A Chronicle reporter went undercover in high school
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Who will deliver us from this meddlesome law?
It's insane to me that the now-adult students still oppose the journalist. They were victims of this law. Whatever they are saving on their taxes now, they lose in a lifetime of benefits - money and otherwise - from a better personal education and a better educated community.
And here they are, shitting on someone who tried an innovative way to repeal it, in the service of the very students she covered, because of some meaningless drama. Because their emotions were insufficiently validated.
The most fascinating thing about her journalism is that, by 2024, she has exposed the students as the antagonists. They only care about themselves. Then, and now.
Given that you are selling it rather than rent it out, it seems to have the intended effect. Just as when I renovated a vacant RSO duplex, I sold it rather than enter rent control again.
Incentives do work, but we accidentally incentivised and subsidized a whole bunch of mom and pop landlords with prop 13.
The subsidization of mom and pop landlords with Prop 13 basically translates into lower rents overall; without it rents would have to rise (or total rentals decrease, which may be a desirable outcome).
<https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/los_angeles/latest/lam...>
Only voters can. Directly. At the ballot box.
So don’t hold your breath. Any other remedy wouldn’t really be legal nor legitimate because of the nature of ballot initiatives, particularly ones that amend the State constitution.
Proposition 13 is sitting on top of a long pile of ballot-passed laws that have over time convinced me the entire ballot initiative process is actually a mistake and primarily enables bad but popular laws.
It is also arguably un-American. I thought the whole idea of having a representative government was so the common citizen didn't have to deal with the tedium of actually governing, so we elect people to govern in our stead. The fact the us Californians were expected to have opinions on props related to dialysis clinics in 2018[1], 2020[2], and 2022[3] should be a prime example of this. I have no idea what those props were supposed to do. All I know is the only reason I am being asked to weigh in on them is because someone with money was finding it too hard to pass whatever law they wanted through the legislature, so they tried to circumvent the normal legislative process by coming to us directly.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_Proposition_8
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_23
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_California_Proposition_29
Or all the renters can get together and decide to screw over the owners; fuck 'em 'cause they're old anyway. That's certainly a possibility. However, expect your children to treat you the same way.
Everyone who says this is pushing a false dichotomy. The two solutions are not "create a landed gentry who pass preferential tax rates to their genetic offspring" and "kick grandma to the curb and throw sand in her face while twirling your mustache".
Many other states have allowances/exemptions for a single owner-occupied "homestead" to prevent older people from losing their homes. Just copy their homework. Under those schemes you don't stop owing property taxes, but (with some variations) you can defer them until you sell the property or pass away. And it is beyond sick (and anti-American and probably unconstitutional) that the Prop 13 tax preference can be inherited by children and grandchildren.
The only "problem" with those schemes (from the perspective of Prop 13 proponents) is that they do not allow the creation of a class of "petite nobility".
I feel for the grandmas who want to live in the same place forever and also did not get educations so were left behind. It was a complicated time. Everyone deserves a community, but maybe not the same community.
> "petite nobility"
The guilded professionals are the petite nobility. The parents of the students in these articles: like, they had a choice. They could fund their schools better and they chose not to. And given that same choice, those same students, they are now adults, and again, they choose not to. Which community do you want to be a part of?
It has 40 million residents (who cares if they're citizens or owners or not) - for $2075 per person.
Take another state (I won't even use New Jersey as the highest) - revenue in Texas: $73.5 billion. Population in 2021: 30 million - 2450. Slightly higher, but not much. Texas has no income tax.
Let's take Illinois: $33.8 billion - population in 2020: 13 million - 2600.
I don't think California's woes can be adequately explained by Prop 13.
However, you could fix most of the problem by making commercial property no longer subject to Prop 13.
[1] https://bythenumbers.sco.ca.gov/Raw-Data/Property-Tax-Raw-Da...
[2] https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/property-tax/docs/96-172...
I don't think its that hard.
> You can't just shut it off suddenly or even gradually over a decade because people will lose their homes en masse
Eliminate the 2% per annum assessment increase limit entirely for properties transferred after the date of the change. In
Phase it out gradually for other properties but, for owner-occupied primary residences (covered or not) apply the original 2% limit formula as a limit on nondeferrable property tax, allowing deferment of the excess with the state acquiring, in lieu of payment, an interest in the property in proportion to the ratio of the deferred amount to the assessed value (the full tax should decrease as the state acquires interest, but the limit on the non-deferrable amount should not), which the owner can repurchase on the same bases any time before or at transfer.
