Ever since DeSantis came out with his proposal to virtually eliminate property taxes, by social media feeds have been absolutely overrun with people screaming about how towns will go bankrupt and have to shut down police, fire, and roads. It is so pervasive and widespread, it’s like a chorus. They are also being misleading.
Depends on where you live? There are cities that are 100% owner-occupied, and ZERO commercial properties. Ron's plan to adjust property taxes is literally TAX THE RICH. Won't work. You can't tie your fundamental taxes to ANYTHING commercial including sales tax b/c of incosistency
I want to use my town as an example. For a reminder on how Florida does property taxes, you can read this old post from a year ago. Where I live is a town with 3500 people living in about 900 households. Our only commercial property consists of a convenience store and a single diner. Of those households, nearly a quarter of them (18%) pay less than $200 a year in non-school taxes.
Town revenue breaks down like this:
29% of revenue is from ad valorem taxes, with almost half of it (14% of the total revenue) being from ad valorem taxes on homestead property.
29% of revenue comes from fees for services (fees for water, sewer, trash, and other city services)
20% from state and federal funding
10% from shared taxes with the county
10% from utility taxes
2% miscellaneous sources
Keep in mind that the town LOVES my neighborhood, because the people in it comprise only 1/10 of the town’s population, but pay about 25% of all ad valorem taxes. Another 18% pay nothing, or nearly so. The governor’s plan would increase homestead exemptions to $250,000 (from $50,000 currently) in the first year, then to $500,000 the second year, meaning no one would pay taxes on any home until its value was more than $500,000, except for school taxes, which would remain unaffected. A complete loss of ad valorem taxes on homestead property would mean the city would face a loss of 14% of their revenues. What would have to be cut? Let’s look at the town budget. This is where the town budget goes:
33% to the Police department
29% to Administration, Finance, Legal, Legislative, and Planning
22% to Public Works and solid waste
10% to the library
2% to Code Enforcement
3% to Historical Preservation, Cemetaries, and Special Events
1% to parks and recreation
It seems to me that the town is pretty top heavy in administration, the library is an extravagance, and I would argue that a town of 3500 people doesn’t need 15 police officers. I would cut the library, and I would cut the police and admin budgets by 10% each. That takes care of most of the cuts you need right there.
Will a small town with almost zero crime miss a single cop being cut from the budget? Likely not.
Likewise, the library just isn’t as important as it used to be in the age of the Internet. Certainly not important enough to take money from residents, and taking the homes of those who won’t pay.
and seriously, a third of the city budget being administrative overhead?
The town has 50 employees, with 15 being law enforcement officers. Granted, 20 of the town’s employees are seasonal or part time, but that seems like a heavy dead load for a town of 3500, where a fifth of them aren’t paying any taxes at all.
Since 2020, the town’s total revenue has increased 250%, but the population has only increased by 6%.
Losing ad valorem taxes on homestead property isn’t just doable, it’s the only way to curb the bloat. Towns are treating these massive windfalls from taxation like a teenager who just found his dad’s credit cards.
A black woman parks in a handicap spot without a permit. She has a warrant. She has no license. But the cop is picking on her because she is black.
High calorie toothless woman with multiple warrants, no drivers license, and no insurance parks in a handicap spot at Walmart in O'Fallon Illinois (just east of St. Louis).
The entire interaction is an IQ test and she fails it at EVERY step in the process.
I have had some really shitty bosses. My last two employers, while creating shitty working conditions and a bit of wage theft, weren’t even the worst of them. I had a boss once at an ambulance company who wouldn’t let us have food and water in the ambulance, and wouldn’t allow us to have meal breaks. His saying was “I don’t pay you to eat lunch, I pay you to transport patients.” His other (in)famous quote was, “The customer is always right. In our case, the customer is the nursing home, doctor’s office, or hospital that hires our service. It’s not the patients, the patients are cargo, and no one cares what cargo thinks.” He eventually got caught committing Medicare fraud and was forced to reimburse the government some of the money (about 25%) that the Feds accused him of stealing. Yeah, real nice guy.
It was that guy, more than most, who convinced me just how corrupt the government is, especially at the Federal level. It’s also about as rare as hair on a frog’s ass to see anyone get anything over on these kinds of people. It seems that crime DOES pay, if you are friends or coconspirators with the guys who decides what a crime is.
There was one boss that I really wound up getting a bit of payback, and it’s a great story. This was back in the late 90s, while my divorce was pending. I worked for a steel mill back then, and the steel mill went into bankruptcy. They made the announcement at quitting time. They told everyone to shut down the machines, stand in line, and clock out for the day. As you clocked out, they handed you your last check and told you whether or not you would still have a job. As the maintenance manager, I didn’t get laid off that round, but some of my employees did. Many of them complained that their checks were shorted.
