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Just so you know ...

No, this blog did not die from Covid back in 2020. Thank you for asking. What happened was that a long running problem finally blew up, one that I couldn't fix until very recently.

About ten years ago, a huge chunk of the population of one of the largest cities in Illinois was uprooted and scattered to the four winds, along with what remained of its possessions. No, the Dustbowl did not come back. That was Nebraska. No, we ran into something far more damaging - real estate speculation.

Our city had produced an impressive number of PhDs and successful professionals for somewhere its size. This gave its school system a great reputation, that proved to be a magnet for rich people with dumb, lazy kids. The rich thought that if they moved into the land of the smart kids, that the extra special school system would magically turn their drug addicted semi-literate kids into Nobel laureates. This didn't happen, but hope lived on and Chad and Trixie continued to move in.

Once in, the rich proved quite willing to demand the local school districts and city government go on eternal spending sprees, and this being one of the most corrupt states in the Union, the rich got their way. Property taxes went up, and then went up some more, as real estate speculators started buying up the old victorians and tearing them down, replacing them with multi-million dollar McMansions, on the theory that if you build it, they will come.

The rule of thumb for mortgages is that if the customer's yearly income isn't at least 40% of the purchase price, the sale should be refused because the customer will almost certainly go into default. The market for all of those unremarkable looking, mass produced multi-million dollar homes was never going to exist, but the teardowns and replacements continued, sending assessments and taxes soaring, forcing people to move quickly into order to avoid eviction.

The city government loved this, thinking it would replace the riff raff (that would be us), and that it would find itself ruling over a city of over 100,000, entirely populated by people who could afford five million dollar homes, and I guess were too dumb to think about the implications of the use of all of that plywood in a tornado zone. I'm not just guessing. I've been in this conversation with city employees.

Like a lot of people, we only had a few days to pack, in the dark and in the sweltering heat, with the power turned off. We got what we could into storage as quickly as we could, and ended up losing a lot, just because there wasn't enough time. The book with my passwords ended up in a box buried in a warehouse, a box that didn't show up until recently.

During that time, I did have access to an alternate account (on Flickr) that I was able to use to continue approving new photos. That's why you were seeing them until 2020. But I didn't have access to the account I had used to set up IFTTT, and to do my administrative work. I also couldn't get into this blog, to say anything about the problem. So, when IFTTT suddenly dropped the number of recipes allowed for a free account, while in theory that would have been an easy problem to fix, I didn't have the access needed to do the fixing. That's why the photo suddenly stopped showing up in 2020 - because IFTTT turned off the applet, and I couldn't get in to turn it back on.

To add to the fun, the email provider that provided the email I used to register the account I had Tumblr use to do the updating on this blog went out of business while I was locked out. No shaming of the owner of that provider for this business failure should be accepted. The poor man took ill, gravely ill, and died. But this created a problem, because somebody at Tumblr thought that he had a great idea, and didn't really think it through.

"Wouldn't it be great," he thought, "if after a while, we forced users to update their own passwords for their own good? Also, if we would make that job easier for them, by sending them an email with one of our sign in links? That's such a wonderful feature, that maybe we should force them to use it to do the updating." Whoever had this idea, I guess, never stopped to ask himself a simple question.

"What happens if the user's email provider goes under, before he can update his password."

Right now, despite having the correct password, I'm locked out of that account because somebody decided that he'd force me to do something, for my own good. I have an appeal pending, but I've heard the rumors and I'm not hopeful. If they prove willing to be reasonable, and to give me a chance to replace my now defunct email account with a new one before changing the password on my account, cool. But far more likely, from what I've heard, I'll get a robotic response from somebody who will refuse to budge.

If so, then I'll have to create a new updating account to replace the old one, and that appeal will still have served a purpose, but it will have helped to make a point. That I haven't just been sitting here, seeing how many new Tumblr accounts I could create. That when the number of accounts I've created goes up by one, that this won't be because I wanted to do that, but because I had to deal with computer security theater and with somebody's bureaucratic attitude.

If that's what it comes to. Maybe the people at Tumblr will turn out to be nicer than those rumors would suggest. That would be cool, but one does have to be prepared for the worst.

As for the future ... is this likely to happen, again? While I can't make any promises about what other people will do, and I know that a lot of whimsical behavior is to be seen in this industry, I'd have to say "probably not."

