Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Pretty Vacant

It sure doesn’t seem very long ago that the availability of new, tiny apartments was the talk of Boston. Designed for young professionals, with units as small as 450 square feet, they came without parking. Who needed a car when there was Uber? Years away from starting families and needing more room, 20-somethings spent most of their time working downtown and enjoying the city’s vibrant nightlife.

Then came Covid, remote work, and a quick migration away from the infection-spreading city. WeWork went wrong and commercial real estate has yet to recover.

If office building vacancies have turned Boston into a ghost town, why is the traffic just as bad as it was before the pandemic?

Washington Post Post

Trump has called the press the “enemy of the people” and threatened retribution, including jailing reporters, investigating NBC for treason, and suggesting CBS’s broadcast license be taken away. Terry Gross talks with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, and Marty Baron, former executive editor of The Washington Post, about the media landscape as we head into a second Trump administration. — Fresh Air with Terry Gross

Bose Buys McIntosh!

McIntosh MA5300 integrated amp, $6000

That’s McIntosh Labs in Binghamton New York, not Apple’s line of Macintosh computers. McIntosh dates back to 1950s-era hi-fi tube amps, and this is big audio news that’s coming from out of nowhere.

I frequently drive past the Bose headquarters, and the chairman of the Bose board lives near here. As a privately held company, he must have approved, if not initiated, this very surprising move to acquire McIntosh.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/19/bose-buys-mcintosh-storied-maker-of-high-end-luxury-audio-equipment.html

If I were to lose all sense of financial perspective and buy a McIntosh product that I don’t need, it would be the integrated amp in the picture. As it is, I own only one Bose product, the now-discontinued Wave Music System I bought in 2008, that I continue to use every day.

Stop & Stop

I was about to leave to visit a Stop & Shop, in search of a particular item that I can’t find at my usual supermarket. Then I saw this TV report.

It’s very unlikely the non-food item I’m looking for will be out of stock, assuming it’s something that’s normally carried at the store. If all else fails, there’s Amazon, of course. I might explain later what it is, and why I’m searching for it, depending on how the story turns out.

Texting About Textiles

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts prohibits clothing, shoes, towels and sheets, etc., from being thrown away.

https://www.mass.gov/guides/clothing-and-textile-recovery

How much of an effect does my small state’s initiative have on the global problem of textile waste? A safe guess is not very much. But as we did with same-sex marriage, we’re setting an example for other states to follow.