FREE WHITEWATER

Budget, City, Daily Bread, Demographics, Economy, Poverty, School District

Daily Bread for 7.27.22: Brief Implications of Whitewater’s (Socio-Economic) Condition

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:20 PM for 14h 38m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 1.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1974, in the Watergate scandal, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee votes 27 to 11 to recommend the first article of impeachment (for obstruction of justice) against President Nixon.

A Monday evening presentation to the Whitewater School Board (Addressing Needs in the District) described the socio-economic condition of the community, and its particular, greater-than-average challenges. See from 7.26.22 Slides on Whitewater’s (Socio-Economic) Condition. 

Socio-economics are only part of district’s (or community’s) condition and needn’t be determinative of achievement. It’s not true that low-income communities cannot achieve economically; it’s that it’s harder for them to do so.  

There are two ways to consider a presentation that includes the district’s socio-economic challenges: as merely instrumental to achieve approval and support for a referendum to exceed revenue limits or as an acknowledgement of a condition that’s intrinsically significant. 

If the measurements are presented as significant intrinsically, then they should and would be influential of ongoing policy. If one believes that these conditions are meaningful (and they are), then policy should be directed to address them. 

Recognition of this significance would lead to an ongoing, all-hands-on-deck response. 

Whitewater, historically, views discussions of a referendum as a budgetary matter, and as in 2018, the 2022 presentation was a budgetary presentation. That’s Whitewater’s misguided approach (although the 2022 presentation was welcome for its candor). Discussion of the socio-economic challenges of the community must begin and be repeated from the top of every public and private institution (superintendents, city managers, chancellors, executives). This libertarian blogger would not suggest that these economic problems are suitable only for local government solutions, but they require government acknowledgement at the highest levels. 

If economic disadvantage should be true, and it is, then government should provide basic services competently, be transparent to residents. avoid distractions and controversies, and remain otherwise limited to allow for private initiatives variously profitable and charitable. 

In difficult economic conditions, boosterism is ineffectual at best and a lie at worst. Of Whitewater’s boosters who were at their height immediately before the Great Recession: vain and self-promoting, narrow of mind and small of heart. There are fewer of them now, as daily life has a way of refuting even the stubbornest lies. 

In difficult economic conditions, there is no margin whatever for administrative turmoil, blaming residents for divisions, or government’s failure to explain before acting. Truman was right: the buck stops at the big desk, the big chair. Personal responsibility and accountability are even more important as leadership accountability. Doctors, lawyers, educators: practitioners have no legitimate escape from the demands of their professions. 

There’s a referendum ahead, but there are actual conditions now and all around. 

What to think about the referendum? Whether four dollars a year or four million, how is the district speaking and acting in response to actual socio-economic needs and academic goals? Government wants, but what is government doing?

Although this is a small town, dozens and dozens of prominent government leaders (city, school district, university) have come and gone since FREE WHITEWATER first began publication in 2007. (It shouldn’t have been so many.  I’m convinced Whitewater would have had less turnover among leaders had they been better aligned with the real condition and needs of the community. Effective rhetoric rests on reality.) 

The referendum is months away; these are brief and preliminary remarks. Loving this small town, as I do, is no casual or occasional affection. Serious subjects deserve serious efforts. There’s time enough for this libertarian blogger to write in detail about which policies and actions that might justify public expenditure, both generally and particularly for Whitewater.   

Great White Sharks Swim Through School of Fish:

 

Budget, City, Daily Bread, Demographics, Economy, Poverty, School District

Daily Bread for 7.26.22: Slides on Whitewater’s (Socio-Economic) Condition

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:21 PM for 14h 40m 28s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 4.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1948, President Truman signs Executive Order 9981, desegregating the military of the United States.

It’s a truism to say that ‘people make history, but not in conditions of their own choosing.’ Whitewater has before her a number of decisions (a school district referendum, city administration of the fire department, a new police chief, a new city manager). These decisions all come in a context. (I’ve the luxury of time, and will consider each of these topics methodically over the coming days.) For today, as a prelude: general measures of the socio-economic condition of the community. 

Last night, preceding a decision to authorize a referendum to exceed revenue limits, the Whitewater School Board heard a presentation on Addressing Needs in the District. A few slides from that presentation appear below. (Credit where credit is due: Old Whitewater would never have presented a document that highlighted the community’s socio-economic challenges. The core tenet of Old Whitewater’s boosterism was to accentuate the positive, in the false theory that positive necessarily begets positive. Mostly, however, accentuating the positive and ignoring difficulties allowed officials and hangers-on to place themselves in the best possible light. Better to be honest and candid. A community cannot address, let alone fix, problems it refuses to acknowledge.)

