The whole story as presented in the article and comments here is a bit misleading. None of these buildings were "abandoned", at least not in any practical sense. The buildings documented here were old (from the 70s I believe) and full of asbestos and things like that and had really outlived their usefulness, and the very large piece of land they occupied had become extremely valuable. The buildings were still fully occupied when the company decided to sell the campus and relocate to new headquarters in downtown Chicago and move manufacturing to a new facility in Elgin.
Once sold, the company moved out. Shortly after, demolition began, and that's when these pictures were taken. The damage is from demolition, not from the normal "abandoned for 10 years deterioration" you see on those Urban Explorer Youtube videos. People worked in these buildings just a few years ago, and a lot of them had been remodeled somewhat recently and were actually pretty nice inside. The 6-story building with the large atrium was newer than the other parts and is still there and the new owner/developer is hoping to continue to use it as an office building (last I heard anyway).
Motorola also still occupies the 14-story building that used to be the world headquarters as well as another large building on the property. The real story here is much more mundane: a big company sold off some valuable real estate as part of a move to chase a younger workforce in downtown Chicago (jury's still out on that decision, especially with a more WFH-focused future).
I suppose it depends on how you define "downfall", but Motorola stock this year is at an all-time high, even higher than its peak during late 90s during the run up to the dot-com boom and when Motorola cellphones were king.
There's been some very hard years in between and it's a smaller company now, but it's actually doing very well by many standards.
DirectShow (the API for video capture and other things in Windows) has long had the concept of a filter which can be plugged into the video pipeline[0]. I'm not certain if that's the reason that the term is commonly used for effects such as the one discussed here, but this "cat filter" certainly might have been implemented as a DirectShow filter, so it's very plausible the terminology comes from that.
I'm pretty sure apps like this were called filters long before Instagram even existed.
I've played with Jami several times because it sounds good on paper but it just flat out failed to work a lot of the time. Messages sent but never received, no indication of why or what was going on. For my uses anyway, IM needs to be above all reliable - when I send a message I need to know the recipient will get it (and in a timely manner, modulo their availability).
Most of my network is on Telegram at my urging because it was the best option at the time, but I'm constantly looking for something better to replace it (as I'm aware of the downsides to Telegram). Currently I'm trialing Element with one of my contacts and I'd say it might be ready if I can get past the initial setup headaches, but Telegram just works so darn well and is so amazingly fast that it will be very hard to get buy-in for people to switch. Most people are overloaded with IM apps already, adding another one is tough unless it can completely replace and deprecate one they're already using. Jami definitely is not that IMO.
> Why should residents who are young and very low risk be a high priority?
Maybe they shouldn't be top priority, but if they're dealing directly with covid patients they sure as heck should have higher priority than a VP or administrator that's been working from home this whole time.
> It is ridiculous there aren't much more clear/specific guidelines, and in some cases enforceable policies/regulations, from the federal government. It's like nobody's driving the bus here.
Why is this not California's fault? States were each permitted to establish their own procedures, which somewhat makes sense given the challenging distribution requirements of the Pfizer vaccine. Montana has significantly different challenges than Rhode Island in that sense. Most states that I know of have established clear guidelines saying who gets it and when - I assume California is the same.
Seems like California is the governmental entity that failed to exercise proper oversight and/or requirements specification here.
Most states you know have established clear guidelines sayign who gets it and when? Including specifics on what medical staff within a hospital system would get it? Like not just "health care staff" or "first responders" (everyone in the Stanford Medicine system is that already right, this is about who within that group gets it).
Please back that up by showing me such clear guidelines from a few states. It should be easy to find this, if indeed most states have done this, presumably in a very transparent way for something so important and contentious, right?
I don't believe most states have.
(It doesn't make it easier that the federal government told states how much they'd get them REDUCED it, and in general is only committing to telling states how much they'll get a week in advance).
Phase 1 says "hospital/free-standing emergency department staff with direct patient exposure and/or exposure to potentially infectious materials"
Other states have similar wording. You'd really have to twist yourself into a knot to convince yourself that a work-from-home administrator falls into the categories specified above. Shame on any state who didn't include wording like that - there was nothing stopping them from putting some common-sense wording in their plans. Beyond the written rules, you'd also have to be a selfish idiot to think that just because you're related to a healthcare company that you should get it this week if you're working from home. If I were in that kind of role, shame would be enough to stop me but as we've seen the elite often have no shame.
(edit)
California's own plan [0] says Phase 1-A includes "paid and unpaid persons serving in healthcare settings who have the potential for direct or indirect exposure to patients and infectious materials and are unable to work from home". So if Stanford was really vaccinating admins who are working from home, then it seems like they violated state guidelines and should be punished appropriately.
