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POSSIBLE TOPICS: VOTETEXAS.GOV—Voter Information; REGISTER TO VOTE; Sudden infant death syndrome: Doctors uncover potential cause in breakthrough study; Many diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes may have a different form of the disease; Friendswood council to continue talks of introducing new wastewater and water impact fee; We return once again to the subject of a garbage fee; In Houston, trash is often picked up late – even for newly elected Mayor Whitmire; Whitmire orders city of Houston to withdraw legal challenge in firefighter pay lawsuit; Montrose Management District relaunches after years of inactivity; Petition calls for recall of Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson after party switch; News Publishers Are Fighting Big Tech Over Peanuts. They Could Be Owed Billions.; China’s policy dilemma: is boosting credit deflationary?;
Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig where we discuss local, state, national, and international stories. My co-host, assistant producer and show editor is Andrew Ferguson.
Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio) is now on Wednesdays at 11AM (CT) or Thursdays at 6PM on KPFT 90.1 FM-HD2, Houston’s Community Media. You can also hear the show:
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- An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.
- You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
Except for timely election info, the extensive list of voting resources will now be at the end.
- MIKE: Today, we’re starting off with a couple of medical- and health-related stories that might be of particular interest for some of our listeners.
- Sudden infant death syndrome: Doctors uncover potential cause in breakthrough study; By Adriana Diaz | NYPOST.COM | Published Jan. 5, 2024, 7:16 p.m. ET — TAGS: Babies , Deaths, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
- After spending years studying the cause of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, doctors believe they have identified a cause, according to a new study published in the journal Neurology.
- Brief seizures accompanied by muscle convulsions have been named as a possible reason for the mysterious and tragic deaths — a tragic loss suffered by thousands of families in the United States each year.
- “Our study, although small, offers the first direct evidence that seizures may be responsible for some sudden deaths in children, which are usually unwitnessed during sleep,” the lead researcher, NYU Langone’s Dr. Laura Gould, said in a statement.
- SIDS, sometimes referred to as “crib death,” typically strikes infants younger than 6 months of age. The deaths usually occur during sleep. In older children, the inexplicable event is defined as a sudden unexplained death in children, or SUDC.
- Gould helped to establish the SUDC Registry and Research Collaborativeat NYU Langone after losing her 15-month-old daughter Maria to SUDC in 1997.
- Her team of researchers at New York University studied more than 300 SUDC cases in the registry, examining medical records and even video recordings of the babies sleeping, along with seven cases where death was considered likely to have been caused by seizures.
- The footage showed that the convulsions were found to have lasted for less than 60 seconds — and that the unfortunate events took place within 30 minutes of the child’s death.
- “Convulsive seizures may be the smoking gun that medical science has been looking for to understand why these children die,” study senior investigator and neurologist Dr. Orrin Devinsky, who helped Gould establish the registry, said in a statement. …
- However, the experts note that further research is needed to understand exactly how seizures can lead to death.
- This breakthrough comes after another team of researchers announced that low levels of a blood enzyme, called butyrylcholinesterase (BChE), may be a potential cause of SIDS. The enzyme plays an important role in waking up.
- “These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault,” said lead researcher Dr. Carmel Harrington, of the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in New South Wales, Australia, in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Association about the BChE research. …
- ANDREW: I hope that these developments are comforting for the families of children who have died from SIDS and SUDC. I think that showing that these conditions have complex medical causes, and the elusiveness of those causes to researchers, is conclusive evidence that the parents of these children did everything that they knew to do.
- MIKE: Those were my thoughts when I included this story.
- Many diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes may have a different form of the disease; A wrong diagnosis can make it harder to get appropriate medications and technology to manage blood sugar. Some Black patients wonder if their race plays a role. By Bram Sable-Smith | KFF HEALTH NEWS | Jan. 7, 2024, 6:00 AM CST
- [Phyllisa Deroze, a resident of Fayetteville, North Carolina and] a 31-year-old English professor at the time, … was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes … It would be eight years before she learned she had a different form of diabetes. …
- The condition is often called latent autoimmune diabetes of adults, or LADA for short. Patients with it can be misdiagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and spend months or years trying to manage the wrong condition. As many as 10% of patients diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes might actually have LADA, said Jason Gaglia, an endocrinologist at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.
- Deroze and three other LADA patients who spoke with KFF Health News, all Black women, are among those who were initially misdiagnosed. Without the correct diagnosis — which can be confirmed through blood tests — they described being denied the medicines, technology, and tests to properly treat their diabetes. Three of them wonder if their race played a role.
- . “That does seem to happen more frequently for African American patients and for other minoritized groups,” said Rochelle Naylor, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Chicago who researches atypical forms of diabetes. “Doctors, like any other person walking this planet, we all have implicit biases that impact our patient experiences and our patient care delivery.”
- Black patients have long struggled with bias across the U.S. health care system. In a recent KFF survey, for example, 55% of Black adults said they believed they needed to be careful at least some of the time about their appearances to be treated fairly during medical visits. Hospital software used to treat patients has been investigated for discrimination. Even a common test used to manage diabetes can underestimate blood sugar levels for patients who have sickle cell trait, which is present in nearly 1 in 10 African Americans.
- LADA ostensibly has nothing to do with race, but misconceptions about race, weight, and age can all lead doctors to misdiagnose LADA patients with Type 2 diabetes, said Kathleen Wyne, an endocrinologist who leads the adult Type 1 diabetes program at Ohio State University.
