Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg put the Rauner administration in context in a column a couple of weeks ago:
Not only did Rauner fail to make tangible progress, but he didn’t even tread water properly. The normal operation of the state, such as passing an annual budget, failed to occur, sacrificed on the altar of the governor’s hunger for term limits, union enfeeblement and other unrelated pet causes. He’s like an office manager getting himself hired by promising to expand a business who then promptly fails to pay the electric bill, as a point of principle against the electric company monopoly, so they turn the lights off. Now we’re sitting in the dark, listening to him explain.
But give credit where due: Rauner has accomplished something real, something that I would have thought impossible:
He makes Rod Blagojevich look good.
In 2014, Rauner won every county in Illinois except Cook, beating Pat Quinn by about 150,000 votes out of 3.6 million cast. That's not a huge mandate. But it has turned into a huge disaster. ("A yuge disaster?" Hm.)
I have three books in the works and two on deck (imminently, not just in my to-be-read stack) right now. Reading:
On deck:
- Kevin Hearne, "Iron Druid Chronicles" book 8: Staked.
- Kim Stanley Robinson, "Mars" trilogy book 2: Green Mars.
Meanwhile, I have these articles and blog posts to read, some for work, some because they're interesting:
Time to read.
Meanwhile, I seem to have a cold. Yuck.
This is what happens when you work across the street from the Chicago Teachers Union:
As part of their negotiations with the Chicago Public Schools and the City of Chicago, the CTU are withdrawing their funds from Bank of America. The Tribune has background:
One day after the Chicago Teachers Union rejected a contract proposal from Chicago Public Schools, district officials said they would slash school budgets and stop paying the bulk of teachers' pension contributions — moves CTU's president quickly blasted as "an act of war."
CPS officials told reporters of their plans while announcing the district would make a fresh attempt Wednesday to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the school system's finances afloat.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is also taking shots at the union:
[B]y intentionally and unilaterally whacking tens of thousands of CTU members right in their wallet—and spreading word that Rauner is trying to sabotage the bond deal—Team Emanuel did something more: make it clear that, the Laquan McDonald controversy or not, they're tired of playing patsy.
CTU doesn't like it, and is planning a big protest rally. It accuses Emanuel of “intimidating” the union. But there's no sign of a strike, and the union will have to convince Chicagoans that its members deserve a defined benefit pension with a 3 percent compounded annual inflation hike for only the 2 percent of salary members still will have to pay.
Of course, the 500,000 children who could be turfed out of school should the union strike, and the parents who will have to stay home from work to care for them, would be the proverbial grass that suffers when elephants wrestle.
I'll have more about the news trucks outside my building later today.
On this day in 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean:
A little more than a minute after launch and high above Kennedy Space Center, shuttle Challenger was ripped apart after failure of a rubber seal allowed a spurt of rocket flame to ignite the spacecraft's giant fuel tank.
The roiling plume of Challenger's disintegration would sear an image in the nation's psyche that spoke of a particular sorrow; among seven astronauts killed 30 years ago [today] was teacher Christa McAuliffe.
"We will never forget them," said President Ronald Reagan in a broadcast hours later evoking triumph from tragedy. "The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them."
Studying the decisions that led to Challenger launching that day uncovered serious cultural problems within NASA. It also led to groupthink about groupthink as people continually mis-applied the lessons from the disaster after not actually understanding them.
I remember exactly when I heard about the disaster: I was taking a final exam in high school when the PA broke in to tell everyone it had happened. (We still had to finish the exam.)
Republican Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner believes in smaller government and lower taxes, so much so that he's blocked the state budget process since the last budget ended in June 2015. Since the state has no budget, we haven't paid our bills, so our IOUs just keep getting bigger:
Moody's Investors Service says the state's backlog of unpaid bills and other obligations now is rising roughly $450 million a month, hitting $6.6 billion as of Dec. 31.
Projections from Rauner's budget are that the total will hit $9 billion by the end of the fiscal year on June 30 and keep rising from there, assuming no budget deal is reached, Moody's says—almost what it was after [former Democratic governor Pat] Quinn took over and pushed through a 66 percent income tax hike that gradually reduced the list of IOUs.
State taxes dropped again on January 1st as earlier, "temporary" tax hikes declined; as a result, Illinois will have $3.6 billion less to spend even if we can pass a budget before June 30th.
