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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

Babbittry, Bad Ideas, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Economy, Foxconn, Government Spending, Scott Walker, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, WEDC

America’s Best Know Better

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A story from the Wall Street Journal‘s Valerie Bauerlein explains the damage that the Foxconn scheme has done to ordinary people in Foxconn Tore Up a Small Town to Build a Big Factory—Then Retreated (“The iPhone maker got fat incentives to build a $10 billion LCD plant that largely hasn’t materialized on land where Mount Pleasant, Wis., razed homes and crops”):

MOUNT PLEASANT, Wis.—Six miles west of Lake Michigan lies a cleared building site half as big as Central Park, ready for Foxconn Technology Group’s $10 billion liquid-crystal-display factory.

Contractors have bulldozed about 75 homes in Mount Pleasant and cleared hundreds of farmland acres. Crews are widening Interstate 94 from Milwaukee to the Illinois state line to accommodate driverless trucks and thousands of employees. Village and county taxpayers have borrowed around $350 million so far to buy land and make infrastructure improvements, from burying sewer pipes to laying storm drains.

One thing largely missing: Foxconn.
….

The impact on Mount Pleasant, by contrast, is palpable. Its debt rating has slipped. Local politics has become fraught. Neighbors have fallen out over land seizures.

“At some point we’re talking about things that are just imaginary,” said Nick Demske, a commissioner in Racine County, where the plant is. “We’re pretending.”

The gap separating critics of the Foxconn project – among them economists and business reporters at America’s finest universities and publications – and the boosters flacking this idea is unbridgeably wide.  (I’m obviously not including myself in the ranks of august critics; it is simply enough to be able to tell the difference between wheat and chaff.)

Claims about the project sound like silly jabbering; critiques of the project are grounded in applied reason.

Someone should tell Foxconn’s local peddlers: America’s best see you clearly, and so view you dimly.

Previously: 10 Key Articles About Foxconn, Foxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers,  Foxconn Destroys Single-Family Homes, Foxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair Budget, The Man Behind the Foxconn Project, A Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the Trough, Even Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) Workforce, Foxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All, Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious, Foxconn’s Shabby Workplace Conditions, Foxconn’s Bait & Switch, Foxconn’s (Overwhelmingly) Low-Paying Jobs, The Next Guest Speaker, Trump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build Foxconn Plant, Foxconn Deal Melts Away, “Later This Year,” Foxconn’s Secret Deal with UW-Madison, Foxconn’s Predatory Reliance on Eminent Domain, Foxconn: Failure & Fraud, Foxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition,  Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere, Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land, Foxconn Couldn’t Even Meet Its Low First-Year Goal, Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans, WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re Stupid, Lost Homes and Land, All Over a Foxconn Fantasy, Laughable Spin as Industrial Policy, Foxconn: The ‘State Visit Project,’ ‘Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn,’ Foxconn: When the Going Gets Tough…, The Amazon-New York Deal, Like the Foxconn Deal, Was Bad Policy, Foxconn Roundup, Foxconn: The Roads to Nowhere, Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment, Foxconn: Behind Those Headlines, Foxconn: On Shaky Ground, Literally, Foxconn: Heckuva Supply Chain They Have There…, Foxconn: Still Empty, and the Chairman of the Board Needs a Nap, Foxconn: Cleanup on Aisle 4, Foxconn: The Closer One Gets, The Worse It Is, and Foxconn Confirms Gov. Evers’s Claim of a Renegotiation Discussion.

Education

In the Milton School District, Disorder Takes Its Toll

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Years of wrangling, opposition to open government, attempts to stifle free speech, administrative stipends out of ordinary policy, and erratic behavior take a toll, as one reads that the nearby Milton School District’s top officials are resigning at the end of this school year:

School District of Milton School Board President Joe Martin read a statement this morning announcing that Superintendent Tim Schigur and Director of Administrative Operations Jerry Schuetz have submitted their voluntary resignations. Their employment with the school district will end June 30.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.1.19

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Good morning.

May in Whitewater begins with rain and a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 14h 07m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 12% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

The Whitewater School Board is scheduled to meet beginning at 6 PM for a closed session, returning to open session:

4. CLOSED SESSION
A. Adjourn into closed session, pursuant to Section 19.85(1) (c), Wis. Stats., to consider employment, promotion, compensation, or performance evaluation data of any public employee over which the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility. Specifically, to discuss administrator contracts, evaluations, and performance of duties with the District’s legal counsel. (Action Item)
5. OPEN SESSION
A. Reconvene into open session per Section 19.85(2)Wis. Stats., for potential action on any matters discussed in closed session. (Action Item)

On this day in 1931, the Empire State Building officially opens.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky report Mueller complained that Barr’s letter did not capture ‘context’ of Trump probe:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

….

