Carl from Chicago

Business executive interested in history, economics, taxation and energy policy.

NIN At Lollapalooza And Sign Language Interpreter

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Dan and I went to Lollapalooza for the Friday, August 2nd show. We primarily went to see Nine Inch Nails who headlined on the North Stage late Friday night.

I saw NIN at Lollapalooza a few years ago and frankly, the show sucked. I am a big NIN fan and I came away seriously disappointed, especially since Kanye was tearing it up on the other side of the festival. The crowd was dead, the volume was low, they seemed to choose a strange mix of songs, and the light show was boring.

This time NIN put on a great show, with a huge light show, and an awesome sounding band. I was very impressed. Also note the “sign language interpreter” on the lower left. They have these ASL interpreters at many festivals now and they are fun to watch and really seem to get into the music. You can see her dance and move with “The Hand That Feeds” in the short video here. I wanted to see what she was going to do for the notorious song “Closer” but this is more family friendly.

Cross posted at LITGM

Chicago “TIFs”

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In Chicago a “TIF” stands for “Tax Increment Financing”. Here is a link to the City of Chicago web site which explains how a site qualifies as a TIF. Basically a TIF limits the amount of property tax the city can collect at the location and in effect gives the owner / developer a big tax break. There are many reasons listed by the city as to why a location might qualify but supposedly it is used to eliminate “blighting factors”.

The Chicago Reader has written a series of articles about how TIF’s are used to reward already rich developers with tax breaks. The Sun Times wrote one this week:

It’s time for another serious look at the pros and cons of Tax Increment Financing in Chicago — a tiff over TIF — the controversial economic development program that’s supposed to revitalize struggling neighborhoods by offering financial incentives to potential investors.

The “sweeteners” come from property taxes that, to a large extent, might otherwise be spent on education, housing, parks, libraries, and public safety.

That’s defensible when there’s enough tax revenue to go around, but it’s problematic in lean times, like now, when Chicago is closing schools, firing teachers, reducing library hours and trying to fight violent crime with fewer police officers.

Another concern is that many TIF “districts” are in affluent areas, especially in and around downtown, which violates the intent of the state law that created the program in 1977 to revitalize “blighted” communities.

Here is a project that is being built under a TIF; this is for a $29M park alongside the Chicago River at Canal and Lake Street. the “River Point TIF” is obviously located in an area that doesn’t appear to be tied to much blight…

While it is likely that politically connected developers and clout-heavy individuals are tied to this process, on the other hand this is one of the few ways the city actually and concretely assists businesses that generate all of the economic value for them. Businesses pay very high property taxes in Cook County / the Loop and then the tax breaks fall back to the selective few that run through this process. It is a very opaque process and there is limited information available on the TIF accounts and funding.

Cross posted at LITGM

“Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin” by Ben Judah

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Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin is a recent book on Russia and Putin, published by the author Ben Judah. This book has been recognized by sources such as Bloomberg as an important book on modern Russia. Here is the review I put up at Amazon.com (I bought the book on Kindle) and I strongly recommend this book and the author, as well.

I picked up this book based on positive reviews in Bloomberg and elsewhere and was very impressed. I have a reasonably good understanding of Russia based on military history and a decent understanding of the global energy business.
 
The first thing that comes to my mind is how brave the author must be to go around Russia asking questions about Putin. From my understanding and this book that is a very risky thing to do since the primary purpose of the security apparatus in Russia is to keep Putin in power.
 
The book follows Putin from the chaos in post-collapse St Petersburg where he worked for a local politician through his election to presidency, the Medvedev years (which were actually the Putin years), and then back into his current stint in charge.
 
The book is not all negative about Putin, which is what I find most interesting. The oligarchs that took control of the energy and media companies were extremely un popular and Putin brought them to heel. This was in fact popular among much of the population. He also took energy revenues and used them to pay some salaries and pensions and bring some modest amount of stability to the poor. And Moscow was substantially re built with sky scrapers and other elements. He also resolved (for the time being) the situation in Chechnya by allying with the current warlord and this momentarily resolved a horrible active war that was being fought in an embarrassing way for Russia.
 
It is very interesting to see how close associates of Putin, even those in his Judo club and KGB days, have become billionaires. They have taken control of the energy infrastructure and then a swiss trading function is another source of his supposed vast personal wealth (unproven).
 
Judah talks to Navalny, the activist against Putin’s latest election, and this is insightful because today Navalny is subject to a phantom prosecution designed to deter him from elective office. You can jump between the articles in the book and the latest news and this is very helpful.
 
There is a lot in this book. It covers an amazing amount of topics from coast to coast, including the border wars with China and the far, Far East. The author attempts nothing less than a comprehensive, border to border analysis of modern Russia.

I will be writing multiple blog posts out of the concepts in this book, including their relations with China, governance, and the links to the global energy industry. Once again, I cannot recommend this book highly enough and works such as this when the author dared to traverse all of Russia and ask people about a man who hates people asking questions, need to be supported.

Cross posted at LITGM.

The End of Media

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I was killing some time downtown when I went into Reckless Records, one of the few surviving independent record shops. I browsed a bit and saw the new CD from Grant Hart, formerly of Husker Du, and bought it for $12.99. Why not. I loved Husker Du growing up and even bought a CD from Grant Hart’s first solo act, a long, long time ago and it was decent.

After I got home I ripped the CD using iTunes. I hadn’t done that for so long that it wasn’t even set up to find the songs on the Gracenotes online library, and for a second I was panicked that I’d have to put the song titles in by hand, like I used to have to do many years ago. But I checked a box in preferences and it found everything and then the CD ripped in just a few minutes. I remember staring at my computer for half an hour in the early years when it took eons to rip a CD.

After I was done I was staring at the CD. What to do with it? I gave away all of my CD’s a while ago. I used to keep a few under the TV cabinet for when I was driving but now I have satellite radio or I hook up my iPod when it’s just me in the car. So after a bit of thought I… just threw it in the garbage. The CD kind of wasn’t that great (haven’t given it much of a chance but it was very weird) and if I was going to have ONE CD in the house, it wasn’t going to be Grant Hart.

That is truly the end of media.

Cross posted at LITGM