It Pays For Itself
The Postal Service | Some Latino Stats | The World's Most Expensive Thing
Today, just a bunch of stats.
The Postal Service
The United States has the largest postal system on the planet, and it accepts no taxpayer dollars. It pays for itself.
| Dwight Garner, Book Review: ‘Mailman,’ by Stephen Starring Grant
Is this a failure of government or the success of privatization?
This fact is similar to public transit: large US cities invest heavily in buses, trains, and ferries as key infrastructure, which underlies everything and benefits everyone. However, cities are constantly balancing on the economic razor’s edge, where transit systems are often underfunded, and their funding is based on regressive policy decisions: those with little pay too much, while businesses pay much less than they should.
Some Latino Stats
I was reading Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right, by Daniel Martinez HoSang1, which explores present-day Black, Asian, and Latino communities in the US, and tries to winkle out why many non-white Americans have shifted ‘off left’, finding the institutions put in place since the 1960s are no longer solving the problems they were hypothetically intended to deal with.
Confronted by the polycrisis (economic pressures, inequality, climate change, political polarization, immigration) and the failure of Democrats to adequately counter those forces through institutional tweaks — both in major urban areas and nationally — many have become disaffected, from the Democratic Party, those institutions, and institutionalism itself.
I was struck by some stats about the growth and demographic changes in the US Latino population. The following is excerpted and paraphrased from Martinez HoSang’s work:
In 1960, there were an estimated six million Latinos in the US, less than 4% of the population, predominantly from Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Most identified as Catholic and remained concentrated in the Southwest, South Florida, and a handful of cities in the Northeast and in Chicago.
In 2007, nearly 50 years later, 55% of Latinos in the US had been born outside the country, and 15 years later, in 2022, the Latino population had exceeded 63 million in a US population of 333 million: nearly 20% of the country. Latinos had built longstanding communities in most states, and a large majority had been born in this country. Under 45% identified as Catholic, while 15% described themselves as evangelical Protestants.
The Democrats have to rethink everything, and they had better get their heads around these figures, and the concerns of the disaffected, Latinos and other communities.
Again, Martinez HoSang [emphasis mine]:
Mr. Trump nearly doubled his support among Black voters from 2020 to 2024, won some 40 percent of the Asian American vote, and took almost half of the Latino vote. Many of those I have spoken with recently — students, lawyers, mechanics, pastors and others — sounded strikingly similar to Mr. Gibson. Angry at a system they contend is indifferent to their lives, they express ideas that were once seen only on the far-right fringe.
The rightward drift of minority voters is not a story of just one election. It is a phenomenon years in the making, one that is reshaping the American political landscape.
The World’s Most Expensive Thing
I was reading Adam Tooze’s newsletter — a must-read — and I learned about The World’s Most Expensive Thing: Itaipu.
Stretching for 5 miles across the Paraná River between Paraguay and Brazil, Itaipu is one of the world’s most powerful hydroelectric dams. In 2016 alone, the binational facility, which has an installed capacity of 14,000 megawatts, produced enough energy to meet Paraguay’s electricity demand for more than seven years. Itaipu is the most expensive single object on Earth, according to Guinness World Records.
A few stats from Wikipedia:
Construction
The course of the seventh biggest river in the world was shifted, as were 50 million tonnes of earth and rock.
The amount of concrete used to build the Itaipu Power Plant would be enough to build 210 football stadiums the size of the Estádio do Maracanã.
The iron and steel used would allow for the construction of 380 Eiffel Towers.
The volume of excavation of earth and rock in Itaipu is 8.5 times greater than that of the Channel Tunnel and the volume of concrete is 15 times greater.
Around forty thousand people worked in the construction.[20]
Itaipu is one of the most expensive objects ever built.
Generating station and dam
The total length of the dam is 7,235 metres (23,737 ft). The crest elevation is 225 metres (738 ft). Itaipu is actually four dams joined together – from the far left, an earth fill dam, a rock fill dam, a concrete buttress main dam, and a concrete wing dam to the right.
The spillway has a length of 483 metres (1,585 ft).
The maximum flow of Itaipu's fourteen segmented spillways is 62.2 thousand cubic metres per second (2.20×106 cu ft/s), into three skislope formed canals. It is equivalent to 40 times the average flow of the nearby natural Iguaçu Falls.
The flow of two generators (700 cubic metres per second (25,000 cu ft/s) each) is roughly equivalent to the average flow of the Iguaçu Falls (1,500 cubic metres per second (53,000 cu ft/s)).
The dam is 196 metres (643 ft) high, equivalent to a 65-story building.[21]
Though it is the seventh largest reservoir in size in Brazil, the Itaipu's reservoir has the highest ratio of electricity production to flooded area. For the 14,000 MW installed power, 1,350 square kilometres (520 sq mi) were flooded. The reservoirs for the hydroelectric power plants of Sobradinho Dam, Tucuruí Dam, Porto Primavera Dam, Balbina Dam, Serra da Mesa Dam and Furnas Dam are all larger than the one for Itaipu, but have a smaller installed generating capacity. The one with the next largest hydroelectric production, Tucuruí, has an installed capacity of 8,000 MW, while flooding 2,430 km2 (938 sq mi) of land.
Electricity is 55% cheaper when made by the Itaipu Dam than the other types of power plants in the area.
Here, in the US, we have yet to construct a single high-speed rail line.