Parking Issues Resolved

Remember RTO? The Chicken Littles were clucking about too few parking spaces at the CDC and an intolerable increase in traffic in the area. Well, that's been fixed. Seems that quite a few of the road warriors will NOT be returning to the office. Not now. Not ever. They may be out on the streets, but not in their cars. You have to wonder if sitting in traffic on the way to work was really all that bad.

Merry Go Round

DeJoy is gone, so what's the problem now? Well, it could be the mail delivery merry go round.

What? Where? When?

What"s going on here? Why does mail swirl around, maybe down the drain? Are the loops getting faster and tighter, or are they spinning out of control? Every day is a new surprise.

Political Pontificates

A trifecta of DeKalb's political pontificates held a town hall to diss and discuss shenanigans under the gold dome. Not to worry, these were Democrats one and all so the party wasn't crashed by professional rabble rousers. Unhindered, they got to lay out Their Truths. One priceless nugget regarded bills to restrict or ban machine issued traffic tickets, all managed by a for-profit private corporation. Here's the kicker: they actually support the privatization of government responsibility. That's right, and they're Democrats, who've obviously never heard of a writ of mandamus. But we get this nugget:

“Here we are pontificating about protecting our children, then we turn around and ban local communities from protecting their children by not being able to give tickets to people who speed in school communities,” Draper said. [emphasis added]

Here's the deal, outside of political echo chambers it makes no sense for private citizens, and private companies, to be issuing fines for violating laws because that is the job of our government, a government ideally beholding to our elected officials. Like them. What they ignore, perhaps willingly, is that if these local communities want to protect children, they are free, almost required, to do so, after all that IS what the police force is for. In fact these new little cities that sprang up had to provide a minimum number of services, and most chose to put police at the top of the list. And yet...here we are, Democrats wanting to privatize government.

We don't need a corporate police force when we're paying for a real one. We may need a writ of mandamus. And a recall vote.

Data Poisoning

Data poisoning started life as a Bad Thing but has been re-purposed for something that is arguably good: intellectual property protection. Zhao's work was originally applied to graphics, visual content but the technique can be used to protect written works, it just isn't clear exactly how that is done. Major news organizations are pushing cases through the court systems claiming copyright violation in data sets used to train large language models. Perhaps one approach is to use homophones, and it appears this is what the AJC has recently adopted. Think "effect" vs "affect" or perhaps even further afield. Meaning be damned. 

Isn't that "side"?

Maybe they really meant "sight" but that doesn't make much sense, which is kinda the point if you're trying to trick an LLM.

Ions? Really?

Yes, "ion" is a word, just not the right word in this instance. But again, maybe the objective is to confuse a machine rather than communicate clearly with a human. 

There are alternative explanations. Maybe the goal is to aid in detecting plagiarism, like a watermark that shines through the LLM training. Perhaps these texts were generated by an already poorly trained LLM. Or, and this is very possible, journalists may have deteriorated badly.

Hasty Retreat

Why is it that city bigwigs must run off somewhere (other than here) to talk the big talk and plan the big plans? Is that because there'll not be very many citizens OF Dunwoody there? Of course the big, if not the biggest topic was how they take more of your money. Does greed know any limits?

Apparently not.

Their biggest debate wasn't whether to pilfer your purse or not, but rather how to do it. One proposal was to simply raise the millage rate by removing the current limit by ordinance, IE: without your vote. The other was to create "special" tax district, in an effort to disguise a tax as something else. One is what we're accustomed to, politicians raising taxes, and the other a bit more clever, raising taxes by adding a new mechanism, and allowing the political prevarication of staying under the millage limit. Wait until they disclose this is not either-or and they do both. 

Unlike Atlanta where Dickens has asked for departments to report on the impact of 5%, 7.5% and 10% budget cuts, Dunwoody fixates on higher taxes. Clearly, city staffing, operational costs and mission has expanded without much in the way of  restraint. And why should there be any restrain? Spending OPM is fun, and gives staffers increasingly valuable connections. And we, as voters, have been asleep at the wheel, electing promise-breakers who are addicted to spend-then-tax. Shame on them, but not without shame on us. 

But there are other options, ones this city would consider their kryptonite, but should be up for discussion nonetheless. How about we stop giving enormous tax breaks to developers? After all we're sitting on some of the hottest property in the southeast, and they should be competing for the chance to build here. In fact, they should be paying. It's called "impact fees," and developers should be paying for the costs their, highly profitable, development imposes on existing taxpayers. Have you heard mayor or council suggest anything faintly resembling this? Didn't think so. 

Make Them Pay Their Fair Share

The drumbeat of the left. Make billionaires pay "their fair share." But...they have an exception, and that would be the equally leftist private universities. Harvard is sitting on a $53bn endowment. Yale, $42bn. Stanford and Princeton, let's call it $37bn. Now at a mere 4% yield on their endowment, Harvard is pulling in over $2.1bn per year. Rest assured, their investments return more than 4%.