- Type 2 diabetes develops in people, often over age 45, whose bodies cannot properly regulate their blood sugar levels. Type 2 accounts for at least 90% of diabetes cases in the U.S. and has a high prevalence among African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic populations. It can often be managed with lifestyle changes and oral medications.
- LADA is more akin to, or even thought to be another form of, Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune condition once dubbed “juvenile diabetes” because it was most often diagnosed in children. Type 1 occurs when the body attacks its cells that produce insulin — the naturally occurring hormone that regulates blood sugar by helping turn food into energy. Without insulin, humans can’t survive.
- LADA is difficult to diagnose because it progresses slowly, Gaglia said. Typical LADA patients are over 30 and don’t require injectable insulin for at least six months after diagnosis. But, like Type 1 patients, most will eventually depend on injections of pharmaceutical insulin for the rest of their lives. That delay can lead physicians to believe their patients have Type 2 diabetes even as treatment becomes less effective.
- MIKE: There’s more to this story that’s worth reading, but I think it pays to include the closing paragraphs.]
- After a bout with diabetic ketoacidosis in 2019, Deroze finally persuaded her gynecologist to test her for antibodies. The results came back positive. One of the endocrinologists apologetically prescribed insulin and, later, an insulin pump, another ubiquitous piece of technology for people with Type 1.
- And for the first time, she encountered the words “diabetes is not your fault” while reading about Type 1 diabetes. It felt like society was caring for her in a way it hadn’t when she was misdiagnosed with Type 2. That’s troubling, she said, and so is how long it took to get what she needed.
- “My Ph.D didn’t save me,” said Deroze, who now lives in the Miami area. “You just see the color of my skin, the size of my body, and it negates all of that.”
- ANDREW: I don’t remember when I first ran across it, but there’s an article from the magazine Pipe Wrench called “No Health, No Care”, written by Marquisele Mercedes. It’s one of the cornerstones of my understanding of medical discrimination (in terms of race, weight, and race AND weight) and how my own weight affects both my actual health and how others (sometimes doctors) perceive my health. It’s a powerful article, a very personal one for Mercedes, and one that I think is very relevant to the piece we’re talking about now. I recommend everyone read it, fat or not, Black or not. I’ve linked to it on the blog post for this show at thinkwingradio dot com.
- ANDREW: I also want to speak on something at the end of the piece we just read, talking about how diabetes is framed differently depending on which type one has. One expert I respect, Asher Larmie, once Tweeted some information on how diabetes works and what causes it. His account has since been deactivated, but I recalled the conclusion being largely that no one can control whether or not they get diabetes. In the process of trying to find those tweets, I ran across a Healthline article from 2019 explaining that all types of diabetes are heavily impacted by genetics, and in this way, diabetes is never the result of personal choice. Whether Type 1 or Type 2, diabetes is never your fault.
- ANDREW: Placing this information in the context created by the article we’re discussing as well as articles like “No Health, No Care” and experts like Dr. Larmie, it’s very clear that instead of being acknowledged as a genetic condition that anyone can be vulnerable to, diabetes is weaponized as a punishment against fat people for being fat. As this article shows, that weaponization is leading to misdiagnosis and further harm. It’s also clear that, as Mercedes says in her article, “[o]ur society doesn’t hate fatness because it’s unhealthy; our society thinks fatness is unhealthy because we hate it.” When considering how racism has influenced Western conceptions of “health”, the hatred and the harm becomes even more pronounced.
- ANDREW: This is a big problem, affecting some of the fundamental assumptions we make about healthcare. It can seem too big to solve. But I think that changing people’s perceptions of diabetes and fatness and the people who live with them is the groundwork necessary to fix this problem, and through resources like those I’ve mentioned here, and articles like the one we’re discussing, changing those perceptions is very possible.
- MIKE: Since type 2 diabetes is a research area for my wife, I took a different interest in this story. My layperson’s understanding is that Type 2 diabetes is a problem of the body becoming less sensitive to naturally produced insulin. It’s believed that this results in an inflammation problem in the islets in the liver that produce insulin, resulting in a need for insulin to be added to the body.
- MIKE: Type 1 diabetes is believed to be an autoimmune problem, which I suppose is similar in some ways to diseases like lupus. That type 1 LADA is racially misdiagnosed is interesting and may well be due to implicit bias in diagnosis. Now that this adult form of type 1 has gotten attention, it will be interesting to see how common it is in Whites and other ethnicities. I suspect that it’s unlikely to be unique to African-Americans.
- Friendswood council to continue talks of introducing new wastewater and water impact fee; By Rachel Leland | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 5:00 PM Jan 9, 2024 CST / Updated 5:00 PM Jan 9, 2024 CST
- Friendswood City Council will continue its consideration of introducing new water and wastewater impact fees at its next council meeting Feb. 5.
- The backstory — At Friendswood City Council’s Jan. 8 meeting, Director of Engineering Jil Arias recommended the city adopt a maximum water impact fee [per equivalent service unit (ESU)] of $3,721 and a wastewater impact fee of $1,675, for a total of $5,396.
- Friendswood currently assesses water and wastewater impact fees per Texas Local Government Code Chapter 395.
- City Council voted unanimously to approve the city’s proposed impact fees but also voted to consider an amendment made by council member Robert Griffon to consider lot threshold at the next City Council meeting Feb. 5.
- Those opposed — Griffon introduced a motion to waive all water and wastewater impact fees on infield development lots, as well as large lots that can be divided into four or fewer lots.
