Month: December 2023
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The last day of 2023
It’s “123123” only if you use the U.S.-style numerical date order…
Susan Gott’s glass studio and workshop, Phoenix Studio and Gott Glass Gallery, is in the neighborhood, and Anitra and I had been meaning to do one of the workshops there for some time. We got around to it in January 2023, but I never got around to posting the photos until now:
A photo of me and Anitra from January 2023. Behind us is University of Tampa’s Henry B. Plant Museum (a.k.a. Plant Hall) and one of its distinctive minarets. Before Plant Hall became part of the University, it opened as the Tampa Bay Hotel in 1891, a 500-room resort and one of the first buildings to feature electricity and an elevator.
Here’s a photo from the Auth0 by Okta company offsite in Cancun back in March.
I need to break out the electroluminescent wire glasses more often.
It’s all too easy for we (temporarily) ambulatory people to treat special needs as a secondary concern, but as the comic above points out, accommodating people with special needs accommodates everyone.
(This doesn’t just apply to buildings — if you design or develop software or web pages, keep this in mind!)
2024 will be an election year in the U.S., and it’s probably be a nasty one. One particular candidate — who faces a boatload of indictments, pretty much committed an act of treason (and possibly more than just that well-publicized one) — still has plenty of followers who see him as either a means to entrench their lofty position in society, or as an avatar into which they can channel their resentment.
That candidate has already campaigned on the fear of rising crime, with crime often being a code word for “the coloreds.” The Southern Strategy still lives.
But actual crime, it turns out, has been dropping:
The problem is that it’s all too easy to sell the idea of rising crime. The general perception, according to a recent Gallup poll, is that crime is up, in spite of the actual numbers. And for those who keep carping about “the illegals” contributing to the not-rising-but-rising crime, the numbers say that they’re may be less of a problem than other groups.
Expect a nastier news cycle in the new year.
Recommended reading
- ABC News: ‘It is historic’: US poised to see record drop in yearly homicides despite public concern over crime
- Axios: Border cities see homicides rates drop
- New York Times: After Rise in Murders During the Pandemic, a Sharp Decline in 2023
- The Guardian: ‘Sitting on a powder keg’: US braces for a year, and an election, like no other
Thanks to Los Angeles’ best blogger, Tony Pierce, for the find!