Why do sites like this jam six identical entries into my browser history? Do they think I'm going to try to hit the back button, have it not work, and then I'll just go, "Well, I guess I'm stuck here! Maybe I'll click on some ads!"
In some ways, the state of the web is degenerating. Way too much tracking, everyone wants metrics on everything you do. And don't get me started on mobile ads.
Yea I wish we could keep the browser in document mode and switch to app mode if someone is an asshole enough to embed an article in a single page app that loads the content asynchronously.
The alternative was back in the day when clickjackers could install Actionscript malware without a prompt that rootkitted the whole computer. Sandboxing and prompts are a definite win.
More likely there's a ticket in the icebox to fix it but for some reason the product owner never wants to allocate time to work on a bug to help users leave the site faster. :)
> Local organizers plan to use existing venues such as Staples Center, Pauley Pavilion and the Rose Bowl. Only a few temporary facilities will be needed at relatively little cost.
The U.S. has been pretty good on this front. Salt Lake City nailed it, almost all of the major additions are still actively used by the community (hockey, cross country skiing, ski jumping, etc).
So far the permanent venues built for 1932 and 1984, have had very long lives full of use - I see no reason why 2028 would be different based on their statements.
LA has already said that almost all of the facilities used in the 28 Games will be existing facilities (or facilities under construction at the time of the bid).
Only a handful of facilities need to be purpose-built for the games, like a velodrome for indoor cycling, and it is expected that those facilities will be kept after the games.
Coliseum (seats ~80k and previously featured in 1932 and 1984 Olympics)
New Rams stadium in Inglewood (seats ~80k. Being built privately with relatively small indirect subsidies)
Rose Bowl (seats ~90k)
And smaller preexisting venues (2 soccer stadiums, Staples Center, the beach, the ocean, etc).
There's no new megastadiums being built. When I looked at their budget, I think the biggest facilities expense was $7 million to make an area at the Rams stadium safe for shooting and archery events.
Are there any recent examples of the costs of hosting an Olympics paying very clear dividends over time, such that the costs of hosting the event were definitely worthwhile for the hosting city?
That chart is good, at least as a start for further research. I'm not sure how much rigor some of the linked to sources really exhibit, but it's a start.
I'd heard the Athens Summer Olympics was a disaster but putting a number on it is pretty sobering.
>>Are there any recent examples of the costs of hosting an Olympics paying very clear dividends over time
Getting quality trained human resources is the biggest dividend. Use the facilities to train top quality athletes, or you have to get them from other countries.
Even in other projects. Like say space projects, one of the biggest goals of any big budget project is to train human resources.
It takes billions to produce rocket scientists, 400m gold medal swimmers.
There are more than ethical reasons why they put ejector seats in fighter planes. Training human resources and producing the right people for the job is an expensive enterprise, replacing them is even more expensive and harder.
Why do countries continue making concessions and spending money on these showcases? Let someone else waste their tax dollars on building and hosting money losing Olympic events.
Los Angeles is treating this like an infrastructure project - it gained numerous benefits from the last two times it hosted, and will likely gain more of the same this time.
Los Angeles of all cities (based on history) has a good chance of running a profitable Olympics.
>The bid contains nothing in the way of improved infrastructure, relying instead on public transportation projects already in the works. But LA 2028 faces challenges.
And they're planning on reusing buildings.
>Local organizers plan to use existing venues such as Staples Center, Pauley Pavilion and the Rose Bowl. Only a few temporary facilities will be needed at relatively little cost.
And they don't know what they're spending the money on.
>Organizers have been talking with City Council members about where to spend the money and are expected to present a plan next fall.
Although I am somewhat "anti-Olympics," my acquaintances in Salt Lake City say the 2002 Olympics were very successful in sort of modernizing the entire city. There is apparently a very clear before-and-after with regards to infrastructure, public spaces, transit, etc., all for the better.
But that was a rare exception, as far as I can tell. Most Olympic cities appear to have that kind of effect as a goal and fall short. I read a proposal a while back that the summer Olympics just get permanently moved to Greece and that sounds like a great idea to me.
SLC's Olympics (at least, on the organizational side and after Romney took over from the previous organizers) were modeled after the LA 84 Olympics run by Peter Ueberroth. Prior to Romney's coup, the SLC Olympics were hemorrhaging money and deeply in the red.
Atlanta also used its Olympics to modernize the city, and much of that infrastructure still remains.
Surprisingly, LA in the past did not use the Olympics to modernize the city. Its bids were submitted on the basis of largely not building anything for the Games, because every time LA's bid on the Olympics, the Games have been out of favor due to the enormous costs of hosting. (For the 1932 games, LA was unopposed.) LA's success in hosting profitable Olympics without much building is, quite ironically, one of the biggest factors in other cities thinking that they could also host the Games.
I see where Sochi and Beijing are listed as having made money. With the amounts spent on holding those events (dozens of billions) I’m skeptical of those claims.
People making these decisions don’t care if it’s a net loss to other people as long as they personally benifit. As long as the rest of the US subsidies it, LA can still profit.
I honestly doubt some sports have any value to the masses at all, such as bobsleigh. The Olympics increasingly operates like a corporation and is used as political tool.
I personally find it the most boring one, it doesn't seem accessible to the masses, therefore runs afoul of the very ideals of the Olympic Games. The Philippine team has to train in Canada. I'm OK with it as a sport, but I don't think it should be put into the Olympics.
"The 1984 Summer Olympics are widely considered to be the most financially successful modern Olympics[4] and serve as an example of how to run the model Olympic Games. As a result of low construction costs, coupled with a reliance on private corporate funding,[5] the 1984 Olympic Games generated a profit of more than $250 million."
Peter Ueberroth is still alive, perhaps he could consult.
