Different Words Is A Clue

I don't think many politicians understand what "affordable" means.

It means that I have enough money to afford it.

It can mean that it costs less or that I have more money.

Too often, having more money has come with the cost climbing to meet the raise, or surpassing it.

Affordable doesn't mean that I want someone else to pay for it.

Affordable doesn't mean that I don't want the person selling it to not make a profit.

But I keep seeing a strong correlation between how tightly something is regulated and how expensive it is, along with a strong correlation between whether most people pay for it out of pocket or if an insurance company typically pays.  There is also a strong relationship between government supplying the money for a good and the prices spiraling out of control.

Combine any or all of these things and it's logarithmic and/or exponentially more expensive.

Sprinkle in some union influence for the maximum price increases for minimum increase in value.

Just as macroeconomics can be summed up as, "Supply and demand, that's it!":  Eliminating the middle man is one of the surest ways to make the price of something go down. 

Just Normal Guns Now

ATF says for short barrel rifles, short barrel shotguns, suppressors and any other weapons, at gun shops you fill out a 4473 and we can roll our own at will as long as our state laws are cool with that.

The further specify they aren't gonna bother trying to sort out who is actually a plaintiff here.  Past present and future members of two different gun orgs would be a nightmare to sort through.

I, for one, am not sick of winning yet. 

Phone Tag

Spent the morning on the phone talking to, almost, every department of Florida DCF and Medicaid finding out why they declined to fill The Boy's prescription to his semaglutide.

Four bots and two live people finally got us to...

The primary care provider didn't have the most recent set of blood work because, for some reason, Quest Diagnostics only sent it to his psychiatrist.

I *THINK* I got it sorted out and everyone pointed at the information they need.

Hot buns crossed.

I now await a call from Medicare, 15 minutes late at time of posting, to get that activated. 

...By Then The Entire Glee Club Had Died

Early bird, worm, and all that.

Called the Social Security Administration to set up an appointment to get The Boy enrolled in Medicare promptly at 0800 EDT.

When I told the robot what I wanted, it (female voice) told me the phone number for Medicare and stopped doing anything but repeating that number. 

Call Medicare and their robot, male voice this time, keeps asking me for The Boy's Medicare number.  It, helpfully, informs me that I can find this number on the red-white-and-blue Medicare card I don't have because The Boy is not yet enrolled.

After doing this loop for a bit, Live Person® gets on the line and says I should call SSA.

DEEP MEANINGFUL SIGH

Call SSA with the same number as before and tell the fembot the exact same thing as before, but (somehow) this time it works and I get Live Person®!

She asks questions, I answer them.  She gets the account information up and informs me that I cannot do anything because everything is set up for Harvey to administer.

Luckily, she's right there to step in!

They ask her a barrage of questions and she answers.

NOW I can talk to them about the account and getting him signed up.

Live Person® tells me he's not enrolled and isn't automatically enrolled because he's on SSI instead of SSDI.  Well, he was supposed to be...

Now I have a phone appointment for tomorrow afternoon to set things up correctly. 

Sealed For Your Protection

This two-factor authentication bullshit is bullshit.

We're trying to get The Boy's Medicare started.  He's been on SSI well past the requisite period.

"Just log in!" everyone says.

How?

Apparently we already had a login.gov account made for him, but we're damned if we can figure out the authentication app for it so the code they're sending as the second factor is disappearing into the aether.

We don't remember setting up any authentication apps.  For all I know you have to have your app downloaded and ready to go and almost anything will convince the setup daemon you're good to go... and it sends the code to the account you didn't realize you'd specified and didn't have ready because they don't really explain the process when they tell you all you need is their name, SSN, place of birth and Medicaid number to get it all done.

They cheerfully explain that you can delete the account and start over if you've lost access to the authentication app.

We might just have to do that.

I'm going to try calling the phone number to make an appointment and see if we can't get this done in person.  Joy!

That'll be another fight with Harvey.  I don't know everything and the information is not kept so that I can find or use it.

Bribing Me With My Own Money?

