No Good Deed Should Go Unpunished

When Victor Wembanyama swapped jerseys with a young fan after the San Antonio Spurs’ 96-87 win over the Brooklyn Nets at the Barclays Center on Dec. 27, it created a viral image that delighted the internet.

What’s followed has turned a sweet interaction into a hotly debated issue that reached New York’s Supreme Court.

Here’s what we know about the situation.

How did the jersey swap happen?

The five-year-old boy, who was wearing a tiny Spurs Wembanyama jersey, and his father attended the game with a sign that read “Victor Wembanyama will you swap jerseys with me?” After the game, they were invited onto the court where the swap was carried out in front of cameras, with the boy getting Wembanyama’s game-worn City Edition top and the 7-foot-3 Wembanyama getting the comically small replica.

What happened to the game-used jersey after it was given to the boy?

On Jan. 14, it was announced the jersey would be a featured item in the Goldin 100 auction opening on Jan. 22, with a starting bid of $10,000. This sparked a public backlash. Many people who found the original interaction so endearing felt it was distasteful to cash in on the gifted jersey so quickly. However, those who defended the move pointed out that the jersey would likely bring in a significant amount of money for the family and potentially have a life-changing impact for the child.

What did Wembanyama think of his jersey going to auction?

The day after the auction was announced, Wemby quote tweeted the news and added a crying emoji. So he didn’t seem pleased by the decision.

What did the seller think of the sale?

On Monday, after the auction had concluded, Frankie Desideri Sr., the father of the boy who swapped jerseys with Wembanyama, filed a lawsuit for a temporary restraining order against Goldin Auctions through the New York State Supreme Court to stop the sale, as first reported by Cllct. In the documents Desideri filed, he said that “multiple attempts to withdrawal from auction (sic)” were made. He also said Goldin used images of him and his son to promote the auction “despite clear, prior instructions that no images be attached to the sale,” which caused “widespread exposure and emotional harm” as a result of “public scrutiny and harassment” that led to his son suffering “severe emotional distress, avoiding basketball games and believing his favorite player dislikes him after he posted about the sale also.” Desideri said it was the use of their images that prompted him to revoke consent to the auction prior to it concluding. In addition, the filing said the jersey was gifted to the boy, making him sole owner of it and that “under New York law, contracts involving minors are voidable at the discretion of the legal guardian.”

In Goldin’s court filings in response, the company said Desideri contacted Goldin two days after the swap took place and “voluntarily and without solicitation” entered into a consignment agreement to auction the jersey. It also accused Desideri of “experiencing seller’s remorse.” The filing went on to say the jersey was “sold, paid for, and shipped to the buyer” before Goldin was made aware of the suit. It also contended the company should not be subject to New York law since it is based in New Jersey.

by Brooks Peck, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. Poor kid (and Wembanyama). Just props in another loser's money-making scam. Also not buying the "life-changing" blah blah blah...if they have enough money for courtside seats the kid will never see a dime.]  

PEPFAR Report

On January 24, when the State Department announced a stop-work order on most foreign assistance, PEPFAR clinics shuttered. After two weeks of intense bipartisan lobbying, the State Department issued waivers intended to allow some PEPFAR programs to continue, but since PEPFAR contracts with USAID for drug orders and other functions, USAID closures have left PEPFAR services paused. This tug-of-war put PEPFAR back in the national spotlight, and it became clear that many Americans have a lot of questions about PEPFAR:

• What does PEPFAR do?
• Who, specifically, does PEPFAR help?
• How much does PEPFAR cost?
• How do we know whether PEPFAR is working?
• Why is America doing HIV/AIDS work in the first place?

Many people are rightly skeptical of the eye-popping claim that PEPFAR saved 25 million lives, mainly women and children, on a budget of $6.5 billion a year—only 0.08% of the federal budget. We found, with some caveats, that these claims are generally accurate: the budget is correct for how much America spends, and we find evidence for 7.5–30 million lives saved by PEPFAR between 2004 and 2018. Our best estimate is 19 million lives saved in that time period.

