Author: Seth Anderson

Just another Gen-Xer still posting on a blog

Rauner vetoes bill that would set minimum teacher salary at $40,000 within five years

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Erected by the Board of Education 1892

Chicago Tribune reports:

Gov. Bruce Rauner on Sunday vetoed legislation that would have raised the minimum salary for an Illinois teacher to $40,000 within five years, putting the re-election-seeking Republican at odds with teachers unions once again.

The bill approved by lawmakers in the spring would make the minimum teacher salary for next school year $32,076. The number would rise to $40,000 for the 2022-23 term and grow with the Consumer Price Index after that.

…

“Refusing to guarantee professional educators a livable minimum wage is no way to lure more teachers to Illinois,” Democratic state Sen. Andy Manar of Bunker Hill said in a statement. “I’m disappointed in the governor’s veto, and I know thousands of dedicated, hard-working, creative educators throughout the state are too.”

Rauner has feuded with labor since his first campaign, including teachers unions that backed the minimum salary proposal.

(click here to continue reading Rauner vetoes bill that would set minimum teacher salary at $40,000 within five years – Chicago Tribune.)

Why would any teacher vote for Bruce Rauner? Why would anyone with a child in the Illinois school system vote for Bruce Rauner? Why would anyone with a relative in the Illinois school system vote for Bruce Rauner? Why would anyone who thinks an educated society is a better society and thus teachers should be paid as if they were an essential part of the community vote for Bruce Rauner?

Struggling to think of anyone who would vote for Bruce Rauner, other than people with a financial motive.

Illinois law currently lists the minimum salary for a teacher at $9,000, a level that took effect in July 1980.

Yeah, that will attract the best and the brightest…

In China, Salmon is Salmon, Even if It’s Trout

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Fish Monger - Metra Market

The New York Times reports:

At issue for many is where the two fish swim. Most Asian salmon spend the bulk of their lives in saltwater. Rainbow trout are often cultivated in water tanks or ponds, which could expose them to freshwater parasites that could infect humans if the fish is eaten raw. The United States Food and Drug Administration warns of potential parasite hazards from eating freshwater fish. In Hong Kong, a Chinese city that operates under its own laws, serving freshwater fish raw is illegal.

“It’s not only the issue of rainbow trout being substituted for salmon, but whether freshwater fish should be used for sashimi at all,” Dr. Kevin Kwok, an assistant professor in the department of applied biology and chemical technology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said.

…

Fish is often mislabeled around the world in order to fetch higher prices, such as labeling yellowtail as mahi mahi or sea bass as halibut. Regulators in the United States label these substitutions as economic deception.

That goes for salmon, too. Officials in the United States forbid fish sellers from labeling steelhead trout — essentially, rainbow trout that swim in saltwater — as salmon. Generally, salmon spawn in freshwater but return to the sea.

(click here to continue reading In China, Salmon is Salmon, Even if It’s Trout – The New York Times.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if this and similar substitution happens frequently in the US as well. Budgets of regulatory agencies have been sliced over the last decade, so who really monitors what kind of fish gets delivered to restaurants?

Salmon House Caretakers Residence

Paul Manafort will likely go to jail if Trump pardons him thanks to a lone holdout juror

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 Cook County Circuit Court

Slate reports:

Manafort was also tried on bank fraud relating to New York and California banks. Both states have double jeopardy statutes that seem to create a potential pardon protection. But there was a hung jury on the conspiracy bank fraud charge for the California bank. California’s double jeopardy law states, “No person can be subjected to a second prosecution for a public offense for which he has once been prosecuted and convicted or acquitted.” That obviously excludes mistrials. So California could prosecute the separate act of conspiracy bank fraud because Manafort has never been prosecuted and convicted or acquitted of that charge.

There was also a hung jury on the four bank fraud charges for his dealings with the Federal Savings Bank in Illinois. The state’s double jeopardy law also allows a second state prosecution after a mistrial. It is ironic that the one holdout juror who caused a mistrial on some charges opened up Manafort to state retrials.

