Homestead Season

We're entering tax season, income and property, as early in the year is your opportunity to investigate your homestead exemption options. The standard exemption you get for just living there, but there are many more. At least in DeKalb county. Some are for various service members, some are for disability, and some are age. The key element of some of these exemption classes is the homeowner is exempted from any and all school taxes, a vast majority of the total tax burden. 

Naturally, those adhering to the notion that more government makes a better world detest these exemptions claiming that everyone should pay because we all benefit from an educated population. There is an implicit, and false, assumption in this argument: that public schools, who are levying this tax, are actually educating all those kids. They address the fact that public schools are handing out diplomas to kids lacking the intellectual stamina to read all the way to the end of a sentence, by simply ignoring the fact. In their world, no fact that does not support their dogmatic beliefs simply does not exist. You can't argue with that. 

Beyond the standard exemption almost all the others are means tested, and for some olde fartes in daVille this inflicts the pain of envy, because in neighboring Cobb County, you simply age into it.

Combine these high taxes, the highest in the state, with bottom-of-the-barrel education outcomes and looming prospects of school redistricting and you must wonder about those homeowners who say they moved to Dunwoody for the schools. What were they thinking? Well, they weren't. That's the only reasonable explanation. Is the commute really that much worse? Hardly. The schools are better. Are the taxes higher? Nope. The schools are cheaper. Are the houses inferior? Not by a long shot. You don't have to jump through hoops for that homestead exemption. 

If you live here, fine. Just don't move here because the schools are so good and such a great deal. They're not.

No Other Option...Really?

Fortune magazine reports that Gen Z students are making it into college "unable to even read a sentence" and this worries professors. Their concern? It could lead to a generation of anxious and lonely graduates. 

Let that soak in.

Fortune doubles down:

"It's leaving colleges no choice but to lower their expectations."

Here's another choice: maintain (or raise) your entrance requirements and your expectations, and simply do not accept applicants who cannot even read a sentence. Professors have lamented that critical thinking is no longer a valid issue, which makes sense when you're dealing with folks who struggle and usually fail to find the period at the end of any given sentence. 

Then Fortune triples down:

"With students struggling, academies have been forced to adapt---a move critics describe as 'coddling'."

Of course when they cannot read a sentence asking them to read a few dozen pages is like asking them climb Everest without a Sherpa, which is nearly as difficult as going half an hour without a screen. But folks, including some of the non-reading Gen Z cohort, are suggesting that college is not for everyone, and they are self-identifying as not college candidates. It is worth noting that college administrators seem to disagree, perhaps because their jobs depend on the myth that your life is worthless without a college degree. A degree that is increasingly not worth the cost and approaching objective, absolute worthlessness. 

Is it ego? Is it greed? Is it self-interest over all else? All of these? Why would anyone, Fortune magazine or the academies, not recognize the vast number of young Americans who are not college-ready, and that lowering standards to well below high-school levels is exactly the wrong thing to do?

Door Knockers

You've had a job, haven't you? Of course you have. Most likely you've had a job requiring a pre-employment drug screening. Equally likely that job did not require post employment, suspicionless drug tests. Almost as if a drug free workplace is a one day event, with that day coming before you're actually at the workplace. Afterwards nobody cares, so...toke up.

It is the same as politicians. They come out to press the flesh before the election, with feigned sincerity they do their best to fool you into voting for them. Afterwards they really couldn't care less about any of that, any of you. Sure, they may have these "public input" online push polls gathering "data" you'll never see, just so they can say they're still "in touch." Hardly.

Want proof? You need look no further than city hall. Do you think those nattering nabobs have a clue about your issues...your concerns? Only if you're as clueless as they are. Are you?

Life On The Train

Suppose there is a train, running at a constant speed down a straight, level stretch of track. The train sports an engineer and a conductor. Passengers are split equally between men and women, and includes a small group of blind men. All of the men sit on one side of the train while the women are seated on the other as the women detest Allspice and the men are not fans of Chanel No. 5. A specially outfitted car carries a circus elephant that had been left behind to recover from a head cold. 

Along the track there are four observers one at each end and two in the middle with those at the ends and one in the middle on the same side of the tracks. The engineer likes to blow the whistle constantly because he's an imbecile and it makes him smile. The conductor collects tickets and breaks up fights. Sometimes.

