GUNS IN FLORIDA: Dueling Reform Needs Legislative Action. Guest Blog by Ross Hancock

Now that Florida has successfully addressed the gun threat to our schools, and the governor has signed the flawed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act into law (with the votes of just a very, very few Democrats, including my own Miami State Rep. Nick Duran), the newly emboldened NRA is ready to solve other problems.

As the governor and legislature have made clear, gun violence is not caused by guns. It is caused by unarmed people. This is exactly what the gun industry and Constitutional scholars (such as that guy who always comments on any Facebook discussion that “assault weapon” does not mean “assault weapon”) have been saying all along.

With more people in the workplace and elsewhere fulfilling their duty to bear arms as ordained by scripture and the Second Amendment, the next legislative session is expected to take up the long-neglected issues surrounding dueling, and whether dueling needs more or less regulation. Florida is on its way, at last, to eliminating “gun-free zones,” where the lack of guns creates a public threat. So our public places cry out for clear rules of etiquette – the “Code Duello” that once governed trial by combat in Europe.

We already have “Stand Your Ground” laws, which cover the rights of the armed person when confronting a renegade unarmed person. But the situation in which two peaceful armed persons wish to lawfully and safely engage in a duel is currently unregulated. Once-sacred dueling traditions that were second-nature to the Founding Fathers are almost forgotten today, and clear rules are needed. (Especially in Florida, where even seemingly obvious things like traffic lights are interpreted inconsistently.)

The responsible gun-owner community has long been aware of the societal benefits of dueling. The rudeness that now pervades our lives, whether in public or online, would not have been allowed to fester back in the day when a justifiably wronged person could demand “satisfaction” on the spot. Workplace disputes and unfair commercial transactions that now clog our courts will soon be resolved by safe, economical duels. When disagreements can be nipped in the the bud, long-simmering antagonisms will no longer take their toll on the mental and physical health of our citizens, whether they be school cafeteria workers, Facebook users, or just drivers on U.S. 1.

The NRA can play a positive role by providing education and certification in the area of dueling etiquette, equipment and safety. They can also ensure that responsible legislation passes in a timely way. Some will object that regulation of dueling treads on the spirit of the Second Amendment itself. But the oft-overlooked “well-regulated militia” clause can, and should, be interpreted as opening the door to responsible rules.

Sierra Club challenges the $2 billion Big Sugar reservoir plan ... by gimleteye

So much taxpayer sacrifice in Florida, for this: Big Sugar

NOTE: Florida voters who support Rick Scott and incumbent state legislators should spend a few minutes considering how Scott rejected in 2010 the state purchase of US Sugar lands that was "too costly" at $1.75 billion. The Fanjuls were the principal agitators who killed the plan.

So, instead of owning 187,000 acres at a cost of $1.75 billion, Florida taxpayers are now committed to fund at least half of a $2 billion, man-made, cement reinforced 16,000 acre reservoir 23 feet deep, that can't deliver clean water up to state and federal water quality standards.

In case you didn't get the math: We are getting 16,000 acres instead of 187,000 acres. We are paying $2 billion instead of $1.75 billion.

Gov. Scott's governing board lambasted the US Sugar as "political". Instead, we got a deal that is political on steroids.

Kind of sucks, doesn't it.

To make a deep reservoir work -- it will be more than a decade if the federal government agrees to cost sharing -- , in 2017 scientists (and senate president Joe Negron) asked for 60,000 acre of storage and cleansing marshes. Then, Big Sugar flooded the state capitol with lobbyists, crying wolf. Not only did the 60,000 acres disappear, Big Sugar turned the bill into a Trojan Horse: inserting benefits to Big Sugar that would cripple future efforts to clean the Everglades and Florida's badly degraded public waters, rivers, and bays.

The current proposal represents an extraordinary betrayal of what the public fought so hard to achieve and what senate president Joe Negron sought to achieve before Big Sugar slammed its fist on the table.

If the state had completed the purchase of US Sugar, preliminarily signed in 2008, it would have been possible to do land swaps (even if the Fanjuls were unwilling). If the deal had been consummated, the public could have assembled the needed 60,000 acres, but last year Big Sugar-friend legislators eliminated eminent domain in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) and provided significant benefits to large landowners like the Fanjuls: a unprecedented decision that provides an easy excuse for failure.