You could even add an additional limit so that the nondeferrable amount increases at the lowest of 2% or the rate of inflation or (and this is the new bit the owners average annual rate of increase in taxable income over the preceding three year period.)
Seniors don't get forced out of their homes (and not just during a transitional period), and taxes are assessed at full value, and commercial, industrial, and vacation real estate stops getting taxpayer subsidies “justified” by stories about fixed-income senior homowners being forced out of their home.
Some things in policy are hard, but lots of time “its too hard” is really “I don't want to do it, but can't argue against it directly.”
Once you accept that humans are emotional creatures first, and then capable of reasoning, it will make sense. People don't care too much about facts, they care about what they feel more.
The problem here isn’t emotions, it’s selfishness. When people say a lack of leadership, they mean a lack of giving a fuck about someone other than yourself. These kids only cared about themselves. They still only care about themselves!
> Jones’ classmates also came off as complicated figures, brilliant and with seemingly endless potential, but so used to diminishing resources that many didn’t see themselves as victims. It’s the resigned lack of ambition... [Jones] found soft drinks and apathy...
> ...many of the students involved grew more resentful and felt unheard.
> I’m not going to calm [the students] down. … I’m not going to try to silence them. If they’re angry and they want to march [to voice their anger at the news article], then I’m going to help them figure out how to do that.
> Tigueros [the student] added: “I’ve got kids now, and imagining that somebody would reveal the secrets that my daughter gave to somebody she trusted? It sounds horrific.”
> Jones didn’t write about the deepest personal secrets discussed in the center...
Tigueros, a now-adult student who was friends with Jones: verbatim only thinking about himself and his family in that quote. And the thing he says verbatim he worries about the most didn't even happen. It doesn't even make sense. It isn't horrific.
I know they were defenseless kids then. But there were also ambitious students at that school. Kids who would benefit from the funding that evaporated. What of them?
You're getting all of the above from a one-line quote saying a person who was an unwitting participant in this experiment now considers it to be unethical? Sorry, but it seems like you're looking for something to get mad about to shore up your (quite reasonable) objections to to a tax policy.
I just wonder how you imagine change is achieved. Because you tell me, how is Prop 13 going to get repealed? Are you going to run a ballot initiative? There are lots of popular laws that are bad.
And speaking of, you know, we kill tens of millions of lab mice and rats every year, and rats are quite smart, and the people working with lab mice realize the gravity of the animal suffering they inflict. They are smart people. Every single medicine you use today has animal suffering animal testing on mice related to it.
The nonconsenting media experiment framework people have a much more expansive framework than the one you are invoking, you are invoking a popsci version of it, and your version doesn't accommodate the intractability of everything being consensual. You just don't know enough about this stuff, and you say something kind of reductive that is really about absolving these now-adults of responsibility for their own screwups.
You're getting co-opted by people who only think to the first level of the expanding brain meme. Oh, some people got upset at my innovative form of protest. Boo hoo.
I'm not going to rank one kind of suffering or using or betrayal against another. It doesn't matter. It was definitely in the students' interest to repeal Prop 13. If only they cared!
You are significantly mischaracterizing the criticisms by the students:
> Trigueros said he was not among the most distressed of Jones’ classmates and listened to both sides of the debate. He understood the Chronicle’s attempt to reveal the challenges facing teachers and students, but said a major line was crossed when Jones stepped into the Peer Resource Center, where the school’s most vulnerable students gravitated and opened up. Nov. 3, 1992: Jonny Dror hangs out at the Peer Resource Center, a gathering space where students could speak their minds at George Washington High School in San Francisco.
> “She saw kids were processing divorces and death and homelessness and coming out. She saw all of that,” he said. “We wanted to consider (Shann the reporter) an ally and advocate for us, (but there was) this deep betrayal, and we didn’t consent to all of that.”
It doesn't change the fact that they are in favor of Prop 13. The average person in California is in favor of Prop 13, and that's exactly the problem! In that sense, it doesn't really matter what happened. They missed the point.
Yes you are. Their criticisms are about their right to privacy being violated by an undercover reporter.
> It doesn't change the fact that they would vote against repealing Prop 13.
