Last night I watched the devastating 3-part HBO series, “Murder in Boston”. The documentary shows how, during the worst of the “crack wars” in 1989, Boston’s cops and politicians were blinded by racial prejudice, making them utterly incompetent in their handling of the Chuck Stuart case.
The “Murder in Boston” videos can’t be embedded, but there is this 9-part podcast that goes into even more detail about the crime and its aftermath. Episode 8 examines the media’s role in the debacle, including some well-deserved criticism of Boston Globe columnist Mike “Southie” Barnicle.
After baseball became integrated, racial prejudice was a factor in why the Red Sox failed to win the World Series until twenty years ago, when the team had new owners.
The notorious Whitey Bulger conducted his criminal activities with impunity in Boston, while his brother Billy was president of the Massachusetts Senate. Whitey got the death he deserved, and Billy turned 90 five days ago.
The ultimate example of Boston’s failed leadership was the favoritism that was shown to the Catholic Church. A blind eye was turned to the child sex abuse done by some priests over many decades.
In April, 2021, I said, “I don’t see the $1400 windfall spiking inflation, and certainly not for very long.” I was wrong about the stimulus money, because of the persistent supply chain problems. Too much money chased too few goods, and inflation spiked.
I did better in saying inflation wouldn’t last for very long. Scott Pelley asks Jay Powell how that was done.
So, what about the unsustainable fiscal path the United States is on, according to Powell? This graph compares the national debt to gross domestic product over the past 55 years.
The problem of deficit spending getting ahead of debt started under Reagan. It was stamped back down during Clinton’s term. George W. Bush’s financial crisis of 2008 was where the debt-to-GDP ratio took off.
With interest rates at zero, there was a lot of borrowing during Obama’s administration (with some of that money going to the HITECH Act, that distorted the hospital software market, giving Epic Systems of Verona, Wisconsin a leadership position). The effect of the pandemic appears as a vertical line, with all debt and no product!
Republicans are going to insist that spending must be cut to deal with the unsustainable fiscal path. Democrats are going to insist that the ultra-rich pay more in taxes, and that corporations no longer be allowed to hold their profits in overseas tax havens.
Somewhere in the middle is a solution. I think it’s called compromising, which is something Democrats are willing to do. Republicans see that as a sign of weakness in their insistence on playing a winner-take-all, zero-sum game.
Something else Powell said is very concerning in the short term, regarding commercial real estate loans. “Certainly there will be some banks that have to be closed or merged out of existence, because of this. That’ll be smaller banks, I suspect, for the most part.”
It’s been thirty years since I connected to the Internet from home and bought my first desktop PC. Those two events go together. Until then I had been using a Tandy 1400 LT dual-floppy portable DOS PC with a monochrome LCD screen, bought used from a brother-in-law.
Tandy 1400 LT
The 1400 LT was excellent hardware that I enjoyed using very much. Extremely durable, its mechanical keyboard would impress any laptop user today. It even had an RCA composite video connector that displayed CGA graphics on a regular TV. Perfect for playing games, such as they were.
The software I used included Quicken, TaxCut, ProComm, and an office application called PFS: First Choice.
Accessories were an Intel 14.4 Kbps modem on the serial port and an Epson dot-matrix printer on the parallel port. The LaserDisc store, Sight & Sound, had a bulletin board that I dialed into with ProComm. I could check on new releases, titles in stock, and chat with the staff and other customers.
Circle Dialing phone service, that seems so ridiculous now, required picking a plan with a limited number of towns you could reach without making an expensive long distance call. I chose my plan based on the towns where my parents and my in-laws lived. Also included were Waltham, where the store was, and Bedford, where TIAC, The Internet Access Company, had a dialup access point.
CompuServe and AOL never interested me. I didn’t see the point in using commercial online networks. The 1400 LT would have been perfectly good for dialing into a UNIX Shell account at TIAC, and I considered doing that, but I was traveling on business up to half of the time, leaving my wife alone to care for our infant son. So I delayed getting online.
Reading an issue of PC Magazine in late 1993, I saw an item about the release of the Mosaic Web browser. I realized that although the Internet wasn’t yet mainstream, it was about to explode, and I should get ahead of the curve. The problem was, to run Mosaic I needed a much better system than my clunky little laptop, and I wouldn’t know how much I could spend until seeing that year’s bonus at work. I found that out on January 31, and I set a budget of $1500, equivalent to more than $3000 today.
Scouring Computer Shopper magazine, the best I could do for that bottom-dollar price was to order a no-name PC clone with an AMD 386 40 MHz processor, 4 megs of memory, a 160 megabyte hard drive, and a 14-inch SVGA CRT monitor. No sound card, no CD-ROM drive. DOS and Windows 3.1 were included, but not pre-installed.
Before the made-to-order system was delivered, I signed up for a UNIX Shell account at TIAC, and got online with the 1400 LT. I played with the text-based Web browser called Lynx, but mostly I explored Usenet newsgroups. In fact, a few months later, that was how I first learned of Prue’s married and maiden names.
Once the new system was installed and ready, I connected the modem and dialed into TIAC. I switched my account to a more expensive SLIP/PPP plan, and paid for Trumpet TCP/IP. Mosaic was free. ProComm included the necessary file transfer programs. After downloading and installing Trumpet and Mosaic, I was off and running, or at least crawling.
Paramount had a Star Trek Web page, and despite the… var-y… slow… speed… of… the… con-nec-tion, I was astounded. The mouse pointer was navigating a Web page. I had seen the future, and it was graphical Web browsing.
A series of modem upgrades ultimately maxed out at 33.6 Kbps, until moving to the house I’m in now, where Road Runner broadband service was available at a screaming 1.5 Mbps.
What happened to the 1400 LT? I sent it to my brother. His stepdaughter stole and pawned it.
What happened to my first desktop? It was too slow to run Windows 95, so I upgraded the BIOS to support an 83 MHz Intel replacement processor. Later, after getting a new system with a Pentium II, the old desktop was my first Internet router, to have more than one PC in the house access the Net. (Much better than the connection sharing feature in Windows 98.)
Intel Pentium II Bunnyman
I installed two $15 Ethernet cards and created a bootable diskette with a custom build of Linux. Later, after buying a dedicated hardware router (pre-WiFi), I put the 8-year-old PC in the back of my 13-year-old Honda Civic hatchback, intending to take it to work. Instead, the all-steel case with internal bracing helped to protect me by providing some support in a rear end collision as I sat at a red light. The car crumpled, the PC was wedged in too tightly to remove, and the case was barely bent.
