Parasondox said:
Main point or TL;DR, what are your thoughts on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. If you haven't seen a segment yet, here is their YouTube homepage. Sorry if it is unavailable in certain countries.
I've always like John Oliver when he was still with the Daily Show, and the Last Week Tonight segments I've seen here and there haven't changed that. That being said...
However, this isn't about the host but the show itself. In the last three episodes they have brought up some very eye opening issues that would often be ignored by TV media or just brushed aside. Internet abuse, Trangender and Stadiums. Yes, stadiums. Actually, nearly all of his episodes have been eye opening to me as someone who isn't in the US and may I add...
People of the USA. How do you do it? How do you put up with so much shit and nonsense from those up top. I mean, yeah I know no country is perfect but for a first world country, doesn't that just push you over the edge? I thought the UK had it bad. Okay, we do but not over the top bad. Okay maybe in certain parts of the country but you get my point.
I feel that the whole dig at the Red Wing stadium utterly fell flat, probably because as a local resident I'm far more familiar with the details and the overall situation than someone knows nothing about it. His segment comes across largely as a "gotcha" setup that fail to address the issue as a whole, but cherry-picked pieces here and there to skew things in certain directions.
First off, this is Detroit - this isn't some other cities like Oakland/LA/Miami etc. that are throwing public money at sporting teams for what sometimes almost feels like the prestige of having pro sports team. Detroit on the other hand actually needs them. Downtown Detroit - which despite popular misconception, is actually quite decent now, but that's propped up by the Tigers/Lions/Red Wings. The sports teams are by far the main attractions for people living in the surrounding cities and suburbs to go to Detroit and spend their money. Without them there would be nothing there save for a couple of casinos, at which point you might as well go across the river to Windsor for the casinos there AND some decent(and safer) nightlife.
Take away the sports teams, and downtown, one of the very few bright spots in Detroit, goes straight into the dumpster.
Second, the public funding is in the form of bonds(which by law can only be used for development projects like this) with the state covering any tax revenue shortfalls to the city - in effect the city of Detroit paid nothing into the whole deal outside of the land contributed to the arena, which was sold for $1. So no, it's not a bankrupt city paying to build a new stadium, it's the taxpayers of the whole state of Michigan. If anything, one can argue that this is another bailout/aid from the state to the city of Detroit.
Now, before anyone think to raise hell about giving away the land away for a dollar, let me first say that I've actually been there. Forget about paying $1 to get those land, I wouldn?t take it if they wanted to give it to me for free. These, like too much of Detroit, are blighted parcels with abandoned buildings - hence why I say that property value is likely to go up, you can hardly go lower than abandoned houses with no one paying, after all.
Bottom line is, this WILL be bring extra tax revenue and jobs to Detroit, both during the construction and afterwards, it WILL remove blighted lands that nobody have touched in decades and turn it into a productive area and contribute to the revitalization of the city. Really, this is no different than any other cities and states offering incentives and tax breaks to get businesses to move there, for some reason people seems to be fine with those.
But did the John Oliver segment cover any of that? No, it just went herp-derp bankrupt city pays billionaire to build stadium lololol.
Yea I guess, if you skip over everything else, because what Detroit really needs is obviously for the blighted lands to remain blighted.
All in all it's a mixed bag tbh, you have the great ones like the segment on Comcast/cable companies, and then you have crap like this.