> The Host City Contract, as written by the IOC, stipulates where any profits would go. 20% goes to Olympic organizing bodies and the part that LA gets to keep can ONLY be used for youth sports initiatives—not affordable housing, homelessness, or a variety of other places...these potential surplus revenues could go. As written in the contract, there is no mechanism for the mayor, City Council, bid committee, and most importantly, the people of Los Angeles to weigh in on where any profits should go.
It’s not profit by the traditional meaning of having cash in pocket. Why not just invest in youth sports and bypass the whole investment charade? I still think it’s a bad use of money but it’s better than hosting an infamously corrupt body in a different city every 2 years to MAYBE generate some youth sports profits as happened in 84.
>This time, organizers said they based the budget on “real” dollars, looking across the next decade to predict expenses and revenues in terms of when the money is actually spent or received.
To be interpreted as: It takes multiple revisions of the budget before somebody in the city government was even realistic enough to apply a discount rate to future cash flows.
No, the original budget was based on an LA 2024 Olympics. After LA accepted the LA2028 Games, the budget needed to be revised. Due to the...uncertainty...of the Trump administration's impact on the economy, it took a while to determine a reasonable forecast for inflation over the next decade.
"The London Olympics cost $19 billion, three times the original $6.5 billion budget, while the Tokyo Olympics are estimated to cost over $25 billion, four times the originally announced budget. There are similar stories from the Games in Athens, Montreal, and Sochi." -- Deadspin
The budget will definitely keep multiplying until it's at least double digits. The initial budget was a fantasy.
The budget estimates for LA have increased because of estimated inflation between now and 2028. There are no new additional/unforeseen costs in this budget.
LA has hosted the Olympics several times and there members of the last organizing committee on the 2028 committee. They know what costs to anticipate and plan for...
Los Angeles has hosted the Olympics twice already and has enough infrastructure to do the job. Sure there will be some expenses, like painting over graffiti and busing homeless out of main areas.
But, it is not like they are building major infrastructure like Athens or Rio.
There are some LA Metro improvements being done but they were planned and tax introduced before the Olympic win, I believe.
I would disagree on "having enough infrastructure", after moving to SoCal a few years back. LAX is a complete nightmare. One can easily spend 20-30 mins trying to drive from the airport entrance to the terminal. The horseshoe design cannot handle capacity.
However, LAX is being redone, both terminal-by-terminal, and with a connector to transit and car rentals. One place to go for a summary is: https://www.lawa.org/en/connectinglax/lamp-news -- the current round of modernization is expected to be done by 2023.
IMHO, this highlights the main pain point: transportation.
The city of LA's population was about 3 million in 1984 and now it's about 4 million. The surrounding cities (which are often hard to distinguish from LA itself) have grown too. Road and freeway expansion have not kept pace. Car traffic has become far heavier.
In 1984, the events were spread all over the place. They'll probably do something similar in 2028.
Will people be able to drive their rental cars and take their Ubers in a timely manner to the drop-off points for these dispersed events?
Will the city and county governments and the MTA add public transport in an intelligent and sufficient way to eliminate the need or desire for large amounts of private transportation? (Answer: no)
The Metro goes 100x farther than in '84. Most of the stadiums are near it, and LAX getting more accessible. Yes it has a while more to go, and it will, but it is not correct to say there has been no improvement.
Something is really wrong with the world when a city throwing around billions of dollars for a sports competition thinks just moving homeless people out of the way is an ethical answer to the problem.
If there was anyone in the decision making process with empathy they might run "slightly overbudget" by a few hundred million to build a hospital, rehab center, and public housing development to get those homeless off the streets permanently.
For starters, the city is not spending billions of dollars on the Games, the funding is private sources and corporate sponsorships. Second, the 2028 Committee is a private, non-governmental organization...
That being said, LA's homeless problem is largely due to the homeless rejecting housing, rehab, drug treatment, etc. In CA, a person cannot be committed to rehab or treatment against their will. This is the single largest factor behind why CA's homeless problem is so much worse than comparable locations.
Empathy won't solve anything until you convince the homeless "advocates" that rehab and housing is more important than the "freedom" of the homeless to do drugs and wreck their lives.
Knew that sentence would hit a nerve, but it is a reality, and unfortunately I didn't take the time to soften it.
You are correct, though I'd shift the focus slightly to mental illness. Mentally ill homeless in LA are deemed competent to decide their own welfare, but not face criminal charges. Logically both or neither of those must be true. Leaving a giant gaping hole of "nothing can be done" in any long-term solution.
With the number of concerts and pro and college sporting events that are held in the Los Angeles area, they already had enough venues to handle most Olympic events. They only had to build something like two new venues (a swim center and a velodrome, I think).
They used student housing at a UCLA (and USC?) for Olympic Village. That had plenty of capacity because a lot of students go home during the summer break.
Basically, the Olympics wasn't a lot more than Los Angeles normally handles, so I'm not surprised it went off well.
One time in 1932 (as if that matters at all today) and another time in 1984. Just security wise 1984 is vastly different than today. As are all sorts of employment issues and things that are done differently today than in the 1980's. I owned a company in the 80's and the things that you could 'get away with' (for lack of a better way to put it) have no resemblance to a company today. Sure tech has greatly advanced but it's an entirely different 'plan with zero failure' than it was back then (and honestly 1930's does not even count back then people dying in construction was a cost of doing business/construction).
Frankly I'm not sure where the scam has a greater effect: at the estimate or the implementation. Probably a little bit of each, of course, but I think intentionally deflated estimates are the worse crime because they are the ideas upon which reality is built. That is, construction and production costs can be renegotiated, clawed back, or otherwise affected by things people can actually do, while estimates are made-up, set in stone, then used to calibrate everything else down the line. This process is not a great human achievement.
To be fair, a company doesn't need to be doing a scam to fall outside the expected budget. There are many causes for budget fluctuation, for example: Inflation rates, wage changes, cost of materials, disruptions, operational errors, overtime, change requests, etc. Besides, it may not necessarily be a scam in some cases since all parties expect the cost to increase, it becomes a matter of how much of variance is acceptable to stakeholders.