> I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff
I don't understand why society is putting up with this. Right now if you're not in a daily COVID-facing role (i.e. an actual front line medical worker) or in a nursing home you should not be getting the shot. This makes my blood boil. There should have been laws passed regarding ordering of the distribution with criminal penalties for line jumpers like this.
There's an article in our local paper with a happy picture of one of our state's congressional representatives (a healthy 34-year-old!) getting the shot. Like WTF? There's doctors and nurses who are treating covid patients who can't get it yet. Why the heck does Congress get priority over them?
Not only do these people have no shame, half of them even have the nerve to brag about it to the rest of us plebes who will have to wait months or more to get it.
Now you see why social media is so powerful. People just bitch and do nothing about this stuff, it's the perfect tool for pacification. Right now I'm bitching but next I'm going to go play video games, so you can see how it works even when you know it's there.
Did it make a difference? They apologized after using many of the vaccines and promised "to make a change". The promise is incredibly vague and won't likely come into effect until after most of the vaccines have been given out. It means nothing
There is a massive pushback against taking the vaccine going on right now. People coming up with a litany of different reasons not to take it. One of those reasons is a lack of trust in the government. If that smiling 34 year old has a lot of constituents telling him they are scared to take it because it might not be safe it becomes his duty to stand up and take it as early as possible with a smile on his face.
What ever happened to starting out with assuming good intentions?
There's been plenty of healthcare workers splashed all over the news taking it already. More importantly, we're a long long way away from the general public even getting to decide to take it or not. If hesitation is still a concern in March/April, then congress could have done the PR stunt at that point.
Right now there's a huge shortage of vaccines compared to the number of people who are both eligible and willing. No need to worry about the unwilling at this point since there's not enough to go around anyway.
Congress took it because they think they're more important than the rest of us, and apparently they think they're even more important than the frontline workers who are still waiting.
Ehh, I completely and truly agree with you/feel the same way, but because I'm feeling a bit cynical right now, I have to say - the congressional representative getting it can be passed off as encouragement for his constituents to willingly get vaccinated in a time where there's quite a vocal bit of people who think Bill Gates is going to be swimming through their veins in a tiny submarine if they get it.
Now - could he have just vocally stated "I am your congressional rep - I have full trust in the vaccine and encourage you all to receive it as I wait for my time in the line of priority"
I agree that healthcare workers, firefighters and police should be the first ones to get the shots - and directly after them, politicians should, and that mandatory. Get the shot or lose your seat.
There are large parts of the population who say they won't get vaccinated because they're afraid that politicians exploit them as "guinea pigs" (especially the PoC community has a really bad history, e.g. Tuskegee syphilis study). Time to turn the usual situation around.
I like your list. I really hope to see a program where 'front-line workers' (i.e. grocery store workers/etc as opposed to 'first responders') are given priority -and- financial assistance to receive the vaccine if they so choose to.
> -and- financial assistance to receive the vaccine if they so choose to.
A decent government should fund vaccinations out of taxpayer money. It's simply way more cost-effective than having people around who want but can't afford vaccination and then society has to pay many orders of magnitude more for treating the illness...
The FDA announced early this morning that they were definitively going to authorize it[1], but they didn't actually issue the authorization at that point, with people telling the press that authorization would come "in the next few days".
If someone called up the FDA after that and said "hey, you've already told everyone you're going to approve this, so just sign the papers and make it official today rather than going home for the weekend and finishing it up on Monday", I have no problem with that. That's not pressure to prematurely authorize it (since they already confirmed they would), that's just cutting through the red tape/BS and making it official faster (IMO).
Put it into a tech perspective - if your company's cloud product went down and you were losing $millions every hour, and the devs found the bug and fixed it, but the product manager said "hey great, we'll fill out the release paperwork in the next few days and maybe approve pushing the change to prod on Monday", would anyone go for that? No way - they'd say we're not going home until this is fixed and released. Replace $millions with actual human lives and that's basically what we have here, isn't it?
Once sold, the company moved out. Shortly after, demolition began, and that's when these pictures were taken. The damage is from demolition, not from the normal "abandoned for 10 years deterioration" you see on those Urban Explorer Youtube videos. People worked in these buildings just a few years ago, and a lot of them had been remodeled somewhat recently and were actually pretty nice inside. The 6-story building with the large atrium was newer than the other parts and is still there and the new owner/developer is hoping to continue to use it as an office building (last I heard anyway).
Motorola also still occupies the 14-story building that used to be the world headquarters as well as another large building on the property. The real story here is much more mundane: a big company sold off some valuable real estate as part of a move to chase a younger workforce in downtown Chicago (jury's still out on that decision, especially with a more WFH-focused future).