Tappan Zee High School: Fill & Download for Free

There is a tremendous Dutch influence even today all up and down the Hudson River as far as Albany.Harlem, New Utrecht in Brooklyn, the Bronx are all Dutch names.Catskill and any other word ending in kill are Dutch words. The Tappan Zee just north of Manhattan is a Dutch word (Zee is Dutch for Sea).In the Albany area, there are dozens of Dutch names - mostly people’s names and cities and counties have these names.As for Little Amsterdam, it’s not there but there are lots of others.The last Dutch Governor of New York was Peter Stuyvesant. He was hated by the people because he was a serious law and order guy. The people of New Amsterdam were happy to get rid of him.But today, there is Stuyvesant High School (the best academic school in the NY school system), Stuyvesant Town, a large housing development with more people than many small cities. I once had an an office in an upscale mall and office plaza in Albany called Stuyvesant Plaza.Oh and New York has an Amsterdam Avenue.

FIRST, AN ORIENTATION BY A NOVOCASTRIANLet’s dispatch the formalities.Newcastle. In name, we’re a clone of Newcastle-on-Tyne. Our citizens are Novocastrians. It’s been that way since the original settlement changed its name from Kingstown. Imagine! And, we’ve had our basis in coal. There all comparisons end.Newcastle is a metropolian area of 500,000+ people covering Lake Macquarie, Cessnock, Maitland, Port Stephens and, the inner core, Newcastle itself. The citizens of these local government areas culturally affiliate themselves to outsiders as part of Newcastle.To think of them as separate from Newcastle is the right only of their inhabitants and, then, only for local stoushes. To outsiders, they are Newcastle.You look to the only game in town as evidence. In the local rugby league competition, someone from the inner city might barrack for the West Rosellas, from Maitland the Pumpkin Pickers, and from the Lake, the Seagulls. But for all parts, Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Cessnock, Maitland and Port Stephens, its Go The Knights.Newcastle Knights. Novocastrian boys aspire to play, girls to cheer.Newcastle is city, not a country town. It has a centre, suburbs and nearby attractions.Therefore, a journalist betrays her outsider status by describing a location as “Charlestown, near Newcastle.” That’s like saying, “Bondi, near Sydney, or “Chatswood, near Sydney.”Newcastle is the capital of the Hunter Valley. The Hunter Valley is vast. A journalist betrays his outsider status by conflating “the wineries” with “Hunter Valley.” The region under vine in and around Cessnock and Pokolbin are only a tiny part of the Valley.When a Novocastrian says “pass the port”, she means suitcase not Portuguese fortified wine. It’s a peculiarity of Hunter Valley Australian English.Newcastle’s reputation for rust-belt industry, smelter-belching smog and unpredictable subsidence from long-quarried coal is a Novocastrian ruse. You see, something new is afoot, we know it but we don’t want you to know.My ostracism is inevitable because I’m going to reveal all. But I live in New York now and they won’t leave their paradise to chase me down.So, here I reveal everything you need to know about Newcastle.Read more … I dare you!Skiffs on Lake Macquarie, Newcastle. Five times bigger than Sydney Harbour.EDUCATION: Prepare for a jobLike most Australian locations, Newcastle public schools are fine. Best school by far is the private Newcastle Grammar School at about AUD $20,000 pa. St Phillips Waratah is also good. The University of Newcastle is a good regional university. ‘Regional’ is the qualifier, meaning it is not as good as ANU, Melbourne or Sydney, Australia’s three best universities. But it’s fine with a beautiful bushland campus. All up, you can receive a quality education from K to university whilst living in Newcastle, but not elite.Stockton Dunes, Newcastle. Sand exported to Waikiki Beach, Hawaii.Sydney schools have better and worse public schools. For instance, Merewether High School in Newcastle is not as good as Killara or Mosman High School in Sydney. But nor is Gateshead High School as troubling as Mount Druitt High. Sydney’s GPS is another level again above Newcastle Grammar, schools like Sydney Grammar, SHORE, Scotts, Newington at about AUD $35,000. The University of Sydney is Australia’s third best university after ANU and Melbourne according to world rankings, ranked around #72 in the world when I last looked. And there are choices for tertiary education: UNSW, Macquarie, UTS … unlike Newcastle.Watagan Mountains, Newcastle. Secret rainforest for adventurers.New York public education is worse than Newcastle and Sydney. I’ve sent my children to the ‘best’ public schools in New York and they didn’t impress. The elite day schools in New York are exceptional, though they accept only A-Type personalities which, despite their mantra for diversity, is a contradiction. The money in the New York private schools like Hackley at AUD $50,000 dwarfs Sydney’s GPS, and Newcastle Grammar is far, far behind these. Columbia university was ranked #5 in the world, with NYU and many, many other colleges there.In short, public education in Newcastle is in the middle of Sydney’s range and better than New York. Private