If Trump pardons Manafort on the charges from this month’s federal case alone, then he would still face prosecution in three very blue states (New York, Illinois, and California) and one increasingly blue-ish state (Virginia). Those are four jury pools that would potentially be altogether worse for Manafort. If, in this month’s trial, Manafort could only persuade one juror out of 12 on about half of these charges, his chances would seem pretty low at running the table in four more trials in Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago, and northern Virginia. And we haven’t even discussed the charges in the second federal trial next month and whatever additional state criminal liability Manafort might face that has not been charged at the federal level. And Mueller still might be strategically holding off on other charges.

(click here to continue reading Paul Manafort will likely go to jail if Trump pardons him thanks to a lone holdout juror..)

Entrance to The Federal Savings Bank

Entrance to the Federal Savings Bank, West Loop.

If I wasn’t lazy, I’d embed an animated gif of Nelson Muntz here…

The Federal Savings Bank
The Federal Savings Bank

Sterling Bay buying ADM wheat mill in Fulton Market, eyes adding Metra station

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Storing Wheat Agfa Scala 200
Storing Wheat – Agfa Scala 200

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Sterling Bay has a $25 million deal to buy an Archer Daniels Midland wheat mill in the Fulton Market district, and hopes to replace it with a project that would include the neighborhood’s first Metra station.

The busy Chicago developer has a contract to buy the 2.2-acre property at 1300 W. Carroll Ave., pending due diligence, ADM spokeswoman Jackie Anderson said in an email. She did not confirm the sale price, which sources said is about $25 million.

…Sterling Bay executives declined to comment on the deal with ADM, or on specific plans for the site, but people familiar with the firm’s plans say it wants to put a Metra station there. Erin Lavin Cabonargi, Sterling Bay’s director of development services, said the firm supports long-running efforts to create a Metra station, “further strengthening the expansion of the central business district and the job creation the neighborhood is promoting.”

It’s unclear whether the train station would be built into the base of a new structure, as seen in downtown skyscrapers, or if it would be a standalone platform. The estimated cost is unknown.

(click here to continue reading Sterling Bay buying ADM wheat mill in Fulton Market, eyes adding Metra station – Chicago Tribune.)

More public transit options are always more better, and traffic in this area is increasingly gridlocked even before all these new corporate HQs and new apartment/condo buildings come on line, so traffic is only going to get worse.

As an aside, Sterling Bay came of nowhere to become one of the biggest developers in the West Loop, and seemingly are targeting the entire city.  

Majestic Corn Silo Kodak Ultra Color 100UC
Majestic Corn Silo- Kodak Ultra Color 100UC

Ogden Avenue 1923
Ogden Avenue – 1923

I Doubt That Is True
I Doubt That Is True

Industrial Devolution
Industrial Devolution

ADM butt crack
ADM butt-crack

First Track on A Debut Album, A Partial List

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Turn It To Ten

Via Whet on Twitter, a fun Friday morning thought experiment – what are some of the best opening songs on a debut album?

I happen to have made a list of debut albums a while ago, and add to the playlist periodically when I think about it. Not definitive, by any means, even of albums I have in my music library, mostly because I’m a slacker at heart. 

I also didn’t include some lead-off songs that I don’t really care for – like The Beatles “I Saw Her Standing There”, Neil Young’s “The Emperor Of Wyoming”, M.I.A.’s “Ba-Na-Na [Skit]”, etc. I also fudged, and didn’t include debut EPs1 

Anyway, here’s one hundred songs I’m playing this morning, sorted alphabetically by album:

Continue reading “First Track on A Debut Album, A Partial List”

Footnotes:
  1. like the Pixies EP, Come On Pilgrim, for instance [↩]

Kroger to Ditch Plastic Bags by 2025

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Bag Gyre
Bag Gyre

WSJ reports:

Kroger Co. plans to eliminate plastic shopping bags from its supermarkets, the latest retailer to address customer backlash against disposable packaging and utensils.

The largest U.S. grocery chain by stores and sales said Thursday that it would remove single-use plastic bags from its 63-store QFC chain in the Pacific Northwest next year and eliminate them from all 2,800 Kroger-owned stores by 2025.

“This is the way things are headed and we figured we should be in front of that,” said Jessica Adelman, Kroger’s group vice president for corporate affairs.

