States are all so different in the luxury tax one would pay on a very expensive car. In one state I lived, your annual license plate fee was based on valuation. Thankfully not where I am living now, but then again, our newest vehicle is depreciated so much by age it would still be cheap. (er) I really don't blame somebody who has fancied something their whole life to break down and just get it when they're settled, retired or about to be, and sitting on their life's savings and can afford it. I especially don't blame somebody who has fulfilled all their obligations like raised their kids, and who has always spent their money on something 'sensible'. LOL. And in retrospect, I also am glad some of my friends and loved ones did splurge on something they maybe shouldn't have when they had the chance and got some enjoyment out of it. One of them was a school chum who got shipped to Vietnam. He sprung for a Jag before he left........and he never came back. Ditto my dear young friend who bought himself a laptop when money was tight for him, and then was a navigator in an aeroshow and took a trip, nose first into a farm field. Yes, you aren't far off when you said you could get a ticket just sitting in a drive in that car. It sends messages to law enforcment to keep an eye on it......because somebody who buys that kind of horsepower usually plans to use it. :-) Had to look it up, Gandle.....have lived under a rock so long, I never even knew what a Viper was.

I volunteered at The Huntington throughout the 80s and 90s propagating roses, working the plant sales and organizing, staffing, planning and working the Old Rose Symposiums and Rose Festivals. What is being complained about as "high ticket prices" are the lowest they have been in a very long time. The Symposiums cost in the hundreds to attend. The GROTW events had become rather expensive, more than the $50 minimum entry this year, until Clair deliberately worked it to reduce and maintain lower prices to permit more people to comfortably attend. Pulling something like this off is an outright b#@%ch. Someone is going to get bent out of shape for something. Guaranteed. I know. Been on both sides of that splintery fence many times. There are fixed costs which must be covered or the institution will not permit you to host the event again. Each of the honored guests have to flown in, driven around, fed and hoteled while there. Some require honorariums to come. Not all, but some do. There are security costs which are associated with the event, not to mention the loss of revenue from other events requiring the facilities this one occupies at this time. The price of the tickets far from covered the cost of hosting the event. A one day ticket wasn't offered because the heavier, more "meaty" talks were Sunday. How intelligent is it to potentially cut your revenue in half by making it possible to only pay for one day? Two days worth were offered to allow people to arrive in town, get settled and find their ways around as well as to sight see while there. Many of us took the opportunity to catch up with friends whom we don't frequently see and to check out old favorites on the grounds. I know of many, some local and many more from out of the area, who paid full price and were only able to attend the one day. You don't get a movie or play ticket for half price because you're only interested in half of the performance. You don't pay half of the restaurant price because you only want the desert. The admission price was posted for two days. Nothing was mentioned about one day pricing, so no expectations should be made they will exist. Saturday was the less formal day. It was also a fuller day for those of us who were there because we could wander around, see what we wanted to see, the people we wanted to talk to and go where we wanted to go. I wouldn't have enjoyed myself nearly as much had I only gone one day, though I DO understand not being able to attend both. Many times over the past twenty-five years, I've had to miss days of Symposiums, Festivals, etc. there because of work or prior commitments. But, I learned a long time ago, make the decision that if it's going to cost you full price for only a part of it, if it isn't worth it to you, don't go. If it is, enjoy. But, I never waste the gas and time getting there and then decide not to attend. If I'm going to make presumptions, they'll be that it will cost me full for part, and not that I won't stay unless they give me a break. That is YOUR choice and YOUR decision. No one wasted your time nor gas but you.

Much as I agree with the foregoing comments about lotteries, I do think there are two circumstances in which they might make sense. The first one is that in some circumstances, $1,000 is more than a thousand times as valuable as $1. Here's a simple hypothetical example. Suppose that you absolutely need to come up with $100,000; if you don't, you will be killed. Suppose further that you can raise $60,000, which isn't enough. Now suppose someone comes along and offers you the following proposition: You toss a coin; if it comes up heads, he gives you $40,000, if it comes up tails, he takes your $60,000. Wouldn't you take it? Because if you don't, you will surely die, but if you do, you have a 50% chance of living. The fact that betting $60,000 against $40,000 on a coin toss is unfair doesn't really matter. Similarly, many people who play lotteries regularly probably figure that the amount of money they spend doesn't matter to them, but winning might make a real change in their lives. Irrespective of whether their math is right, perhaps those decisions aren't as pointless from a psychological viewpoint as they might appear at first. And I'm saying this as someone who doesn't play the lottery. There is a second, rare circumstance in which it makes sense to play the lottery. Some lotteries work by distributing a fixed fraction of the bets to everyone who has bet a particular number. Which means that if you can pick a number that few enough others have picked, the odds are actually in your favor. This technique doesn't work nearly as well when lottery sellers offer to pick random numbers for you--but once upon a time I had a friend who used this technique successfully. At the time, he had access to a lottery that let you pick three digits, and paid off half the proceeds to everyone who had gotten them right. This lottery offered the opportunity to "box" a number if all three digits were different. For example, if you bet 346 and boxed it, you would effectively be placing equal bets on 346, 364, 436, 463, 634, and 643. He reasoned as follows: (1) If you picked two identical digits, you couldn't box the bet, so many people would avoid it. (2) Other people wouldn't realize that you could place a bet with a 0 as the first digit. (3) Anything with 7 or 11 in it would be popular, and hence should be avoided. As a result, he hypothesized that 066 or 088 would be unpopular enough to be worth playing. Sure enough, the first time one of those numbers came up, it paid off enough to justify having played it. But these situations are unusual. In general, I agree that lotteries should be considered an optional tax that one should choose not to pay.

OMG! Lucky you! your gonna have so much fun!!!!! We saw him last year in Omaha, floor seats ,smack dab in the middle isle. He was sitting at his piano right in front of that isle, we were so happy to be there. For anyone who couldn't see as well, although most seats were fine places to sit,,he had two huge screens up high for an even better veiw! Me, my dh and another couple who love Elton's music had the best time. I would love to go back!!! This was his Rocketman tour and the Rocketman song took about 20 mins to finish,,at least that much. I'm laughing now thinking back how I had my phone on for my son so he could listen to a couple songs. By the time Benny and the Jetts came on we were howling out the lyrics. I didn't think it was too loud on the floor but some friends way up high said it was ear splitting. When are you going?--It's time to rip some EJ music to the ipod and start practicing every song!