#Advisory Council

[tenth-sentence]

"I demand the right to represent my people," Tasslehoff said proudly, "and take my place on the advisory council."

"DragonLance Chronicles: Dragons of Winter Night" - Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

[so-journeying]

Sometimes when I'm awfully low, when the world is cold, I will feel a glow just thinking of YOU… & the way YOU look tonight. Yes YOU're lovely, with YOUR smile so warm..

There is nothing for me but to love YOU

Frank Sinatra's name means: Honest Roman Senator [Publican]

The name was in origin a nickname from Latin senator denoting a member of the Roman senate (from Latin senatus, a derivative of senex 'old'), which later came to be used as a title of magistrates in various Italian states.

[vicforberger]

Lab test subjects as employees

In late 2022 and early 2023, a few folks started contacting me about being disqualified or having to repay unemployment benefits they received during the Covid-19 pandemic because of their participation in lab testing studies. Then at the July 2023 Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council meeting, a coalition of lab testing companies and Rep. Gundrum asked the council to support a change in the…

[thesarahfiles]

On October 31, 2013, Sarah joined the newly appointed Advisory Council for the Challenger Center.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has signed a bill that is aimed at fighting homelessness.

Called “Home IL,” it will bring state agencies, nonprofit organizations and other advocates together. The bill focuses on an equity-based approach, which includes the voices and contributions of those who have experience homelessness.

It codifies the collaboration to move Illinois to “functional zero” homelessness by bolstering the safety net, targeting high-risk populations, expanding affordable housing, securing financial stability for unhoused individuals and closing the mortality gap.

“Every person deserves access to safe shelter and the dignity that comes with housing,” Pritzker said. “This is a first-of-its-kind multi-agency cooperative effort — bringing together state agencies, nonprofit organizations, advocates, and people with lived experience to prevent and end homelessness. I’m grateful for their dedication and believe that together, we can prevent and end homelessness once and for all.”

Rockford has already taken strides in this aspect. In 2017, it became the first community to reach “functional zero” levels among veterans and the chronically homeless.

Illinois’ Interagency Task Force and Community Advisory Council works across 17 state departments and agencies, as well as over 100 processes, programs and policies, to develop a comprehensive plan to combat homelessness.

The goal of the plan is to prevent shelter entry or ensure that shelter stays are limited and lead to quick transitions into stable living situations.

Pritzker has also committed about $360 million for the initiative in his FY24 budget. These investments include:

• $118 million to support unhoused populations seeking shelter and services, including $40.7 million in the Emergency and Transitional Housing Program.

• $50 million in Rapid ReHousing services for 2,000 households, including short-term rental assistance and targeted support for up to two years.

• $40 million in Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) Capital funds to develop 90+ new PSH units providing long term rental assistance and case management.

• $37 million in Emergency Shelter capital funds to create more than 460 non-congregate shelter units.

• $35 million for supportive housing services, homeless youth services, street outreach, medical respite, re-entry services, access to counsel, and other shelter diversion supports.

• $21.8 million to provide homelessness prevention services to approximately 6,000 more families.

• $30 million for court-based rental assistance.

• $15 million to fund Home Illinois Innovations Pilots.

• $12.5 million to create 500 new scattered site PSH units.

“People experiencing the trauma of housing instability are our neighbors and community members who deserve to be treated with humanity and dignity. With this cooperative effort, Illinois is ensuring our state agencies can continue to collaborate, and that stakeholders are at the table with us, to support our most vulnerable in living healthy, well, and with dignity.” Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton said. “Our state is making it clear that we will continue to work together so we can all move forward, and we will focus on holistic strategies that bring us closer to ending homelessness in our state.”

[itsmissing]

design comm for a bargain mage

[dolores-slay]

Freaky deaky that I have been with Dragon Age since I was 16-17 years old and we waited 10 years for this game never being sure it it's even coming, only to have fandom influencers who got to play it for some unclear reason saying they will spoil the game's story as if that's a normal thing to do and telling US to get off social media if we don't want to see it. What is going. on.

