We do the same here in Indianapolis and my read is that it's about cost containment. Our tax base here really doesn't fully support city services. And then more people move to the high-tax-base suburbs for better services, and the cycle repeats and gets worse.
To be fair, Indiana is now a Northern South state. MAGA governor, doing MAGA things to the state run universities, demolition of decency, acquiescence to federal power when it should fall to the state. And the AG is attacking doctors doing legitimate surgeries (abortion) with criminal harassing charges. Brain drain is also significant around West Lafayette, Marion county, and Bloomington due to anti-immigrant activities. And even small towns like Spencer are getting ICE presence.
Its becoming a place to actively leave, if you haven't already.
… and don’t forget about the new law they’re rolling out to lure the Bears from Chicago. Read the actual drafts so far… Absolutely nothing about the Bears being required to pay a dime for the stadium, but a whole bunch of new taxes for which the revenue is “redirected” into making the Bears’ lease payments. LOL, it’s such a huge money giveaway the Bears would be crazy not to take it.
Honestly the roads in Carmel and Fishers are not significantly better. They do have a shit-ton of roundabouts though. More roundabouts than a Yes song.
When I rode the city bus as a teen in South Bend, IN, in the 80s, there were some designated bus stops. But buses worked on a hail model anyway. You could be on any corner on the route, and as the bus approached, you'd just stick up your arm and it would stop. It was really efficient. But I suppose that works best in a small city like South Bend.
Having a graphic file of your signature is hella useful. I did it the old school way thirty years ago -- I signed my name on paper until I liked it, scanned it, created .gif and .bmp files. Still use that.
As a kid i remember being fascinated by technical difficulties screens, EAS tests, etc. Generally anything that unwittingly revealed the technical aspects of running a broadcast station. This was before we really knew how to use the internet even, so for many years, I'd wonder what a screen saying "No Access Card" or "Coriogen Eclipse" meant. When we learned about Google, it was suddenly a very educational experience to google these things and learn what was going on behind the scenes. I'm a software engineer today, but surely the nearest parallel universe version of me grew up to be a broadcast engineer.
On Toronto's public transportation, TTC, occasionally the upcoming bus stop ticker would flash diagnostic information(?) and "64K RAM" instead of the upcoming stop name. Doesn't seem like there's a wiki page about these faults yet.
I think I get it too. There's a strange, hard-to-describe feeling there for me. It's like a "comfy, but darkly eerie" feeling whenever something like a broadcast technical difficulty or "Max Headroom"-esque event happens.
Like, I'm sitting comfy watching TV, and there's some technical glitch that pulls back the curtain a little bit. It's interesting and not as irritating as a bug in say a website, because I'm still intrinsically doing the activity I was previously (watching television), I'm just now inexplicably watching a different broadcast.
Who knows, it might be the dreamlike quality Cartoon Network/Toonami/Adult Swim had in the late 90s/early 2000s as well. The technical glitches fit thematically with the low-fi beats.
What other industries but tech do any of us bother to talk about finding jobs that align with our values? (Outside of avoiding illegal or immoral work.) I think we were incredibly fortunate before ZIRP went away that we had much greater opportunity to choose companies that appealed to us.
I think it’s in part due to the fact that we’re expected to expend effort in these jobs thinking “big picture” about the roadmap and planning.
If you’re at a job where you get handed jira tickets and crunch bugs, you can probably ignore the big picture purpose and purpose and just be a cog that pushes code.
But if your job keeps telling you to think about why and how to improve the product, you will immediately see your values butting up against management’s values. This is a recipe for disillusionment because it causes you to think about what you value and then you get sucker punched when you see decisions being made with a different set of values by a machine that disregards your own.
Normally when you plumb a building, you're probably not working on an application that performs sentiment analysis on call workers, or finding a way to become a middleman in financial transactions, or you're probably not aiding the intelligence agencies of a world power.
I think more than you think? I like to believe that pretty much any career can have moments of “I’m proud to be part of this organization.” And “I can’t be part of this anymore.”
We’re not special in that regard. Our challenge lies in the sheer breadth of options available to us; but even that’s not unique: managing non profits, janitors, HR professionals, and lawyers also can work with a breathtaking array of companies.
Really the only folks who don’t have that issue to the same extent are tradespeople: carpenters, electricians, plumbers; but even they can say no to a job for a person or company they don’t want to support.
I choose every single job according to my values. I'd easily pick jobs where I earn less solely due to the company operating on ethical grounds. I did that throughout both of my careers (retail & tech) and will continue to do so.