At the time Mueller’s letter was sent to Barr on March 27, Barr had days prior announced that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In his memo to Congress, Barr also said that Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but that Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and it made initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.

Jennifer Rubin observes Rod Rosenstein is leaving as a diminished man and shamed lawyer:

“Rosenstein talks a lot about the rule of law in very eloquent ways,” former prosecutor Mimi Rocah tells me. “But his recent actions — signing on to Barr’s letter which misrepresented the Mueller report and gave a legally indefensible and unnecessary conclusion, standing behind Barr at a press conference that was more like a defense closing argument — directly threaten the rule of law, because he no longer looks like someone leading the DOJ in neutral ways.” She adds that “we can’t have faith in decisions he’s made. For him to cite Trump as a defender of the rule [of law] given the damage he has done to the DOJ and FBI as institutions is shameful.”

 Large tornado caught on camera near Sulphur, Oklahoma:

Mendacity, Trump

10,000

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We expect honesty even from children, but septuagenarian Trump may be the most prolific liar on the contemporary scene. He is a model of mendacity and depravity.

The Fact Checker is keeping a running list of all of President Trump’s false or misleading claims, reviewing every word the president says (or tweets) to compile an exhaustive catalogue of misstatements. In the course of his more than 10,000 false or misleading claims, Trump made nearly three times as many false or misleading statements in his second year than he did in his first. And he’s nearly made as many false claims in his third years as he did in his first. Almost a quarter of these claims were during campaign style rallies and nearly a fifth were about immigration. Here’s what you need to know. Read more on the Fact Checker database: https://wapo.st/2GTsnga.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.30.19

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see afternoon rain with a high of forty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 14h 02m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 18.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board will meet for a bargaining session beginning at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1803, American representatives sign the Louisiana Purchase Treaty: “The Louisiana Territory was vast, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to Rupert’s Land in the north, and from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west. Acquiring the territory would double the size of the United States, at a sum of less than 3 cents per acre.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Robert Reich contends In fighting all oversight, Trump has made his most dictatorial move:

“We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” says the person who is supposed to be chief executive of the United States government.

In other words, there is to be no congressional oversight of this administration: no questioning officials who played a role in putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census. No questioning a former White House counsel about the Mueller report.

No questioning a Trump adviser about immigration policy. No questioning a former White House security director about issuances of security clearances.

No presidential tax returns to the ways and means committee, even though a 1920s law specifically authorizes the committee to get them.

Such a blanket edict fits a dictator of a banana republic, not the president of a constitutional republic founded on separation of powers.

If Congress cannot question the people who are making policy, or obtain critical documents, Congress cannot function as a coequal branch of government.

If Congress cannot get information about the executive branch, there is no longer any separation of powers, as sanctified in the US constitution.

There is only one power – the power of the president to rule as he wishes.

David Graham contends Charlottesville Was a Turning Point:

The weekend of August 12, 2017, may well have been a turning point in recent American history, but it’s not entirely clear which way things turned.

That weekend was when neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us” and employed other anti-Semitic slogans. There were multiple violent clashes, and one woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when James Alex Fields Jr., one of the marchers, drove his car into a crowd. And President Donald Trump infamously equivocated about the incident. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” and then vacillated over the course of several days, declining to mount a sincere and forceful condemnation of the march.

By any objective standard, the incident was one of the lowest points of an administration defined by its nadirs, and the immediate reaction showed that public opinion concurred. Americans condemned Trump’s response, and his approval hit a record low.

  Veterans to the Rescue:

America, Babbittry, City, History, New Media, Newspapers, Press, Social Media, Writing

The Media’s ‘Post-Advertising’ Future

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Nationally and locally, the media (whether profit or non-profit) continue their significant transformation: the decline of print, the rise of (interactive) digital media, and the collapse of a middle-of-the-road partnership of boosterism between mediocre newspapers and middling officials.

Print’s doomed, and so is digital that merely repeats the same banal style of contemporary print.

Traditional forms of advertising are also doomed, as Derek Thompson explains in The Media’s Post-Advertising Future Is Also Its Past (“Why the news is going back to the 19th century”).

Thompson makes key points that apply in places big and small:

Advertising’s not enough:

One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while The New York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising.

America’s past:

To understand the future of post-advertising media, let’s briefly consider its past. During a period of the early 19th century known as the “party press” era, newspapers relied on patrons. Those patrons were political parties (hence “party press”) that handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals.