- Griffon said he opposed infield lots and larger lots having to pay the wastewater and water impact fees because their size indicates that they are situated in areas that have existing infrastructure and have likely already paid an impact fee, meaning they would be charged twice.
- “Friendswood is rapidly approaching build-out,” Griffon said. “We should incentivize the development of these infill developments and larger lots and not penalize [developers] by forcing them to pay impact fees twice.”
- Community Impact reported in August that the city only has 1,900 acres left to build out.
- Those in favor — City Manager Morad Kabiri pointed out that the costs to operate Friendwood’s water infrastructure simply “are what they are.”
- Friendswood currently has agreements with both Houston and the Gulf Coast Water Authority for use of their surface water and wastewater treatment plants, which would cost more than $100 million if Friendswood were to build its own infrastructure, Kabiri said.
- “So theoretically, of our 14,000 active connections we have today, 12,000 of thereabouts are residential,” Kabiri said. “If all of them were to subdivide into two, not four, you would be doubling the demand on our system, and we wouldn’t have the financial resources to provide the services to all of them.”
- Next steps — City Council will consider Griffon’s amendment to consider lot threshold at the next meeting Feb. 5.
- MIKE: I was left confused when I read about the maximum and minimum fees. Will they be monthly? Annually?
- MIKE: So, I did what Andrew would do: I looked at the cited documents linked in the story. Well, it turns out that according to the document, “… The impact fee will be assessed … at the time that a plat is filed …” So I infer that this will be a one-time fee assessed at the time a plat is filed with the city. I think that makes it equivalent to a permitting fee.
- MIKE: I think that City Manager Kabiri’s points make sense to me. Just because there is existing infrastructure in the vicinity of some undeveloped lots, or of lots that can be further subdivided, that doesn’t mean that the existing infrastructure can support additional development. Thus, fees on new plats are reasonable and fair.
- MIKE: Council member Griffon’s proposal to exempt certain lots from fees amount to putting any new essential infrastructure improvements required by new development on the backs of Friendswood taxpayers rather than on the developers who will be creating the increased load.
- MIKE: As City Manager Kabiri reportedly said at one point, “… the costs to operate Friendswood’s water infrastructure simply ‘are what they are.’”
- ANDREW: I’m happy to hear that I’ve inspired you to dig deeper. And it’s a good thing you did — I didn’t see anything in this article that would have tripped my research instinct, so well done for catching what I wouldn’t have.
- MIKE: That’s what makes us a team.
- DOCUMENT REFERENCES:
- PDF Page 15 Section 2.3 — Definition of Equivalent Service Unit
A water service unit is defined as the service equivalent to a water connection for a single-family residence. The City of Friendswood utilizes 1-inch meters for single-family connections. For the impact fee
calculation, all meters 1-inch and smaller equate to one ESU. … - Definition of Equivalent Service Unit — A water service unit is defined as the service equivalent to a water connection for a single-family residence. The City of Friendswood utilizes 1-inch meters for single-family connections. For the impact fee calculation, all meters 1-inch and smaller equate to one ESU.
- PDF Page 27, Section 4.2 — TLGC Chapter 395 states that the maximum impact fee may not exceed the amount determined by
dividing the cost of capital improvements required by the total number of service units attributed to new
development during the impact fee eligibility period (2023 – 2033). … - PDF Page 30 Section 4.2.4 — The impact fee will be assessed (subject to future updates) at the time that a plat is filed (where applicable), and collected during the building permit process, as identified in the impact fee legislation.
- PDF Page 15 Section 2.3 — Definition of Equivalent Service Unit
- MIKE: Coincidentally, Charles Kuffner discussed another fee-based story discussing a story from the Houston Chronicle in his OffTheKuff column entitled, “We return once again to the subject of a garbage fee” (Posted on Monday, January 8, 2024 by Charles Kuffner). The Chronicle article he cites is titled, “In Houston, trash is often picked up late – even for newly elected Mayor Whitmire”. I cited his Facebook post:
- Kuff cites the article in part: “In his inaugural address Tuesday, Mayor John Whitmire said his garbage bin had languished at the curb for a week, a common service delay in the city. Residents logged more than 29,000 complaints for missed garbage pick-ups in 2023, the highest tally in at least a decade, according to the city’s 311 data. …
- “Solid Waste has long been underfunded, struggling to attract the number of drivers and maintain the number of trucks needed to reliably pick up garbage and recycling bins for its roughly 400,000 customers. Department leaders have said the department’s $100 million budget, far behind its Texas counterparts on a per household basis, is not enough to provide quality service.
- “Every other major Texas city charges residents a monthly garbage collection fee that provides sanitation workers with more resources. Houston does not, so Solid Waste must compete with other departments over property and sales tax dollars for funding in City Hall’s annual budget. …”
- KUFF then goes on to add, “Mayor Whitmire has suggested that Solid Waste should be an “enterprise department”, which means that it would get its funding directly from a dedicated revenue source – the mythic garbage fee – rather than being funded from the general revenue budget. Public Works and the Houston Airport System are two existing enterprise departments. This would have the effect of improving the department’s performance and would also save a bunch of money from the general revenue budget, which as we all know is a thing that needs to happen. …”
- MIKE: Something I’ve said before on this show is, “You get the government you pay for. Everyone expects more or better services, but no one want to pay the taxes for them.”