The circumstances of my lockout were highly peculiar. They're highly unlikely to ever be reproduced, and also, I'm a lot more prosperous now than I was, then. Dad had raised a large family, spent a lot helping us with our educations, and saw us enter the job market, one by one ... just in time to see a reality in which employers colluded in order to break the back of skilled labor, and in order to artificially hold down wages. In 2014, if I was lucky, I'd get $7 / hour. Today, I make over $120 / hour, and I've been urged to charge over $200 / hour, not by my colleagues, but rather by my clients, who feel that I haven't been charging enough.

No, I'm not on OnlyFans. I'm a guy. I'm a guy who, right now, is at the ABD stage for his PhD in Mathematics, has four years of college teaching experience as a TA, also has a degree in Physics, and is about to get a degree in Electrical Engineering, as well. I do tutoring and consulting work in material that goes well beyond Calculus. The demand for that work is great, and the supply is inescapably limited, so the market price for that has always been high. When universities decided to engage in a little economic terrorism of their own, and started refusing to offer anything other than poverty-level adjunct positions to their new hires, they left their students in sudden need of tutoring (a lot of it), because the adjuncts couldn't hold office hours, and still get to their next scheduled work sessions in time.

Each student became a potential employer, if only a temporary one, meaning the number of customers for our work was now in the tens of millions, at the very least. Collusion eventually broke down, thanks to the wonders of the Prisoners' Dilemma, and our wages rose back up to an honest market price, despite all of the efforts of employers to keep this from happening.

At $7 / hour, I was a vulnerable, marginalized person who kept running into the sort of narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths who delight themselves by preying on the poor, while "compassionate conservatives" make excuses for their behavior. At $120- $200 / hour, at a time when my siblings mostly make more than that, I'm not such easy prey, any more. Life is calming down.

I had said something about our city producing professionals in numbers out of proportion to its size. This was not because the school system was particularly good (it wasn't), and certainly not because we had any great connections to call on. It was because our city was in northeastern Illinois, far enough from the South and West sides of Chicago that the gangs wouldn't find their way out to us, but close enough to Chicago for our parents to take the train into work, in the morning, and get there on time. Our school system produced success stories, not because it was great, but because it had great students, the children of the best, bright and hardest working young people who had escaped what, today, would be called "slums" or "the Inner City."

America has a class system. as much as some people try to pretend that it doesn't. As much as our friends on the Right like to pretend that they're cheering for us to work hard and succeed, the fact is that they clearly really aren't. They want us to work hard, to be sure, but in the way I was working hard, in the beginning - for next to no pay, and with the credit for my work going to my "social betters." In the beginning, I ran into people who did their best to beat me down and keep me in "my place," in part because of Classism and Racism, and in part, because as long as I was beaten down, scared and hungry, they could put their names on my work, creating the illusion that they had skills that they had never really developed, because I would be too scared to say "no" to that exploitive arrangement.

People like that colluded in an effort to rig the job market for their own benefit, but in the end, they failed to change the basic economic facts of life, one of them being that when a commodity is priced below market price, shortages will appear. If the schools hadn't made the short sighted choice of going with an all adjunct work force, something else would have made the collusion break down, sooner or later. It was just a matter of time, and now, our time has come.

The MAGAs can go straight to Hell.

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Foggy Quarentined Chicago

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Morning March

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Wintrust Arena DePaul Development

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Beach closure.

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The end of summer swimming season is marked by turning over the lifeguard towers.

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2109 Heart Walk (I).

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Along the lake front.

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Chicagoans lining up at Genesis Growers with their organic produce

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Logan Square Farmers Market

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Chicago's Bean

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This is Boss. He sniffs for explosive devices. Today he’s protecting visitors to Wrigley Field

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Fireworks.

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See from the lakeshore.

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Hello Chicago.

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Large mural by Mosher on the side of The Brew Yards in the west loop.

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Shadow

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Family

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1st Sox game!

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Crowds along the river.

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Summer in Chicago

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The Harding Tavern - Logan Square

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Red

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A young woman in a red dress - I believe it's a Quinceañera dress - walks through Millenium Park in Chicago with her friends.

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UP Steam Locomotive Big Boy on Display West Chicago Illinois 7-29-19_2074

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