davidf560

The whole story as presented in the article and comments here is a bit misleading. None of these buildings were "abandoned", at least not in any practical sense. The buildings documented here were old (from the 70s I believe) and full of asbestos and things like that and had really outlived their usefulness, and the very large piece of land they occupied had become extremely valuable. The buildings were still fully occupied when the company decided to sell the campus and relocate to new headquarters in downtown Chicago and move manufacturing to a new facility in Elgin.

Once sold, the company moved out. Shortly after, demolition began, and that's when these pictures were taken. The damage is from demolition, not from the normal "abandoned for 10 years deterioration" you see on those Urban Explorer Youtube videos. People worked in these buildings just a few years ago, and a lot of them had been remodeled somewhat recently and were actually pretty nice inside. The 6-story building with the large atrium was newer than the other parts and is still there and the new owner/developer is hoping to continue to use it as an office building (last I heard anyway).

Motorola also still occupies the 14-story building that used to be the world headquarters as well as another large building on the property. The real story here is much more mundane: a big company sold off some valuable real estate as part of a move to chase a younger workforce in downtown Chicago (jury's still out on that decision, especially with a more WFH-focused future).

I suppose it depends on how you define "downfall", but Motorola stock this year is at an all-time high, even higher than its peak during late 90s during the run up to the dot-com boom and when Motorola cellphones were king.

There's been some very hard years in between and it's a smaller company now, but it's actually doing very well by many standards.

DirectShow (the API for video capture and other things in Windows) has long had the concept of a filter which can be plugged into the video pipeline[0]. I'm not certain if that's the reason that the term is commonly used for effects such as the one discussed here, but this "cat filter" certainly might have been implemented as a DirectShow filter, so it's very plausible the terminology comes from that.

I'm pretty sure apps like this were called filters long before Instagram even existed.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/directshow/di...

They appear to be using Pfizer in at least some locations in Illinois, FWIW.

I've played with Jami several times because it sounds good on paper but it just flat out failed to work a lot of the time. Messages sent but never received, no indication of why or what was going on. For my uses anyway, IM needs to be above all reliable - when I send a message I need to know the recipient will get it (and in a timely manner, modulo their availability).

Most of my network is on Telegram at my urging because it was the best option at the time, but I'm constantly looking for something better to replace it (as I'm aware of the downsides to Telegram). Currently I'm trialing Element with one of my contacts and I'd say it might be ready if I can get past the initial setup headaches, but Telegram just works so darn well and is so amazingly fast that it will be very hard to get buy-in for people to switch. Most people are overloaded with IM apps already, adding another one is tough unless it can completely replace and deprecate one they're already using. Jami definitely is not that IMO.

Two sentences after the part you quoted it says a belt was around his neck. Later on it mentions that he hung himself from the doorknob.

There's been plenty of healthcare workers splashed all over the news taking it already. More importantly, we're a long long way away from the general public even getting to decide to take it or not. If hesitation is still a concern in March/April, then congress could have done the PR stunt at that point.

Right now there's a huge shortage of vaccines compared to the number of people who are both eligible and willing. No need to worry about the unwilling at this point since there's not enough to go around anyway.

Congress took it because they think they're more important than the rest of us, and apparently they think they're even more important than the frontline workers who are still waiting.

New York's plan: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/ny-unveils-draft...

Phase 1 says "Healthcare workers in patient care settings"

Tennessee's: https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/health/documents/cedep/nov...

Phase 1 says "hospital/free-standing emergency department staff with direct patient exposure and/or exposure to potentially infectious materials"

Other states have similar wording. You'd really have to twist yourself into a knot to convince yourself that a work-from-home administrator falls into the categories specified above. Shame on any state who didn't include wording like that - there was nothing stopping them from putting some common-sense wording in their plans. Beyond the written rules, you'd also have to be a selfish idiot to think that just because you're related to a healthcare company that you should get it this week if you're working from home. If I were in that kind of role, shame would be enough to stop me but as we've seen the elite often have no shame.

(edit) California's own plan [0] says Phase 1-A includes "paid and unpaid persons serving in healthcare settings who have the potential for direct or indirect exposure to patients and infectious materials and are unable to work from home". So if Stanford was really vaccinating admins who are working from home, then it seems like they violated state guidelines and should be punished appropriately.

[0] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/CDPH%20Document%20...

Why should residents who are young and very low risk be a high priority?

Maybe they shouldn't be top priority, but if they're dealing directly with covid patients they sure as heck should have higher priority than a VP or administrator that's been working from home this whole time.

