OT: Anniversary of the "Indiana Pi Bill"

[Mike Schwartz (PC Support)]

> >The basic story is that the Indiana House of Representatives was duped
> >into passing (unanimously! 67-0) a law stating, among other things,
> >that the value of pi was, in fact, exactly 3.2.  (Fortunately, the
> >Indiana Senate did not pass the bill, but apparently only because a
> >mathematics professor happened to be visiting the legislature at that
> >time.)
> 
> That makes about as much sense as the recent changes in daylight savings
> time foisted on the U.S. by the brain-dead legislature.
> 
> Bill

     This is a bad time to get me going on legislatures.  With the new
budget, they want us pilots to start paying a fee every time we takeoff,
land or use any kind of air traffic services.  Right now they are going to
implement this fee as an extra tax on every gallon of fuel until they figure
out how to charge us "per use", like Canada does to their pilots.  

     I just LOVE this, because I already pay about 75 cents worth of extra
taxes on every gallon of aviation fuel into the "aviation trust fund", which
was supposed to have been used for new runways, airport improvements, etc.
Almost none of those billions of dollars that they collected over the past
years have been spent on any improvements.  Congress just sits on the money,
considering it another form of revenue, while almost every runway I land on
is full of potholes and almost every airport has radio navigation aids that
date back to the 1950's.

Mike Schwartz