Another problem in public policy is that a lot of major infrastructure/work would never be implemented if the public knew the end price tag at the start.
The politics of project cost are immaterial and only assuage egos. The fact appears to be that lowest-cost bidding invites this course of events. Contractors simply lie to get the gig.
NASA doesn't make $2.5 billion a year from sponsors and ads like the Olympics is planning to. They're not even allowed to.
Brindenstine has talked about having corporations sponsor missions before (e.g. the Doritos® ISS Crew Resupply Mission or the Mars Candy Company Rover). However there hasn't been much movement on that front, and I doubt that NASA's sponsorships would be as profitable. Imagine if IBM sponsors a rocket that self destructs after a computer glitch— it would be awkward for them and not good marketing for Watson.
The Olympics are also planning on making a billion dollars or so from ticket sales. I think NASA charges $50 or so for tickets to watch a launch at the cape. At the Olympics, some tickets may be that cheap or cheaper (e.g. the Slovenia vs South Sudan handball match, no offense to either of those countries). However tickets for more popular events like the opening ceremonies are going to exceed $1000.
The Olympics also has more events within a single year than NASA. There may be a few dozen launches a year, and they're hard to sell tickets for since most launch attempts get scrubbed/rescheduled at least once and they're not always in accessible locations. Meanwhile, the Olympics will have hundreds of events and you can be reasonably confident that they will happen on the same day that's on your ticket.
I think you've just explained why the olympics has a better business model than a Government agency that's charged with atmospheric research and space exploration, however, the parent comment is about how it seems like a waste to put effort into the olympics that could be invested in expanding the frontiers of our knowledge.
I believe the Olympics every four years are more important for humanity than the existence of NASA. I also think we could be doing the Olympics for cheaper than ~$20b every four years.
We're not leaving this planet for a long time yet. Even if we do, it's not desirable to abandon Earth, it's vastly superior to all other practical options we have. We're going to have to continue to try to co-exist and avoid any further world wars. $4b or $5b per year for a large gathering of the sort the Olympics represents, is dirt cheap if it lends even a tiny boost to global peace between nations.
Keeping in mind this isn't actually an either or situation. It's obviously not either NASA's budget, or putting on the Olympics at a $20b cost. We - humanity - can in fact afford to do both.
I'd vote for reducing NASA's annual budget by 19% (~$4b per year) to pay for the Olympics, if that was the only option. That's a very easy decision.
It's one of the few things that most of humanity does together. Over a billion people watch some part of the Olympics globally. It's a modest, important pillar of peaceful co-existence between nations and peoples broadly. We shoud do more things together in that spirit. Maintaining peace between the 195 nations is more important than NASA's continued operation, by several orders of magnitude.
For another example, the UN is also more important than NASA (the UN has a core budget comparable to an annualized cost of the Olympics). I'm not much of a fan of the UN, and I still recognize that it serves an important purpose of promoting cooperation and discussion between nations and would be almost entirely impossible to replace today.
Competitive sport is critically important to humanity and arguably always has been in some form or another. Sometimes people that don't love sport generally, entirely fail to understand what it accomplishes and how important it is.
If NASA goes away (and yes, it would obviously be a huge loss), a dozen other countries will continue with various space efforts. How many things do that many nations cooperate together on in an overwhelmingly positive spirit other than the Olympics?
I don't know that I personally believe sport competition is more important for humanity than NASA. To me sciences and space exploration could easily be 10 times as important as sport. I think the point is that there could be any number of better uses for our collective time and money than sport. Imagine what we could do as a species if we were actually committed to solving something at all costs whether that is curing cancer or stopping man made climate change.
Cross cultural humanitarian bonding is more important than any medical or technological breakthrough. It might be nice if regular people bonded over rockets, but they don't. They bond through sports. Because of this, international sports competitions go a long way towards softening some of humanity's worst tendencies: racism, sexism, and xenophobia.
In my eyes, sports reinforce/exacerbate those things.
Hooliganism, violent riots, murdering players making own goals, murdering referees doing the wrong (or right) call... I really don't think sports brings out the best in humanity. At best it's a replacement for jingoism.
Rockets don't make people punch other people in the face. Sports really do.
Rank and file people seeing the world come together and work towards a common goal, even on something as "trivial" as a game, humanizes those different people. And yes, it sometimes results in an occasional fight, but it's much better than the kinds of fights that occur which involve rockets.
I think creating a world in which humans are less inclined to kill one another is more important than increasing our energy supply. We're not exactly lacking in energy as it stands.
I participate in a number of sports. None of those require society to lay out tens of billions of dollars every few years.
Your points would hold more water if NASA's entire mission was "moving humanity to a different planet", but it isn't. Much of what NASA does is focused on protecting the planet we live on right now.
IF Nasa were able to dedicate the olympic's budget towards hitting the olympic KPIs, it'd be a much different organization.
$20B would put an American on the moon and maybe even put an American on mars, surely that would get the world's attention.
Want peace? Let's detonate a nuclear bomb in space and get people to recognize the destructive potential of our current arms.
The olympics is designed to get people to tune in, NASA is set up to create knowledge. Judging both organizations by outcomes that only the olmpyics is concerned about is a great way to obfuscate NASA's contributions.
> We're not leaving this planet for a long time yet.
IMO, that's an argument against Olympics, not for it.
I'm far from calling myself an environmentalist, but consider all the waste and pollution produced by people flying in from all over the world. The negative impact is significant.
And this is why Amsterdam said fuck no to the Olympics.
If your country is already obscenely rich and you're literally reduced to begging tourists to please stay away what is the point of hosting the Olympics?
"The new figure represents a $700 million increase over previous estimates, with organizers saying they had to adjust for inflation after L.A., which originally bid for the 2024 Games, agreed to wait four more years."
