Got a bit warmer by late afternoon yesterday, but cool and clear to start. Same forecast for today.
I’m in a suburb of Chicago, and I was quite surprised by the difference in pricing at the grocery store. Items I buy every week in Houston were 1/3 or 1/2 again as expensive. Bacon was $14 instead of $8. Rolls, sliced ham, soda, all more expensive here. Dinner out was more than I expected too. Gas is $2.49 (or more) vs $2.15/gal. Tolls on the highway were $1.10 for a short stretch (and used to be just 40c.)
This is far from a luxury area. Mom’s house will likely sell for $140K, and is 1800 sqft on a big corner lot. The opposite of gentrification is happening here. The streets here in the neighborhood haven’t seen any maintenance in at least 20 years and maybe 30. Houses are smaller than mom’s through most of the area. One car garages are not uncommon. Some blocks, a larger 2 car garage is actually bigger than the house.
All this to say, prices are WAY out of line for the sort of area it is, and yet they are inline with where my sibs live too. I’m pretty sure they are typical prices for most of Chicagoland, if not a bit lower than nicer areas.
Why would you live here or expect to STAY here? It is NOT getting better, it’s getting worse.
My sibs seem to be either suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or cognitive dissonance. Neither is healthy in the long term.
There are millions here looking at the same fate, and many are pulling the ejection lever. I wish my family would too.
nick
After a cold and rainy Spring, summer has hit with a vengeance. Wind off the Sahara, so temps are going up to 37C (nearly 98F) this week. We are rarely that hot.
Most building here have no AC. The trick for residences is to open all the windows overnight, and close them during the day. That doesn’t work so well for businesses, since no one is around at night, so offices tend to be really unpleasant during heat waves.
This is the first year we’ve had wildlife problems in the veggie garden. There’s a deer and a crow family that have decided they’ve found a great snack buffet. Since it’s our last year in this house, we aren’t too fussed about it, but my wife is still annoyed that some other critters are eating her food.
Meanwhile, she’s back into professional translation with a vengeance. Some little project she thought would give her a slow start has turned out to be huge and urgent. We don’t know the actual customer – they’ve gone through an agency – but it’s something strange and wonderful. Without going into details (because it may be proprietary), it’s little snippets of text from some sort of knowledge base. Sometimes referring to something modern, more often to something that hasn’t existed for hundreds of years. For the really obscure tidbits it can take 30 minutes of research to translate 2 words.
Also, someone was overly clever. The original data must have been organized, but some helpful idiot decided to alphabetize it. Just as an example, consider the word “die”: It could refer to metal casting, to plastics, or to those little cubes in a casino. The loss of organization makes things…interesting.
Gotta get back to work…
Why would you live here or expect to STAY here? It is NOT getting better, it’s getting worse.
My sibs seem to be either suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or cognitive dissonance. Neither is healthy in the long term.
There are millions here looking at the same fate, and many are pulling the ejection lever. I wish my family would too.
My guess is that everyone figures a big Fed bailout of the state/county/city pension problem is coming, and, from what we saw in March, if you have enough money and live in the right part of town, the amenities are hard to replicate anywhere else. Definitely not in the Sunbelt. I understand why long time residents hang on and hope for the best.
Still, there are signs of trouble. Growing up playing Flight Simulator, it was a bit jarring to see that Megis Field was no more and to hear the story of how that happened. Pure class envy. They’ve tried to do the same thing to the airport in Downtown St. Petersburg for decades. “It would better serve the public as a park.”
Clint doesn’t care. GA went too far, but Warner entrusts him with money for a reason. GA makes small films profitable.
The studio doesn’t really care either. Warner did not wholly finance “Million Dollar Baby”, and the Oscar resides elsewhere. They won’t repeat that mistake, especially now that the execs have to answer to the Death Star.
https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/clint-eastwood-film-new-movie-georgia-despite-hollywood-boycott-over
Two comments and you guys didn’t notice the wrong day of the week? Well, I fixed it and no one can prove it….
And thank goodness, because I woke up thinking today was Thursday and I only had today and tomorrow for everything I need to do. That would not be good.
n
Funny. My RSS feed shows Thur. June 26, 2019 – like my men..
