Unlucky 13

The California real estate assessment valuation-benchmark created by Proposition 13 is now almost 35 years old, which is really too long for a California parcel to “escape” an actual taxable-assessment.

If the escape is not capped, there will be less and less revenue, fewer balanced budgets, more lost services, more lost jobs, more election waste, and more pain.

I am suggesting that each California parcel receive an updated evaluation/assessment at least once, each quarter-century (25 years), regardless of it being a residential or commercial parcel.

I am not suggesting the elimination of Proposition 3, but merely installing a cap, to stop its choking effect which will get tighter and tighter, year after year, if we continue doing the same thing.

But Enough About Me…

A tad over a year ago I switched from AOL to gmail as my primary internet access. However, it wasn’t until recently that I discovered a very disturbing aspect of Google’s gmail service.

A couple of weeks ago, I was cranking out a long e-mail to my international patent attorney in London concerning one of my inventions, when I sat back to proofread what I’d already drafted. My eyes started roaming the screen and I noticed that gmail had popped up ads along the top and the right side, each ad keyed into words and phrases in my private e-mail. At first I thought this was just pure coincidence, but then I decided to call up several previous e-mails to different people on different topics and each one of my private e-mails showed ads keyed into the words, phrases, and topics of each different e-mail.

Call me paranoid, but this is the manifestation of Big Brother, 1984, a la Google!

Correction: In “Agony of D’Tweet,” (May 21-27), the Weeklyinadvertently misquoted Assemblyman Bill Monning’s projections of how much new revenue lawmakers may try to raise though a majority-vote budget. “I think we will try to raise some revenue through majority-vote options, but a very small amount, a maximum of $3 billion to $3.5 billion,” Monning said. (The original story said “million.” Those zeroes add up.) The Weekly regrets the error.