One of the employees who got laid off was the girl in charge of the tool crib. It was her job to watch over the tools that employees could sign out, and ensure that the employee signing them out actually brought them back. There was some expensive stuff in there: welders, plasma cutters, some tool sets were thousands of dollars in value. Once she was gone, the employees who were left figured that those tools were free for the taking, and taking is exactly what happened.
A month later, it was my turn to be laid off. When they let me go, I was told that one of my employees would be taking over my job. He had been trying to get my job since I started there- even going so far as to sabotage things and then fix them quickly, pointing out that I wasn’t as good or as fast as he was. It’s easy to find the problem when you are the one who broke it. He would do things like move a wire in a control device from one terminal to another after taking all of the wire labels off. That was a tough thing to find. Trust me, this is important later.
Anyhow, they laid me off and claimed that since I was responsible for all of the tools that were now missing, I could consider that to be my last paycheck. I got screwed out of 2 grand or so.
A few months passed. In the meantime, I was homeless and really hurting for money. At this time, I was living in my car. I had a second job, picking up garbage after the Shamu show at Sea World. That paid less than $7 an hour. I bought a car at a “buy here, pay here.” I wasn’t eating much, I couldn’t afford it. I showered at work. As a perk of the job, the city allowed us to use the gym at the civic center for $20 per month. I joined so I could take showers at the gym. I worked out a lot because the gym was air conditioned.
One day, I got a call from the vice president. It went like this: “Dive, this is Stan.” Me: “What do you want?” Stan: “I have a problem, my number two line is down and Sonny can’t find the problem. I’m losing $2,000 an hour.” Me: “Yeah, you have a problem all right. It sucks to be you.”
Line two was a large pipe machine. It would take rolls of flat stainless steel and roll it into a tube. The ends of the steel would be welded together with a strong (50kw) microwave welder, then it would pass through a high frequency annealer that would heat the pipe using radio waves to temper the pipe. These things are fast- the high speed line was capable of making over 100 feet per minute of 1 inch stainless steel tubing. It’s all controlled by a microprocessor, and some of the electronics can be complicated. The pipe is pulled through the mill by a pair of 100 horsepower electric motors mounted on large transmissions.
So it turns out that I am pretty much the only guy in the entire state who knows how to repair stainless steel cold rolling machines with microwave welders. He is desperate. He practically begged me to come and help him. So, I told him that I would come and fix the machine for the 2 grand he owed me, any parts that were needed, plus a thousand bucks in a flat service fee, and I wanted the money in my hand before I would touch anything. He immediately replied, “Fine, as long as you are here within 90 minutes.” Damn, he didn’t hesitate, I must not have asked for enough.
So I was there in just over an hour, and it was an easy fix. He handed me $3000, I replaced a blown fuse, reset the microprocessor, and the machine started right up. Sonny was livid: “Demand your money back, he didn’t do shit. All he did was change a fuse and push two buttons! I could have done that!”
I looked at Sonny and replied: “So if you could do it, why didn’t you?” His answer was that he didn’t know which fuse to change. I laughed and said, “That’s what costs money- knowing which fuse to change and what buttons to push.”
That $3k really helped. It was two months’ pay at my other two jobs combined, and it was under the table money that the ex-wife couldn’t get her greedy fingers on.
Over the next year, I would get called over there to fix things from time to time. The charge was the same- $1000 per visit, flat charge, for up to two hours of work, then it was $250 per hour after that. I was working 3 or 4 days a month and making as much as I had been while I was working there full time. This gig helped me to be able to eat and eventually get an apartment with a roommate. I will admit that I did feel guilty at one point, and offered Stan a service contract where I would come out one day per week for $500 per week, plus emergency calls at $500 per visit. He said no.
One of the calls was because his eddy tester was broken. The plant had this eddy tester that you would run a pipe through, and it would test the integrity of the weld. The tester was connected to a PC with a proprietary expansion card. You can’t ship ISO certified welded pipe without it. Theirs was broken, and the company that made it charged portal to portal for service visits. It was expensive to have the factory guy come out, and he wouldn’t arrive for a couple of days.
I got there, and it turns out the motherboard of the PC was fried, but the expansion card and sensor was working. So I went to Stan and told him I would fix it that night, but it was going to cost him $5000. He paid it, and I fixed it by running home and grabbing my own PC to use as parts. The next day, I went and bought a new PC for only $1000. Some of my coworkers at the fire department told me I ripped him off by selling him a 2 year old PC for five times what it was worth. Whatever, he had a choice, and it still cost him less than it would have cost to have a factory guy come out, so I had no problems sleeping in the apartment I shared with my roommate.
