DeStantis' statements made it obvious this is political retaliation for speaking out against his legislation. I don't particularly care for either party, but Florida taxpayers are going to end up paying the bill both in settlement money and in lost jobs due to the government open hostility / retribution towards their first amendment rights.
Florida voters could pass an initiative to add recalls to their constitution, presumably. And initiate a recall if it passes. A pretty high bar, but potentially doable.
If you're really so worried about teachers preying on your kids (ah, the latest conservative boogeyman rears its head!) sending them to a religious school is statistically speaking the last thing you should do.
Just to be clear, you believe that using a child's preferred pronouns, talking about periods, and acknowledging the existence of homosexuality are all "preying on kids"?
Like if I were a gay teacher with a husband and said something about my husband, I'm preying on kids?
Or if a school nurse tells a little girl not to be freaked out when she gets her period, that's preying on kids?
> Just to be clear, you believe that using a child's preferred pronouns
A lot of conservatives do sincerely believe that. They're wrong, of course, but this is an actual belief that a lot of right-wing people (including right-wing medical professionals) both in the US and in Europe share.
This isn't so much about hostility to first amendment rights, as it us about hostility to a massive and beloved corporation.
Disney is the second largest employer in the state. Pays the state over $1billion in taxes, of the state's $100billion budget [1]. And has over 50 million anual visitor's in its Florida parks in a (pre pandemic) year; which is more than twice Florida's population [2], and about a third of their anual tourists [3].
If I were a politician, this is not a fight I would want to take on.
I live in a republican sun belt state where the legislature’s politics have never matched my own (at least not as long as I’ve been able to vote), but until pretty recently, it was generally all mostly in the vein of smallish government, business friendly conservatism. Not necessarily my favorite, but not a dealbreaker.
Now they’re tacking hard right on social issues, threatening to cripple our quite good public university systems, and trying to strip local governments of any meaningful self determination.
Joke’s on me I guess, since I’m most likely not going to move my family, so looks like I’m gonna just bend over and take it. But it feels like we’re in the process of actively destroying our future and any remaining attraction for dynamic folks who might consider relocating or starting businesses here.
Similar situation (but not in the sun belt). Lived in this area all my life, always been a lot farther "left" on basically everything than the state's government, never been that big a deal aside from our taxes being way higher than they ought to be for how bad/absent government services are (which, to be fair, at least some poorly-governed red states have the good taste to also be low-tax—just not ours).
Now? We're moving to a blue state, and don't consider it optional. Republicans got weirder after Palin, but have gone batshit crazy post-Trump. They're coming for schools & teachers. They're coming for libraries. My daughters might not be able to get medical care they need, as they get older (and no, not just abortions—my wife's gone through miscarriages and other issues that she'd have had to go out-of-state to treat under current laws, and has never had an abortion). God-for-fucking-bid any of my kids end up being LGBT and have to see their state governor working hard to make their lives worse.
It's gone from a tolerable, if not ideal, situation I'd intended to stick out indefinitely and had been living with relatively contentedly for decades, to plainly intolerable, in a hurry. Way too much risk in sticking around.
[EDIT] I don't mean that as criticism of your probably sticking around, to be clear. If our situation were different, we might too (or might not really have a choice).
Without condoning or condemning your decision to move, I've increasingly felt that this is basically what Republicans want. Making their state inhospitable to Democrats pushes them out to denser blue states where their votes count less per capita and stave off demographic trends towards progressive politics in their own state.
It seems really effective and difficult to defend against.
Certain drugs and procedures (like D&Cs) are kinda "dual use" and are banned or impractically difficult to obtain in several states, now. We've had to use those before, for non-abortions, and have also had what they call an "ectopic pregnancy" which is quite dangerous and will not result in a living baby but is now really hard to get treated in some states, such that it's easier and safer to travel to another (I think ours is still OK for that one, though).