education in Newcastle is good. Sydney is like the English ‘public’ schools in liberal education. New York is funded amazingly and more driven than Sydney.Christchurch Anglican Cathedral, Newcastle. A ‘new castle’ for Novocastrians.JOBS: Get a jobAt 500,000 people, the economy isn’t deep. Like smaller population centres, some industries dominate: health and education. Both are underwritten by the government. In my view, the city is unusually large to be propped up by the government. Of course, there are countless SMEs and actually I’ve seen a renaissance in small business diversity. A long time ago, Newcastle was a major hub for insurance, exporters, traders, commodity dealers. It was deep and diversified back in 1880 and people came to Newcastle from across the world. From 1910 to 1990s, BHP turned Newcastle into a one horse town for steel. The resurgence in small business growth now being experienced is the best thing that’s happened to Newcastle in 130 years. But that has some way to develop. If you want a safe, secure job in a big organisation, it’s health or education …. basically, the public service. Consequently, most young talented Novocastrians move to Sydney. A quick check of University of Newcastle alumni on LinkedIn will bear this out.Sydney at 3.8 million people has a deep economy, meaning many industries. Take your pick. So compared to Newcastle, it’s a well-rounded world class alpha city. Scratch a little below the surface, and this is an observation of many returning expats, and you’ll find that the jobs can be a bit regional. For instance, multinationals may offer sales or simple IT departments in Sydney. You’ll not get, for instance, the cutting edge IT work for banks performed in Sydney. JP Morgan will do this stuff elsewhere.Barrington Tops, Newcastle. A wilderness wonderland.New York, well … before you say, wow, it’s the capital of the world …. actually has fewer job prospects than you think. Sure, Greater NY has almost the same population as all of Australia. And brilliant jobs are found in the middle of nowhere. For instance, want to work on IBM’s Watson (world’s leading AI)? You can do that well away from Manhattan in the middle of a sleepy village called Armonk to the north. However, NY is dominated by investment banking, hedge funds, broadcasting, publishing and commercial litigation. Other industries really don’t rate. Then again, what they call a SME, in Australia would be large.In short, if you don’t work at the John Hunter Hospital, Area Health Service or the University of Newcastle, you’re basically in a Newcastle SME. If having a cutting edge career is not your thing, great. If it is, Newcastle is not for you. Sydney is better. New York is amazing.Port Stephens cliffs, Newcastle. Aquatic paradise.CULTURE: Before and after workI’ll reverse the order of cities here:New York: hypertensive, rough, cutthroat, pressure-cooker, a polygot mix of every nationality, capital of the world, stimulating, gritty, elegant, pulsating, world class performing arts, amazing food scene except for seafood and SE Asian, the city never closes, crippling traffic along the main corridor of George Washington Bridge, Tappan Zee, Holland Tunnel, Long Island freeway. Beaches. My God. They clamber onto a 5 metre strip of pebbles surrounded by barbed wire. It’s awful. Central Park or Slope Park are their beaches, or the tiny strips of sand up in Westchester County. The Jersey Shore is yuk.Sydney: big, bold, beautiful, glittering, egalitarian, outdoorsy, thriving, one level below world class performing arts, best seafood in the world, extremely good SE Asian, some exceptionally good places to eat by world standards. M5, Pacific Highway, ANZAC Parade, F3, Northern Beaches … all chocked, very bad transport issues, as bad as NY but with much smaller population. Beaches: sparkling, 99.9% rating in the world. The northern beaches are clearly the best within Sydney. Not Bondi and those tiny Eastern Suburbs ones.Newcastle beaches. Surfing capital of Australia.Newcastle: close-knit, more egalitarian, more relaxed, healthy outdoor living, traditionally working-class but re-imagining itself into something more diverse, punches above its weight on the food scene but not at Sydney’s level, anyone who says there are traffic problems in Newcastle haven’t experienced the world enough. This is a commuters dream if you live and work in Newcastle. Most people take 20–45 minutes to get to work. If you live in Newcastle but work in Sydney, you’re not a Novocastrian, and that State Rail trip to Sydney of 2.5 hours is sheer drudgery. Beaches: shhhhh. Don’t tell anyone. These are even better than Sydney’s, truly world class. And I’m not even talking about Newcastle or Merewether. Try Nobby’s. Get up into the dunes there. Better, go to Stockton and amaze yourself at the solitude. Or closer to town, Glenrock or venture down to Caves. Only Whitehaven, QLD and Hyams, NSW are better in the world.Newcastle vineyards. Oldest wine-making region in Australia.In short, Newcastle offers less hectic living but to experience the finer things in life you’ll need to visit Sydney or New York. But in Newcastle, getting out and about is so much easier.I hope these comparisons give context for all the other comments provided. I miss Newcastle a great deal.