(click here to continue reading Kroger to Ditch Plastic Bags by 2025 – WSJ.)

Kudos to Kroger. My understanding is that Kroger was the first supermarket chain in the US to give away plastic bags instead of paper, back in the 1970s1

Footnotes:
  1. or 1960s, I forget the details [↩]

Seattle’s air quality is as bad as smoking 7 cigarettes. Blame climate change deniers

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Everyone Is Looking For Someone To Blame
Everyone Is Looking For Someone To Blame

Vox reports:

Ash and smoke are choking Seattle’s air for the second week in a row, as wildfires smolder in the Cascades and in British Columbia. The air quality in Seattle this week has been worse than in Beijing, one of the world’s most notoriously polluted cities.

As of Wednesday morning, the Air Quality Index in Seattle was at 190, a rating classified as “unhealthy.” In parts of the city, the index rose as high as 220, which is “very unhealthy.” Other parts of Puget Sound, like Port Angeles, Washington — 80 miles from Seattle — saw the AQI rise to 205 this week.

To put it in perspective, an AQI of 150 is roughly equal to smoking seven cigarettes in a day. People breathing air this unhealthy should avoid being outside and exerting themselves, particularly people with heart and lung problems, the elderly, and children.

(click here to continue reading Seattle’s air quality is as bad as smoking 7 cigarettes. Blame wildfires. – Vox.)

And yet one of the two major political parties in the US is adamant that nothing can or even should be done to ameliorate the effects of climate change. A vote for the GOP is a vote for this kind of apocalyptic condition to worsen.

Clouds over Seattle- Kodak HIE

Fires are a natural occurrence in many woodlands and are essential to a healthy ecosystem. But the growing scale and destruction from these fires stems from human activity.

What kinds of human activity? According to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, environmental terrorists.

“[Fires] have been getting worse,” Zinke said in an interview with Breitbart News Saturday. “We have longer seasons, hotter conditions, but what’s driving it is the fuel load. And we have been held hostage by these environmental terrorist groups that have not allowed public access, that refuse to allow the harvest of timber.”

I asked the Interior Department who these terrorists are and they pointed me toward Zinke’s August 8 editorial in USA Today, where he said that radical environmentalists “make outdated and unscientific arguments, void of facts, because they cannot defend the merits of their policy preferences year after year as our forests and homes burn to the ground.”

Environmentalism is a recurring scapegoat in the Trump administration. Earlier this month, Trump blamed “bad environmental laws” for amplifying wildfires.

But researchers say this ire is pointed in the wrong direction. And in Zinke’s zeal to blame conservationists for deadly fires, he conspicuously sidestepped larger human-caused factors driving the current rash of wildfires, including climate change.

(click here to continue reading Ryan Zinke’s “environmental terrorists” claim for wildfires, explained – Vox.)

Google expanding space in Fulton Market, this time on Randolph St

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 All That False Instruction

Chicago Tribune reports:

Google is planning a two-level store in Chicago’s Fulton Market district, its first known location for a retail flagship.

The technology giant is close to finalizing a lease for almost 14,000 square feet on the first and second floors of several connected, two-story brick buildings between 845 and 853 W. Randolph St., according to sources.

If completed as expected, Google’s deal will represent another milestone in the evolution of the longtime meatpacking district west of the Kennedy Expressway, where Google already has its Midwest office headquarters and more than 900 employees.

To date, Google’s only retail spaces have been pop-up stores and small shops within other stores.

…

Google’s lease will include former spaces of longtime area restaurants Jaipur and Perez.

Behind the connected buildings, an alley forms a pedestrian walkway between Peoria and Green streets. The property is directly across the street from the Nobu Hotel that is under construction.

(click here to continue reading Google expanding space in Fulton Market, this time with a flagship store – Chicago Tribune.)

I am very curious as to what exactly Google wants with a storefront. Are they planning to launch some new product? Expand the Next line? A new phone? Obviously, Alphabet has plenty of cash to throw around, but I’m puzzled as to what the point of this new endeavor is, other than being in the Hot West Loop1. 