- MIKE: I commented on Kuff’s post of this story on Facebook something I’ve alluded to before on this show: “To put it simply, we live in a “flat tax” state that forces us legislatively and constitutionally to be a flat tax city. That means flat sales taxes, flat property taxes, and user fees of various kinds. …”
- ANDREW: I also think that when conservatives say “flat tax” they expect “one tax”. That is to say, they expect to be able to throw the same amount of money in an envelope every year and send it off and not think about it anymore. Specific taxes for individual services complicate this, and so they dislike them. It may be one reason why politicians love to promise “no new taxes”.
- ANDREW: I do have to say, though, I’m not entirely sure how separating out the funding that Houston’s Solid Waste department would get would help matters. I suppose the department could spend fewer resources and time on arguing for their piece of the general budget pie, and that might help.
- ANDREW: But in order to make a real difference, I think the Solid Waste department would have to charge the average Houstonian a garbage collection fee that’s more expensive than the money the department currently gets from the average tax bill. And if that’s the plan, then I don’t think it matters whether Solid Waste has its own fee. What matters is that people would be paying more money to the city in general. I think that could be fine, but I think it should be discussed.
- ANDREW: But maybe there’s something I’m missing.
- MIKE: One thing missing is that this is a flat, regressive tax, just like sales taxes are.
- Whitmire orders city of Houston to withdraw legal challenge in firefighter pay lawsuit; By Shawn Arrajj | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 5:36 PM Jan 3, 2024 CST / Updated 5:36 PM Jan 3, 2024 CST
- A long-running battle between the city of Houston and the union representing firefighters with the Houston Fire Department took one step toward a resolution Jan. 3.
- Following talks with union leadership, newly elected Houston Mayor John Whitmire said in a news release he directed City Attorney Arturo Michel to have the city withdraw from a lawsuit related to firefighter contract negotiations. …
- The city and the Houston Professional Firefighters Association have been at odds since 2017, when the two groups were unable to reach an agreement in contract negotiations. As a result, Houston firefighters have been working without a contract since that time, though the city has funded several pay raises for firefighters.
- Whitmire promised to end the standoff and negotiate with firefighters while campaigning for Houston mayor in 2023. As a state senator, he filed a bill in February with the goal of forcing the city to enter into collective bargaining talks in a process called binding arbitration. Whitmire’s bill was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, and the city of Houston challenged it in court.
- In December, State District Judge Lauren Reeder upheld the bill, ordering the city and the union to negotiate on back pay and benefits for firefighters dating back to 2018. …
- A separate court case relates to whether the city was adequately following a state law that requires cities to pay firefighters at a rate that is competitive with what firefighters make in the private sector. The Texas Supreme Court dealt a win to the union in March, upholding the state’s collective bargaining law and remanding the case back to trial court.
- Former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner has warned that binding arbitration would come with a large price tag for the city and would negatively affect the city’s credit rating, adding that “it takes the budgeting process away from those who were elected by voters and are accountable to the citizens.” …
- Whitmire and Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association President both directed their lead attorneys to begin meeting immediately until there is agreement on a path forward, according to the release.
- MIKE: Going by my recollections, I believe that this dispute goes back to a city referendum passed by voters that put firefighter pay on par with police pay. I believe it was at that point that the City and firefighters reached a contract deadlock.
- MIKE: Whitmire’s decision to resolve the problem by going ti binding arbitration doesn’t solve the core problem that previous mayors had fought. Namely, if you follow the voter’s wishes, will the voters want to pay the tax increases that will result, since the city must pass balanced budgets?
- MIKE: The State of Texas has made sure that this decision will come with maximum political pain in the form of some combination of regressive fees and flat taxes.
- MIKE: The State has made it unconstitutional to implement any kind of progressive city income tax. The State has also constrained increases in property taxes, which are also regressive in any case.
- MIKE: Apropos of prospective garbage fees and increasing water fees, will we see some new kind police and fire department fees?
- MIKE: Stay tuned.
- ANDREW: It’s complicated by state laws, as you mention, but I think one of the big problems with paying firefighters the same as police officers is that there are about 5,200 police officers on the payroll, expected to fill all kinds of roles, many of whom get paid overtime. This leads to more than 90% of an over one-billion-dollar department budget going to payroll.
- ANDREW: There is a growing call to move many of the duties that police are expected to fill to their own city departments; many of these jobs would cost less than hiring a single police officer. With fewer responsibilities, Houston’s police could focus on the functions that can’t be agreed to be handled by other departments, which would likely help address if not outright solve the staffing shortages the department has been experiencing and give a good reason to fire or transfer away a good number of those officers. This would probably create plenty of space in the budget to pay firefighters at the same rate as police.
- ANDREW: But because of state laws, any reduction in law enforcement budgets are punished with sales tax revenue deductions and restrictions on increasing property taxes and utility fees. A strategy of starvation, essentially. As a result, police budgets in Texas are essentially one-way only. While firefighters certainly deserve pay parity with police, so long as these punitive state laws remain in effect, local governments will do everything they can to avoid the financial pain it will bring.
- Montrose Management District relaunches after years of inactivity; By Shawn Arrajj | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 4:07 PM Jan 9, 2024 CST / Updated 4:07 PM Jan 9, 2024
- Officials with the … Montrose Management District announced the group’s relaunch in December after years of inactivity with the goal of enhancing public safety and stoking economic development in Montrose. …
- In order to reform, the district had to receive a petition from commercial property owners in its boundaries with at least 25 signatures.