I missed the part of the article where a former student said that, can you show me?
I apologize, I wrote what I was thinking down wrong. They would vote in favor of Prop 13, which is bad. Not sure why I wrote it backwards. It's true that they do not talk about this. But Prop 13 is still law. It is a popular law. Even though it hurt them.
> Their criticisms are about their right to privacy being violated by an undercover reporter.
Where did the reporter violate their privacy? She didn't write anything about it. She was indeed trustworthy. In a sense she met her obligations as a student, however pretend. But she did what a student would do under that covenant. And by the way, students violate each other's privacy then all the time. They aren't reporters, but they also go and tell the secrets she didn't, so are you going to say those students are the antagonists?
Also, she had the approval of the administration. Perhaps they could have said that the peer space or whatever it is was off limits, but truthfully I think it is a much lower drama office than it sounds.
You are getting hung up on really modern and broad meanings of things like privacy and consent and whatever. This isn't intersectionality programming Code of Conduct world. There's a specific thing and a specific harm, that isn't interesting at all, that occurred, in that specific place, with specific students, that doesn't generalize away from, well the students are the antagonists. That is the surprise of all of this. If she hadn't been in that peer counseling office, those same students would be just as pissed off, and they would still be looking out for #1, and still be missing the point entirely.
Where in the article does it show students advocating any position on Prop 13? You twisting the narrative to fit your agenda.
> You are getting hung up on really modern and broad meanings of things like privacy and consent and whatever...
Privacy is not a new concept and your response here is revealing.
The students don't advocate any position on Prop 13. It's a popular law, and I'm a betting man, I would bet that the average Californian supports it, so the average student-now-adult does, and indeed, maybe that's why it was so hard for Jones to make a persuasive case. Unambitious students want low taxes more than they wanted better educations - sounds stupid, because it is. Anyway, my agenda is only the surprise at the students being the bad guys.
I think their privacy got validated for some sense of privacy. I just don't think it matters, at all. I think they are wrong to care about it so much, and the particular way and circumstance and sense their violation occurred, keeps me protected for my privacy in all the ways it matters. They are totally orthogonal. Tough cookie.
Thank you. I appreciate your admission that you made a series of unfounded assumptions and then used that to judge people you don't know.
And you know this how, because it hasn't been repealed? Come on.
And by the way, students violate each other's privacy then all the time. They aren't reporters, but they also go and tell the secrets she didn't, so are you going to say those students are the antagonists?
Students don't generally broadcast each others' secrets through a citywide daily newspaper. And while you could argue that the advent of social media gives them equivalent publishing power and some students abuse it, such usage is generally condemned.
You have a weird fixation on the people in this story, maybe it's a good time to go for a walk.
Tale as old as time. Good read
Not that I care much if we use oil or not but it's interesting how the inevitable type predictions come and go and come back again.
Answer - Texas and Illinois are higher per capita, but Texas has no income tax. Might be hard to directly compare.
You can compare dollars per student, however.
According to https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-s...
CA: $13,642 TX: $9,871 NY: $24,881
By this, CA and NY should have the best schools, and Texas's should be absolute ass.
CA still spends more than everyone else, regardless of Prop 13. Hardly deprived students.
I see she’s living in Europe now.
I started out in San Francisco as a journalist, radio talk show host and city girl who couldn’t boil an egg. Then I came to Wales, that mythic land of castles, mist and magic. At the age of 41, I fell in love with a Welsh farmer named Rich, and came to live on his beautiful farm by the sea. Life on the farm was quite an adjustment for me, but after a steep learning curve, I came to love it. We bought our first goat in order to help with my son Benji’s bronchial infections. Together Rich and I learned to make a probiotic called kefir, to use up our surplus goats milk.
Then Rich contracted a life-threatening superbug infection and, when the doctors couldn’t help us, I used our kefir to save Rich’s life. I also learned to put the kefir into skincare, which cured Benji’s eczema. Rich and I started our little business Chuckling Goat on the farmhouse kitchen table, offering our handmade kefir and kefir skincare online. Today we have 70 goats, 10 employees and 30,000 happy customers in 28 countries around the world.
Take a look at the prices for a used copy.
Not many books pull it off.
- Borrow a physical or digital copy from your library
- Borrow a digital copy from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/fasttimesatridge0000crow
- Download a digital copy from Anna's Archive: https://annas-archive.org/search?index=&q=fast+times+at+ridg...