So no, I didn’t notice it. But yes, I can prove it.
Gas here in Oregon is running $3.39 to $3.50 a gallon, about $1.20 more than I was paying in TN.
Gas here in Oregon is running $3.39 to $3.50 a gallon, about $1.20 more than I was paying in TN.
“West Coast” blends plus taxes. Also, Oregon requires full service … or did when we lived there.
Plus, The Coast. Anywhere with a view from the Pacific is an hour from I-5 minimum. Newport was generally less terrible if you can wait — unlike the Seaside/Cannon Beach stretch of the coast, they have other year-round revenue streams besides tourism.
Just wait. I’ve written here before that ODOT is plotting to toll all the Interstate miles around Portland, from the bridges down to Wilsonville, with pilot projects already approved for the stretch of I-5 along the river across from Downtown Portland and 205 just north of the split.
We’re one of the leading candidates to do the toll work. Ironic considering how much WA/OR people cr*p on The South and Texas. We have *all* or the toll projects in Seattle, including the tunnel under the city.
Cost of gas was the same in Portland and Cottage Grove as we were passing through. Does not seem to be a coast penalty that I have seen, yet.
Yeh, had forgotten about that little issue. Remember that from my trip 20 years ago when some little Indian guy started to chew my butt for pumping myself. Irritated me at the time but later it was explained that the owner could suffer severe penalties for letting that happen.
Which reminds me, I need to figure out where the fuel cover release is on the rental car.
@rick, the little edit countdown is funny, if I switch back to the tab after being away for a while, the countdown runs fast until it catches up. I can watch it run down thru the numbers…. just funny (ha ha) not an issue. If I reload, it skips right to the current amount of remaining time.
n
Look at the cop’s load out.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7182885/Police-officer-pulls-10-month-old-daughter.html
That’s what they’re wearing for normal patrol?
n
Cost of gas was the same in Portland and Cottage Grove as we were passing through. Does not seem to be a coast penalty that I have seen, yet.
The road between Newport and I-5 was getting some of the crazy hairpin turns bypassed the last time we went. Maybe transportationg isn’t such an issue anymore. Or Oregon has pricing laws — that wouldn’t surprise me.
Don’t forget Camp 18 if you take 84 back. Another place we always stopped.
The cocktail waitress will be 32 when redistricting comes up and NY loses two (or more) seats. My guess is the party will let that take care of their problem unless someone primaries her. Lack of pork never sits well for long — just ask Alan Grayson in FL.
https://www.infowars.com/aoc-criticized-for-wearing-600-watch-during-crying-border-photo-op/
Chicago, expensive? Shirley you’re joking!
Just a sad statement on today’s world. I am sure that this is common in most areas now, it is in ours.
Very heavy Police, Sheriff, and State Patrol presence in the Tri-Cities area right now. They are having another no-holds-barred round-up of gang members. Not too hard, just look for the tats and stop them. 99.9% chance they have open warrants and are violating their parole. The problem is they are too soon back on the streets. Many are illegals, but deportations are minimal and even if they are deported they soon return. Not enough room in the jails.
We have a large legal-here-many-generations Hispanic population and they are very cooperative but are coming under fire (literally) from the miscreants.
Portland and Cottage Grove are both on the I-5 corridor, as is Salem, where I paid $2.85 for gas a couple of days ago. It had been more than $3.10 a month or two ago.
Re; Oregon and full serve gas stations. Current law does not require full serve, you can do it yourself. Changed at the first of the year. Don’t think that most of OR gets gas from CA, prices don’t reflect that. I suspect the gas comes from farther north (WA). Most big stations still have the attendant doing your gas, but smaller stations may not require that.
Re: FF and saved logins: there’s a way to export; several links via the googles/bings/ducks. https://www.intowindows.com/3-ways-to-backup-passwords-saved-in-firefox-57-58/ .
I think there is also a way to share your FF user profile between systems.
Re: editing countdown: I’ll look into it. Added: I don’t see that issue. Posted this comment, wandered over to some other tabs for a while, came back, and no ‘fast count’ on the countdown timer.
In the Firebox directory, there’s a file profiles.ini that can be edited to
refer to a profile directory (*.default) copied from elsewhere.
