Yeah, I know. It makes perfect sense too, since "rated" is basically like "combined mileage". But I rarely supercharge in situations where I will be doing 55 mph.
Stop relying on local property taxes to fund the schools. That’s a US thing that isn’t replicated in most other well-off countries.
The closest thing Germany has to US-style annually-billed property tax is Grundsteuer, and for homeowners, it’s low triple digits at most. It pays for neighborhood streets, sidewalks, storm drains, and (I think) the fire department. We do pay a pretty hefty transfer tax when we buy property - I think it was about 5% of the purchase price, but that’s a one-time thing.
Schools are funded out of general revenues, mostly personal and corporate income taxes, assessed nationally. Each state has its own school system, with differing structures and standards.
What’s more, funding schools from local property taxes keeps the good schools in the rich communities and the bad schools in the poor communities. It prevents equality of opportunity. It is cynical, mean-spirited, and appalling.
This is true, having split kids between two districts I've seen this first hand.
Funding from state would equalize it, and the rich communities can do their gilding via the PTA. I'd much rather have that then them pulled out of public education entirely.
I live in Australia. Here, there are no school districts, and local government has nothing to do with public schools - they are all state-run and funded out of the state government budget. The state government does rely in part on property taxes, but also has other revenue sources, so abolishing property tax wouldn’t have any direct impact on education funding here. I don’t see any inherent reason why a US state couldn’t adopt the same public education model.
I’m 100% in favor of recouping the money via other taxes. My motivation for being against property tax on primary residences is my belief that if you own a single family home free and clear, no one should be able to take it away from you simply because you don’t have any money.
If you have a house but no money, I don’t think the government should take and sell your house to pay for those services. And if they did, you’d probably cause the government to incur more costs providing for you as a homeless person than it would have earned from your property tax.
Sure, why not. American public schools are terrible self-protecting bureaucratic monstrosities. I would be fine with scrapping their funding and reworking the whole system.
OK, I'm typing this comment on Firefox for Android BTW, so I keep trying to like it.
Here's my current annoyances:
– on Android, scrolling and performance is very poor on certain websites, on a high end phone; this including Mastodon, and my report was dismissed;
– on Android, the UI has issues detecting between light and dark modes at the system level; it has other obvious bugs, too, that are reported but remain unfixed;
– poor integration with the OS for player controls; both Android and desktop (macOS);
- unreliable HDR support; in macOS it works, but I sometimes get flicker, and it might get disabled if the viewport is small;
- poor battery life on macOS; this used to be true for Chromium as well, ans Safari is king obviously, but lately Chromium has an edge over Firefox;
– incompatibility with certain online apps, like MS Teams; in fairness they worked hard to fix Meetup at least;
– poor PWA support, no SSB; on both desktop and Android. I prefer PWAs to Electron variants: better sandboxing, use of browser extensions, often better memory use; see: https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/
– no customizable keyboard shortcuts and poor accessibility preventing OS-level solutions; in macOS I can set shortcuts for Chrome, for various Tab actions, like Pin Tab or Close Others. And Brave/Vivaldi have customization built into their settings;
— poor extensions security: for LanguageTool or Google Translate I'd like the "Click to Enable" option or the ability to disable by default or enable per-hostname;
– unusable profiles – in Chrome different profiles have different history and extensions, so for security purposes they are above Firefox's containers; I actually don't get the point of Containers at all, being useful only for logging into multiple AWS accounts, otherwise they have no privacy or security benefits;
---
Firefox does have certain advantages. They aren't enough to keep me using it, though. But in the interest of fairness:
+ History sync actually works;
+ DNS-Over-HTTPS works with fallback to system;
+ Tree-style-tabs;
+ Better bookmark management;
+ Reader view (Android & desktop);
+ Ctrl+Tab;
+ Non-admin upgrades;
+ uBlock Origin;
+ Total Cookie Protection;
+ Android: multiple search engines;
+ Android: Open in app;
+ Android: Dark reader / uBlock Origin / other extensions;
> – unusable profiles – in Chrome different profiles have different history and extensions, so for security purposes they are above Firefox's containers; I actually don't get the point of Containers at all, being useful only for logging into multiple AWS accounts, otherwise they have no privacy or security benefits;
FF has those kinds of profiles too, if you want to you can start it once using the ProfileManager from the command line, (un-)check the box asking if you want to always default to the last profile used or instead always start FF in the ProfileManager UI from now on, so you can choose on each startup.
These profiles are completely separated as well, have their own histories, bookmarks, cookie jars, extensions etc.
FF's Containers on the other hand are a less heavy-handed approach, by staying in the same profile, having the same bookmarks, extensions and history but fully separating the cookie jars, enabling you to have (just as an example) Facebook in its own little world, everything else outside that container and/or in their own specific containers, unable to cross-contaminate (to track you) with third-party cookies and the like.
Basically, profiles and containers are entirely different levels of sandboxing.
This is precisely what I'm ranting about. At this point, the Facebook container is privacy theatre.
You don't need a Facebook container, at least since “Total Cookie Protection”. Which itself it's just a better way to “disable 3rd party cookies”, that doesn't break websites, although Firefox's isolation goes beyond just cookies.
And Firefox isn't the only one that does it, although it may be the best. But Safari, Brave Browser and even Chrome have deployed similar protections. See for instance: https://brave.com/privacy-updates/7-ephemeral-storage/
