WillEngler
Joined 12 years ago
Joined 12 years ago
I don't think I raised choosing who gets to stay and who gets deported. My big objection to the current sweeps is that they function as a dragnet where they are detaining and questioning anyone who appears Mexican/Venezuelan/etc. Generally American citizens and permanent residents get released within an hour or so, but I still think that is intolerable. For example, there was a young woman who was ethnically Latina, but was adopted by a white family so she had an anglo-sounding last name like Smith. She was keeping papers on her, knowing the sweeps were happening. She was detained and when she presented her papers the agents didn't believe that someone who looked like her could have that last name so they kept her detained for an hour or so. I think that is an erosion of my constitutional liberties and yours.
But to try and get at your question, there are lots of legislative changes I would like to see (like this: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/497...). You may not support pathways to citizenship for long-time peaceful and productive residents. I think it's orthogonal to the current cruel and unconstitutional deportation tactics.
Do you think clergy should be allowed to administer the Eucharist to detainees at Broadview? To me their refusal to allow that is emblematic of how they are deliberately being cruel. (I am trying to answer your questions directly, if you would humor me and answer one of mine.)
First, I did not support the very loose amnesty policy, but I also don't support ICE teargassing the grocery store parking lot outside of my old apartment in Logan Square. In any case I don't think one's opinion on the first thing should disqualify them from having a take on deportation tactics.
Second, I think there is substantial ambiguity in what people voted for on deportation. There were lots of promises of deporting dangerous criminals (something that I agree would be a good idea). A subset of Trump voters in 2024 did want to round up migrant day laborers standing outside of Home Depots, and they are getting what they voted for. But I think another large subset believed that there was going to be a targeted deportation of "the worst of the worst". The administration claims to be doing this, but the worst of the worst are very unlikely to be looking for work outside of Home Depot.
Lastly, to your question, I think there are many many ways for the tactics to be more humane (and constitutional). To take just one example, I think the feds should resume allowing Catholic clergy into the Chicago-area processing facility at Broadview to administer the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Insofar as brutalism is about showcasing the raw building materials, yes, I think this is precisely what brutalism is about. Brutalism often uses concrete, but the big idea is to showcase the underlying material. (And if wood is more beautiful than concrete, great!)
A way that I look at Newport's writing is, he's making claims that most organizations are leaving money on the table by not adopting better work methods. I can't unilaterally go Newport-style at my current job. But this is a forum with lots of entrepreneurial people on it, and maybe someone would like to test his theory and smoke the competition by starting a company that values Deep Work/Slow Work/etc.
I've gotten really into Ableton this past year and I've been curious whether I should get into Max for Live. Being a programmer and looking at their marketing materials, it seemed like it should tap into the right parts of my brain. But seeing your comment now ... maybe not the right move. Especially because I'm not looking to accomplish anything special, I just want a sandbox to play with digital audio concepts.
(fwiw, you have to pay for the $1k suite version of Ableton to get Max, so Bespoke could still be a great alternative even if they do a lot of the same things)
It's useful for city planners and the like because "neighborhoods" have fuzzy boundaries that people disagree on, but Chicago's community areas are well-defined.
There's also been a lot of work to nurture additive manufacturing businesses (https://ysu.edu/center-for-innovation-in-additive-manufactur...). A mixture of federal grants (partly from the Appalachian Regional Commission IIRC) and support from the university going into that.
But to your point of embracing white collar workers ... does that solve the problem economic development agencies are actually trying to solve? An interesting case study a few miles down the highway is Pittsburgh. There's been a much-hyped boom in high skilled tech jobs seeded by CMU (robotics, software startups) plus a relatively strong healthcare/biotech sector there. But that doesn't do much to replace the big swath of steel and manufacturing jobs that were around a generation ago. So average wages go up and there's probably _some_ trickle down benefits, but the new tech jobs don't do much for the median Pittsburgher whose parents/grandparents would have worked in the mills.