That era’s journalism was hyper-political and deeply biased. But some historians believe that it was also more engaging. The number of newspapers in the United States grew from several dozen in the late 1700s to more than 1,200 in the 1830s.

Advertising’s influence:

It was advertising that led to the demise of the party press. Ads allowed newspapers to become independent of patronage and to build the modern standards of “objective” journalism. Advertising also led to a neutered, detached style of reporting—the “view from nowhere”—to avoid offending the biggest advertisers, such as department stores. Large ad-supported newspapers grew to become profitable behemoths, but they arguably emphasized milquetoast coverage over more colorful reader engagement.

….

Mid-century newspapers were as broad and unobjectionable as department stores, because department-store advertising was their business. News media of the future could be as messy, diverse, and riotously disputatious as their audiences, because directly monetizing them is the new central challenge of the news business.

The future: 

Every once in a while, somebody asks me whether we’ll ever get back to a place where the country can agree on a “single set of facts.” Those asking the question tend to be nostalgic for the 1950s, when they could count the number of television channels on one hand and rely on Walter Cronkite and a local media monopoly to control the flow of information.

That past is dead and irrecoverable. We’ve accelerated backward, as if in a time machine, whizzing past the flush 20th century to a more distant, more anxious, and, just maybe, more exciting past that is also the future.

The key lesson for publishers is to offer sharp (and sometimes sharp-tongued) writing, to see that content is king.  They’ll also have to rely not on advertising but on subscriptions or patronage (of others or oneself). Advertisers want calm, but calm in turbulent times is another word for avoidance, acquiescence, or appeasement.

Just as bloggers are a return via digital to America’s eighteenth-century pamphleteers, so newspapers will have to return via digital to the style of America’s nineteenth-century papers to survive.

It’s improbable that those who have adopted the mid-twentieth century style will carry on into the new era: their writing is dull, and their outlook mere babbittry.

For America, however, is outlook is favorable: we are a vigorous people who will meet the demands of a more vigorous era.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.29.19

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see morning rain with a high of fifty.  Sunrise is 5:50 AM and sunset 7:53 PM, for 14h 02m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 27.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board will meet beginning at 7 PM, going into closed session and reconvening into open session.

On this day in 1862, the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi begins.

Recommended for reading in full:

John Schmid reports One in four Wisconsin jobs at high risk in a new age of robotic workers and hyper-automation:

When it comes to replacing humans with robots, few companies are as enthusiastic as Foxconn Technology Group.

In its drive to manufacture iPhones, TVs and game consoles at the lowest cost, Foxconn systematically has replaced tens of thousands of inexpensive Chinese workers with even cheaper and more productive robots.  A separate subsidiary, Foxconn Industrial Internet Co., one of China’s biggest tech companies, supplies industrial robots to other businesses that want to cut labor costs.

But the topic of automation barely came up in Wisconsin after the 2017 announcement that Foxconn had agreed to build a multibillion-dollar manufacturing campus in the state. Instead, the project’s backers insisted Foxconn would create 13,000 high-paying human manufacturing jobs.

It’s as if the state has little appetite to talk about non-human workers and a new era of hyper-automation that economists say is already underway — a shift that will go far beyond manufacturing.

….

Assembly lines will be ground zero but a host of other occupations and industries — from delivery truck drivers to bankers and hospital workers to fast-food staff — also are at risk. In the latest leg of industrial revolution, jobs won’t go to lower-cost immigrants or foreign rivals, even if that’s where the nation’s political debate often gravitates.

“States in the Midwest, Great Plains, and South are most exposed to automation, while ones in the Northeast, West Coast, and Southwest face comparatively less risk,” according to research published this year by the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based policy group.

Brookings spent more than two years compiling data on occupations, industries and regions that are ripe for automation under the current slate of technologies (not counting technologies still on the drawing boards).

Of the 50 states, Wisconsin is 10th most exposed. Nearly half of all occupational tasks performed by humans in the state (47.5 percent) can be replaced by computer-driven technologies that already exist, according to Brookings’ estimates.

Wisconsin finds itself in a cluster of states with a high percentage of at-risk occupations. Indiana is the nation’s most vulnerable with 48.7 percent of human employment tasks at risk. Iowa (48.0 percent) and Mississippi (47.7 percent) have similar rankings.

(Irony: the very company that promised – falsely – to create thousands of high-paying jobs in Wisconsin is, in fact, a world leader in automation.  See also Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere. The ignorant local men of the Whitewater Community Development Authority and the ‘Greater’ Whitewater Committee who have pushed Foxconn need a new slogan: WORTHLESS for WHITEWATER™.)