While the district presented these slides for a particular purpose (to support exceeding revenue limits over four years), they serve a more significant general purpose. Socio-economic data are not everything, but they are something, and much more than official press releases and headshots. 

Economic disadvantage among K-12 students here is greater than in nearby communities and greater than the state average. That condition affects what Whitewater does and what Whitewater can do. These conditions do not mean that government’s solutions are right for the community, but these conditions do require a response. It is, as it has been for Old Whitewater, a profound wrong to pretend otherwise. 

Much to consider. 

 ‘Lifeguard’ drone saved a drowning 14-year-old on a beach in Spain by dropping a life vest:

 

The devices, made by Valencia-based General Drones, have now been deployed on 22 beaches across Spain to assist human lifeguards.

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, July 26th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Drive My Car

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Tuesday, July 26th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Drive My Car @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Drama.

2 hours, 59 minutes (2021). Japanese, shown with English subtitles.

Oscar winner for Best International Feature Film 2022.

A renowned stage actor and director learns to cope with his wife’s unexpected passing when he receives an offer to direct a production of “Uncle Vanya” at a drama festival in Hiroshima. A taciturn young woman is assigned to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900 Turbo. The New York Times called this “a quiet masterpiece; considers grief, love, work and the soul-sustaining, life-shaping power of art.”

One can find more information about Drive My Car at the Internet Movie Database.

Daily Bread, Gubernatorial Race 2022, Politics, WISGOP

Daily Bread for 7.25.22: The WISGOP Gubernatorial Debate

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 77. Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:22 PM for 14h 42m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 9.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission meets at 6 PM. The Whitewater Unified School Board meets in closed session at 6 PM and open session at 7 PM.

On this day in 1965, Bob Dylan goes electric at the Newport Folk Festival, signaling a major change in folk and rock music.

Last night, the three WISGOP candidates for governor (Michels, Kleefisch, Ramthun) participated in their final debate before the August 9th primary.

Of press coverage, see Bauer, Takeaways from Republican Wisconsin gubernatorial debate and Beck & Hess, Tim Michels, Rebecca Kleefisch and Tim Ramthun debate family leave, DACA, abortion in tight Republican governor’s primary.

Although close in polling, Trump-endorsed, flush-with-cash Michels has key advantages with about two weeks to go. After eight years of exposure to Wisconsin voters, how would former Lt. Gov. Kleefisch close more strongly than Michels?

Only scandal or Trump’s change of mind.

Chess robot grabs and breaks finger of seven-year-old opponent at Russian tournament:

 

Last week, according to Russian media outlets, a chess-playing robot, apparently unsettled by the quick responses of a seven-year-old boy, unceremoniously grabbed and broke his finger during a match at the Moscow Open.

“The robot broke the child’s finger,” Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, told the TASS news agency after the incident, adding that the machine had played many previous exhibitions without upset. “This is of course bad.”

….

[President of the president of the Moscow Chess Federation Sergey] Lazarev told Tass that Christopher, whose finger was put in a plaster cast, did not seem overly traumatised by the attack. “The child played the very next day, finished the tournament, and volunteers helped to record the moves,” he said.

His parents, however, have reportedly contacted the public prosecutor’s office. “We will communicate, figure it out and try to help in any way we can,” he said. Smagin told RIA Novosti the incident was “a coincidence” and the robot was “absolutely safe.”

Assuming Lazarev’s remarks have been translated into English correctly, one can say that he has a different definition of absolutely safe from the definition used in the rest of the world. 

Daily Bread, Language, Science/Nature

Daily Bread for 7.24.22: ‘Parentese’ as a True Lingua Franca

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see morning showers with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:39 AM and sunset 8:23 PM for 14h 44m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 15% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1935, the Dust Bowl heat wave reaches its peak, sending temperatures to 109 °F (43 °C) in Chicago and 104 °F (40 °C) in Milwaukee. See also Why the Dust Bowl was hotter than this heat wave, despite global warming.

