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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
> that works out to a 500 Mb/s link per building, which seems pretty modest for a institution
We're talking 500 Mb/s of upload 24/7 though, which can't be used for anything else (i.e. you need capacity beyond that for any other internet traffic). I doubt a regular old 1Gbps business class connection will cut it there (I'm sure they'd shut you off after a few days of uploading like that).
Despite another post that cited a large budget for NYPD, most agencies are cash-strapped. Telling them they need a $thousands/month internet connection at every precinct isn't going to go over well.
I've been to several PDs (think suburban city - probably like the majority of agencies) where their entire "internet infrastructure" consisted of a Comcast cable modem screwed to a sheet of plywood on a wall. Like I said elsewhere, most PDs are the opposite of high-tech - compared to most companies, their employees don't spend nearly as much time on computers or the internet.
> That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure this specific case matters? Are there things a person speaking to a police officer has any expectation that the officer may not relay as said to them? I would rather have it always recorded and strong laws about it's accessed.
If you watch the Jussie Smollet video he requested that officers turn off the cameras and they did so. I have no idea what the laws around this are, but as I understand it people have that right. That may not apply out in public but it seems to in private homes at least.
> If you're concerned about writing potentially sensitive video to non-volatile storage, that can be solved via technical means. Just encrypt the video with an ephemeral key kept in memory, then store the encrypted video on non-volatile storage. You get best of both worlds.
Once you've recorded that video it's subject to FOIA requests and rules of evidence and all kinds of things like that. If your recording only includes the past minute or 2, you can be reasonably sure it doesn't include something it shouldn't (such as a victim who asked not to be recorded from an hour ago). If hitting that button commits a 5 hour buffer, then you're going to have all kinds of stuff now "in the public record" that maybe shouldn't be there. But also you now have 5 hours of more or less useless video that you have to store and account for (which costs $).
> Mind showing your calculations? Keep in mind you don't have to store the videos in perpetuity. Limiting it to 180 days (with option to extend if the incident is being disputed) would suffice for most cases.
It's actually less about the storage and more about the bandwidth to transfer that data to the storage location. Though the cost of the storage itself can still be an issue even if you're only retaining it for 90-180 days.
There's a whole bunch of factors of course, but pick a reasonable bit rate (5-10 Mbps perhaps) for your recording and multiply it by the number of hours recorded per officer and the number of officers in an agency. Chicago PD has 12,000 police officers. I don't know how many of them work on a given day but let's say 10,000. Say each one records 5 hours per day based on the 5 hour buffer proposed here.
10,000 * 5 hours = 50,000 hours of footage per day
50,000 hours * 5 Mbps = 112.5 terabytes per day
112.5 terabytes uploaded in 24 hours = 10.4 Gbps
(you need to be able to upload a full day's recording within 24 hours or you'll never catch up)
Doing this quickly so hopefully my math isn't off but it's in line with what I remember. 10Gbps being uploaded 24/7 to the cloud. 20 petabytes stored at any moment if you're holding everything for 180 days.
Sure, you can attack some of these numbers (not every officer will have a recordable interaction every day etc.) but I hope it gets the point across.
It's not just culture, it's the police unions as well. Any new tech (like auto-recording when the weapon is drawn) generally has to have union approval. Unions are frequently resistant to these kinds of changes.
That, and also police agencies in general are pretty much the exact opposite of high-tech. The younger officers probably embrace technology having grown up on it, but a lot of the more senior people are wary of anything technological and see it as just another hindrance to their job. These are not people who sit in front of computers all day like we do.
Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded. Also, several minutes of buffer fits nicely in RAM. 5 hours would require a lot more RAM (making devices more expensive and thus harder to get deployed) or would require it to be written to flash disk which introduces new technical and legal issues.
Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival. Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.
"This guy" was recently named to Biden's Coronavirus Task Force, FYI. The average age of COVID19 deaths is in the 80s. It will be interesting to see how he applies his views on old age in that role.
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).