SEE YOU DOWN THE ROAD.

A recent issue of New York's Times blurbed their online job listings.  "Run away and join the circus.  For real."  The listing is for a Circus Transportation Supervisor.

I did not investigate further as the searches require job-seekers to upload a resume and other contact information, which only makes sense.

It's likely that these days a Circus Transportation Supervisor ought be conversant with movement permits, perhaps with maintaining special vehicles, and possibly with hiring-in rigs and drivers.

I wonder if such a person also has the opportunity to serve in vehicle maintenance during the winter.

That's the rationale between my current business cards, which list me as Wagon Shop Superintendent and Train Master for the Karlson Brothers Circus.  In the model circus world, you can still run trains and show elephants.

Find yourself a circus and go to it.

Next Karlson Brothers exhibition will be in Baraboo, the weekend Circus World opens.

MAKE COLLEGIATE HOCKEY GREAT AGAIN.

Yes, the past couple weeks' posts have tended to the gloomy.  Let's close out the month with cheerful news.

The No. 1 ranked Wisconsin Badgers (35-4-2) took home their fifth-ever NCAA National Championship over the weekend after defeating the No. 2 Minnesota Golden Gophers 2–0 Sunday at the Frozen Four in Hamden, Connecticut. It was a dominant weekend performance from Wisconsin against both No. 4 Clarkson and No. 2 Minnesota, as the team did not allow a goal all weekend.

The Badgers had not won a National Championship since 2011, despite having made it to the Frozen Four every year except the 2012-13 season.

That's Wisconsin women's hockey, which we have followed for all their previous national titles, and, once again, the final game involved the best of the West.

It's always a good day when the goaltender is the first star of the tournament.  "Over the last two games of the season, [junior goalie Kristen] Campbell managed to keep a clean sheet while facing off against possibly the Badgers’ two toughest opponents of the season. Despite facing a total of 41 shots on goal throughout the Frozen Four, Campbell did not allow a single goal."

There is still unfinished business.  Back in 2006, Wisconsin's icers won both championships.

This year, neither the Wisconsin men nor the Minnesota men are in the national tournament, although one-time Western Collegiate Hockey Association stalwart Denver is.

LIQUIDATING THE RAILROAD?

Over the years, I've been skeptical of efforts to make businesses in general, and railroads in particular, better by shrinking the physical plant and antagonizing shippers.  The latest effort sails under the banner of "precision scheduled railroading," but, trackside, it strikes Jeff Lusanne as just another speed-up.

[T]he central focus of [precision scheduled railroading] is to “sweat the assets” of a railroad, by reducing the headcount, idling locomotives and equipment, closing shops and facilities, reducing maintenance, curtailing service, and selling off routes. The stock market joyfully responds to every cutback, pumping the stock price up in the short term, while the physical infrastructure decays, morale sours, and customers are chased away.

The approach might look good for a quarter or a business cycle, but what happens when there's economic growth?

For railroad workers, PSR is more like a spreading virus that, no matter how disastrous its results have been, continues to spread from railroad to railroad. Harrison died in December 2017, but since that time, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, and Kansas City Southern have adopted the PSR policies and begun or announced cutbacks. BNSF, which is privately owned, is now the only large railroad that is not openly implementing PSR, although it has made operational changes that harshly impact operating crews and dispatchers.

In each case, these railroads announce that PSR will lead to “operational efficiencies” and “better service,” with the financial and trade press providing universal praise. It is a preposterous, proven lie. The concept of PSR is that railroads can do more with less—they can get rid of workers, reduce maintenance, close repair shops and sorting yards, cut train frequency, and supposedly provide better service while still making more money. Only the latter is true, and only for a short time—until the long-term consequences emerge.

When CSX implemented these policies in 2017, service to customers plummeted so drastically that the industry-friendly Surface Transportation Board was pushed to criticize the delays and demand regular reporting on performance. Meanwhile, CSX invented its own metrics for measuring its performance that didn’t match the rest of the industry, making it impossible to determine how bad it had gotten.

I suppose we should be grateful CSX management didn't single-track sections of The Water Level Route, but when you have a columnist for World Socialist Web Site pointing out that the railroads are leaving business unsolicited during a time of truck-driver shortages, something that's contrary to most principles of business strategy, something's not right on the railroad, under-performing routes not-withstanding.

Over recent decades, the railroads have sought only the most profitable traffic, a tendency that PSR emphasizes.

The policy works to make railroad operations “efficient” only in the sense of how the railroad can spend as little as possible to provide service. For example, they may cut a train that provides the only service over a route, and instead reroute traffic hundreds of miles out of the way on another higher-traffic route to consolidate operations, in an effort to save on crews and shutter trackage. Yet the customer sees transit times that take days or even weeks longer.

Another method is to run fewer trains that are longer and heavier than ever before and save on the reduction of crews and locomotive usage—assuming that massive trains don’t suffer more frequent problems that cause more frequent delay. Traffic gets held for longer amounts of time for the fewer, more “efficient” trains that do run, which adds to transit time.

If customers complain about the service, the railroad might decide they aren’t even worth the trouble—the emphasis is on the highest-margin traffic that the railroad can run with the lowest costs, and in effect, customers are chased away. In 2017, when CSX implemented PSR, its total yearly carloads fell by 1.4 percent compared to 2016, with almost every type of traffic showing declines, yet the stock price doubled. That feeds into the cycle that allows further reduction of employees, equipment, and maintenance.

Those are just the within-mode effects.  Motorists see more congestion with big rigs operated by over-stressed drivers, and the roads get beat up.  In the limit, do the railroads have to rediscover that the Chicago Great Western model of One Big Train a day doing all the work isn't sustainable.

Will the investors figure it out before the soviets of transportation workers Mr Lusanne prays for emerge?

WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?

In a sane world, there would be no reason for Our President to remind higher education of its responsibilities to protect free speech, or for higher education to view such an executive order as anything controversial.

We do not live in a sane world.

Among the many responses to President Trump’s executive order on campus free speech last week, some of the lamest came from the major groups representing colleges and universities. Flipping open their “Intro to Corporate PR Crises” textbooks to page one, they did what many large and powerful institutions do when faced with an embarrassing, obvious, and public problem: Deny there’s a problem at all.

Few people with any knowledge or experience of higher ed actually believe there’s no free speech problem on campus. FIRE’s 20-year history defending students and faculty across the political and ideological spectrum is a testament to the existence of the problem. So is the more than a decade FIRE has spent reading and rating the speech-related policies of more than 400 of our nation’s largest and most prestigious schools. 90 percent continue to feature speech codes that are either unconstitutional (on public campuses) or violate their own promises of free speech (on private campuses), with nearly 30 percent of them doing so egregiously. These are among the reasons FIRE gets approximately 1,000 case submissions per year from students and faculty asking for our help defending their rights.