This is in Linux; I have no idea whether Windows is the same.
“That’s what they’re wearing for normal patrol?”
Just a sad statement on today’s world. I am sure that this is common in most areas now, it is in ours.
I don’t think it is a sad statement on today’s world as much as what the cops are getting ready for down the road.
Don’t forget Camp 18 if you take 84 back. Another place we always stopped.
I meant 26, not 84.
FFox export will be great but it’s not just that. Skype has saved chats, photos and video that we want, without going looking for them and figuring out any file format issues.
I did just reset his 23 and me login, so we have access to that info again. Almost 700 new emails since October, most from facebook. He got a friend request from someone he used to work with and I can’t figure out where to respond to it and let the guy know that dad died…
Chigongo is expensive, but it ain’t worth it. They just legalized mj and hope to collect 57 million in taxes.. won’t even dent their shortfalls.
Next comes casino gambling.
n
I’m in a suburb of Chicago, and I was quite surprised by the difference in pricing at the grocery store. Items I buy every week in Houston were 1/3 or 1/2 again as expensive. Bacon was $14 instead of $8. Rolls, sliced ham, soda, all more expensive here. Dinner out was more than I expected too. Gas is $2.49 (or more) vs $2.15/gal. Tolls on the highway were $1.10 for a short stretch (and used to be just 40c.)
Doesn’t Chicago / IL have a $15 minimum wage ? That would do it.
And just about all of the midwest and upper east coast gasoline refineries have been closed and converted into tank farms. Most of those gasoline refineries dated back to the 1910s and 1920s and were small and horribly inefficient. Updating them involved horrendous EPA paperwork and liabilities. So, most of the gasoline and diesel are made on the huge and extremely efficient refineries on the gulf coast and pipelined or shipped to their various places. That shipping cost is not cheap but it is cheaper than the 100 year old refineries were.
Chigongo is expensive, but it ain’t worth it. They just legalized mj and hope to collect 57 million in taxes.. won’t even dent their shortfalls.
MJ legalization is far from a panacea. It brings new problems. WA State Dems wanted to avoid a close Gubernatorial race in 2012 so it was one of the initiatives which went on the ballot to get the Seattle vote out to the polls.
Next comes casino gambling.
That won’t happen if Native American casinos are nearby.
Oregon tried but failed seven years ago to pass a ballot measure to allow a company to build one commercial casino on an old dog track east of Portland. The tribal interests in OR and WA were too powerful, and the Ilani (sp?) casino in Vantucky (Vancouver, WA, part of the Portland metro) was announced shortly after the election.
Alley Oop: dinosaur time travel
https://www.gocomics.com/alley-oop/2019/06/26
So that is how it happened !
Arlo and Janis: romance novels
https://www.gocomics.com/arloandjanis/2019/06/26
It ain’t the romance novels that have declined, it is her prince charming. And she is older too.
My sibs seem to be either suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or cognitive dissonance. Neither is healthy in the long term.
And the last one out has to take your Mom.
ADD: and since Texas is turning clue over the next decade due to the invasion from within and without, would your sibs be better here ?
Crankshaft: old people using the bank teller
https://www.comicskingdom.com/crankshaft/2019-06-24
Be sure to see all three panels. And I prefer depositing checks using the ATM myself.
xkcd: reading in the original
https://www.xkcd.com/2168/
Oh yes, Randall Munroe definitely thinks sideways.
Be sure to see all three panels. And I prefer depositing checks using the ATM myself.
I still use the lobby tellers and write checks to pay bills. Having cancelled checks (well, images of cancelled checks) still comes in handy once in a while.
I grudgingly have direct deposit, but, post Vantucky, my wife and I have separate checking accounts at different banks used to receive our respective payroll transfers.
In Vantucky, I always suspected my wife’s employer had a deal with the bank, US Bank, to get our balance on a regular basis. The paychecks were always way too precise — keeping us going, including vacations (within limits), and covering emergencies but never enough to save for, say, “tail” malpractice necessary for a doctor to leave their job.
US Bank is on my sh*t list for life, and we now use credit unions.