Not much of a news story here - wait four years, inflation goes up - when you're looking at 6b, 700m in inflation seems reasonable with the state of inflation in the economy.
Partially, but probably not the main driver. The city is getting more dense, despite the work of NIMBYs. There are some LA Metro improvements being done but they were planned and tax introduced before the Olympic win, I believe.
The advantage of the Olympics is that it helps to steamroll over NIMBY objection and ensure that politicians are actually willing to commit funding to transit projects.
Partially, yes. This is the drive behind the "28 by 28" initiative at LA Metro, where the goal is to complete 28 pre-planned projects before the games. (The original plan, sans Olympics, was to complete about 5-6 of them.)
These projects include the Subway to UCLA, the LAX People Mover and Metro connector, the "Regional Connector" downtown, the extension of the Gold Line in the San Gabriel Valley, hundreds of miles of bike lanes, and various freeway upgrades. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-eight_by_%2728)
I'd hope a metro area of 13 million people could drive transit construction in the 21st century in the general case, but cities all over the US continue to impress on their total failure to do so.
Had to comment on all the FUD being spread in these comments. (Note: I am a volunteer with LA 2028 but I'm not on the committee so my thoughts don't represent those of the LA 2028 Committee, just my own as an informed volunteer.
1) Cost increases over the past year have all been to account for estimated inflation between now and 2028. This is deliberate--the committee wants to have a realistic budget to target revenue goals against, not a fairy-tail budget, even if it looks bad early on.
2) LA is not building many new facilities for the Olympics. Almost all of the facilities will be existing facilities, like Staples, the United Airlines LA Coliseum, the Rams/Chargers(?) stadium, the pools at Loyola Marymount, UCLA and USC, the tracks and fields at all three colleges, the port of Long Beach, Santa Monica Beach, etc. Athletes will be housed at UCLA and USC (again), and the media center will be paid for and built by NBC largely at existing facilities.
The facilities that will need to be built: a velodrome for indoor cycling. A rock wall for the climbing events, location undetermined, but which is expected to remain after the event. BMX courses in Big Bear, which the resorts there have said they will maintain after the event depending on location.
3) Tax dollars are not being wasted on this event. The purpose of the budget is to raise private funding, i.e., donations or sponsorships. LA 2028 is working with NBC (first time in history organizers have worked with broadcasters) to sell a joint package so that they aren't competing against the broadcaster.
The lack of tax dollars also means that it's not a choice between the Olympics and housing, etc. In fact, the Olympics are spurring the use of tax dollars on housing and transportation infrastructure, including the acceleration of nearly 40 years of public transit building into 12 years. The public transit lines planned have already led to thousands of new housing units being built in LA county in proximity to those lines.
4) The LA Olympics have been profitable. Every. Single. Time. The 84 Olympics are still the most profitable in history by whatever metric you use, especially once adjusted for inflation. The returns from the 84 Olympics are still being used to fund K12 athletics today. As in 84 and 32, LA wasn't the first choice for the Olympics and its plan every time has been the overwhelming re-use of existing facilities. (Even the LA Coliseum was built more than a decade before the Olympics as a war memorial.)
5) LA is capable of holding an Olympics next year, if necessary. The only other city with sufficient facilities to hold an event of this magnitude on such short notice is London, which has maintained most of its facilities from the 2012 Games.
Offtopic, but hope I'm not the only one who finds naming the LA Coliseum "United Airlines..." disgusting. Don't want it renamed at all, but especially by such a despicable company. What can be done about that?
Unfortunately nothing, since USC has a long-term lease on the facility that included naming rights...and they sold those rights to United. The actual name is now technically the United Airlines Coliseum...
Staples Center gets a pass since it's been Staples since it opened.
> 5) LA is capable of holding an Olympics next year, if necessary. The only other city with sufficient facilities to hold an event of this magnitude on such short notice is London, which has maintained most of its facilities from the 2012 Games.
Every city is capable of hosting the Olympics without subsidizing the efforts of the organizers. It's simple: Charge more for tickets to attend, charge for press passes.
If it was profitable, the Olympic committee would be funding the events themselves, not asking for large handouts from municipalities.
Every city is capable of hosting the Olympics without subsidizing the efforts of the organizers. It's simple: Charge more for tickets to attend, charge for press passes.
This is simply not true. The Rio, Athens, Sochi, and South Korean games were unable to sell the majority of their tickets at face value. Even London had trouble selling all of its tickets and gave entire blocks free to schoolchildren (though this was an issue primarily for preliminary and early rounds for multi-stage competitions and not at all an issue for marquee events). Increasing ticket prices would simply have resulted in even fewer ticket sales.
If it was profitable, the Olympic committee would be funding the events themselves, not asking for large handouts from municipalities.
Many of the Games have been profitable...at least the well-run ones. The IOC also does fund part of the costs of each Olympics, as well as numerous events that serve as trials for Olympic placement, and sporting federations that govern Olympic sports. The IOC is in fact one of the largest funders of organized amateur sports competitions in the world.
> This is simply not true. The Rio, Athens, Sochi, and South Korean games were unable to sell the majority of their tickets at face value
The Olympic committee's inability to accurately forecast demand does nothing to refute my statement. Overly (and most likely, IMO, fraudulent) optimistic revenue projections are a symptom of externalizing the cost of the event.
You don't need to sell over priced tickets (or many, many tickets) if your costs are low. If it costs billions and billions of dollars, yeah, you gotta sell lots of tickets. Seems like any decently size university could host summer olympic games. The question then comes down to capacity. If only 20k people can attend, that dictates a certain price per ticket. They still have television rights, etc. If it turns out not to be profitable, then that's an accurate gauge of how important it is to society.
Seems like any decently size university could host summer olympic games.
Scale matters. The Olympics draw millions of attendees: Atlanta sold 8 million tickets; London sold 11 million. Moreover, there are over 100 different sports in the Olympics, most of which have multiple rounds of competition (except for the long-distance races like the marathon), requiring several thousand hours of competition.