We can concede that "free speech" is a Complex Proposition, with "standing to address the ekklesia" differing from "spouting off in the agora" and "respecting disciplinary discourse practices" is different from either.

That's not what Robert Shibley is seeing.

The higher ed lobbying organizations are, of course, free to criticize the executive order and to predict any number of dire consequences that might stem from it. But prefacing those predictions with (sometimes identical) forms of “move along, there’s nothing to see here” is so transparently erroneous that it can’t help but undermine their credibility when they talk about the potential downsides.

FIRE’s own position on President Trump’s executive order is that, while asking schools to follow the law or their own promises should not be controversial, it’s too soon to tell whether these steps will have a positive (or negative) effect. Much depends on how agencies put the order into practice. We will watch, wait, and continue helping campus communities defend their expressive rights. Because regardless of what the higher ed establishment tells you, students and faculty do not enjoy robust expressive freedoms at every school required to provide them.

But wait, there's more!

IT'S A SHAME THAT A LAW FOR THIS IS EVEN NEEDED.

Legislation to ensure safe food and drugs is probably desirable, but does it preclude entrepreneurial kids from selling lemonade?

Although state law currently prohibits the sale of homemade drinks, the Texas House of Representatives passed a bill last week legalizing lemonade stands run by children. It now heads to the state Senate.

The legislation would outlaw permit requirements for minors who wish to operate a temporary stand selling lemonade or any other nonalcoholic beverage. In doing so, it would overturn the Texas Food Establishment's ban on the sale of unregulated drinks, which was enacted over health concerns.

Such prohibitions are in force in a few other states as well.

I suppose if something goes wrong in the subdivision, the usual suspects will have a Bush to blame.

"Yesterday was one small step for lemonade, today is one giant leap for young entrepreneurs," Rep. Matt Krause (R–Fort Worth), who championed the bill, said after the House gave its final approval.

A similar law recently passed in Colorado after the police shut down a kid's lemonade stand over licensing woes. The makeshift business was operating next to a festival where adults were selling the same beverage.

The Dallas Morning News highlights that several young lemonade vendors across Texas have met the same fate. Unaware that their business endeavors were in violation of state law, sisters Andria, 8, and Zoey Green, 7, had their stand shuttered in 2015 by police who noted that they were operating without a permit.

Krause's bill has drawn cheers from Texas politicians, including Land Commissioner George P. Bush, who tweeted a video of him patronizing a lemonade stand outside of his office.

"Can't think of anything more basic, more entrepreneurial, more creative for a child to begin the idea of learning the value of a dollar," said Bush in the video. "I'm encouraging my fellow Texans to support this piece of legislation that goes far to build imagination and creativity in our great state."

Get it passed and signed before summer!

AFTER DEATH, THE JUDGEMENT.

James H. Kunstler is no member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

What actually happened with RussiaGate? A cabal of government officials colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to interfere in the 2016 election and, failing to achieve their desired outcome, engineered a two-years-plus formal inquisition to deflect attention from their own misconduct and attempt to overthrow the election result.

In one way, the deflection might have worked. Our President could work with Republicans in Congress to cut tax rates and simplify the tax code, because what is the purpose of Republicans if not to cut tax rates and simplify the tax code?  But they might not have gotten on board with tighter border enforcement as enough of them might have accepted enough of the Narrative that they could not rule out a resignation or impeachment within the first six months or a year.  Perhaps that's what all the flying spittle on Hardball was about.

Now comes the pay-back: to the talking heads on the cable shows, and to the careerists of the Permanent Government.

There remains also, the rather sweeping panorama of misconduct and probable crime among the government (and former government) players in the agencies mentioned above. Does the full Mueller Report mention, for instance, that the animating document claiming that Trump colluded with Russia was manufactured by Mrs. Clinton’s employees? And that this document was used time and again improperly and illegally to prolong the inquisition? How could Mr. Mueller not acknowledge that? And if not, what sort of investigation was this?

Fake transcripts to get into college, fake stories about high school kids behaving badly, fake bias crimes, why not fake evidence of campaign corruption?

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at how bad it has gotten in two years.

Iconoclasm is never pretty, though.  I did warn you. "The gentry liberals, and the academic-entertainment complex, have done much damage, as have the rent seekers. But like any other ruling class, they will not relinquish power graciously." And the ungraciousness is on display at CNN, night after night.

Mr Kunstler concludes,

My favorite college professor and mentor, David Hamilton, once put a curious question to us when we were vexing him for some reason now forgotten: “Why,” he asked, “Did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times?”

We twiddled our cigarettes and pulled our chins.

“Because he was just that pissed,” he said.

That reads like inter alia Kurt Schlichter.

Our ungracious ruling class is not going to like the new rules.

CHIEFS ESTABLISH STANDARDS AND HOLD OUR SAILORS TO THEM.

An essay by Command Master Chief William Houlihan spells out the responsibilities of the senior noncom.

Many of our sailors don’t trust the Mess. They don’t trust us because we are not doing the jobs we used to do, the jobs the Mess was intended to do.

Our focus seems to have shifted. Too many of us believe the strategic direction of our Navy is where we should be concentrating. Not enough of us are walking berthings, establishing standards, visiting the mess decks, and just listening to our men and women.

Chiefs need to get their damn heads out of their academic and post-Navy aspirations and back into the lives and development of their sailors. Our sailors don’t need chiefs pretending they understand the very complex concept of “strategy.” Our sailors need chiefs whose daily “strategy” revolves around unit mission and sailor development.

It's not quite the role of professor-as-senior-noncom as regular readers understand it, and yet, it's about saying No and upholding standards.  "We earn a sailor’s trust by doing what they’ve been led to believe chiefs do: lead, nurture, discipline, care, challenge."

Via Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds, who notes, "Don’t be out of touch and career-obsessed. That’s what officers are for."  In higher education, those would be the serial administrators.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

National Public Radio suggests there's an affordable water crisis along the shores of the Great Lakes.

In cities across the country, the cost of water has spiked in recent years, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to perilously endure weeks or even months without an essential resource.

The crisis is especially acute where you would least expect it – the Great Lakes, the region of the country with the most abundant fresh water.

A nine-month investigation by APM Reports examined the cost of water in six large cities near the Great Lakes – Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Buffalo and Duluth – over the past 10 years and found that rates have risen alarmingly fast.

I can throw all sorts of social science penalty flags on this reporting, or is it crisis mongering. I submit, though, that one diagram and one anecdote will suffice to make my point.