Some of that stuff was already troublesome to access because providers were wary of running into existing abortion regulations (Roe, especially after modification by Casey, did not absolutely guarantee abortion rights through all of pregnancy—not even close) and a lot of hospitals have religious affiliations and are allowed to limit care based on the beliefs of those religions (despite potentially being the only option in a large area because of guarantees & licenses from the government, which, you know, makes it entirely insane that they're allowed to do that). We ran into some of that, it really sucked, and it'd be a ton worse now, and (I'm pretty sure) we're not even in the worst state as far as that goes.
[EDIT] But, notably, despite not having things as bad as a couple other states, the state's solidly "red", so at risk of shifting to an even more restrictive stance at any time now that we don't even have the very-limited protections of Roe.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, no criticism inferred (and certainly no offense taken). I have daughters too and ultimately may not be able to stick it out either, but not sure where else I’d want to move to.
Yes, I'm similar. I don't mind the red states because they are relatively low tax and they don't really do anything legislatively, which is fine by me. A lot of GOP governors seem to have gone off the deep end at the state level lately; I'm not really sure why.
DeSantis, for the most part, was your typical classic GOP governor in his first term. Florida is usually a red/blue state that leans a little red. They really went off the rails his second term though.
> DeSantis, for the most part, was your typical classic GOP governor in his first term. Florida is usually a red/blue state that leans a little red. They really went off the rails his second term though.
It's entirely cold political machinations. It's not ideology, it's not deeply-held beliefs, it's not a philosophy, it's not him (and others like him) doing what they think is best: it's strategy, aimed squarely at electoral success. They might get it wrong, maybe it'll backfire, but that's what it is. Stances on issues are merely more kayfabe crap to the ones who are all-in on the whole thing just being a game to play & win. Their "concerns" are often transparently and publicly manufactured—seriously, it's nuts how in-the-open a lot of this is—to drive their voters to the polls.
He changed, because some advisors, consultants, and probably donors whom he trusts & relies on, told him to.
Too bad all this hurts a bunch of people in the process.
> it's strategy, aimed squarely at electoral success.
Electoral success? I've been wondering if the DeSantis and Trump (and most of the Republican Party) have been chasing a local maxima as of late.
The republicans have been pursuing wedge politics, well, since, forever, but primarily since the 1960's when they Nixon's/Reagan's "hippy punching" found success. The problem is that it only works when you can keep the majority. Every wedge issue slices of x% of people, whether it's Librarians, Teachers, LGBTQ+ issues, etc. It works great until you've wedged off more who would vote against you than for you in a general election.
Then if you're at that local maxima, then yeah you're gonna cater to those fringe elements because those are the only votes that are left you can get. You've burnt the bridge with the rest of the electorate.
> Then if you're at that local maxima, then yeah you're gonna cater to those fringe elements because those are the only votes that are left you can get. You've burnt the bridge with the rest of the electorate.
The way election strategy works can sometimes be unintuitive.
1) Not every demographic votes at the same rate—the "youth vote", which is a lot of people, famously, barely matters. "But they won it for Obama in '08!"; firstly, no, actually, he'd have lost a couple states without them but still would have won; secondly it still wasn't all that good; and thirdly it promptly plummeted again, there was no staying-power.
2) "Off-cycle" elections tend to be ignored by moderates and have low overall turnout.
3) Primaries are A Thing, and you have to win the nomination (determined almost exclusively by committed members of your own party) before you can even attempt the general.
4) The "true swing" segment of voters—the ones that both claim not to be committed partisans, and also don't consistently vote exactly as if they were committed partisans (that is, aren't lying or deceiving themselves when they say they're swing voters)—is itty-bitty, and they are practically all, in the language of political science, "low information voters" (and, yes, you can just treat that as a euphemism for "morons"). There's less to gain from directly courting them than one might think, and courting them doesn't necessarily involve, like... good policies. Or even being connected to reality. Even more than other aspects of campaigning, it's mostly about name recognition, good acting, and marketing.
What does all that mean? The name of the game is GOTV (Get Out The Vote). And suppressing same for your opponent. You don't ignore everything else, exactly, but the person who gets more of "their people" to the polls is very likely to be the one who wins, not the one who sways fence-sitters. Notably, achieving this doesn't necessarily require targeting even all of your own party.
