As to the investor’s logic, you’re correct. However, Seattle voters have repeatedly voted against spending money on stadiums. We even have a delightfully named lobbying group: Citizens for More Important Things. (http://www.citizensformoreimportantthings.org/)

And that is why simply maintaining a level playing field where free enterprise is allowed and everyone can play by the same set of rules is the best strategy. If we don’t start gambling public funds on sports teams we won’t risk losing them.

What you described in other cities is a playing field in which corrupted elected officials allow politically connected individuals and corporations to masquerade as free market capitalists. In reality the politicians and the cronies have created a second set of rules for themselves, called “heads I win, tails you lose.” Invest public money, and if the investment succeeds, they take the profits. If the investment fails, the taxpayer absorbs the loss.

In the long run, are huge corporate welfare packages and bailouts that disproportionately benefit the politically connected the mark of a free country? No. Definitely not. There’s no reason we have to compete to be the city who is most willing to abuse our own taxing authority, eminent domain, etc. to attract a sports team. That’s not progress. That’s not liberty. That’s stupidity.

I don’t want to be the sucker who’s paying for a failed deal either.

As for your suggestion that the backers see this as a risky proposition, let me offer an alternative explanation. If there are multiple cities that they might invest in, and those cities are all keen to have the extra economic activity that the investment is expected to bring, then they are going to ask those cities to compete to offer the best deal to get the project into their city. If I think my investment is a sure thing then it’s an even better investment with $200M of someone else’s money and given a choice between a city with cheap loans and a city without, it would be an easy decisions for any investor.

I have no idea if the stadium is a good idea or not; I don’t know anything about the sports concerned or your local teams. That said, I think your analysis is a little disingenuous. There have been many, many cases where local governments have underwritten private projects to build infrastructure that was expected to increase local economic activity and had great success; this seems to be exactly that sort of situation.

There’s a lot that date rapists get right, most notably free dinner.

“Google has put their desire to have a real-name driven internet ahead of their user’s desires.”

This wasn’t their original idea, of course. It’s a government initiative. See NSTIC, etc.

“…bastards are still bastards under their own names.”

And trolls are still trolls under the multiple fake real names they use on the disposable accounts they set up for trolling.

I also think “failed” is an overstatement. From an engineering perspective it looks like a huge success, moving all their properties onto a very solid new platform built around an “identity system” that’s optimized for sharing data about users with advertisers and governments. By making G+ the default on new Android and gmail signups, advertising heavily, using their dominant position in search to favor G+ posts and pressure web sites to install +1 buttons, Google’s continuing to get signups for the system. As for usage and engagement, if you like Google’s redefinition “using G+” to include searching (or checking gmail) (or reader or any other Google property) then the numbers are ok; if not, it looks like a very low adoption rate. I’m working on a blog post on this and so far my conclusion is “reasonable minds differ”.

That said I basically agree with Adam’s thesis here. There was a good discussion of this back in November at htto://goo.gl/VVopJ … once again, reasonable minds differ, but I know what I think :) Google+’s unnecessary insistence on their unpopular, expensive, contentious naming policy and the resulting unpleasantness of the nymwars blunted their initial growth. They lost their a great chance to take significant market share away from Facebook and Twitter with a spectacular launch. Yes, there’s been progress since but it was a huge blunder and it was based on an incorrect assumption and not listening to the hundreds of people who said “hey wait a second”. Oops.

l

The whole idea about making people be identified with their real names to limit the number of “bastards” or internet trolls was a thin masking for what I feel is the real reason: advertising aka money.