tfl: The Flatiron Life

I may not wear sweaters or scarves, but I am a big fan of Facebook.

If the PRChi is going to host the Olympics then all those Olympians are going to need to live somewhere. Don’t worry; Ben Joravsky reports The Mayor has a plan: Buy and old hospital, raze it, sell the land to a developer who will be required to let Olympians live there before selling the units to the public.

That alone scares me but lets look at some details.

City officials haven’t released all the specifics, but here’s what they’ve revealed: The city will agree to borrow $85 million to buy the Michael Reese Hospital campus, near 31st and King Drive, from its current owner, Medline Industries. But Medline will only get $65 million, because the company has agreed to make a $20 million “charitable contribution” back to the city.

Wait, huh, why doesn’t the city just spend $65 million and skip the contribution part?

“You see a lot of it in the sub-prime mort­gage loan business,” [a source in the mortgage lending industry] says. “You’ll get a situation where a house is worth, say, $100,000, but the buyer has no money for a down payment, so the buyer says to the seller, ‘I’ll tell you what—you’re only asking $100,000. I’ll give you $105,000. And then you give me back $5,000 so I can pay a down payment.’”

Brilliant! Sub-Prime loans seem to be a smart deal, right? Smart deal for the leaner in this case because unlike a lot of people who got No-Income-No-Asset loans, the city, with its powers tax and eminent domain, is more like Your-Income-Your Assets and Chicagoans are on the line when the deal heads south.

That will not happen though, right? The city has a track record of sound real estate deals, yeah?

This is starting to remind me of the debacle at Block 37. In the late 1980s and early ’90s the city spent about $40 million to buy and demolish the block bounded by Washington, Randolph, State, and Dearborn, then sold it for $12.6 million to a consortium of developers. They never got a project off the ground, and a few years ago the city ended up buying the property back for about $32.5 million. Even as real estate prices were skyrocketing, the city managed to lose millions of dollars on each transaction.

Crap! 2016 looks more and more like when Jos and I move back to Indiana.

Now at this point you realize that regular reasoning isn’t going to win the day. You have to resort to the “Because I said so” fall-back, but while effective, that never seems like a clean win to me. To the kid it appears you don’t have a good reason and you’re just being an ass about it. That’s why I fantasize about the rest of the discussion going this way:

Me: Do you know who invented the roof?

Kid: No.

Me: It wasn’t a kid. In fact, nothing important has ever been invented by a kid. Do you know why that is?

This is a snippit of Scott Adam reasoning (in his mind) with a child against climbing on the roof.

I need to keep this in mind when my will cannot as easily be imposed on Jonah by simply placing him a couple yards away from the thing I don’t want him to have.

In his provocative new book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein argues that “the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future” by turning out hyper-networked kids who can track each other’s every move with ease but are largely ignorant of history, economics, culture, and other subjects he believes are prerequisites for meaningful civic participation.

I think Prof. Bauerlein makes good points that there are things people in the past leaned that children today do not learn, but I am not convinced of his argument.

First, one of his subtitles to the book is “Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.” This might be sound advice, but I am not sure it is because of the digital age. I suspect those older have always been suspect of those younger and wisely were slow to trust them. Isn’t not trusting anyone until they have proved themselves trustworthy a fair and healthy policy?

Assuming what he says about how and why the young people are not to be trusted in the digital age, I think he is drawing the line too wide. The social culture he describes to me rings true for those 20 and under but not for my peers.

Second, it is difficult to not just hear his argument as another “kids these days are destroying society” rant of a crotchety old man. I was recently surprised to learn exactly how old this line of argument is. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, presumed to be from 370 BC, Socrates laments the growth of writing. Socrates, as the voice of Plato, knows writing will lead to a decline of rhetoric which is the only true knowledge, don’t you know.

What does it make of both Pluto’s and Bauerlein’s arguments that this 28-year-old, who is fairly hip to technological changes and the new web social networking, is refuting the latter’s argument, that the sub-30-year-olds are ignorant and cannot be trusted, by using a 2-millennia-old argument from the former against writing? I would not have even heard about Pluto’s rant if it had not been written down in Ancient Greece and then blogged about a couple weeks ago. Come to think of it, I only heard of Bauerlein because of a blog, a vlog at that!

Watch and give your thoughts.

Having said all that, I think they might both be right. Imagine if there can only be so much knowledge in the world and all our “advnaces,” from writing to Wikipedia, just spread it out. So there can never be another Plato but the average intelligence is higher. Would this be bad?

Yesterday, Jonah and I took one of our rare ventures downtown during rush hour to attend Jacob’s end-of-quarter German party. As we were walking back to the train at the end of the evenning, a crazy man walking toward us leaned down to Jonah and put the butt of his cigarette up to his mouth. I felt the blood instantly run from my face. I pushed the stroller away from the man, swatted at his arm and screamed in a voice that I didn’t know I had, “GET AWAY FROM MY BABY!” The man is lucky that I did not catch his arm, because I have never been so certain that I would have caused someone bodily injury. People turned around and stared. Jacob said to me, “Good job, sweetie. I think that might have been a little overkill, though.”