So, train's moving, whistle's blowing. The bloke standing at the end of the tracks behind the caboose, with the train moving away hears the whistle and knows it is flat. At the other end that bloke hears the whistle coming towards him and knows it is sharp. The blokes in the middle hear it coming towards them, then moving away. They hear a whistle that is sharp, briefly on pitch as it passes, then becomes flat as it moves away. The exact same train observed at the exact same time and three different observations. Which is correct? Do you take a vote? The two blokes in the middle heard the same thing, while those at each end heard something different to the middle and the other end. The conductor, and all the passengers, hear an incessant but on pitch whistle. So who's correct? Turns out they all are. Four observation locations, four different observations and all four are correct. At the same time. 

These observers aren't just listening they are looking. In the train windows and inside the train. The three blokes on the one side see passengers. They are all men, so they conclude it is a train full of blokes. The lone observer on the other side sees windows full of women, concluding it's a mobile hen party. The conductor walks down the aisle looking to one side and seeing women, to the other are the men. The conductor knows there are both men and women on the train. Do you take a vote? Three blokes saw a train full of men, one saw only women, and the conductor, who is actually correct, sees both men and women. But who gets believed?

The blind guys who have never seen an elephant, literally and figuratively, send their most trusted member to the circus car to feel out the situation. Almost half an hour later he returns and tells the blind that an elephant is a huge creature with two tails, a small one at one end, a large one at the other. They both "wag" and each has a wet spot beneath. He offered other details regarding leathery hide and tree-like legs, but it was the two tails that fascinated. Even some sighted, who had never seen an elephant, were convinced this was indeed a wonderful animal. Others, who had seen elephants, claimed the "big tail" was actually a very long nose, that operated like a monkey's tail...it could grab things. Unsurprisingly, no one who believed two tails was ever going to believe the Pinocchio story. 

Is there a point to this? That, dear reader, is for you to decide.

Be Prepared

For promises broken. 

Not like they haven't been already, but if you read the Blue Bag Rag you noticed Mother Mayor getting front page ink to let you know what's coming, even though they've already crossed more lines than Trump. We no longer have the city manager reporting to council. No, no. Not his idea of fun? Beneath him? Regardless, the city charter calls for the city manager, and the city manager alone, to show up. In fact, the city charter has no notion of a "department" of city manager and one of the few things council can actually do to rein in this madness is to eliminate that "department." Immediately.

Without delving into the dick-pic fiasco, the city police department is objectively inferior to what we had as unincorporated DeKalb. Well, if one of your key performance indicators is "cops show up in our neighborhoods to enforce laws" but maybe that's not your KPI. Is yours PR stunts like coffee with a cop? Really? 

Then there's the bloat. Mapping all the bureaucratic entities this city has spun up would be a full time job and it is one of the many jobs the city isn't going to do. Because that kind of transparency is unflattering.

So Mother Mayor has been sent out to grease the already slippery slope. Who's pulling those strings? In any event they are about to run, not walk, away from every founding principle, every promise made. All to gorge themselves on greed. Will enough ever be enough?

Proxy Voting

Proxy. This word gets tossed around quite a bit, and not just lately. Back in the early days of the civil rights movement ZIP codes were (and still are) closely associated with demographics. It was common for insurers and lenders to change rates or even refuse to serve certain ZIP codes, claiming they were not discriminating based on race.

But it sure looked like they were.

So some laws were passed. These laws removed intent from discrimination...it no longer mattered whether you intended to discriminate if the outcome was indistinguishable from intentional discrimination. If it looks like intentional discrimination then it was. And it wasn't just ZIP codes, insurers and bankers, it was employers inferring from names or colleges the race of an applicant with that affecting the hiring process. Recently there have been accusations that higher ed has been using these same proxy indicators to favor demographics they prefer. 

There are other proxies, codewords, for race. Urban is a euphemism for Black, despite the fact that a lot of non-Blacks live in cities, but should there be a dramatic increase in Whites, that is decried as gentrification. So...maybe? Products can also be proxies. Remember Colt 45 Malt Liquor? Cadillac cars? Or...how about this: fried chicken. 

Maybe the recent council votes were not about traffic and drive thru congestion. In both cases these were fried chicken emporiums. Were all the requirements placed on the applicants just a way of saying no? For reasons having nothing to do with traffic or walkability? Remember, if it looks like racism, it is racism.