thewayne | Entries tagged with florida

If you are a compensated blogger, you would have to register with the state within five days of your first post or face a possible $25/day fine. This applies more to paid bloggers with active posting and following and excludes news web sites.

The law also requires political bloggers writing about Florida to file monthly reports reporting their income from blogging.

Talk about gross First Amendment overreach! Now, this is just a bill filed in the legislature, a proposal. It may never see consideration, or it may sweep through. But the thing that gets me is the Republicans keep calling Democrats snow flakes and such, here they are the ones being incredibly thin-skinned.

Time for me to create a Ron DeSantis tag and post more about him!

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/florida-bill-would-make-bloggers-who-write-about-governor-register-with-state/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/03/1732240/florida-bill-would-make-bloggers-who-write-about-governor-register-with-state

All because Disney decided to speak out against Florida's "Don't Say Gay" legislation. Which they didn't do until Disney's LGBTQA workforce segment and friends called the company on its position.

Now, this is going to have some very interesting repercussions. The special tax district was enacted in 1967 when Roy Disney started working on Disneyworld. Walt died in December of '66 from complications of lung cancer. The special tax district effectively made Disneyworld its own city with the ability to levy tax, build roads, it was responsible for its own ~~law enforcement~~, sewage, it could build its own airport and theoretically its own nuclear power plant if it wanted to. And let's face it, Disney had the money.

UPDATE: Disney does not handle law enforcement. They use Florida Highway Patrol for that. Disney Security is about on par with night watchmen, as they describe it. Orange County Sheriff's Dept maintains an office, used mainly for processing shop lifters.

And June 1 next year the special tax district goes away. TAKE THAT, MICKEY! DE SANTIS HAS YOUR NUMBER! And he'll be getting your tax dollars, too!

Or will he?

If Disneyworld is no longer a special tax district, seems to me that the local municipality is now on the hook for providing those municipal services: water, sewer, law enforcement and fire protection/EMS. And has to provide the fire equipment, too, or buy/lease the trucks/equipment from Disney on-going. There is absolutely no way the area municipality has budgeted for that as De Santis is a Republican True Believer and has been slashing taxes, causing reductions in budgets and Rainy Day funds throughout the state.

Disneyworld makes more than enough money to keep all those services well-funded for the area they're responsible for. As a big business, under the Republican paradigm of tax cuts, they shouldn't have to pay a lot as they are one of Florida's largest employer with 80,000+ employees - including all those fire fighters, EMS, police, water/sewage workers, etc. Who are no longer going to be working for Disney. Will the local municipality going to hire all of them, or are they going to contribute to local unemployment numbers?

But my point there is that if standards of service slip, Disneyworld has the right to utterly pack and slam local town council/county board meetings for not providing adequate service. According to the Wikipedia article, Walt wanted to open a theme part in the Eastern U.S. because 5% of Disneyland's visitors were coming from east of the Mississippi even though - at that time - that had 75% of the country's population.

Corporations are people, or so they say. For the most part, Disney stays pretty quiet in the political sphere. Florida just made it very personal for Disney's bottom line. The Mouse can be quite a giant when riled. It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next election cycle or two.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61179262

Thank you, non-big government that can be drowned in a bathtub! They've made $77,000,000 doing this, I do not know over what timespan. It was exposed when two sisters moved to FL from Idaho. One has been disabled her entire life, the other is her caregiver. Because of her disabilities, she has a digital footprint of zero. They went to DMV to get her an ID for Medicare, and within days she started getting junk mail, phone calls, and even had salesmen turning up at her door!

According to the article: "A state spokesperson said there's no way for drivers to opt-out if they don't want their personal information sold.

"The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles provides public records as legally required, in accordance with federal and state law, and as a necessary function in order for customers to efficiently conduct everyday business. The department has successfully instituted proactive security measures to ensure customer information is protected and any misuse of customer information will be pursued to the fullest extent of the law."

There's a HUGE EFFING DIFFERENCE between providing public records as required AND SELLING EVERYONE OUT TO MARKETING SLIME! That IS NOT providing public records AS LEGALLY REQUIRED! That spokesman and the head of MVD and probably most of the executives in that division should be strung up by their thumbs. Then again, so should Rick Scott and most of his cronies.

NEVER give the government your phone number unless you absolutely have to! This is especially true for voter registration, though with as much data being bought and sold, I don't know that it makes any difference. And if you have a PO Box, use that for any official correspondence.

As an example of voter registration data, last election cycle we started getting calls on our home line for ME for political surveys. I'm registered independent, and they were making big efforts to sway NM independents. We didn't have a home line when I registered to vote 14 years ago! So some data aggregator put my voter ID street address together with another record that had that phone number tied to this address, and *POOF* I start getting phone calls. We've since unplugged that phone because of the number of calls we've been getting.

https://www.wxyz.com/news/national/florida-is-selling-drivers-personal-information-to-private-companies-and-marketing-firms

Crossposts: https://thewayne.livejournal.com/1154667.html

Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

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Entries tagged with florida

Proposed Florida law requires bloggers who write about DeSantis et al to register with the state!

Florida cancels Disneyworld's special tax district

Florida Dept of Motor Vehicles sells ALL drivers license registrations to data brokers

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