> Every wedge issue slices of x% of people
Some are immensely effective. I listened to way too much of NPR's post-2016 "holy shit, how did this happen?" interview series with Trump voters, and, over and over, people said "yeah, he sucks, but I prayed on it and stopping baby-murder was more important". That single issue is a giant GOTV driver and excuse to do whatever the fuck else they want with their policies, for Republicans. I haven't looked into the data, but wouldn't be a bit surprised if their pro-life stance is a lot more effective, by those measures, than the Democrats' contrary stance.
> DeSantis and Trump (and most of the Republican Party) have been chasing a local maxima as of late
Trump's campaign was revolutionary. The way he built his platform was exactly like he'd walked into a rural diner, struck up political conversations, wrote down all the ideas he heard, then just said those things. This is, it should be noted, a lot different from the usual Republican platform (this is likely why they didn't bother to assemble an official party platform, as they usually do—they didn't want to codify his in any way, but also couldn't contradict it). The reason the normal platform can differ so very much from what their voters want, is because of how US elections are structured (the two-party system) which strongly tends to produce situations like that. Trump just said "yeah, fuck all that" and said exactly what Republicans wanted to hear.
The rest of the party is still trying to figure out what that means for future elections, and the future of the party. DeSantis' whole mess is part of that effort, I expect.
The veiled threat of, "We have plans to invest $17 billion and create 13,000 jobs [in Florida] over the next ten years. I hope we’re able to do so." is interesting. Disney is making it clear that this is potentially only the beginning.
I wouldn’t call it veiled, or even much of a threat for that matter. It’s a rational actor plainly stating facts that are readily apparent to everyone. There’s no good reason why the corporation should make any future significant investments in a state where the legal and regulatory regime is not only unpredictable but currently openly hostile.
They’ve got a pretty, pretty big sunk cost in the state, so it’s not like they’re going to pick up and move, but it seems like it would be a pretty poor use of company resources to spend more than necessary in Florida right now.
I think if anything it demonstrates that Disney are playing with a relatively weak hand here.
Disney have a broader problem - they are not the only player in central Florida. Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World is the most attended theme park in the world… but Universal just down the road hold the number 2 and 3 slots.
Yes, WDW is the most attended group of parks on the planet, but Universal are on an epic roll and have a 3rd Florida gate under construction.
It’s not just that Disney can’t pack up WDW and move it to a state friendlier to them. They can’t pack up the critical mass of demand drawn to central Florida either - replicating that elsewhere would take decades.
I don’t think that the Florida legislature are that worried about whether Disney will create however many thousand jobs. They know full well the central Florida tourism market is a juggernaut that’s not slowing down anytime soon and that Disney will maximise their presence in this market regardless of the political climate.
Keeping some corporate and creative jobs in California instead of relocating them to Florida is fairly small fry in that context.
To me, investing in FL is a long term looser, not because pf politics but because of Climate Change. It has been there for a bit over 50 years, 50 years from now, the potential exists that it will be a place only mermaids can visit.
Someone pointed out that lack of growth is treated as decline in our culture/economy. So the threat of climate change in Florida is that real estate prices will stop growing - that breaks a fundamental assumption - line goes up - and that drives a race to the exit. So far this has only happened in some localities, so we'll see.
If my house is underwater fiscally, it may as well be underwater with the fishes.
I'll gladly buy your Miami property for a discount. My thesis is it's not going anywhere in the next 100 years and that the prices will only continue to rise.
Florida real estate prices is incredibly volatile. They are in an upswing now (along with everyone else), but crash just as quickly. Land speculation is a risky business, but there is money to be made in Florida vs. more stable markets.
> My thesis is it's not going anywhere in the next 100 years and that the prices will only continue to rise.
I don't think you've looked at a graph for the last 50 years. In the end, they will probably rise if just because of inflation. The question is will it outpace inflation or crash. Frankly, the job market in FL isn't great for techies (although I interned for IBM at Boca Raton in 1995), so I haven't really looked into it.