Why argue over politics (lit., the activities or affairs engaged in by a government, politician, or political party)? One argues over politics so that society might be free to pursue science, industry, art, and philosophy. A recent study on parents’ communication with their children reminds how much an unencumbered people can accomplish. Oliver Whang reports ‘Parentese’ Is Truly a Lingua Franca, Global Study Finds (‘In an ambitious cross-cultural study, researchers found that adults around the world speak and sing to babies in similar ways’):

We’ve all seen it, we’ve all cringed at it, we’ve all done it ourselves: talked to a baby like it was, you know, a baby.

“Ooo, hellooooo baby!” you say, your voice lilting like a rapturously accommodating Walmart employee. Baby is utterly baffled by your unintelligible warble and your shamelessly doofus grin, but “baby so cuuuuuute!”

Regardless of whether it helps to know it, researchers recently determined that this sing-songy baby talk — more technically known as “parentese” — seems to be nearly universal to humans around the world. In the most wide-ranging study of its kind, more than 40 scientists helped to gather and analyze 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents on six continents, in 18 languages from diverse communities: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, internet savvy and off the grid, from hunter gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing.

The results, published recently in the journal Nature Human Behavior, showed that in every one of these cultures, the way parents spoke and sang to their infants differed from the way they communicated with adults — and that those differences were profoundly similar from group to group.

“We tend to speak in this higher pitch, high variability, like, ‘Ohh, heeelloo, you’re a baaybee!’” said Courtney Hilton, a psychologist at Haskins Laboratories at Yale University and a principal author of the study. Cody Moser, a graduate student studying cognitive science at the University of California, Merced, and the other principal author, added: “When people tend to produce lullabies or tend to talk to their infants, they tend to do so in the same way.”

The findings suggest that baby talk and baby song serve a function independent of cultural and social forces. They lend a jumping off point for future baby research and, to some degree, tackle the lack of diverse representation in psychology. To make cross-cultural claims about human behavior requires studies from many different societies. Now, there is a big one.

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars past daytime moon during launch:

 

A SpaceX tracking camera captured a Falcon 9 rocket and the moon during the launch of a new batch of Starlink satellites on July 22, 2022. (video is looped several times).

Daily Bread, Food, Technology

Daily Bread for 7.23.22: Can a 3D Printer Be the Future of Beef?

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 90. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:24 PM for 14h 46m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 22.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1632, three hundred colonists bound for New France depart from Dieppe, France.

So, can a 3D printer be the future of beef?:

Beef has a massive carbon footprint. Plant-based alternatives, like Beyond Meat, have grown into a $5.6 billion market. Still, scientists are trying to go a step further. This time, growing real meat in a lab without killing a cow. We head to Israel to see how a 3D-printed steak is made and if it could really make a dent in the busted beef industry.

Massive Sandstorm Shrouds City in Northwestern China:

 

This giant sandstorm in northwestern China looks like something out of an action movie. Filmed on July 20, the storm can be seen approaching and then swallowing cars on the road. Luckily, no casualties were reported.

Attrition, Authoritarianism, Big Lie, Daily Bread, Elections, Federal Government, Insurrection, Law, Never Trump, Trump, Trumpism

Daily Bread for 7.22.22: Trump’s Maneuvering is Futile Against Cheney’s Attrition

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 88. Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:25 PM for 14h 48m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 30.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1990, Greg LeMond, an American road racing cyclist, wins his third Tour de France after leading the majority of the race. It was LeMond’s second consecutive Tour de France victory.

Jennifer Rubin’s fifth and final takeaway from last night’s January 6th Committee hearings is the most significant: 

[Committee Chairman Bennie] Thompson said at the beginning of the hearing that “the dam has begun to break.” More witnesses are emerging and new evidence is pouring in, he said, adding that the committee will reassemble in September for more hearings.

Among the issues left to examine is the full-blown scandal concerning the Secret Service’s deletion of texts from Jan. 5 and 6. (To no one’s surprise, the Secret Service agents that promised to refute testimony from [Cassidy] Hutchinson have not shown up. They have retained their own lawyers.)

In any case, the series of Trump advisers and allies expressing disgust at his actions should convince all but the most delusional cultists that Trump should never be trusted with power again. As [Former Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew] Pottinger said, Trump gave America’s enemies ammunition to claim our nation was in “decline” and that democracy doesn’t work.

In an eloquent summation, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) reminded the country that “we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.” Her message was clear: Trump’s return to power would be unimaginable.

Republican Liz Cheney isn’t a model of libertarianism, but she does have a powerful grasp of the dispositive power of attrition. Trump is all about maneuver, moving this way or that on any given day, shifting and lying as he believes the moment requires. He thinks in immediate and personal ways: what to say today, whom to praise or disparage today. Trump looks no farther than the next florid press release, the next rally, etc.

