Exactly the same situation exists in the Vermont Senate. Senate districts are more or less built along county lines; my county has only a single senator, Chittenden county (which includes Burlington) has six, all elected at large. It is, as far as I know, the largest elected delegation from a single district in the entire country.
We send all our political crazies to Montgomery to serve in the Legislature, so politics in North Alabama tend to be (relatively) quite.
The latest excitement has been the opening of our first Cabela’s store (http://www.cabelas.com/), which got front-page newpaper coverage and a prime spot on the local news.
What we’ll do if we get a Bass Pro Shop staggers the imagination…
Ireland. The fight over water charges.
Up until now, water supply has been paid for out of general taxation. As part of the bailout programme when the country tanked a few years back, the government agreed to introduce metered water charges. The end goal, although they wouldn’t admit it directly, was pretty clearly privatisation of water.
If the goal was just to raise some extra money, they could have just tacked on a water fee to every electricity bill, and people would have bitched and paid it…but no. They’ve spent well over a BILLION euros so far setting up committees to examine this, setting up a semi-state company called Irish Water, having it put in meters for every household, paying consultants, running massive PR campaigns, on and on and on.
And the country has responded with a resounding FUCK YOU. About half of households registered with Irish Water. There have been massive protests. The government climbed down and said OK, we won’t have metered charges where you have no idea what you’re going to pay but we dunno maybe 400 a year, we’ll just do a flat fee of E100 per year per single-person household and E160 per multiple-person household. (Remember all the money they spent on installing those meters? For no reason, apparently.) The country said Yeah, no, we’re sticking with FUCK YOU. About half of the people who registered have actually paid the fee. More massive protests.
Some people just cannot handle yet another tax, on top of all the austerity measures. Some are mainly pissed off about the property tax, which came in a couple of years earlier but which you didn’t really have the option of just not paying, or are pissed off with the government in general, so they’re taking it out on this. A lot of people would pay if there were a guarantee (which would mean a referendum) that the water supply can’t be privatised, but the government absolutely refuses to do that because something something something.
Meanwhile, via layers of such byzantine fuckedupitude that I can’t even, we have a situation where you can register with Irish Water, get a rebate of E100, and then not pay your bill.
A county near me wanted to pass a resolution asking God not to smite them regarding gay marriage. I was hoping it would pass because I was attending a gay wedding that week and I figured better safe than sorry.
Another county is trying to pass a resolution to begin flying the Confederate flag, because, you know, fuck y’all.
To be fair, the city I live in did illuminate their main bridge in rainbow colors to celebrate the SCOTUS decision on gay marriage.
The biggest city in my state made minimum wage $15/hr. Most people who make more than $15/hr are upset about it (because greed). They don’t think someone ‘flipping burgers’ should make what they make.
The salmon run heavily in our state, but have been dying before spawning in record numbers due to our snowpack drought and overheated streams from this last summer (it was the hottest ever on record). We get a lot of revenue from Salmon and when they ran this last August it hurt a lot of people, especially the Tribes. There’s a lot of concern over climate change and the future of Salmon here.
Which, by the way, is a total Texas Republican dominance thing; up through at least the mid-1990s, guns were totally forbidden in Texas state university dorms, but a few years back, those knuckleheads in the legislature passed a bill to legalize it.
I live in Florida. I win!
The owners of a coffee shop in my town were caught making frat-boy comments in an online forum. The local Offenderati immediately got out their posterboard and markers and started protesting the shop, saying it promoted misogyny and rape culture. The owners have been run out of town on a rail and a competitor’s coffee shop is opening a second location where their store was.
What are “frat-boy” comments? Are we talking, “I wear a pink polo with a popped collar,” or “I’d rape that bitch”?
Conspiracy, spying, stalking, noises, harassment, stealing thoughts, brain implant, infringement of privacy, secrecy, sending messages in any form like car noises, hearing messages by spying, abuse of authorities, infringement of fair trial, false imprisonment, false arrest, etc. I live in a shitty country where power & money are exception to the laws.