No university has the facilities for all of the Olympic events. No university has the space to hold all of the events within a two-week time-frame (or even a two month time-frame). No university in the world can handle those sorts of crowds.
And finally, the crowd sizes you suggest - 20k, are generally smaller than the crowds that attend annual specialty regional events like the Mt Sac Relays or Penn State Open.
To who? Why should a city invite 10's of millions of people to watch competitors?
If you can generative the same profit with 20k more expensive tickets, why invite 20 million? Just so people can spend their money in your town? Money they could have spent on something else.
If you think about it as an entertainment/sport industry with a product that comes out every 4 years that number doesn't seem too bad. wonder how many jobs it creates.
At the very least the host should be chosen based on it's current ability to host the games, not rely on tens of billions of dollars worth of construction projects to get there. LA is probably one of the few places with most of the venues already in place.
The other option would be to host different sports in different countries, so the burden get's spread out more. It's kind of ridiculous that countries have to build artificial rivers now and all kinds of ridiculous crap. Why not host the kayaking somewhere there is a natural river they can use.
"some political leaders are already talking about improvements, asking for a study on ways to pay for street and sidewalk fixes.
None of that would be part of LA 2028’s budget
"
The problem with 'budgets' for things like this is that they show exactly what you want them to show.
The current leaders want to show that the project is cheap and on budget, so of course that new road isn't included in the budget. The next leaders will want to show how bad the previous incumbents were with finances for the Olympics, so of course that road will be included in the budget.
It's a wealth transfer for the politically connected, same as anything else.
Why should we care who the fastest runner on the planet is? Or the fastest cyclist? In what way does it enhance the lives of the great majority of people?
I hate this traveling Olympics nonsense. It's such a scam. Just hold the summer Olympics every year in Greece. I don't understand how sports get such a pass on corporate welfare. It's not just an Olympics problem, the NCAA, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB all fleece tax payers. The NFL is the worst though.
I think the Olympics are the worst offenders. At least NFL stadiums get used for a few years. Olympic stadiums quickly become ghost towns after the event.
I agree with you, except that I'd put the Olympics at the bottom.
They have their beauty pageant/silent auction/bid every two years, where cities across the world bid against each other for a single year Olympic event, and the process is riddled with bribery. The NFL (and all other pro sports teams) at least sign a multi-decade contract. Still a terrible deal for tax payers, but not as bad as the Olympics.
> First, and importantly -- both previous LA Olympics generated real profits, as in, actual economic profits. Not unicorn fantasy profits like most tech companies embrace (ahem Groupon, Uber, Twitter, Tesla, etc.).
Sure, and what did they spend it on? Was it worth the displacement? Did they build more public housing? Of course not.
> Second--while you may not care about the Olympics or sports, literally billions of people around the world--and millions of people in Los Angeles--do care about the Games. The Games are both a celebration of sport, health, community, unity, and a vessel for raising money to fund youth athletics.
LA could also house the homeless—that would be something to actually celebrate. Right now, the Olympics are a celebration of capital.
I don't get what your going at, unless you're just trying to be a troll?
The City of Los Angeles has never organized an Olympics. A private group, located in the city of Los Angeles, organized an Olympics in cooperation with various cities in Los Angeles County, including the city of Los Angeles.
The private group acquired the right to put on this event in part by pledging that profits from the event would go toward funding youth sports, which was one of the options provided by the event licensor (the IOC).
The private group earned $250 million in profits on the event, after paying for expenses like the costs of police and fire personnel working the Games. That profit was then used toward its contractually-obligated purpose of funding youth sports.
Sure, and what did they spend it on? Was it worth the displacement? Did they build more public housing? Of course not.
No people were displaced by the LA Olympics, because no housing was torn down to construct Olympic facilities, because only 1 or 2 facilities were built for the 32 and 84 Olympics.
No public housing was built, because the Olympics were put on by a private organization. However, important to note: private housing was used for the Olympics. Specifically, USC's then-new student housing was used to house athletes before students moved in. The construction of student housing freed up hundreds of houses around the campus for occupation by lower-income residents.
LA could also house the homeless—that would be something to actually celebrate.
LA could house the homeless. The problem is that a lot of them don't want to be housed because it means giving up alcohol or drugs, or taking their medication, so thousands of shelter beds go unused every night.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadThe U.S. has been pretty good on this front. Salt Lake City nailed it, almost all of the major additions are still actively used by the community (hockey, cross country skiing, ski jumping, etc).
Still not sure that alone makes it a good choice, but I expect a lot will be in use in the future.
Only a handful of facilities need to be purpose-built for the games, like a velodrome for indoor cycling, and it is expected that those facilities will be kept after the games.
They're reusing existing stadiums:
Coliseum (seats ~80k and previously featured in 1932 and 1984 Olympics)
New Rams stadium in Inglewood (seats ~80k. Being built privately with relatively small indirect subsidies)
Rose Bowl (seats ~90k)
And smaller preexisting venues (2 soccer stadiums, Staples Center, the beach, the ocean, etc).
There's no new megastadiums being built. When I looked at their budget, I think the biggest facilities expense was $7 million to make an area at the Rams stadium safe for shooting and archery events.
1. Economic Impact of the London 2012 Olympics (https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/2100/994)
2. Analysis of Impacts on China's Economy of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5369536)
3. The Economics of Hosting the Olympic Games (https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/economics-hosting-olympic-g...)
4. Google Scholar Search: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C11&q=eco...
I'd heard the Athens Summer Olympics was a disaster but putting a number on it is pretty sobering.
Getting quality trained human resources is the biggest dividend. Use the facilities to train top quality athletes, or you have to get them from other countries.
Even in other projects. Like say space projects, one of the biggest goals of any big budget project is to train human resources.
It takes billions to produce rocket scientists, 400m gold medal swimmers.
