Local politics gadfly, “Ladra,” in the course of fulminating about voter suppression in Hialeah, turns to fulminating about people surprised at voter suppression in Hialeah:
Hellllooo? Do you not read Political Cortadito? Do you think I’m kidding? I’m not even exaggerating most of the time.
via Intimidation at JFK starts early in early voting | Political Cortadito.
Yes, she is the blogger Hialeah deserves.
If anyone can pull of the trick of turning Miami into a communications technology center, it’s probably Manny Medina (and the smart people on his team).
Thus, this excerpt from his profile in today’s Herald is the sign of something that could be A Very Big Deal:
Q: You’re working with local leaders to initiate a not-for-profit Tech Conference of the Americas in Miami. When will it happen? Can you tell us what you’ve got in mind? How do you think it will help the region?
As I attended technology conferences in San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, etc., I was always amazed how any one of them would attract from 100,000 to 250,000 participants. Some conferences actually transform the entire city.
I began to ask why we couldn’t do this in South Florida. The answer was always that we could not compete with Silicon Valley, the Research Triangle, etc. My view is that we do not need to compete, we need to use our number one asset — that we are the undisputed capital of Latin America for everything except technology. Therefore, why not launch a Tech Conference in South Florida to serve as the technology bridge between Latin America and the rest of the world?
Circumstances today create the perfect storm for us to do this. The economic meltdown in Europe and the slowdown in North America are making Latin America substantially more attractive for technology companies. At the same time, Latin American enterprises and governments have an insatiable appetite for the transfer of this new technology.
The conference has to have three main attributes: It needs to be substantive. In other words, tackle real issues facing the industry today like cloud computing, cyber security, big data, analytics, etc.; it needs to be a great networking event; and lastly, it must be fun. I could not think of a better venue than South Florida.
If we think of Art Basel’s impact in our community, I am convinced that making South Florida the Tech Capital of Latin America could have as big if not a bigger impact. The idea has been overwhelmingly embraced by local leaders. We have already secured a few hundred thousand dollars of funding. The goal is to have the first annual conference in the Spring of 2014. Over the next few months, we will be reaching out to the broader community to invite everybody to join us and help make this annual conference a major success for our community.
I hear that the conference has reserved space for 2014.
One of the first things you learn when you study public welfare economics or public choice theory is that the private provision of public goods runs up against the problem of free riders — people who benefit but don’t pay. This is one of the core justifications for the governmental provision of public goods such as police and fire protection, and for the funding of those services through compulsory taxation. One of the things you learn later is that there is some debate over what exactly qualifies as a public good. And in some courses you also learn that rent-seeking businesses like to masquerade as suppliers of a public good in order to get subsidies they do not deserve.
Our modern experiment with gutting local, state, and now national government in the names of low taxes and privatized profit while simultaneously offering handouts to well-connected corporations provides telling reminders of each of these lessons.
The most recent of these is the Hallandale Beach lifeguard who lost his job for saving a life. Unfortunately for Tomas Lopez, he left his station in the lifeguard zone unattended in order to save a swimmer in distress in the no-lifeguard zone. As the nation now knows, Lopez got fired for that dereliction of duty (and then got offered his job back when the media howls began).
Lopez’s employer would have preferred Lopez act like the fire department in Obion County, TN that just watched while a home burnt to the ground because the homeowner hadn’t paid his household subscription fee to the local fire department.
And of course the Affordable Health Care Act’s ‘mandate’ raises similar issues, in that it tries to penalize free riders who might choose not to buy insurance, perhaps counting on public provision of emergency medical care.
Meanwhile, across the nation, we give corporate welfare to stadiums and other businesses that promise usually dubious local benefits. Here in South Florida, the latest example is Jungle Island. Once a great offbeat local attraction known as Parrot Jungle, the management sold their lovely grounds in Kendall for a development and with the fig leaf that it would be good for jobs, development, and tourism, they got the City of Miami to give them a loan not even a bank would have agreed to. They built an unattractive park in an out-of-the-way location, and overcharged to see it. Unsurprisingly it went bad, and as the taxpayers are the last to be paid rather than the first, we haven’t seen any of our money back. Instead they’ve gotten further subsidies. Equally unsurprisingly, the Jungle Island people have a proposed solution: the city should double down and give them more land and more money so they can build a hotel. At least this one isn’t going under the radar.
The moral of the story is that we need the government to support true public goods: police, fire, basic health care — but not tourist attractions. How sad we so often have it backwards.
Incidentally, to an economist, the lifeguard question is harder than it may seem: one optimal solution in a basic microeconomics textbook would probably be to charge admission to the beach and use that to pay for the lifeguard. Second-best would be to make clear where was protected and where wasn’t (which is what Hallandale Beach did), and let people choose, so long as there isn’t a risk of gratuitous rescue.
In a public welfare frame, though, we’d ask if there’s a public cost to letting people drown — if it makes us feel bad maybe it’s not worth the financial savings. Or, if we think that swimmers can’t be trusted to make good decisions about their safety, we might make a parentalist decision to provide lifeguard services whether swimmers know enough to demand them or not. Alternatively, if we think beaches are a public good and charging for them would depress their use below the optimum, then it would be wrong to charge for access them in which case it makes sense to treat lifeguarding as a public good too.
When I got into the car this afternoon around 2pm, the outdoor temperature register, which I think monitors the temperature under the car, said 107° (41.7° Celsius).
I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it above 100 before. It went down to about 95 after we drove around a bit.
In response to yesterday’s Local Food Note I had a chirpy email from a person who asked to be identified only as “a Shake Shack representative” saying that the Shake Shack opening near the UM campus is planned for “mid-to-late July.”
(Sadly, no promotional considerations were offered for this message.)
Update (6/24): Drove by today and it looks as if some construction is underway.
Some time ago I blogged about the death of the Smoke’t near the UM campus which was to make way for a Shake Shack. I drove by the other day, and it didn’t look like a lot was going on there. Online, however, I learn that Shake Shake is due to open here in “June 2012”, which would be…now? On the other hand, the official Shake Shake page just says “this summer”. But Craigslist has them hiring. So maybe soon?
From Danny Meyer, the founder of the chain, I find that we’re going to be part of an odd pairing:
We’re going into Coral Gables, Florida, right across from the University of Miami. We’re going into New Haven, just adjacent to Yale.
Which I think will make us the only two universities outside New York City with one near by.
As for Smoke’t (I never noticed the apostrophe before — I thought of it as “Smoke T” not “smoked”), rumors of its rebirth in South Miami are not confirmed by their website, which says nothing about any relocation or reopening.
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