Renton wants some of this action...
Renton would like some of this action... Charles Mudede

Renton Wants More Public Transportation: The city of Renton, which has almost 100,000 humans, and which is more diverse than Seattle (it's close to being majority minority—meaning, it is close to what the US will become in the near future), wants to be a part of Sound Transit's light rail expansion and be serviced by more rapid transit buses. Meaning, it wants to catch the next train out of the 20th century.

Apple, Microsoft, and Google Are Sitting on a Mad Bunch of Cash: $391 billion to be exact. Apple's cut of this obscenely large stash is by far the most, $215.7 billion. Microsoft is next with $102.6 billion, and Google is last with $73.1 billion. A good amount of this money stays outside of the country for the sole purpose of depriving our democracy of the revenue it needs to support the institutions and government-funded research programs that these companies benefit directly from. For more on this kind of robbery, read Entrepreneurial State by the economist Mariana Mazzucato.

A Capitol Hill Brewery May Have a Rational Solution to the Absurd Problem Caused by Gendered Bathrooms: Make it not about men or women but about urinals or toilets. Sydney Brownstone breaks it on down.

Seattle Teenager Accidentally Shoots and Kills the One Thing He Understood to Be His Life: He had a gun. It was loaded and there in his hand. It fired in his direction. The bullet entered his body and shut what it was doing down. It is not known how the teen got the gun or why he was messing with it.

New Jersey Judge Determines the Precise Monetary Value of a Six-Year-Old Boy Killed by a Gun Fired by His Neighbor's Son: It is $572,588.26. The boy was shot by a boy who found the loaded rifle under his father's bed.

NIMBYs Are Wrong Not Only Because Their Bad Politics Make Cities More Expensive but Because They Are Unrealistic About Climate Change: The post in Crosscut points to a study of the San Francisco housing market that shows only two things (in a capitalist system) can effectively lower the housing costs in a prosperous city: more houses or fewer jobs. This is music to the ears of urbanists, who want more and more density; and is pure noise to NYMBYs, who want to freeze the city in time. But the main thing wrong with NYMBY people is they live in and fight for a world that does not exist anymore. In their world, there is no such thing as climate change. The news of forest fires, increasingly warm winters, and melting continents of ice must not appear on their TV sets or smartphones. In their world, there is no need for density because everything is so hunky-dory. White people can live today in exactly the same capacious way they did in Leave It To Beaver. But this is a fiction. In the real world, density is needed because it provides an obvious and ready way to significantly reduce the amount of energy humans consume. If the city has a direct answer to the growing crisis of climate change, it is density. To oppose this is not just wrong but evil. We have a moral obligation to pack more humans into our neighborhoods and backyards.

Vancouver B.C. Has a Lot of Homes Linked to the Panama Papers: This is not a surprise at all. That city is drowning in the surplus capital (or the global savings glut) that's always looking for what is always hard to find: investment opportunities. The city offers a safe place for this cash to sit and grow and make life miserable for its poor and ordinary people.



China's iPhone Maker Foxconn Replaces 60,000 Troublesome Humans With Obedient Robots: New York Times reports that Foxconn, which makes Apple lots of money by manufacturing its beloved products at very low costs, and a lot of this money ($181 billion) is then stored outside of the United States to avoid paying taxes, "has reportedly replaced 60,000 human workers from one of its factories in China with robots." What this indicates is that Chinese capitalism will never make the big leap into a high-income society. It will be stuck in or reverse from its current middle-income position. But what we must remember in all of this is that the US would be in the same situation today if the crash of 1929 and two world wars had not happened. The US only became a high-income society after 1946 and the consolidation of democratic institutions that protected workers and limited the power and influence of the financial sector.

Workers In France Go on Strike to Protest Reforms that Would, Among Other Things, Make it Easier For Employers to Fire Employees: The government, which is run by a "socialist," insists that giving bosses the ability to fire workers easily would create more jobs. Unions in the energy and transportation sector have tossed this neoliberal logic into the bin and started a strike that threatens to bring the state to a standstill. The BBC: "Motorways, bridges and tunnels have been blockaded, and flights and rail services affected. Nuclear power production has slowed, and fuel remains in short supply." Tell me, can you feel that? The heat is on.



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