Cheney, by contrast, so clearly sees the power of attrition to erode an adversary so that he becomes impotent and ineffectual of future action. In a case like this, attrition takes a few weapons (claims about Trump’s autocratic ambitions and selfish actions) and uses them to hit, chip, crack, and then shatter an adversary. What’s shattered is thereafter ruined: that dust and that rubble will not reassemble itself. 

Trump likely thinks that it matters whether Republicans re-nominate Cheney in Wyoming. Cheney rightly sees that what matters is advancing a confident, consistent, incremental erosion of Trump for all time. Slow, steady, relentless. 

Trump maneuvers, but Cheney attrits. Hers is — by far — the more powerful approach. Successful attrition of an adversary will leave nothing of him, save a stack of yellowing press releases and tarnished trinkets. 

 London to New York in just over 3 hours? That’s the aim of this new net zero supersonic airliner: 

 

It hasn’t taken to the skies yet, but the Overture aircraft is designed to trim hours off long-haul flights and avoid harming the environment by using 100 per cent sustainable aviation fuel.

Cats, Technology

Friday Catblogging: An Open-Source Robotic Cat

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Sarang Sheth writes about a robot cat called Nybble:
Designed to be a robot that you can build, play, and explore with, Nybble comes with a laser-cut plywood body that you must put together first. The entire process takes about 4 hours including the assembly, software and calibration configuration time, and once you’re done, Nybble is ready to play with! Nybble’s architecture makes it a rather nimble, flexible little cat, as it borrows bionic concepts from a cat’s skeleton. The robot cat comes outfitted with two ultrasonic sensors on its front that act as the robot’s “eyes”. It sports a USB input that lets you connect it to a device to tinker around with its open-source code and teach it new tricks (in Python, C++ or a graphical user interface via the Petoi desktop app), and even comes with Bluetooth and WiFi dongles as well as an infrared remote controller. Other parts include a holder for two 14500 Li-ion rechargeable 3.7V batteries that give Nybble up to 45 minutes of play-time, and even silicone covers for the cat’s feet, to give it friction as well as prevent it from accidentally scratching your furniture!

Big Lie, Courts, Daily Bread, Elections, Law, Trump, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 7.21.22: Trump as Wisconsin’s Obsessive Stalker

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 89. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:26 PM for 14h 50m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 41.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater, Wisconsin will see a meeting at 3 PM of the Joint Review Board to present on Tax Incremental Finance Districts 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. Years of tax incremental financing through local government planning and reams of press releases about government-directed development programs, yet for it all Whitewater is still a low-income community. What’s changed in the last twenty years is the size of the group that still believes local government is a meaningful engine of residents’ economic well-being. That tiny remnant of diehards could fit on a park bench next to the bum talking about the time machine he invented. 

On this day in 1949, the United States Senate ratifies the North Atlantic Treaty, the treaty that establishes the legal basis for NATO.

A national story in the Washington Post assesses Trump’s focus on Wisconsin. Philip Bump writes Trump’s deluded effort to flip the 2020 results in Wisconsin, explained: 

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) neatly, if unintentionally, summarized nearly every aspect of Donald Trump’s post-2020 election effort to somehow return to power.

“He would like us to do something different in Wisconsin,” Vos said of Trump, explaining a phone call the former president made to him last week. “I explained that it’s not allowed under the Constitution. He has a different opinion and he put the tweet out.” (It was actually a post on Truth Social, but we’ll get to that.)

Vos’s summary makes clear that he has now joined former vice president Mike Pence and a battery of other officials across the country: Trump wanted them to do something they had no power to do — and so Trump disparaged them publicly.

The situation in Wisconsin, however, is a bit more complicated than Trump’s other ongoing efforts to somehow reverse the results of an election that’s seen President Biden serve as president for 18 months. It derives from a recent decision from the state’s elected Supreme Court that Trump allies are now presenting as having invalidated the presidential election results in that state.

It does not and it could not, and, as Vos notes, this should be obvious to even the most Trump-sympathetic observers.

….