There are more than ethical reasons why they put ejector seats in fighter planes. Training human resources and producing the right people for the job is an expensive enterprise, replacing them is even more expensive and harder.
https://nolympicsla.com/faq/
Los Angeles of all cities (based on history) has a good chance of running a profitable Olympics.
>The bid contains nothing in the way of improved infrastructure, relying instead on public transportation projects already in the works. But LA 2028 faces challenges.
And they're planning on reusing buildings.
>Local organizers plan to use existing venues such as Staples Center, Pauley Pavilion and the Rose Bowl. Only a few temporary facilities will be needed at relatively little cost.
And they don't know what they're spending the money on.
>Organizers have been talking with City Council members about where to spend the money and are expected to present a plan next fall.
But that was a rare exception, as far as I can tell. Most Olympic cities appear to have that kind of effect as a goal and fall short. I read a proposal a while back that the summer Olympics just get permanently moved to Greece and that sounds like a great idea to me.
Atlanta also used its Olympics to modernize the city, and much of that infrastructure still remains.
Surprisingly, LA in the past did not use the Olympics to modernize the city. Its bids were submitted on the basis of largely not building anything for the Games, because every time LA's bid on the Olympics, the Games have been out of favor due to the enormous costs of hosting. (For the 1932 games, LA was unopposed.) LA's success in hosting profitable Olympics without much building is, quite ironically, one of the biggest factors in other cities thinking that they could also host the Games.
LA, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, Calgary, London, Beijing, etc. all did quite well with the olympics in the past.
People making these decisions don’t care if it’s a net loss to other people as long as they personally benifit. As long as the rest of the US subsidies it, LA can still profit.
"The 1984 Summer Olympics are widely considered to be the most financially successful modern Olympics[4] and serve as an example of how to run the model Olympic Games. As a result of low construction costs, coupled with a reliance on private corporate funding,[5] the 1984 Olympic Games generated a profit of more than $250 million."
Peter Ueberroth is still alive, perhaps he could consult.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/aug/13/abando...
It’s not profit by the traditional meaning of having cash in pocket. Why not just invest in youth sports and bypass the whole investment charade? I still think it’s a bad use of money but it’s better than hosting an infamously corrupt body in a different city every 2 years to MAYBE generate some youth sports profits as happened in 84.
To be interpreted as: It takes multiple revisions of the budget before somebody in the city government was even realistic enough to apply a discount rate to future cash flows.
The budget will definitely keep multiplying until it's at least double digits. The initial budget was a fantasy.
LA has hosted the Olympics several times and there members of the last organizing committee on the 2028 committee. They know what costs to anticipate and plan for...
And why would anyone expect those on government contracts.
There are some LA Metro improvements being done but they were planned and tax introduced before the Olympic win, I believe.
However, LAX is being redone, both terminal-by-terminal, and with a connector to transit and car rentals. One place to go for a summary is: https://www.lawa.org/en/connectinglax/lamp-news -- the current round of modernization is expected to be done by 2023.
The city of LA's population was about 3 million in 1984 and now it's about 4 million. The surrounding cities (which are often hard to distinguish from LA itself) have grown too. Road and freeway expansion have not kept pace. Car traffic has become far heavier.
In 1984, the events were spread all over the place. They'll probably do something similar in 2028.
Will people be able to drive their rental cars and take their Ubers in a timely manner to the drop-off points for these dispersed events?
Will the city and county governments and the MTA add public transport in an intelligent and sufficient way to eliminate the need or desire for large amounts of private transportation? (Answer: no)
https://la.curbed.com/2017/8/4/16098474/olympics-transit-fut...
Something is really wrong with the world when a city throwing around billions of dollars for a sports competition thinks just moving homeless people out of the way is an ethical answer to the problem.
If there was anyone in the decision making process with empathy they might run "slightly overbudget" by a few hundred million to build a hospital, rehab center, and public housing development to get those homeless off the streets permanently.
That being said, LA's homeless problem is largely due to the homeless rejecting housing, rehab, drug treatment, etc. In CA, a person cannot be committed to rehab or treatment against their will. This is the single largest factor behind why CA's homeless problem is so much worse than comparable locations.
Empathy won't solve anything until you convince the homeless "advocates" that rehab and housing is more important than the "freedom" of the homeless to do drugs and wreck their lives.
You are correct, though I'd shift the focus slightly to mental illness. Mentally ill homeless in LA are deemed competent to decide their own welfare, but not face criminal charges. Logically both or neither of those must be true. Leaving a giant gaping hole of "nothing can be done" in any long-term solution.
It's a private organization that contracted with another private organization with the support of the local governments and populace.
It helps to look at actual history instead of projecting tropes.
They used student housing at a UCLA (and USC?) for Olympic Village. That had plenty of capacity because a lot of students go home during the summer break.
Basically, the Olympics wasn't a lot more than Los Angeles normally handles, so I'm not surprised it went off well.
One time in 1932 (as if that matters at all today) and another time in 1984. Just security wise 1984 is vastly different than today. As are all sorts of employment issues and things that are done differently today than in the 1980's. I owned a company in the 80's and the things that you could 'get away with' (for lack of a better way to put it) have no resemblance to a company today. Sure tech has greatly advanced but it's an entirely different 'plan with zero failure' than it was back then (and honestly 1930's does not even count back then people dying in construction was a cost of doing business/construction).
Another problem in public policy is that a lot of major infrastructure/work would never be implemented if the public knew the end price tag at the start.
What an incredible waste.
Brindenstine has talked about having corporations sponsor missions before (e.g. the Doritos® ISS Crew Resupply Mission or the Mars Candy Company Rover). However there hasn't been much movement on that front, and I doubt that NASA's sponsorships would be as profitable. Imagine if IBM sponsors a rocket that self destructs after a computer glitch— it would be awkward for them and not good marketing for Watson.
