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Comment by bandyaboot | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think the elimination of the Reedy Creek district is meant to ever actually occur. The point is twofold. To send a message that dissent from the business community will not be tolerated. And, to keep stoking the fires of the culture wars. When they get their people denouncing the opposition as “groomers”, they are achieving their objective.

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That's what people said about Brexit..but here we are

Your use of “dissent” is an interesting way to frame a major corporation trying to exert pressure to oppose a Florida bill the majority of people in Florida support.

Is this a change from Republican orthodoxy, where big corporations get whatever they ask for regardless of public opinion. Yes.

> to oppose a Florida bill the majority of people in Florida support.

Please provide a source for this claim.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FN_ArK9VEAEnDva?format=jpg&name=...

The question is: "To what extent do you support or oppose the following items in the bill? Banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade?" Respondents supported it 50-34.

Don’t confuse support for one provision to mean support for the entire bill.

If you scroll down in the same poll a few questions you will see:

“To what extent do you support or oppose the following items in the bill? Allowing parents to sue school districts over alleged violations of sexual orientation and gender identity discussions in schools”

Support 41% Oppose 43%

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017f-9034-d137-abff-f0f41...

I think it would have been more enlightening if they'd separated out the question, to see how many people would be okay with sexual orientation being taught, but not gender identity. Or vice versa.

They're two very different, and somewhat conflicting, concepts. For example, is homosexuality an attraction between people of the same sex, or the same gender identity? This is a contentious issue even amongst adults, never mind teaching it to children.

It’s an entirely appropriate framing.

I suspect there's a way to eliminate Reedy Creek district.

I don't think it's the law stopping the dissolution of the district -- it's that no one important in the state seriously wants to do that. Who does it benefit?

There is: the state of Florida can pay off the debt. All at once. That is the only legal way to do it without endangering all of Florida's other debt (bonds, etc.).

The local community can’t afford to assume the districts responsibility even if the bond debt is assumed by the state.

Wouldn't the local community collect a lot more taxes if the district didn't exist? As I understand it (admittedly not very well), right now Disney is effectively "paying taxes" to itself.

That's actually covered in the article. "Mills" is the term of art for the amount levied in property taxes. Reedy Creek has the ability to tax at 30mills and currently taxes at 13.67 (1/3 of which goes to paying the debt) the counties are limited to only taxing at a rate up to 10 mills (and are currently at about ~7 mills (Osceola) and ~5 (Orange) so there's a 3.67 shortfall they can't make up and another 3-5 which they currently don't.

The added revenue to the counties would be far short of the amount they'd need to provide the current services and service the debt.

Osceola Millage Rates https://www.property-appraiser.org/final-millage-rates/

Orange Millage Rates https://ocpaweb.ocpafl.org/faqcontent/Taxroll_Info#A404411

> currently taxes at 13.67 (1/3 of which goes to paying the debt)

So they'd need about 9 mills (2/3rds of 13.67) to pay expenses without the debt? It's likely that they could make up the shortfall by reducing some services. Any services that the local community didn't want to pay for and the Disney company still wanted, Disney could pay for itself.

I also wonder if the the district is fairly valuing the land. How much would a hotel be willing to pay for an acre near the park, and is that the valuation the district uses?

Each time I learn more about it, this arrangement seems crazier. It was strange enough that private companies are allowed to run their own local governments in Florida. Now it turns out they're also allowed to issue tax advantaged municipal debt, and transfer that debt to taxpayers if this sweet deal ever ends.

It's true that Reedy Creek is being singled out because Disney has fallen out of favor, but I'm still hoping there is some flaw in this arrangement that leads to the end of all special districts now that people are paying attention.

Disney built a world class destination in the middle of, what is basically, a swamp. They built all the necessary infrastructure and paid for it by taxing themselves. In a lot of ways it put Orlando on the map and provided a huge boost to the surrounding economy.

I'm not sure who was getting screwed there? It honestly seems like it was a win/win situation.

> I'm not sure who was getting screwed there?

Here's one: normally corporate bond payments are federally taxable, but municipal bonds aren't. Everyone in the country is missing out on taxes on payments on that 2 billion dollar debt.

Yeah but that’s a chicken and egg problem. Those bonds wouldn’t exist without the current exemption.

You and I talked about this the other day, and I walked away from this article further convinced that improvement districts are an abomination to the concept of democracy and must be ended. To these ends I think it would be smart for some politician to say "I don't think this bill goes far enough" and propose legislation to dissolve every improvement district.

>The point is twofold. To send a message that dissent from the business community will not be tolerated. And, to keep stoking the fires of the culture wars.

I think the purpose was a lot more narrow: to position Ron DeSantis for the 2024 Republican Presidential primaries. Relatively small numbers of Republicans vote in the primaries, and they tend to be the angrier, more extreme wing. Donald Trump was nominated in 2016 despite a majority of Republican primary voters actually voting for other candidates. Once he was nominated, however, most Republicans fell into step and supported him.

> Relatively small numbers of Republicans vote in the primaries, and they tend to be the angrier, more extreme wing. Donald Trump was nominated in 2016 despite a majority of Republican primary voters actually voting for other candidates.