It’s worth considering the logic here. If the Supreme Court were tomorrow to declare that voting in polling places was for some reason unconstitutional, would Trump (or anyone!) argue that votes cast by that method in 2020 should not count? Would the natural response be to recalculate election results to exclude those votes? Or would there be a recognition that most or all of those voters would simply have cast ballots some other way? That’s setting aside the assertion that it’s odd to decry illegal behavior when illegality was asserted only after the fact. If buying alcohol was made illegal tomorrow, the 21st Amendment repealed, would that mean that everyone who’s had a drink since 1933 engaged in criminal activity?

Trump has become Forward’s obsessive stalker, returning to her again and again with unwanted advances. 

 Ius and Tithonium Chasmata seen in “true colour” (4K UHD): 

 

Observations made by ESA’s Mars Express with the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) were combined into a “true colour” image, reflecting what would be seen by the human eye if looking at Ius and Tithonium Chasmata (trenches), part of Mars’ Valles Marineris canyon structure.

Bad Ideas, Business, Corporate Welfare, Daily Bread, Foxconn, Government Spending, Kleefisch, Michels, No Honor Among Thieves, Politics, Scott Walker, Trump

Daily Bread for 7.20.22: Michels Keeps His Money, Discards His Views

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:27 PM for 14h 51m 54s of daytime.  The moon is in its third quarter with 50.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1969, Apollo 11‘s crew successfully makes the first manned landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon six and a half hours later.

Here at FREE WHITEWATER there is a category dedicated to the failure that was and remains the Foxconn project. Foxconn was and remains a national embarrassment. Trump and Walker pushed this sham, and Walker’s dutiful lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, supported it with the bubbly enthusiasm one would expect of her.

Now in a battle with Kleefisch for WISGOP gubernatorial nomination, Trump-endorsed candidate Tim Michels has decided to criticize Kleefisch for supporting Foxconn. Well, fine: Foxconn was a mistake. 

And yet, and yet — before Michels turned on Foxconn, and before he won the endorsement of the Foxconn-enticing Trump, Michels himself was making big money from the Foxconn project. Corrine Hess reports Governor candidate Tim Michels criticizes Foxconn deal after making millions on the project:

MOUNT PLEASANT – Republican candidate for governor Tim Michels says the deal Scott Walker struck to bring Foxconn to Wisconsin was a problem and is also criticizing the Evers administration’s renegotiation of the Foxconn contract.

Michels’ own company was named a subcontractor for the project in 2018 and it made millions of dollars building roads for the Foxconn project.

The wealthy business executive has also gotten the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, who proclaimed Foxconn’s Mount Pleasant complex would be the “eighth wonder of the world.”

“We had a problem with the initial Foxconn negotiation and then Tony Evers said he was going to renegotiate Foxconn made a big complete mess of it,” Michels said in an interview after a campaign rally Monday. 

….

When asked how much money the company was paid on the Foxconn contract, Michels said, “I don’t know the exact number. It’s certainly several hundred million dollars worth of work. I’d probably guess closer to a half of a billion dollars worth of work.” 

Oh, brother.

Michels needn’t talk about this — two simple photos would suffice:

(L-R: Michels corporate profit, Taxpayer outcome.) 

Tim and Rebecca deserve each other in the way that George and Martha of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe deserve each other.

 Apollo 11 Moonwalk Montage:

 

CDA, City, Daily Bread, Development, Economics, Economy, Government Spending, School District

Daily Bread for 7.19.22: Individual and Household Well-Being

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 89. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:28 PM for 14h 53m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 61.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM. 

On this day in 1903, Maurice Garin wins the first Tour de France.

In small towns across the Midwest (and places far beyond), discussions about development and economic improvement almost always focus on particular projects, and as frequently those are government-subsidized projects. There’s an emphasis on capital projects: what can we build today? The theory: if we build it, they will come. (In W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, on which Field of Dreams was based, building is meant to entice a single person: “if you build it, he will come.” No matter, as capital projects to attract others sometimes fail to attract even a single person.) 

Peter Coy’s recent column in the New York Times, on measuring economic inequality, makes plain the emptiness of considerations of mere capital spending. However one thinks about inequality, from left, center, or right, all serious considerations emphasize individual economic well-being: 

Differences in wealth and differences in income are the wrong ways to measure economic inequality, and going by either of them “dramatically overstates” the degree of inequality in the United States, a working paper argues.

The right measure of economic inequality is differences in spending power, says the paper, “U.S. Inequality and Fiscal Progressivity: An Intragenerational Accounting,” which is by the economist Alan Auerbach of the University of California, Berkeley, the economist Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University and the software developer Darryl Koehler of Economic Security Planning.