The Olympics are also planning on making a billion dollars or so from ticket sales. I think NASA charges $50 or so for tickets to watch a launch at the cape. At the Olympics, some tickets may be that cheap or cheaper (e.g. the Slovenia vs South Sudan handball match, no offense to either of those countries). However tickets for more popular events like the opening ceremonies are going to exceed $1000.
The Olympics also has more events within a single year than NASA. There may be a few dozen launches a year, and they're hard to sell tickets for since most launch attempts get scrubbed/rescheduled at least once and they're not always in accessible locations. Meanwhile, the Olympics will have hundreds of events and you can be reasonably confident that they will happen on the same day that's on your ticket.
We're not leaving this planet for a long time yet. Even if we do, it's not desirable to abandon Earth, it's vastly superior to all other practical options we have. We're going to have to continue to try to co-exist and avoid any further world wars. $4b or $5b per year for a large gathering of the sort the Olympics represents, is dirt cheap if it lends even a tiny boost to global peace between nations.
Keeping in mind this isn't actually an either or situation. It's obviously not either NASA's budget, or putting on the Olympics at a $20b cost. We - humanity - can in fact afford to do both.
I'd vote for reducing NASA's annual budget by 19% (~$4b per year) to pay for the Olympics, if that was the only option. That's a very easy decision.
It's one of the few things that most of humanity does together. Over a billion people watch some part of the Olympics globally. It's a modest, important pillar of peaceful co-existence between nations and peoples broadly. We shoud do more things together in that spirit. Maintaining peace between the 195 nations is more important than NASA's continued operation, by several orders of magnitude.
For another example, the UN is also more important than NASA (the UN has a core budget comparable to an annualized cost of the Olympics). I'm not much of a fan of the UN, and I still recognize that it serves an important purpose of promoting cooperation and discussion between nations and would be almost entirely impossible to replace today.
Competitive sport is critically important to humanity and arguably always has been in some form or another. Sometimes people that don't love sport generally, entirely fail to understand what it accomplishes and how important it is.
If NASA goes away (and yes, it would obviously be a huge loss), a dozen other countries will continue with various space efforts. How many things do that many nations cooperate together on in an overwhelmingly positive spirit other than the Olympics?
Rockets don't make people punch other people in the face. Sports really do.
Rank and file people seeing the world come together and work towards a common goal, even on something as "trivial" as a game, humanizes those different people. And yes, it sometimes results in an occasional fight, but it's much better than the kinds of fights that occur which involve rockets.
* two people of different ethnicities holding hands
* cold fusion
Need I remind you we discovered fusion to kill people?
Sexism? I hope you do realize that you are actually defeating your own argument here, since women are segregated and compete separately.
Trans-men, who were not even top athletes among biological men, already dominate biological women's competition.
Your points would hold more water if NASA's entire mission was "moving humanity to a different planet", but it isn't. Much of what NASA does is focused on protecting the planet we live on right now.
$20B would put an American on the moon and maybe even put an American on mars, surely that would get the world's attention.
Want peace? Let's detonate a nuclear bomb in space and get people to recognize the destructive potential of our current arms.
The olympics is designed to get people to tune in, NASA is set up to create knowledge. Judging both organizations by outcomes that only the olmpyics is concerned about is a great way to obfuscate NASA's contributions.
IMO, that's an argument against Olympics, not for it.
I'm far from calling myself an environmentalist, but consider all the waste and pollution produced by people flying in from all over the world. The negative impact is significant.
If your country is already obscenely rich and you're literally reduced to begging tourists to please stay away what is the point of hosting the Olympics?
I'd like to know how much security alone ends up costing. London 2012 security ended up costing over £1 billion. I can't see a US city spending less.
Not much of a news story here - wait four years, inflation goes up - when you're looking at 6b, 700m in inflation seems reasonable with the state of inflation in the economy.
Could you provide a reference there? A 10%+ increase over four years seems excessive.
It comes out to about 2% a year.
Inflation is usually targeted between 2% and 2.5%. So an estimated 10% over four years seems reasonable.
These projects include the Subway to UCLA, the LAX People Mover and Metro connector, the "Regional Connector" downtown, the extension of the Gold Line in the San Gabriel Valley, hundreds of miles of bike lanes, and various freeway upgrades. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-eight_by_%2728)
1) Cost increases over the past year have all been to account for estimated inflation between now and 2028. This is deliberate--the committee wants to have a realistic budget to target revenue goals against, not a fairy-tail budget, even if it looks bad early on.
2) LA is not building many new facilities for the Olympics. Almost all of the facilities will be existing facilities, like Staples, the United Airlines LA Coliseum, the Rams/Chargers(?) stadium, the pools at Loyola Marymount, UCLA and USC, the tracks and fields at all three colleges, the port of Long Beach, Santa Monica Beach, etc. Athletes will be housed at UCLA and USC (again), and the media center will be paid for and built by NBC largely at existing facilities.
The facilities that will need to be built: a velodrome for indoor cycling. A rock wall for the climbing events, location undetermined, but which is expected to remain after the event. BMX courses in Big Bear, which the resorts there have said they will maintain after the event depending on location.
3) Tax dollars are not being wasted on this event. The purpose of the budget is to raise private funding, i.e., donations or sponsorships. LA 2028 is working with NBC (first time in history organizers have worked with broadcasters) to sell a joint package so that they aren't competing against the broadcaster.
The lack of tax dollars also means that it's not a choice between the Olympics and housing, etc. In fact, the Olympics are spurring the use of tax dollars on housing and transportation infrastructure, including the acceleration of nearly 40 years of public transit building into 12 years. The public transit lines planned have already led to thousands of new housing units being built in LA county in proximity to those lines.
4) The LA Olympics have been profitable. Every. Single. Time. The 84 Olympics are still the most profitable in history by whatever metric you use, especially once adjusted for inflation. The returns from the 84 Olympics are still being used to fund K12 athletics today. As in 84 and 32, LA wasn't the first choice for the Olympics and its plan every time has been the overwhelming re-use of existing facilities. (Even the LA Coliseum was built more than a decade before the Olympics as a war memorial.)
