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Residents take a stand at the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors meeting. Concerns over safety, noise, and infrastructure vs. business growth. Is this the right balance? #LoudounCounty# #DataCenters# #CommunityImpact# #AspenPower# #LocalGovernment#

Tensions rise at the Loudoun County meeting as Supervisor Caleb Kershner presses for answers on zoning enforcement protocols. Watch the heated exchange unfold. #LoudounCounty# #Zoning# #CalebKershner# #LocalGovernment# #Politics#

We’re checking in with our @PGCPS summer interns who are getting a front-row seat to local government in action. Interning with the Office of Community Relations gives students a unique way to grow while seeing how Prince George’s County truly interacts with our community.

Japan's Prime Minister briefed her country with wet hair last night. Beijing would have detained the citizen who filmed it. At 10:29 p.m. on Friday, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake struck Japan's Yamanashi Prefecture, registering a maximum seismic intensity of lower 6 in the town of Fujikawaguchiko at the foot of Mount Fuji. By 11:15 p.m. — forty-six minutes later — Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was standing at the Prime Minister's Office briefing the nation. Crisis management center activated. Director-general-level emergency gathering team convened. Human life first. Information to the public, promptly and accurately. She was also visibly straight out of the bath. Hair still wet. No makeup. Takaichi posted on her own X account a short time later, in plain language: she had come directly from the bath without time to dry her hair or apply makeup, and apologized for her appearance. She did not have to volunteer that detail. She chose to. That choice is the story. Because somewhere about 1,700 miles to the west, operating under the same physics but a very different political philosophy, the first hour after a magnitude 5.6 earthquake would have looked nothing like this. It would not have been spent activating a crisis center, dispatching emergency teams, and putting the head of government in front of cameras to admit she had rushed straight out of the shower. It would have been spent deciding what to tell the public, what to delete, and which citizen with a camera to detain. We know because we have watched it happen. In Wuhan in early 2020, the doctors who tried to warn the world about a novel coronavirus were summoned by police and forced to sign confessions for "spreading rumors." The citizen journalists who filmed the morgues and the sealed apartment doors — Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin, Li Zehua — were disappeared by the state. Fang Bin would later be sentenced to three years in prison; he was held for the duration. In Zhengzhou in July 2021, passengers drowned trapped in a flooded subway tunnel while state propaganda ran headlines about heroic rescue. When BBC correspondent Robin Brant asked the local government how a metro system less than a decade old could leave passengers to die on a platform, the Henan branch of the Communist Youth League posted his whereabouts to its 1.6 million followers and called for people to track him down. Death threats followed within hours. In Hebei in August 2023, when the floodwaters from Typhoon Doksuri had to go somewhere, authorities diverted them away from Beijing and into Zhuozhou — and the Hebei provincial Party Secretary, Ni Yuefeng, publicly declared the province would "serve as a moat for the capital." Videos of the submerged villages disappeared from Chinese social media within hours. And in Sichuan in 2008, after a magnitude 8.0 earthquake killed at least 5,335 schoolchildren in school buildings that collapsed while government offices nearby remained standing — what citizens named "tofu-dreg schoolhouses" — the writer Tan Zuoren tried to compile a list of the dead. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Huang Qi, the activist who tried to help the parents, got three years; in 2019, the Party gave him twelve more on state-secrets charges. He is still inside. The pattern is not a series of accidents. It is a system. In the People's Republic of China, the function of the state in a disaster is not to serve the public. It is to protect the Party from the public. Compare and contrast. In Tokyo on Friday night, the head of government decided that telling the country what she knew, forty-six minutes after the ground stopped shaking, mattered more than how her hair looked. In Beijing under any equivalent scenario, the head of government would not be at a podium for hours, or days. The citizens with cameras would already be on a list. Wet hair is not the real headline. Wet hair is the headline because of what it accidentally exposes: a democracy is a system that runs toward its citizens in the dark. A dictatorship is a system that hides from them. Sanae Takaichi did not need to apologize for her hair. The Chinese Communist Party owes apologies it will never make, to families whose dead it never named. ACI — Aric Chen | Insights

The areas where these gangs operate(d) are places like Rotherham and Oldham. They are basically South-Asian Muslim ghettos. Even many of the police in these places are part of the biraderi clans, they're also Pakistani (or Bangladeshi) Muslims. And so are many of the councillors that control local government. That is important context here.

The Netherlands has blocked a U.S. company from buying Solvinity, a Dutch cloud provider connected to DigiD, the digital ID system millions of people in the country use every day. DigiD is used for taxes, healthcare, pensions, and local government services, so it plays a major role in daily life in the Netherlands. The U.S. company, Kyndryl, wanted to buy Solvinity, but the Dutch government stopped the deal over concerns about security and control of sensitive citizen data. Officials worried that U.S. ownership of infrastructure linked to DigiD could place Dutch data under U.S. laws like the CLOUD Act, allowing American authorities to request access. Its one of the first times the Netherlands has blocked an American tech acquisition over national digital security and data protection concerns.