If you got a thick enough layer of concrete & pavement under Miami and built a contiguous seawall, you could just float the SS Miami wherever you want!
It can be both. Businesses seeing a governor and party in power going after companies because of something they said is a strong short-term disincentive. Rising sea levels and increasing temperatures are a strong long-term disincentive.
Both a sensible business move and the right thing to do. If they could magically roll up the entirety of WDW and relocate it elsewhere I suspect they would.
They did it in Florida in the 1960’s and Disneyland Paris in the 1990’s, and they could easily do it again if they were again motivated to spend the enormous amount of money it would take.
They bought the Florida land through shell companies so no one would suspect what was going on during the 1960s. That wouldn't fly today. They'd have to pay 10x the price.
At this point, they would be fools not to stash in a filing cabinet somewhere a plan for a WDW equivalent somewhere in one of several less hostile US states.
It wouldn’t be the same, with all of WDW’s history, direct involvement of Walt and Roy Disney, weird systems (underground garbage vacuum service, etc). But America has a lot of unoccupied land, and most states would be happy to give Disney significant leeway in exchange for long-term guaranteed taxes, jobs, and tourism.
One thing is certain: the next FL governor after DeSantis will have a gigantic mess to clean up.
I wish the PNW would get some love, we have very little going in terms of Amusement parks (the biggest one is in Idaho, you've probably never heard of it). Eastern Oregon has plenty of land...I can dream anyways.
The issue with the PNW is similar to the issue with Florida. Climate Change is going to nuke both areas out of habitability in the next handful of decades. While sure FL has conservative loons running things and that's problematic in the short to medium term for Disney that'll pass. It'll be being on fire or under water that'll keep them away.
I don't see how climate change is going to nuke the PNW. Our coasts are too high to be much affected (so we don't have issues with rising coast lines), while the heat makes summers more...normal for the rest of the country, the fact that we get rain 9 months out of the year should insulate us from the changes. Forest fire season does suck, but again, 9 months of rain a year means it isn't that long.
Perhaps we should all be buying in Alaska, however, given that it will soon be the next mild climate tropical destination :).
Wildfires are expected to get more intense and longer as climate change goes on in the PNW. I don't think you're going to want an inferno to be a destination point. It's nothing against the PNW - it's a beautiful part of the country we definitely need to preserve but if you're looking at things in decades I don't think you'd want to invest considerably into a tourist destination there if you're Disney is all.
Disney already puts up with yearly fires in Central Florida, which are as bad as anything we've had up here. Florida is literally a swamp on fire in the summer, which is such a contradiction!
That seems like a pretty stupid plan given that it was only recently that Florida overtook Texas in legislative culture wars. Pretty much any other state would be a better choice.
"Possible". Culture wars are always fascinating in the tradeoffs people are willing to make in their rational. Californians will scream "More Housing! Get rid of Golf Courses and build houses!" But a massive theme park expansion in the middle of a developed area? All good if it hurts someone you hate.
> Californians will scream "More Housing! Get rid of Golf Courses and build houses!" But a massive theme park expansion in the middle of a developed area? All good if it hurts someone you hate.
Disney's a big corporation but they don't have the power of eminent domain. If (if!) they ever attempt to grow the Anaheim property beyond their current holdings they will pay an absolute king's ransom for each and every square foot.
Besides, reading the actual plans it's pretty clear that Disneyland Forward is more about repurposing and optimizing their current space rather than a "massive expansion" as you call it. Really feels like you're just making up a situation in order to "both sides" the issue.
To the people I see commenting that the state of Florida will be a loser in the long run, between April 2020 and July 2022, Florida's population grew by 3.3% [1].
Compare that to states such as California (-1.3% [2]) and New York (-2.6% [3]) for the same period.
Seems like more people like what DeSantis and Florida have been doing overall.