President Trump has offered the American people a bribe to vote for Republicans for Congress.

They take both houses, he vows to give all of us $5,000.

Yippie?

That's like $1.2 trillion bucks.

No way this massive cash distribution will, in any way, be inflationary...

Printer go brrrrrrrrrr, I guess because I'm pretty sure the gubmint ain't got no extra $1.2 trillion laying around while they deficit spend normally.

I generally like Trump, but shit like this ticks me off.

I'd much rather he vowed to get the government to spend $5,000 less for every adult.

That'd be some positive change that'd be a real benefit to everyone. 

Same Logic

Public opinion is against Flock and other similar camera systems.

To the point that the local sheriff canceled their contract with both Flock and Axios.

Governor DeSantis banned them from FDOT right of ways.

But the press is publishing lots of articles like the picture above.

It seems very much akin to saying that since the Nazis MUST have killed a few people who deserved it, then The Holocaust is completely justified.

Some of the nearby county's sheriffs are not getting the message the public is sending and are saying that they will continue using Flock cameras that are placed on private property.  I think some of them have been running unopposed for so long they've forgotten they're elected officials and subject to the opinions of their constituents.
 

This Is The Same Logic

One Florida sheriff is touting their relationship with Flock and how it helped them find a missing child.

The thing they are missing is they are, in essence, saying that it's OK to enter every house in their jurisdiction without a warrant to catch a child pornographer.

The huge question is, "Does the good outweigh the bad?"

Considering the contents of the Bill of Rights, no.

The founders were firmly of the idea that it's better to let a few criminals get away with it than to trod on the rights of the innocent to catch them.

Something we're going to have to address is the issue of private organizations collecting information and then selling it to the government(s).

I suspect that if we decide that if the government buys something they cannot, legally, collect on their own is forbidden; the collection of such data by private entities will stop. 

I'm Getting A Little Sick Of This

One of the things you get with being a 100% service connected veteran in Florida is a property tax bill of $0.

$1 property?  $0 property taxes.

$500 million property?  $0 property taxes. 

Apparently they will be most affected by the referendum on increasing the homestead exemption. 

How?

Increased ad valorem.

Increased ad valorem that everyone will have to pay if the local politicians don't get the message about reducing their bloated budgets.

It's a scare tactic to get us to vote against our own interests in favor of these "poor" veterans.

Oh, a married 100% vet gets $4,158.17 a month ($49,898.04 a year tax free) for their service too.  So Mr Young complaining about ad valorem going from $2,000 a year to $4,000 a year can cover it with a single month's check.  Or he can space it out and hold $333.33 a month until tax time.

If he's living on that disability check exclusively, he shouldn't be living in a city with $2k ad valorem.  I'm willing to bet that he and his wife have jobs and are making decent money and this is just a "I don't wanna spend an extra $167 a month to cover the services of the municipality I've chosen to live in."  For example, the total taxes on the inlaws house, where we get no tax breaks, is less than the ad valorem Mr Young claims he's paying.

The average home value in Loxahatchee, according to Zillow, is about $860k.  Mr Young is already skipping out on approximately $10k in property taxes every year, but having to pay an extra $2k is going to break him?

I am, myself, a disabled veteran, but I am growing ever sicker of listening to people who are less fucked up than me with a much higher rating complaining about the benefits they're getting.  They're the kind of people who say, "You're welcome for my service," unironically. 

In the process of trying to find out how much Mr Young is being assessed, I discovered that I should be taking an additional $5k off my home's assessed value because of my own disability rating. 

PS: There are approximately 60,000 100% veterans in Florida.  That's 0.2% of the population.  Yes, let's design our entire tax policy around this teeny constituency. 

I'm Much Cheaper

It turns out I did more about 155mm shells than General Dynamics did last week, and I didn't spend $500 million to do it.

Ooops! 

Though it appears that GDOT did a, "we think this might work, but we won't know until we try to actually do it," deal by using older machinery to make newer rounds.

Well, we now know that the machines that made M107 rounds don't make M795 rounds.

