brainiac conspiracy

Today's Worst Persons

Time-Warner Cable. Are they the most hated company in America, or what?

---Baron V

Midday Music Blogging

Because we had ourselves a little wake-up call. Not fun!

---Baron V

Nobody Forced Them to Buy The Bonds

And it's not as though a city like Detroit, with its perpetually shrinking tax base, could have possibly looked like a fail-safe investment. I am guessing the banks bought their bonds because they just assumed they'd be made whole against any losses, no matter how risky the loans, because if there's a lesson we've learned from the Great Recession, it's that the principle of moral hazard only applies to people, not banks.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Bernard Parks.

It's bullshit already that people with a zero percent equity stake should have to bear 50 percent of a rental property's retrofit costs. I suppose if we renters could take a pre-tax deduction on our Form 1040, it might be half-palatable, but I am guessing a citywide rent strike is a better alternative in the near term.

---Baron V

Today's Real Worst Person

City of Long Beach, you are hereby exonerated because

City of Detroit retirees will face sizable cuts to their monthly pension checks in the future, as the city works its way out of bankruptcy, according to a first proposal from Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr.

• Detroit city retirees in the general retirement system will face up to a 34% cut to monthly pensions. So if someone has a $2,500 a month pension, it’s possible such a retiree could lose $850 a month.

• Police and fire retirees face smaller cuts of up to a 10% cut, according to the proposed bankruptcy blueprint filed Friday morning. On a $2,500 a month pension, the possible hit on a monthly pension for retirees would be $250.

• The plan also eliminates cost of living adjustments for pensions in the future.

Of course, this is in complete violation of Michigan law, and if we lived in a nation that was governed by caring and thoughtful people, we'd accept the premise that $1,100 a month is simply not enough to live on---not even in a place like Detroit! But we aren't governed by caring and thoughtful people, so the greedy little moochers will need to be taught another lesson in fiscal probity.

---Baron V

Housing Should Be A Right

In an egalitarian society, government should manage markets to make housing affordable and accessible to nearly everyone, and not simply treat it as another asset class that can be leveraged by an unregulated private sector into a profit center. Everyone needs shelter, after all, but not everyone needs stocks, bonds, securities, etc., so housing should be treated more like commodities (which often receive government subsidies and price supports) than as an equity to be inflated. Of course, the free-marketeers will cry socialist tyranny, then remind us that it can't possibly work, even though we know that in fact it works rather well. It only makes sense, really---when people have access to affordable housing---even if it's only rental housing---they'll have more disposable income that they can use to feed and clothe themselves, they'll be able to afford regular visits to the doctor or dentist, and they'll worry less about incurring massive debt that could haunt them if they lose their jobs. In other words, under such a scenario the collective quality of life of a nation is greatly improved. You'd have fewer billionaires (and fewer financial panics), but for the average wage-earner, it would be win-win. Yes, all this government intervention comes at a price, but we can afford it, and without even having to raise taxes. We just need to make some shifts in our policy priorities, because we have the money.

(Via.)

---Baron V

Random Observation

This thing and that thing are not unrelated.

Given the increasing level of in poverty in America over the last few years, it's frankly surprising that our crime problem hasn't gotten a great deal worse. One thing's certain, however: Giving people the chance to open a MyRA account isn't going to do anything to reverse the trend. Just trying to be helpful.

---Baron V

He'll Be Missed

Maddening as Team Democrat has been to many of us on the left, one thing I've never had any reason to complain about is my own personal Congressperson, who hails from a time when Democrats actually cared about labor and the environment, and actually threatened to impeach a President for breaking the law instead of imploring us to look forward, never back. But that was then and this is now, so those of us in the district will probably end up being represented by another neoliberal corporatist next year.

---Baron V

Our Perfect World Has Turned To Shit

Because you goddamn kids and your goddamn bicycles.

More to the point, people who drive around in 4,000-pound vehicles capable of traveling at speeds in excess of 100 mph claiming that bicyclists on city streets are some kind of public-safety threat are in dire need of a reality check. I can't say I've ever seen a careless cyclist cause a collision, but I've seen plenty of careless drivers cause them! I mean, why is it that so many people in this town feel offended when someone merely asks them to share the roads? We all pay to maintain them, in one way or another, but not all of us own a car or want to drive for short trips. I guess this just proves that Get Off My Lawnism isn't exclusive to suburbia and is a universal humbug.

---Baron V

Zero Blogging Day

Because it's been kind of a sleepy day, and napping's more restful than blogging.

---Baron V

Monday Night Street Blogging

Because when people were naming city streets in Dr. King's memory back in the '70s, it stood to reason that most of those streets would run through minority neighborhoods, which in those days were also, generally, the poorest and most segregated in the country. Good thing that's not a problem anymore.

---Baron V

Light Blogging Day

Because my filthy hovel in the Marxist dystopia is even filthier than normal, so it's cleaning day.

---Baron V

Give Us Your Money

Or the city gets it:

A key contributor to the report was Austin Beutner, a commission member who served as Villaraigosa's "jobs czar" at City Hall. Some of the commission's members have been doing business at City Hall for years---and had interests that made their way into the 2020 report.

Part of the report criticizes city leaders for taking eight years to approve a rail yard backed by Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway---a company that was represented by [commission chairman Mickey] Kantor, a corporate lawyer. "Competitive ports have all made major improvements, while Los Angeles bent to the will of special interest groups and NIMBYism," said the report [...]

Another passage hit city leaders for taking three years to approve a $1-billion development plan sought by USC. "Not a sensible way to treat the city's largest private employer," the report states.

Thomas Sayles, USC's senior vice president, serves on the 2020 commission.