[arlathen]

if it's gonna be october can we go after the 12th. it's away games the rest of the month after that.

[baronetcoins]

Context: it is 8 gazillion degrees outside (95 f)

[sith-shenanigans]

it continues to delight me that Krovos dresses less fancily as a Dark Councilor than she did as a lord

no more robes. she’s going to wear a jumpsuit because nobody can call her on it

[xtruss]

A bulldozer works to maintain Chicago's underground. More frequent and intense storms pose danger to aging infrastructure like these tunnels. Photograph By Keith Ladzinski, National Geographic Image Collection

Here’s What Worries Engineers The Most About U.S. Infrastructure

Water and sewer systems built in the mid-19th century weren't meant to handle the demands of modern cities, and many bridges and levees have aged well past their intended lifespan.

— By Alissa Greenberg | July 17, 2023

Christine Kirchhoff’s family were preparing to move into a new house when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017. Then the massive storm dumped 50 inches of rain on the area in just a few days, leaving two nearby reservoirs so full that their operators were forced to open the floodgates. Kirchhoff’s family had to be evacuated by boat. Both their original and new houses were inundated.

As an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, Kirchhoff spent a lot of time thinking about water even before it swallowed her family’s livelihood. She is part of the legion of professionals behind the complex, often invisible systems that support American life: dams, roads, the electric grid, and much more.

For the last 25 years, the American Society of Civil Engineers has been sounding the alarm on the state of that infrastructure across the country. In their most recent assessment, for example, transit scored a D- and hazardous waste a D+. It’s an expensive problem to ignore. The ASCE estimates current infrastructure conditions cost the average family $3,300 a year. “Everyone is paying whether they know it or not,” Kirchhoff says.

Train derailments, highway and bridge collapses, and dam failures have become increasingly common. But which areas are civil engineers most concerned could cause imminent catastrophe, and what can we do about it? Kirchhoff and other infrastructure experts weigh in.

Water Contamination Crises are Already Here

The engineers we talked to agreed: our water systems are in trouble. Both those that protect us from water as a hazard (stormwater, dams, levees, bridges) and those that help us manage water as a resource (drinking water, wastewater, inland waterways) are in grim shape.

Streets were flooded after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017. Photograph By Ilana Pancih-Linsmam, The New York Times/Redux

The United States’ 2.2-million-mile drinking water and 800,000-mile sewer system was developed in part in response to the widespread waterborne diseases of the mid nineteenth century, Kirchhoff says. Maintenance has lagged woefully behind since then; some older areas, including some cities in the northeast, still use century-old wooden pipes. And many more of our pipes nationwide are still made of lead.

A water system designed for yesterday’s climate and to filter yesterday’s contaminants is especially problematic in a world of increasing demand, fiercer and more frequent storms, and “forever” chemicals. The result: boil orders, water main breaks, and sewer overflow, plus 15 percent of our water treatment plants working at or over capacity. These issues, combined with the toxicity of lead pipes, lead to water crises like the one that continues to plague Flint, Michigan.

Amlan Mukherjee, the director of sustainability focusing on infrastructure at WAP Sustainability Consulting, recommends focusing on these pipes—swapping lead for PVC or other materials and fixing the leaks that spill some 6 billion gallons of treated water a day—as one high priority fix.

Our coastline is also dotted with facilities storing hazardous oil and other chemical waste cocooned in donut-shaped earthen structures, adds Bilal Ayyub, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park—structures that, he notes, could be made of concrete. Because of soil’s vulnerabilities, he worries that dramatic rainfall or a storm surge could destroy these structures, resulting in a release of toxic chemicals “bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill by orders of magnitude.”

His worst-case scenario has already happened at least once, when floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey ate through the earthen container at the San Jacinto River Waste Pits, releasing noxious waste into a nearby river.