5) LA is capable of holding an Olympics next year, if necessary. The only other city with sufficient facilities to hold an event of this magnitude on such short notice is London, which has maintained most of its facilities from the 2012 Games.
Staples Center gets a pass since it's been Staples since it opened.
https://www.latimes.com/sports/usc/la-sp-united-airlines-col...
There may also be some restrictions on changing signage due to historical status.
You can leave this sort of thing out in order to both strengthen your own points and improve the quality of discussion here. Winning all-round.
Every city is capable of hosting the Olympics without subsidizing the efforts of the organizers. It's simple: Charge more for tickets to attend, charge for press passes.
If it was profitable, the Olympic committee would be funding the events themselves, not asking for large handouts from municipalities.
This is simply not true. The Rio, Athens, Sochi, and South Korean games were unable to sell the majority of their tickets at face value. Even London had trouble selling all of its tickets and gave entire blocks free to schoolchildren (though this was an issue primarily for preliminary and early rounds for multi-stage competitions and not at all an issue for marquee events). Increasing ticket prices would simply have resulted in even fewer ticket sales.
If it was profitable, the Olympic committee would be funding the events themselves, not asking for large handouts from municipalities.
Many of the Games have been profitable...at least the well-run ones. The IOC also does fund part of the costs of each Olympics, as well as numerous events that serve as trials for Olympic placement, and sporting federations that govern Olympic sports. The IOC is in fact one of the largest funders of organized amateur sports competitions in the world.
The Olympic committee's inability to accurately forecast demand does nothing to refute my statement. Overly (and most likely, IMO, fraudulent) optimistic revenue projections are a symptom of externalizing the cost of the event.
You don't need to sell over priced tickets (or many, many tickets) if your costs are low. If it costs billions and billions of dollars, yeah, you gotta sell lots of tickets. Seems like any decently size university could host summer olympic games. The question then comes down to capacity. If only 20k people can attend, that dictates a certain price per ticket. They still have television rights, etc. If it turns out not to be profitable, then that's an accurate gauge of how important it is to society.
Scale matters. The Olympics draw millions of attendees: Atlanta sold 8 million tickets; London sold 11 million. Moreover, there are over 100 different sports in the Olympics, most of which have multiple rounds of competition (except for the long-distance races like the marathon), requiring several thousand hours of competition.
No university has the facilities for all of the Olympic events. No university has the space to hold all of the events within a two-week time-frame (or even a two month time-frame). No university in the world can handle those sorts of crowds.
And finally, the crowd sizes you suggest - 20k, are generally smaller than the crowds that attend annual specialty regional events like the Mt Sac Relays or Penn State Open.
To who? Why should a city invite 10's of millions of people to watch competitors?
If you can generative the same profit with 20k more expensive tickets, why invite 20 million? Just so people can spend their money in your town? Money they could have spent on something else.
Seems like such a colossal waste of public funds.
Don't you wonder why the IOC or the LA organising committee aren't volunteers?
The other option would be to host different sports in different countries, so the burden get's spread out more. It's kind of ridiculous that countries have to build artificial rivers now and all kinds of ridiculous crap. Why not host the kayaking somewhere there is a natural river they can use.
None of that would be part of LA 2028’s budget "
The problem with 'budgets' for things like this is that they show exactly what you want them to show.
The current leaders want to show that the project is cheap and on budget, so of course that new road isn't included in the budget. The next leaders will want to show how bad the previous incumbents were with finances for the Olympics, so of course that road will be included in the budget.
More seriously: this always happens; what’s the point of hosting an olympics anyway? Even a permanent location would be better.
Why should we care who the fastest runner on the planet is? Or the fastest cyclist? In what way does it enhance the lives of the great majority of people?
My point is that bidding your city to host the olympics, or other such activities, usually ends up not making anybody happy.
They have their beauty pageant/silent auction/bid every two years, where cities across the world bid against each other for a single year Olympic event, and the process is riddled with bribery. The NFL (and all other pro sports teams) at least sign a multi-decade contract. Still a terrible deal for tax payers, but not as bad as the Olympics.
Sure, and what did they spend it on? Was it worth the displacement? Did they build more public housing? Of course not.
> Second--while you may not care about the Olympics or sports, literally billions of people around the world--and millions of people in Los Angeles--do care about the Games. The Games are both a celebration of sport, health, community, unity, and a vessel for raising money to fund youth athletics.
LA could also house the homeless—that would be something to actually celebrate. Right now, the Olympics are a celebration of capital.
The City of Los Angeles has never organized an Olympics. A private group, located in the city of Los Angeles, organized an Olympics in cooperation with various cities in Los Angeles County, including the city of Los Angeles.
The private group acquired the right to put on this event in part by pledging that profits from the event would go toward funding youth sports, which was one of the options provided by the event licensor (the IOC).
The private group earned $250 million in profits on the event, after paying for expenses like the costs of police and fire personnel working the Games. That profit was then used toward its contractually-obligated purpose of funding youth sports.
Sure, and what did they spend it on? Was it worth the displacement? Did they build more public housing? Of course not.
No people were displaced by the LA Olympics, because no housing was torn down to construct Olympic facilities, because only 1 or 2 facilities were built for the 32 and 84 Olympics.
No public housing was built, because the Olympics were put on by a private organization. However, important to note: private housing was used for the Olympics. Specifically, USC's then-new student housing was used to house athletes before students moved in. The construction of student housing freed up hundreds of houses around the campus for occupation by lower-income residents.
LA could also house the homeless—that would be something to actually celebrate.
LA could house the homeless. The problem is that a lot of them don't want to be housed because it means giving up alcohol or drugs, or taking their medication, so thousands of shelter beds go unused every night.