I am assuming I have temporary super powers.No more brinkmanship over the budget and debt ceiling. Ever. In a world where some unnamed members of Congress have blamed certain other politicians for damaging the economy through the creation of "uncertainty", those very members of Congress have gone and destroyed around 2 million jobs and hundreds of billions worth of GDP via holding the gov't hostage at various points since 2011. Implement the McConnell Rule on the debt ceiling so it can be held up, but as a practical matter will also be raised to meet spending already voted on by Congress.Implement entitlement fixes that make Social Security solvent for another 50 years (that means through about 2080) and Medicare for another 25 years (health care changes too quickly and its inflation rate does too). This will involve some pain for everyone, both recipients and those paying in. Lower COLAs, means-testing on beneficiaries, higher income caps, tougher rules on extraordinary end-of-life care. Ugly stuff. And it takes these things out of politics for a generation -- or two!Offering Medicare to people under 65 and offer private insurance to people over 65. This system I call "opt-in/opt-out" and it works basically like this. If you're old, you get care. If you don't like the government's program, go buy one with the money. This is a version of the Ryan Plan. If you are under 65 and want to buy the government's plan, you can, but you pay for it -- unless you are low enough on the income totem to get it paid for under the existing ACA framework. In 10 years, we can revisit if it's worth administrating either of these options.Cap the U.S. military budget at "next 5 combined" levels. That currently seems to be around $440 billion. The U.S. spent $682 billion last year, or 39% of the world's total on defense. Enough already. No one likes what we do with the money, at least not overtly. We'll draw this down over 5 years to give everyone time to adjust. We'll keep a nice navy going and invest heavily in surveillance aircraft, force-projection weapons, etc. Heck, we'll still be able to invade an Afghanistan here and there. But the troops in Europe? No. South Korea? Please, a "pave Pyongyang" policy will suffice. Enough. And no more of these absolutely nonsensical aircraft programs that cost hundreds of millions per plane. UAVs in large numbers are to small quantities of manned aircraft what decoys were to the SDI in the 1980s: the end of them. Doesn't mean I want no manned planes, but I want no more of these insane programs that are obsolete before the first plane is certified.Implement federal rules on hydraulic fracturing that make it legal across the U.S. provided some basic standards are applied and make it subject to inspection by the DOE, DOI, BLM, EPA or whoever is relevant. Dare states to sue. Get good rules in place to make sure good wells are drilled and stuff is recycled and disposed of properly. Do this everywhere. They say the perfect is the enemy of the good. Coal is actually killing people. Lots of people. Gas will kill many fewer people if we use it to get rid of coal. Oh, and a lot of that fracking is getting us domestic oil. Saudi who? (See #4.)Get lots of free trade agreements signed. The stuff that exists between us and Brazil is stupid. Let's get a BAFTA. Hell let's reopen a new round of GATT. Let's negotiate with everyone. We win on all of these. Our markets are pretty open. Theirs are usually not. We make nearly no manufactured goods here. Go crazy. Scream about free trade and ignore protesters who vandalize Starbucks' along the way. I like Starbucks. Nice people work there, plus they pay decently.Pass an incredibly liberal immigration bill. Oh dear, he said the "L word." Yeah, I did. 12 million Mexicans live here. Deal with it. They mow your lawn. They clean your kid's school. They take care of your kid. They buy goods in your store, helping to employ your workers. They buy gas. They support farmers. They shop at Wal-mart. They are Americans in every way but a damn piece of paper. Every day they fear some guy in a cheap ass black windbreaker deporting them. Enough. Let's stop pretending they are going back and find a way to make them legal. Yes, let's try to do a better job on the border from here. Also, let's start selling visas and green cards. Let's let everyone who gets a degree here stay. Let's stop shooting ourselves in the foot because some jingoistic idiots with rifles stand on the Arizona border shooting at brown people and claim they're patriots.Blow up the tax code. When you put it back together, stop taxing labor so damn much. Stop preferencing so many things there is no evidence for preferencing. Start taxing land value, including the resources on land. Tax financial transactions. Tax consumption, but most especially the kinds you want to discourage or are direct user fees (like gasoline). Tax carbon in a small way, growing over the next decade. Understand this tax is designed to raise no incremental revenue and within 50 years, this tax will be back to collecting nothing. Lightly tax big incomes to make up the rest with a small number of rates, none so high as to make them confiscatory. Once people compute their income from all sources and take the giant standard deduction, a few will pay this small income tax. Hand back a small negative tax to the lowest income people to compensate for the consumption taxes that will hit them harder. Oh. and let's see what we can do about that payroll tax (see #2) once we have really blown the code up. When the thousands of tax accountants march on Washington to complain, feel free to deport them instead of the "illegals".Once and for all fix the nonsense with U.S. corporations offshoring all their cash. With the understanding that there's a reason to keep some monies offshore, tell U.S. corporations that you'll be