Physical Collapse is Happening Now

Meanwhile, the number of high-hazard-potential dams in the United States now tops 15,000. Many were built during or before the WWII era and have been widely neglected since then. And when it comes to bridges, “there are cautionary tales all over,” says Maria Lehman, president of ASCE and vice chair of the Biden Administration’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council. “Every county in the country has a list of bridges that, if they had money, they would replace tomorrow.”

Our 617,000 bridges include not just those spanning mighty rivers but also every highway overpass and minor link across a stream—and close to one tenth of them are significantly compromised. “If you have to think in terms of catastrophe, we’re already there,” Mukherjee says. In 2007, the collapse of an I-35W bridge in Minnesota killed 13 people and injured 145. More recently, a six-lane bridge over the Mississippi was closed for three months in 2021, disrupting interstate travel and shipping because an inspector missed a significant crack. Americans drive 178 million trips on structurally deficient bridges each day.

Every day, millions of Americans travel across bridges and overpasses, like the Marquette Interchange in Milwaukee, that may be structurally deficient. Photograph By Keith Ladzinski, National Geographic Image Collection

Yet the US spends only 1.5-2.5 percent of its GDP on infrastructure, proportionately less than half of what the European Union spends, Lehman says. This long-term lack of funding has run out the clock on many solutions. Many of our bridges were built to last 30-50 years, but nearly half are at least half a century old. The average age of our levees is also 50; our dams average 57.

Now, extreme weather is intensifying just as structures fail. We’ve already seen consequences in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, when collapsing levees inundated 80 percent of New Orleans, killing hundreds, or in the failure of an under-inspected dam in Edenville, Michigan, which flooded the region and destroyed thousands of homes in 2020. The trend is set to continue: after Superstorm Sandy engulfed New York City transit, Ayyub helped study similar risks in Washington, D.C and Shanghai. His models showed widespread flooding that could swamp D.C. metro stations and in severe cases even reach “the backyard of the White House.”

The Future of U.S. Infrastructure

Mukherjee is optimistic about the use of new technology to solve some of these issues, though adoption has been slow. Drones can provide human inspectors with up-close views of areas they can’t reach themselves and reduce chance of human error; a drone on an unrelated project captured footage of the Mississippi bridge crack two years before its discovery.

Ayyub has also worked with North American freight railroads to find weak links using computer modeling, combing through thousands of stations to “identify exactly which point if it fails will have the biggest impact,” he says. Why not do the same with our power grid and waterways?

One piece of good news: in 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provides $1.2 trillion over five years for the ailing systems that help American society run, the largest federal investment in US history. It was a major victory. “Every president for the last eight presidents said we should spend a lot of money—like a trillion dollars—on infrastructure, and none of them delivered,” Lehman says.

Unless it is renewed regularly, though, this funding will barely stop the bleeding. And meanwhile, across the country, families like Kirchhoff’s (who after a difficult year were able to rebuild both the destroyed houses) struggle to recover from a relentless march of disasters, many of them preventable. It’s time for the US to learn the lessons drawn from of a century of neglect, Lehman argues, and begin maintaining the systems that makes so much of American life possible while they’re still in working condition.

“If you have a leak in your roof, you go up there, find it, replace the shingles, put on a little tar” she says. “If you let it go, it’s not going to be a little fix: it’s going to be a replacement.”

[gwydionmisha]

Tallahassee Mayor Nixes LGBTQ+ Advisory Council Meeting During Pride Month

[wealthnsociety]

The Evolving Landscape of HNW Wealth Management 

HNW Wealth Management individuals represent a significant and growing segment in the financial world· With assets worth millions, they require specialized investment strategies and tailored services to manage and grow their wealth. This blog explores the intricacies of HNW wealth management and the high net worth investment management strategies that cater to this elite group.   

Understanding HNW Wealth Management 

HNW wealth management is a bespoke service provided to individuals with substantial financial assets. It encompasses a broad spectrum of services, including investment advice, estate planning, tax optimization, and risk management. The primary objective is to preserve and grow the client's wealth while aligning with their financial goals and risk tolerance.   