That strategy doesn't work as well if you get ranked choice voting or anything other than first-past-the-post.

https://reason.com/2022/04/28/florida-tennessee-ban-ranked-c...

...oh

Few people remember that Trump likely won the nomination due to "cross-over" voters in states with open primaries. There was an organized effort by Democrats to cross-vote for him as the Republican candidate under the belief that he couldn't possibly defeat Hillary Clinton in the actual election.

I don't know if there is a way to determine whether or not that effort actually succeeded, but it did exist and was spoken about with great pride until Trump became the President.

>To send a message that dissent from the business community will not be tolerated.

And as a consequence it means less business will ever come to Florida which is a disaster for them. It also means any existing businesses in Florida are likely to move more of their new work outside of the state. It's really a bad decision on DeSantis' part and I don't think he cares obviously but his party does.

It’s been said that reality has a well-known liberal bias[^0]. The palpable fear and petulance on display in Florida seems to reinforce that statement. Stunts like this underscore the fact that the US consistently fails with people like DeSantis in office because their gut gets in the way of what is right [^1]. And we all know the problem with politics is the left admitting it’s not always right.

[^0]: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4698442/user-clip-reality-lib...

[^1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_un...

But naming the opposition "white supremacist", "far right", and "racists" is perfectly accurate and OK.

When people espouse positions that are friendly toward white supremacist ideology, and adopt policies that are demonstrably racist, I think it's absolutely reasonable to call them white supremacists and racists. When people hold positions that are quite clearly far down the right side of our traditional political spectrum, I think it's correct to call them far right.

It's not an ad hominem attack or partisan name-calling to say someone is <insert negative description here> if they actually, factually fit that description.

Everything you say is likely correct, but for full context, these actions are a response to an initial political action that most likely can also be described in identical terms. From a less polarized position, this is fire fighting fire.

This is a pretty big escalation. There are definitely examples of both sides being the aggressor in the broader "culture wars", but IMO the absurdity of this particular issue is pretty much entirely on the right.

I'm not sure how to resolve the absurdity level between the left's initial action and the right's reaction. They both seem equally absurd to me. But maybe that's where subjectivity comes in.

Disney’s political actions were entirely within their rights. The state taking adverse action against them for exercising those rights should not be tolerated in a liberal society.

>And, to keep stoking the fires of the culture wars.

It's slimy and dishonest to pretend that only republicans are fighting a culture war when the bulk of the progressive platform is explicitly about changing US culture. It's like calling Ukraine the aggressor for defending against the Russian invasion.

Cultures change constantly. They’re never in a sort of stasis. Culture is just the expressions of a group of humans, how they think, and how they interact.

One could argue that rolling back abortion access (which has existed for decades and is part of US culture) is conservatives in America explicitly changing US culture. Same with bills like the one in Florida that disallow teachers from discussing human gender or human romantic relationships.

Everyone is generally trying to affect the direction of the culture of the US at the political level at all times. It’s not a right va left thing it’s a humans exist thing.

>Cultures change constantly. They’re never in a sort of stasis. Culture is just the expressions of a group of humans, how they think, and how they interact.

That doesn't obligate a people to quietly accept a culture imposed onto them by out of touch urbanites/intellectuals/ivory tower elites.

>Same with bills like the one in Florida that disallow teachers from discussing human gender or human romantic relationships.

Human gender and normalcy of romantic relationships are culturally defined. This bill isn't about forbidding discussion of genders, its about resisting the imposition of progressive culture onto the children of moderate/conservative parents. This isn't about bigotry, this is a genuine concern that normalizing fundamentally abnormal behaviors can do more harm than good to individuals and society.

The issue is not whether Republicans are the only ones fighting a culture war.

It's about whether the Republicans are only fighting a culture war.

What are their policies on healthcare? Infrastructure investment and repair? Climate change? Transportation policy? Childhood poverty? Topsoil depletion in the midwest? Extreme severe drought in the southwest? etc. etc.

Why do they appear to spend so much time talking about things in the "culture war" realm and so little time advancing policy agendas about things that really matter (not that are no "culture war" issues that matter).

Progressives are quite clear about the metrics by which they consider one state of a society to be better than another. More equality of opportunity. Less income/wealth inequality. A more even distribution of GDP between labor and capital. Reduced discrimination against protected classes. Improved health outcomes. Equal treatment under the law. Above all, the type of society you would choose to live in if you could not control who your parents were or where you would be born.

It is far from clear what the conservative/Republican equivalent of this is.

> It is far from clear what the conservative/Republican equivalent of this is.

Amount of brown people in their voters neighborhood

This doesn't work in Florida.

I'm not sure policies matter much in the end. If I went into a coma before election night 2016 and woke up today, how would I tell we just had four years of a hard-right authoritarian government and we are now about a year and three months into a moderate center-left government?

I have to be honest it's not a night-and-day difference.

Nobody could tell; that's why we have cloth masks to differentiate ourselves.

About a year after Trump's election, I found myself thinking along similar lines. I mean, his administration made very little difference in my life, or the lives of anyone I know. Yes, I could be empathetic towards people whose lives I mostly just read about. But realistically, I had no actual evidence of any impact.