About five years ago, Jacob took me to visit his friend Corey. One of Corey’s cats had recently delivered a litter of kittens and I bent down to take a look. The mother cat reared up and scratched my eye. I am so sorry, mama cat. I understand now.

Ray-Ray asks in comments,

Do you guys know why there’s two versions for Google — iGoogle and Google Reader? I have both going, which adds to the disorganization that I need to sort out…

The reason is because Google is trying to reach people who use homepages (iGoogle) and people who don’t (gReader). My question is why do you use a homepage? (Not is a critical OMG kind of way, but what advantages do you see to it kind of way.)

A lot of people use homepages to gather all their information together. On iGoogle you can see my Gmail, gReader, other feeds, weather, and other misc items. I definitely see the value in it and would recommend it as a second choice or an away from home choice. However, to me it is a bit cluttered and small for everyday use

This is my setup at home and work.

My browser of choice is Firefox. It began because it was perceived to be safer and faster than IE. I no longer know if that is true. I continue to use Firefox because of the add-ons. For instance, I have an add on called Forcastfox installed that added the weather and forecast to the status bar.

Firefox allows you to have multiple pages as you homepage. These pages will open in different tabs. My homepages are Gmail and gReader.

With gReader I have a pretty standard setup. I read mostly in the All Items view sorted by ‘auto’. I star things I want to blog about or need further update. I share things I find interesting and share with comments things I do not think are full blog post worthy.

If you want to improve your gReader abilities, I suggest hitting ‘?’ and learning a couple keyboard shortcuts.

Gmail is more customized. I have two add-ons installed: Better Gmail 2 and RTM for Gmail.

Better Gmail 2 allows me to make sure Gmail is always uses a secure connection;this mean you melding kids cannot read my email as easily. I am also able to add keyboard shortcuts, hide some stuff, and show the inbox count in the tab. All of this really increases my productivity in email.

RTM for Gmail adds Remember the Milk as a side bar to Gmail. I can manage all of my tasks from the same window as email. I can also create tasks from emails for future follow-up.

That is my setup. What do you all do that makes you more productive at the computer?

I just noticed that the trends page of Google Reader tells you how obscure the feeds you are reading are. This is your feeds ordered by how few people subscribe to them in Reader. It is possible that these feeds are wildly successful, just not with people who have the good sense to use one of the most popular and best feed readers. Possible, but I think unlikely.

I have a lot of feeds where I am the only person who subscribes to them. Most of them I understand somewhat.

I am am the only person who is looking for comment made on my pictures in flickr. As I think you have to be logged in to flickr as me to have access to a private url to get that one, I am glad I am the only subscriber.

I would like to see more people subscribing to Rachel’s, Rob’s, Dana and Kris’, and Zach’s photos. However it does not seem unreasonable that I am the only one or two who is.

There are some blogs that I think should find a wider audience and I am want to call them out.

One of them is the blog for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. (Yes, that is the same Pulitzer family as the Pulitzer Prize.) The Pulitzer is a great little museum in St. Louis and the employer of my cousin-in-law Rachel. It is an interesting daily dose of what it is like behind the scenes at an Art Museam. The posts are not long nor dense and the authors are very responsive to questions.

Make me not the only subscriber! Check out the blog and if you find yourself in STL go to the museum.

More obscurity to come…

I recently joined Facebook. I had resisted for a long time because I am so repulsed by the overgrown Geocities site that is MySpace. I was pleasently suprised that instead of being another disconnected home of content, I could add my flickr feed and the feed to this blog to the feed in Facebook.

It is great that more people are reading Jos and I, but I have found a downside. When someone comments on the post in Facebook it is not a comment here and vice versa. Facebook supposedly offers this great API for applications. This might allow me to write something to sync the comments. Does anyone know if a solution to this already exists?

In the mean time, I would prefer for comments to be made on the blog, but I am not going to be fascist about it.

When the time comes, this is how I want to go out.

I think Americans would be more open to multi-culturalism if it meant more awesome funeral processions and pyres.

That is the low estimate of how many crimes there are spelled out in the US Code according to a report from the Heritage Foundation.

I don’t want to debate about what should and should not be illegal or if it should be a federal or state issue. (Well you know I do, just not here.) What I find interesting is we often hear that ignorance is no defense for breaking the law. However the number of things that are illegal is larger than the number of things an one person can hold in their head. It seem like the only way you could be sure to not be an accidental criminal is to assume everything you do is illegal until the government tells you it is not.

Does that sound just? I am curious of your opinions on if that seems fair that there should or should not be more crimes than thinks you can think of in a week and why?