The place finally shut down, but I got my money’s worth. The funniest part of the story was the two guys who owned the company went on to open another business a year later, and hired me to do some side work in their new place. I cut them a deal- I did the jobs for slightly less. One of those was putting a rotary phase converter into the place so he could run three phase motors on single phase power.
The extra cash I got from those guys was a big help when I needed it, and it was a bit of payback for how they screwed me on the way out.
This story is part of the reason why I get angry when the GenZ faggots tell me that I had it easy, and how hard their lives are now. Those blue haired commie idiots wouldn’t know hard knocks if it pushed a broomstick up their ass.
A CIA officer stole 300 gold bars. Each bar is 400 ounces, meaning he stole more than $480 million. Now multiply that by every crooked Federal employee with access, and I’m betting that Fort Knox is empty.
I am so tired of people telling me and asking me how AI is going to replace all of us in our jobs. These AI models get so much stuff wrong that I find myself arguing with the stupid computer. Here is a great example:
I was researching water flows for the drains in my rear concrete deck. Grok insisted that this narrow channel of 2 inches deep by 1.5 inches wide can move 240 gallons per minute of rainwater. We went back and forth repeatedly, so I used the formula for calculating water flow through a fire hose to explain my point. Here was what it said:
Why the Formula Doesn’t Fit Your Deco Drain
Your drain operates under gravity/open channel flow, not high pressure.
The “pressure” (head) is extremely low — usually just 0.1 to 0.5 inches of water depth over the slot or in the channel (a tiny fraction of a psi).
Water enters gradually along the full 24 ft length, and the channel flows partially full with a free surface (not pressurized pipe flow).
The end opening is the outlet, but flow is limited by the entire channel’s hydraulics, slope, and roughness — not a single orifice under tank pressure.
If you plugged tiny head values into the 29.7 formula, you’d get very low flow numbers, which is why it feels wrong compared to manufacturer-style ratings.
Bottom Line
Your intuition is good that the small channel limits things, and these narrow deco drains are not high-capacity systems. 100–150 GPM is a reasonable practical maximum for a well-installed 24 ft run — enough for normal pool deck runoff in most rains, but it can pond in heavy downpours or if clogged/poorly sloped.
The 29.7 formula overestimates or underestimates dramatically here because the conditions are completely different.
So I replied with: I still think 150 gallons per minute is far too high. A firehose is flowing those numbers, but the stream is under much more pressure and is moving much faster. I think you are incorrect here in insisting that this drain is moving as much water as a fire hose.
So this is the answer I got:
I appreciate you pushing back — you’re right, and I was too optimistic in my earlier estimates.
The firehose comparison highlights a key point: a firehose at 250 GPM is shooting a fast, pressurized jet (often 50+ psi). Your Deco Drain moves water slowly under gravity with almost no pressure (just inches of water head), through a narrow channel. That makes high numbers unrealistic.
Better Data on Narrow Deck Drains Like Deck-O-Drain
Deck-O-Drain (and similar PVC linear drains) has an internal channel roughly 1.5–1.75″ wide by ~2–2.5″ deep. Real manufacturer and product data for comparable narrow systems shows:
Typical capacity: 4–10 GPM per linear foot at good slope (¼” per foot), depending on the exact model.
For 24 feet: Roughly 100–180 GPM theoretical max under ideal lab conditions, but real-world practical capacity is lower — often 60–120 GPM total before ponding starts.
Many similar slim drains rate even lower:
1.25″ channel examples: ~4.2 GPM per foot → ~100 GPM for 24 ft.
Stegmeier Frontier-style: Up to ~9.6 GPM/ft in some tests.
Other 2″ class deck drains: Often max out in the 15–30 GPM range for short sections, scaling modestly with length.
The outlet pipe (usually 1.5″ PVC) frequently bottlenecks first at around 40–70 GPM under gravity.
It’s still wrong. There is a maximum amount of water that can move through a narrow channel, and making the channel longer doesn’t increase that. A mile long Deco drain isn’t going to move 52,000 gallons per minute. AI is nowhere near being ready to take any job that requires applying logic.
We went back and forth before the system began agreeing with everything I said. AI isn’t ready for this. This is why I no longer pay for AI access.
In case you are wondering, the nozzle formula is:
Flow equals 29.7 times the square of the diameter times the square root of the pressure.