Reading between the lines, to me, it seems that they're getting a handle on it, but the worst case scenario played out. 

Why It Wasn't A Problem

In 1868 granting birthright citizenship to anyone born on our side of the line wasn't an issue because all you got was citizenship.

If you didn't get to work, like everyone else, you'd starve.

If you worked it was, relatively, simple to become a productive member of society rather than a burden. 

It's an issue now because of the lavish, and unending, handouts and, as was pointed out in the comments, the penumbral right to bring everyone with even 1% consanguinity with you here to live.

The issue compounds.

Personally, I'm in favor of killing the handouts.  We really can't afford them.

Ideally we only let the citizen stay and send their parents packing.  I'm not sentimental about breaking up a family whose only goal is to punch out an anchor baby and start hanging from the welfare teat.

Especially now that we've seen how much fraud came with it. 

No It Doesn't Do That

The massive tax cut represented by increasing the homestead exemption will NOT make renting a house more expensive.

Cutting taxes on home owners doesn't increase the taxes on rental properties.  Those remain the same as before. 

In fact, there's language slowing down the rate they can increase the taxes on non-homestead properties from 10% to 5%.

That will help renters, not hurt them.

Right To Repair

It would appear that President Trump did us hot-rodders a solid!

 

🚨 JUST IN: President Trump signs an order to STOP people from being arrested or targeted for FIXING THEIR VEHICLE, giving the “right to fix”

Common sense!

This also breaks up a California-based monopoly on 3rd party car parts certification, per Lee Zeldin 👏🏻

TRUMP: “It came… pic.twitter.com/yOf3FiBzlu

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 29, 2026

 

I think I'm better than the dealer at fixing my car and have always felt that I should be able to access, modify or fix any system on it.

Amazing

Revenues doubled in the past five years, but a 15% cut will eliminate everything they, successfully, funded with half the money previously?

I think we're in, "pull the other one, it has bells on it," territory. 

The maths of the people crying about this tax cut aren't adding up.

BTW:  If tripling the exemption on property taxes results in a 15% drop in revenue, then you should be fine.

What these governments are going to have to do is separate the "must have" from the "nice to have."

Two things they keep bringing up to scare the normies is schools, fire and police.

Schools are already lavishly funded from the portion of property taxes that are unaffected by the homestead exemption.

In too many cases the city fire and police services are a duplication of effort and the county, with it's more diverse funding, could take over the task.

But the giant, huge, thing they're missing is the voters have been demanding relief from the taxation of their property and, by extension, they are saying they want the cities and counties of Florida to figure out how to live more cheaply. 

The voters are painfully aware that these same governments managed to provide all the services they threaten with half the money when there was just 45% inflation while the revenue increased 100%.

That means that the previous level of funding could survive a 28% cut in revenue.

The problem is the funding levels went up as the revenue did.

The voters get another chance to remind them in November by endorsing or rejecting the tax cut. 

Progressive

The road from high-trust to low-trust societies follows a predictable path.

One of the first steps is the entities that have been entrusted with keeping order, refusing to do so or being selective about what order they keep.

Anarchotyranny is the result.

The classic example is a homeowner who has suffered through repeated thefts and burglaries and receiving no justice who decides enough is enough and administers some on their own.

The people who are supposed to be investigating the crimes that led to this, enforcing the law and meting out punishment...  Come down hard on the homeowner.

The homeowner did, assuredly, break the law; but the motives matter.

What was the government doing to keep them from losing their property?

Had they arrested anyone?

Had they secured a conviction?

Did they even bother to actually investigate past taking a vague description or logging the video of the crime?

The government and police have failed in their duties and since they are given powers delegated from The People, it is the right of The People to reclaim those powers from the government and police.

But there's a simple solution:  Just make it legal to shoot burglars and thieves in the act of stealing AND/OR running from the scene of the crime.

Fuck 'em.

Because if the cops don't start arresting people and the district attorney doesn't start getting convictions:  People are going to start killing criminals on their own and will shortly thereafter start shooting the police who try to stop them.

