"Yeah, because the alternative is people living in a house for 30 years and being forced to sell it to pay for increasing property taxes they cannot afford on a retired fixed income is so much better for everyone."

Please. That could have easily been solved. Instead we're in a situation where the people on 3 sides of me rent their original homes out -- it makes no sense to sell them because they pay only _$400_ a year in property tax. The 2 of the 3 houses behind me pay less than $800. Me, I pay $8500. Same size house, bought 12 years ago at a decent rate -- the problem is I remodeled it, and the county reappraises at current day rates. The house across to the left just sold, I expect he'll be near what I pay.

Prop 13 does nothing but encourage neighborhoods to be turned into rent factories and engender bad feelings between neighbors who pay VASTLY different sums for the _exact same service_. It was a good idea poorly implemented, and now everyone is too scared to change it.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-9.0a1.en-US.win64-x86_64.installer.exe , as linked from http://nightly.mozilla.org/

64bit nightly installer. I've been running it a while now, fairly nice.

"(except for in California, where you have to have a teacher certificate to home school"

This is not correct. There is no requirement to have a teaching certificate in CA. That was a short-term decision of a court that was overturned on appeal a few months later; it was never a law. The only requirement is that the lessons include the standards-track material as well, and this is enforced thru periodic testing and feedback with a local school. Additionally popular are home schooling coops who create a legal and instructional framework around what is essentially a school for multiple children, run out of homes.

You are not misinformed.

The largest textbook purchasers are California (#1) and Texas (#2); The rest of the country arguably gets what we 2 states 'agree' on thru our negotiations with the publishers. Texas has such a large influence because it orders books at the state level, whereas most states order (and decide) at a district level.

Now normally, we balance each others whacky theories out. However, CA has drastically reduced _new_ textbook orders due to budget issues for the last few years, so this and last years TX board meetings were of particular import, as TX had unusually strong influence with the publishers.

Then perhaps the power companies should stop subsidizing CFLs? Every hardware store has CFL stacks @ near incandescent (below, in some cases) prices thanks to power company subsidies. This article is entirely misleading; you are not sucking up double the rated wattage from the utility, they simply have to transmit that power your your wires. The only additional cost to them is the transmission loss that occurs -- there's no "larger wiring" they need to deply, because they're ALREADY wired to handle the 60-100w bulbs we're all replacing!