I still use the lobby tellers and write checks to pay bills. Having cancelled checks (well, images of cancelled checks) still comes in handy once in a while.
I would not go without cancelled checks for any business activity or charitable contributions that you plan to deduct. My friend got audited by the IRS for his charitable contributions to our church. His wife was the accountant for our church for a number of years and he just gave online instead of writing a check. The IRS started by disallowing all of his contribution deductions until he could prove that he had given the money. He eventually won but they made him work for it. Now he writes checks.
I still use the lobby tellers and write checks to pay bills. Having cancelled checks (well, images of cancelled checks) still comes in handy once in a while.
Ditto.
I’m in the demographic (ahem) targeted in the Crankshaft strip, but I don’t drive, so I must use the lobby tellers. When I once joked with one of the tellers about using the drive-up lane, I was somewhat forcefully told pedestrians were not allowed there.
I’ve never used an ATM, and hope never to have to. I have younger friends who are equally Luddite. 🙂
I agree, but not my reason for leaving. Upon graduation, my only job opportunity was here. Left Chitown for SoCal and still here. Only activity that wanted me was aerospace and they were not in Chicago.
Confucious say: “What goes up must come down.” OTOH: What goes east west does not always go east.
Um, hey burrito beto, the only one who is at fault is the ‘parent’ who decided to enter the US illegally.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7183413/Trump-responsible-deaths-Beto-claims-photo-showing-drowned-father-daughter.html [pix of dead people at link]
This is the REAL face of illegal immigration–
ICE releases list of illegal immigrants accused of rape and murder who were released under sanctuary city policies
Good. Pour encourager les autres…
Two more deputies are fired for not intervening during Parkland school shooting where 14 students and three staff were killed
Deputies Edward Eason and Josh Stambaugh were fired Tuesday for the inaction
Sheriff Tony explained: ‘In essence, it was neglect of duty. We lost 17 people’
Part of the media complicity in minimizing and covering up pedophilia involving gay men…. “victims” means “BOYS” whereas girls are almost always identified as such, unless the abuser is a lesbian, then it’s “victims” again…
“High school science teacher, 50, accused of abusing 19 victims pleads guilty to child sex charges as it’s revealed he posted video of himself performing sex on a minor online for $50 and ran an explicit Snapchat group with students ”
n
Um, hey burrito beto, the only one who is at fault is the ‘parent’ who decided to enter the US illegally.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7183413/Trump-responsible-deaths-Beto-claims-photo-showing-drowned-father-daughter.html [pix of dead people at link]
Ol’ Bozo the clown believes that anyone should be able to walk / ride/ fly / crawl into the USA anytime that they want to. In addition to that open border, anyone coming across should get a free apartment, free healthcare, free pocket money, free schooling, free college, a free drivers license, free electricity, free water, and a free Tesla car.
If we truly cared here in the USA, we would do all of these things and more according to Bozo.
Meanwhile, Bozo’s home town of El Paso, Texas is totally overwhelmed with illegal immigrants.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/over-1000-illegal-immigrants-apprehended-on-us-mexico-border-largest-group-ever-apprehended-at-single-time-sources-say
Um, hey burrito beto, the only one who is at fault is the ‘parent’ who decided to enter the US illegally.
Now that he won reelection as Mayor of San Antonio, Ron Nirenberg is the new Prog power player in the Texas border region. Robert Francis and the Castro Brothers are playing catchup, fearful that history is passing them by.
“New Silex malware is bricking IoT devices, has scary plans”
https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-silex-malware-is-bricking-iot-devices-has-scary-plans/
“Over 2,000 devices have been bricked in the span of a few hours. Attacks still ongoing.”
Lovely. Welcome to the future.
Um, hey burrito beto, the only one who is at fault is the ‘parent’ who decided to enter the US illegally.
I posted several days ago: LEARN TO SWIM! No speekee de Eengleesh.
I this was a WHITEY! guy and daughter, he would be charged posthumously for child neglect. The Progs would call for his corpse to be hung from the “wall”.
“Linus Torvalds Sees Lots of Hardware Headaches Ahead”
https://devops.com/linus-torvalds-sees-lots-of-hardware-headaches-ahead/
“Linux founder Linus Torvalds, today at the KubeCon + CloudNative + Open Source Summit China conference, warned attendees that managing software is about to become a lot more challenging, largely because of two hardware issues that are beyond the control of DevOps teams.”