Hit this link to see the diagram.  Neither National Public Radio nor American Public Media Reports could be bothered to make a shareable image of it.  That's unfortunate, as it would be useful to see Chicago's average annual water bill rise from around $273 for a household of four in 2010 to $576 in 2018, while Phoenix hovers at around $400 a year over the full decade.

Yes.  Phoenix.  As in Arizona.  As in Sonoran Desert.  As in piping water from the Grand Canyon.  Something strikes me as unsustainable there.

The water utilities of the big cities around the Great Lakes (the chart omits Milwaukee, perhaps the sewer socialists did more than pray to Our Lady of Infrastructure) have been raising their rates in order to renew the mains, some of which are going on 200 years old, and more than a few of which are lead pipes.  Those rate increases, however, are pinching the budgets of poor people.  Here's how public radio propagates its Narrative.

Many cities have been forced to raise rates to deal with decrepit infrastructure – leaking, cracking water pipes that in some places date to the 19^th century. With the federal government allocating less money for water infrastructure, most cities have foisted the bill on to their customers, especially those who can least afford it.

The APM Reports investigation found that the rising cost of water has hit poor families the hardest; the government-run water utilities in these six cities have issued at least 367,740 shut-off notices in the past decade. And an analysis of shut-off data revealed disproportionately high concentrations of water shut-offs in poorer areas and in majority black and Latino neighborhoods in every city.

"Washington austerity: women and minorities hardest hit." Wait until they look at the federal money involved in those Arizona pipelines making the lower rates for flood-irrigated golf courses possible.

Sometimes, the people who have their city water turned off turn to eighteenth-century approaches to making do.

[Chicago pensioner, Rev. Falicia] Campbell's basic tasks like doing the dishes or getting ready to leave the house became expensive and arduous. To bathe each morning, she had to pour gallons of bottled water into a pot to heat on a stove. She then carried the water up the steep stairs to the second floor and dumped it into the bath tub. She made the trip multiple times until she had enough water to take a bath. Then she'd use the water for the toilet. By the time she was on her way to her church, she was already exhausted. And there was a financial burden too: She was having to spend $20 a week on bottled water.

"There's an old saying you never miss your water until the well runs dry. And I found that out. It's very difficult to get around without water," Campbell said one day last October. By then, her water was back on. With the help of friends and family, it had taken her a month to come up with the deposit demanded by the Chicago water department. She's enrolled in a $120.93 monthly plan. If she's lucky, she'll pay off her debt by September 2021.

There's got to be a political economy problem in here: $121 a month for current and past use of city water, $80-90 a month for bottled water.  Why?

Phoenix, on the other hand, appears to have already established a reserve for maintenance and replacement, although if that reserve is relying on federal money, they, too, might be facing future problems.

Phoenix Water Services Director Kathryn Sorensen said the cost of water is determined not by a city's proximity to water but by the quality of its infrastructure.

Phoenix gets its water from the Colorado River, about 200 miles away. It's piped to the city through the Central Arizona Project, built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation between 1973 and 1994. The project was for the most part federally funded, but there's a repayment plan in place.

"We're not like a natural gas utility or an electrical utility where you can move the product easily over thin wires or in relatively inexpensive pipes," Sorensen said. "You need concrete, steel, iron, and so the cost of a water utility is in its infrastructure, and the trap that a lot of utilities fall into is that they get behind in the rehabilitation and replacement of that infrastructure."

In the case of the big cities around the Lakes, that appears to have been the case.  The water utilities, however, were not returning calls from reporters.

As far as those "relatively inexpensive" electric and natural gas grids, don't get me started.  Cold Spring Shops pays more in transmission and distribution charges, and taxes, this being Illinois, than it does for therms and kilowatt-hours.

WHY IT MATTERS.

Two opinion columns make the case that the land grants and mid-majors and regional comprehensives are in the same business as the Ivies and ought behave accordingly.

We start with an anonymous whinge in The Guardian from someone purporting to be on faculty at one of the selective institutions you've probably read about in U.S. News.

I teach at an elite American university – one of the oldest and best-known, which rejects about 90% of applicants each year for the small number of places it can offer to undergraduates.

In this setting, where teaching quality is at a premium and students expect faculty to give them extensive personal attention, the presence of unqualified students admitted through corrupt practices is an unmitigated disaster for education and research. While such students have long been present in the form of legacy admits, top sports recruits and the kids of multimillion-dollar donors, the latest scandal represents a new tier of Americans elbowing their way into elite universities: unqualified students from families too poor to fund new buildings, but rich enough to pay six-figure bribes to coaches and admissions advisers. This increase in the proportion of students who can’t do the work that elite universities expect of them has – at least to me and my colleagues – begun to create a palpable strain on the system, threatening the quality of education and research we are expected to deliver.

I suppose I should be heartened that the Varsity Blue fallout discovers what access-assessment-remediation-retention looks like at the top of the academic food chain, and, in a perverse way, perhaps I should be encouraged that the students at wherever this is have enough initiative to advocate for their own accommodations, rather than rely on the swarms of deanlets and deanlings in the various special education retention offices to take care of things.

A CASE FOR THE CANON AND THE CURRICULUM?

Our President recently signed an Executive Order notifying institutions of higher learning that they are on Double Secret Probation or something, and at risk of losing federal funding if they suppress free speech.  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (disclaimer: they are on the Cold Spring Shops "nice" list at Christmas) issued a statement that summarizes the stakes well.

To the extent that today’s executive order asks colleges and universities to meet their existing legal obligations, it should be uncontroversial.

FIRE will watch closely to see if today’s action furthers the meaningful, lasting policy changes that FIRE has secured over two decades — or results in unintended consequences that threaten free expression and academic freedom. We note that the order does not specify how or by what standard federal agencies will ensure compliance, the order’s most consequential component. FIRE has long opposed federal agency requirements that conflict with well-settled First Amendment jurisprudence. We will continue to do so.

FIRE knows from years of experience that censorship silences students and faculty from across the ideological and political spectrum. Any principled and effective defense of freedom of expression must protect student and faculty expressive rights without regard to viewpoint. To secure the benefits of the “marketplace of ideas” for campus communities and for our nation as a whole, all students and faculty must be free to peacefully speak their minds.

As our work demonstrates, campus censorship is a real and continuing problem. We appreciate the executive branch’s attention to this issue. As a proudly nonpartisan organization, FIRE will continue to lead the fight for campus speech rights and academic freedom regardless of the political party in power or the popularity of the speech at issue. The First Amendment and freedom of expression require no less.

The separate mention of "campus speech rights" and "academic freedom" is salient, and it's a point not necessarily well understood by politicians, or by academicians themselves.

WHAT BERNIE SANDERS OR KSHAMA SAWANT CAN'T DO, THE INVISIBLE HAND CAN.