It is ridiculous there aren't much more clear/specific guidelines, and in some cases enforceable policies/regulations, from the federal government. It's like nobody's driving the bus here.

Why is this not California's fault? States were each permitted to establish their own procedures, which somewhat makes sense given the challenging distribution requirements of the Pfizer vaccine. Montana has significantly different challenges than Rhode Island in that sense. Most states that I know of have established clear guidelines saying who gets it and when - I assume California is the same.

Seems like California is the governmental entity that failed to exercise proper oversight and/or requirements specification here.

I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff

I don't understand why society is putting up with this. Right now if you're not in a daily COVID-facing role (i.e. an actual front line medical worker) or in a nursing home you should not be getting the shot. This makes my blood boil. There should have been laws passed regarding ordering of the distribution with criminal penalties for line jumpers like this.

There's an article in our local paper with a happy picture of one of our state's congressional representatives (a healthy 34-year-old!) getting the shot. Like WTF? There's doctors and nurses who are treating covid patients who can't get it yet. Why the heck does Congress get priority over them?

Not only do these people have no shame, half of them even have the nerve to brag about it to the rest of us plebes who will have to wait months or more to get it.

The FDA announced early this morning that they were definitively going to authorize it[1], but they didn't actually issue the authorization at that point, with people telling the press that authorization would come "in the next few days".

If someone called up the FDA after that and said "hey, you've already told everyone you're going to approve this, so just sign the papers and make it official today rather than going home for the weekend and finishing it up on Monday", I have no problem with that. That's not pressure to prematurely authorize it (since they already confirmed they would), that's just cutting through the red tape/BS and making it official faster (IMO).

Put it into a tech perspective - if your company's cloud product went down and you were losing $millions every hour, and the devs found the bug and fixed it, but the product manager said "hey great, we'll fill out the release paperwork in the next few days and maybe approve pushing the change to prod on Monday", would anyone go for that? No way - they'd say we're not going home until this is fixed and released. Replace $millions with actual human lives and that's basically what we have here, isn't it?

[1] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-stat...

that works out to a 500 Mb/s link per building, which seems pretty modest for a institution

We're talking 500 Mb/s of upload 24/7 though, which can't be used for anything else (i.e. you need capacity beyond that for any other internet traffic). I doubt a regular old 1Gbps business class connection will cut it there (I'm sure they'd shut you off after a few days of uploading like that).

Despite another post that cited a large budget for NYPD, most agencies are cash-strapped. Telling them they need a $thousands/month internet connection at every precinct isn't going to go over well.

I've been to several PDs (think suburban city - probably like the majority of agencies) where their entire "internet infrastructure" consisted of a Comcast cable modem screwed to a sheet of plywood on a wall. Like I said elsewhere, most PDs are the opposite of high-tech - compared to most companies, their employees don't spend nearly as much time on computers or the internet.

That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure this specific case matters? Are there things a person speaking to a police officer has any expectation that the officer may not relay as said to them? I would rather have it always recorded and strong laws about it's accessed.

If you watch the Jussie Smollet video he requested that officers turn off the cameras and they did so. I have no idea what the laws around this are, but as I understand it people have that right. That may not apply out in public but it seems to in private homes at least.

Now calculate how big of a data pipe you need to AWS to upload 400 terabytes of video each day and how much does that cost?

If you're concerned about writing potentially sensitive video to non-volatile storage, that can be solved via technical means. Just encrypt the video with an ephemeral key kept in memory, then store the encrypted video on non-volatile storage. You get best of both worlds.

Once you've recorded that video it's subject to FOIA requests and rules of evidence and all kinds of things like that. If your recording only includes the past minute or 2, you can be reasonably sure it doesn't include something it shouldn't (such as a victim who asked not to be recorded from an hour ago). If hitting that button commits a 5 hour buffer, then you're going to have all kinds of stuff now "in the public record" that maybe shouldn't be there. But also you now have 5 hours of more or less useless video that you have to store and account for (which costs $).

Mind showing your calculations? Keep in mind you don't have to store the videos in perpetuity. Limiting it to 180 days (with option to extend if the incident is being disputed) would suffice for most cases.

It's actually less about the storage and more about the bandwidth to transfer that data to the storage location. Though the cost of the storage itself can still be an issue even if you're only retaining it for 90-180 days.

There's a whole bunch of factors of course, but pick a reasonable bit rate (5-10 Mbps perhaps) for your recording and multiply it by the number of hours recorded per officer and the number of officers in an agency. Chicago PD has 12,000 police officers. I don't know how many of them work on a given day but let's say 10,000. Say each one records 5 hours per day based on the 5 hour buffer proposed here.

10,000 * 5 hours = 50,000 hours of footage per day

50,000 hours * 5 Mbps = 112.5 terabytes per day

112.5 terabytes uploaded in 24 hours = 10.4 Gbps

(you need to be able to upload a full day's recording within 24 hours or you'll never catch up)

Doing this quickly so hopefully my math isn't off but it's in line with what I remember. 10Gbps being uploaded 24/7 to the cloud. 20 petabytes stored at any moment if you're holding everything for 180 days.

Sure, you can attack some of these numbers (not every officer will have a recordable interaction every day etc.) but I hope it gets the point across.

It's cultural to the institution of policing.

It's not just culture, it's the police unions as well. Any new tech (like auto-recording when the weapon is drawn) generally has to have union approval. Unions are frequently resistant to these kinds of changes.

That, and also police agencies in general are pretty much the exact opposite of high-tech. The younger officers probably embrace technology having grown up on it, but a lot of the more senior people are wary of anything technological and see it as just another hindrance to their job. These are not people who sit in front of computers all day like we do.

Cameras now are starting to include technology where the camera is automatically activated as soon as the officer draws their weapon.

Why not buffer 5 hours by default?

Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded. Also, several minutes of buffer fits nicely in RAM. 5 hours would require a lot more RAM (making devices more expensive and thus harder to get deployed) or would require it to be written to flash disk which introduces new technical and legal issues.

Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival. Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.

"This guy" was recently named to Biden's Coronavirus Task Force, FYI. The average age of COVID19 deaths is in the 80s. It will be interesting to see how he applies his views on old age in that role.

I keep wondering what unintended consequences our nearly-unprecedented efforts on non-pharmaceutical interventions ("lockdown", social distancing, masks, etc.) might end up having on the virus - for example, could all our isolation and distancing be accidentally selecting for strains of the virus that transmit more readily over further distances?

Believe it or not, I have no interest in living in the bay area - even if the costs were the same. I personally would like somewhere that didn't get quite so cold in the winter but still has 4 seasons.

I can honestly tell you that out of all the people I know, I can't think of a single one who would move to the bay area even if the costs were the same. Weather isn't everything.

Software developers simply do not get offered pay anything close to SV wages pretty much anywhere else in the US (maybe NYC? not sure on that one) - as far as I can tell. It's not really in dispute that SV software wages are significantly higher than elsewhere in the country, is it?

Now, we all know there's many reasons for that, including competition and housing costs. My point is that salaries are so much lower almost anywhere else that FAANG could offer half of what they do in SV and get the best of the best in an area because it would still be a huge premium over local rates. The question becomes: if Facebook could hypothetically switch all its employees to other parts of the US and pay them top dollar relative to the area, would they still be earning $600K profit per employee while spending considerably less on salaries? Prior to C19, FB needed to pay those rates to be able to attract the best to the high COL area in SV because they felt a strong need to have their employees co-located. If FB has proven to themselves that they can have their employees WFH permanently without any significant productivity loss, then naturally they will no longer care about having to attract people to the Bay (and by extension they wouldn't need to offer those kinds of salaries anymore).

But maybe I'm all wrong on this. Who knows.

My point is there is no such thing as a "$500K engineer" anywhere but SV (and maybe Seattle), and thus no such market exists elsewhere. Honestly even writing "$500K engineer" sounds so absurd to me because it's so far away from "normal"... I doubt anyone who lives within 500 miles of me doing software development as an individual contributor makes even half that. Maybe I'm badly misinformed though.

Believe it or not, there's plenty of smart, even brilliant people who do not live (and choose not to live) in California. I myself may not be FAANG-caliber, but I've known known a number of people who used to work where I do and now work for Amazon, Facebook, and Google. They moved to the west coast, but obviously prior to taking those jobs they were just as good and living in the Midwest working for a Midwest salary.

It's honestly rather shocking to me that people seemingly genuinely believe that there can't possibly exist smart engineers who live somewhere other than SV.

you should be paid according to the value you create for the company, and nothing else

But, you need to subtract your pay from the value you create. If you create $1MM value but cost $500K, and someone in the Midwest can create that same $1MM value for only $150K, it's pretty obvious what most companies will choose.

FAANG companies somehow convinced themselves that paying $500K for talent in SV made sense even if they could get similar talent basically anywhere else in the US for less. This massive WFH experiment that we've all been in seems to have demonstrated to some of them that physical location doesn't really matter as much as they thought. The next logical step is that paying inflated rates to hire someone in a particular physical location doesn't make sense, if you're just going to have them work remote anyway.

WFH may just be the pin that burst the SV tech wage bubble.

Maybe this is overly simplistic, but won't this all work itself out over time? More companies refuse to pay inflated SV salaries (note: most companies in the world already do not employ people there anyway), so some of the concentrated SV talent leaves for other places like Chicago where they can still get a sufficient wage relative to the cost of living. This continues for a while and eventually the COL in SV will start to equalize with other places in the country like Chicago, won't it?

Perhaps the real message here is that SV companies are realizing this is a perfect way to get out of paying $300-500K salaries for jobs that are more like $150K anywhere else in the US. It's kind of like the outsourcing craze from 15 years ago, except instead of getting 3-5 developers for the price of 1 by going to Europe or Asia, SV companies can get 3-5 developers for the price of 1 that are still US-based and only a couple of timezones away.

As someone who doesn't live in California but still near a big city in an area that is still "expensive" (but nowhere near SV prices) relative to smaller towns and rural areas, I can't figure out if this remote shift is a good thing or bad thing for me yet. I fear that my suburban house will be worth less going forward because proximity to a major city may be way less valuable now if so many fewer people ever physically go into work anymore.

There's another aspect too: when kids are in a classroom together, there's a peer-pressure effect. If all the other kids are listening quietly and doing their worksheets, the remaining children are likely to fall in line (not 100% guaranteed, of course). My observations of Zoom classes with young kids this spring is that this effect did not occur virtually.

Not to mention that home is filled with lots of fun, distracting stuff that the kids otherwise wouldn't have access to during the school day in a classroom.

What's happening in Illinois seems to be like a smaller version of what happened in the US. The northern part of the state near Chicago got hit early on in March-May, and that has quieted down a lot. Now the downstate areas closer to St. Louis are getting hit, as well as other more rural areas of the state (and some of the suburban Chicago areas as well which had been spared somewhat initially).

It's nearly impossible to draw firm conclusions (obviously, though so many are trying), but to my non-expert eye it certainly seems like this virus just burns through areas until some threshold level is reached (either due to some form of immunity kicking in, or the local population getting sufficiently scared to take their own measures more seriously, or something else). And it looks more and more to me like there's only 2 kinds of places: those that have been hit already and those that will be hit. It's unclear if the lockdowns really did much beyond delaying the inevitable (which, to be fair, is what we were told they were supposed to do in the beginning - it was "slow the spread", not "stop the spread").

Even looking at other countries, areas that were being scolded for doing a bad job seem to be nearing the end of their curve while areas that were touted as doing successful mitigation measures are flaring up. And of course there's counter-examples to everything that can be found as well.

It's hard to shake the feeling that no one really has any idea and everyone is just guessing. Even mask usage isn't clear - in the US it is getting near universal recommendation from our experts, while quite a few European countries with their own experts are not recommending masks, saying that there's little proof that they help and possibly some evidence they may do harm. It's mind-boggling how little agreement there is, even on something relatively simple to do like wearing a mask (fwiw, we wear ours because intuitively it seems they should help and it's a simple thing to do if it helps in any way).

The built-in generator options don't output any more power than a generator that you can buy at any home improvement store for several hundred dollars. Sure, having it integrated into the vehicle might be a nice feature, but I don't see anything special about the power output.

This just replaces a free-standing generator strapped down in the back of the truck. Those tend to be noisy but they're relatively cheap. I doubt most jobsites care that much about the noise, but I suppose tailgaters might like it. On the other hand, tailgaters tend to prefer inverter generators which are very quiet and use very little gas.

In fact, thinking more about it, I wouldn't want to be at a tailgate with an F150 running all day spewing exhaust all over. A small portable generator and an extension cord can be located relatively far away from the gathering - that's a lot harder to do with the truck itself.

If you're referring to where it appears to hit his head, he actually has on a "helmet" of sorts that's made out of rows of thin wire, so the arc is actually hitting that. The suit is not just for show - my understanding is it would be very dangerous to stand that close to those coils otherwise.

I don't know all the ins and outs of the safety of interacting with these things, but I do think one concern if you were to get hit by one of the arcs is skin burns.