So what is PEPFAR? President George W. Bush created the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2004. PEPFAR is run by the US Department of State and is overseen by the US Global AIDS Coordinator, a Senate-confirmed role reporting directly to the Secretary of State. About half of PEPFAR’s funding is spent on providing antiretroviral drugs to people with HIV, which both extend their lives and almost always prevent them from transmitting HIV to others. (...)

The President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) provides funding to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS in low- and middle-income countries. For the first twenty years of its history, it was popular and bipartisan, the shining jewel of US aid programs. But right now, many PEPFAR programs are paused, clinics are shuttered, and the upcoming reauthorization fight looks uncertain. The State Department, which administers PEPFAR, says the program has saved 25 million lives. We are an independent team of journalists, academics, and technologists who decided to investigate whether that was true.

Our key findings:

• PEPFAR has saved between 7.5 and 30 million lives, at a cost between $1,500 and $10,000 per life saved. The US government is willing to spend at least a thousand times this much to save an American life.

• In Africa, unlike in the United States, HIV/AIDS primarily affects women and children. One of the main goals of PEPFAR is to prevent “vertical transmission”, where a pregnant mother with HIV passes on her infection to her baby in utero or during delivery. PEPFAR has prevented at least 5.5 million babies from being born with HIV.

• The number of people who die of HIV/AIDS each year has been declining since 2004–the year PEPFAR began operation. PEPFAR is a major reason for this decline.

• PEPFAR helped decrease the cost of first-line HIV medications from $1000 a month to only $60 a year ($5 a month). Because of the declining cost of medications, PEPFAR is more cost-effective each year, and is doing more and more on a budget that has been declining in real dollars since 2009.

• PEPFAR also offers post-exposure prophylaxis to nurses, rape victims, and others exposed to HIV, and pre-exposure prophylaxis, medications that prevent contracting HIV, to women whose husbands have HIV and other at-risk populations.

• Over time, PEPFAR is handing off its responsibilities to the governments of the countries we’re helping, but it will take decades if we want to defeat HIV/AIDS and years if we want to not destroy the good works we have already done.

• PEPFAR is a well-audited program. The audits we spot-checked showed 0 to 2% rates of undocumented program expenses. This compares extremely favorably to other government programs: the Medicare fraud rate, for instance, is reportedly 5-10%.

• Controlling HIV/AIDS abroad keeps Americans safe from HIV/AIDS at home. The federal government spends $29 billion annually on medical care for Americans with HIV and AIDS, not counting insurance company spending: six billion for PEPFAR is a good deal.

PEPFAR advances American interests: the program is popular, appreciated, widely known, and helps us compete with China, prevent terrorism, and win allies in Africa and beyond.

by Kelsey Piper, Leah Libresco Sargeant, Colin Aitken and others, PEPFAR Report |  Read more:

Image: Our World In Data

[ed. If there's one benefit to be gained from all the blundering and idiotic 'cost cutting' this administration is currently engaged in, it's that people are becoming more aware of all the good and essential things our government does, which go unnoticed most of the time. PEPFAR Impact Counter tries to estimate the number of people affected by its closure, and says that 13,854 adults and 1,474 infants have already died from this policy. What about everything else? Here's one perspective:]

"I’m really pessimistic about all this. I think the main effect will be saving ~1% of the budget at the cost of causing so much chaos and misery for government employees that everybody who can get a job in the private sector leaves and we’re left with an extremely low-quality government workforce. I freely admit that DEI also did this, I just think that two rounds of decimating state capacity and purging high-IQ civil servants is worse than one round. In fact, this is what really gets me - both parties are careening towards destruction in their own way, there’s no real third option (...)

Probably nothing catastrophic happens for the first few years of this. The cuts to clinical research mean we get fewer medications. The cuts to environmental funding mean some species go extinct. The cuts to anti-scam regulators means more people get scammed. But the average person has no idea how much medical progress we’re making, or how many species go extinct, or how many people get scammed in an average year. Maybe there will be some studies trying to count this stuff, but studies are noisy and can always be dismissed if you disagree. So lots of bad stuff will happen, and all the conservatives will think “Haha, nothing happened, I told you every attempt ever to make things better or dry a single human tear has always been fake liberal NGO slush fund grifts”.