It takes a long time to destroy a city or a state. It won't necessarily be the entirety of Florida but Orlando's economy is pretty Disney centric and might take a pretty big hit if Disney divests over the next 20 years. Will it be Detroit levels? Who knows.
Also, there are term limits, so DeStantis is out in 2026 either way. Disney just has to wait it out a couple more years.
For those who think that Disney is cancelling this because of the fights with DeSantis... LOL.
A corporation knows a lot better than that. Decisions are driven by profits, and profits alone, and neither Disney nor DeSantis would keep going too long in this game of chicken. Disney needs Florida and Florida badly wants Disney.
Florida is still a huge supporter of Disney's business despite the politics. Disney is simply following what every other major company is doing right now: cutting back expansion plans, reducing major expenses (such as building a campus and moving thousands of people there) as their stock is really nothing to write home about right now. AND using this as a convenient excuse for what they are doing due to economic, not political reasons.
If Disney could recoup the relocation investment in the next quarter, it would absolutely do it irrespective of the recent fighting.
I think this was more about keeping the Imagineers in Glendale, California, where they all wanted to stay. This move was a key source of internal dissatisfaction with Chapek.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadhttps://reason.com/2023/05/16/ron-desantis-confirms-again-th...
https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_recall_in_Florida#:~:....
Got any sources or references I can read that backs this up?
Everything's so simple when you just live in a fantasy world.
Like if I were a gay teacher with a husband and said something about my husband, I'm preying on kids?
Or if a school nurse tells a little girl not to be freaked out when she gets her period, that's preying on kids?
A lot of conservatives do sincerely believe that. They're wrong, of course, but this is an actual belief that a lot of right-wing people (including right-wing medical professionals) both in the US and in Europe share.
Disney is the second largest employer in the state. Pays the state over $1billion in taxes, of the state's $100billion budget [1]. And has over 50 million anual visitor's in its Florida parks in a (pre pandemic) year; which is more than twice Florida's population [2], and about a third of their anual tourists [3].
If I were a politician, this is not a fight I would want to take on.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/data-download/enormou...
[1] https://www.floridapolicy.org/posts/florida-house-and-senate...
[2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/FL
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/florida-tourism-hits-reco...
Now they’re tacking hard right on social issues, threatening to cripple our quite good public university systems, and trying to strip local governments of any meaningful self determination.
Joke’s on me I guess, since I’m most likely not going to move my family, so looks like I’m gonna just bend over and take it. But it feels like we’re in the process of actively destroying our future and any remaining attraction for dynamic folks who might consider relocating or starting businesses here.
Now? We're moving to a blue state, and don't consider it optional. Republicans got weirder after Palin, but have gone batshit crazy post-Trump. They're coming for schools & teachers. They're coming for libraries. My daughters might not be able to get medical care they need, as they get older (and no, not just abortions—my wife's gone through miscarriages and other issues that she'd have had to go out-of-state to treat under current laws, and has never had an abortion). God-for-fucking-bid any of my kids end up being LGBT and have to see their state governor working hard to make their lives worse.
It's gone from a tolerable, if not ideal, situation I'd intended to stick out indefinitely and had been living with relatively contentedly for decades, to plainly intolerable, in a hurry. Way too much risk in sticking around.
[EDIT] I don't mean that as criticism of your probably sticking around, to be clear. If our situation were different, we might too (or might not really have a choice).
It seems really effective and difficult to defend against.
Some of that stuff was already troublesome to access because providers were wary of running into existing abortion regulations (Roe, especially after modification by Casey, did not absolutely guarantee abortion rights through all of pregnancy—not even close) and a lot of hospitals have religious affiliations and are allowed to limit care based on the beliefs of those religions (despite potentially being the only option in a large area because of guarantees & licenses from the government, which, you know, makes it entirely insane that they're allowed to do that). We ran into some of that, it really sucked, and it'd be a ton worse now, and (I'm pretty sure) we're not even in the worst state as far as that goes.
[EDIT] But, notably, despite not having things as bad as a couple other states, the state's solidly "red", so at risk of shifting to an even more restrictive stance at any time now that we don't even have the very-limited protections of Roe.
