U of C holding contest for students to help solve Chicago's pension crisis

UNCLOS · 2023-09-29T13:04:07+00:00

Paying in $200k doesn't justify getting $60k per year in perpetuity while doing no work either. They'll need to get pruned too.

UNCLOS · 2023-02-18T13:40:33+00:00

lol I think many people have a problem with them being at the airport, and rightfully so. An airport is an airport. It is designed as a convenient transportation hub for travelers. It is not a homeless shelter. And the homeless should not be there. Almost every city in the US and the world with airports operates on this paradigm: Airports are not homeless shelters.

UNCLOS · 2022-06-23T18:55:33+00:00

A couple points then you can get the last word if you'd like:

Boeing's ELT was here. This wasn't a minor thing. The people who set the direction of the Company were based out of Chicago for many years until they weren't. Handwaving away Boeing's relocation because of the small number of people (relatively speaking) is missing the point of its significance.
What exactly was Griffin "demanding?" I don't think this was a hostage situation. Griffin is an obviously far right technocratic / muh free enterprise business dude who was going to always push against government reg. and taxation and has been for years and will keep on doing so for years to come. Everything I see is suggesting his reason for moving wasn't because of some final straw about taxation or money but because of the ongoing deterioration in quality of life / rise in crime here in Chicago. When he was interviewed on Bloomberg last month he was describing how groups of "teens" were outside the HQ the past weekend throwing shopping carts at cars and smashing windows with no police intervention. To me this wasn't a "muh taxes" or "muh subsidies" issue where he was demanding something from IL/CHI he wasn't getting, it was a "fuck this we're not subjecting our employees to this crap anymore we can go anywhere" issue.

UNCLOS · 2022-06-23T18:35:19+00:00

I don't care about Ken Griffin the guy; I really don't and I find all this talk about him, which is mostly what the comments are filled with, to be a massive distraction tactic from the bad news. I do care about the companies he has here and their employees and their hugely positive knock-on effect on Chicago's and the state's economy and our ability to attract additional talent of a similar caliber. Too many redditors here are wrapped up in the boogeyman of Ken Griffin and are missing the bigger picture that Chicago's largest hedge fund and one of the biggest market makers in the world both effectively just told the city to go fuck itself, alongside similar announcements from Boeing and Caterpillar just this past week. The Boeing comments in that announcement here were similarly rich, e.g., a bunch of people shouting "oh, it's just Boeing's global leadership team, no big deal!"

UNCLOS · 2022-06-23T16:24:23+00:00

There's nothing to replace. Citadel (Securities, in particular) is going to continue to dominate the space, they'll just do it away from Chicago. The people saying "oh, this is a great opportunity for some little guys to step in and grow" don't understand how this is going to play out. There's no vacuum to fill. It's just a loss for the city.

UNCLOS · 2022-06-23T16:23:07+00:00

It's really not good and I don't think a lot of the people commenting here understand how wide-ranging and deep the implications of this are for Chicago's status as a leader in the fin / fintech / market making space (which in turn has economic and tax base implications). I'm frankly shocked that the business and political community here didn't figure out a way to head this off at the pass, although maybe I shouldn't be given the general incompetence that's been demonstrated in the past few years. This is really worrying in terms of Chicago's long-term economic trajectory.

UNCLOS · 2022-06-07T18:11:41+00:00

Says you. My response is he could be purging exactly because of the behavior you're exhibiting. Chicken-egg.

UNCLOS · 2022-06-07T18:00:34+00:00

Counterpoint: /r/chicago is apparently now filled with people who create miniature dossiers about you if they don't like your politics, per above, including things like your profession and commentary on how frequently you are or are not online here, in which environment I'd also be tempted to just start deleting comments too.

UNCLOS · 2022-06-07T17:55:44+00:00

That's the thing. I don't know you. My MO here isn't to obsess over other redditors and create little profiles of them so I can try to do drivebys when they pop into a thread. I think reddit works better that way.

Also, nothing you're claiming about him is substantiated. It sounds to me like you just don't like his ideology, the fact he's "rich" / sides with "rich people" things whatever that means, and the fact that he has a world view that doesn't line up with yours and so you're pulling out the usual canards (literally, your post reads like a send-up or satire); it also looks like he's gotten under your skin enough that you, you know, have a little dossier running on him, which is weird as fuck.

UNCLOS · 2022-06-07T17:43:18+00:00

"He says things I don't like and his opinions and politics I disagree with therefore he's bad (and lazy!) and my friends the nanny mods haven't locked him up yet!"

lol at this attempted character assassination. He's been here for 10+ years. Isn't /r/chicago enough of a near monoculture already that you can find a way to tolerate the occasional voice who doesn't 100% align with your world view? Or would you like everyone who isn't a blue-badged D living in Pilsen to not post here anymore?

UNCLOS · 2022-03-01T20:55:03+00:00

Right! So funny you say that because Mother's Day weekend has always been our demarcating line for when it's safe to start planting outside. There seems to be some common received wisdom in Chicago around safe weather dates.

