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Arcades, Churches and Laundromats: A Trucker’s Haven on the Precipice of Change

Political donations from the sector surged to more than $26 million during 2021 and the first three months of this year. That influx of cash is outpacing spending by internet giants, drug makers and the defense industry — providing a fresh pool of financing for candidates heading into November’s congressional elections.

Before dropping out, Resnick had already done internships at McLaren, the Formula One race car company, chaperoned in England by his parents; then at Elon Musk’s Tesla; and at the Silicon Valley office of the world’s leading commercial drone-maker, DJI Technology of China — now his main competitor.

Meanwhile, Apple has stepped into advertising in a bigger way, filling the data void it created. Apple has a measurement platform called the SKAdNetwork, which apps use to pull some data from iPhones to track ad performance. Apple also is developing its own ad products, particularly in search advertising. Apple helps app developers place ads when consumers browse the App Store, showing ads in results similar to how Google and Amazon return ads in their search properties. Apple’s critics have even accused the company of leveraging privacy concerns to benefit its own advertising ambitions. Apple does not reveal how big its ad business is, but a recent report from Toni Sacconaghi, a Bernstein analyst, estimated Apple’ ad revenue grew from $300 million in 2017 to $4 billion in 2021. That’s only 2% of Apple’s total yearly revenue, which mostly comes from device sales and services.

Yet amid a malaise that afflicts much of the city, entrepreneurial energy remains evident. Central Avenue’s sidewalks crowd with the brightly colored booths of street vendors, selling a broad range of food, clothes, and other products—more like Mexico City or Mumbai than the South L.A. of the past. Some new apartments are rising to replace the decrepit ones, and the street-level liveliness seems more Washington Heights than car-centric Los Angeles. Despite its troubles, Central Avenue does not exhibit the deathly sense of abandonment of places like the South Side of Chicago or other inner-city communities, where the spirit of enterprise has all but disappeared.

“We still have potential,” insists 63-year-old Rick Caruso, a billionaire running what once seemed a quixotic campaign for mayor. On June 7, Caruso will be a candidate in the city’s open mayoral primary, facing off against, among others, the race’s early frontrunner, long-time congresswoman Karen Bass. (The top two finishers will meet in a run-off general election in November if no candidate wins a majority of the vote.) Without any press, but for me, Caruso spent a recent morning at the Beehive, a new Southside business incubator located amid the detritus of the city’s industrial past. The youthful activity of the startups seemed to energize him. “I want to get on the phone and get investors to come back here—but they won’t if they see instability, the homeless camps, and the crime. That has to change.”

Though he has discarded his designer suit, Caruso cannot help but appear natty with his coiffed hair and monogrammed white shirt. The grandson of Italian immigrants, and son of an entrepreneur who founded Dollar Rent a Car, he started his real estate business here in 1987 and made a fortune worth more than $4 billion by developing shopping complexes, most notably the Grove, adjacent to the iconic Farmer’s Market. A key Caruso theme is restoring the promise that made L.A. the premier urban growth center of the last century, during which the city’s population grew from barely 100,000 in 1900 to nearly 4 million. Now, Los Angeles’s populationis in decline and its appeal has faded. The city peaked at a population of 3,983,000 in 2019, and fell 134,000 to 3,849,000 by 2021, with a 41,000 loss in the last year.

They argued that an upgrade to the crew alerting system would have triggered additional pilot training on simulators and Boeing would then have had no reason to minimize and hide MCAS as it did to avoid extra pilot training. If MCAS had been subject to such scrutiny during certification, the report suggests FAA engineers could well have flagged its design flaws. “The additional training would have likely removed the incentive for Boeing to limit disclosure of the MCAS system, thus making its existence part of the pilot training process and possibly identifying and removing MCAS’s dependence on a single angle-of-attack indicator,” the report states.

Perhaps the biggest impact from the Boudin recall — both politically and practically — is the loss of the most popular scapegoat for frustrations over crime in San Francisco. Removing an easy target of blame could lead to more scrutiny of the San Francisco Police Department, which “solves fewer crimes despite larger staffing per city resident and costs per area patrolled” compared with other California jurisdictions, according to a March report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Boudin repeatedly argued during the campaign that district attorneys can only bring charges when police make arrests. The San Francisco Police Department’s arrest rates have been decreasing for years.

“Were the alliance similarly tested, nato armed forces could find that they, too, have many of the problems Russia has had in Ukraine. It follows that the alliance should not take a dismissive attitude towards Russia”

These patent licenses need transparency. The NIH doled out $32 billion in government grants last year alone, understanding how those grants benefit patent holders, including the NIH itself, is a critical next step in untangling the complicated nexus between pharmacy companies, research institutions, and the federal workforce.