Wilbur Ross’s playground. Marvel (and shake your head) at this New York Times look at the messy and complicated world of how Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross’s trade shop is faring these days. Not well.
Subway buskers find phones competing for eyeballs and ears. While I respect the talent of the subway busker, I have never cared for them. Either they’re directly in the way of me getting to my destination, or they distract others who slow down and get in the way. Being Washington, of course there have been lawsuits about the legality of busking.
This Washington Post article highlights another strange roadblock to busking success in 2018: smartphones. I’m just old enough to remember Washington before smartphones took over, and the much-loved Blackberry didn’t work as well in a subway tunnel as it did throughout the rest of the swamp.
Here’s musician Mark Francis Nickens: “‘[Busking is] not appreciated or as revered now as much as it once was,’ Nickens said of his performances, ‘because all you have to do is pull up your smartphone and Google any song you want, by any artist you want, and you can listen to it instantly.’”
That is, if you get reception in the tunnels…. Something that D.C.’s public transit authority has been trying to solve for the better part of 20 years.
Where new grads go after college. The WSJ has an interesting interactive infographic about where kids move after they graduate, and you can sort by school. A stat on D.C.: “Washington, D.C. ranks sixth in the nation in population but second in drawing power. It attracts 2% or more of alumni from 218 schools, second only to New York.” Potomac fever!
Amazon University? With cities and counties going out of their way to show Jeff Bezos the money, this one was a new idea: a college to train their workers? D.C. already has a handful of colleges that are perfectly fine.
Time to retire the Blue Angels? That’s what one veteran in Seattle proposes. And in its place? He suggests that the Navy use its considerable resources to help tackle long-term unemployment and offer job retraining. Which they already do: if you join the Navy.
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