Michigan Central
The Michigan Central train station closed in 1988, one year before Ruth and I moved to the Detroit area. I can think of no better symbol for the fall and rise of Detroit than this historic building. Built by the Vanderbilts and opened in 1914, it is a sibling to Grand Central station in New York.
After its abandonment by Amtrak it became a well known eye sore, and as a ruin it became used as a set for movies like Batman vs. Superman. Unlike the locals, our memories of this once glorious building is of a haunting structure with blown out windows.
Reports of its restoration and re-use surfaced throughout the years, but never became real until Ford purchased the building in 2018. It finally re-opened in 2024 and ever since I have wanted to go see it, which we finally did yesterday. The building, like Detroit, has survived the decline of the 90s and early 2000s to be the most prominent physical manifestation of Detroit’s motto: “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes.”
See the results of the labor of so many to restore this building to its original beauty in the pictures that I took. I envy those who get to work in this building, one with the personality afforded by wood, limestone, and granite. Designed when architecture emphasized materials of the earth over materials made from the earth.
I use Lillihub developed by Loura as my primary micro.blog web app. The app’s existence is a testament to the open nature of micro.blog, ironically it has all of the things that Dave Winer has been promoting about Wordpress.
If you are a micro.blog member and haven’t tried Lillihub, I recommend you check it out. Loura has recently made some UI improvements that have a fresher and more appealing layout. I also appreciate her prompt response to my feedback for making dark/light mode a toggle and adding keyboard shortcuts. The shortcuts greatly speed the ability to move through the timeline.
Dave Rogers: “The tech-bros are building slaves.” I had not thought of AI this way, but it makes some sense.
Finished reading: Hostile Takeover A Jessica Warne Spy Novel by Cheri Baker 📚
I think this MIT Technology Review article, noting a gap in knowing what is going on with AI between experts and non-experts, asks the wrong question and reaches the wrong conclusion. The gap is about trust rather than knowledge and it is a lack in trust of the humans making/using AI more so than the AI itself. Non-experts having lived with the Internet and seeing the corrosive effects of an addictive social network fueled by greedy humans have no reason to trust nor believe any claims of new technology for altruistic reasons.
I think North Side Baseball provides an explanation on the Chicago Cubs that as good as any other and I would summarize it thusly, they have no margin for error. Without any big bats in the lineup prone to hit home runs they need the entire lineup to be hitting, and the probability of that happening consistently is low. For me it all comes back to how this team has been constructed around good but budget friendly players.
Well, that was a shock. Down arrow-ing through my morning bookmarks and hit lillihub.com to find a complete UI overhaul, most prominently being dark mode. I don’t see a way to turn dark mode off and usually such web sites mess up my eyes, but for some reason that is not the case. Perhaps it’s because the text is not in bright white but either an off-white or another shade.
Spring has come.
Retirement First Quarter Report
At the beginning of April I passed the first three month milestone of retirement and I want to write down some thoughts about this new phase of life. Am I glad that I retired? Absolutely, but I would be lying if I did not admit feeling some fear caused by the fact that our retirement income is tied to the market that reacts to the whims of the President of the United States.
The market, and my reaction to it, is emotional and so the challenge is in managing those emotions. Uncertainty is a reality that always exists and my technique for living with uncertainty is to focus on, to the extent possible, what I know. For example, if all of our savings were to disappear, which is a very unlikely scenario, I have had these three months of life lived to my schedule whereas I could be still working, still have the savings disappear, and not have had that time.
Retirement for me is about savoring the most precious gift of time, which always passing and often only appreciated via hindsight. The best way to face uncertainty is in gratitude for the current moment. I have reasons to be grateful simply to be alive to experience this moment, but I confess that in the later years of my career I grew frustrated with having the precious time of my life controlled by a corporation that simply did not know nor care about me.
I’ve been working since I was 12 years old. When I define work in the context of my life, I broadly include in it all the requirements placed on my time by others, school and employers. Forty seven years, almost non-stop, of waking up to an alarm clock dictated by somebody else, and when I became more aware that my remaining time in life is shorter than the past life I have lived I grew more irritated with having to share that remaining time with a lifeless corporate entity.
Had you asked me what I planned to do in my retirement I would have simply answered, not work! Loveboy’s Working For The Weekend has been on loop in the soundtrack of my life these past 47 years. I retired so that there were no more stressful Sunday nights as my mind and body gave up the brief bit of relaxation it started experiencing the prior Friday evening.
Mission accomplished! I have even found on a few occasions that I forgot the day of the week, feeling as though it were a weekend.
Same Ole Cubs
Every year it seems the problems with the Chicago Cubs is the same, they struggle to hit with runners in scoring position because they have poor hitters. When the same issues keep appearing that indicates to me there is a systemic problem, which is not something fixable through signing one or two players. The evaluation of talent and construction of the roster is producing the same results we see year after year.
Getting the Cubs to the World Series after a century of losing is turning out to be easier than getting them back a decade after. It’s easy to get a talented team when you tank seasons and trade away what experienced players you have for prospects. The core of the 2016 team were those prospects lead by experienced veterans, but veterans who were in the later half of their careers.
Obviously, fans are not going to allow such a heavy rebuild. Seems to me that if you aren’t able to load up on prospects you have change your approach to obtaining MLB players. Every free agent signing the Cubs have made since 2016 are of players who are in the back end of their careers. Signing Alex Bregman this year is no different than signing Dansby Swanson, players who have won championships but who are not in their prime and therefore seem less capable of hitting consistently over a season.
Read Joan Westenberg’s essay, Optimism Is Not A Personality Flaw. Christians actively working to initiate armageddon are the most dangerous of the pessimists that Westenberg describes.
Finished reading: Before Religion by Brent Nongbri 📚
Stay Awake
The intended effects of social networks for the sake of wealth ought to be the lens through which we look at AI. At their beginning we were told of all the good things social networks provide, and they did do that for a while, but then the wealth generation went in to hyper drive. We have no reason to believe the motivations towards more and more AI is not the same wealth generation. And since there can only be one most wealthiest person on earth, that leads to not caring about the negative impacts on the rest of the world.
A potentially helpful question to ponder when thinking about where all this AI “stuff” is going. Think of the songs that you have heard in your life, do those songs stand out because they sound good and are entertaining or do they stand out because you connect to the lyrics and relate what they convey? Perhaps that connection has also leads to feeling like you know the song writer, or better yet that the song writer knows you.
Bob Nystrom’s blog post, The Value of Things, inspired the question. Perhaps a way to combat the nihilism of AI is consciousness. Most times we are unconscious, which is like hearing music and simply enjoying the sound, while times we are conscious enough to hear and relate to the words. The risk of AI is the decrease in the amount of time that we are conscious, so perhaps working on our own consciousness is a method to combating the affects of AI.
Dave says, We Are All Good Germans Now, and I get his point but while he is using metaphor, there is an actual act made by the United States for which we all Americans should feel is our birthright shame. The United States is the only nation on earth to drop a nuclear weapon on another nation, and this reality, which is our shame, is how most of the world sees us. Consider the reason why you never hear U.S. politicians suggest attacking North Korea.
Ever since World War II U.S. citizens have been told to fear the possibility of other countries dropping nuclear weapons on us, while the rest of the world knows the U.S. has and thus is willing to drop nuclear weapons on them.
I agree with this representative in pushing back against those who want to make light of the recent threats the President made. The consequences of not taking a mad man seriously is that the mad man being emboldened to keeping and someday following through. Fear does not lead to greatness.
I wonder, is this how everyone felt during the Cuban misile crisis? I think not enough people are paying attention to what is going on and what might happen in the next 24 hours. We don’t want to face the reality is that the script has flipped and the United States, we, us, are the bad guys. I know it’s hard for my generation to admit this given how much post World War II programming we all received, but understand all that you were told to fear about the USSR, that is now how the children of the world today are now being told about the US. And they would be right.
Seeking Purity Denies The Cross
Today, on Holy Saturday, Christians are in the between times of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, and for those so inclined a time such as this can be a good time to wonder, just what is this all about and where is it that we are going.
As a life long Christian I can’t help but feel a sense of deja vu, here we are once again at Easter and then days and months will pass and the liturgical calendar will start all over again. And I wonder some times, what is the point? Is humanity evolving in any way through this repetition?
This beautiful spring day was also the home opener for the Detroit Tigers.
Very cool dashboard for the Artemis II mission around the moon. There is so much more technology now than when we last traveled to the moon 50 years ago, including our ability to check in on the voyage via the Internet. I wasn’t home to watch the launch on TV but I got a notification on my phone about it and was able to watch the launch on my phone sitting in a strip mall parking lot.
Welcome the first daffodils of the season.