Then I met up with a very old friend of mine. Successful SV VC guy. Incredibly smart. Incredibly human. Probably reads Hacker News (actually, scratch that). Happens to be of Indian ancestry, though he grew up in Davis, CA. Very wealthy thanks to a few good choices made after he dropped out of his PhD program. So yeah, maybe he didn't have my middle class white anglo privilege going on, but if there's a ladder, I had always assumed he was only 1 or 2 rungs below me, at worst.

As it turns out, no. Trump's election had made him adopt a policy of no longer engaging in any business travel to anywhere in the USA except major metropolitan areas. Was it paranoid? I don't feel equipped to comment. But that was the verdict of a guy that I respect enormously for his intelligence and his decision making processes. He felt too unsafe in Trump's America to visit mid-size towns in Iowa.

So, when you say:

> I have to be honest it's not a night-and-day difference.

I'd advise checking in with some brown people you know (or don't know). Some immigrants not yet moved into citizenship. Someone in any group that Trump verbally attacked. Because I felt the same way until my friend gently but forcefully told me that I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about if I was trying to generalize from my own experience.

>Trump's election had made him adopt a policy of no longer engaging in any business travel to anywhere in the USA except major metropolitan areas

So not because of any negative experience with these areas, just because of some bigoted stereotype? Sounds like the parent post was right, nothing in daily life really changed, except perhaps the perception of some increased danger. Perhaps brought on by the way that Trump was reported on in the media?

The fact that people feel something does not imply that it exists. Humans are notoriously unreliable witnesses.

> The fact that people feel something does not imply that it exists.

I absolutely agree.

Nevertheless, to hear that an intelligent, savvy, world-travelling person could now feel unsafe in many parts of the USA was, to me, indicative of a type of change that is as real as them actually being unsafe. Which is to say: I don't know if they were actually in any more danger than they would have been before, but they now perceived American society as if they were. That didn't happen because they ate the wrong thing for breakfast.

The fact that the "overton window" of the visible culture seemed to have move enough after Trump's election that this person now felt unsafe, regardless of whether there was an actual change in their safety, seems really notable to me, and no doubt even more notable to the people who live with this shift in perception.

What actually made midsize towns in Iowa unsafe to visit for persons of Indian descent in Trump's America? Did the Iowans suddenly get more racist? Was Dubuque declared a "sundown town"? Have the Iowans calmed down now that we live in Biden's America?

I think my friend's explanation was that he felt that people who might potentially feel inclined to verbally or physically harass him now felt less inhibited after Trump's election. That is to say, there was no actual shift in attitude but a shift in the likelihood of public behavior based on those attitudes. I have not checked in with him since the last election, but based on conversations we've had in the past, I would guess he does not imagine that Biden's election has changed things much. The genie escaped from the bottle; putting it back is much harder.

So essentially the people in mid-size towns in Iowa were and are mostly racist (and not "implicit bias" racist but "shouting racial slurs and engaging in physical aggression" racist) but the national attitude during 2008-16 was holding them back from verbally and physically harassing people of color as they wanted to do, because they knew Obama would crack down on them like a ton of bricks.

After Election Day 2016 the formerly mild-mannered Iowans (a state so racist that America's first Black president won a majority of votes there in 2008 and 2012) decided to drop all pretense of being nice to people of color.

I'm sorry but it sounds frankly ridiculous.

That feels like a more or less willful misreading.

Let's suppose that my friend crosses paths with 100 Iowans during a business trip there. Let's suppose that 1% of Iowans are racist or bigoted enough to at the very least yell some abuse at this particular clearly non-caucasian individual. Before Trump's primary campaign and electoral win, social pressure kept the 1 person my friend may have encountered from acting on that impulse, but afterwards, that person felt much freer to just speak their mind (or worse).

Such an analysis says nothing about Iowans in general as people. It says that it's easy to be worried that the general attitude had shifted enough in Iowa (but not, say, in NYC or Chicago) that the tiny percentage of people who might act on their racist/bigoted impulses are now more likely to do so, changing my friend's risk exposure by visiting.

It's not for you or me to judge whether that's sufficient reason to avoid Iowa now. That's an individual decision to be made, and I do not sit in judgement of those who decide one way or another.

But you're also missing the deeper aspect of the point I'm trying to make. You don't have to believe me, but I'm telling you that my friend is a hyper-rational, highly intelligent, well informed individual. The fact that such a person could move from "I have never worried about being brown when moving around the USA" to "I will not visit anywhere outside of large metropolitan areas" - that's the change. You are free to argue that it is is irrational, or even "ridiculous" as you put it, but the point is that the state of American society pre-Trump left this individual feeling safe, and the same state post-Trump left them feeling anxious. If they were a person prone to irrational, emotive decisions or generally over-reacted to anything, then I would be inclined to dismiss the change in their sense of their own safety. If they had always worried about this aspect of life in the USA, I would be inclined to dismiss the change. But they are not and they did not, and so I take this change quite seriously.

It’s slimy and dishonest to pretend that I said something that I did not say.

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