. And as I said its like a digital gold…

“I think that’s a good lesson for everybody: never use hotel internet if you want to do a secure call,” Germany’s ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, told the BBC this week. Some may feel the advice came a little too late.

Should we move to Kansas? What stuff should we throw away? Are we too worried about money? Readers have plenty to say about our monthly concerns.

Not just Affirmative Action. It can’t get off the ground without being specifically exempted from environmental regs (which is effectively command-economy-by-stealth; can’t build things without explicit political favor).

California calls electric cars “zero emissions vehicles” because they don’t have tailpipes. That is deceptive. Generating the electricity that powers those cars creates particulate pollution, and of course electric cars still use tires, which are made from petroleum. Electric cars weigh far more than gasoline-powered ones, so their tires degrade faster, as electric car buyers are learning. The same analytics firm cited earlier compared two cars—a plug-in electric and a hybrid. The electric car weighed about one-third more than the hybrid and emitted roughly one-quarter more particulate matter because of tire wear. Total direct emissions went up, not down, when the electric car was driven.

Part of that success lies in Porsche’s quality standards. 911s don’t break too often, and when they finally do, it usually doesn’t take a rocket scientist to fix them. That’s why 70 percent of all 911s ever built are still on the road, and that’s why you can find unicorns like this 930 with more than 725,000 miles on the clock.

Subsidies intended to boost our semiconductor production come with a tangled web of strings attached.

With the opening of China in 1972, a young John Kamm embarked on his China venture, starting in Macau and then Hong Kong. In 1976, he began attending trade fairs in mainland China in the waning days of the Cultural Revolution. A journalist and trade promoter during a period of political upheaval, Kamm’s work took him throughout the largest cities and surrounding countryside, including Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta. Kamm saw aspects of Chinese life largely unknown to those living in the West. This instalment of John Kamm Remembers details some of Kamm’s experiences during this period. In early March, we will release a companion piece, “Nothing Starts Without a Sale: Learning to Sell in Cultural Revolution China,” focusing on the bi-annual Chinese Export Commodities Fair held in Guangzhou.

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