DeSantis, for the most part, was your typical classic GOP governor in his first term. Florida is usually a red/blue state that leans a little red. They really went off the rails his second term though.
It's entirely cold political machinations. It's not ideology, it's not deeply-held beliefs, it's not a philosophy, it's not him (and others like him) doing what they think is best: it's strategy, aimed squarely at electoral success. They might get it wrong, maybe it'll backfire, but that's what it is. Stances on issues are merely more kayfabe crap to the ones who are all-in on the whole thing just being a game to play & win. Their "concerns" are often transparently and publicly manufactured—seriously, it's nuts how in-the-open a lot of this is—to drive their voters to the polls.
He changed, because some advisors, consultants, and probably donors whom he trusts & relies on, told him to.
Too bad all this hurts a bunch of people in the process.
Electoral success? I've been wondering if the DeSantis and Trump (and most of the Republican Party) have been chasing a local maxima as of late.
The republicans have been pursuing wedge politics, well, since, forever, but primarily since the 1960's when they Nixon's/Reagan's "hippy punching" found success. The problem is that it only works when you can keep the majority. Every wedge issue slices of x% of people, whether it's Librarians, Teachers, LGBTQ+ issues, etc. It works great until you've wedged off more who would vote against you than for you in a general election.
Then if you're at that local maxima, then yeah you're gonna cater to those fringe elements because those are the only votes that are left you can get. You've burnt the bridge with the rest of the electorate.
The way election strategy works can sometimes be unintuitive.
1) Not every demographic votes at the same rate—the "youth vote", which is a lot of people, famously, barely matters. "But they won it for Obama in '08!"; firstly, no, actually, he'd have lost a couple states without them but still would have won; secondly it still wasn't all that good; and thirdly it promptly plummeted again, there was no staying-power.
2) "Off-cycle" elections tend to be ignored by moderates and have low overall turnout.
3) Primaries are A Thing, and you have to win the nomination (determined almost exclusively by committed members of your own party) before you can even attempt the general.
4) The "true swing" segment of voters—the ones that both claim not to be committed partisans, and also don't consistently vote exactly as if they were committed partisans (that is, aren't lying or deceiving themselves when they say they're swing voters)—is itty-bitty, and they are practically all, in the language of political science, "low information voters" (and, yes, you can just treat that as a euphemism for "morons"). There's less to gain from directly courting them than one might think, and courting them doesn't necessarily involve, like... good policies. Or even being connected to reality. Even more than other aspects of campaigning, it's mostly about name recognition, good acting, and marketing.
What does all that mean? The name of the game is GOTV (Get Out The Vote). And suppressing same for your opponent. You don't ignore everything else, exactly, but the person who gets more of "their people" to the polls is very likely to be the one who wins, not the one who sways fence-sitters. Notably, achieving this doesn't necessarily require targeting even all of your own party.
> Every wedge issue slices of x% of people
Some are immensely effective. I listened to way too much of NPR's post-2016 "holy shit, how did this happen?" interview series with Trump voters, and, over and over, people said "yeah, he sucks, but I prayed on it and stopping baby-murder was more important". That single issue is a giant GOTV driver and excuse to do whatever the fuck else they want with their policies, for Republicans. I haven't looked into the data, but wouldn't be a bit surprised if their pro-life stance is a lot more effective, by those measures, than the Democrats' contrary stance.
> DeSantis and Trump (and most of the Republican Party) have been chasing a local maxima as of late
Trump's campaign was revolutionary. The way he built his platform was exactly like he'd walked into a rural diner, struck up political conversations, wrote down all the ideas he heard, then just said those things. This is, it should be noted, a lot different from the usual Republican platform (this is likely why they didn't bother to assemble an official party platform, as they usually do—they didn't want to codify his in any way, but also couldn't contradict it). The reason the normal platform can differ so very much from what their voters want, is because of how US elections are structured (the two-party system) which strongly tends to produce situations like that. Trump just said "yeah, fuck all that" and said exactly what Republicans wanted to hear.
