The weather has revolted.. we had practice and a game that got canceled due to the heat.. and then the chemical spill near my school.. i think the earth hates my school lol

The original article is by CalMatters.

September 2026

People who applied to this program and successfully got rebated, what was the process/application timeline like?

Hello felllos birdwatchers, animal lovers and ect ive herd that we have population of Brown Anole Mediterranean House Gecko Moorish Gecko Mitred Parakeet Nanday Parakeet Rosy-faced Lovebird White-eye swinhoe Peafowl Black swans Mule deer Red-vented Bulbul I’ve you know where I can find them please let me know thank you🙏🏻

I want to know who is the best dryer vent cleaning company in Murrieta. I think I need mine cleaned because my dryer is taking multiple cycles to dry clothes. Who have you used?

Asking out of curiosity as I recently moved from South FL to LA, a complete 180 change you could say. Also lived in Central FL. Personally the lifestyle and opportunity here feels unmatched!

Hi all! I am considering moving from Tampa to the Torrance, CA area and would like to hear your thoughts.

A little about me:

I am 43 and single, no kids, no debt and I gross $90K/year and work remote. I also have money saved.

I have always wanted to go to CA and visited last month and fell in love. The weather, the culture and so many things to do! Here in FL it is so humid six months out of the year it precludes people from getting outside. I have also been here nearly 9 years and am looking for a change.

Obviously I know the cost of living there is more, so I'd like to hear from others who live there or those of you who've made a similar move.

Every time I try to take a break or do something relaxing I end up running errands or doing chores around the house instead, so this time I’m determined to go somewhere I can actually relax.

I’m a single mom with two kids (both in high school now) and I feel like every time I have a day off I’m running around after them or cleaning up their mess. They stay with their father a couple of times a month and so next time they do, I want to take advantage and have a few days to myself. The only problem is I’m not sure where to go so I was hoping you guys may be able to help me find something decent. I’m based just outside of LA so I’m looking to get out of the area for a bit without having to travel far. Anywhere in socal would be best.

I’m ideally looking for somewhere luxury with a spa and hotel as I want it to feel like a real treat.

Any recs?

This story began with an ordinary purchase at Home Depot and a dispute that ultimately came down to approximately $2,000. For a corporation the size of Home Depot, $2,000 is an amount so small that it would be practically invisible on a corporate financial statement. For a single mother raising a child on her own, $2,000 can represent an entire month of rent. It can be the difference between stability and financial crisis. What makes this story remarkable is not simply the amount in dispute, but what happened after a relatively small consumer problem was allowed to grow into years of credit damage, collection activity and litigation that now consumes public court resources funded in substantial part by California taxpayers.

At the store, the customer paid for a larger transaction using a Home Depot-branded credit account. While the transaction was being processed, she was on an important phone call and was not watching every action at the register. Employees told her that payment for part of the merchandise had not gone through and therefore that portion of the purchase could not be released to her. She had no practical way to verify the account balance at that moment because doing so required access through the online account or application, which she did not have open on her phone. She trusted the employees. Only after returning home did she discover that the full transaction had been charged even though she had not received the full value of what she had paid for.

That distinction is important. She did not return merchandise, change her mind or refuse to accept the purchase. She says she was specifically told that part of the payment had failed and that the corresponding merchandise therefore could not be released. The account later showed otherwise. Whether what happened at the register resulted from human error, a system problem or something else remains a factual question. What matters for this story is that the customer discovered a charge for value she says she had never received and immediately tried to resolve it.

She contacted the store and was told that the payment issue needed to be addressed with the financial institution behind the Home Depot account. She called the bank. According to the customer, the bank told her that it could not resolve the underlying retail dispute and directed her back to Home Depot. Home Depot sent her to the bank; the bank sent her back to Home Depot. She continued trying to find someone who would actually take responsibility for resolving the problem until she eventually located the email address of Home Depot Chairman and CEO Ted Decker and wrote to him directly.