Or maybe one newsworthy thing will happen - a plane will fall out of the sky in a way easily linked to DOGE cuts (and not DEI?), or the tariffs will cause a recession, and then all the liberals will say “Haha, we told you that any attempt to reduce government or cut red tape or leave even the tiniest space for human freedom/progress has always been sadistic doomed attempts to loot the public square and give it to billionaires!” They’re already saying this! Everyone is just going to get more and more sure that their particular form of careening to destruction is great and that we can focus entirely on beating up on the other party, and we will never get anyone who cares about good policy ever again.

Probably this isn’t true, and I shouldn’t even say it because everyone else is already too doomy. You’d be surprised how many basically sane people I’ve heard expressing worries they’ll being put in camps (not even illegal immigrants or some other at-risk group!), or that Elon Musk sending people emails asking them what they’re doing is a form of fascism. I try to remind myself that if there had only ever been half as much government funding as there is now, I wouldn’t be outraged and demand that we bring it up to exactly the current level (and, once it was at the current level, become unoutraged and stop worrying). The current level is a random compromise between people who wanted more and people who wanted less, with no particular moral significance. This thought process helps, but I think that even in that situation one could justify a few really good programs like PEPFAR on their own terms (ie if it didn’t exist, I would be outraged until it did), and I still think that changing the size of government should be done through legal rather than illegal means, competently rather than incompetently, and honestly rather than lying about every single thing you do all the time."

New Transportation Options in Sugar Land

There once was a sugar plantation where cane fields stretched as far as the eye could see, and enslaved people—primarily African Americans—toiled away in the heat. In time, the plantation grew into a factory called Imperial Sugar, which grew into a city that was aptly named Sugar Land. Over the next few decades, Sugar Land grew beyond recognition. Master-planned neighborhoods sprouted, and as cars became popular in the 1970s, highways expanded to connect these neighborhoods—and also splinter them. In 1970, just over 3,000 people called Sugar Land home. In 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 110,000.

Sugar Land is located just southwest of Houston; today, it is the sixth-fastest growing city in the U.S., and it is running out of space. With only 4% of land left to build on, the city is looking for innovative transportation solutions—and looking up for answers.

Over the past year, Sugar Land has set in motion three big initiatives—one of them is a community microtransit service, the other two involve aerial solutions. Earlier this year, the city partnered with Wisk Aero, a company that has spent the past 14 years developing electric, self-flying taxis, also known as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL).

The pilot would allow residents to hop on an air taxi (from, say, downtown Sugar Land) and fly to a designated vertiport in a fraction of the time it would take them to drive. Mitchell Davies, deputy director of aviation at the Sugar Land Regional Airport, says the airport has identified potential locations for a so-called Vertiport and is working closely with Wisk Aero and the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct an airspace study. The Vertiport should become operational “by the end of the decade or sooner,” he says.

More recently, the city announced that it is studying the possibility of bringing an “autonomous elevated cable and rail mobility system” that would glide above its streets. The system, which is operated by a provider of urban mobility systems called Swyft Cities, can best be described as an on-demand gondola—a bit like Uber, except instead of a car, it’s a cabin that slides by to pick you up and drop you off at your desired location, with no stops in between. An engineering schematic study is currently underway to examine the potential for the gondola system, including potential locations. It is expected to be completed later this year.

When highways won’t do

The story of Sugar Land is the story of so many American cities, particularly in regions where the car is still king. Melanie Beaman, transportation and mobility manager at the City of Sugar Land, says that traffic in the region is expected to increase by 40-60% by 2045, and if the I-10 debacle in Houston is any indication, building more lanes won’t free up more space, it will simply attract more cars. “You’ll end up erasing the city with this big, huge mega-freeway,” she says.

To come up with solutions, the city conducted a yearslong study that culminated in a 163-page Mobility Master Plan. After interviewing close to 2,000 residents, they outlined plans to develop a safe streets program, to allocate more room for people to walk and bike, as well accommodate those who use wheelchairs and strollers. They also laid out their goal to position Sugar Land as an innovative mobility leader. “City leadership has told us to be bold in what we do with transportation,” says Beaman. “We’re told to be trailblazers and not be afraid to take risks.”

by Elissaveta M. Brandon, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Wisk Aero, Whoosh Hold LP