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Dan and I have the habit of sending boxes of books back and forth after reading them, and I recently received a large contingent of books which was much appreciated. We both are trying to stay away from military history reading to the extent we can because we’ve read so much of it over the years. In this instance I take the book “Gulag” which is an excellent history of that horrible system of jails and concentration camps that were used to repress the Russia people (and their satellites), and utilize its otherwise completely depressing contents to support our direct lighting system for tomato plants.

A positive use for this important but incredibly depressing book. On the other side I should balance it out with the Black Book of Communism.

Cross posted at LITGM

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Below is parade organizer Andy Thayer (the white guy on the right side). Conveniently for him a smiling photo of Chairman Mao is going right past him, he’d be proud. I’ve seen Mr. Thayer on the news (that’s how I recognized him) and at least he talks about non-violent protests a lot.

A little bit of humor – “Don’t Bomb Me, Bro” is a take on the “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” internet meme. Also check out the sign linking LBJ, Nixon, Bush & Obama. In general I didn’t see any of the traditional “Bush = Hitler” type signs nor did I see any particular anti-Republican signs. These protestors were mostly against everyone and they did not like Obama or the Dems, either.

Look at this completely ridiculous sign of some sort of Iranian scientist with his child (probably an actor) saying stop the US and Israel from murdering Iranian scientists. The group pledges solidarity with Iran. There hardly is a less popular group than Iranian nuclear scientists but in the US it is his right to pledge allegiance to Iran, I guess.

As I said above I was surprised about the vitrol that the protestors had for the Democrats. This guy couldn’t make his distaste for the Democrats any clearer.

These 2 with the bandanas and the one with the Guy Fawkes mask backwards on his head are the ones that the authorities are keeping their eyes on as likely troublemakers. I would not bet against the police they are out in massive force and seem organized and with high morale.

Just like in Madison you need to tax the rich and to help unions. They are out here marching with these looney tunes it can’t be helping their cause.

If you want to hear the erudite chants here is a movie… “This is f*cked up, this is f*cking bullsh*t”

And another movie of the communists marching… note the rise of the Hammer and Sickle. Another traditional group marching to represent the 99%, apparently.




Cross posted at LITGM

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Went down into the loop to patronize a local business for lunch. By most accounts business has been bad because the city is on lock down for these protestors. The streets did seem very empty for a beautiful sunny Sunday in May.

The police had a base on the north side of the new Art Institute Wing. They blocked the entrance with city snowplows and left a car in the front in case someone wanted to enter or exit.

Here someone is moving the car so one of the officials’ cars can leave.

This is the start of the protests. The journalists were in a big red tourist bus so that they could take pictures of the proceedings. Probably there were as many journalists and hangers on (who weren’t joining the chants, just watching as if it was on TV) as there were marchers.

Here is the start of the protestors with the 2 police trucks. The protestors were smart to put the war veterans against the war up front, there were a few of them. They certainly earned their right to protest, the rest, not so much.

You can see one of the journalists pointing their camera at me and the other people watching this on the corner. I can say with certainty that everyone I saw there that wasn’t marching was just there to see the spectacle. When someone came out of the crowd with handouts no one took them or showed any sympathy.

Cross posted at LITGM

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They had the streets in River North blocked off (Ohio) in order to let the VIP’s come in from the airport. They mainly came in long white vans with black Chrysler 300 cars, and some other high-end ones mixed in as you can see below.

A bentley! Must be someone important.

Ha this was funny some how a cab was in the midst of them and he was speeding through traffic alongside the VIP’s.

This the answer to the question “how many policemen can you fit into one van?” A lot. I can see 8 outside plus 1 driver.

Cross posted at LITGM

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It has been quiet but tense here in Chicago awaiting the NATO protests now that the G8 is being held at Camp David. There hasn’t been a lot of action but the police presence is heavy.

Here is a view of the Boeing HQ that has been boarded up with fences setup. I think that our Mayor didn’t approve of this because he wants to see “business as usual” rather than everyone hunkering down for a riot but there will be some sort of protest here on Monday due to Boeing’s role as a defense supplier for NATO (or whatever the “rationale” is for the protestors).

I was driving back to Chicago from Champaign (located in the middle of the state) last weekend when I saw boats exactly like this (with the red Coast Guard logo on the side of them) coming north on I-57 on the back of a truck. I did not see the machine gun in front, however. These boats are patrolling the Chicago River and a couple of times I saw the machine gun up front manned. It would be interesting to determine what you’d do with a heavy machine gun in a crowd control situation, but that likely is for a more formal threat to NATO.

Helicopters are overhead all day long and you can hear the droning of their propellers. That building next to them was (using CGI) part of the Transformers movie – it was split in half I think.

When the Bulls were winning championships the police stationed cars in groups “waiting to roll” to the scene of the disturbance (if it occurs). Here are a bunch of cars waiting in River North. They were all gone later.

At night I walked along Michigan avenue and there were many less tourists than normal given that it was a beautiful May Friday night. I have been receiving promotions from local restaurants trying to drum up business and I’ve taken advantage of that as well.

Cross posted at LITGM

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The local River North restaurant Rockit uses former album covers as binders for their menus.  I was surprised one day to see Tarkus by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

While Tarkus would be an obscure album today (the average person who is familiar with classic rock might know “Lucky Man” and a couple other songs) it is hard to think that in 1971, when this album came out, it reached #1 on the billboard charts in the UK (and #9 in the US).  According to wikipedia, this album landed between “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones and “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel.

To put this in context – “Sticky Fingers” was one of the run of 4 fantastic albums that put the Rolling Stones in the pantheon of rock – they were 1) Beggars Banquet 2) Let it Bleed 3) Sticky Fingers 4) Exile on Main Street.  And everyone knows Bridge over Troubled Water.

And yet Tarkus, and mostly Emerson, Lake & Palmer, is completely and utterly unknown.  Nowadays Tarkus would be viewed as a niche product, un-commercial for radio / MP3 singles but perhaps capturing a tiny but devoted market.  The song Tarkus takes up a whole side, and is over 20 minutes long, a series of sub-songs linked into one big song.  If you even thought about releasing a jazz / semi-metal / progressive rock album (CD) like this today you’d get laughed out of the record executive’s office (if they have offices anymore).

At least I was entertained seeing Tarkus as part of my lunch menu.  To think that one day long ago that this would be more than a minor trivia item, or a piece of kind of ugly artwork, is almost unthinkable.

Cross posted at LITGM

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There are many blogging tools to use; over at LITGM we use “Blogger” which is owned by Google (and free) and over at Chicago Boyz and at other sites we use Word Press.  Many of the up and coming sites are now on Tumblr, which looks pretty much like another blogging platform to me.

There was a Louis CK sketch where he talks about how amazing it is to fly on an airplane and connect to the Internet and all the things we take for granted while everyone whines about it.  I felt the same way as I started to look at some of the new technologies available under Blogger.

Blogger just rolled out “dynamic views”.  I am not a blogging technical expert but in laymans’ terms, you get a lot of real estate back that is taken up with static page elements like the blogroll on the side and post categories and comments.  When you hover your cursor over these items, they “pop up” (dynamically) and then you can click on them if you wish else they don’t take up space otherwise.

Another advantage is that they load up your blog when you turn it on (you see the Blogger “gears” running) and then you can view it a bunch of different ways, from a “classic” view to a “magazine” view or “flip card” which is cool if you have a lot of photos because you can see them at a glance and click to get at the post underneath.

Like everything else, they are trying to get the bugs out at Blogger.  When they initially rolled it out, you couldn’t see items like your blogroll / links because those “widgets” didn’t work with dynamic views.  Some super-technical web nerds could make it work but the average person wouldn’t unless they wanted to hack html code.  There are sites and message boards out there with many comments bemoaning the new technology and what is lacking but of course Google has added many of these widgets back so that they now work with dynamic views and at least you can see comments and labels (basically their version of tags or categories).

I turned “the most important site on the internet” Drunk Bear Fans into a dynamic views site and it is pretty cool.  Since there is more page real estate (the tabs on the side only pop out when you hover over them) I was able to make the pictures bigger and I also did some other housecleaning.  This is more of a test bed than LITGM so I will keep working over there until it is ready for “prime time” and then maybe we will kick over LITGM, too.  For now we are looking at the header because you still have to work on that in html to get the great pictures up there that Gerry inserts but I am sure one of the tech guys at Google is working on that in a frenzy and that will be in some upcoming version.

It is simply amazing how far the technology has come on blogging and web development FOR FREE.  Dan was chuckling at how much just the hard drive would have cost back when we were in college 20+ years ago to store the pictures, movies and other elements associated with a site like LITGM, which also is free along with all the development time Google has put into this platform (plus the fact that they bought the company that made the original technology in the first place).

I was in the dot.com “boom” era in the early 2000′s in the middle of all the companies that imploded.  I can tell you first-hand that building a site that a 10 year old could do with dynamic views would have cost millions and millions of dollars, and it would have crawled.  The cloud based infrastructure that these sites use and the power of the tools that they give developers and non-developers alike FOR FREE is amazing.    For a couple of minutes it is worth stepping back and reflecting on that.  Then back to complaining about everything, just like Louis CK says.

Cross posted at LITGM

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Recently I was walking in River North and a restaurant was touting their “local farming” element. Fine but that hay bale seemed to be sprouting some extra fungus. I don’t think Dan would feed it to his animals.

I liked this gull on a lamp.

Dan and I have an ongoing complex analysis going on linking the city of Baltimore and tattoos of the skull variety. Here is a high end rug for the richest drug dealer in that town.

As part of the ongoing series “Cars that Should Not be Left in the Street” I bring you – a Bentley convertible.

Last and least the giant garish statue of the famous girl with her skirt blowing up.

Cross posted at LITGM

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In Chicago a new real estate boom is occurring. There are 3 large hotels and 2 major apartment skyscrapers being built in River North.

There is also some good news on the “abandoned building” front. At 111 W Wacker, there is an abandoned, partially finished skyscraper that was going to be an 80+ story condo / hotel. They recently changed the facade in the front of the building as you can see in the photo above and claim to be working on completing the building, sitting idle since the 2008 crash. According to this article, it is to become a 65 floor apartment building, apparently satisfying an insatiable demand for high end apartments in the city (also due to the fact that people were having trouble selling condominiums in this real estate market). We’ll see if it actually gets built but this is a good start nonetheless. I wonder if it hurts a building to sit out half-finished, exposed to the elements all winter, but apparently this isn’t stopping the new owner. Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

On the other hand, there is a Staybridge Suite building in River North that has been covered with some sort of strange tarp for years. If you go to this link you can see the odd shape that the building was supposed to have. I will believe that they finish this damn thing when I see actual construction, although they do keep the lights on at night. The f’d up part of this is that Staybridge is an actual company – I hope that this leads to some bad publicity or something for them, leaving a giant half built eyesore in the middle of Chicago. Hopefully they make some headway on this before the current mini real estate boom ends in dust and misery like the last one.

Cross posted at LITGM

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When I started out with computers it was all Apple. We had Apple II machines and I remember the “green screens” (and then an “ochre” screen). It was quite exciting to have 2 disk drives, back in the day when you stored your programs on disk rather than on a hard drive in the machine. My father had a background in computing from the earliest days and was happy to invest in computers when hardly anyone else I knew had one and this helped me to get exposure which has been a big help in my career. The most exciting games were Choplifter which was great with the joystick (thanks to Wikipedia for helping me with all these memories), Castle Wolfenstein which startled me when the guards shouted at you, and of course the epic Wizardry game for which I have the cover sheet of the rules manual right here.

In college I had an IBM PC XT. This machine was also state of the art for the day and its casing was some sort of nearly industrial metal that you could run over with a truck. By then we had started to move on to 3.5″ disks which seemed very futuristic when compared to a 5.2″ floppy. I remember actually moving this computer around which was not simple because it was the opposite of portable.

At work we had “luggable” machines which were compacs. I am not sure which version we had it may have looked like this I do remember that it was 1) very heavy 2) if I lost it I’d probably be fired 3) it had an eerie screen color that was described as amber.

Over the years I ended up in the Windows world because this was the tool for business and in various jobs you had to program on and work with Windows laptops and desktops.  Given that, it made sense to just stay in the Windows world for my home PC’s of which I’ve had many but are quite boring so I will spare you that update.

Cross posted at LITGM

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While organizing my old photos I came across 2007 pictures from a visit to Castillo de San Marcos, a fort in St. Augustine, Florida. The fortress was built by the Spanish as part of the time they occupied Florida.

The fortress is of the typical “bastion” type. I am not an expert in this era so I relied on wikipedia which had a nice description. Apparently the grades were built so that cannon would be more effective aiming downward as attackers neared the fortress.

Here is a view of one of the cannon pointed out towards the ocean from which attackers may arrive.

This is a view of the fort itself with the courtyard in the middle.

There were many cannons at the fort. The cannons weren’t all from that fort; some were donated from Spain or other museums. This is a four-pounder.

Here is a 16 inch mortar.

Note the fine detailing on these cannon. Very interesting.

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Yahoo! had a recent article titled “1 in 2 New Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed“. From the article:

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder

The article discusses the “plight” of an individual with a college degree who is working as a barista at Starbucks because he cannot find employment in his chosen field (note – is “barista” a masculine or feminine term, or neutral?)

And what was this individuals’ major? CREATIVE WRITING.

I often contemplate what someone with that major thinks their job opportunities really are out there in the world. Let’s see…

- You could use your skills to write something, like this blog, for instance (and cash in all the nickels you will receive, maybe)

- You could go to Hollywood and try to write for a show or screenplay (good luck – the competition is ferocious)

- You could try to write that serious book that is in your head (uh… and there is a 1 in a billion chance that it will sell enough copies, should it be published, to feed you for even one month)

I’m not saying that creative writing isn’t interesting, fun, or could lead to pay that could sustain your life. I just don’t think that you need a DEGREE to do this, and if you are “banking” on this out of the gate, then you are in for some very likely serious hard knocks in the cash flow area.

Also, it isn’t clear to me that “creative writing” as a degree is necessary to be a “creative writer”. I would be interested to hear of a single popular author or even widely read blogger or screenwriter that has a degree called “creative writing”. Since I must admit that I am not sure even what “creative writing” is I looked it up at trusty old wikipedia and here is their definition:

Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems. Writing for the screen and stage, screenwriting and playwriting respectively, typically have their own programs of study, but fit under the creative writing category as well.

Who would you even send a resume to for “creative writing”? If this definition was true, you aren’t sending it to any newspapers or technical writing firms (there are a lot of computer specifications being written) or even ad agencies; I don’t think that most screenwriters hire underlings and certainly the big film studios don’t hire you out of college and train you.

The article goes on to explain what is likely obvious to most readers:

College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.

I can’t imagine that these findings are a surprise to anyone. If you don’t have connections, you are better off getting a practical science-based or business-based degree (you can put computer science in whatever bucket you want) to get your foot in the door in business or in government. It IS true that many, many people started out with liberal arts degrees and rose to the top (often becoming lawyers) – but many of those that DID rise (in recent years) already had massive connections and were able to get in to elite graduate schools or careers like investment banking where only the most elite can apply. When you eliminate the liberal arts programs from elite Ivy-league or private universities from the mix (like Northwestern), getting a liberal arts degree from a non-elite school is going to leave you marooned in your job hunt. Probably 90%+ of liberal arts degree holders that are graduating now come from these non-elite schools (just a guess), so those are the ones likely “underemployed” or working as a barista somewhere.

What is surprising to me is that this is a surprise to anyone, at all.

Cross posted at LITGM

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Once I was having a conversation with a friend after a few drinks and he said

What would the business world be like if it really was the way it appeared on soap operas?

On soap operas business is a clandestine, cloak and dagger operation.  You are forever opening drawers for obscure documents while the other guy isn’t there, thinking about conspiracies, and flirting / sleeping with one another.  People have large offices, secretaries, and complex relationships with everyone they encounter.

And very little actual work seems to get done.