Madison restaurants’ struggle for staff nears a crisis point.  Artisanal food, foodie residents, atmosphere, all the rest, and yet the working conditions aren't great.

Surya Café, a vegan spot serving smoothies, snacks and sandwiches in Fitchburg, will open a second location in the old Garver Feed Mill on Madison’s east side this summer.

When head chef Lauren Montelbano thinks about staffing it, she shudders.

“It’s terrifying,” said Montelbano, who runs her current café inside a yoga studio with four employees. “I look at how many restaurants there are in the city and the suburbs. Where does staff come from for these restaurants?

Incentives matter, even inside the thirty square miles of socialist wishful thinking surrounded by reality.

The inability of Madison-area bars and restaurants to find and keep employees has been nearing a crisis point for years. Low unemployment in Dane County (1.9 percent as of December 2018) and a proliferation of new dining spots has led to more competition for fewer workers.

Those who start a job may not stay long. As of 2017, restaurants’ annual turnover rate was 72.5 percent, compared to 46 percent for the U.S. private sector overall. (Many people move in and out of restaurant jobs on a seasonal basis, so it’s not three-fourths of a restaurant’s full-year staff turning over each year.)

Restaurant consultant Sam McDaniel has been telling clients, “retention is the most important thing in the restaurant business.”

Strip away the numerology and the business bafflegab, and what the owners have to do is make sure the staff isn't motivated to sing an old country song.

“There’s a systemic failure in the hospitality business to create good jobs,” said McDaniel, who co-founded Graft on the Capitol Square and now works at the Goodman Community Center.

“It’s a chicken and egg thing,” he said. “Are we struggling with staffing because there aren’t enough people? Or is it that jobs are not good, so people don’t want the jobs?”

Restaurants get stuck in a cycle of constantly hiring and training workers who themselves might be juggling two or three jobs. It’s expensive for the restaurants and exhausting for everyone.

Many chefs said they don’t call references anymore. Once someone is in the door, she can start immediately. Some even rehire people they don’t want to work with, because they feel they don’t have a choice.

“Most of us are in such dire need,” Montelbano said. “It’s like, do you have a pulse and can you hold a knife? Great! You have a job.”

Madison’s not alone. Staffing challenges are universal in restaurants from Denver to Baltimore. In Chicago, “a surge of new openings, a smaller pool of immigrant workers and more opportunities for cooks in non-restaurant jobs with saner hours” has stressed the industry, according to a recent Chicago Tribune story.

“The squeeze is particularly profound at small independent restaurants without the allure of big-name backing or room in their budgets to absorb higher pay.”

Saner hours and better pay. Imagine that. Or perhaps a reality check: your artisanal veggie stuff only sells when it's cheap.

Madison is short on both of those things. Restaurant closures, the sudden spike in easy-to-train concepts like poke, and dark Mondays and Tuesdays at popular restaurants and bakeries all have some connection to staffing issues.

Wages are one part of the problem, particularly for cooks. Restaurants could charge diners more, but what kind of backlash will they get if the burger goes from $8 to $10?

It’s like a game of chicken. Raise the price on the wings to pay the dishwasher an extra buck an hour and give the fry cook a week off, and see your ratings dive on Yelp. But without a decent salary, those jobs are even less attractive.

“Food and labor are so expensive,” said Caitlin Suemnicht, chief creative officer of Food Fight Restaurant Group. “Something’s gotta give. Restaurants are going to have to start charging more. We’ve been battling it to keep it down, but sooner or later prices are going to have to rise. And no one wants to be the first one.”

Nobody might want to be the first one, but the place that stays open on Monday and Tuesday with higher prices might just be on to something. Remember the fundamental logic of competitive markets: price taking is a behavior in equilibrium, but the adjustment from equilibrium to equilibrium isn't well understood, even by experienced economists.

Last October, Stephen Carroll left Brasserie V, where he started as a sous chef in 2014. To give a snapshot of the kitchen situation now, Carroll offered a chef’s litmus test.

“In the last two years the biggest difference I’ve noticed is, how many days a week or a month do I find myself in the dish pit?” said Carroll. “There was a stretch last year at BV where we didn’t go a week fully staffed. At least one time a week something would happen, someone wouldn’t show up.”

Dishwashers, like fast food counter service workers, are among the lowest paid employees in the industry. Carroll called washing dishes the “hardest and least respected (job), but it’s more integral than any other part of the restaurant. We can’t put beautiful food on dirty plates.”

Over the past few years, those in charge of restaurant hiring report scheduling interviews with people who didn’t show, cooks who worked a single shift and never returned, and a rash of no call/ no shows on all sides of the house. Carroll doesn’t think pay is the main reason for turnover.

Some of that might be a breakdown of manners, yes, and yet ...

“I think all of this comes down to the problem of, there’s too many restaurants in the city,” Carroll said. “I can’t say I’ve ever experienced anything like the situation in the last two years in the previous 15 years I’ve been in kitchens.”

As the consultant McDaniel pointed out, some restaurant jobs don’t inspire loyalty. Nationally, line cooks make an average of $25,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the front of the house, base pay for tipped workers in Madison is $2.33/hour, which makes a difference in cold, slow months like March. Front of house pay can vary wildly based on time of year, style of restaurant and accuracy of tip reporting, but the BLS claims that waiters make only $20,000 on average per year.

“In a large chunk of the industry, both high level — what would be considered great restaurants — and your normal, run of the mill, employees are seen solely as a cost to control, and not as an asset,” McDaniel said. “After years and years, the labor force has recognized that.

“When you combine that with a robust restaurant city where there are other jobs available, there is less reason for people to stay and deal with the crap.”

College towns might be great places to locate cheap and contingent labor, and yet, capital cities might be full of legislators and bureaucrats and rent-seekers looking for an environment in which to wine and dine those public servants; then there's the financial and technology sector, and a business model that relies on cheap and contingent labor might not work out so well.

Restaurants need to “normalize” jobs with basic amenities like sick days, health insurance and vacation days, McDaniel said. In the front of the house, month-to-month or unpredictable schedules may work well for people looking for a side or summer job but not for career employees.

“Hiring and scheduling practices are not keeping up with the way people are approaching these jobs,” said Brian Hamilton, an industry veteran currently working at Brothers Three and the Ohio Tavern. “The kids these days — I know that’s a common opening — they really depend on flexibility and that’s incredibly hard sometimes.

“There are ways you can go about alleviating that as the person making the schedule, but it’s a challenge on both sides, for the employee and the employer. There’s a serious deficit of talented, driven, career restaurant people, and that’s what this business needs more of in Madison.”

Becky Schigiel is the former director of the Worker Justice Center and worked on the Just Dining Guide from 2012 to 2015. The guide, which is no longer updated, focused on working conditions in downtown Madison restaurants.