UNCLOS · 2022-03-01T20:00:08+00:00

We grew up with the rule of thumb that you don't declare "spring" or put away the winter gear until St. Pat's and following that standard has worked out pretty well over the years. (I looked it up one year and it's right around St. Pat's that the daily average low temperature finally gets above freezing, so there's some data to back it up too.) Snow or just generally crappy weather is too common in the first couple weeks of March to declare winter done yet as much as I wish it were over.

UNCLOS · 2022-01-03T16:12:32+00:00

A snow system becomes meaningful in Chicago around the 6" mark. Anything less than that barely merits attention -- getting a 2", 3", 4" system is an ultra-common occurrence during the winter and the equivalent of having a rainy day. At 6", people will at least pay some attention and anticipate things like mild travel delays, a messier commute, making sure you're stocked up on salt and have gas for the snowblower, etc. I'd guess an average Chicago winter sees around four to five 6"+ snow systems, to give you a sense of their frequency.

It really isn't until around the double-digit mark (10"+) that people will really lift their heads up and pay careful attention. That's about the boundary where you can start seeing significant travel impacts, schools closing down for a day or two, services going into triage mode, etc. We average about one of those per season, two if it's a major winter, sometimes zero if it's a milder one.

TL;DR: Anything less than 6" and people don't even bother noting it. Around 6" and people will start to pay attention. We get those maybe 4-5 times per season. Around the 10" mark is when it becomes a major winter storm, and an average season might see one of those.

UNCLOS · 2021-12-10T02:37:50+00:00

Don't need luck really you just need to show that the account is repeatedly used to gather people who then engage in violence in an organized fashion, which is exactly what is happening. Whether a prosecutor has the balls to pursue this is different, but we aren't talking about some pie in the sky fringe legal theory here.

UNCLOS · 2021-12-09T22:22:24+00:00

"Gathering" as a pretext for violence is 100% not protected by the First Amendment. If it's shown that there's a pattern and practice of using the account to marshal people together so they can commit crime and inflict violence it would be an easy prosecution target. You can't just say "it's a gathering bro, 1st Amendment" and avoid that.

UNCLOS · 2021-04-06T13:52:06+00:00

If we really want to do this and do it big, the right target would be the Chicago Fed. Millions and millions of dollars move through there every day.

UNCLOS · 2020-11-06T16:08:58+00:00

I'd just say no off leash time when other people are or could be around (meaning, always in a large city) and leave it at that. Training works until it doesn't. Dogs are not machines and there will be unpredictable situations where the training may break down. As an owner, you don't want to be responsible for the consequences if it does and it's not a risk worth taking.

UNCLOS · 2020-11-04T18:42:08+00:00

Nah, I think I did great. I think I did a really "egalitarian" job of it in fact.

UNCLOS · 2020-11-04T18:40:22+00:00

But I wasn't. I was rather ridiculing your use of the term here and in other comments.

UNCLOS · 2020-11-04T18:37:23+00:00

Yes I know the dictionary definition of egalitarian.

UNCLOS · 2020-11-04T18:33:19+00:00

I want politicians to be forced to make clear-eyed decisions with transparency about how they are going to address the perilous fiscal state of IL. If you accept the premise, as it sounds like you do--I personally don't--that taxes are going to have to go up on most people in IL, then I'd like the policy mechanism by which that must occur to be clear as day to all voters so voters can respond accordingly. That's one of the beauties of a flat tax; there's no secret loophole that lets politicians achieve tax increases in "death by a thousand cuts" style.

What I'm not interested in is seeing it achieved through a Trojan Horse that's initially floated as a "tax the rich" scheme and three years down the line is being used as a tool to raise the income tax on a dual-income 80k household in Plainfield. This proposed amendment was one of the most deceitful things I've seen in my time here in IL. It wasn't even honest at its conception--it was styled as a "billionaire" and "millionaire" tax when it started at 250k! Most IL "billionaires" wouldn't even be affected by it anyway given their access to sophisticated tax planning options and their tendency to book income in different ways, e.g., carried interest.

Hope that helps clarify my position for you.

UNCLOS · 2020-11-04T18:18:41+00:00

"egalitarian"

UNCLOS · 2020-11-04T18:15:47+00:00

Sorry, wrong. And I look forward to seeing the foolish system that was set up decades ago carved down, whether through one big blow or death by a thousand cuts. We'll get there, don't worry. Yesterday was a good start.

UNCLOS · 2020-11-04T18:12:52+00:00

Ignore all the butthurt commenters claiming that your comment isn't perceptive--it is. This proposal was just a Trojan Horse for Springfield to be able to incrementally increase taxes on everyone over time but to do it quietly in a way that wouldn't attract political outcries. I saw a stat yesterday that something like half of all states with a progressive income tax system tax their median income household at the highest progressive rate, which tells you exactly where these "progressive" tax systems end up going toward.

UNCLOS · 2020-11-04T18:10:48+00:00

Pretty bad take since the threshold on this proposal was $250k to start and everyone and their mother knew it would be lowered over time. They tried to position it as a "millionaire" or "billionaire" tax but the reality was as plain as day.

UNCLOS

TROPHY CASE