Enjoy!
Undercover investigative journalism is an absolute minefield, legally and ethically, and in school we went over historical cases and the potential legal liabilities that were present.
Undercover reporters do not enjoy ANY of the protections afforded to undercover police officers, and indeed there have been recent high-profile cases of undercover sting operations by media organizations resulting in criminal charges.
For instance, in 2015 an anti-abortion organization called the Center for Medical Progress conducted an undercover investigation at Planned Parenthood facilities, and two members of that organization were later charged with 15 felonies in the state of California related to presenting fake IDs and "criminal conspiracy to invade privacy."
Edit: To clarify, I am not defending the actions of this group. I agree that they engaged in deceptive, grossly unethical behavior. I am merely pointing out that just because they claimed to be undercover journalists doesn't give them any legal protections. They were still able to be prosecuted and convicted.
Wait a minute.
That group was pushing their own agenda / opposed to Planned Parenthood and put out deceptive videos to push a false narrative.
That's not 'journalism', that's their own form of activism and lying.
My point was not to suggest that their actions constituted good or ethical journalism. My point was that claiming to be a journalist doing an undercover sting is not going to get you any legal protections that would be afforded to police conducting an undercover operation.
My point was that journalists don't just get to say "I'm going undercover" and all of sudden enjoy legal protections, the way an undercover police operation would.
So just because the members of the group claimed that they were conductive investigative journalism does not mean that they can't be criminally prosecuted for their actions.
I’m tempted to argue with you, but the facts so clearly speak for themselves that I’ll just link to the Wikipedia article so that others can see what really happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Medical_Progress
> CMP established a fake company to pose as buyers of fetal tissue and secretly recorded Planned Parenthood officials during meetings.
> The CMP released edited videos of the discussions which made it appear as if Planned Parenthood intended to profit from fetal tissue, although the full unedited videos instead showed that Planned Parenthood requested only a fee to cover costs without any profit.
> [...]
> [In] March 2017 Daleiden and the second CMP employee were charged with 15 felonies in California—one for each of the people whom they had filmed without consent, and one for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy. Planned Parenthood also sued the CMP and Daleiden for fraud and invasion of privacy, asserting that the videos were deceptively edited to create a false impression of wrongdoing.
I’d like to avoid an argument thread, so please go improve the Wikipedia article if you think something is inaccurate.
Apples != Oranges
After spending 10 minutes with the court complaint, a large group of people were funded to spend a very long time posing as doctors, using fake IDs and signing NDAs, to, among many things, attend abortion doctor professional conferences, get access to a list of members of an abortion doctor federation, access clinician-only areas and databases inside planned parenthood locations, and all in service of proving Planned Parenthood was an industrial operation focused on "infant organ trafficking."
When they couldn't show that after months and 100s of hours of footage, they retconned life-saving fetal tissue donation into "infant organ trafficking" through video chopping.
(Note: I grew up in Buffalo, the reason why the roster stuff is scary and they signed the NDA with the fake names, is abortion doctors are regularly targeted, ex. two classmates lost their father, he was shot in their kitchen)
> presenting fake IDs
You forgot felony wiretapping.
EDIT: oh, my mistake, you're referring to the genesis of the "Fast Times" story. Not meta enough whoops
“ A pair of underachieving cops are sent back to a local high school to blend in and bring down a synthetic drug ring.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1232829/?ref_=nm_knf_t_1
There also may be a few selective-admittance public schools with well-above-median spending.
As far as money directly spent educating kids in an ordinary school (not shared costs like building construction and maintenance, or utilities) some cost way more than others. A bus-riding kid with an address not that close to any other students with an IEP requiring a tutor to follow them around and help them in every class or a special self-contained classroom serving only a handful of students but requiring 2-3 dedicated staff can cost 5-10x more than a student with no special requirements whose parents drive them to school or who live near what would be a bus-stop regardless of their attendance.
Individual student costs vary a ton, and when averaging over entire systems you also may have extreme outlier institutions throwing off the numbers.
California in particular also has a (much) larger ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) burden than most other states, which will tend both to increase their costs and depress their standardized testing results.
Different sources on the web give wildly different numbers for per pupil spending by states (obviously, including different universes of spending), but every one of them puts CA near the middle of the 51 (states+DC). So, no, in relative terms, its not “so high”.