In the process of creating the guide, Schigiel noticed that some employers had grown antagonistic, aiming to “keep labor as low as possible no matter what.”

“There’s this small business mentality, ‘I’m giving those people a job and they are screwing me over,’” Schigiel said. “A job is not a gift. You can’t open your doors if nobody’s washing the dishes, waiting the tables.”

On the other hand, you can't open your doors if nobody wants to wash the dishes, or if your pay packets are not career focused. Talent and drive still command a premium.

Pay for cooks has finally started to rise. Epic Systems in Verona recently posted $19 an hour for line cooks. Palette Bar & Grill, coming into Hotel Indigo, advertised $15-$17/hour for the same. Tangent, open since December, is offering up to $15/hour for night line cooks, and the newly opened Portillo’s is at $12-$15/hour for cooks.

Food Fight’s group of 19 restaurants and one bakery in the Madison area saw turnover start to slow after giving a $1/hour increase to every kitchen employee and implementing a $13/hour minimum wage for all kitchen staff. It represented an investment of $500,000 in labor.

Incentives matter.

Job boards teem with offers for cooks, servers, delivery drivers and bartenders. Not uncommon are $200 sign-on bonuses. Capitol Lakes, a retirement center downtown, posted a sign-on bonus for up to $1,000 for line cooks. Some promise no nights or five-day weeks, bus passes, paid time off after a year, dental and health insurance.

There's no discussion in the article about higher pay for those evenings and weekends, and yet, that is another margin along which to optimize. Particularly with the rent-seekers gathering after the legislative sessions close for the day.

THE COLLEGE BUBBLE RUNS FLAT.

The University of Akron would like to unzip almost half its faculty.

The University of Akron offered a buy-out to about 47 percent of faculty on Monday in an effort to balance its budget.

Taking a “voluntary separation or retirement" offer would pay a faculty member 100 percent of 2019-20 base pay, split into two installments. The employee would leave the university on May 31, 2020. The first payment would come on July 2020, the second in January of 2021.

The offer does not appear to be an attempt, in the style of a 1980s railroad, to retrench to a core system, hiving off extravagances such as the Pacific Extension of The Milwaukee Road.  "Only full-time, permanent professors not teaching in what Akron calls 'strategic investment areas' are eligible -- some 340."  At the moment, the "strategic investment areas" are law, engineering, and polymer sciences.  (Rubber is a polymer, you see.)

The university's interim president, John Green, explains his efforts in a memorandum that is a paradigm of bafflegab.  "The feedback I have received from our continuing conversations has been useful and instructive on the key challenges of making UA’s academic programs more distinctive, fostering greater faculty collaboration, and addressing our enrollment challenges to achieve financial sustainability."  It goes on in that vein, and there is an accompanying set of talking points.

Nowhere in the talking points does anyone note that the university is losing enrollments.  But George Orwell would not be surprised.

Reorganizations are usually about eliminating “redundancies.” How many people would be let go?

There is no intention for involuntary personnel reductions because of the potential reorganization proposals.

Presumably, the lump sum offer to step out of line and disappear will achieve sufficient personnel reductions.

But is anybody really reassured by what appears to be a sacrifice of rigor?

How does this help to establish “clearer, easier-to-follow, and more efficient academic pathways for students?”

As one example, many students start out believing they want to become engineers but find they are unable to meet the math requirements. Having the degree offerings from the School of Engineering Technology that currently reside in the College of Applied Science and Technology located within the proposed “College of Engineering, Science and Technology” would enable those students to continue to pursue an engineering-related degree within one college. This is the type of model used at The University of Cincinnati’s College of Engineering and Applied Science.

With apologies to John Gardner: neither their curricula nor their polymers will hold water.

But at least Akron's women's basketball squad got a participation trophy.

TOO TACKY FOR WORDS.

A vigil is no place for Frat Boy Casual.  "A man wearing a 'Make America Great Again' hat attended a vigil for victims of the New Zealand mosque shootings and was told to leave by upset mourners."

There used to be such a thing as manners, and one of the conventions was that gentlemen would remove their hats during prayers.  "On Monday, students at York University in Toronto held an on-campus vigil for victims. During the closing prayer, a young man wearing a MAGA hat appeared in the crowd."

Nyekulturny.

Apparently the individual in question is in the habit of flaunting his disregard for convention, whether of the traditional kind or of the post-modern kind, around York events.

Unfortunately, the people who might have the responsibility for developing character among York's students and neighbors know neither how to simply say nyekulturny, nor how to invoke Emily Post.

Yanni Dagonas, the deputy spokesperson for York University, tells Yahoo Lifestyle:

“York is one of the most diverse and inclusive universities in Canada and our commitment to diversity and inclusion is a great strength. All community members are expected to conduct themselves in a way that promotes an atmosphere of civility, diversity, equity, and respect in their interactions with others. Our community should be able to enjoy a safe environment for work and study, free of violence, harassment, intimidation, and bullying.”

“We are guided by our values as an institution of higher education and remain committed to intellectual integrity, freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, and equal rights and dignity for everyone,” Dagonas said. “Any student, staff or faculty member may file a complaint under the Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities (CSRR) if they feel unsafe or experience acts that are disruptive or diminish the rights and dignity of individuals.”

I suppose York, being a university, and, worse, a university located in Canada, cannot take the stance that students and faculty shall conduct themselves like ladies and gentlemen.  Too bourgeois, too binary, too triggering, not inclusive enough.

A CASE FOR MARKET TESTS?

California-Merced sociologist Charlie Eaton explains How Wall Street Buys Ivy League Access.

His complaint deals with the insider dealings among eating club members, trustees of the Ivies, and fast-track partnerships on Wall Street, which he contends are more pernicious than a couple of celebrities passing their spawn off as rowers.

His essay focuses on the emergence of a new subset of the power elite, this subset equipped with the best quantitative tools money can buy and computers can simulate.

Private equity and hedge fund managers have particularly benefited from Ivy League connections, and they have returned the favor. Private equity and hedge funds hardly even existed at the beginning of the 1980s. But financial deregulation made it possible for their managers to make fast fortunes. This led to a rapid migration to the new funds from the ranks of investment banking, a profession long dominated by Ivy League graduates, according to sociologist Lauren Rivera.

The old-school ties might perpetuate limited-access highways for the well-connected, as the research he cites suggests.

My analysis of the Forbes data adds quantitative evidence to recent qualitative research by Rivera, Megan Tobias Neely and a team of researchers working with Amy J. Binder. These sociologists have shown how elite private universities foster shared identities, trust and social networks that provide advantages to their alumni in ways that have helped keep the top echelons of finance closed to women, people of color and those without degrees from the most prestigious private universities.