Stoic Delicacy

Urban Melodrama

Footnotes:
  1. a phrase I hear too frequently [↩]

The Slippery Slope of Complicity

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PMURT KCUF
!!!PMURT KCUF

Paul Krugman writes, in part:

The real news of the past few weeks isn’t that Trump is a wannabe Mussolini who can’t even make the trains run on time. It’s the absence of any meaningful pushback from Congressional Republicans. Indeed, not only are they acquiescing in Trump’s corruption, his incitements to violence, and his abuse of power, up to and including using the power of office to punish critics, they’re increasingly vocal in cheering him on.

Make no mistake: if Republicans hold both houses of Congress this November, Trump will go full authoritarian, abusing institutions like the I.R.S., trying to jail opponents and journalists on, er, trumped-up charges, and more — and he’ll do it with full support from his party.

But why? Is Trumpocracy what Republicans always wanted?

Well, it’s probably what some of them always wanted.

(click here to continue reading Opinion | The Slippery Slope of Complicity – The New York Times.)

Very true. Trump is not some aberrant Republican, he is the GOP’s standard bearer, speaking out loud what most say in private. 

Krugman again:

But there are some special aspects of the modern GOP that make it especially vulnerable to this kind of slide into leader-worship. The party has long been in the habit of rejecting awkward facts and attributing them to conspiracies: it’s not a big jump from claiming that climate change is a giant hoax perpetrated by the entire scientific community to asserting that Trump is the blameless target of a vast deep state conspiracy.

And modern Republican politicians are, with few exceptions, apparatchiks: they are creatures of a monolithic movement that doesn’t allow dissent but protects the loyal from risk. Even if they should happen to lose a race in their gerrymandered districts, as long as they toed the line they can count on “wing nut welfare” — commentator slots on Fox News, appointments at think tanks, and so on.

Trump Keeps Trying to Kill the Agency That Investigates Chemical Plant Disasters

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Crippled WIth Self Confidence
Crippled WIth Self Confidence

Mother Jones reports:

Earlier this month, after a three-month probe, the investigators from the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board concluded that a faulty valve at the plant caused the explosion. The board plans to issue recommendations that aim to prevent such an accident from happening again at a refinery.

But despite the warm welcome in Superior—and wide recognition of its expertise in chemical plant disasters—this small, independent federal agency is teetering on the brink of elimination.

The Trump administration has twice in its budgets attempted to shut down the Chemical Safety Board; so far, Congress has rejected the attempts. For the 2019 fiscal year, both the House and Senate have proposed restoring full funding.

But the assaults appear to be taking a toll. Hostility from the Trump administration and disarray from its efforts to eliminate the agency follow years of leadership turmoil and high turnover that started during the Obama administration. In 2015, its chairman, who was embroiled in a congressional investigation into poor management, resigned under pressure—yet leadership problems remain.

Combined, these problems threaten to cripple the agency’s investigations of chemical plant disasters

(click here to continue reading Trump Keeps Trying to Kill the Agency That Investigates Chemical Plant Disasters – Mother Jones.)

yayyy, Hillary’s emails!

Word of the Day – highbinder

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Emolument Man
Emolument Man

Word of the Day:

n. A swindler, especially a corrupt politician. …The word ‘highbinder’ comes from the name of a nativist gang that flourished in New York City in the early 19th century, possibly an alteration of ‘hide’ + ‘binder’.

(click here to continue reading Word of the Day.)

The Internet IS The Public Square

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Can t Remember What I Was Thinking Of
Can’t Remember What I Was Thinking Of

Brent Simmons writes about something I’ve been thinking about for the last few months:

My problem with Twitter remains the same: centralized social networking concentrates way too much power in one place.

Twitter is awful in other ways, sure, not just for that reason. (The issues with Nazis and harassment and abuse. The way it treats third-party Twitter developers.)

And Facebook, too, is awful in its own ways.

But, even if it were well-run, centralized social networking is still a deeply bad and unhealthy idea. Josh Marshall writes that we should be concerned about

…ceding so much of the public square to private platforms which really aren’t about free speech in any way and don’t have free speech in any way. They’re all ordered by algorithms designed to maintain time on site and service ad sales. In no sense are they open or free.