What Causes the Smell After Rain?:

Agriculture, Bad Ideas, Business, CDA, Economics, Economy, Local Government, Poverty, State Capitalism, State Government, Taxes/Taxation, That Which Paved the Way, Trade, Trump, WEDC, Wisconsin

‘Stung by Trump’s Trade Wars, Wisconsin’s Milk Farmers Face Extinction’

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After years of the ignorant scheming of tax incremental financing, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, capital catalyst grants, the Trump tax bill, and now Trump’s trade war, Alan Rappeport reports Stung by Trump’s Trade Wars, Wisconsin’s Milk Farmers Face Extinction (“The flagship industry in a pivotal swing state faces an economic crisis”):

KENDALL, Wis. — For decades, Denise and Tom Murray rose before 5 a.m. and shuffled through mud and snow to milk cows on the farm that has been in their family since 1939. This month, after years of falling milk prices and mounting debt, the Murrays sold their last milk cow, taking pictures while holding back tears as the final one was loaded onto a truck and taken away.

“It’s awful hard to see them go out the last time,” said Ms. Murray, 53. “It’s scary because you don’t know what your next paycheck is going to be.”

Wisconsin is known as “America’s Dairyland,” but the milk makers who gave the state its moniker are vanishing, falling prey to a variety of impediments, including President Trump and his global trade war.

….

But Mr. Trump’s trade approach has pushed many of Wisconsin’s already struggling dairy farmers to the edge. Milk prices have fallen nearly 40 percent over the past five years, the byproduct of economic and technological forces that have made milk easier to produce and state policies that ramped up production and sent prices tumbling.

That has coincided with Mr. Trump’s sweeping tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, which were intended to help American manufacturers but have set off retaliatory tariffs from Mexico, Canada, Europe and China on American dairy products. Most painful for Wisconsin’s dairy farmers has been a 25 percent tariff that Mexico placed on American cheese, which is made with a significant volume of the state’s milk production.

Mr. Trump has insisted that any short-term pain from his trade war will pay off in the long run through improved access to foreign markets. And he has tried to mitigate the effect by providing federal aid to farmers whose products have been hurt by the trade war. But the crumbling of Wisconsin’s flagship dairy industry has some farmers questioning whether Mr. Trump’s promises will come true in time to save their farms.

These ‘community development’ men, playing with public money, haven’t developed anything meaningful; on the contrary, they have presided over Wisconsin’s economic decline.  This is irrefutably true for Whitewater.  See Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade and A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA.

No marketing, no press release, no backstage maneuvering, no letter to the editor, no laminated plaque, no sycophantic reporting will withstand the crushing truth of their inferior economics.  

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.28.19

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-three.  Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset 7:52 PM, for 14h 00m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 35.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1945, Benito Mussolini and over a dozen other fascists are executed by partisans.

Recommended for reading in full:

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare offers Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary:

Thursday [4.18.19] I surveyed the entire Mueller report. I read some sections carefully; I skimmed others. My job was to anchor Lawfare’s initial coverage, so I needed to have a sense of the big picture, as well as detailed knowledge of certain findings and arguments. Starting Friday [4.19.19], however, I am reading the entire document carefully, starting at the beginning. I’m writing up my thoughts as I go in this post. There will be no cohesive argument to this journal. It will simply be a collection of my observations, questions and thoughts as I go through the document. It will get long. I will not attempt to summarize the underlying document, merely to reflect on it, but I will organize this post by document section. I will update the post as I read. I hope people find it useful.

The following table of contents are links to the sections of this journal, which correspond to sections of the report itself:

Introduction to Volume I

The Special Counsel Investigation

Russian “Active Measures” Social Media Campaign

GRU Hacking Directed at the Clinton Campaign

Russian Government Links to and Contacts with the Trump Campaign

Prosecution and Declination Decisions

Introduction to Volume II

Background Legal and Evidentiary Principles

Factual Results of the Obstruction Investigation

B. The President’s Conduct Concerning the Investigation of Michael Flynn

C. The President‘s Reaction to Public Confirmation of the FBI’s Russia Investigation

D. Events Leading Up to and Surrounding the Termination of FBI Director Comey

E. The President’s Efforts to Remove the Special Counsel

F. The President‘s Efforts to Curtail the Special Counsel Investigation

G. The President’s Efforts to Prevent Disclosure of Emails About the June 9, 2016, Meeting Between Russians and Senior Campaign Officials

H. The President’s Further Efforts to Have the Attorney General Take Over the Investigations

I. The President Orders McGahn to Deny That the President Tried to Fire the Special Counsel

J. The President’s Conduct Toward Flynn, Manafort, [REDACTED]

K. The President’s Conduct Involving Michael Cohen

L. Overarching Factual Issues

Legal Defense to the Application of Obstruction-of-Justice Statutes to the President

In Search of Undiscovered Insects:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.27.19

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see rain and snow with a high of forty-two.  Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 57m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 44.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1963, Dave Brubeck performs at Beloit College.  Here’s The Dave Brubeck Quartet – Take Five – at Carnegie Hall from that same year:

Recommended for reading in full:

Adam Serwer, from 2017, offers a reminder of The Myth of the Kindly General Lee (“The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed”):

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

….