For these reasons, the environmental response to the Everglades reservoir plan -- really, it is a Big Sugar reservoir plan -- is muted. This week, Sierra Club offered the following response to Gov. Scott's water management district board.

The Sierra Club is not happy with the outcome, thus far, of the EAA Storage Reservoir Project plan; it must be improved quickly because we are running out of time.

We cannot respond, and do not know how anyone in the public can respond, to the draft PACR, because it has not been made available to the public.

What we can comment on is the stakeholder process, the TSP (Tentative Selected Plan) and the Secretarial Order.

The District waited for five months after the bill signing to start an inadequate stakeholder scoping process that was squeezed into a seriously truncated time period. The District refused to hold scoping meetings in Broward, Miami-Dade, or Monroe counties - limiting the meetings to just West Palm Beach and Clewiston - and has not responded to Sierra Club’s questions related to details of the District’s modeling. I [Diana Umpierre] have here a list of those questions and the date upon which they were submitted to District staff – we hope that by submitting them to you today on the record we may finally get the answers we have a right to. Finally, there is no proof that the TSP or the claimed benefits have been fully vetted by external state and local agencies or reviewed by a truly independent scientific body and if it has, without public notice, it has been within a ridiculously small window of time.

The TSP does not account for the approximately 18,000 acres of public land, purchased with our tax dollars, which are currently neither serving a public purpose nor providing ecological services, but instead are leased to sugar and other agricultural corporations. The SFWMD thus far has failed to provide an optimal configuration, failed to explore the use of those 18,000 acres, and instead constrained their modeling to only parcels A-1, A-2 and lands just west of A-2. The intent of SB10 was not to limit analysis of project configurations to these lands. As a result, we do not know if your tentatively selected plan represents the actual optimal configurations or “best buy.” The District has failed to show the public what else is possible and therefore we cannot judge what is on the table.

An excessively deep reservoir does not provide all of the ecological benefits we expect from an Everglades restoration project. When the EAA reservoir was first proposed in 2000, it was envisioned as a shallow 6-feet deep reservoir; later in 2006, it was proposed as a 12-feet deep reservoir. These water depths are far more reasonable, safe, and ecologically beneficial than the 23 feet deep industrial-scale reservoir presented by the District. We are also concerned about the increased safety risks it poses to those near and downstream of this proposed super deep reservoir.

The Secretarial Order is vague in the "assurances" it claims to provide. For instance, the FDEP states "additional actions" would be taken if water quality standards are not attained. We are concerned this could mean reducing the ecological benefits of the project, such as less water flowing south and less reduction of harmful discharges to northern estuaries, in order to reduce the need to treat water. While Sierra Club appreciates that FDEP says it will meet water quality standards, it is just an aspirational goal because the Order has no teeth to guarantee benefits to the estuaries, the Everglades or Florida Bay.

For Sierra Club, neither the TSP nor the Order is good enough. We urge you to spend the next two weeks to deliver an optimized plan that guarantees benefits to the public in a transparent manner. While we do not oppose the EAA Reservoir, we demand better. We will continue to advocate for improvements to the plan and for more land for true Everglades restoration.

Diana Umpierre
Organizing Representative, Sierra Club

Maggy Hurchalla: the case goes on ...

Environmental activist Maggy Hurchalla is very pleased to announce additions to her defense team in the lawsuit brought by Lake Point I & II, LLC, against her.

Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte has agreed to lead the defense team along with his law partner Patsy Palmer of D’Alemberte & D’Alemberte, a Tallahassee law firm specializing in appellate litigation. Sandy D’Alemberte is a distinguished First Amendment lawyer who has been President of the American Bar Association, President of Florida State University, Dean of the FSU Law School, and a state legislator. Mr. D’Alemberte noted:

“This case raises a very important question of whether a citizen can be subject to a damage award when she has exercised her constitutional right to petition the government and advocate for the environment.

I am delighted to work again with Rick Ovelmen, who I have known for years and who is regarded as one of the best First Amendment lawyers in the nation. Mr. Ovelmen, a graduate of Yale Law School, began his career as a partner at Paul & Thomson with noted First Amendment lawyers Dan Paul and Parker Thomson. He later served as general counsel to the Miami Herald.