When I was growing up everyone I knew had a job of some sort.  You started out mowing lawns and shoveling snow, and girls babysat.  Some people in rural areas (we weren’t near fields) de-tasseled corn, which could be a brutal job out in the hot sun.  When you were 16 you graduated into a new type of job, a more formal job with an actual boss on a payroll and with a paycheck, in retail or at a fast food restaurant or something like that.  You worked during the school year, and then you worked a lot during the summer, and you worked during spring break (if you could).  When you were back from college in the summer you worked too, or stayed on campus and found some sort of job there, instead.

Now kids don’t get jobs at nearly the same rate for a variety of reasons – they have a lot more homework than we did, and parents want them to focus on school as the highest priority.  Plus the minimum wage is higher now, and the retail and fast food jobs are often going to full-grown adults that need the work in this economy.  For whatever reason, I see a lot less kids (16-20) that seem to be potential full-time college student candidates doing actual work when I am out shopping or elsewhere in the type of jobs I used to work.

But instead there are many more TV programs that appear to show work.  The most prominent is “The Office”, which actually has many more truthful elements of actual work than the traditional soap operas.  The divide between management and staff is more obvious, and the staffers reflect their stereotypical personas (the semi-autistic or boring accountant, the pretty secretary, the beaten-down HR worker, the semi-optimistic sales staff, and those hangers on that have somehow survived rounds of layoffs but you can’t quite figure out what they do), while the actual workers are in the basement, moving paper with a forklift and having a culture of their own.

The general spirit of the office is the absolute minimum level of competence and business skills to keep the organization afloat, with a chimerical camaraderie of forced meetings and boring encounters.  There is a continuous focus on the head office and corporate, which is certainly realistic, since change do derive from the top often with little knowledge of what is happening “on the ground”.

Since many kids don’t have jobs or actual contact with formal managers, shows like “The Office” do in fact color their view of the traditional workplace.  While many kids can understand what is obviously real and what is obviously fake, the “accoutrements” of power (secretary, an enclosed office, a conference call relationship with corporate) seem relevant.  Certainly living in the “cube farm” is not a good fate, sitting at a communal table or small beige cube adjacent to obnoxious, dopey or deranged co-workers is to be escaped at all costs.

An abstract concept of “work” and “management” unhinged from “actual work” or “actual management” appears to be at its highest in the (wealthy) Arab world.  This excellent article in Bloomberg describes the job situation for young adults in Saudi Arabia.

Today, all three still live at home, get pocket money from their parents and are jobless in Riyadh, capital of the world’s largest crude oil exporter.  When the three Saudi men met each other in school 11 years ago, they dreamed that by the time they had reached their mid-20s, each would have a well-paid job, a house, a new car and maybe a wife

Most of the work in Saudi Arabia is actually done by guest workers or expatriates.  The “dirty” work of construction, domestics, etc… is done by fellow Arabs from countries that aren’t sparsely populated and endowed with natural resources, and the “thinking” work of managing and running businesses is done by expatriates from around the world.

The article goes on to explain how young adult Saudis don’t want to work in supermarkets, construction, or as cashiers.  They want the jobs that they see on TV – the managerial jobs, sitting behind a desk, in a climate controlled and first class office building.

“In my previous job, I used to sit at a desk in my own office,” he says. “I want the same standard of work.”  Abdullah, who has a high school diploma, says he has been offered “bad” jobs: as a waiter, security guard and cashier.

The interesting part of this is that the Saudis want those jobs without any sort of skills that would make them relevant in the wider, competitive world.  They have a concept of what “work” means and this abstract concept is completely unhinged from any sort of skill building or “work your way up from the bottom” mentality that could support it on a larger scale.

This is the ultimate abstraction of work; routine, office tasks with demanded accoutrements that have no bearing on the underlying economy or added value of goods or services.

Cross posted at LITGM

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A view of Trump and the IBM building on a clear spring day.

A view of the Aon building (they are moving to London, by the way) and the new Prudential Tower at night.

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The flag being unfurled at the Chicago White Sox opener.

The bridge to the new wing of the Chicago Art Institute.