Spending power — the amount of goods and services that a person can buy — is what really matters to people because it captures the ability to satisfy their wants and needs, Auerbach, an expert on the economics of public finance, told me. He asked me to imagine bars of gold encased in a radioactive block. If wealth can’t be used, it’s of no value. The same goes for income, he said.

Study after study has shown rising inequality of income and wealth in the United States. An article by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published in 2017 found that the average real income of the top 0.1 percent of the population grew by 298 percent between 1984 and 2014, while the average real income of the bottom half of the population grew just 21 percent.

But spending power gives a different picture. Still bad, but not as bad. The richest 1 percent of 40- to 49-year-olds in the United States own 29.1 percent of their age cohort’s net wealth, but account for only 11.8 percent of their group’s remaining lifetime spending power, the new paper says. The poorest fifth of the 40-somethings own just 0.4 percent of the group’s net wealth but have 6.6 percent of the remaining lifetime spending power, the paper says.

(Emphasis added.) 

These analyses — from whatever part of the economic spectrum — focus on what individuals and families possess, what they have at their disposal, not whether some development man thought that he could play builder with public money.

(Now and forever: venture capital is privately funded; development men, local landlords, and their ilk who want to play at venture capital should use their own money, not public funds. There was never a more dishonest program in Whitewater than the CDA’s capital catalyst program.) 

When a school district — like Whitewater’s — insists that $1.6 million for athletic fields will produce an economic uplift, they cannot offer a single bit of evidence on how this will measurably affect overall individual and household incomes within the district.

That’s what matters. The rest is misdirected discussion in Whitewater, in Wisconsin, in the Midwest, or anywhere else.  

 Birmingham [England] golf course catches fire after extreme temperatures amid heatwave: 

 

America, City, Daily Bread, Local Government, Politics, School District, University

Daily Bread for 7.18.22: Sure Enough, It’s National Issues that Grip Wisconsinites

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 88. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:28 PM for 14h 55m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM. 

On this day in 1968, Intel is founded in Mountain View, California.

The claim that national political controversies are merely an expression of resentment is false. It was false after 2016, it was false in 2020, and it’s false in 2022.

Our national political controversies are over competing ideas and philosophies. Reducing national conflict to feelings of insult is simple-minded. (For criticism of claims that national debates are stem from resentment, see Resentment’s a Nebulous National Explanation and Considering The Politics of Resentment, Concluding Thoughts. )

Sure enough, a recent survey of Wisconsinites’ political concerns shows that they are most concentrated with national politics and that those national concerns are about policies and programs, not hurt feelings. It’s policy not politesse that underlies national conflicts. 

Sophia Voight reports Wisconsinites are carrying the weight of the nation’s problems on their shoulders heading into the midterm election, survey finds: 

Wisconsinites have the weight of the nation’s problems on their minds heading into the 2022 midterm elections, a nod to a state whose voters might be pivotal to the balance of power in the U.S. Senate this fall.

That was a key finding of the La Follette Policy Poll, a written survey sent to 5,000 state residents last fall, which asked about the issues that matter to them most and the problems they most want solved. Nearly 1,600 responded.

“The main goal was taking a pulse on what are the policy topics Wisconsinites care about most with the hopes of steering our elected officials and candidates toward those topics,” said Susan Webb Yackee, a professor of public affairs and director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison.

The poll asked how concerned people were with the economy, government regulation, infrastructure, income distribution, taxes, the federal budget deficit, climate change, race relations, education and health care in the country and in Wisconsin.

Results showed that people across all groups found these issues to be a greater problem on the national level than in the state. 

These are competing ideas about the “economy, government regulation, infrastructure, income distribution, taxes, the federal budget deficit, climate change, race relations, education and health care.” 

Concern over these national issues is justified: each one of these topics holds significance for Americans. 

While some local issues may be about resentment, that’s not a cause of America’s present divisions. People are disagreeing over ideologies not insults. 

(The intensity of national debate means that there is little or no margin when local government causes turmoil by failing to communicate, failing to justify thoroughly its decisions, or blaming residents for communication failures and division. Government is responsible for governmental actions, not residents, parents, families, students, or household pets.) 

Our continent-wide conflicts are over clashes of ideology. The La Follette survey reminds us that we should see the divisions for what they truly are, while recognizing that local government mistakes could not come at a worse time. 

 The Rio Tinto offers a “visit to Mars” to space and nature enthusiasts: