Supervisor Antonovich has declared war on the California budget system, stating that it is “a mix of tax schemes and band aids that only delay the inevitable”.

Antonovich’s recommendations include:

• The elimination of state agencies with duplicative responsibilities
• A two-year budget to prevent the annual budget negotiations crisis and interrupted revenues to local government and schools
• A part-time legislature like 46 other states that enables citizen lawmakers to bring valuable professional experience to the legislative process
• An end to term limits that restricts the will of the voter and has produced a “musical chairs” system of inexperienced legislators controlled by consultants and lobbyists
• We need to bring our civil service system into the 21st Century.

Those who live in California, especially in Los Angeles County, know that we have some of the highest nuisance tax rates in the country, including sales tax, gasoline tax and business tax. With the recent boom years in real estate, property tax revenues jumped significantly as well, going from $6.4 billion in 1981 to a whopping $43 billion in 2007.

So where does all this money go? In a 10-year period (1997-2007) the California state payroll grew by 24%, from 719,000 to 895,000 employees. Fat paychecks are in abundance as well, with over 15,000 taking home salaries in excess of $100,000 per year, and over 1,000 employees take home over $200,000 per year. As of November 2003 there were only 8 state employees making over $200,000. Talk about a huge cost of living increase!

Antonovich also recommends copying Nevada’s successful methods to encourage business to stay or relocate to California with business-friendly incentives. Proposed incentives would include reduced taxes and regulation as well as an innovative marketing campaign.

I’m not normally an Antonovich fan, since it seems he’s often ignoring the issues we see here in Santa Clarita, but this message from him does make sense. I agree that the Governor’s office and the State Legislature should be contacted to let them know that having the state go into bankruptcy as a result of this blatant overspending is not an option.

The IRS and state revenue agents have begun using social media outlets like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook to track down “tax deadbeats” who brag about upcoming revenues online.

Seems these revenue agents are not supposed to use “friending” someone with false information as part of this process, so they can only look at public profiles in their search for revenues. However, with MySpace profiles defaulting to “public”, there’s apparently lots to be found there. Google searches can also reveal a lot of info, such as job changes and relocations.

According to the Wall Street Journal (which shares a common corporate parent with MySpace), “Agents in Nebraska collected $2,000 from a deejay after he advertised on his MySpace page that he would be working at a big public party.”  Jim Eads, director of the Federation of Tax Administrators said, “These new supplements [internet searches] are often far more efficient than the older ones, such as reading the local newspaper or making inquiries at barbershops and church meetings.” Well, we wouldn’t want the IRS to be wasting time talking with our hairdressers and crashing our parties now, would we?

Social media is a great tool for communicating with peers, reconnecting with friends and building business relationships, but this does illustrate how others may use your online updates for purposes other than what you intended. Do remember that what you post to your social media profile is public information, and be sure to keep that in mind before you hit “share” or “update”.

Caution: This post may be considered to be controversial by some, as it includes some straight-talk about various types of intolerance. If you think you may be offended, you have five seconds to click away… one… two… three… four…

Students at Vasquez High School in Acton, which sits on the border between the Santa Clarita and Antelope Valleys, got to witness the consequences of bullying and intolerance first-hand this week, when Jeremiah Lasater committed suicide in a school restroom. Jeremiah had apparently reached his limits after being subjected to daily tormenting by his fellow students.

Jeremiah had reportedly been tormented by his classmates in middle school (High Desert School) as well, but it seems the administrators at both schools, the middle school and high school, didn’t see the need to intervene. Why was Jeremiah so “special” that he deserved this treatment? Apparently he was a special-needs student, standing 6 feet, 6 inches tall and weighing nearly 300 pounds. He didn’t fit into the so-called ”norm”, so his classmates went out of their way to make sure he knew that… day, after day, after day… until he finally broke down and took his own life to end his misery.

Says Stan Halperin, Acton-Agua Dulce Unified School District’s superintendent, “We have a zero-tolerance policy, and when we have an incident of bullying or taunting we address it immediately. We call in the parents and follow the policy, which included suspension and following the suspension with a learning pattern to teach the kids that bullying is wrong.” Uh, huh… Other parents have indicated that schools in the Acton area have long been known for not taking enough action regarding bullying on campus. I’ve had calls from parents living in Acton who didn’t want to give up their house and acreage there, but desperately wanted to find somewhere inexpensive in the Santa Clarita Valley to call “home”, at least on paper, so their kids didn’t have to go to their local schools.

So, now the school district is paying for grief counselors for these bullying kids, while Jeremiah’s parents plan for his funeral… What’s wrong with this picture?

This has been a week chock-full of intolerance, as election day is just around the corner and Proposition 8 supporters are gearing up by announcing their intolerance of the gay lifestyle. In my opinion, intolerance is intolerance, no matter how you attempt to justify it. It doesn’t matter what the target is, whether it’s calling a homosexual a “sinner”, referring to a person of color by the “N-word”, calling an overweight person “fatty”, or referring to the low-income Latino women in the Newhall area as “those stroller-pushing mamas”… all of these examples are derogatory and represent an intolerance of those who are different from yourself. And if you’re a parent, your children are likely picking up on this “vibe” and may be using it as a weapon against others in the schoolyard.

The question that many are asking is, “How do our children learn intolerance?” Well, it would seem that they learn it first at home, and then at school from their peers. Not all of us had the luxury of growing up in a household free of intolerance, but we do have the opportunity to make the choice as to whether we’re going to perpetuate that intolerance in our children and in our own lives. Can people change the way they act (and react) around people who are “different” than them? Of course they can! But will they, or will we continue to hear stories of kids either being murdered (as was the 14-year-old in Oxnard recently) or committing suicide as the result of bullying and intolerance?