What might be more important, dear reader, is that the top echelons of finance are full of people with similar intellectual proclivities and shared models of reality.

Crash.  "If you have a run of events several standard deviations above the mean, and you've played your financial cards right, you're rich, but if those events start coming in below the mean, down comes your house of cards."

THERE'S REALLY TOO LITTLE COMPETITION.

Higher education's spinmeisters rally around the narrative that trustees at the University of Spoiled Children and elsewhere who bought access to the rich and famous is reason to double down on faux-egalitarianism.  Start with John Warner in his "Just Visiting" page on Inside Higher Ed.

Competition is bad for education, bad for learning, bad for students, bad, ultimately, for educational institutions as well.

Competition is wasteful and inefficient, and leads institutions to engage in deliberately obstructive practices to hide the trust [c.q] cost of attendance to students.

Competition has squeezed poorer students not just out of admission at elite private universities, but public flagships as well, as demonstrated by a report from New America Education.

Students competing for scarce slots in magnet schools or college feeders experience increased stress and anxiety. Even the winners are losing.

I’m thinking about an even larger class of those who are harmed. How about black and brown children who are subjected to emotionally abusive practices at so-called “no excuses” charter schools so they may fare better in an admissions competition that will always be stacked against them?

All the ills that Mr Warner lays off on competition are actually evidence of the absence of competition.  Competition is the discovery of improvements in the way of doing things.  That's most commonly understood as market competition with the introduction of new products and technologies and finding more creative ways of using resources.  There is also competition among jurisdictions to provide bundles of amenities that voters will support with their taxes, and governance structures more generally understood also emerge in a form of competition.

HOW MUCH EXCESS DEMAND IS THERE FOR ADMISSION TO NAME COLLEGES?

A lot, apparently. "Felicity Huffman released on bail after allegedly bribing to get kid into college as part of sweeping admissions scandal."  She's apparently famous in some entertainment circles, and married to someone famous in some fashion circles.

The complaint also names Lori Loughlin, another celebrity who had not previously come to my attention.  Her younger kid is a real piece of work.

Pi Day update: here's the NBC clip.

Watch at 43 seconds, when she notes "I want the experience of, like, game days, partying ... I don't really care about school."  More details here.

MARKING OFF.

The Karlson Brothers Circus train has a little trouble getting out of winter quarters.  We're well on our way to Delavan.

See you down the road.

ROAD SOCIALISM?

Streetsblog's Angie Schmitt recommends a recent working paper by Iowa Law's Gregory Shill, "Should Law Subsidize Driving?"  The language in the abstract strikes me as excessively hyperbolic, e.g. "A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology, the private automobile. Decades of public and private investment in this shift have created a car-centric landscape with Dickensian consequences."  And yet, the six major take-aways of the research ought come as no surprise to regular readers.

WHEN ROBERT REICH CHANNELS MILTON FRIEDMAN?

Well, almost.  "Enlarge and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit."  It's mostly standard stuff, involving the upper bound on earned income at which the credit goes away, but then there's the intriguing proposal that it be paid out monthly, rather than as the lump sum that goes with the income tax refund, the way things currently work.

The earned income credit might not be a negative income tax as Robert Lampman or Milton Friedman would have it, and there might be some troubling details in implementation, and yet, its endorsement by economists of varying strains might, just might, be evidence of its usefulness compared with other policy proposals.

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT.

The sensational tease is "Senators grill Big Pharma executives about Soaring Drug Prices."

Understandable grandstanding, by the politicians and the newsies alike.

Senator Stabenow (D - Mich.): "I think you charge higher prices here because you can, and American taxpayers are subsidizing all of you."  Well, duh.  It's unlikely that anybody holding the title of Senator, or of Representative, is going to see that voter welfare might be improved by the government, oh, reducing its involvement.

SQUABBLING OVER NOTHING.

Victor Hanson is an historian, and he offers perspective.  Fifty years ago, national politics might have been even more fraught than it is today, and yet the Republic carried on.

America is such a huge and diverse country, and so abundantly endowed with natural and human resources, that it is capable of achieving unprecedented scientific, economic and technological breakthroughs even as its social fabric is tearing apart.

Or, put another way, while the media highlights crime, protests, grievances and civil disorder, a majority of Americans still go to work unbothered each day.

And in a rare society with a free market, constitutional government and individual freedom, people continue to do amazing things even amid the utter chaos around them.

Back in the day, the institutional chaos might have been genuine.

Today much of it is trumped up.  Decide for yourself, dear reader, whether or not that is a pun.

PANTSUIT ON FIRE.

Multiply-failed presidential hopeful "Crooked" Hillary Clinton went to the voting rights rally in Selma, Alabama.  Rather than fake her southern roots "feelin' no ways tahrd," she went full screech-owl whingeing about having had Wisconsin's electoral votes stolen.

"I was the first person who ran for president without the protection of the Voting Rights Act. I’ll tell you, it makes a really big difference. And it doesn’t just make a difference in Alabama and Georgia. It made a difference in Wisconsin, where the best studies that have been done said somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 people were turned away from the polls because of the color of their skin, because of their age, because of whatever excuse could be made up to stop a fellow American citizen from voting."

(You'll have to find the video-tape of her rant yourself, we don't present tenure music or anything else that assaults the ears.)

Sadly, no.

In one of our earlier items, we cited the perspective of Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He noted that Trump earned almost the same number of votes in Wisconsin as did Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee.

"Clinton, in contrast, earned 238,000 fewer voters than did Obama," he told us at the time. "It would be a mistake to attribute essentially all of that decline to the voter ID requirement."

"Earned 238,000 fewer voters" strikes me as a backhanded way of saying "likely antagonized voters," but I digress.

Four Pinocchios and a Pants on Fire for one claim.  Oh, and the Voting Rights Act is more accurately understood as a piece of Reconstruction legislation, five score years or so after Appomattox.  Wisconsin, as a Union state, is not subject to that law.  Not bad for a day's work, Grandma.

FASCHING IST.

A change of pace this year, the introduction of the 2019 Nubbel.

Looks like a few Jägerbombs might have been served.

Sober times to come.

LINES ELECTRICALLY OPERATED. YOU CAN SLEEP.

Should I gripe about the headline, "Full steam ahead for Austria's night trains," as Austria's main lines are almost all electrically operated?

Or should I quote from the article, and then gripe?

From early evening onwards, the departures board at Vienna's Hauptbahnhof station becomes a roll call of destinations to whet the appetite of any globetrotter: Venice, Rome, Zurich, Berlin, Warsaw...

It's an unusual sight in a continent where budget airlines and faster trains have become the norm and led to the closure of many slower overnight routes.

