#wrigley building

[rabbitcruiser]

The Michigan Avenue Bridge (officially DuSable Bridge) opened to traffic on May 14, 1920.

[supplyside]

Chicago River

[hometownhistorychicago]

Aerial view of Chicago (1922)

[shelterinplace]

Charles Green Shaw [Wrigley Building with Gum] 1937

An early precursor to Pop Art

[urbs-in-horto]

Aerial view of the completed South Tower of the Wrigley Building, Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River, 1921. (Note the warehouses and lines of rail cars in the lower right.)

[findingtherightangle]

[the6thofmay]

Prince of Wales and William Wrigley, Jr., chewing gum magnate and owner of Chicago Cubs at the Wrigley Building in Chicago.

[imageryphoto]

Photographer of The Year —2023

For the second year in a row I received a Silver Camera Award and selected as Photographer of The Year by Noir Magazine. 310 photographers were selected from over 85,000 members with submissions of almost 200,000 images. It is quite a selective group. This years winner was The Wrigley Building in Chicago Illinois. Last year’s winner was the model and the cyclist. Both are available for purchase…

[mrsmoose54]

States 46 & 47 Day 6 - (Chicago IL - Kenosha WI) - Day 6

[sndwave]

why is this the description for air quality on my weather app today

[rabbitcruiser]

The (July 14) burned down 47 acres of the city, destroying 812 buildings, killing 20, and resulting in the fire insurance industry demanding municipal reforms from Chicago’s city council.

[captainhongjoong]

noooo i just realized i put the wrigley building and the aon center backwards on the poll. i fixed it

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sympathy for the spammer

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).

It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/

That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:

http://thebezzle.org

Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.

A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.

MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.

It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."

The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468

This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.

One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.

Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.

But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.

The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."

This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.

The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.

But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.

They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:

https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:

https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/

The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.

And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.

Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[yeyinde]

Question about Straw House, Straw Dog Johnny! OK so he obviously has some brain trauma due to taking a bullet to the head and all, and we can see him shifting between thoughts and emotions in a way one can describe as volatile, but I've been dying to know... Does Johnny have moments of clarity, moments where who he was before being shot break through? If so, how lucid is he? Is he able to take stock of his surroundings, does he know he's got a captive in his bed? Does he wonder about his team mates, until his mind splinters and he returns to being a shell of a man in the woods?

sorry this took me so long to answer!! it got super long so i had to find ways to cut it down, but since i couldn't write this in Johnny's pov, i rambled. a lot.

but—to answer your question: yes and no lmao

i don't think he's fully gone. definitely delusional, grasping at nothing, and struggling to adjust to this civilian world where no one needs him. not even his teammates.

but he's cognisant, and in many ways, he's still Johnny. still Soap. but he is a victim of circumstances. he has untreated TBI (which outside of physical recovery does need therapy as well, especially to offset the emotional trauma that underlines it all), and he decided to pick one of the loneliest places in Canada to hide out in. maybe not the loneliest, but there's definitely a sense of disconnect when you move outside of the big cluster of cities near the border to the US, and nowhere else captures that primordial, almost cosmic sense of crushing aloneness quite like NWT (for me, at least lmao)

it's the social isolation, the feeling of worthlessness (because i do see him as someone who'd never retire from this, ever), and the loss of agency and familiarity that really send him spiralling. he's grasping at straws and sinking deeper into his terrible mental state. listless, in a way. and very, very angry. everything was ripped away from him in seconds and now he's stuck inside a cabin with nothing but his thoughts for company. and while we don't really know how he came to be squirreled away in NWT (specifically a patch of unorganised land outside of Wrigley), we know that it was not choice.

he still thinks of his teammates, remembers (vividly) everything that happened, but had no choice but to leave. there's a lot of resentment, though. he feels robbed. broken. useless. feels like he should be there with them when they hunt down Makarov, rather than sidelined like he has been. it festers. builds.

but then you come along.

a task, a mission. someone he can save. and even if he were fully cognisant, woke up perfectly fine one day, he'd still find ways to rationalise it. he does not, nor will he ever, see you as a captive. he did you a favour. he saved you. by any means necessary. even if those means are morally reprehensible and outright illegal. Soap is patting himself on the back for doing what needed to be done, and nothing anyone says will change his mind.

and if he was ever caught, he'll pretend to feel some sense of remorse for his actions. let people lead the discussion of how tragic what happened is and how truly sorry he is for the pain caused, but the entire time, he's plotting on how to get his family back. you're his. he found you. he'll never feel guilt over what he sees as a good deed. but i think he can be convinced to feel remorse over sneaking into your bed.

[urbs-in-horto]

Wrigley Building lit by a bank of floodlights from across the Chicago River.