See if you can catch yourself in the act of being intolerant, and then reflect on whether you really like that type of behavior or not, or if it’s just an old “reaction” that you’d like to change. It can start with something as simple as refraining from giving someone “the bird” when they cut you off in traffic. Think about it… how much do you do on a daily basis that is a result of your earlier “programming”, and how does that fit who you are today? Do you like the way you feel when you’re acting intolerant, or does it leave behind a feeling of anger or resentment that then follows you like a black cloud for the rest of the day? It takes effort to change years of patterning, but it’s definitely possible if you’re persistent.

Fortunately, it seems many of today’s children are choosing to make their own decisions to some extent, often going against their parents’ examples of intolerance, and instead are just accepting people for who they are. Let’s hope that Santa Clarita’s parents and school administrators will quickly learn how to end bullying and tormenting in our schools, instead of turning the other way and acting as if it didn’t happen. We are all aware that administrators and staff on certain campuses will watch bullying happen and do nothing to stop it… it’s time to either reassign or retrain those people so no more parents are burying children who were killed on our school campuses as a result of intolerance.

I have a greater appreciation for the trapeze acts after taking "flying lessons" recently with Peter Gold of Trapeze-Experience. It’s a lot of fun and a great way to challenge yourself while getting a bit of exercise. As Peter says, "Our participants discover remarkable parallels between the way they go about their trapeze-development, and the way they go about their lives."

Trapeze from an educational and personal growth standpoint can really shift your thoughts and awareness of yourself to something more powerful and creative than you were before your trapeze experience. Ram Shiram, Fortune 500 Consultant and former Harvard Business School faculty member says, "Quite simply, those who don’t shift, will get shifted. And no company in the world, #1 market-share or not, is immune from becoming dust."

Tom Peters, bestselling author and consultant says, "Things are moving so fast that there simply isn’t time for the old way of doing business."

Have you been working with a Realtor who is doing business the old way and is not "immune from becoming dust"? If so, it’s time to call Linda Slocum at 661.670.0349 for a better Realtor experience!

Recent studies show that certain types of cocoa can actually increase blood flow to the brain as well as brain functions. Cocoa high in flavanols are the subject of several recent studies proving that cocoa can even help prevent dementia and cognitive decline.

Is that why women tend to crave chocolate each month? To think they told us it was only part of PMS!

Mars Inc and other companies are working to develop cocoa products that are high in flavanols, so look for those on your supermarket shelves in the near future!

Recent studies show that certain types of cocoa can actually increase blood flow to the brain as well as brain functions. Cocoa high in flavanols are the subject of several recent studies proving that cocoa can even help prevent dementia and cognitive decline.

Is that why women tend to crave chocolate each month? To think they told us it was only part of PMS!

Mars Inc and other companies are working to develop cocoa products that are high in flavanols, so look for those on your supermarket shelves in the near future!

While there are other PDA phone options available, the Blackberry system remains very popular in Corporate America. Your Realtor likely uses an alternative like the Treo 650 because of its ability to multitask with Realtor-specific software products. However, the service providers that are required for a successful real estate transaction quite often use Blackberry’s. Lenders, title companies and others use their Blackberry’s to quickly address issues that may arise in a typical real estate transaction.

RIM has agreed to settle with NTP for a reported $612.5 million.

According to the Chicago Tribune, NTP was reportedly trying to get as much as $1 billion from RIM. But over the past few months, the U.S. Patent Office has been reviewing NTP’s patents and rejecting them. NTP has a long legal path to challenge those rejections, one that could drag on for a several years.

Still, "those [NTP] patents could [now] have a clock ticking against them," said George Wheeler, an intellectual property lawyer at McAndrews, Held & Malloy Ltd. in Chicago.

David Airan, a patent attorney at Leydig, Voit & Mayer Ltd. in Chicago, agreed. "There was too much on the table for NTP to risk not settling."

What does this mean to the estimated 3 million Blackberry users in the US? It’s hard to say at this point… technicaly the judge could order Blackberry services to be shut down in the US, but they are still seeking other solutions to this issue.

One of the arguments is that the Blackberry transmissions are relayed from Canada, the headquarters of Blackberry’s developer Research in Motion (RIM). They argue that a section of the U.S. Patent Act bars unauthorized use of a patented invention "within the United States", and that they are transmitting from Canada, not the U.S.

RIM is also seeking help from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which is reconsidering the NTP patents (the company that filed the patent infringement suit). Preliminary comments from the U.S. Patent office state that the NTP patents don’t contain new inventions and should therefore be canceled.

RIM has stated that it has developed some sort of "workaround" in case they do not succeed in court.

Personally, I’m not a Blackberry user, opting instead for the Treo 650 mostly because of it’s easy interface with programs that I normally use in my business. However, people that I go to for real estate support services use the Blackberry’s heavily, from lenders to title reps to escrow officers and many others who affect the flow of paperwork in any real estate transaction. So if the Blackberry’s use in the U.S. was banned, it would affect me greatly even though I don’t use their devices. The Blackberry devices are also used quite a bit by U.S. law enforcement personnel, so this could end up being a personal safety issue as well.

Should Blackberry be denied the use of their product in the U.S. because of a prior patent by another company that has never developed products to go along with this patent? Hopefully the U.S. Patent Office will find a way to allow the Blackberry products to remain in use in the U.S.