I suspected as much.
Did I mention that windows sucks? This machine is old and slow, but today it’s been page swapping, and REALLY slow.
I tried to get skype working again and find that the disk is full. MS d/L’d 116G of updates. and never deleted any old updates. So they filled my disk to the point that the pc would barely run.
dinner out with my sibling, barely beat the thunderstorm home. Had just enough time for youngest to catch some fireflies before the rain started. Getting POUNDED at the moment.
n
Illinois has one of the worst possible manual tolling payment solutions I’ve ever seen…
You have to stop, reach out and start pressing buttons on a machine with a display, while it shouts at you, then feed it money thru any of the 3 different acceptance devices, at which point it finally lets you proceed. no pay by mail, no obvious cameras or strobes at onramps. They brag about “open road tolling” which the rest of the world has had for a decade. Their transponder is as big as an 8 track tape and won’t stick to your window, and it dies as it is something active inside. The only way you know it died is when you start getting billed BY MAIL for bad reads. What a POS.
n
Their transponder is as big as an 8 track tape and won’t stick to your window, and it dies as it is something active inside.
Dude, you are OLD ! What the heck is an 8 track tape ?
“snicker”.
I tried to get skype working again and find that the disk is full. MS d/L’d 116G of updates. and never deleted any old updates. So they filled my disk to the point that the pc would barely run.
I am seeing this problem all over my LAN. Dadgum winblows downloading updates and never deleting them on several PCs. I only notice when people start complaining or my source code server runs out of disk space AGAIN. The source code server has a 250 GB primary drive and a 4 TB secondary drive with 32 GB of ram running Windows 7 x64 Pro.
You have to stop, reach out and start pressing buttons on a machine with a display, while it shouts at you, then feed it money thru any of the 3 different acceptance devices, at which point it finally lets you proceed. no pay by mail, no obvious cameras or strobes at onramps
We have one of those machines in Taylor at our test site for a project in the Northeast somewhere. A company in Portugal makes them and supplies all the accessories. Big $$$.
The machines (well the ideas behind them) suck. Slow, loud, awkward (several people had to get out of the car to use them) and each one is double, as they had passenger car height and semi truck height stacked one on top of the other.
n
thanks for the password links, I used the nirsoft tool to expose them all and copy them. that’s one backup.
Tomorrow I’ll image this drive. Don’t want to do it in the middle of a storm.
Deleted enough temp files that I went from “full disc” messages to less than half full.
There is an equivalent amount of physical stuff here in the house too. I might get done, progress is slow but visible.
n
And no one commented on my post title? Where it came from or what its link to posts/comments is ?
n
And no one commented on my post title? Where it came from or what its link to posts/comments is ?
Were you thinking of something like this?
The machines (well the ideas behind them) suck. Slow, loud, awkward (several people had to get out of the car to use them) and each one is double, as they had passenger car height and semi truck height stacked one on top of the other.
Maintenance of the machines is probably a union gig.
And you would be surprised at how many of our competitor’s ORT systems flat out don’t work. That’s why they come to us.
Even the competition hired us for a critical project to which I’m currently assigned. A surprising (and unsurprising, really) number of their employees are people who used to work for us, especially in project management.
“This is [name]. He was a lead developer on the tag reader when he was on your payroll. Talk to him if you have problems with the reader settings.”
“Linus Torvalds Sees Lots of Hardware Headaches Ahead”
Windows and Mac OS users have it worse than Linux since they depend on a closed source vendor for patches to fix the CPU bugs at the OS level and improve the compilers.
And both companies would prefer to lock developers’ business logic into their proprietary languages and APIs which are not truly portable to other systems.
@mediumwave, funny list but it left off the original joke. I’m sure the joke appeared elsewhere but it was in either Young Frankenstein, or Blazing Saddles that I first heard it.
Because we were talking about coffee, the joke (usually voiced by a very unlikely female) “I like my coffee like I like my men, strong and black.” often followed by whoever she says it to doing a ‘spit take’….
I was maybe being too subtle…
n