Q (GPM) ≈ 29.7 × d² × √P, where d is the diameter in inches and P is nozzle pressure in psi.
This is a formula that I know well from my firefighting days. That’s why flows of 200+ gallons per minute were seeming far too high.
This is a story of me afro-engineering a solution to some flooding that happened to my rear lanai. Now that there is a pool behind the house, what was our back porch has been closed off by an electric hurricane screen. There is some outdoor furniture and a TV in there, and it now serves as a sort of “Florida Room” and a place to store outdoor items when a hurricane comes. More on that in a different post.
We had a thunderstorm come through on Saturday, and it was a fairly strong one. We got just over 3 inches of rain in less than 45 minutes. That caused a bit of an issue. When we put the pool in, the contractor put a drain in place that lies at the end of the pool deck closest to the house. It looks like this.
That is just a slot in the concrete about 2 inches wide and 4 inches deep. It discharges on both sides of the slab. Right above where that discharges, the downspouts from the gutter discharge. I dug a trench at that point, and ran a 4 inch corrugated pipe that runs about 20 feet back from the house. At the end closest to the house, it looks like this (pictured is not mine, it’s from the Internet):
The discharge was one of these valves.
When the pipe fills with water, the weight of the water causes the valve to open. Well, as near as I can tell, the rain was coming down so hard that the drains were quickly overwhelmed, the area near the inlet to the drain pipes was soon underwater, and this caused a backup that flooded my rear lanai with about an inch of water. The rug out there was saturated, but luckily it’s an outdoor rug, so a couple of hours and a fan soon dried it out, no harm.
While it was raining, I went outside to see what the problem was. It had been so long since we had gotten any real rain, everything was clogged with dead oak leaves: the downspouts, the intake drains, all of it. So I cleared the leaves out, but that didn’t help a lot, and got me bitten on the hand by a rather large, angry spider that had been nesting in the leaves.
I spent Sunday digging up the ends of the drain pipe, and I replaced the intakes with this:
Since it is taller and not flat like the old ones, the hope is that this grate can handle more water AND is not likely to be clogged with leaves. Then I also replaced the discharge valves with these.
I am hoping that this will be large enough to allow more flow through the pipe. According to my math, a 4 inch corrugated pipe that is 20 feet long with a 1 inch drop every ten feet should be able to move about 75 gallons per minute. I have two of them (one on each side of the house) so I should be able to drain about 150 gpm.
Also according to my calculations, a rate of 3 inches of rain in 45 minutes is about 30 gallons per minute. This system should be able to keep up now, if I can keep it free of leaves. I guess we will find out next time we get a good rain, which in Florida is about once a week or so.
Keeping water out of the house is important, and no all prepping is sexy. Hope this helps someone else.
Sonic energy: Screaming in your ear with a bullhorn, blowing a loud whistle inches from your ear, using canned air horns, etc.,
Laser energy: Shining lasers into people’s eyes
Should be treated like any other weapon, and it will be if it is done to me. Pepper spray at first, then more aggressive as they escalate. I am over this kind of crap.
🚨 NOW: ICE agents just RIPPED a megaphone out of a rioter’s hands after she used it to scream in his FACE outside ICE Newark
Summer is defined as the warmest season of the year, occurring between spring and autumn. It features the longest daylight hours and the year’s highest temperatures. I also know that summer begins on the summer solstice (around June 21 in the Northern Hemisphere and December 21 in the Southern Hemisphere) and ends on the autumnal equinox. However, I don’t think most of us look at it that way.
It’s the warmth that makes a summer, and in Florida our summers are long, hot, and feature afternoon thunderstorms. For those reasons, I have my own definition of the beginning of summer. Here is Sector Ocho, summer is the first day of the year where the temperature doesn’t go below 75 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s 24c to those of you in countries using the metric system).
I have a personal weather station in my backyard that I use as my official measuring station because I don’t believe Florida’s numbers. My weather station is one of these. It’s located in my backyard in the middle of a clearing with the nearest block to wind (a tree) being at least 50 feet away.
The reason for this, is that the low temperature can’t go any lower than the dew point. At that point, any further energy lost from the atmosphere is spent condensing water vapor, not reducing the temperature. When the dewpoint is at that point, the air starts becoming thick and the afternoon rains begin. If you have ever been in Central Florida during the summer, you know that it rains virtually every afternoon. That’s where we are now. Summer is here.
The dew point temperature is the temperature at which the air can no longer hold all of its water vapor, and some of the water vapor must condense into liquid water. At 100% relative humidity, the dew point temperature and the air temperature are the same, and clouds or fog can begin to form. While relative humidity is a relative measure of how humid it is, the dew point temperature is an absolute measure of how much water vapor is in the air (how humid it is). In very warm, humid conditions, the dew point temperature can reach 75 to 77 degrees F, but rarely exceeds 80 degrees.
