The Minneapolis pledge to abolish the police department really looked like vaporware at the time, which it was, overhyped by its supporters and its detractors alike.
People complain about the subway in New York, and certainly it's experienced a decline in public order, but it's still basically a normal place. Whereas the last few times I've taken the subway in LA, it's been horrifyingly gross. latimes.com/california/sto…
This, of course, is a policy choice. Do we want people who can afford to be in a car to be willing to get on transit? Then you have to arrest people who commit crimes on the system.
The Red Line in LA also only runs every 15 minutes, even at rush hour. The system could be genuinely useful -- the traffic on the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour sucks. But they don't run enough service and they've let the conditions become squalid. It's sad.
People who haven't updated their takes on Medicare since ~2007/8 really need to. Health care cost growth has come in way below forecast & reforms have cut some costs. As of '07, Medicare was forecast to be 8% of GDP by 2035. Current forecast is under 5%. joshbarro.com/p/nineties-2-e…
Basically the cost trajectory of the Medicare program looks way less dire than it did, and the choices we need to make to make the program long-run sustainable -- on either the tax or spending side -- have gotten way more modest.
As for Social Security -- its 75-year actuarial deficit is estimated at 1.2% of GDP. It's easier to accurately forecast Social Security spending than Medicare spending. This is manageable with really any of: benefit cuts, tax hikes, and/or deficit financing.
People are making fun of this, but a built in smart scale sounds useful (just add ingredients directly to the bowl and read the weight), and if it works correctly, the feature that automatically adjusts speed as the viscosity of the contents changes would be convenient, too.
Plus, KitchenAid is far and away the brand leader here. A KitchenAid stand mixer is a status symbol of a "serious" home cook. If you want to convince people your machine is differentiated, it might even make sense to take this gimmicky high-tech branding tack.
We have some guest columnists coming in next week while I'm on vacation (and I think they're going to be really good!) but I suspect within a couple of years it'll just be possible to automate the newsletter when I'm away.