- During a Dec. 5 community engagement session, officials with Hawes Hill and Associates—the economic development agency brought on to advise the district—said they received a petition with signatures from 60 property owners. The district’s board accepted the petition at a Dec. 14 meeting, officially bringing the district back to life for at least a duration of 15 years.
- A 15-year service plan lays out the following guidelines for how the district will assess property owners: a- The assessment rate is a maximum of 9 cents per $100 in property value as determined by the Harris County Appraisal District, lower than rate of 12 cents per $100 in property value assessed when the district last operated; b- Mid-rise and high-rise buildings pay assessments based on the value of only four levels of each structure; Multifamily residential complexes of 25 units or less are exempt from assessments; Mixed-use properties will pay assessments only if the business portion of the property is more than 40% of the total valuation.
- The plan is reviewed for potential changes by the board of directors every year. …
- MIKE: The story then breaks down a projected budget of anticipated revenues and expenditure. Continuing …
- During the Dec. 5 community engagement session, Andrea Duhon, deputy executive director with Hawes Hill & Associates, said the district will look to improve public safety by funding security patrols along key Montrose corridors and deploying security cameras. Other initiatives would involve graffiti and litter abatement, maintaining consistent street lighting in public areas, and potentially developing a new homeless outreach program.
- One function of the management district could involve long-term maintenance of projects completed by the Montrose Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone. By law, TIRZs can use their funds to build projects, but not for long-term maintenance.
- Eleven of the board’s 15 seats are not filled, according to the district’s website. …
- The next meeting of the Montrose Management District will be Jan. 11 at 9600 Long Point Road, Ste. 250, Houston.
- MIKE: Andrew and I have discussed TIRZ stories at least twice over the past years. We have done considerable research and had considerable discussion about them between ourselves, and we still are not sure what they are, how they work, who governs them, how money is collected, and who precisely decides how that money is spent.
- ANDREW: And to muddy the waters further, now we have a Management District to worry about. Is this the same as the Montrose TIRZ? Is it different? Are the two organizations in charge of the same money, or different money? Do they interact in any way? We have no idea and can’t seem to find out.
- MIKE: These questions that we have just add more fog to this story. There are a couple of points in this story that I highlighted for myself because they raise questions that go unanswered.
- MIKE: First, if law states that TIRZs cannot use their money for long-term maintenance, how does the Montrose Management District (which may or may not be identical with the TIRZ boundaries) plan to get around that?
- MIKE: Second, if only 4 of the 15 Montrose Management District’s board seats are filled, what is the process for filling them. The story and the Montrose Management District’s website make no mention of an election or other selection process or criteria, at least that I can find.
- MIKE: Personally, I don’t know how I feel about TIRZs in general. On the one hand, I see them as quasi-governmental entities that are insufficiently accountable to civil government, at least as far as I’ve been able to learn. On the other hand, they can be seen as civic organizations that look after their own neighborhoods in ways that City government may not, thus avoiding neighborhood neglect by a city that may feel the need to focus on different priorities.
- MIKE: Since “what’s done is done”, I’ll be interested in how this story develops. But our lack of understanding on this topic adds more questions on top of our questions, so keep in mind that the questions that we’ve raised are likely not the final questions to be answered or asked.
- ANDREW: Mike often references Donald Rumsfeld’s matrix of “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.” I think we’ll find a hell of a lot of all three before we get to the bottom of this.
- Petition calls for recall of Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson after party switch; Johnson, formerly a Democrat, joined the Republican Party last year. by Madaleine Rubin | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG | Jan. 9, 2024 @ 8:07 PM Central
- A three-time former Dallas City Council candidate is circulating a petition to oust Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson in response to his switch to the Republican Party last year.
- Davante Peters, a local activist and owner of a Dallas health store, said Tuesday that he has obtained about 1,100 signatures in support of recalling Johnson. Peters told The Texas Tribune that Johnson’s political party affiliation switch and absence at several City Council meetings last year made him doubt the mayor’s commitment to his position.
- Dallas City Secretary Bilierae Johnson confirmed to The Dallas Morning News that Peters filed his petition Friday. Peters said he must obtain over 103,000 signatures from registered voters by March 5 in order for the petition to reach Dallas’ City Council, who can decide whether to hold a mayoral recall election.
- “If we regular people didn’t go to work, we wouldn’t have a job,” Peters said. “I feel like our leadership should be held to that same standard.”
- According to Dallas’ city charter, the petition must be signed by 15% of registered voters eligible to vote in the city’s most recent general election within 60 days in order to move forward. If Peters hits that threshold and the city’s secretary finds that all signatures are valid, the City Council can choose to bring the recall to a vote.
- In Dallas, the mayoral office and all City Council positions are nonpartisan — voters do not see candidates’ party affiliation when they cast ballots. But Johnson’s announcement in September that he was switching to the Republican Party prompted backlash from some voters. The mayor’s move turned Dallas, solidly Democratic, into the country’s largest city with a GOP mayor. …
- Peters said he felt that the online petition was a “symbolic effort.” His recall petition is the first filed with the city’s secretary against a Dallas City Council member since a failed effort to unseat a council member in 2017.
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- Johnson’s office did not respond on Tuesday to requests for comment on the petition.
- In September, a KERA News analysis of city records revealed that Johnson has missed over 130 unexcused hours of council meetings, including 13 total meetings — more than any other current Dallas City Council member. …
- Peters said he hopes the petition will gain support from [Dallas County Democratic Party chair Kardal Coleman], and other Dallas Democrats and community activists.