The report also warned that the city is "dramatically underinvesting" in the harbor, the airport, and the Department of Water and Power. One of the panel's members is Brian D'Arcy, who heads the DWP's powerful employee union. Sayles served on the DWP commission until last year. And Beutner ran the DWP for nearly a year.

Hey, these things might be all true, for all I know. Maybe we are underinvesting in infrastructure, and maybe it would be a good idea to give more of our money to some railroad, who knows? But the findings of any "bipartisan" panel that's headed by a career fixer like Mickey Kantor deserve to be treated to a little scrutiny because, you know, grifters gonna grift unless somebody stops them.

Also too, a city in decline.

---Baron V

Addition By Subtraction

It seems counterintuitive, but transportation studies have shown, and recent history has confirmed, that building more roads in dense urban areas actually increases traffic and congestion instead of reducing it. Want to relieve your urban core of congestion, gridlock and smog? Tear down the freeways.

Granted, here in L.A., as in most other Southwestern cities, this policy option is less needed since most of our highway systems predated development; they were simply "roads to nowhere" that eventually spurred suburbanization. But most cities east of the Mississippi---and particularly in the Northeast---saw once-virbant neighborhoods torn asunder with the coming of the Interstates, with the predictable accompaniments of increased blight and crime. Replace those highways with at-grade boulevards and parkways, you'll increase interurban mobility, reduce blight, reunite neighborhoods, incentivize the use of public transit,and improve local property values. Win-win! Now, there are plenty of grass-roots efforts across the country that are working to make these changes in their respective communities, but it would be nice to get an assist from some people in Washington. Tearing down freeways costs money, after all, and a lot of northeastern cities like Detroit and Buffalo, which would benefit greatly from losing their urban freeway networks, just don't have the resources. That's too bad because there's plenty of money to go around in Washington---we just need to change our policy priorities.

---Baron V

Perception is Reality

Even though people's perception is, quite frequently, wrong. Violent crime in this country, for example, has been on a slow and steady decline for the better part of three decades, yet many people still think cities are inherently dangerous places. There are many reasons for this cognitive dissonance, I imagine, but one of them must surely be the increasing militarization of our municipal police departments. Hey, if the cops need all that firepower, there must be some big scary threats out there! Now, poor policy analysis yields poor policy outcomes, so it's incumbent on our political leaders to act as a corrective, to separate the bullshit from the reality and to take measures to meet the public's genuine, not perceived, needs. Of course, this being 21st-Century America, our policymakers are doing the diametric opposite.

---Baron V

The Kids Today

Chronologically, I am much closer to Generation Medicare than I am to Generation Millennial, but I will never understand the proclivity of so many people of my age group to blame Those Goddamn Kids for all of society's ills, even though they didn't cause any of them. Nor will I understand why media outlets like the Washington Post continue to stoke this phony generational conflict with bullshit stories like this. Then again, if we set the olds and the youngs at each other's throats, perhaps they'll forget who's really waging war against them, and what it is costing all of us.

---Baron V

Where All The Money Goes II

Hint: Still not you or me!

For a cool $2,500, marc&mark, founded by the former personal chefs of Steve Madden and J.Crew chairman Mickey Drexler, will devise a cookbook of 30-40 recipes based on your child’s specific eating habits and “areas for improvement”; teach your nanny how to shop for these recipes (“ ‘It’s knowing how to pick a ripe avocado or peach, really simple stuff you might not think of,’ Mr. Boquist said”); and then come to your home for a two-day cooking demonstration, during which your nanny, who up until now has been eating all the wrong peaches, will learn how to debone a fish, cook Tunisian couscous with braised carrots, and make cinnamon ice cream with toasted almonds.

As opposed to, oh I dunno, buying a few used cookbooks at a yard sale for $25 and giving them to the nanny for Christmas. Then again, these kinds of "stressed-out lifestyles of extremely affluent people" stories have become a monthly staple in the Times, even though they only really prove that a lot of New Yorkers have, like, way too much and too little creativity.

---Baron V

Urban Renewal

Everybody wants "pro-growth" urban policy because "growth" equals more tax revenues, which equals more government services, better infrastructure, higher standards of living for everyone, etc. But that's not always possible, particularly in older cities that have lost their economic base due to globalization, and often, the best remedy for a shrinking population and shrinking budgets is to downsize the city and open up abandoned properties for alternative uses. Long term, the real solution is to vote the globalizers and the privatizers in our federal government out of office and replace them with people who will adopt policies that protect the nation's manufacturing base and boost wages, and to elect local leaders who will push policies that incentivize reinvestment in the urban core and that discourage sprawl. But until that happens, the next best thing is, often, to open up the land and let the locals farm it. It saves money on the monthly grocery bill!

---Baron V

Helpful Suggestion

If the President sincerely wants to iron out the bugs that are plaguing Goldberg.gov, he should contact the people who designed this site, then fly them to Washington and pay them whatever they want to fix it. It's fast, intuitive, and easy to understand. You can comparison-shop plans without having to sign up for an account, and you can find out which networks your doctor belongs to (very important!). I spent a couple of hours on the site this morning, and while I didn't particularly like the dollar figures I was quoted, I didn't have to pull out clumps of hair trying to navigate it. Just a thought!

---Baron V

Idiocies of Rural Life

More accurately, there are eighty of them:

It may seem mean-spirited, but sorry to say that Karl Marx was basically right: country life promotes an insular and self-reinforcing worldview, and in the realm of policy, that generally means poor outcomes. It definitely means poor leadership! (To be fair, not every one of the hillbilly Hayeks hails from the sticks; a few, like Bachmann, represent suburban districts. But by and large, a great deal of our current political conflict stems from America's rural-urban divide---which might be somewhat more tolerable if our simple country folk weren't, in the aggregate, a bunch of welfare moochers.)

---Baron V