Key Components of HNW Wealth Management 

1· Personalized High Net Worth Investment Management Strategies 

 High net worth investment management focuses on creating customized investment portfolios. Unlike standard investment plans, these strategies are tailored to meet the specific financial objectives of HNW individuals. This includes diversifying across various asset classes such as equities, bonds, real estate, and alternative investments like private equity and hedge funds. 

2· Comprehensive Financial Planning in HNW Wealth Management 

Comprehensive financial planning is critical in HNW wealth management. This includes estate planning to ensure wealth transfer across generations, tax planning to minimize liabilities, and risk management to protect assets. Financial advisors work closely with clients to develop a holistic plan that encompasses all aspects of their financial life. 

3· Exclusive Investment Opportunities for High Net Worth Individuals 

HNW individuals often have access to exclusive investment opportunities not available to the public. These can include private placements, venture capital investments, and luxury real estate projects. Leveraging these opportunities can significantly enhance portfolio performance and wealth growth. 

The Role of Technology in HNW Wealth Management 

The advent of technology has transformed HNW wealth management. Advanced analytics and artificial intelligence provide deeper insights into market trends and investment performance. Digital platforms offer HNW clients real-time access to their portfolios, enabling informed decision-making. Moreover, robo-advisors and automated investment tools are becoming integral in offering personalized investment management services efficiently and cost-effectively. 

Challenges and Solutions in High Net Worth Investment Management 

1· Market Volatility 

 Managing the investments of HNW individuals involves navigating market volatility. Implementing robust risk management strategies and diversifying investments can mitigate potential losses and ensure wealth preservation. 

2· Regulatory Changes 

Staying abreast of regulatory changes is crucial in high net worth investment management. Advisors must continuously update their knowledge and adapt strategies to comply with new laws and regulations, ensuring their clients' investments remain secure and legally compliant. 

3· Personalized Client Service in HNW Wealth Management 

Providing personalized client service is essential in HNW wealth management. Building strong relationships based on trust and transparency fosters client loyalty and satisfaction. Regular communication and tailored financial advice are key components of exceptional client service. 

Conclusion 

HNW wealth management is a dynamic field requiring specialized knowledge and skills. By offering personalized investment strategies, comprehensive financial planning, and exclusive investment opportunities, wealth managers can effectively cater to the unique needs of high net worth individuals. As technology continues to evolve, it will play an increasingly vital role in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of high net worth investment management, ensuring HNW clients achieve their financial objectives and secure their wealth for future generations. 

[readingrecap]

🗓️ This Week in Meetings 5/6 - 5/10

Here is the list of all the meetings with agendas currently scheduled for this week in Reading. As always, this list is only up to date as of Monday morning and new meetings or modifications can be added/revised at any time. For PDF’s of the agendas, please click on the meeting name. Please check out https://www.readingma.gov for any changes. Monday Housing Authority May 6, 2024, 5:00…

[wausaupilot]

After northern hunters bag fewer deer, some seek closer look at herd management

While the deer population has been steadily growing to a high of roughly 1.6 million statewide, their numbers have been falling in northern counties.

By Danielle Kaeding | Wisconsin Public Radio Some county officials, conservation groups and lawmakers say the state should take a closer look at deer management after Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a Republican bill that would have temporarily banned hunting does up north. Republican lawmakers introduced the bill in an effort to boost the deer population after a dramatic drop in the gun deer harvest…

[subsidystadium]

St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce backs Tampa Bay Rays ballpark proposal

A member of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce wants everyone to know something. The newest proposal by the Rays is “good” for the area. How? Well, according to the author, building this ballpark would “attract businesses and provide high-quality jobs”. Beyond that, did you know that the current ballpark brought a “positive atmosphere” to downtown Tampa Bay? Then he claims that the Rays are…