House of the rising Moonglum

Ostensibly a story about the fact that Cisse’s mom is not coming to Chicago to accept her son’s degree, the Sun times actually manages to do a good job showing what an amazing person Amadou Cisse was. For those not following local chicago news, he was a graduate student who was killed in Hyde Park just after having defended his dissertation. He took over the fathers place in his family, after his father died, even helping put his younger siblings through school. The quotes they got from the family show how loved he was. The topper for me though was that he went home last month to take his mother on the Hajj (حج). That is true devotion. One the one hand, it is such a waste that he was killed, on the other hand, I hope that I will be able to be as proud of my life when my time comes.

OK, so apparently I am starting to do more youtube posts. *sigh* Let me know if you find them annoying, I know I do.

In any case, I was reading an article about current trends in IP law and noticed a video ad on the side. It is talking about genetic mingling and the fact that natural blondness is a recessive gene. And then it claims ownership of that gene. Eeeeh. Am I the only one totally creeped out by that?

24/7 North Of Howard Watchers has a great chart about TIF income. Half a billion dollars in earmarked money that no one has to account for. Awesome.

I’m not sure the Aesop fable is entirely appropriate though. I think that if we are going for ants and grasshoppers, we are more like the Disney (A Bug’s Life) ants. I’ll let you take the metaphor from there, if you will.

Crain’s takes a look at the city’s TIF income for the year. The amount of slush fund TIF income looks to be about a half a billion dollars. Or, six times the tax increase. Oh yeah, TIFs are a great idea. According to the county numbers the increment would have covered the tax increase. This is the problem with TIFs. All that increase in property value which could be used for general purposes gets diverted, and we are all forced to pay more taxes. I would much rather have a specific amount set aside for what the TIFs are supposed to be doing for a set amount of time. Of course that would make it much too easy to see where the money is going. I’m glad at least the Cook County Clerk is trying to make it a bit more visible. Between the Clerk and the Assessor I feel like there is positive change being made from the bottom. I wonder how Orr and Houlihan have been able to keep their elected positions. I guess the machine hasn’t turned their might on them yet, focusing instead on the president and the aldermen.

Random Youtube post. Charge your iPod with an onion.

I would just like to mention that my physics degree does not help me understand this. I also have a really hard time believing it, but now I want to try. I wonder if the old firewire connector would work as well?

Crain’s Chicago Business has a short and understated article talking about a new study that says that TIFs need more transparency. That study wins the understatement of the year award in my book. TIFs are what we used to call “slush funds”. Use em on whatever you want, no political repercussions. I can’t even find a central location with a list of where the SSAs and TIFs are (pdf), let alone what the money is being spent on. The NCBG has a pretty good report, but really. If these are so great the city should really have the info available in a central location, showing all the great things they are doing with the money. And I can’t find anything on the SSAs.

I guess we just have to hope that our tax money is being spent well.

I love a good post apocalyptic story. Peak oil has been my favorite as of late, but what will it really look like? The fact of the matter is the US is still the world’s third largest producer of oil, and major discoveries will continue to be made, even after the peak. A much more likely story is that our ability to import will fall dramatically, leading not to a complete loss of oil, but rather a dramatic redistribution of how we use it. I particularly like the comparison to airlines. No more empty seats.

Hopefully we will use that realignment to come up with some other ways of generating and distributing the energy we need to maintain our standard of living.

So, as most of you know, I recently purchased a home over a year ago. Going into this I knew it was going to be more expensive than I thought, so I stored up some money for the eventual tax bill. Well thanks to the odd way we do things around here, I just got my first tax bill today. I knew it was going to be a doozy, but almost had a heart attack when I saw that it was 60% more than my estimate! However these Cook county property tax bills are not exactly what one might call transparent. So after a bit more looking around and a phone call or two, I discovered that on your first tax bill, depending on your closing date, you actually get the bill for the entire year in one installment.

OK breathing again. Actually came out to 20% less than my estimate. Strangely the same thing happened to me earlier this week with the metro water district. I got someone on the phone who didn’t want to deal with me and yelled at me about having someone call and if I wasn’t there they were going to disconnect me. So when no one called I called them back and a very nice man told me that I had never missed a bill and there was no way they would disconnect me and in fact everything was in order and I didn’t need to contact them again.

At least my tax bill is itemized so I can see where my money is going. (And since I’m not in an SSA or TIF it might be accurate.)

I don’t know if anyone has heard of this, I know I hadn’t. Apparently there is a non Greyhound bus service in the midwest. It is called megabus, and fares start at $1! As air travel becomes more of a pain, I am loving seeing alternate intercity transportation modes. I would really love to see an express electric train company follow much the same routes, especially if they could get some fast ICE style trains.

Still driving myself to Indy though. :/

Well, South Carolina Democrats knocked Colbert off the ballot. It would have been interesting to see if they did that if he went the 3,000 signatures route instead of the money route to get on in the first place. In any case, I was laughing so hard I cried watching that episode. You can see it on the web if you missed it.

He did do one thing if nothing else though, he really makes you think about how candidates are chosen, and how they are presented to the voters. Here in Chicago we get plenty of that (Stroger) but it is interesting to think about it on a national level as well.

News.com has an unusually clear look at what it means to be an early adopter. This is what I meant when I said I will wait for 10.5.1.

Yet another notch on the “Stroger is bad” bandwagon, to mix metaphors. So a number of my readers voted for Stroger instead of Peraica (I’m pretty sure all my readers voted for Claypool over Stroger) on woman’s issues grounds. My response at the time was twofold. First the entire cook county system is democratic so there is no way Peraica could do anything out of left field like eliminating access to abortion or something like that. And second, Stroger will be so corrupt and incompetent that that same access will be compromised. Clearly we will never be able to find out the truth of the first statement, however, my worst fears about the second appear to be coming true.

It looks like Stroger Hospital is going to lose its OB/GYN accreditation! Forget mismanagement, that means actual bad care. Argue details of specialized care with me, once we have our basic care sorted out. Still mad at Stroger and everyone who told me to vote for him.