But Austria's state railway company ÖBB is looking to expand its network.

It already runs 26 such routes, either on its own or in partnerships with other operators.

In late 2016, ÖBB bought the night train operation of its German counterpart Deutsche Bahn, which was looking to offload a department it judged insufficiently lucrative.

Around 60 percent of DB's overnight routes were preserved, including a revamped Vienna-Berlin service which started a few months ago.

Pointing to the "moderate growth" in passenger numbers -- more than 1.4 million used the services in 2018 -- ÖBB has ordered 13 new trains equipped with state-of-the-art sleeper carriages.

Contrast that with Amtrak, where the people in charge have never had a coherent vision of their overnight services, nor are they serving that trade well today.  The article notes some challenges in operating train services across national borders -- some of those destinations are outside the Schengen zone, but there is no longer an Iron Curtain, and there's a common currency these days -- as well as the expense of a fleet of special cars, and doing laundry.  Somewhere George Pullman and Fred Harvey are cringing.

The value of the overnight trains, though, is the same as the value of the day trains: they make intermediate stops.

Among those preparing to board at Vienna station to spend a night on the rails on a recent evening, some told AFP they had chosen a night train with the environment in mind.

"It's a small gesture, and it won't stop me taking the plane for my holiday in Madagascar this autumn, but it's better than nothing," said Austrian traveller Yvonne Kemper.

David, a 42-year-old from Germany, said he was using the Hamburg service because he needed to get to Göttingen in Germany for a business trip -- a medium-sized town which, typically, is served by night trains but has no airport.

ÖBB spokesman Bernhard Rieder explained that Austria's attachment to night trains is down to "a tradition stemming from Austria's mountainous terrain, which limited the development of high-speed lines".

Göttingen might well be better served by the continental rail network than, say, Garden City, Kansas, or Klamath Falls, Oregon, both still on the Amtrak national network; let alone Iron Mountain, Michigan, or Lake Placid, New York, which last had sleeping car service half a century ago.

BATTLE LINES BEING DRAWN.

Sarah Hoyt summarizes the position of the Militant Normals.

[Democrats] don’t realize how much they’re scaring most of this country. They don’t understand how much we fear and loathe the faces they’ve revealed for decades, and particularly since Hillary lost: the praise of socialism, their reluctance to condemn even Venezuela, their crazy desire for not having borders and being open to invasion, their general hatred of America and hatred of all Americans.

Even if the media soft-pedaled it, most of us understood perfectly that Mr. Obama loathed America to the point of hating our flag.

And most of us saw in his presidency the perfect example of what happens when you elect a president who hates the country he leads.

We knew that to elect Hillary was to put in power the rest of the program of our destruction and we didn’t want that.

I inserted "Democrats" as the subject of that passage. I could have used "The Credentialed Elite." That appears to be who she's after in a subsequent excerpt.

For decades, regardless of the party nominally in power, our polity had been in the hands of those who at best thought America was uncouth and needed reform, and at worst hated us and wanted to bring us low among the nations of the world. Open borders, ever-multiplying regulations that stopped our economy cold and sent jobs overseas, destructive welfare policies that actively made it punitive to stay together as a family. It goes on.

All it would take is a few members of that Credentialed Elite to step up and refute that "uncouth and needed reform," but their continued silence in the face of the socialist takeover of the Democrats is persuasive.

Or (one could hope) perhaps the Credentialed Elite is as the Great and Powerful ... wizard of Oz.

NOT IN OUR BACK YARD.

George Will would have you believe that getting people onto rapid transit is something elitists do, but Streetsblog begs to differ. "‘Elitist’ Duke Kills Rail Project That Durham Spent 10 Years Planning." Why?

On the precipice of an important federal deadline, Duke announced on Wednesday that it would not sign an agreement granting the 17.7-mile Durham-Orange light rail project access to land owned by the university. The decision blocks planners from applying for $1.2 billion in federal construction funding that they almost certainly would have gotten.

In a letter [PDF], University top brass blamed the decision on concerns about impacts of the light rail line to its hospital from electromagnetic and electronic interference and construction vibration.

If it wasn't the vibration, it was likely to be something else.  "GoTriangle, the agency advancing the project, says the concerns are just the latest in a six-year laundry list from Duke that project leaders have addressed."

The university is supposedly a nest of Concern for the Marginalized, but that's not how they come across.  "Durham City Councilman Charlie Reece said university officials are out of touch with the needs of the community, especially lower-income residents."

That's likely true of university trustees.  "The decision seemed to be made primarily be three university executives: Duke President Vincent Price, Executive Vice President Tallman Trask III, and Health Affairs Chancellor Eugene Washington were the only signatories on the letter to GoTriangle."  Isn't that redolent of the Social Register?

The faculty, not so much.

The Faculty Union demanded that University leadership continue the project. Earlier this week, more than two dozen faculty and staff signed a letter urging the University to grant the project access.

Duke climate scientist Drew Shindell told Streetsblog on Wednesday that the decision flies in the face of the University’s stated concerns about climate change and about the health of the community.

This is a university where the faculty once rushed to judge their lacrosse team as a way of signalling their Concern for the Marginalized.  Fool me once, shame on you ...

It's also interesting to see a tool of the rent-seekers being deployed against rent-seekers.

Another City Councilman, Mark-Anthony Middleton, echoed the “elitist” rhetoric in a statement to the News Observer, and urged the city to use eminent domain to acquire the needed land.

“How can the very economic trajectory of our region be determined by one wealthy, private landowner?” he asked.

Sometimes a politically connected landowner exerts clout to exercise eminent domain.  Now for a real puzzler: does one private landowner have better knowledge about how best to use the land than a state actor, which is the logical basis for eminent domain?

BABY, IT'S STILL COLD OUTSIDE.

Might be wise (as well as lucky) to have an extra pączek or two this morning, as the discipline of fasting during Lent will be more real with a protracted winter in progress.

The German version is called Berliner, the Austrian version Krapfen.  Enjoy, then reflect. “You don’t have to be Polish to like pączki.”

IF ANYTHING CAN GO WRONG, IT WILL.

It isn't enough that this year's polar vortex has caused Amtrak to cancel all train services out of Chicago, and induced news reporters to set their tracks on fire.  A recent upgrade to the signalling at Union Station also went wrong.

The trouble stemmed from communications issues with Amtrak's automated system, spokesman Marc Magliari said. Crews had to shift to manual control of the signals and track switches, which "leads to delays," he said.

"In my time here, which is now about 18 years, I have not seen a signal control system outage of this duration," Magliari said at a media briefing in the afternoon. "We want to make sure that we apologize to our customers, to Metra's customers and others for the inconvenience."

