Charge It!

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A small law office client of mine needs a new main office printer and has been hemming and hawing over leasing one that cooks dinner and takes out the trash (and keeping it for the next 11 years) versus buying one that they can afford to throw away when the warranty expires.

Meanwhile, every car dealer in the known universe trumpets cars for as little as $169/month [with “$3,499.00 due at signing” in very very small print]. Still, I was gratified to see that the re-designed Mercedes SL550 has lost some weight, gained some size, has great mirrors, and will now cost you a little more than it used to. $895.00 per month with $0 down on a low mileage 30 month lease. “Low mileage” means about 63 miles/month in car land.

Huh. For that I can get a Hyundai Equus!

Leases are often more expensive than we expect. The regular special offer for the Mercedes is $1,299/month for 24 months with $7,093 due at signing.

That’s just the intro.

Miami-Dade wants to assure that every student in their school district has a digital device. They’re not talking about cellphones or pocket Pacmen.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho plans to lease more than 100,000 devices — it isn’t quite exactly clear what they will get — through Bank of America Public Capital for $63 or so million. That’s about $12 million a year which the schools will pay off over the next six.

I’m thinking they have laptops and iPads in mind for students from kindergarten through 12th grade who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford them.

“It’s unprecedented in the United States, this type of purchase,” Justin Bathon of the University of Kentucky’s CASTLE center on school technology leadership told the Miami Herald.

I love the idea of putting technology in student hands. My class at Stevens was the last the institute required to buy slide rules. Now college students are expected to own laptops and PDAs. The next gen will have implants.

There are just a couple of issues Miami-Dade needs to overcome.

  • Students need current technology. The first iPad was released on April 3, 2010. There have been five generations in those three years. Six years from now there may not even be an iPad.
  • A lease in which you own the product at the end ain’t a lease. It’s a purchase.
  • All taxpayers deserve equal treatment. If the kids in the back rows get freebies, it’s not fair to make the kids in the front rows pay the full freight. That’s an extra tax.

Mr. Carvalho is working wonders in Miami-Dade. He has cut $400 million from the nearly $4.3 billion budget and built the district’s reserves to more than $70 million. He cut the administrative staff by almost 600 people, pushing the most of them back into the classroom. Still there are 53,100 employees for over 400,000 students.

He can work wonders in technology this fall as well. Here’s how.

  • Call it a purchase.
  • Understand that, just like textbooks, electronic devices have finite lives. Unlike textbooks, electronic devices have far shorter lives.
  • Make a plan to buy and deploy 400,000 devices and replace them every 1-2 school years.
  • Replace all textbooks and all library books with electronic editions.

Surprisingly, that’s likely to cost [only] about twice as much as the current $63 million initiative and it makes a lot more sense.

 

Guest Post: George says It Was Mis-Identification

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Years ago I went to the supermarket breakfast section and ordered toast and butter for fifty-cents.  That day I was not particularly well groomed — in fact I was downright raunchy.  I was a man in his seventies.  My white beard was scraggly, my hair was unkempt, and I looked like I had dressed in a hurry in a burning house.  But I was hungry and not concerned about what people thought.

I was into my second slice of toast when I sensed a female figure standing nearby.  I lifted my eyes to behold a late middle-age woman with blue hair, nicely dressed.   I squinted — thinking that she wanted to canvass me for a donation to some liberal cause–for which I have a dozen practiced reasons whereby I can sensibly decline.   But this was not the case.

“Sir?”  She said, before I could speak.

“Yes, Ma’am?” I squeaked.

She extended a frail hand which held a half-folded five dollar bill.  “Sir, I give you this in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.”

I held back my embarrassed gasp and feigned humility — as I realized she had (mis)taken me for one of the homeless guys who begs at the intersection.

“Thank you, Ma’am,” I garbled, as I turned my eyes away and shyly took the bill.

“God bless you, Sir,” she said and quickly walked away.

“Goblusyoumam”, I mumbled to her quickly departing back.

I was both embarrassed and humbled.   And I vowed that in the future I would spiff up before venturing down for breakfast.  And it’s a good thing because I have since seen this good woman shopping with her grandchildren.  I purposely avoid their glances, but it is doubtful that she would recognize me anyway because I have since lost the beard.

My experience with mis-identification has not always been benevolent, as I was once mistaken for a marital interloper and got slammed between the eyes as I exited the men’s room at a local club.   I awoke with my tormentor applying wet toilet paper to my face and apologizing.

In a similar vein, Mr. Patel, who lives a block from me, is from India, and he works at WalMart five days a week.  He is a diligent worker, and when at work, he wears a white shirt and pleated slacks.  But at home he often prefers to drape himself in some variation of his native Hindu bedeckery.   One day he wore it to the Chinese restaurant for lunch, and somebody called him a Muslim.

This morning at WalMart he told me about it and complained.   I jokingly said he ought to wear a sign.   His hot response produced a dab of spittle on his lip–which I did not understand and could not spell if I had.

There is a moral to this story:  Don’t judge people by how they look.   Judge them by how they vote.

– George Poleczech

Fungible Fotographers Fired

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Fungible Fotographers Fired

“There’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said last month.


The image is an Associated Press photograph that won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news. It was taken by Nick Ut on June 8, 1972.

Ms. Mayer immediately called her comment a “misstatement” that was taken “out of context.” She even tweeted an apology. But that’s what she said and apparently that’s what the morons in Chicago believe.

The Chicago Sun-Times fired Pulitzer Prize winning photographer John H. White and 28 other top pros this month.

Oh.

Wait.

There’s no such thing as a professional photographer anymore.

In a statement, the “news”paper said: “The Sun-Times business is changing rapidly and our audiences are consistently seeking more video content with their news. We have made great progress in meeting this demand and are focused on bolstering our reporting capabilities with video and other multimedia elements. The Chicago Sun-Times continues to evolve with our digitally savvy customers, and as a result, we have had to restructure the way we manage multimedia, including photography, across the network.”

There’s no such thing as a professional photographer anymore.

The Sun-Times will let its reporters shoot more video and photos. In fact, they are training the reporters to use iPhones to do it.

According to a leaked staff memo the training will include “iPhone photography basics,” as well as capturing and editing video on iOS, and uploading it to the appropriate social sites.

There’s no such thing as a professional photographer anymore.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a professional race car driver. We could round up 43 soccer moms, teach them to turn left, load them into stock cars at Daytona or Indy cars for the 500, and have the reporters record it all with their iPhones.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a board certified ophthalmologist. We could create an iPhone app and simply refract our own eyes. And train our neighbors to suck out cataracts with teeny tiny vacuum cleaners.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a professional football referee. We could round up a platoon of ex-high school jocks-turned Realtors™, train them in football basics, and turn them loose in September. Oops. Never mind.

Back to the Sun-Times.

You think they’ll get this picture with an iPhone?


Crash at LeMans

Do you really think any of the reporters in this famous photograph even thought to take the picture that won the Pulitzer .6 seconds later? Do you think any of them even saw Jack Ruby? The Pulitzer Prize winner is here.


Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald

If the Sun-Times reckons theirs is good journalism, it will never publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph again.

Chicago has long been okay with mediocre. I’m not. I hope you aren’t either.