His current firm, Carlton Fields Jorden Burt has a great reputation from its years of public service stretching from its founders to William Reece Smith (President of the American Bar Association and the University of South Florida), Alan Sundberg (later Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court), and Sylvia Walbolt (noted public interest litigator).”

Mr. D’Alemberte and Mr. Ovelmen join Ginny Sherlock and Howard Heims of the firm of Littman, Sherlock & Heims, the original members of the defense team. Ginny, a graduate of Florida State University School of Law, is a former editor and reporter with The Associated Press and a participant in the Washington Press Club Foundation’s Women in Journalism oral history project. Howard is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire School of Law and holds an undergraduate degree in environmental science. Ginny and Howard have represented citizens and citizen associations throughout the state in environmental and land use matters for more than two decades.

Geniusofdespair's Run For State Rep. By Geniusofdespair

It is an arduous task to run for office. At the end of each month I had to check a box on a website and put in a pin number I could never remember. Four digits? What do they think I am a Genius?  And, if I had raised any funds I would have had to do even more work every month and even open a bank account  (very annoying task). OMG. How do they do it?

So, since I am so busy with other stuff, like purging my house, I am happy to announce my run for State Rep. is so over.

I wrote to the State of Florida:

"Please remove me from this stupid election for State Rep. 112. I don’t want to be part of a group I am ashamed of. Thank you. If I were elected I would be appalled. Nick Duran is welcome to the seat."

I do think that Nick Duran is a bad Representative for District 112 but I am not going to save you from him, one of you can run. Maybe I will run again, who knows. Right now, not going to happen. I am so tired of remembering to check that box. Now if I had a person to do all the work, that would be a different story.

I want to thank my good friend Ross Hancock for all his help and I hope I didn't disappoint him too much, he did remind me to check the box.

A shadow passes over Florida Congressional District 27. Donna Shalala, why? ... by gimleteye

Donna Shalala's late entry into the Democratic primary for Congressional District 27 is puzzling. As Eye On Miami observed, the primary is clogged with contenders. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a moderate Republican, held the seat for more than two decades. Hillary Clinton, in 2016, carried the district by 19 percentage points.

Why would Ms. Shalala, 77, enter a race where a squadron of Democrats is already running, including state senator Jose Javier Rodriguez?

Shalala served a distinguished term as University of Miami president. Earlier, she was Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton WH and a friend of both Bill and Hillary. Her campaign finance plan inevitably includes Clintons' Florida campaign contributors like Big Sugar billionaire Alfie Fanjul -- a board member and major donor to the University of Miami while Shalala was president.

Jose Javier Rodriguez is a leader in a Democratic legislative delegation where leadership is rare as hen's teeth. For example, his support for water treatment and storage marshes in the Everglades in 2017 challenged Big Sugar's control of Florida's political order.

Everglades restoration today is a work-around to maintain the privileges and prerogatives of Big Sugar. Hardened problems in Everglades restoration were created on Bill Clinton's watch.

In 2000 Clinton signed into law the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan which originally cost $6.7 billion (now, at least three times that much) and pivoted around the false flag of technological fixes that many environmentalists knew at the time could not pan out. (Aquifer storage and recovery wells were the false flag; a placeholder in CERP instead of acquiring large parcels of sugar lands to clean up the industry's massive pollution. These pollution costs are primarily paid for, by the public.)

Ironically, in the early 1990's Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's husband -- Dexter -- successfully prosecuted Florida's refusal to protect water quality in the Everglades. While U.S. Attorney in South Florida, Lehtinen defeated the state in federal court (cf. Judge William Hoeveler) but was bitterly disappointed when Clinton allowed the state of Florida off the hook, seizing defeat from the jaws of victory, with a settlement agreement that could not fix the problem of Big Sugar's pollution of the Everglades.

Fast forward, nearly twenty years.

JJR, a Harvard-educated Cuban American Democrat with a bright future in politics, worked during the 2017 legislative session in Tallahassee to shore up the key initiative of Republican senate president Joe Negron who called for the addition of 60,000 acres of land, including centrally-located parcels owned by the Fanjuls, to fix "once and for all" the fatal flaws in South Florida water management infrastructure that turned so much publicly-owned waterways into toxic sewers. (There are about 600,000 acres of industrially grown sugarcane in the Everglades Agricultural Area, around the rim and south of Lake Okeechobee.)