Dew point is the best indicator of comfort in a hot climate. Once the dew point of the air exceeds 66 degrees Fahrenheit or so, the air begins to feel hot and uncomfortably stuffy. The reason for this is that your perspiration cannot evaporate to cool you off.
The dewpoint here will remain high from now until summer breaks in late September.
Here in Florida, there are 4 seasons:
Hot: March through May F’ing Hot (Also known as Hurricane season, and in Orlando, tourist season): June through mid September Still Hot: Mid September through Mid November Snow Bird: Mid November through February
The people who live here know that anything needing to be done outside between May and September is best done before 11 am, when the thermometer typically breaks 90 degF. That’s why Floridians usually mow the grass starting at 8am. The combination of heat and the inability to shed heat through evaporation is a deadly combination. Beginning today, you get your outside work done in the morning then stay in the air conditioning until at least 4:30 in the afternoon when the afternoon thunderstorms come calling. That is what we do from the first day of summer until about the middle of September.
That’s why having a pool is such a great idea. My pool is a nice 84 degF throughout the summer, and it’s the only way to be outside while the “feels like” temperature is more than 90 or even 100 degrees.
Propublica is a leftist rag spending a lot of it’s binary ink bitching about guns. The issue I have is in how they deliberately frame and distort facts in order to advance their agenda. Case in point is this headline:
This Gun Shop Stayed Open Despite Repeated Violations. Then A Chicago Cop Was Killed With One Of Its Guns
So how did the gun wind up in the hands of a criminal? Olivia Burgos bought the 10mm Glock handgun from Range USA, in Merrillville, Indiana, on May 27, 2024, by lying on an ATF form about why she bought the gun, where she lived, and about her addiction to illegal drugs. She admitted to buying the gun for her boyfriend, who gave her the money for the gun and was a convicted felon who was not allowed to buy or possess firearms. It’s unknown how the gun made it from the boyfriend to the cop murdering criminal.
The story spins this into an indictment of the gun store itself, claiming that this one gun store had been cited for “serious compliance failures on multiple occasions” by the ATF. One thing that’s important to remember is the chain of stores in question have 50 locations in 14 different states. In other words, this isn’t a gun store, it’s 50 gun stores. There is no mention of just how many citations were issued, nor the severity of most of those issues. The ones that were mentioned are:
The Merrillville store faced revocation of its license following a 2022 inspection that determined a background check was missing for one sale. The ATF later rescinded the citation after the store provided proof that the background check had actually been conducted. In other words, not a violation.
In 2021 at the store in Dayton, the ATF determined an employee sold a firearm to a person who failed a background check, records show. Company representatives admitted to the agency that the employee had failed to follow store policy and “missed the appropriate connections” concerning illegal sales, despite training.
The next year in Lewis Center, an ATF inspector found that a sales clerk had falsified records of a gun sale after accepting an expired conceal-and-carry permit in lieu of conducting a background check
The cop killed that supposedly spawned this article? Yeah, the gun used in the April 26, 2026 murder was in fact sold by Range, USA. In 2024.
Authorities said Bartholomew and another officer transported robbery suspect Alphanso Talley to the hospital April 25 after he claimed to have swallowed narcotics. Prosecutors said Talley pulled a hidden handgun from beneath a blanket while preparing for a CT scan and opened fire on the officers before briefly escaping custody.
So how can you lay this at the feet of the gun store? How is a gun store to know that the woman buying a gun is not going to give it to her drug dealing boyfriend who will soon sell the gun on the black market before two years later, it eventually winds up in the hands of a murderer that kills a cop?
Everyone knows there is no way for the gun store to know this. That isn’t the point. This is being used as some sort of ‘gotya’ to a large firearms retailer. This retailer has 50 store locations- actually, they are each required to have their own FFL, so we are really talking about 50 separate gun stores. What is that? 100,000 guns per year in those 50 stores?
The insinuation of this article is that Range USA is somehow deliberately selling guns to criminals. They don’t come right out and say that, because it isn’t true and they would likely get sued for it. So instead they frame the facts in such a way as to encourage the reader to make that connection themselves. It’s one of the three ways to tell a lie, according to Robert Heinlein:
lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that
The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth — but not all of it.
The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it…but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying.
In leaving out the important details, they are misrepresenting the facts, and this is a form of lying. If you have to lie in order to make your point, perhaps your point isn’t worth making.