The rest of the party is still trying to figure out what that means for future elections, and the future of the party. DeSantis' whole mess is part of that effort, I expect.
They’ve got a pretty, pretty big sunk cost in the state, so it’s not like they’re going to pick up and move, but it seems like it would be a pretty poor use of company resources to spend more than necessary in Florida right now.
Disney have a broader problem - they are not the only player in central Florida. Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World is the most attended theme park in the world… but Universal just down the road hold the number 2 and 3 slots.
Yes, WDW is the most attended group of parks on the planet, but Universal are on an epic roll and have a 3rd Florida gate under construction.
It’s not just that Disney can’t pack up WDW and move it to a state friendlier to them. They can’t pack up the critical mass of demand drawn to central Florida either - replicating that elsewhere would take decades.
I don’t think that the Florida legislature are that worried about whether Disney will create however many thousand jobs. They know full well the central Florida tourism market is a juggernaut that’s not slowing down anytime soon and that Disney will maximise their presence in this market regardless of the political climate.
Keeping some corporate and creative jobs in California instead of relocating them to Florida is fairly small fry in that context.
If my house is underwater fiscally, it may as well be underwater with the fishes.
> My thesis is it's not going anywhere in the next 100 years and that the prices will only continue to rise.
I don't think you've looked at a graph for the last 50 years. In the end, they will probably rise if just because of inflation. The question is will it outpace inflation or crash. Frankly, the job market in FL isn't great for techies (although I interned for IBM at Boca Raton in 1995), so I haven't really looked into it.
It wouldn’t be the same, with all of WDW’s history, direct involvement of Walt and Roy Disney, weird systems (underground garbage vacuum service, etc). But America has a lot of unoccupied land, and most states would be happy to give Disney significant leeway in exchange for long-term guaranteed taxes, jobs, and tourism.
One thing is certain: the next FL governor after DeSantis will have a gigantic mess to clean up.
Perhaps we should all be buying in Alaska, however, given that it will soon be the next mild climate tropical destination :).
The massive plan to expand the Anaheim park drops on the same day.
https://www.foxla.com/news/disneyland-forward-disney-anaheim...
Weird that people like theme parks, yeah.
Besides, reading the actual plans it's pretty clear that Disneyland Forward is more about repurposing and optimizing their current space rather than a "massive expansion" as you call it. Really feels like you're just making up a situation in order to "both sides" the issue.
In practice, this would about double the size of the current park (The detailed drawing represent the new areas, which are currently parking lots)
I guess we disagree on whether 2x is “massive”?
I think very few Californians are against converting surface parking into workplaces.
I'm also unclear how this is 'culture war'? Could you expand on that?
Compare that to states such as California (-1.3% [2]) and New York (-2.6% [3]) for the same period.
Seems like more people like what DeSantis and Florida have been doing overall.
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/FL/PST045222
[2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/CA/PST045222
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/NY/PST045222
>between April 2020 and July 2022
It takes a long time to destroy a city or a state. It won't necessarily be the entirety of Florida but Orlando's economy is pretty Disney centric and might take a pretty big hit if Disney divests over the next 20 years. Will it be Detroit levels? Who knows.
Also, there are term limits, so DeStantis is out in 2026 either way. Disney just has to wait it out a couple more years.
A corporation knows a lot better than that. Decisions are driven by profits, and profits alone, and neither Disney nor DeSantis would keep going too long in this game of chicken. Disney needs Florida and Florida badly wants Disney.
Florida is still a huge supporter of Disney's business despite the politics. Disney is simply following what every other major company is doing right now: cutting back expansion plans, reducing major expenses (such as building a campus and moving thousands of people there) as their stock is really nothing to write home about right now. AND using this as a convenient excuse for what they are doing due to economic, not political reasons.
If Disney could recoup the relocation investment in the next quarter, it would absolutely do it irrespective of the recent fighting.
Background: https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/49663329-trading-places-r...