Easiest choice of my life. How can one live with themselves knowing you fuck over people?
I entered middle school in 1979, at which time I was slotted into available "advanced" classes. This was as close to a G&T program as we had. It changed my game. Not because of the knowledge imparted, but because (a) I was with other kids who wanted to learn and were willing to work, and (b) I was largely removed from the disruptions I had increasingly experienced from kids who didn't want to be there. At last, I could relax and just do school. It didn't make school a paradise, but it sure removed the worst of what was problematic for me about it. Freed from most of the nonsense, I was in a better head space and was able to do well.
A lesson runs at the pace of the slowest students, and those slowest students don't want to learn and actively disrupt the class and everyone else. We tolerate this far too much its damaging to the other 20-30 children in the same lessons and moving them to their own classes would have a much bigger average impact than picking the brightest for special lessons. Ideally we would do both so people could go closer to their pace.
This is not a fair assumption and is what leads to kids in remedial classes not getting a decent education.
Kids can be genuinely disruptive or not care, or they can care but struggle with the material, those are orthogonal traits.
I don’t disagree that the lesson goes at the pace of the slowest students, but those slow students deserve a disruption-free classroom too, even if it moves slower than the advanced class.
Interesting. CA GATE has little/no effect other than pulling me out of class to arrange triangles with a timer. The public high school I attended offered most AP classes (but was otherwise under-resourced), around ~15 perfect SAT-I results, and ~25 full scholarships to Ivy League schools per year. Not as fancy as a room full of IITians, but almost. Maybe there was some purpose for the G&T program other than bureaucratic pyramid-building or the specter of inventorying possibly intelligent people. Oh yeah, and I was bullied in middle school by a math teacher who encouraged the class to bully me as well who seemed to be offended at having a student added to her class.
I do this, but I guess I'm safe, since I did it via the setting "Forward a copy of incoming mail to x and archive Gmail's copy" or equivilent option for each provider.
This was one of the most wicked cool things I've read in a long time.
I grew up in a TV market that was UHF only (South Bend, IN) in the 1970s. TVs from before about 1963(?) didn't have to have UHF dials. So a company named Blonder-Tongue (Blonder was pronounced like blunder) produced UHF receivers you could attach to your TV through the little screw tab things on the back, the predecessor to the coax input. I had never seen Blonder-Tongue referenced anywhere except in nostalgia articles about my hometown.
Blonder tongue was a well known vendor for regional cable tv network (analog) operator equipment, supplies, electronics. I think it still exists in some form for video mixing/live studio broadcast equipment.
I work in a lot of nursing homes and their in-house "cable" systems are almost universally a rack full of DirecTV receivers connected to a rack full of Blonder Tongue NTSC modulators. I would have to assume similar systems were common in all sorts hospitality environments in the past, and only survive in nursing homes because most of the residents don't care about HD and might not even want it.
The is probably how all jails and prisons are running their systems, too. Lots of these places still running CRT 4:3 TVs too. The 4:3/16:9 issues are rampant. And obviously the picture quality is just like you remember from the 1980s.
On a only slightly related note, there's a thriving collectors market on ebay and other places for "clear plastic" see through enclosure prison CRT TVs since they're both a novelty, and nobody makes CRTs anymore. People buy them to hook up to like Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo bare metal hardware for retro gaming.
It's getting harder and harder to bring them home. The prisons are trying to keep the items inside the system, even though the prisoners actually bought the items outright.
Ah yes, South Bend is too close to Chicago, too close to Indianapolis, too close to Detroit... No VHF frequency left to allocate! The biggest problem is Chicago. South Bend is on a subcontinental ridge, with an average elevation nearly 300 feet higher than Chicago, and with all the transmitters in Chicago up 1500-1800 feet above ground and close to the lake, overcoming the curvature of the earth limitations on VHF propagation is fairly simple. Anyone in South Bend with a large antenna on their roof would easily receive all the stations.
On the upside, that meant having two versions of CBS and NBC (I don't remember an ABC affiliate in South Bend) plus the couple of other stations. My cousin got his start as a weatherman on NBC in South Bend simply by them needing someone to fill in from time to time and him being essentially the only person they could find that grew up in South Bend but had gone off to study meteorology at a university that was very very good for meteorology.
Just for completeness, the screw tabs were for an antenna, the notorious rabbit ears if you were close to the stations, or one on the roof if you were farther away.
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