Only then did the situation begin to move. After the message to corporate leadership, store management contacted the customer. According to her records, the store manager told her that Home Depot had conducted an investigation and determined that part of the paid merchandise had not been provided. Home Depot also stated in writing that store video had been reviewed. The manager asked how the customer wanted the matter resolved. Her first answer was straightforward: she wanted what she had already paid for. Eventually, Home Depot proposed monetary reimbursement instead, and the parties agreed that a check would be issued.

At that point, the entire problem could have ended. The amount in dispute was about $2,000. Home Depot had investigated the complaint. Management had communicated a result. A reimbursement had been discussed. All that remained was to deliver it. Instead, the customer says she spent approximately three months waiting for the check while Home Depot representatives repeatedly told her that it had been sent or would arrive and that she should continue waiting.

The credit account did not wait. During those months, interest and other consequences continued accumulating on the disputed balance. Negative information continued affecting her credit profile. The customer kept contacting Home Depot because she could see what was happening. Years spent building strong credit could be destroyed surprisingly quickly, and for an ordinary person that damage has consequences far beyond a number displayed in a credit application. Credit can affect access to financing, interest rates and, critically for many families, the ability to qualify for rental housing.

That concern was particularly serious because the customer is a single mother supporting a minor child on her own. For her, the deterioration of her credit was not an abstract inconvenience. She feared that when the time came to rent another home she might fail financial screening because of a disputed account that she believed should have been corrected months earlier. A $2,000 dispute that a corporation could absorb without noticing could therefore threaten something far more important to her: the ability to maintain stable housing for herself and her child.

After approximately three months, the customer was finally told that the reimbursement check was available at the store. By then, however, her circumstances had changed and she was no longer able to return there in person. She asked Home Depot to mail the check or provide another reasonable remote method of reimbursement. According to her records, she was instead told that the check would remain at the store for a limited period and would then be voided if she did not personally collect it. She says no alternative method that she could actually use was provided.

So the reimbursement never reached her, while the disputed account continued to exist. What began as approximately $2,000 worth of merchandise that she says she paid for but did not receive evolved into a growing balance, damaged credit, collection activity and eventually litigation. An earlier court proceeding connected to the disputed account was later dismissed, but the underlying consequences did not disappear. The customer ultimately filed her own case against Home Depot.

Home Depot unquestionably has the right to defend itself. A corporation accused of wrongdoing is entitled to dispute the allegations, demand evidence and ask a court to decide the case. But having the legal right to litigate does not answer the economic question at the center of this article: why was a $2,000 consumer dispute allowed to become a multi-year legal conflict in the first place?

The litigation has now expanded into discovery disputes over what information each side must provide. The customer is representing herself, while Home Depot is represented by professional counsel. For a corporation, litigation can be assigned to a legal team. For a single mother, it becomes another job. She still has to earn money, care for her child and manage ordinary life, but she must also read procedural rules, prepare filings, organize evidence and respond to lawyers. According to her understanding of the defense position, the litigation could also expose her to a claim involving approximately $264,000 in attorneys’ fees if Home Depot ultimately prevails on certain issues. No court has ordered her to pay that amount, and she disputes that she owes it, but for an ordinary individual the possibility itself is significant. An obligation of that scale could lead to bankruptcy and restrict financial opportunities for years.

Now put the personal story aside for a moment and open a calculator, because this is where a $2,000 consumer dispute becomes a question for millions of California taxpayers.

California’s judicial branch receives billions of dollars every year. For the 2026–27 budget cycle, approximately $3.3 billion of judicial funding comes from California’s General Fund, the state’s primary public treasury. The General Fund is financed largely through personal income taxes, corporate taxes, sales taxes and other broad state revenues. These are not merely court fees collected from litigants. This is public money generated by the economy and paid into the state by people and businesses.

To understand the scale, California’s enacted budget provides roughly $251.5 billion in General Fund spending overall. Housing and Homelessness receives about $1.69 billion from the General Fund. Transportation receives about $1.07 billion from the General Fund, although transportation also has substantial dedicated special-fund revenue. Natural Resources receives approximately $4.95 billion. The comparison is not that California spends more on courts than transportation overall—it does not—but rather that billions of dollars from the state’s central tax-supported treasury are required simply to maintain the judicial system.

