Events

If the website has community-written reviews, you can destroy it by soliciting bribes from the reviewed businesses: With the Web site Yelp still responding to allegations by San Francisco businesses that it manipulates the prominence of positive and negative reviews, some Chicago merchants are adding to the heat. They allege that Yelp representatives have offered to rearrange positive and negative reviews for companies that advertise on the site or sponsor Yelp Elite parties. Yelp's CEO Jeremy...

Regardless of what one thinks of Thomas Friedman generally, his column today echoes some of my own bleak thoughts recently: Let's today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the...

I got so caught up in the rampant destruction in my office yesterday I forgot to mention it was the warmest day we've had since November 6th, four months ago. At least Tom Skilling reported it, else no one would have known. Skilling said November 5th, but the official high maximum on November 6th—at midnight, sadly—was 18.3°C, same as yesterday's. Not that it matters; Parker and I haven't had a good, 90-minute walk in about that long.

Those guys are fast. The windows are in, except for the trim: Also, given my proven ability to walk and chew gum at the same time, I managed to finish the CD ripping project while working on a complex client report. iTunes reports 5,570 songs and 49.4 gigabytes—15.5 days of music. I think that should hold me for a time.

Usually it only involves a DVD and an Internet connection, but today they're using crowbars: Reformatted, pre-installation:

The Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters has temporarily moved about four meters: Actually, some of the office simply moved into the International Data Center: (The IDTIDC is behind the dressing screen in the corner of the room.) All of this comes about because of the 95-year-old windows that the guys can finally replace today. I say "finally" because I ordered them in October. It took six months because (a) they new ones had to be custom-made to match the rest of the 95-year-old building; (b) that...

Now that the press have had a couple of days to digest the Bush Administration's anti-terror legal memos, a consensus of sorts is emerging: Yale law professor Jack Balkin called [the memos] a "theory of presidential dictatorship. They say the battlefield is everywhere. And the president can do anything he wants, so long as it involves the military and the enemy." The criticism was not limited to liberals. "I agree with the left on this one," said Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington...

Yes, he's shrill, and often offensive, but today I think Mark Morford gets it right: You are fuming in disbelief. How can I not see it? How can the vast majority of the country not see it? How is it that no one but you and a few manic fringe writers seem to notice that President Obama is either A) a thinly veiled socialist commie instigator hell-bent on destroying America from the inside out, or B) nothing more than a cleverly disguised corporate-loving Bush clone because, oh my God, haven't you seen...

Economist business-travel blogger Gulliver reports on British airline Ryanair's customer-service standards: Jason Roe is an Irish blogger who noticed what he thought was a bug on Ryanair's website. The price of the flights he was trying to book changed when he accidentally went into the voucher section. Thinking he had found a way to beat the budget airline's credit-card fee, he duly blogged about it—and in so doing unleashed hell. The tenth commenter on his blog was "Ryanair Staff #1"... As...

Crain's Chicago Business reports today that the pension liabilities of several prominent employers have exploded just as their assets have imploded: Boeing Co.'s shareholder equity is now $1.2 billion in the hole thanks to an $8.4-billion gap between its pension assets and the projected cost of its obligations for 2008. At the end of 2007, Boeing had a $4.7-billion pension surplus. If its investments don't turn around, the Chicago-based aerospace giant will have to quadruple annual contributions to its...