It's a place we, as a society, do not want to be; but the first step back from the brink is the hardest and it's on Leviathan to make it. 

Mixed Feelings

First off, she's lying, they are not banning classic cars with this bill.  Bad way to start.

What they are changing is the issuance and usage of cars with the special classic car license plate.

Near as I can tell, if you register your hot-rod normal like, you are not constrained by the new rules.

At the moment you pay $13.50 for a rear plate or, optionally, $15.50 for front and rear plates; plus $150 for sales tax and $25 one-time registration.  It's always been the law that you can't use it for "general transportation purposes."  So $178.50 and your car is registered forever in Minnesota.

General transportation purposes is not actually defined.

The proposed bill really defines, and limits, what you can do with your special, lifetime, registered car.

I am not that shocked that they went very restricted.

But you takes the tax break, you takes what restrictions come with it.

This is not going to destroy the hobby and most people who actually qualify for the plate as it was originally intended have the money to register and insure their cars with normal plates and can drive as much as they like, anywhere they like.

Betcha that there's a lot of shitboxes that are 2006 and older that have a "Collector's Vehicle, collector plate" who are doing it to avoid the 10% of original MSRP plus 1.575% of current value.

For reference a '69 Chevelle's MSRP is in the $2,600 ballpark.  Current value is VERY subjective, so let's say $50k because that's what Autotempest says.  So $1,047.50 a year to register your '69 Chevelle in Minnesota.  That's steep.

A 2006 Toyota Corolla ran $14,725 sticker price and is worth $6,500 today.  $1,574.88 a year.

See the incentive to call your shitbox a collector car?

The Rat Rod people have also made it difficult to make a, "is this a collector car?" decision on condition.

Club memberships don't really help either, there's scads of Ricer clubs that will include that Corolla.

Considering that I paid $250 total for three cars in Florida, I can see that the real problem isn't the definition of "Hot Rod" but a rapacious and greedy Democrat controlled government.

Angus McThag And The Mystery Of The Missing Title

The reason we couldn't find the title for Noxious was we never had it.

We bought Noxious from a local car dealer and they filed the purchase as "release of lien" instead of "paid in full" and the system expects the lein holder to then request a title for the purchaser.

Because the car was paid for in full, the fine folks at the dealer didn't realize they'd checked the wrong box and our title has been electronically held for the past 8 years.

So, instead of $76 or so for a replacement title, I paid just under $13 for a first title.  Plus I took it home the same day.

Even more fun!

If you use one of the third party title services you pay between $150 and $180 depending how you want it shipped and wait one to three weeks for it.  Regardless of whether it's an initial title or a replacement.

Glad I spent the 45 minutes at the motor vehicle office today.

Surf And Turf

I only got lobster once while I was in the Army.  On Columbus Day in basic.

We got steak fairly regularly, especially on Federal holidays.

It was, generally, great for morale and let the cooks demonstrate they could actually cook if allowed.

That's a bit of undeserved snark.

The mess hall never had anything actively disgusting.  Occasionally they'd serve something I was too picky to eat, but it wasn't unwholesome, and there was normally a second choice.

But I notice the same people who hate the military all the time are the ones complaining about how much getting surf and turf to the troops costs.

It's probably no coincidence that these people are also ignoring the fraud in Minnesota and other places.

A Little Nervous

 Tampa is the home of MacDill Air Force Base.

MacDill is the home of CENTCOM, which is the command that's responsible for the Middle East and, therefore, Iran.

I worry that, thanks to some idiots on the blue side of the aisle, we've let in cells of sappers and saboteurs who will attack the base and its surrounds.

Controlling the border is important.

Getting Mexico to stop being a sieve for every foreign national on the planet looking to get into America would be good too. 

Good!

Trump removed a keystone item in preventing life at TL7+ by eliminating the regulations that measured some gas emissions.

Good!

Now, do refrigerants!

The only thing "wrong" with R-134 and R-410 is Dupont's patents have expired.