[thedivineart]

PICK A CARD ✶ list of reasons why will you love your future spouse﹙🍥﹚

one

cards: 7 of hearts, 10 of hearts, 4 of diamond,

peaceful and calming or healing aura

loves to surprise people but in positive way

sincere and devoted to their feelings

will possibly give you a loving and happy marriage life

successful individual due to their honesty

make someone softens around them

someone who to have large family like 4 kids and more

brings happiness and security at home

loves to play with kids

fear of being abandon or being left alone

brings heat and warmness in your heart

allowing you to fulfill your desires

very committed person when it comes to marriage life

everything they do or say something it brings amusement into you

build strong foundation for the relationship and marriage, as well friendship and sexual matters

financially stable or someone who will bring comfort in your life whether emotional and materialism

others: south node in taurus, strong taurus placements, moon in libra or strong libra placements, grass green, mint green, lavander or purple, violet, Possible names: mint, cyan, wrigley, pepper, Wesley, Adam, Esme, Aaron, Rhodes, Keanu, Sabrina, Emerald, Naomi, Alex/ Alexander / Alexandra, Ann or Anna / Hannah, Danielle/ Daniela / Daniel, Venus / Vanessa / Van / Vaughn, Oliver/ Olive /Olivia, Gareth, Finn / Finley, Kelvin / Kevin, Justine, Alfredo / Alfred / Wilfred, Wilson, Tomas or Toby

If you liked this reading leaving like, comment or feedback and re-blog are highly appreciated, thank you😊🤍

two

cards: ace of hearts, 10 of hearts, 10 of clubs

in life their main focal is home, family and the happiness they can bring into their abode life

very passionate in family, give gifting and nourishment to love ones

may love to stay at home probably a home body individual or they are often into their home spending time with their family

also they are affectionate for their family , relationship and even in friendship

someone who care a lot and often reminds you to take care of yourself

likes to visits his or her love ones or the people they care the most

reliable person who knows how to solve and give advice specially in home and family matters

someone who can't say no or have a hard time to refuse in favor of others

they may also likes to bring joy in family

successful in any aspects of life like in business

the happiness is growing when you are with them

this person is the one whom you will called "home"

stable, solid and happy marriage life

you will become more happy or will smile often when you meet them

they want a huge family, lots of kids cause they do believe that the more the merrier it is

sometimes they will be annoyed in you or you will be annoyed in them

spending and taking vacations in near beaches, family bonding or a simple date in beach or something near water

will work hard to achieve something in their life not really only for themselves but for the family also

they feel success is only valid because they have a family who's support and affectionate into them

others: sagittarius, sagittarius rising, strong sagittarius placements, sagittarius conjuncts in taurus, moon in taurus, taurus placements, taurus conjunct aquarius, aquarius sun, strong aquarius placements, aquarius conjunct pisces, pisces rising, pisces placements, aquarius in 4th house, possible names: Megan, Lola / Lolita / Lollie, Mauve, Maggie / Margie / Madge, Gen, Olive, Cyrus, Ace, Cecil / Celina / Cecilia, Art / Artemis, Seraphine / Seraphina, Sage, Scarlett, Eleonor or with a, Rosalinda, Celeste, Ethan, Henry, Gema / Gemma, Rhea, Amethyst, Phoebe, Genevieve, Darwin, Alex / Alexander, Gallen, Hugo, Kyla or Kyra or with H, Kai, Finn, Rio, Clio, Gareth, Mina, Juliet, Joe

If you liked this reading leaving like, comment or feedback and re-blog are highly appreciated, thank you😊🤍

three

cards: 6 of clubs, queen of spades, jack of clubs , jack of diamonds

they do take the responsibility in problems or situation to resolve it, however in very specific people who happened to pick this pile, your fs doesn't want to deal to this kind of responsibility into their life.

they do use their intelligent to outsmart the people who will going to betray them

likes to share their thoughts, opinions, ideas and feelings; honest

when saying something you may notice they have hand gestures and body language

reading and writing is their way of showing love perhaps it could be one of their hobbies

cannot leave without learning and studying most of the time; could be educated individual as well, lots of achievement in study matter.

open and willing to share an advice if you need it, even not too they still giving you an advice though

ambitious and skillful when it comes to work and something they do

primarily to people who pick this pile doesn't still know who is this person or they still don't yet appear in your life, in few people you knew this person. a relative by marriage for some

they don't live in your neighborhood, living far away, might be a foreign for few

they know how to turn tables for good and probably in bad too; know how to convince people and manipulative as well

don't like to get close to anybody or everybody, it's like they got strong boundaries or they do know to keep their privacy to people that mostly appear as cold and aloof

hardworking and honest often in trusted position whenever they are, in school / university, sports, into their community etc, they love to participate in anything

others: moon in sagittarius, strong sagittarius placements, sagittarius conjuncts virgo, virgo sun, moon and rising, placements in virgo, purple, green, pretty, handsome, attractive well being, adventures, extrovert, loves freedom, optimistic, fair minded person, likes to be honest, Seraphina or Seraphine, blaze, sage, Scarlett, Diana or Dianne, Aurora, Arc, Archer, Hunter, Apollo, Curtis, Marshall, Alden, Jason, Clark, Dustin, Amelia, Virginia, Emery, Aster, Rhea, Gaia, Pari, Melissa, Hazel or Acel, Daphne or Daphnie, Agatha

If you liked this reading leaving like, comment or feedback and re-blog are highly appreciated, thank you😊🤍