New! – Your Ironic Middle-Aged Haikus of the Day

Returned rental car
They tried to charge extra hours
Not what they quoted

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Your doctor’s office
Miscoded the procedure
Insurance won’t pay

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Modern vampire tales
Even square beta guys know
It’s porn for teen girls

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Once upon a time
We laughed at denture glue ads
Sadly, no longer

Chicago “TIFs”

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

The Baroque Computers of the Apocalypse

The Second World War demonstrated the devastation that could be caused by even conventional bombing…and was capped by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the intensification of the Cold War and the first Soviet atomic bomb test…and the Communist aggressiveness demonstrated by the outbreak of war in Korea…air defense of the United States became an issue of very high priority.

During World War II, the British had been successful with their innovative network of radar stations linked to command centers at which the positions of friendly and enemy aircraft were plotted continuously and orders issued to fighter squadrons and antiaircraft gun sites. In the postwar era, though, the increased speeds of combat aircraft, combined with the utter devastation that could result from a single failed intercept–one plane, one bomb, one city–drove the view that something better than manual plotting would be required.

Although digital computers were still very much in their infancy in 1953, the solution to the air defense problem chosen in that year was a computer-based system to be known as SAGE…the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. Real-time information from multiple radar sites flowed in digital form to the computers at the SAGE Direction Centers. The computers tracked the targets, friendly, unknown, and enemy, and displayed them on dozens of video displays at each Center. Battle-management personnel at these displays made the determination of which enemy targets should be engaged with what priority, and what friendly aircraft should engage them, and the computers then calculated the optimum intercept courses. For certain fighter aircraft types, the interception commands could be relayed directly via datalink, obviating the necessity for voice communication. SAGE Direction Centers also had control over high-speed BOMARC antiaircraft missiles…these carried small nuclear weapons intended to ensure that a near miss would not allow enemy bombers to escape.

At the heart of each Direction Center was a pair of  computers, AN/FSQ-7, duplexed for reliability. Each pair contained fifty thousand vacuum tubes, covered almost an acre of floor space, and consumed about 3 megawatts of power. (Some sources cite the 50,000-tube number as being for each computer of the pair–either way, it’s a LOT of vacuum tubes.) Here’s a fairly well-done recent article about the SAGE project. Note, however, the author’s comment about “thousands of people all over North America constantly scanning their radar screens for Soviet attacks, all hankering for an opportunity to launch a radio-controlled nuke.”  I wonder: does this guy really believe that the airmen at the SAGE scopes were really looking forward to a nuclear war, or did he just think that’s the sort of thing that would play well with his editors and his audience?

Developing the hardware required for SAGE was a challenge; developing the software even more so. IBM’s Tom Watson Jr explained the issue:  “In those days computing was typically done in what was called batch mode. This meant that you would collect your data first, feed it into the machine second, then sit back for a little while until the answer came out. You could think of the batch processor as a high diver at a circus–each performance involves a lengthy drum roll in preparation, a very fast dive, and then a splash. But the SAGE system was supposed to keep track of a large air defense picture that was changing every instant. That meant it had to take a constant stream of new radar information and digest it continually in what is called “real time.” So a SAGE computer was more like a juggler who has to keep a half dozen balls in the air, constantly throwing aside old balls as his assistant toss him new ones from every direction.”

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Illinois Will End up Like Detroit if It Does Not Change Course

Detroit was once the greatest city of the modern world. Automobiles were the cutting edge of technology in the first half of the twentieth century. Talent and genius flocked to Detroit. Innovators in engineering, technology, design, finance, marketing, and management created a concentration of economic dynamism and creativity unlike anything the world had yet seen. Detroit was the Silicon Valley of its day, except its products were made of tangible metal, rubber, and glass. The auto industry transformed America into a land of mobility and personal freedom beyond the dreams of earlier generations. Henry Ford said, “History is bunk.” He meant the old limits could be blown away, and ordinary people could have a better life than they had ever dreamed of before.

(The rest is here.)

How to Lose a War: A Primer

cross-posted from zenpundit.com

Since Pakistan is now attempting to get its victory over the United States in Afghanistan formally ratified, now seemed to be a good time to reflect on the performance of American statesmen, politicians and senior generals.

It has occurred to me that we have many books and papers outlining how to win wars. Certainly the great classics of The Art of War, The History of the Peloponnesian War and On War are the foremost examples, but there are also other useful classics in the strategic canon, whole libraries of military histories, memoirs of great commanders and an infinite number of PDFs and powerpoint briefs from think tanks and consultants. Strangely, none of these have helped us much. Perhaps it is because before running this war so few of this generation’s “deciders” read them en route to their law degrees and MBAs

We should engage in some counterintuitive thinking:  for our next war, instead of trying to win, let’s try to openly seek defeat. At a minimum, we will be no worse off with that policy than we are now and if we happen to fail, we will actually be moving closer to victory.

HOW TO LOSE A WAR

While one of these principles may not be sufficient cause for losing an armed conflict, following all of them is the surest road to defeat.

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