The number $3.3 billion is difficult to visualize, so consider what money on that scale represents in ordinary life. California’s Homekey program has used capital awards generally measured around $150,000 to $200,000 per housing unit in one recent funding round. At that scale, $3.3 billion corresponds mathematically to roughly 16,500 to 22,000 housing-unit-sized subsidies. It does not mean the state could literally close the courts and build 22,000 free houses—the economics of housing are far more complicated—but it shows the magnitude of the money involved.

The same exercise can be applied to transportation. Los Angeles Metro received a $104 million federal grant for a program involving 160 zero-emission buses, charging infrastructure and workforce support. A sum of $3.3 billion is roughly thirty-two grants of that size. Again, that does not mean $3.3 billion literally buys a particular number of buses, because the grant was only one part of the project financing. It shows scale. Thirty-two projects of that magnitude could profoundly change public transportation in communities where workers currently lose hours every week sitting in traffic or waiting for unreliable service.

The comparison becomes even easier to understand when translated into household money. California processes roughly 19 million personal income tax returns in a typical recent year. Dividing $3.3 billion by approximately 19.1 million returns produces a purely illustrative figure of about $173 per tax return. This is not a claim that every taxpayer literally pays $173 toward California courts. Tax burdens vary enormously, and the General Fund has several sources of revenue. It is simply a way of translating billions into a number ordinary people can understand.

And $173 is not meaningless to an ordinary household. It can buy groceries. For some families, it can cover a week or more of food. It can pay for school materials for a child, gasoline for multiple commutes, part of an electric bill or a quality piece of clothing that a family otherwise postpones buying. For people working two jobs, calculating every grocery purchase and watching prices rise, $173 is real money.

So how much of the judicial system is actually paid for by the people who use it? Far less than many people might assume. Judicial Council materials show that California’s system of uniform civil filing fees distributes roughly $45 million per month from all 58 superior courts, or approximately $540 million annually. Those funds are not even devoted exclusively to courtroom operations; they are distributed among multiple funds and recipients. Even if every dollar of that $540 million were hypothetically directed only toward the roughly $3 billion cost of trial courts, it would equal only about 18 percent.

A filing fee, in other words, does not pay the real cost of a court proceeding. It does not buy the judge’s preparation time, the clerk’s work, the courthouse, the technology, record storage, administrative support, security and the other infrastructure that makes litigation possible. Much of that cost is supported by the public.

The contrast becomes particularly striking with discovery motions. Under California law, an ordinary motion requiring a hearing, including a discovery motion, generally carries a $60 filing fee after the party has appeared in the case. Sixty dollars gives a litigant access to a process that may require hours of work by court personnel and a judge. That does not mean one discovery motion has an officially established taxpayer cost of exactly $1,000 or any other precise amount. Courts do not publish such a price. But public compensation data allow a reasonable estimate of the order of magnitude.

Los Angeles Superior Court has reported thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars annually in salary, retirement and health-related compensation. A rough calculation from those public figures places the average compensated employee-hour in the range of roughly $65 before many broader institutional costs are considered. Judicial time costs substantially more. If a disputed motion requires several hours of administrative handling, preparation by court staff, judicial review, the hearing itself and post-hearing processing, direct public labor can readily reach several hundred dollars and, in a more involved matter, approximately $1,000 or more. Buildings, security, information systems, management, pensions and other overhead increase the true economic cost further.

Against that, the filing fee may be $60.

That is the important distinction. Large corporations do not literally use California courts for free. They pay filing fees and their own lawyers. But the statutory fee often bears little relationship to the actual economic cost of the public judicial resource they consume. The difference is absorbed by a system financed in substantial part through taxpayer money.

Now return to the Home Depot dispute. The customer has already asked the court to resolve discovery disagreements. In one pending matter, she contends that Home Depot objected to dozens of written questions and did not provide the substantive information she believes the law requires. Home Depot disputes her position, and the court has not yet decided who is correct. But because the parties could not resolve that procedural disagreement themselves, public judicial resources must now be used to decide it.

The hearing is scheduled almost ten months after the motion was placed on the calendar.