moving to a more rational situation whereby taxes are paid in the jurisdictions they are earned, as most countries do, but you're looking to the Irelands of the world to help make that less unpalatable than it is now. In the meantime, cash can come home at a discount to the U.S. rate. The discount shrinks for every year you delay, however, so bring back the greenbacks now. Also, if you take the dough and send it to your owners or use it for R&D, you can deduct/tax credit that. Whee. Go. Fast. Hurry.Stop subsidizing the too-big-to-fail banks forever. End the system by which taxpayers are making those banks rich even though they perform minimal valuable lending functions to regular businesses and people. Tell the banks you wish they were smaller but their alternative is to raise much more equity to stay that big. Either way, the current regime, like the V-22 Osprey, is a goner.Figure out the 10 worst things in the Affordable Care Act and modify them. Whether it's the dumb 50-employee rule or the web site or the inability to offer truly catastrophic plans, I don't know. But since I have super powers, right and left have given me a list and I now know what they are and have produced a bill that fixes them and President Obama has signed it. Even the GOP agrees the ACA is not terrible and we're moving on.Term limit everyone and ban them all from ever serving as lobbyists. It's time for citizen legislators who go, do, and then leave. And don't view leaving as the payday.Make every state district by a neutral committee, like California, and adopt a top-two primary, like California. As dumb as our initiative system is, these ideas seem way less dumb. The districting one is absolutely essential (and since I'm omnipotent, I'm having the Roberts court make it Constitutionally mandated to protect one person-one vote), and top-two, which seemed really dumb to me in theory, seems less dumb in practice. I still think it might be gamed from time to time, but the idea of few right or left-wing extremists making it out of primaries seems like a win to me. (This is a long game for the economy, but then the current economy is the ultimate long con....)Decriminalize lots of criminal activity with the goal of the U.S. having one of the lowest prison populations per capita, not the highest. Hey, guess what, there are bad people out there. Murderers, rapists, robbers. Keep them in prison. Heck, the occasional really bad white-collar crook, too. But drug users? Prostitutes? Enough. They clog up the judicial system and make our prison economy the envy of the world. And not in a good way. Let's make all of the behavior millions of people are going to do anyway legal. You want to end human trafficking for prostitution? Me too. So get prostitution out of the shadows. You want to end killings associated with drugs? Me too. So get drugs out of the shadows. I mean this is so obvious and our current methods are so stupid.... Limited police, limited courtrooms... Heck, even limited prisons, though we keep spending billions to build more. Enough.Build world-class infrastructure/transportation all over the country, wherever it makes sense. What's the ROI on the Interstate Highway System exactly? 10,000%? 1,000,000%? What did the BART strike prove about the benefits of mass transit even for the millions who don't ride it? That it's absolutely essential! This stuff pays for itself and fits with the megatrends of people wanting to get away from car ownership. Let's have great roads and bridges, not dangerous ones that might kill people like in Minnesota or "prayer bridges" like the Bay Bridge (whew, we made it before the big one) or the death-in-waiting Tappan Zee (they pray every day the new one is done on time). Let's get cars out of urban centers and have buses like in Indonesia where they show up every minute and whisk people around efficiently. Let's prepare for self-driving cars with whatever is necessary to make them work.Since we're building, let's build fiber optic cables to every home and business in America. Google, Apple, the government, I don't care who does this. Our broadband is a national disgrace. Fixing it will employ millions of people for a decade. Win-win-win.And as wires go, let's build a long-distance grid that allows us to carry wind and solar power over very long distances. Figure out where the power is and might be, build the big wires, low-loss technology. Make zero-carbon, zero-explosive-risk renewables as effective as they can be so Arizona sun can power Louisiana air conditioners at 7pm. Stop saying it can't be done and go do it. We can get more than half our power from renewables by mid-century, but only if we do this. Oh, yes, and millions more jobs building it. Win-win-win.Propose utility regulation rules that encourage distributed generation. The big projects are great, the little ones are great too. Have FERC, DOE, whoever make up rules for the states to try to make uniform distribution generation rules. Propose a national solar permitting standard. Yell a lot about this until the rules are in place everywhere. Sue states that try to block good rules and enact anti-consumer ones instead.Ratchet down the surveillance state. You are killing the next wave of great internet / communications companies. If you think this isn't going to hurt the American economy, I have a news flash for you: It already is. Track the terrorists, fine. Since we are getting out of the "Reasons to Hate America Business" (see #4, 5, 17 and 18), this should not be a huge problem.Believe in America. Now, get out of the way. Let the country be great at being great. It's what we do. We never quit. We invent. We build. We come back. We innovate. We devise. We modify. We improve. We grow. We learn. We design. We develop. We represent nearly 1/4 of the world's output with only 1/20 of its people. Let us get to work.