Twitter is not the public square. It just wants you to think it is. The web itself is the public square.

(click here to continue reading inessential: The Public Square.)

Ghosting all of my social media accounts is very, very tempting. Especially Facebook and Instagram which I care less about. I’ve already started the process of culling my interactions with both of those platforms. I only log in to Facebook using my Mac’s alternative browser, and since I have two-factor authentication turned on, it is even more time consuming to log on, thus I log on once or twice a month. I am considering removing most of the ephemeral contacts there as I have already done on Instagram. I deleted the Instagram app from my phone, and don’t miss it yet, and maybe never will. 

Defunct Tweets
Defunct Tweets

Twitter is slightly different, as I mostly use my Twitter account as a microblog. I’d guess that 90% of my posts contain URLs linking to a news story, or to my own photographs. If there was a quick, painless way to delete every Twitter post that didn’t contain a URL, I’d do that right away, but I’m not sure if that is possible, or tbh, even really worth it. I’m low profile enough that I don’t interact much with strangers on Twitter, nor do I seek out heated political arguments with the mouth breathers; so I’ve yet to encounter that toxic part of Twitter.

I never found a good method to integrate Twitter with my blog, perhaps I should look for a solution to that. My tweets1 are archived in a Google Doc spreadsheet; if I use Buffer, my tweets are also posted to my Tumblr, yet I’d rather there was a place on my own domain which hosted this running link history. 

Perhaps the microblog tool will work2.

I don’t miss the amount of fiddling Moveable Type required, Twitter’s main attraction for me is the ease with which I can create a link to something interesting I’ve encountered, Twitter is integrated into iOS and MacOS in a way that self-hosted WordPress blogs are not.

 Frostpocket Kitchen

To the bigger question, I miss the character of the web before Facebook et al existed. I doubt we can return to those days. It sort of reminds me of the back-to-the land movement of the last century: folks like my parents eschewing the technologies of the day to go to farms and communes and try to exist with one foot in the future and one foot in the past.

Footnotes:
  1. using the magic of IFTTT [↩]
  2. though I’m unclear at the moment if I can quickly integrate it into this blog, and whether or not I’d have to pay for use for the tool [↩]

B12 Radio Station

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Since Audio Hijack added a feature1 enabling seamless play from my iTunes playlist to the internet, via ShoutCast, I created an internet radio station this afternoon.

I don’t know much about such stuff, but it was fairly painless to set up. At least, so far. 

The station link is here:

http://listen.shoutcast.com/b12partners

Broadcast

Audio Hijack - Internet Radio Tools

The plan is just to let my station run for a while, as I’m playing music in my office pretty much all the time, whether or not I’m there, or sleeping or dancing on the grave of my enemies.

About the only annoying thing with using a free service is that twice an hour I have to play a two minute track that I had to change the artist and title to “Advert:”. From my understanding, the SHOUTcast server overlays advertising on top of these tracks, depending upon the country. If you are in a country where they don’t display ads, you hear the music, but in the US, you’ll hear some ad. I’m using “Funky Nassau (Part II)” by The Beginning Of The End on the LP “What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967-1977)” and also Ry Cooder’s “Seneca Square Dance” from the soundtrack for The Long Riders.  

Currently, I’m playing three tracks at a time from LPs that I’ve read about at the Pitchfork website. I made a big playlist of all their Best LPs of the decade, and added other albums that I first heard of on their site. Stuff like Cal Tjader, Superchunk, Sex Pistols, Bootsy Collins,Miles Davis, Camera Obscura, Dukes of Stratosphear, Bob Dylan, Fela Kuti, Big Star, Talking Heads, etc. etc.

Typical stuff for me, in other words. I frequently play entire albums in sequence too, if that’s your thing.

Tune in if you can!

Slices of my music library:

Music Library

CDs in need of a re org
CDs in need of a re-org

The Replacements Tim
The Replacements – Tim

Overstuffed CD shelf
Overstuffed CD shelf

C R E A M
C.R.E.A.M.

CDs shelf one
CDs shelf one

Planetary D Constellation

and this might be a valid player

Footnotes:
  1. or at least I just noticed it today [↩]