Cross posted at LITGM

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I was watching the TV show “Metal Evolution” (now I am going to have to watch all the shows online, too) when I heard a quote so funny I almost had tears running down my face.  They had an interview with Gary Holt of Exodus and he said (on the topic of his band “selling out” to the record company)

If I had to do it all over again I’d just keep writing songs about killing people

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Recently Bloomberg had an article about Italian gas prices exceeding $9/gallon.

Austerity measures introduced by Prime Minister Mario Monti’s government have pushed Italian gas prices to the highest in Europe, an average of 1.82 euros per liter, or $9.17 per gallon, with taxes accounting for about 54 percent of the total,

The article goes on to talk about how this price increase impacts ordinary Italians just attempting to get around and go to their job.

The Italians hit hardest by higher gas taxes are those like teacher Cioni — working people who live in areas poorly served by public transportation.

Even in the US, where taxes on gasoline are high but do not comprise 54% of the total cost like they do in Italy, driving now requires actual trade-offs as you near $5 / gallon gas.

In the suburbs of Chicago you typically drive long distances during the normal course of the day. For instance it is over 30 miles from the Chicago loop downtown to Naperville each way. Since you probably will be driving around a bit when you get there, it is reasonable to think that you might burn 3-4 gallons of gas depending on traffic and mileage, along with $5 in tolls (depending on the route you take). If you figure that gas is $5 / gallon, then that round trip just cost TWENTY DOLLARS. Note that this analysis doesn’t consider the wear and tear on your car… this is just the incremental cost of the journey.

I remember growing up that $20 was a lot of money. You could live for a few days with $20 in your pocket (just the occasional fast-food meal, some gas, etc…). Now you spend $20 EVERY TIME YOU GET IN THE CAR.

This type of taxation does severely punish the “working” poor. It doesn’t punish the poor who aren’t working nearly as much, because they can take the laborious time to use whatever public transportation is available. The working poor, on the other hand, are essentially “on the clock” and if you are near or a bit above minimum wage you are probably taking home maybe $10 / hr after taxes. Thus the trip from Naperville (or a nearby suburb) to and from Chicago just took up TWO HOURS of your working time.

A family member who lives in Naperville talked about a neighbor who works at a popular (casual) restaurant in the city as a waitress and I started doing the math in my head… the money would have to be significantly better than from a local restaurant just to make up for the difference in gas prices and tolls alone.

I expect that over time gas prices at this level will significantly impact car-buying behavior.  When I purchased an Altima in 2010 (which I subsequently sold to a family member because it was too big for my parking garage and accumulated wear and tear) I bought a 4 cylinder engine, which made me seem like a minority on the highway because everyone else seemed to have a 6 cylinder.  However, the 4 cylinder engine (which is fine for a cruising car like the Altima, it isn’t a sports car after all) gets better gas mileage which will pay off very quickly with gas at $5 / gallon.

I expect that kids learning to drive will begin to associate driving with a very high marginal cost – i.e. each time you get in the car, money is flying out of your pocket.  When I started driving insurance costs were the big barrier, followed by the price of the car and then gasoline.  Thus once you bought and insured the car, you might as well drive it. Behavior that lasts a lifetime often begins when you are first starting out, so those that are starting driving today might view it as an occasional luxury or something to do as a necessity rather than as an activity in the normal course of life.

For the working poor, high gas prices tied to high taxes (especially in Europe) make their lives much more difficult because it cuts right against their take-home pay and often they need to drive to reach their jobs.  Since the poorer individuals often live far from where the jobs are located in the service sector (i.e. downtown Chicago is where a lot of night life is but the cheaper housing is often in the far-flung suburbs) this will limit their opportunities to local employers which could cut their opportunities significantly.

For younger people starting out, the incremental cost of a trip will make driving a much more “thoughtful” experience and trips will often be combined or deferred altogether.  Since habits you develop as a teenager often stay with you for many years or even a lifetime this could cause a seismic shift in behavior, away from driving.  Whether that is good or bad depends on your position; it certainly hurts the vitality of the economy because for most parts of America public transportation is not convenient, reasonably priced, or even available.