Dammit. I was going to post that!
Australia - negative gearing.
You can get a nice tax break for the cost of the house you just bought just so long as you don’t live in it!. And hey, if you make it costly enough, you can avoid tax on your regular income too! And don’t worry too much about paying tax on the profit when you sell - we’ll give you a 50% discount on it.
This is clearly the One True Way to organise a tax system, and it’ll be chaos and old night if any changes are made to it whatsoever. Say the politicians with multiple-property portfolios.
(pats RNATB’s knee) That’s very nice…
In the meantime, Operation Jade Helm was an economic boom to Bastrop, Tx, what with all of the nuts that visited the area to keep the federal government from taking over rural Texas and imposing martial law over rednecks, burnt pine trees and toads. Stores and hotels around town went to the bank on it and are hoping for a sequel.
My city is rolling out “resident’s parking schemes” in several different areas. Basically, this means that for all on street parking, non-residents have to pay a few £ to park, supposedly to help residents who, in a city not really designed for cars (being far too old), often wind up having to park some distance from their houses.
Residents, incidently, have to pay a £30 “administration fee” for a pass each year.
The parking restrictions only apply from around 8am until about 6pm.
Parking in the daytime was never a problem; the issue always was that there are simply more residents with cars than available spaces, as many old houses are now converted to flats, and lots of streets have no on street space at all.
The scheme is utterly useless at solving the issue it was supposedly aimed at, is charging everyone, including the people who were having trouble in the first place, and is drastically reducing custom on some major local shopping streets, as there’s now no free parking at all, so just, say, nipping into the nice independent craft shop for one item now costs an extra £2, which makes it cheaper to just visit the big out of town chain with its own car park instead. Shops are closing, leaving empty stores and cheap nasty takeaways behind.
Residents were consulted before the scheme was rolled out of course. In the area I recently moved from, I was invited to take part, even. Not one single resident in the whole fecking area voted for the scheme. Several hundred voted against.
Houses are really expensive in my neighbourhood so there’s a ballot initiative gaining support to see if not building any housing for a year might make them cheaper.
Back home (The Netherlands - I live in the UK now) the debate once again rages about Sinterklaas en zwarte piet (i.e. Saint Nicolas and black Pete…
Sinterklaas en zwarte piet date back to the early 19th century and last year political correctness went overboard and the country was in uproar about banning ‘zwarte Piet’. Even the government got involved…Quote from wikipedia
Zwarte Piet (plural Zwarte Pieten) is a companion of Sinterklaas, usually portrayed by a man in blackface[3] with black curly hair, dressed up like a 17th-century page in colourful attire, often sporting a lace collar and a feathered cap. He first appears in print as the nameless servant of Saint Nicholas in Sint-Nikolaas en zijn knecht (“St. Nicholas and His Servant”), published in 1850 by Amsterdam schoolteacher Jan Schenkman; however, the tradition appears to date back at least as far as the early 19th Century.
He’s black because he climbs down chimneys - this year it seems that is the line they’re taking and thus zwarte poiet won’t be blackface but sooted
My little town is pretty boring so I have to go back 6 months. A Letter to the Editor concerning a young man who was driving way too fast for the Letter Writer’s liking. She was afraid for her grandchildren’s lives… I guess while allowing them to play in the street which is also the main thru-fair aka a highway? Her screed ran for half of a small newspaper’s page.
She was majorly mad because when she yelled at the young man he flipped her off. So she told the Mayor about this demanding he punish the young man.
Because the Mayor is his daddy.
The Mayor declined and suggested she… well, she didn’t write what he said she should go do but it was heavily implied.
The funniest things about this is 1) she used to own our house and went a bit crazy here (thousands of dollars of landscaping and thousands of dollars in kitchen cabinetry plus a limestone bar and fireplace in the basement that periodically floods … with the fireplace not hooked up to a flue, we think they were tweaking… they lost the house to the bank) and 2) the young man is my oldest son’s BFF.
More than you’d ever want to know about the topic can be found here.
You don’t live in Bristol, by any chance?