So, as a Grover Norquist-inspired plutocrat, Rauner wins if the Democratic legislature passes his budget proposal, and he wins if the state's government remains hobbled. Meanwhile, we residents and taxpayers of Illinois would really like essential government services to resume.
Rauner gives the State of the State address in just a few minutes. It should be interesting.
President Obama and I have the same fitness tracker. His, however, has some customizations:
What counts as must-have features for many people — high-definition cameras, powerful microphones, cloud-connected wireless radios and precise GPS location transmitters — are potential threats when the leader of the free world wants to carry them around.
And so using the latest devices means more than merely ordering one on Amazon for delivery to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It means accepting the compromises imposed by White House technology experts, whose mission is to secure the president’s communications, and by the Secret Service agents who protect him.
He has not given up, though. Mr. Obama is the first commander in chief to regularly carry a specially secured BlackBerry. He reads briefings and checks scores from ESPN on an iPad (the first of which was given to him by Steve Jobs before its public release). And recently he has been seen wearing the Fitbit Surge, a fitness band packed with all the latest technology, on his left wrist.
The article goes on to speculate (because neither the Secret Service nor Fitbit will comment on presidential security) just which features, exactly, they've removed. And my friend request has so far gone unanswered...
Even though the U.S. only had its second-hottest year on record, NASA and NOAA reported today that worldwide temperatures were the hottest since records began in 1880:
Globally-averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the previous mark set in 2014 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius). Only once before, in 1998, has the new record been greater than the old record by this much.
The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1.0 degree Celsius) since the late-19th century, a change largely driven by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.
Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with 15 of the 16 warmest years on record occurring since 2001. Last year was the first time the global average temperatures were 1 degree Celsius or more above the 1880-1899 average.
The Times analysis:
Politicians attempting to claim that greenhouse gases are not a problem seized on that slow period to argue that “global warming stopped in 1998” and similar statements, with these claims reappearing recently on the Republican presidential campaign trail.
Statistical analysis suggested all along that the claims were false, and the slowdown was, at most, a minor blip in an inexorable trend, perhaps caused by a temporary increase in the absorption of heat by the Pacific Ocean.
“Is there any evidence for a pause in the long-term global warming rate?” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s climate-science unit, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan. “The answer is no. That was true before last year, but it’s much more obvious now.”
How was the U.S. not hottest-ever last year? If you look at NASA's map, you can see why. Almost the entire world was significantly hotter than normal, except for the Antarctic Circle, bits of the North Atlantic, and the eastern U.S.:
They've even got a nifty video showing the progression over time:
I've just spent a few minutes going through all my company's technology expenses to figure out which ones are subject to the completely daft rental tax that Chicago has extended to cover computing services. The City theorizes that rental tax is payable whenever you pay to use a piece of equipment that belongs to someone else for a period of time. This makes a lot of sense when you go to Hertz, but less when you use Microsoft Azure.
My understanding of the tax and the City's might not be completely orthogonal, but here are some examples of things that I've flagged for my company.
Salesforce.com: This clearly falls within the tax ruling. You pay for an online service that runs on someone else's computers. This is exactly what the city was after when they extended the rental tax.
Microsoft Azure: The tax only seems to cover Azure Compute fees, and specifically exempts Storage charges. So how are database hours taxed, then? With Azure, you pay for Database compute and storage together. Clearly Azure Storage is exempt, though. So now we've got a recordkeeping burden that Microsoft can't help us with yet. Great.
LinkedIn Professional: This may be subject to the tax, if you interpret the tax very broadly. But a LinkedIn subscription isn't so much for the use of its computers (which is free), but for enhanced features of the product that seem more like consulting services than compute time. I think we'll see some litigation over services like this one.
JetBrains ReSharper software license: This does not seem subject to the tax, because we're only paying for a license to run the software on our own computers.
Basically, the City is trying to raise revenue any way it can, but they don't have the technical wherewithal to understand why the tax as constituted makes no sense. Some people in my company feel this makes Chicago unattractive to business, but that's true only if you don't count the difficulty getting talented people to move away from all the city has to offer. It's a frustrating new tax, though, and one the City probably wouldn't have to impose if the rest of the state would pay for its share of the services that Chicago provides to it.
Too many interesting things to read today. I've got some time between work and Bel Canto to get through them:
I have not read Bel Canto, though I understand it's loosely based on an actual historical event. I also haven't ever heard anything from composer Jimmy López before, since it only permiered last month. Friends who work for the Lyric tell me it's pretty good. I'll find out in a few hours.