Cats with jobs

 

pic.twitter.com/tZ2t2cTr8d

— cats with jobs 🛠 (@CatWorkers) April 18, 2024

China Builds A Temporary Bridge In Seven Days: Baltimore Will Take Years To Rebuild Theirs

 

Seven days to build a temporary bridge, after the Lixinsha Bridge in Guangzhou was broken by a ship. The temporary bridge was opened this morning. pic.twitter.com/mUThVKNB9E

— Sharing Travel (@TripInChina) March 3, 2024

 From Ian Welsh:

I know I’m a broken record on this, but it’s important. China is dynamic. They’re higher tech in general than America or Europe and they have an engineering culture and a belief in technology which we have lost.

The ability to do this sort of thing just doesn’t exist outside of China, to the best of my knowledge. They’re not just better than everyone else, they’re miles better.

The Chinese have automated delivery vehicles all over the place. Robots in retail outlets and restaurants. The world’s largest high speed rail network.

The future doesn’t happen in America any more, it happens in China. According to people who visit, there’s also essentially no homelessness.

More than that China is willing to regulate: when delivery workers were abused, China stepped in and mandated better treatment. They also, publicly, built recreation and rest stations for them. During the pandemic they put up temporary hospitals in a week.

And more and more they design at home. This is similar to the switch from Britain to America in the 19th century: at first the Brits kept the design jobs, but increasingly they moved to the US. Of course in that case it was helped by the immigration of engineers and scientists, especially Scottish ones, but the Chinese are doing just fine, now, without a lot of Europeans and Americans. (Though there’s still an idealization of whites, if you’re an engineer or a scientist who wants a job in China and can speak Mandarin, you’ll have a job fast.)

It’s not our world any more. It’s the Chinese.

The Sports Team Con

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Most economic studies say that economically, pro sports are a wash. Teams cost their cities at least as much as they produce in revenue. And speaking of costs...Sacramento's Kings got a $70 million loan from the City when they first moved to Sacramento so costs are often at the expense of the public, whether people attend games or not. Sure, your roads may be full of potholes, but at least you've got a team of mercenary athletes to represent your city!

Big league teams regularly move, or threaten to move, unless they get subsidies or stadium financing. The pro football Oakland Raiders got subsidies from Oakland, then Anaheim, then Oakland again and finally Las Vegas. George W. Bush bought into the Major League baseball Texas Rangers with some borrowed money, then persuaded Arlington Texas to finance their stadium, and later sold it for a handsome profit. The rate of return is difficult to calculate since he didn't invest any money. The profit was capital gains, too, so it was not fully taxed. That little score comprises an estimated 75% of Shrub's net worth.

After they had been in Sacramento for a while, the NBA Kings threatened to move and the City of Sacramento magically produced a quarter billion dollars for a newer, City-owned stadium. No tax revenue for the City, and no stake in or veto on the team's movements. And--bonus!--if the team threatens to move again, they could extort still more from a City beleaguered by the beggar-on-every-corner economy it currently enjoys.

Why we can't possibly get a quarter billion dollars to house poor people, we must subsidize the wealthy! Forbes reports the team is now worth roughly double what the plutocrats who bought it paid, and, by design, the City shares in none of those profits.

One foundation of this particular extortion racket is that, in the US, pro sports teams are exempt from antitrust prosecution. A city cannot create a new team and still play in the major leagues. UK sports franchises have no such exemption, and there are reportedly 13 soccer stadiums in the City of London, which exist without extracting public money.

In one public appearance, then-mayoral-candidate Darryl Steinberg proclaimed he was proud to have been part of the state's legislative effort to set aside environmental constraints and build the Kings' new stadium downtown. The Kings, in Steinberg's words, were an "asset," despite their questionable economics, the potential for extortion he set up, and despite a poll at the time that said 70% of Sacramento City voters opposed any subsidy for pro sports.

The Romans had bread and circuses--certainly more cruel than pro sports like football where a mere 30% of participants report brain injuries. And that didn't prevent the fall of Rome. Meanwhile, Steinberg's mayoral stint is expiring, and he's reportedly considering higher office.

In better news, the Sacramento Bee paused its cheerleading for pro sports coming to Sacramento to publish an opinion piece that was at least ambivalent about the possibility of the Oakland's A's moving to town. But the piece only accuses the A's team owner of being "un-woke," and it ignores the costs of promoting entertainment over civic virtue.

Finally, a word about what kind of role models these high-achieving athletes are. They are often drug addicts, or insanely obsessed with just their sport. These are supposed to be providing role models for youth. Better to have public servants cognizant of the consequences of promoting bread and circuses.

AB2200 - Single Payer Healthcare Committee Comments close 4/16/24

Here's my letter to the legislature about AB2200 (the California Guaranteed Health Care for All Act (also known as CalCare) single-payer healthcare for California.

You can still write them (or just copy/paste what's below) by Tuesday, April 16, at this link. Just select AB2200 as the bill on which you'll comment. 

My note:

The US currently pays roughly double the cost of healthcare in single-payer Medicare-for-all nations with worse healthcare outcomes. A World Health Organization study in 2000 ranks US health outcomes (life expectancy, vaccination rates, patient satisfaction, infant mortality, etc.) 37th in the world, between Costa Rica and Slovenia. The Sacramento Bee said, "It's as though we have the health care of Costa Rica and pay six times more for it."

Our current health care also means the US experiences more than a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France--single-payer countries with similar demographics to the US--have none. Perhaps related: The US incarcerates at five times the world average, seven times more, per capita, than Canada and France. So are French or Canadian crime rates worse than the US? Nope. About the same or less.

Could making more than a half million people desperate every year generate more crime? There's even a Netflix series ("Breaking Bad") that describes how a chemistry teacher starts cooking meth to pay hospital bills. Sure, that's fiction, but it's not too much of a stretch to believe desperation drives people to crime.

We could continue the beatings until morale improves, but we've already tried more policing and incarceration. Between 1982 and 2017 US population increased 42%, but spending on policing increased 187%. 

How about we try treating people well? The all-sticks-no-carrots approach works so poorly. Cops only solve an estimated 15% of crimes, and less than half (40%) of the murders in California. The "copaganda" so ubiquitous on TV says Perry Mason always gets the bad guy, but that's a Hollywood illusion. Let's try something that really works: taking care of people.

Why don't we have single-payer healthcare now? When Harry Truman proposed it in 1948, the southern senators ("Dixiecrats" - now switched to Republicans by Richard Nixon) opposed the bill. They were concerned they might have to share their hospitals with people of color. 

Racism! The gift that keeps on giving!

Happy Dog

 

Happy dog.. 😊 pic.twitter.com/waaQZ0ZOPx

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) April 5, 2024

Political Economist Mark Blythe Analyzes the Economy

 In a wide-ranging conversation, political economist Mark Blythe analyzes the European and American economies, including Modern Money Theory (the only legitimate objection to it I've encountered to date):

How asset managers came to own everything and you failed to notice

Mark Blyth, Rhodes Center for International Finance and Economics: