Collapsing Recliner
Every now and then I have an experience that reminds me of just how much technology, in this case smartphones and their cameras, have changed our lives.
I have a La-Z-Boy recliner that is the center of my “man cave.” The man cave is the basement of our condo, which also happens to be my home office during work days. Sunday night I sat down on the recliner and started falling backward, if I hadn’t reacted I probably would have flipped myself and the chair over. Obviously, something broke, and my diagnosis found a part that looks like a clamp that attaches to a rod that runs across both sides of the chair had “ripped” and thus disconnecting what I assume looks like an arm that holds up the right back of the recliner when it’s not reclined. When reclined the chair is perfectly stable.
Detroit Skyline To Change
General Motors and Bedrock have announced the conceptual changes they propose of the Renaissance Center in Detroit. The changes involve removing two of the four office towers along with the current ground floors at the base of the complex. The ground floors will be replaced with a similar design that has glass walls rather than concrete.
Earlier this year General Motors announced they were moving their world headquarters from the Renaissance Center, which they bought in 1996, to the New Hudsons site built by Bedrock. GM’s move brought speculation about the future of the Renaissance Center, whether it be completely torn down or repurposed in some way. The conceptual design is a middle solution between the two.
As stated , GM bought the Renaissance Center in 1996, and my speculation is one of the reasons why it could is that it gained extra money in that year when EDS was spun out of GM and was provided a multi-million dollar payment.
I worked at the Renaissance Center from 2004 to 2015. In 2004 EDS, which was the company I worked for, consolidated their Detroit office space into one of the two smaller towers on the east side of the complex. Through work force reductions and acquisition of EDS by Hewett Packard, the company slowly vacated floors and eventually entire tower it was in and by 2015 only occupied one floor in the north east tower (Tower 100).
While I disliked the morning and evening commutes, I very much enjoyed working at the Renaissance Center. It was the center of all of the major events in Detroit, including Super Bowl XL in 2006, Detroit Red Wings and Pistons championship parades, the Final Four, and Red Bull aerial races, not to mention the yearly Fireworks. I am happy that GM and Bedrock have found a way to keep a good portion of the original complex.
I am reading “How the Ivy League Broke America” by David Brooks, published in The Atlantic (gifted link), and agreeing almost entirely with the points that Brooks is making.
Looking back, I know that my grandmother’s (who raised me) strongest desire for me was a college degree that lead to achieving “the American Dream.” Her desire was influenced by the meritocracy Brooks describes, even if the arc of her life started before the meritocracy view of the world was instituted.
So, I fit in the college educated category, except that my grandmother was not wealthy and my education was paid for mostly by Pell Grants and student loans. The grants sufficiently covered my credits, so I only needed a relatively small amount of loans for things like books.
I feel as though if I were born just ten years later I probably would not have the life I have today, because I probably would not have afforded that college degree or I would have been hugely in debt.
Like most of her generation, my grandmother wanted me to partake in the American Dream and she believed that would only happen if I had a college degree. She wasn’t wrong, but the problem is that if you can boil down the achievement of a better life to one thing it becomes very easy to put a dollar value on that thing and when that happens a barrier is created.
What Brooks describes in this article is a cultural problem that government itself cannot fix. Yet, government made up of people who see the problem can make government an enabler of a fix rather than a barrier. Does eliminating the Department of Education help or hinder? Honestly, I am not entirely sure.
I use Lilihub.com to read my micro.blog timeline, but up until today I hadn’t used it to write a post. I am pleasantly surprised to see that it’s post editor is more than the input box that micro.blog provides, and so I will be using this more in the future.
Looking through photos that I took last month, and I like this one.
After reading the simple explanation about cross posting from micro.blog, I checked out Pixelfed and decided to create an account and enabled cross posting. I don’t k now too much about Pixelfed, but the accounts are formatted Mastodon and mine is @frankm@pixelfed.social. The public view of my Pixelfed profile is at https://pixelfed.social/frankm.
Of the authors that I read regularly, Richard Rohr has the most influence upon me. I am happy to learn that he was written a new book, The Tears of Things, coming in March, 2025. At this point in his life, each new book that Richard writes he thinks it is his last.
I do a lot of my writing in Drummer and some of that is published on the Drummer associated blog and other parts is published to my regular blog hosted by micro.blog. (Some times I publish posts to both blogs by copy/paste between outlines.) What I write and publish to my blog get’s cross posted to Bluesky and Mastodon, and in that way I am using the editor of my choice.
Matthew Burdette, Is The Church Obsolete?:
Famously, the essay in which the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke about her conversion—the authenticity of which I do not doubt —focused on the role that Christianity plays in Western civilization. But one should be clear-eyed about this matter. If the point of Christianity is the survival of the West, then Christianity may be treated as a useful fiction or a necessary evil alongside things like police forces and the military. The place of Jesus in such a Christianity is clear: he is a mascot, a long-dead victim of Roman imperialism and religious zealotry whom we invoke when we need a symbol, so that we may display him for all to see, pinned to the cross by our highest values and current political aspirations.
Dave Farquhar: “It was 61 years ago, on November 18, 1963, that the push button telephone, or touch tone phone, was first introduced.”
Bluesky is a continuation of the idea that long threads are a good idea rather than a single blog post. In my opinion multiple paragraph threads read better and last better as blog posts, making a platform like micro.blog so much better.
I think the 2024 holiday shopping season could be one of the biggest ever, because smart U.S. consumers will expect prices to rise next year due to Trump’s tariffs. Many will get richer in the next six months, but soon after reality will kick in with a recession that likely becomes a depression. The Republicans in office now and those to come in are no smarter than the ones in 1929.
If Trump were really smart he would make Social Security solvent forever. Doing so would eliminate a political weapon in the manner of how Democrats and Republicans used abortion as a political weapon. I doubt Trump will do this because Republicans like using the threat to Social Security to the same extent as Democrats. Protecting Social Security would be extremely popular and would tremendously improve Trump’s legacy.
Looks like there is new energy around moving off of Twitter to another social network, and this time the more appealing destination is Bluesky. You can find me on Bluesky and the majority of my posts there of their home here. I only occasionally drop in on Bluesky and Mastodon and micro.blog is my most often viewed feed.
I think we ought to start a discussion about what it means to be a patriot in the United States. Such a discussion should be like Civics lessons about the purposes of the U.S. Constitution. In my opinion, equating patriotism to loyalty to any President, or frankly political party, is counter to the purpose of the U.S. Constitution.
Time to brush up on the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution. We ought to also consider how the SCOTUS Citizens United decision enabled the billionaire class to buy this past Presidential election.
Our identities are complex and ever-shifting, and men who worry that women’s power comes at their own expense, or whites who worry that this is true of Black and Latino power aren’t entirely wrong. As the saying goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
But there’s one part of your identity that is inherently solidaristic: whether you are a worker or an owner. If you own the business, you make more money when your workers earn less. If you work at the business, every dollar you earn is a dollar your boss doesn’t get. Workers' gains are bosses' losses.
That’s why they want us to “vote with our wallets.” It’s not just that those votes are rigged for the people with the fattest wallets. By tricking you into thinking of yourself as a “consumer” who benefits from low prices, they get you to stop thinking of yourself as a worker who suffers from low wages.
Emphasis added. I tend to agree that focus on prices can be a redirection away from wages, and that is compounded by the fact that increased prices do also lead to increased profit margins. Consequently, inflation can be a win-win for many CEOs, at best it enables very lazy or uninspiring people to run companies, at worst it enables them to be come very, very rich.
I appreciate and recommend Dave Roger’s post on and about Veterans Day.
Ann Wilison Schaef, When Society Becomes An Addict:
The context of our elephant—our society—is the fact that the system in which we live is an addictive system. It has all the characteristics and exhibits all the processes of the individual alcoholic or addict. It functions in precisely the same ways. To say the society is an addictive system is not to condemn the society, just as an intervention with an alcoholic does not condemn the alcoholic.
You might hear those who identify as Christian say that in Christ we are free, but they often leave the “free from what” unsaid. These Christians will say sin, but I don’t think they really know. I would like to suggest that in this book Ann Willson Schaef describes exactly that from which the Way of Christ sets us free.
Addicts and their families live from crisis to crisis. Every event or issue is perceived as a major turning point, and one barely ends when the next one begins.
The God of the Addictive System, who is the God that religion teaches and who in truth has little in common with the God of the Old and New Testaments, is God the Controller. It follows, then, that if it is possible to be God as defined by that system, one must try to control everything, and we do!