Cross posted at LITGM

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Today governments across the United States are facing budget shortfalls caused primarily by making promises in terms of pensions and benefits to workers that no longer are supportable. Recently I was in California and I saw this sign in a bathroom at a popular tourist attraction.

The key concept to understanding how we got into this predicament is the word “craven”. Here is the official definition per Webster:

lacking the least bit of courage : contemptibly fainthearted

Politicians lacked the courage to stand up to public sector workers, predominantly the unionized ones like teachers, firefighters, and policemen, because negotiating with them seemed to be all downside:

1) If they are angry, they can go on strike, disrupting schools, hospitals and essential public services
2) They are voters (predominantly Democratic) and represent a (mostly) unified voting block that is prepared to petition to achieve their goals in the media (which is usually sympathetic to their cause, since they are mostly Democratic, too)
3) Many of them (Police, Firefighters, and to some extent teachers) present sympathetic postures to the public; fighting with them is a no-win situation (even if you win, you lose)
4) Their army of retirees often are still local and also vocal and organized and prepared to demonstrate as well, although they are not in a position to block essential services

Thus the “craven” route was simply to capitulate – write up promises to TODAY’s government workers and RETIREES and then just “kick the can” into the future to the date when those promises came due. Today’s politicians won’t be there when the bills come due (Daley most famously sold off Chicago’s assets, signed long term unaffordable deals for labor peace, and walked off into the sunset) so this fits their short term strategy to a tee.

However, in the near term, I think that politicians’ inherent “craven” behavior will work in REVERSE, giving us an opportunity to tackle the root cause of the problem. How do I come to that (preliminary) conclusion?

It is simple – there are really only two solutions available for politicians today (in places like Illinois, California, and Detroit, where it is literally collapsing) and in the near term in more well run or well funded places:

1) Raise taxes AND cut services drastically to pay for union benefits and pensions
2) grab a hold of the problem, cut payments to today’s workers and retirees and cut their benefits and costs, thus leaving more dollars for services TODAY and the opportunity to AVOID tax increases

So let’s say that you are a politician running for office in a few years – what do you promise constituents?  You have to promise #2 - that you won’t cut services today and won’t raise taxes - or you won’t get elected.  I’d love to see people run for office on a platform of #1 and get elected – it won’t happen.  Now what will actually happen a lot is that politicians will promise #2 but do a variant of #1 to get elected (because it is VERY hard to take on the entrenched unions when you come into office) – but then the financials will collapse further and they will be FORCED into making a harder choice, or they will come up for re-election and be drummed out of office.

Soon the EASIER or “more” craven approach will just be to get elected on a basis of reducing government costs on the backs of existing workers and retirees and chopping compensation to avoid raising taxes or reducing services.  Thus the entire process that led to our current debacle will operate in reverse, with bad consequences and subsequent demonizing for government employees as the root case of the issue.

Government workers, especially unionized ones, will see many victories but a long term defeat on all these issues.  In the end sympathies won’t be enough to offset the crippling taxes and immense service cuts that are necessary to pay for past politician promises.  The politicians will side with the majority, who will have to reform the system, even though this reform will be rocky and filled with failures and vitriol.

Politically craven behavior, which dug this grave, will work in reverse.  This is a hope, at least.

Cross posted at LITGM

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There has been a preservationist battle over the Prentice Women’s Hospital, which looks like a strange concrete spaceship from a 1950′s sci-fi movie. Here is an article from a preservationist web site describing the building and its history. From the article

A concrete, cloverleaf-shaped icon, Prentice Women’s Hospital has added drama and interest to the Chicago skyline for nearly four decades.

One of the current issues is that it isn’t adding ANY interest to the Chicago skyline anymore. The reason for this is that myriad other, larger buildings have been added all around it – the only reason that I can see this at all (other than being on the street, facing it), is that I am atop a building that ACTUALLY is part of the skyline and looking down.

While I am all for preservation in various forms it seems odd to demand that a hospital retain an old facility like this. The facility is clearly a high maintenance item – just look at it – and can’t be very practical to refit for today’s technology and practices. And there is nothing else to do with this facility – it is in the middle of the hospital campus so you can’t just turn it into some “boom boom” nightclub like you could here in River North, or even into some sort of weird shopping mecca like Bloomingdales did with the old Shriner’s building (site of the circus).