- MIKE: This is just another, more flagrant, reason why Texas needs to end so-called non-partisan elections. A candidate’s party affiliation reflects their political and social values, whether their party affiliation is listed on the ballot or not. Voters deserve to know this on the ballot when they vote.
- MIKE: But what Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson did last year amounted to election fraud, at least in my mind if not legally. He ran as a Democrat in a heavily Democratic city and then switched parties. Has there ever been a more blatant political “bait and switch’ than that?
- MIKE: The question must be asked if he ran as a strawman candidate for the Dallas Republican Party with the official switch planned — perhaps the better word is “conspired” — beforehand.
- MIKE: I feel the frequent need to point out that the phrase “Republican dirty tricks” is embedded in the American political lexicon. Whatever you might say about Democrats, they have not stooped to this level of dirty tricks, and hence there is no equivalent term for them in popular use.
- ANDREW: I certainly agree about dropping supposed nonpartisan elections, though I’m reluctant to bash party switching while in office.
- ANDREW: Sometimes internal party politics requires principled people to change their affiliation, especially in smaller political parties like county parties where it’s very easy for one person to consolidate social power around themselves and then leverage that into institutional power.
- ANDREW: If you find yourself on the wrong end of that social power, then even if you’re already an elected official, staying in that party could be bad for you. Although, in that case, it’s usually smarter to become unaffiliated or affiliate with a third party than it is to switch to your party’s main opponent… unless you are the most fence-sittingest of centrists and/or don’t care who you’re with as long as you can get something out of them. So I’m not saying I’m happy about Johnson’s decision, but I do worry about setting a precedent that traps decent-to-good leaders in parties that have no intention of letting them lead.
- ANDREW: I think the much stronger argument for recall is Johnson missing thirteen total City Council meetings, unexcused. That’s dereliction of duty, is what that is. I mean, when Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo took an excused leave of absence for mental health reasons from August to October last year, there was a lawsuit to remove her (which I’m not sure is still pending or not). If she had to put up with that, there’s no way the mayor of a city the size of Dallas should skip council meetings for an even longer time without any reason and get to stay in office.
- MIKE: I think an element of this is that Johnson switched parties less than a year after being elected Mayor. His purported reason, as I recall, was that being a Republican might better enable him to work with the Republican-dominated government of Texas.
- MIKE: If he believed that when he ran, he should have switched before the election. Then he could have made that case to the voters.
- News Publishers Are Fighting Big Tech Over Peanuts. They Could Be Owed Billions. By Julia Angwin | NYTIMES.COM | 8, 2023 (Ms. Angwin is a contributing Opinion writer and an investigative journalist.)
- A bitter battle is taking place between Big Tech and the free press over how to share in the income that news content generates for technology giants. The future of our news ecosystem, a linchpin of democracy, depends on the outcome.
- Last week, after months of hardball negotiations, Google and the Canadian government agreed on a deal that would require the company to pay Canadian news outlets about $73.5 million a year. Canadians are no longer facing the threat that Google would remove all news content from its search results.
- The settlement is far less than Canada wanted — it had sought $126 million — and a small fraction of the estimated $550 million that news publishers deserve from Google. The lesson here is clear: As much as publishers may be suffering right now, they must continue to stand firm against the bullying tactics of Big Tech.
- These platforms gained their audience in part by sharing news content free. Now they are using their market power to force the press to continue to do business on their terms.
- Canada is a test case for the world. In June its government passed a law that will force tech companies to pay for the news content featured on their platforms. In August, Meta, the owner of Facebook, responded by blocking Canadians from seeing or sharing any news items on Instagram and Facebook. Meta argues that it has generated significant revenue for publishers.
- The ongoing Meta blockade is already damaging Canadian publishers, particularly smaller ones. Chuck Lapointe, the chief executive of Narcity Media, which operates websites designed for Gen Z and millennials, wrote that his properties had suffered a 30 percent decline in traffic and a 15 percent decline in revenue since the blockade began, forcing him to lay off over 16 employees. The Meta blockade “is killing us,” wrote Gabriel Ramirez, a journalist and co-founder of The Bridge Canada, a news outlet for Latin American immigrants.
- Canadian publishers were even more terrified of a Google boycott because Google drives even more traffic to news. A few months before the law was passed, the company ran a weekslong test that removed Canadian news outlets from its results, in what it described as a “potential product response” to the law.
- It was like saying, “Nice restaurant you have here; it would be a shame if it had a fire,” said David Beers, the editor in chief of a nonprofit regional news site in British Columbia, The Tyee, which gets about one-third of its traffic from Google.
- The Canada-Google deal sets an important precedent: It prevents Google from influencing which media businesses survive and fail.
- In the past few years, after enduring withering criticism for profiting by purloining news content, Google and Meta began cutting private deals with individual news outlets across the globe (including The New York Times). Google says it has committed $1 billion to journalism and has cut deals with news outlets in more than 22 countries since 2020.
- Critics say that without government intervention, the deals tech companies strike allow them to determine which news outlets survive and could allow them to financially starve those that are critical of their business or political interests.
- “The internet is supposed to be a level playing field. Instead these platforms are picking winners,” said David Skok, the founder and chief executive of The Logic, a business and tech news publication. He said that his publication was one of only two Canadian national nonbroadcast news publications that had not already signed a deal with Google or Meta before the legislation’s passage.