Big Sugar, through massive lobbying in Tallahassee, deftly turned the senate president's bill, triggered by need to solve massive pollution of waterways in his Stuart district, to its own advantage. Negron, who recently announced his plan to retire from the senate, was disappointed at the absence of Democratic support beyond JJR, and it was the failure of Democrats to support additional land purchases that allowed his bill to morph into Big Sugar's Trojan Horse. That Trojan Horse was signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott a year ago and is now headed for Congress, after the stamp of approval by the legislature last week of the plan by the South Florida Water Management District shaped under tightly managed conditions to favor the sugar industry. Meanwhile, a companion bill to benefit Everglades Agricultural Area sugar farmers is speeding through the legislature, thanks to a novice senate Democrat, Lauren Book.

Where does Donna Shalala fit into this narrative? Hard to say, but an early indicator would be to follow Friends of Bill who are financially supporting her campaign.

NOTE: As former leader of Sierra Club and now of Friends of the Everglades, the Miami-Based conservation group founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, I opposed the plan to restore the Everglades in the late 1990's that failed to include adequate acreage to store and cleanse Big Sugar's pollution. I strongly supported the ballot referenda in 1994 to tax Big Sugar and to force Big Sugar to clean up its pollution. The state legislature has failed to enact the provision of state law, created by that election, to hold Big Sugar primarily responsible for its pollution and the costs of cleaning up its destruction of water quality in outstanding Florida waters and public lands including Everglades National Park. I have written extensively about these issues, for many years, on this blog, for newspapers, and for online forums. As an individual citizen, I support Jose Javier Rodriguez for Congress.

Get to Know Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum - Running for Governor. By Geniusofdespair

  (you have to press skip the ad, it goes on forever otherwise)

Andrew D. Gillum is a Democratic serving as the Mayor of Tallahassee, Florida since 2014. At the age of 23, Gillum became the youngest person ever elected to the Tallahassee City Commission in February 2003.  He grew up in Miami.

Andrew Gillum's Website. 

From his website:

As Mayor, Andrew developed a thriving innovation economy, beat the gun lobby in court to protect common sense reform and stood up to President Trump and Governor Rick Scott to defend immigrants.

As Governor, he will fight against the special interests that are standing in the way of taking real action on climate change, and he will always ensure Florida is a welcoming and safe place for everyone, no matter where they come from, who they love or how they identify.

Why take Parks for Buildings County Commissioners? Enough. By Geniusofdespair

Note that the Museums ate up 8 acres of the park taking 4 each. If you think two new Museums will  use up only 2 acres,  you are an idiot. Parcel B is a piece of shit. Use that if you really want to appease certain groups that already have museum space, but leave Bicentennial alone - I am begging you.

They renamed Bicentennial Park, Museum Park and then forced down our throats two Museums there -- in the park leaving us with about 21 acres -- using up what little green space is left downtown. Now those clueless County Commissioners want 2 more museums except instead of in parcel B, they want to use Bicentennial Park. I am sure they will want to fill in the slip AGAIN that spans between Parcel B and Bicentennial Park. That was the plan when they wanted to put the Soccer Stadium in the park, or was that the Baseball Stadium.

Buildings don't need the waterfront. People do. Do you know how many people are downtown now? You can't drive anymore. Brickell is one big parking lot. They now say they only want 2 acres of Museum Park Bicentennial Park. It is never two acres, you need parking roads etc. Again filling in the slip might get pulled into this very bad plan. Even though the Virginia Key Trust, once headed by Athalie Range,  is planning a history museum celebrating African American and Caribbean Culture, Commissioners want a SECOND museum. And, even though the Freedom Tower is there with significant Cuban history, they want another Cuban Museum almost across the street.  NO NO NO.  Build them somewhere else. DO NOT FILL IN THAT DAMN SLIP MORONS.

Doug Hanks and Andres Viglucci of the Miami Herald reported:

While engineered to defuse a brewing fight over putting the museums on county parkland, the plan to double the museum count at Museum Park hasn’t mollified opponents. And pulling off the Museum Park strategy requires approval from the Miami City Commission, where a key commissioner overseeing the park is already grumbling about the scope of the plan for a two-acre parcel.

 Museum Bicentennial Park. Little green space left with a few trails, parcel B behind the American Airlines Arena on the right in the photo. Green space here is stupid. If you must build build in Parcel B. No in the small bit of green space in Bicentennial Park.

Take friggin' Parcel B. Pile all your damn museums and other crap there. It is so noisy from the causeway you can't hear yourself think from Parcel B. Leave what is left in Bicentennial Park and don't fill in the damn FEC Slip.

Old bad ideas do resurface....I wrote a blog in 2011.

Watered-down Everglades reservoir is politics as usual in Florida | Guest column
Karl Wickstrom Published 3:30 p.m. ET March 5, 2018 | Updated 8:37 p.m. ET March 5, 2018

The Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir plan, born out of Senate Bill 10, looked like the one we’d been waiting for all these years. No more toxic summers. No more guacamole algae and disease spread along the coasts by Lake Okeechobee discharges.

Built right, a dynamic reservoir could cut the discharges, send clean fresh water to Florida Bay, and rebuild three extraordinary fisheries and the lifestyles and economies they once supported. We all cheered.

As it now stands, the plan is not what was envisioned. In February, Everglades Foundation scientists published an evaluation of the South Florida Water Management District proposal for the EAA Reservoir that echoed what the Department of Interior suggested on an official agency call last fall: The reservoir needs more land for treatment to deliver the benefits promised by the district.

But even those promised benefits — based on the state’s suspiciously optimistic projections — offer too little relief to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee, too little fresh water to Florida Bay, and too little pollution cleanup for the Everglades. It’s heartbreaking to watch this happen.

With another 6,500 acres of filter marshes, scientists say the plan could work. We have that. The state of Florida owns enough land to make the difference, but our elected officials allowed — or even encouraged — the plan’s authors to hamstring it.

Why would Florida pass up a chance to restore these world-class inshore waters, the heart of our $9.7 billion fishing industry? The same reason as last time and all the others before: politics. Our water system is working exactly the way the sugar industry wants it, and as the biggest political influence in Florida, sugar gets what sugar wants.

Once again our politicians played on our hopes, pledged to bring back our estuaries and protect them, and then offered us another weak, sugar-approved compromise with the usual “take it or leave it.”

Getting SB 10 and the EAA Reservoir right wouldn’t have cost the sugar industry much at all. Reestablishing the miles and miles of grass meadows in the southern Indian River Lagoon, in Pine Island Sound and across Florida Bay wouldn’t have taken an acre of sugar cane out of production. Neither sugar nor state agencies cared enough about the coasts to give this plan a real chance, though.

Now we’re all expected to support the reservoir, just like we were expected to support the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and Central Everglades Planning Project and Acceler8 and all the other compromises that ended up failing us. Once again, the people we elected are making excuses, assuring us it’s the best deal we can get.

What would happen if we stood up to them and demanded a real solution? Like a plan that doesn’t leave waterside communities exposed to higher risks of cancer and liver failure and neurological disease, or waste nearly $2 billion of taxpayers’ money doing as little as possible to defend public resources.

What if we told the politicians, if you want the support of the fishing community, find a way to make this project work?

The pollution must end. The degradation, surely, must end.

The community cannot tolerate watching a few make egregious profits while the general public suffers. The estuaries are swamped with some 700 billion gallons of tainted runoff from inland last year. Proposed solutions by the establishment would address about one-fifth of the problem.

Let’s stop the delays and subterfuges, and build a flow-way that truly sends the water south.

Karl Wickstrom is founder and editor-in-chief of Florida Sportsman.

Boston Dynamics: leading the world to a dystopian future ... by gimleteye

It is not going to be very long before we will look back at this YouTube video and think -- how quaint.

How many more lines of software code will it take, to instruct an intelligent robot to destroy whatever is obstructing it from its orders? Not fiction, anymore.

The animatronic, AI dog is visually arresting but you should be more rattled by miniaturized drones (cf. killer bees) that are much harder to knock down or to chase.

Is democracy up to the task of mediating the impacts of artificial intelligence on society and the economy? Not so far.