I support the preservationists but this one seems like a lost cause because it would obviously be impractical and fiendishly expensive to do anything with it, and it isn’t in a good location for alternative uses. The building is also too tiny to be called part of the skyline anymore. And plus, it is damn ugly.

Cross posted at LITGM

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On the masthead of our blog at “Life in the Great Midwest” it used to read “We Shill for Nobody”. And that is still true. But if we find something that may be interesting to others we like to share it.

Recently I bought a Sony Blu-Ray Disc Player BDP-BX58. This replaces my existing Samsung DVD player (which worked fine). I bought it, after rebate, for about $100 at Costco.

I bought it to try out the internet through my television. It also allows you to stream other media (pictures from your PC, songs from your PC, etc…) through your TV which I wasn’t as interested in.

Although it is a DVD player, I only put a DVD in to make sure it worked and all the wires, sound, etc… were working correctly through my surround sound system. I remember reading an article about a focus group that tested a smart phone with a bunch of high school students – the researcher said in all the time he watched them text, stream, and run apps, he never saw them use the smart phone to MAKE A PHONE CALL. Like them, I was basically using this DVD player as a gateway to the internet not as a DVD playing device.

I went to You Tube and immediately started having fun. Recently I was at a friends’ condo and we were discussing music (for hours, since I know a lot of obscure stuff, but he dwarfs my knowledge on the topic). It was cool to just type in a band like “Mastodon” and all their videos come up, including all their appearances on late night shows like Letterman. Obviously there is a lot of stuff on You Tube and it is fun to watch it through your TV.

There is an app in the Apple Store for your iPhone or iPad that allows you to control the Sony DVD devices. I loaded it up and went through a process to “register” the device (you have to load the app, and then have the DVD player on in a setup area, and follow the instructions to connect), and then you are able to TYPE in your iPhone to control the DVD player. This is very important because if you are searching on You Tube, for example, and have to hunt and peck through the woeful number / letter one at a time system, you will soon throw the remote away in disgust. Once you turn on the DVD player and you can control the whole process through your iPhone it completely enables the You Tube search experience, at a minimum.

A lot of people use Netflix through the TV, streaming, but I have plenty of movies queued up through Direct TV that I am not watching already so I am not that interested. But for many people streaming Netflix (and not having cable or satellite at all) would be a great model. How good Netflix is as far as quality for streaming depends on your internet connection… since my connection is so-so it likely would be lousy.

I also tried Hulu. There is a lot of content there and it was $7.99/month. It is the same content that I already have on Direct TV so I didn’t buy the service but, along with Netflix and a hi-def antenna for sports, you’d be doing pretty well.

You can also browse the internet through the DVD player. This wasn’t very good. Even a simple blog like LITGM comes through poorly; the player has trouble with more complex pages and navigation is awful. This one is clearly first generation so there is a ways to go until browsing web pages through this device would be remotely satisfactory.

What does this mean for Sony? I am astounded that you can buy a clearly physical device, that comes in a box, with an HDMI cable (those things used to be $50 by themselves), a remote, along with software and the ability to download a controller through the app store (for free)… for $100? It means bad things for them, clearly. My old Samsung DVD player, although perfectly useful, is basically getting thrown out because if this new device (with Blu-Ray) is worth $100, then that means my Samsung is worth about 2 cents.

The rise of things that don’t require manufacturing, don’t require packaging, through the internet, are amazing. On the other hand, Apple clearly does do manufacturing, but they have a remarkably small number of products when compared to the bewildering array of code numbers and variants produced by Sony. I remember an article somewhere on the internet where Steve Jobs recommended that one of the hardware manufacturers drastically reduce their number of products; for Apple you can count the number of products between iPads, iPods, and Macs, while you’d need to quit your day job to count up everything that Sony offers.

This Blu-Ray device, warts and all (especially w/internet browsing, as opposed to apps like You Tube), is amazing. What isn’t amazing for Sony is I can’t see how they can profit when it costs $100 at retail. Hardware is clearly getting hammered by software right now.

Cross posted at LITGM