Republicans want these billionaires to pay their fair share. They generously allot $200,000 in assets per student tax free (down from $500,000) and want to garner a 21% tax rate, up from 1.5%. Seems more than fair. Others want to see the rate at 35%, more in line with what the left wants other billionaires to pay. The left conveniently ignores the fact that many of these universities siphon over 50% of NIH grant funds, dumping the money in the general fund, allowing them to divert other monies into growing their endowment.

But the left remains steadfastly against these billionaires paying their fair share, suggesting the tax collected, likely only a few hundred million dollars, is "laughable." You gotta wonder how many working class stiffs paying out a few tens of thousands think their taxes are hilarious.

Frogs And Oceans

Incrementalism is an effective tool when the goal is to impose something on "the people" that the people don't really want. It looks a lot like intentionally pushing folks down the proverbial slippery slope, but more subtle. The undesirable changes need to be added much more slowly so as to be as imperceptible as possible, so that in the end no one can figure out how we came to a terrible end. What started out as a warming bath became boiling a frog, a frog that never new it was what's for dinner. 

It turns out you cannot un-boil a frog. Just cannot be done. The only option is to boil the ocean, radical, dramatic change, done with urgency and purpose, the purpose of throwing out that pot of water and the frog it cooked. Now a lot of folks will say "you can't boil the ocean" and these folks would be incrementalists, who'd much rather boil a frog and further insist that no one else should be allowed to do anything else. Then along comes someone who can, and will boil the ocean. 

That's where we are.

While we can only watch what is happening at the national level, at the local level we may, only may, have time. Maybe not, but we have a little time to find out.

There are voices on social media touting expansion of our local administrative state, advocating mission creep, costs and financial consequences be damned. Well, to be clear, there is one outspoken voice harping on "investing in ourselves" without offering any credible notion of ROI. That voice is shrill, delving into insults and ageism, often targeting the very voters who voted FOR the city referendum, without which this voice would be mute. Or at least totally irrelevant.

What's missing is a bit of history, and a decent respect for it. Before there was a City of Dunwoody, there was a marketing effort, a damn good one, to get voters to support the referendum creating the city. The Big Tent of this effort, under which all other issues were discussed was Local Control. The three rings in this big top were: zoning; police; and paving. Notice anything missing? Like parks, and interstate lanes paved in other peoples' front yards paid for with other peoples' money? What the electorate was sold was zoning to slow apartment development, police that wouldn't start every shift driving down to Buford Highway, and fixing our pothole riddled streets, backed up by the CVI study saying this could be done on $18M ($27M in 2025 dollars). That's what 81% of the voters thought they were getting, and that's what they still want. 

Now that is not what they got and what they actually approved was a mini-me of a the federal administrative state which has followed the lead in mission creep and bureaucratic expansion. And the water will slowly, inexorably heat, until we must confront the necessity of boiling our own little ocean of rancid frog stew. 

Unless we do something now.

Revenge Of The Nerds

Seems like only yesterday everyone was rightly complaining that all we had on offer to lead the free world were two white male octogenarians. Fast forward and many are now complaining about a bunch of twenty-somethings taking over the federal government and taking it down. And this truly is the revenge of the nerds, as the gray lady has outed these children, complete with pictures where available. This borders on doxxing, which has come full circle from a lib attack tool, to a neocon tool, back to the libs again. Things really are moving quickly. How long will it take for the libs to stop defending the status quo and get back to "progressivism?"

Show Some Compassion

You may be one of those cheering on the reduction in the size, employee-wise, of the federal government, but can't you show a little compassion? Have you not seen the dismissal notices? Do you not think these are harsh? A little empathy might be in order, after all, have you never received a notice from the IRS?

Urban

Initially it seemed ludicrous when Dunwoody set up a team focused on "urban renewal" both because it relabeled a suburban bettendorf and because we surely had not been urban long enough to "renew" anything. Clearly it was a money-grab going after federal funding.

That said, perhaps that IS the definition of urban: how addicted to federal dollars is the local government?

Andre Dickens, mayor of Atlanta, urban by any definition, fears the federal funding D-T's. He's worried about water infrastructure, saying "because the size of the problem is in the billions, and we can't expect local governments to repair billion-dollar infrastructure on our own financially." He should be worried as this comes across as entitlement. Here in Dunwoody, the city made a commitment to install turf on a school's field, and now is claiming unexpected poverty. The mayor quoted in the blue bag rag says, "The fact that the bond failed, we’re now in a really big period of uncertainty because we don’t have any idea if there will be federal funding for infrastructure." Wow. Grass is infrastructure. Perhaps that is what you have to call it to get your hands on OPM. 

So here's a thought exercise: what would happen if a particular local government, say Dunwoody, were instantly weened from the federal money teat? What "right-sizing" would occur? How? Would entire activities be shuttered? Everyone takes a haircut? The more dramatic the change, the more urban the government. On the upside, perhaps it would remove the outside influence of "free" money, putting an end to the political prostitution we suffer today.