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

Patrick Marley and Kevin Crowe report Overtime for state workers tops $80 million, with some Wisconsin employees more than doubling their pay:

MADISON – Overtime for state employees jumped 12% last year under a system that allowed dozens of employees to more than double their pay by routinely working long hours.

The state spent $80.9 million on overtime in 2018, or $8.7 million more than the $72.2 million it spent in 2017, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of payroll data released under the state’s open records law.

More than three-fourths of the overtime — $63.6 million — was rung up at the Department of Corrections and Department of Health Services, which have struggled to keep employees at facilities that must be staffed around the clock.

That meant big paydays for employees willing to work long hours week in and week out, including a nurse who made nearly $217,000 last year.

(Scott Walker was as a fiscal conservative in the same way he was a ballerina.)

Inside One Of The Last Pinball Factories In The US:

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, April 30th, 12:30 PM @ Seniors in the Park, If Beale Street Could Talk

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This Tuesday, April 30th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of If Beale Street Could Talk @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building:

If Beale Street Could Talk (Drama/Romance/Crime)

Tuesday, April 30th, 12:30 pm
Rated R (language, sexual content). 1 hour, 59 min. (2018)

Based on the book by James Baldwin. Tish, a young woman in 1970’s Harlem, embraces her pregnancy while she and her family struggle to prove her fiancé innocent of a crime. Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actress, Regina King.

One can find more information about If Beale Street Could Talk at the Internet Movie Database.

Enjoy.

Cats, Faraway Places, Good Ideas

The Lanai Cat Sanctuary

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Hawaii may seem a paradise, but even within that wonderland there’s a cat paradise:

Although he regularly greets guests at the Lanai Cat Sanctuary, Keoni Vaughn will never forget one passionate visitor who showed up a couple of years ago.

“He came to the cat sanctuary … from Japan to spend the day with us — 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., five hours, only to fly back to Japan the same day,” said Vaughn, the shelter’s executive director.

“Talk about the ultimate cat lover. He was in heaven.”

Heaven, of course, means different things to different people, but for cat lovers, it just might be full of purring bundles of fur — in black, brown, white, gray or ginger. If that’s your bliss, the Lanai Cat Sanctuary, just a few minutes’ walk along a red-dirt path from the island’s airport, is home to 620 cats.

Via Missing your cat while you’re in Hawaii? Lanai’s sanctuary lets you cuddle up.

See also The Lanai Cat Sanctuary.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.26.19

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-one.  Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 7:50 PM, for 13h 55m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 54.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1865, the 10th Wisconsin Light Artillery musters out:

It had fought in the battles of Stones River, Resaca, Jonesboro, and Bentonville, the sieges of Corinth and Nashville, the Atlanta Campaign, and Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Recommended for reading in full:

Tom Hamburger reports House panel moves to hold former White House official in contempt after he obeys Trump administration’s instruction not to testify:

“The White House and [Trump Admin official] Mr. Kline now stand in open defiance of a duly authorized congressional subpoena with no assertion of any privilege of any kind by President Trump,” [Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Elijah] Cummings said in a statement. “Based on these actions, it appears that the President believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight.”

Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler write Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too (“A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive, algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians”):

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

There is no indication that this position is an official policy of Twitter, and the company told Motherboard that this “is not [an] accurate characterization of our policies or enforcement—on any level.” But the Twitter employee’s comments highlight the sometimes overlooked debate within the moderation of tech platforms: are moderation issues purely technical and algorithmic, or do societal norms play a greater role than some may acknowledge?

….

Twitter has not publicly explained why it has been able to so successfully eradicate ISIS [from the platform] while it continues to struggle with white nationalism. As a company, Twitter won’t say that it can’t treat white supremacy in the same way as it treated ISIS. But external experts Motherboard spoke to said that the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters. So it’s no surprise, then, that employees at the company have realized that as well.

Why Did We Just Shoot A “Bullet” At An Asteroid?: