Month: April 2017

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Monday/ let us ‘re-accommodate’ you ..

United Airlines got extensive and extremely bad press today, for the brutal way they treated a passenger on a Chicago to Louisville flight on Sunday.  The passenger was a doctor that had already boarded, and refused to give up his seat voluntarily (for a United Airlines employee); the doctor said he had patients to see the next morning.

The Chicago Airport Police came on board, and soon violently dragged him off the airplane. The passenger suffered injuries to his face in the process.  The other passengers were just shocked. Some had recorded it and posted the incident on Facebook and Twitter.  Adding insult to injury, the United Airlines CEO issued a cold-blooded ‘apology’ on Monday : “I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers”.   Right.  As a Twitter user noted : United made a business decision that that doctor’s humanity was worth less than $800. Make them pay for that.   Said another tweet : ‘After what your goons did to a passenger on #flight3411, I will never fly with United again. There is NO excuse’.   

(Tue 4/11/2017):  from Thatcher A. Stone writing on CNN.com:  Flying for vacation travel or work on a modern US carrier’s plane can be enjoyable and pleasant. Just do what you are told by the crew. And, to fulfill their part of the bargain, airlines need to follow the rules and treat passengers who get bumped fairly.
If United had taken a senior gate agent and brought him onto the airplane and said to the doctor, “here is our written policy about denied boarding. I know you are in a seat, but you are mistaken that we can’t remove you. But guess what? You will get refunded whatever you paid if we can get you to your destination within an hour and if it takes longer you could get up to 400 percent.”
He would likely have gotten up and gotten off the plane in a second.
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Sunday/ Amazon construction update

The city of Seattle had a decent Sunday (with sun!), and I used the opportunity to go check out the progress on the Amazon biospheres.   There is also a third Amazon tower building for which construction had started in the fall of 2016, with its completion scheduled for some time in 2018.

The three biospheres all have complete outer shells, but there is still work needed on the inside. What must surely be the city’s smallest dog park, is in the lower right of the picture : an enclosure barely bigger than my sitting room. Just behind the white containers on the left of the picture, is the foundation of Amazon Tower III, slated for completion in 2018.
Here is an artistic rendering of the three Amazon Towers. From left to right : Amazon I is the set of buildings with the red & green; Amazon II is the blue one to the right of the biospheres, and Tower III is the one on the far right, still under construction (37 floors). © Magnusson Klemencic Associates
This is the view on the north-facing side of Amazon II. There is an Amazon Go grocery concept store* on the far corner (where the yellow paneling ends) – but the store is not yet open to the public. *There are no check-out lines. The store uses technology to detect when a shopper takes an item from the shelf, and then syncs the data to the shopper’s smart phone.
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Saturday/ still in an almost-zero rate world

The number of jobs added to the US economy in March was only 98,000 – far fewer than the 185,000 estimate. Weirdly, the unofficial unemployment rate went down to 4.5%, the lowest in 10 years (meaning more people had given up looking for work?).   Hourly wages only rose 0.2% (in a strong economy this number would be 3% or even 4%).

The Federal Reserve Bank will probably keep raising the federal funds rate, to allow them more room to maneuver for the next recession.  There is so much talk of raising the rates – or not – at each Federal Reserve Meeting, that I had to look up the recent history of the rate (see below).  It’s still very low by historical standards (the rate is now 0.75 to 1.00 %):

Dec 16, 2008 target rate set to 0.0–0.25
Dec 16, 2015 — 0.25-0.50
Dec 14, 2016 — 0.50-0.75
Mar 15, 2017 — 0.75-1.00

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Friday night movie

I don’t watch movies on TV as a rule, but sometimes I click up and down through the channels just to see what is on.  On Friday night I stumbled again onto ‘This is 40’ (2012, directed by Judd Apatow). I knew that after all a lot of interpersonal relation-ship chaos, the movie would end with a great scene where Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd & Leslie Mann) go out to find some live music, and that it would be Ryan Adams singing ‘Lucky Now’.  So I patiently waited for the movie to reach the end, so that I could see the song again.  I love that song!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thursday/ Syria .. what will happen tomorrow?

So .. what to make of Pres. Trump’s (and/or his Secretary of State’s?) sudden change of heart regarding intervention in Syria, is the question being debated all night here on cable news.   (The Pentagon launched dozens of missiles to hit the air base near Homs, in Syria, that was reportedly used for preparing and launching the sarin gas attack against civilians on Tuesday).   There have been chemical attacks before.  This is a civil war that has now raged for 6 years, claiming ~500,000 lives, displacing 7.6 million people internally in Syria, and producing 4.8 million refugees.

Many observers are not too critical of the action that was taken, but it was not authorized by Congress (it should have been); it was an abrupt change in policy, and it was done unilaterally.   Several tweets noted that officials in the State Dept were out of the loop, as were key US allies.

Donald Trump tweets from 2012 and 2013 when President Obama was in office.

 

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Wednesday/ my new guilty pleasure

Single-serve Nutella is a boon for travelers (me) that need something to put on bread that does not need a refrigerator.

I picked up a new guilty pleasure while in Germany & Switzerland recently: putting Nutella* on my bread or toast.   The convenience stores in the train stations there sell single-serve Nutella packets, and once I had a few slices of bread with the stuff on, I was hooked.

Nutella is widely available here in the United States, and comes from a factory in Brantford, Ontario, in Canada.

*Nutella is a chocolate and hazelnut spread and has been around since 1964, when it was first produced in Alba, Italy – an area known for the production of hazelnuts. [From Wikipedia].

Nutella featured on the front page of a recent issue of the German newspaper Die Welt. Some unhappy European Union member states complained at the 2017 EU Spring Summit that they are getting sold second-rate household products in their stores.  For example, said the East European countries : our Nutella is not as creamy as the product that is available in Germany! (I would complain too!).
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Tuesday/ Bertha sees daylight

Yay! The tunnel boring machine called Bertha, digging the State Route 99 tunnel under the city to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct, emerged today into the sunlight.  The tunnel is 1.7 miles (2.7 km) long.  Digging started four years ago in April 2013, but came to a halt in December 2013 when damage to the the main bearing was sustained.  It would be two years, until December 2015, before digging could resume.

So .. now the tunnel is dug, but it will still take until early 2019 before the current above-ground section of State Route 99 can be moved below ground, by using the tunnel.

The moment the tunneling machine broke into the end wall. What happens next? Well, the braces in the disassembly pit will be removed, the tunneling machine pushed forward so that the cutter head can be removed. then the rest of the machine will be taken back through the tunnel to the starting point. (The crane that can lift the very heavy machinery, is located).
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Monday/ farewell to dandelion

Here are the crayons from Crayola’s 24-crayon set. Dandelion is the dark yellow third from the bottom. Crayola will reportedly replace the dandelion color with a color from the blue or green family.

Crayola announced recently that they are retiring the dandelion crayon color.  I have fond childhood memories* of Crayola crayons, but I did not have dandelion – it was introduced only in 1990.  Even so, I bought a 24-pack with the dandelion crayon color in (cost $4), to put on my desk here at home, to see what the fuss is about, and to have a dandelion crayon after all.

*I was fascinated by the colors called periwinkle and mahogany, and when the metallic silver and gold crayon colors came out).

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Sunday/ Puget Sound low tide

We had some sun on Sunday, and even though it was not warm! (50 °F/ 10 °C), it was still nice to get outside.  My friends Bill & Dave and I took their dogs to the beach at the edge of Puget Sound between Golden Gardens, and Carkeek Park.

1. The main picture shows the edge of Puget Sound looking southwest, more or less where the bubble no 10 is on the map.   2.  I’m no crap expert, but I think this is a dungeness crab we ran into on the beach.   3.  Just out of curiosity, I looked up the rules for catching crab on the Washington State Dept of Fisheries and Wildlife.  When the season is open, there is a limit of 5 adult males.  (For area 10 the season is closed right now).
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Saturday/ (I don’t like) April Fools’ Day

It turns out ‘fake news’ goes back a long way – in the case of fake news regarding the collapse of the Space Needle, all the way back to April Fools’ Day in 1989.   Local TV station King5 reports that an April Fools’ Day joke that year, was taken as seriously real news, in spite of a bold ‘APRIL FOOLS DAY’ caption on the fake picture that was aired.   So many people called 911 that the local 911 system was shut down.  The story made national headlines, and jokesters John Keister and Steve Wilson that put the footage together (including a hysterical ‘eyewitness’) had to apologize on air.

Fake news from April 1, 1989 : that the Space Needle had collapsed. (No such thing happened).
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Friday/ Zuma’s end game?

On Thursday night South African President Jacob Zuma fired the widely respected Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan* and set off an outcry by many in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and opposition political parties. By the end of the week, the South African rand had slipped some 8% against the dollar, amid renewed concerns about corruption at the top levels of government. Many South Africans are also concerned that the South Africa’s economy and viability as an investment could be downgraded by credit ratings agencies.  (Unemployment in South Africa is a huge challenge, and stands at 27%).  From Bloomberg News Jan 26, 2017 : In a 2014 report, the graft ombudsman found that the president unfairly benefited from a taxpayer-funded 215.9 million rand upgrade of his private home, and last year the nation’s top court ruled that he violated his oath of office by refusing to repay some of the money. In a separate finding last year, the ombudsman implied that Zuma allowed a wealthy family in business with his son (the Guptas) to influence cabinet appointments and the awarding of state contracts.

The next South African Presidential election is only in 2019, but all eyes are looking to December of this year.  The ANC’s 54th national conference will be held, and Zuma’s support (he is the current ANC President) will surely face a crucial test.

*Fired along with eight other ministers in the cabinet.  Technically the South African Constitution allows for the President to do this, but there is wide agreement that this was done in the President’s personal interest, and not in the interests of South African citizens.

‘Rise up, South Africa’, says this photo in Die Burger newspaper. That is fired Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan (with his arm raised) in the middle of the picture, with his ex-deputy Mcebisi Jonas to his right.