- Two years ago, Australia became the first country to push for a level playing field, enacting a bargaining code that required Google and Meta to negotiate payments to news publishers. Facebook shut off access to news content in Australia for about a week but ultimately complied.
- The Australian code proved to be a boon to the news industry there, prompting the hiring of more than 100 reporters and generating more than $130 million in annual payments to Australian news outlets large and small, according to Rod Sims, a former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
- When other countries initiated similar efforts, however, Google and Meta started pushing back more aggressively. When Brazil considered a similar law last year, Google posted ads on its popular search page stating that the law would “force Google to fund fake news.” The bill was withdrawn. South Africa and California are facing similar pushback.
- Canada’s draft regulations required Meta and Google to each pay news outlets a minimum of 4 percent of their annual revenue in Canada. For Google, that would have amounted to about $126 million, according to government estimates.
- Google argues that fewer than 2 percent of search queries in Canada are seeking news. “Simply put, the 4 percent appears to be an arbitrary figure that overstates the commercial value of news-related links,” Google wrote in its public comments on the law. The government appears to have agreed to Google’s terms in agreeing to cut the minimum payment by nearly half.
- But a new working paper concluded that Google and Meta are vastly undercounting the value of news to their platforms. The study, by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Houston and the Brattle Group consulting firm, estimated that about 35 percent of searches on Google were “seeking news media content.”
- “News is to Google what sports is to cable,” said one of the study’s authors, Dr. Haaris Mateen, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Houston. “Without it, the product loses most of its value.”
- The study estimated that Google owes U.S. publishers 50 percent of the value created by news, which it estimated at $10 billion to $12 billion in revenue sharing annually. The study found that Facebook, whose users spend less time seeking news — about 13 percent of their time — owes $1.9 billion to U.S. news publishers.
- The researchers’ numbers were based on surveys … But even if the survey estimates are not perfectly accurate, they illustrate how publishers are fighting Big Tech over peanuts — hundreds of millions of dollars — when they could well be owed billions. …
- Mateen estimated that Google owes $550 million to Canadian publishers. “The amount the Canadian publishers will get under the agreement with Google is tiny compared to what they should be getting,” he said.
- But it’s a start. Now other governments need to follow suit with similar efforts. The struggle is painful. But Big Tech needs to start paying up and paying fairly.
- MIKE: This is a story about Canada, but it’s a global question. Australia has wrestled with it over the past couple of years. It will soon be coming here because there are huge vested interests in both sides.
- MIKE: The intellectual property (IP) generated by news organizations has intrinsic monetary value, but news organizations are not getting all the value of what they generate. Back when I was taking the NYC subway to work in the 1970s, you bought a newspaper. That generated revenue for the newspaper. Advertising also generated revenue. Between the two, the papers made money. Further, the amount they charged for ads was also calculated by how many times a single newspaper was read, which could be up to 5 times. That was the model 50 years ago.
- MIKE: Today, most people don’t buy newspapers. They read for free what they can on the web. Some folks subscribe to get around paywalls, but I believe they’re a minority. Some folks provide a email address — which has some resale value for the news organizations — in order to get a few free articles each month. But the fact that news organizations have shrunk, merged, or failed in vast numbers over the internet age tells us that this model is not sustainable.
- MIKE: Now, although I’m blessed to be able to subscribe or contribute to several news organizations, most people like me mostly look at news aggregators like Google. That gives eyeballs to Google. If they click through Google to the story, Google gets data that they can use to create saleable value. The news organization gets some eyeballs for ads through the click-through, but are they getting all they’re entitled to?
- MIKE: The premise of this story is that news aggregation gets eyeballs to Google. Click-throughs provide data with value for Google. The news organizations get the few eyeballs for ads, which is simply not enough revenue in the absence of subscriptions, street sales, and the remaining ads which are often blocked, and which are therefore less valuable to advertisers.
- MIKE: So — and I’ve said this on the show before — one of the things that must change if quality reporting is to survive is the revenue model that supports it. As Andrew once said, “Fake news is free. Truth is behind a paywall.” Or something like that.
- ANDREW: “The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free.” Nathan J. Robinson, for Current Affairs, August 2020. We do love good quotes on this show.
- ANDREW: Initially, I wasn’t convinced that news publishers really had an argument against Google. Your explanation convinced me that they do, though of course I have caveats: I think “intellectual property” is not only impossible, it’s bad for creators and shouldn’t exist, and that Google shouldn’t be making money off of tracking either because Google (and everyone else) shouldn’t be tracking people and using that data for advertising-slash-manipulation purposes.
- ANDREW: Actually, on that second point. I wonder how laws like this will interact with non-tracking search engines like DuckDuckGo. That company doesn’t track its users — it’s prohibited from collecting your search histories and what results you look at per its legally-binding privacy policy, so it does not have the information needed to make inferences and build tracking profiles on its users like Google does in order to sell targeted advertising and search results. This means that news article click-throughs generate no data with value for DuckDuckGo, and thus the argument that publishers are relying on to get money out of Google doesn’t work with DuckDuckGo. (Incidentally, DuckDuckGo makes money by showing anonymous ads on search result pages — those ads aren’t based on your private data, but instead based on the search keywords you gave to the company to get to that specific page, which again, aren’t saved.)
- ANDREW: So, theoretically, search engines that don’t track click-throughs shouldn’t be affected by laws that require search engines to share tracking profits with news outlets. If that’s how this plays out, that might even create an impetus for new and existing search engines to simply stop tracking their users. Even if only a handful do that, it would be great for privacy online, but then news publishers might be up a different creek without the same paddle. If they then try to go after ads on search result pages, I think that will be a much more difficult argument.
