Santa Clara County leaders keep stacking “just a little more” onto the Sales tax rate—now eyeing a countywide health-care tax atop SB 63’s potential 0.5% transit levy. With flat population and a county budget that’s tripled since 2012, residents are paying more for the same potholes and emptier buses & trains.
Read MoreFrom the Wells Fargo new accounts scandal to the Sears Auto Center fake-repairs faceplant, business history is awash in clever incentive programs that backfired spectacularly. Incentivate takes a look at the Top 6 Screw-ups.
Read MoreSan Dieguito Academy's student newsletter explores how young adult books that romanticize and improperly portray toxic and abusive relationships do subtle harm on their impressionable audiences. Many YA romance books suggest that men are allowed to treat women however they want, whether the action is sexual or physical abuse. Bad ethics, bad writing, bad marketing.
Read MoreWhen ConAgra moved to Chicago, its CEO admitted it had nothing to do with the city’s incentives (although he took them anyway). On his academic blog, UT Austin Professor Nathan Jensen calls handouts like these, which Silicon Valley cities routinely give out, “redundant, expensive and ineffective.” Why, after all, should a company get $62 million just to move four miles?
Read MoreMost media choose to focus on the political ramifications of the Trump administration's new law 'n' order-tinged homelessness directives. But the excellent Calmatters (excerpted below) examines the real differences between status quo CA approaches to the unhoused and the direction of the new fed orders--especially when it comes to managing illegal encampments and drug usage & addiction.
Read MoreAlex Epstein at Energy Talking Points pins California’s disastrous wildfire strategy on resilience failures, not climate, and urges free market insurance to spur smarter prevention. This would prevent premium hikes from strangling homeowners in Silicon Valley cities like San Jose and Los Gatos on the edge of flammable hillsides.
Read MoreSchool of Woke's Kenny Xu and former local DEI Dean Dr. Tabia Lee believe that to reform universities like SJSU, individual instructors must take a stand against destructive ideologies—even, and especially, when tenure's at stake (as with Dr. Lee two years ago). An Opp Now exclusive Q&A.
Read MoreMost tax breaks and perks don’t influence where a company sets up shop. Even when they do, cities usually lose money. Instead, focus on tech-clusters and businesses with multiplier effects, say Timothy J. Bartik and John C. Austin in a Brookings commentary. Furthermore, when it comes to creating jobs, cash handouts are far less effective than investments in business services and infrastructure.
Read MoreWhile SJ and Santa Clara county officials stretch credulity in efforts to explain away increases in area homelessness counts, our Southland neighbors are actually delivering real improvement. Overall # of homelessness is down in LA and % in shelters is improving more quickly than SJ, also. NBC4's Ted Chen reports.
Read MoreFor all the hundreds of millions the struggling transit agency will spend on a better control system, it refuses to automate away the costly jobs of train operators. So says Gregg Dieguez, writing for the SHIFT Bay Area Substack, in which he calls out transit worker unions for pressuring BART’s directly-elected board members to prioritize unnecessary jobs over the needs of riders.
Read MoreAll 11 supervisors stressed, three months ago, that SF shouldn’t pack shelters, clinics, and other services into just a few neighborhoods. Actually doing something about it is a different story. The exceptional Frisc reports.
Read MoreFirst-time reader Jasmine Williams writes from Texas: "A work-colleague sent me your Weekend Reading about admitting and dealing with failure. Ooh, I like! I have forwarded it around to my team. You might also like the below from Greg Opelka in the WSJ, hits some of the same notes."
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