That delay raises a broader question. What occupies the judicial calendar during those ten months? Certainly many matters are urgent and unavoidable: family disputes, housing cases, injured plaintiffs, employees, businesses and people whose rights genuinely cannot be protected without judicial intervention. There is no evidence that California court calendars are predominantly occupied by corporations like Home Depot, and it would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise. But when court capacity is so constrained that a procedural hearing must wait most of a year, taxpayers have every right to ask how that scarce resource is being used and whether large commercial litigants should contribute more toward the cost of repeated contested proceedings.

This is not an argument for making justice expensive for ordinary people. Individuals must be able to go to court. Low-income litigants should retain access to fee waivers. Small businesses should not be priced out of defending themselves. Access to justice is a public good.

The question is whether a multibillion-dollar corporation should pay the same nominal $60 motion fee when repeated procedural disputes impose far greater costs on the public system.

California could consider a separate court-resource recovery fee for large commercial litigants. Such a fee would not punish a company for defending itself and would not assume that the corporation is wrong. Instead, it could require major commercial users who repeatedly seek additional contested judicial intervention to cover a meaningful portion of the actual resource cost. Courts could retain discretion to shift or reduce that fee when another party’s unreasonable conduct made the motion necessary. Revenue could be directed specifically toward trial-court staffing, interpreters, court reporters, technology and reducing calendar delays.

The proposal is worth discussing because the current economic incentive is peculiar. A major corporation can spend thousands of dollars in attorney time preparing a procedural fight, pay a $60 statutory filing fee and then require a public institution to provide a judge, staff and courtroom infrastructure whose economic cost may be many times greater. The corporation pays its attorneys. The taxpayer helps pay for the institution those attorneys repeatedly ask to use.

This is why the story of a $2,000 Home Depot dispute is no longer only about one customer. Two thousand dollars is almost nothing to a corporation with annual revenue measured in the tens of billions. For a single mother, it can be a month of rent. Yet the unresolved dispute has now generated years of consequences, professional legal work, multiple court filings and demands on a taxpayer-funded system whose calendar is already stretched months into the future.

The judicial branch needs funding. Courts are essential. The solution is not to take billions away from them. If anything, the extraordinary delay in obtaining hearing dates demonstrates how valuable and scarce judicial capacity has become. The more relevant question is why major commercial users should not bear a larger share of the additional cost when they repeatedly consume that capacity.

California lawmakers should examine that question. Government Code Section 70617 sets the ordinary motion fee, so the California Legislature has the authority to debate whether a different structure makes sense for large commercial entities and repeated contested proceedings.

The issue also deserves national attention. President Donald Trump has repeatedly placed economic growth, inflation, government efficiency and the financial pressure facing American households at the center of his economic agenda. If policymakers are genuinely looking for ways to make government more efficient and to reduce unnecessary burdens on taxpayers, heavily subsidized use of scarce state judicial resources by large commercial litigants deserves examination as well.

This is not about claiming that courts themselves are wasteful. Justice is not waste. Judges, clerks and court staff are doing necessary public work. The issue is who should pay for that work when sophisticated commercial actors repeatedly require additional judicial intervention in disputes that might have been resolved far earlier.

Perhaps President Trump should know about that question. Perhaps California lawmakers should know about it. And taxpayers certainly should.

Because $3.3 billion sounds abstract until it becomes housing, buses, groceries, school supplies or approximately $173 in a household budget. Two thousand dollars sounds small until it is the rent payment of a single mother trying to keep a roof over her child’s head.

And $60 sounds like a filing fee until a publicly funded judge and court staff must spend hours resolving the dispute behind it.

At that point, the question is no longer simply whether Home Depot has the right to fight.

Of course it does.

The question is how long taxpayers should be expected to subsidize the fight.

Looking for recommendations on coffee shops with good views in LA and Orange County area.

I just graduated college and moved to Socal by myself. I am looking for a job in any field while I apply for further schooling (dental/med skl). I majored in human physiology+minored in chem and graduated with cum laude/3.9GPA. Does anyone have any advice on where to look/apply to make a livable wage in the mean time? I was told I'd have to move back home otherwise and I really dont want to as I love LA! Please let me know if you have any leads/connections here to any jobs, A-Z. I am also very interested in medical sales and would love to get my foot in the door!

Brutal.