- China’s policy dilemma: is boosting credit deflationary?; By Kevin Yao | REUTERS.COM | January 10, 2024 @12:07 AM CST / Updated 4 hours ago
- China’s central bank faces a major hurdle in quelling the threat of deflation: more credit is flowing to productive forces than into consumption, exposing structural flaws in the economy and reducing the effectiveness of its monetary policy tools.
- The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is under pressure to cut interest rates as falling prices raise real borrowing costs for private businesses and households, curbing investment, hiring and consumer spending.
- Deteriorating asset quality from the property crisis and local government debt woes is also pressuring central bankers to release liquidity into the banking system by cutting reserve requirements to fend off any risks of a funding crunch.
- But both moves share a common problem: demand for credit in China mainly comes from the manufacturing and the infrastructure sectors, whose overcapacity issues are exacerbating deflationary forces in the economy.
- Beijing has been redirecting money flows from its ailing property sector towards manufacturing in a bid to move its industries up the value chain. Infrastructure spending has been responsible for China’s high investment rates for decades, diverting economic resources away from households.
- “Much of the credit is going to the infrastructure sector and also into some of the excess capacity,” said Hong Hao, chief economist at Grow Investment Group. “That way, it actually creates further deflationary pressures. That’s the problem.” …
- Analysts say the PBOC’s predicament increases the urgency for the government to speed up structural reforms to boost consumption, a long-standing deficit in policies it has vowed to address throughout 2023, but struggled to make significant progress on.
- China’s consumer prices fell by 0.5% year-on-year in November, the fastest in three years, while factory-gate prices tumbled by a whopping 3.0%, underscoring the weakness of both external and domestic demand relative to production capacity.
- December inflation data is due on Friday, while the PBOC could decide its next move on its benchmark rate on Jan. 22.
- A sustained period of falling prices may discourage further private sector investment and consumer spending, which in turn can hurt jobs and incomes and become a self-feeding mechanism that weighs on growth, as seen in Japan in the 1990s. …
- MIKE: There’s more to the story, but it gets technical with lots of numbers.
- MIKE: Discussion surrounding deflation tends to sound paradoxical. After all, if low inflation is good for the consumer, isn’t a bit of deflation even better? Well, yes and no.
- MIKE: If you have money, deflation is great, Stuff you buy either stays the same price over time or actually gets cheaper. But on a macro basis, it’s bad, because without some fear of price increases, buying incentives decline. This is the premise behind so-called “sales”: creating an artificial urgency to shop NOW! If waiting for a purchase might present the opportunity to get it cheaper, why hurry at all?
- MIKE: If people are waiting to shop, sales go down, inventories go up, workers get laid off, and there’s even less consumer demand. This is the dreaded “vicious cycle”.
- MIKE: This is the dilemma that China is facing. And the problem is accentuated by the fact that China has almost always been a production and export-oriented economy rather than a consumer-oriented economy. Thus, credit in China is aimed toward manufacturers rather than consumers. Increasing production creates supply pressures that depress prices further.
- MIKE: Add to the mix China’s slowly imploding demographic timebomb. China is facing an aging, steeply declining population by the end of the century. China’s housing market is already drastically overbuilt, with many incomplete buildings leading to declining home prices, and it will only get worse. This impoverishes Chinese families who have existing equity in homes.
- MIKE: Fewer people buy less stuff, leading to less demand, declining prices, fewer jobs, and thus less consumption. Old people buy less stuff but consume more medical services and products. This exacerbates the vicious cycle.
- MIKE: This takes us back to the dilemma facing the People’s Bank Of China regarding interest rates. There is a saying in economics that you cannot push on a string. The meaning is that at a certain point, interest rates can’t go lower and still stimulate demand. At some points, there have been negative interest rates, meaning that you were actually charged a tiny percentage to keep your money in a bank. The idea was to encourage people to spend money, but what I think it mainly did was discourage people from putting money in banks.
- MIKE: I don’t have an answer to this. I might get a Nobel Prize if I did. But it’s more than just an interesting dilemma for China. Japan got into this fix 40 years ago, and they’re still trying to dig themselves out of it.
- ANDREW: The fact that this is also a problem Japan experienced and is still trying to recover from is what makes this ideologically interesting for me. I think it’s pretty universally agreed that Deng Xiaoping took China into a more market-oriented direction in the 1980s, and that’s a direction that Chinese leaders since have reinforced. The problem with market-based economies is that they tend to have cycles of growth and shrinkage, and workers and consumers feel the brunt of that shrinkage when it comes.
- ANDREW: I suspect that if President Xi doesn’t want to move away from a market economy (which I think he won’t), then one of the more effective growth strategies may end up being creating jobs in public works programs similar to the US New Deal. Infrastructure has traditionally been a major sector in the Chinese economy; therefore it might be wise to look for sectors that have untapped potential for public job creation. Government administration, public transport, healthcare, even things as specific as food assistance package preparation might find a use for a sudden influx of capable but inexperienced workers. If people have jobs that they feel are secure, they’re more likely to spend money on goods, which can drive the economy.
- ANDREW: Ultimately, I don’t have the answer either, and I suspect there won’t be one single answer. But in my opinion, this situation was easy to see coming as China looked to compete with capitalist nations at their own game. Time will tell where they look for solutions
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