I explained the Chinese real estate & debt crisis in much detail in 2024 on my Substack. Nothing has changed since. China is in what we call "the largest balance-sheet recession the world has ever seen". And it will take years to get out of it and assuming the CCP's investment-led growth model does not dig the next hole in the meantime - a likely. The FT published added some colour to it two days ago: "Housing is important to every economy. But to China, it’s extra important. According to the PBoC, 96% of urban households own a home, and 41% own at least two. The average household owns 1.5 properties. And as such, property constitutes around 70% of China’s private wealth. The comparable figure for the US is around 30%. So when Chinese property prices fall, the authors make a pretty compelling case that this has all sorts of particularly bad economic spillovers. And fall they have. The negative wealth effect is substantial, and “effects are amplified by elevated household debt, much of which consists of mortgage obligations”. This — and the weaker income expectations that the falls generate — goes some way to suppressing consumption. Moreover, declining land-sale revenues constrain local government budgets, “limiting their capacity to finance developmental projects and maintain existing public infrastructure”. And this is even before any credit impacts from rising non-performing loans and mortgages on bank balance sheets are considered. Tl;dr: bad bad bad. Of course, China isn’t the first soon-to-be-global-economic-hegemon-East-Asian-power staring down demographic oblivion to have piled its savings into a property boom. Back in 1991, the world was fretting over the rise and rise of Japan. And the Japanese were buying Japanese residential real estate at outlandish prices. Japan’s house prices peaked back in 1991 and spent the next 30 years on a downward trajectory. We’re only a few years into the Chinese property bust, and its ultimate trajectory is both unknown and unknowable. But Rogoff and Yang have pulled together some cool data they kindly shared with Alphaville, allowing us to make this chart below. So far, it looks like prices in Chinese cities are falling at around the same pace as they did over the first five-to-10 years of Japan’s bust. Japan’s property crash is associated with a lost decade (or two) of economic growth. In the 10 years leading up to 1991, Japanese real annual GDP growth averaged 4.4%. In the subsequent 10 years it averaged only 0.9% per annum. The same numbers for China, with 2021 marking its property zenith, are 7.0% per year and 4.6% per year (so far). If the IMF’s forecasts turn out right, this latter number will fall to around 4.0% per annum. While the levels are different, the before-and-after drop looks comparable. Was it housing wot dun it? Rogoff and Yang reckon that a 40% decline in house prices translates into a total consumption loss of 2-4% of GDP. Not nothing, but not a single answer explaining life, the universe and wiggles in the decadal pace of real economic growth. To get here, they construct a historical dataset comprising subnational data across 47 prefectures, and input and output data at granular industry levels. They then use this to examine the macroeconomic implications of Japan’s real estate bust. And the authors argue that: a housing bust can generate substantial adverse effects on the economy via real channels. . . . overbuilding during the boom can trigger a demand-driven recession with limited reallocation and low output. Unlike financial channels, which amplify shocks through leverage, bank balance sheets, credit constraints, or fire sales, real channels operate directly through investment, consumption, labour markets, or productivity. In Japan’s case, the housing market collapse depressed activity through three key real channels: investment, consumption, and sentiment. This is all pretty intuitive. But using city-level and household-level Chinese data plus some whizzy maths, they put meat on the bone for these three channels. They find that Chinese cities that overbuilt housing the most are less keen on new building, suppressing investment. Sounds legit. Chinese household consumption is estimated to be more responsive to house price changes than it was in either Japan or the US given its outsized role in private wealth. And it looks to the authors like people have scrambled to rebuild precautionary savings they thought they had amassed in property. Understandable. Then, on the sentiment side, Rogoff and Yang use an LLM to gauge market perceptions of the housing market. And by incorporating city-specific perceptions, they double the estimated effect of house price changes on consumption. Huh. While China is not Japan, 1991 was not 2021, and a *lot* of other things are/were going on, it’s interesting to see that the overall magnitude and pace of property price falls — as well as the aggregate drop in the pace of headline GDP growth — has (so far) been spookily similar. And as for the big question — are we there yet? "If China’s adjustment unfolds in a similar way as Japan’s, it would mean China has not gone half way through the transition. By contrast, if China’s path is eventually comparable to the United States, it appears to have already covered roughly two-thirds of the adjustment before reaching the bottom." So more to come.

I recently posted a video in Chinese social media to criticize the poor management of Qingdao local government, and complained about a shop that sold bad beer & food. Video got a national huge hit. Many ppl share the same critics as me so lets see how the situation will develop!