In 2016 we witnessed the weaponization of the internet and the application of artificial intelligence (bots) to augment the manipulation of technologies (cf. social media platforms) to political purposes. Moreover, the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the subsequent deformation of the GOP Congress over "intelligence" issues show how base human impulses -- a president's -- are susceptible to weaponized attacks by our enemies -- Putin's Russia.

These are massively important problems to confront with speed. Instead, we are locked down by screeching; over Trump/Russia collusion, over the 2nd Amendment and whether teachers should be armed with semi-automatic weapons. One wants to just shake our elected by their lapels and say, "Stop! Watch this!"

Even more true today than a year ago: The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up In The World's Face ...

The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face
Alex Pareene, Splinter
4/5/17

If you want to understand intra-GOP warfare, the decision-making process of our president, the implosion of the Republican healthcare plan, and the rest of the politics of the Trump era, you don’t need to know about Russian espionage tactics, the state of the white working class, or even the beliefs of the “alt-right.” You pretty much just need to be in semi-regular contact with a white, reasonably comfortable, male retiree. We are now ruled by men who think and act very much like that ordinary man you might know, and if you want to know why they believe so many strange and terrible things, you can basically blame the fact that a large and lucrative industry is dedicated to lying to them.

Because there was a lot of money in it for various hucksters and moguls and authors and politicians, the conservative movement spent decades building up an entire sector of the economy dedicated to scaring and lying to older white men. For millions of members of that demographic, this parallel media dedicated to lying to them has totally supplanted the “mainstream” media. Now they, and we, are at the mercy of the results of that project. The inmates are running the asylum, if there is a kind of asylum that takes in many mostly sane people and then gradually, over many years, drives one subset of its inmates insane, and also this asylum has the largest military in the world.

Crap: Donna Shalala Why this Congressional Seat? By Geniusofdespair

Run for Senator, run for Governor not this seat Donna Shalala. The 27th District is already over-run with candidates:


Mary Barzee Flores - Former federal judge[11]
Kristen Rosen Gonzalez - Miami Beach City Commissioner[12]
Matt Haggman[13]
Michael Hepburn - Nonprofit vice president[14]
Mark Anthony Person[15]
David Richardson - State Rep.[16]
Jose Javier Rodriguez - State Sen.[17] My pick
Ken Russell - Miami City Commissioner[18]


WHY WHY WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?

Some of the best Democratic candidates in the State are already running here. Why you?

I am not the only one who is moved by Opera singers. By Geniusofdespair

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: A BIG FAT MYTH. By Geniusofdespair

Why get a job at all? That big nut we all have to crack.

Where are those damn "regular person" jobs? A not particularly motivated person could always get a job. There was toll taker, now it doesn't exist. Call center/telephone operator, gone overseas. Store clerk or retail support: Fox Business calls it a "retail apocalypse",  23 big retailers closing stores, i.e. Abercrombie & Fitch is closing 60 stores, Payless is closing 800 stores, and many more have filed for bankruptcy. Then there were taxis and pizza deliveries (driverless cars will make that obsolete according to the news today). You could get a job taking ads in the local newspaper. Oops, gone.

As certain things die in the 21 century what is there to take their place? Specialized computer jobs are not a fit for most of us. Of course the steel and aluminum industry will be booming as we get into a trade war. Even the sugar industry has automated most of its farm jobs. We are automating our jobs away, and our thirst for bargains on-line is killing the brick and mortar stores (where PEOPLE worked).

What do most of the industries spend their money on? Figuring out how to get rid of humans and bust unions. Let's give businesses more tax breaks so they can do that better. The Transit Union in Miami is getting a raw deal right now, they can't get a contract.

What have the disaffected, under-employed - mostly men - turned to: Playing Video Games and reading WAAAY too much crap on-line. Others are binge watching TV.

America is now going through the slowest job growth in 6 years according to MSNBC.

The question is, how do you you earn that $56,378 nut (remember that is 2016)?

In Miami most jobs for regular people pay under $15 an hour. Let's base it on $14 which is $560 a week -- not take-home of course. But if it were take-home,  that would still be only $29,120 a year (working all 52 weeks). That is hardly enough to afford that $56,378 needed to live an average life. And those low paying jobs are not even a dime a dozen anymore. They are disappearing. Where are the jobs, jobs, jobs? I know that is growing, making violent video games.