https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTGE5l96roE
Oakland News Now – California: The ‘Golden’ or Fading Economy? – video made by the YouTube channel in the video’s upper left hand corner.
While many have insisted its regulations stifle business, the numbers tell a different story. In the past year, the weight of California companies in the S&P 500 Index has risen by 3 percent, beating out all other states. Surprisingly, investors’ trust in California companies has grown during the pandemic – the proportion of corporate bonds sold by California-based firms rose from 11.5 to 12.5 percent, the most among all states. Still not convinced? Look no further than the 21 percent increase in California’s GDP over the past 5 years, which shadows that of New York and Texas. Most telling of all – if California were to become a country, it’s growth rate would only trail China’s. Not to mention, Silicon Valley is still the centerpiece of global innovation to this day, home to the headquarters of Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix, among other tech conglomerates. Despite the departure of a few firms, no other region comes close to its intellectual power.
Still, rising housing prices are a costly and endemic problem, having driven hundreds of thousands of Californians to the brink of extreme poverty. A shortage in affordable housing has produced an ongoing homelessness crisis, made worse by the pandemic. Simply put, income hasn’t kept pace with rent. In spite of its prosperous image, California has the highest homeless population of any state. Ironically, cities branded as wealthy tourist destinations, namely San Francisco and Los Angeles, boast remarkable levels of homelessness and extreme poverty. Strolling down Church Street, a visitor can glimpse makeshift tents and litter scattered on the sidewalk. A UN report found that San Francisco’s treatment of its homeless population was a violation of fundamental human rights and constituted ‘cruel and inhuman treatment’. In recent years, Californian politicians have declared much of their campaign focus on tackling homelessness, with Governor Gavin Newsom announcing a $12 billion plan to create more housing units and build on existing pandemic plans to convert hotels into homeless shelters. These plans are heading in the right direction. But in order for California to fix homelessness in the long run, it must deal with the problem’s root cause – unreasonably expensive housing.
California is far from its ruin. It’s likely to remain a prosperous state for years in the future, although its growth has slowed down in the face of a pandemic – a pandemic which has hit the state especially hard. The fact is – its economic numbers don’t suggest a demise. Hollywood and Silicon Valley aren’t going anywhere and will continue to cement California’s place as an epicentre of the film and technology industries. Tourists will continue to flock to its sunny beaches and tropical environment. Sure, barring reasonable measures, California’s appeal as an affordable place to live may decrease, but that has always been a disadvantage Californians have accepted.
via IFTTT
Note from Zennie62Media and OaklandNewsNow.com : this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a YouTube channel. When the video is “liked” by Zennie62 YouTube, then it is automatically uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective here, on top of our is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours – is the use of the existing YouTube social graph on any subject in the World. Now, news is reported with a smartphone and also by promoting current content on YouTube: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary, or having a camera crew to shoot what is already on YouTube. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.