"Operating safely is our priority. There's no choice between operating safely and operating quickly," Magliari said.

The problem cropped up at 8:35 a.m., turning later commutes into marathons. Trains between Union Station and Western Station were briefly halted around 9:45 a.m. Frustrated commuters reported sitting in rail cars for nearly three hours.

What was the problem that cropped up?

U.S. Sen Dick Durban [c.q.] (D-Ill.) says the problem that disrupted signal systems at Chicago Union Station was caused when “a worker fell on a circuit board, which turned off the computers and led to the interruption of service that went on all day long.” Durbin learned this, the Daily Herald reports, when he spoke with Amtrak CEO Richard Anderson about the incident.

Anderson issued a statement Friday saying human error had caused the problems that disrupted traffic in and out of Union Station for about 12 hours, apologizing for the problem and promising to appoint “a veteran Amtrak executive” to improve performance in Chicago.

Given Mr Anderson's past record of gutting service and calling it improvement, we have reason to be skeptical.

Durbin said the fall wasn’t the only problem that led to the service disruption.

“The most important error they made was to decide to do a server upgrade to their computers during peak hours of service. This should be done in the middle of the night when only a handful of trains are running.”

Durbin wasn’t the only member of the Illinois congressional delegation concerned about Thursday’s incident. Congressman Dan Lipinski, a Democrat whose district includes a number of Metra-served communities southwest of Chicago, issued a statement saying Amtrak’s apology “is only a start. There are many questions Amtrak needs to answer and then fixes need to be made as soon as possible.” Lipinski, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Rail, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials, said he will meet with Anderson next week.

You'd think Illinois Democrats would understand that you don't call a technician in overnight, not at Chicago railroad union scale rates.  Gotta problem widdat?

Not only that, Amtrak give the impression of being more interested in anything but running trains.  Look at this photograph of the main waiting room during the evening rush hour.

Chicago Sun-Times photograph by Nader Issa retrieved from the Daily Herald.

Yes, the north end of the waiting room is cordoned off.  For a squash tournament.  "A four-walled glass court surrounded by bleachers has been constructed at the north end of the Great Hall to accommodate the Professional Squash Association’s world championships tournament, being held this week through March 2."  Perhaps the weather-related cancellations of the regional trains, which sometimes marshal passengers in the main waiting room account overcrowding in the airport-style boarding lounge that replaced a proper train concourse fifty years ago, make the marquee events easier to get to.  First class passengers?  Possibly expendable as well.

Amtrak is happy to earn revenue by renting out parts of the facility to help pay the $22-million cost of renovating the famous Great Hall and its 219-foot-long skylight, Magliari said.

“We believe there’s a market for the Burlington Room, the Legacy Club and parts of the Great Hall,” Magliari said.

That's a revenue-enhancement too far for Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin.

To beleaguered commuters, the event must seem like Amtrak, the station’s owner, is fiddling with Roman-inspired architecture while they do a slow burn.

Every weekday, in the dismal underground east of the Great Hall, commuters run a gantlet of low ceilings and narrow corridors that lead to packed platforms. The crush is so bad that some riders complain that they never know if they’ll be able to make it to their train on time.

Is this any way to run a railroad station — Roman imperial grandeur for the few, a rat maze for the many?

Metra is a tenant at Union Station, and Amtrak behaving like a vaudeville landlord is nothing new. Will some corporate flack brag on the Enhanced Boarding Experience?

Chicago Sun-Times photograph by Nader Issa retrieved from Daily Herald.

Amtrak hope to be able to improve the concourse area once the waiting room is finished, and once money becomes available.

Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said [engineering consulting company] Arup created conceptual designs for future work on platforms, concourses, and tracks. As funding becomes available, he added, having those designs ready will create “a better way forward.”

Perhaps, but it would be better if the public could see the designs in order to assess them: Are the plans grandiose or practical? Would they improve the traveler’s experience? And how would they be funded?

In the short term, Amtrak can upgrade passengers’ experience by carrying out a key aspect of its vision for Union Station: It has moved a variety of functions, including its Metropolitan Lounge, as well as Amtrak ticketing and waiting areas, from the concourse building into the headhouse. Those moves, the railroad has said, will allow it to carve out room in the concourse so corridors can be widened, sightlines opened, and street-level entrances made more spacious.

Drive away enough passengers with weather-related cancellations and box lunches and the exercise is moot. The owners of Chicago Union Station allowed the concourse building to be destroyed as they expected to be serving only commuters once the long-distance trains disappeared.

Amtrak’s view, in essence, is that it had to fix the Great Hall before it could fix the concourse building.

With the restoration of the Great Hall essentially complete, it’s time for the railroad to finally deliver on that promise.

Which will be finished first, another improvement of passenger flow in the concourse, or a solid-state interlocking at Western Avenue?

GIVE US THAT OLD TIME RELIGION.

To Jeffrey C. Isaac, whether you get hauled off in a tumbril or a Stolypin car probably doesn't matter.

I think it is a huge error to exaggerate the differences separating "democratic socialists" like Sanders and "progressive liberals" like Elizabeth Warren. And while I think vigorous debate about principles and policies is essential, I think it is also a huge error for these debates to become acrimonious or to become centered on abstract labels rather than concrete principles and policies. For it will be necessary, at some point in the summer of 2020, for all of the contestants to come together behind the winner of the primary, in order to defeat Trump and his Republican enablers. This will not be the end of debate, for the 2020 election will not be the last election—hopefully!—and democracy is an ongoing and unfinished project. But it will be the time to put some of the most heated debates on temporary hold, and to work together to support a Democratic victory.

As a left liberal who retains some sense of connection to his neo-Marxist roots—and who rejoined Democratic Socialists of America, after a 20-year hiatus, on the day after Trump's election—I personally lean in the general direction of Sanders and Warren, whose platforms are the most "left" of the many Democratic contenders.

Bully for you, Jeffy.  The good news is, the voters might not be so receptive.  "I am painfully cognizant of the fact that while there is much discontent, and while the left has made headway in some important quarters, American society in 2019 is not fertile ground for democratic socialism."

APPROPRIATELY ACCULTURATED.

A German radio station broadcasts a report from Milwaukee.  "Wenn Menschen in ein anderes Land kommen, dann bringen sie auch ihre Kultur mit und vor allem auch ihre Esskultur."  It's about importing customs, and food, from the Old Country.  In particular, it's a report recognizing the anniversary of the founding of Fred Usinger's sausage emporium with free bratwurst and all the trimmings and trappings.

The reporter seemed particularly taken by the emporium itself, in all its late nineteenth-century glory.

A few of the other landmarks of Old World Third Street also figured in the report.

"Deutsche Gemütlichkeit" in Milwaukee, sicher!