Brian Gongol
European Council's new president is the prime minister of Poland
No doubt this carries some added significance considering Russia's behavior right now and the long-standing friction between Poland and Russia
Nebraska regulators are going to charge Lyft and Uber drivers with misdemeanors
The regulations on the books favor the incumbent taxi services. It's definitely time for the legal authorities to review whether that's really in the best interests of passengers.
Stock in Fiat Chrysler should hit a New York market by October
Fiat has bet the farm over and over on its pursuit of Chrysler; now, they have to find a way to make it worth the expense as some of the bills come due
Departing CNN reporter thinks nobody's paying enough attention in Washington
Lisa Desjardins: "Members of Congress could put the entire text of '50 Shades of Gray' into a bill, and no one...would ever notice"
Getting to know the shelf cloud
The nonchalant beligerence of Vladimir Putin
He's reportedly boasted that he could "take Kiev in two weeks" and is knocking around threats of the use of nuclear weapons. The United States is doing very little to overtly confront the situation, which might be a deliberate and thoughtful strategy -- or it might be a colossal error of dallying at a time when a full-throated defense of a nation we've been courting as a potential ally may be necessary.
Lawsuit threatened over letting the "Redskins" use the University of Minnesota football stadium
The Vikings are using TCF Bank Stadium this season, and one of those games will be against Washington. Some parties say they'll sue if the ethnic slur naming the team is actually used on the campus.
Membership in labor unions, by the numbers, in Iowa and Nebraska
You're far more likely to encounter a union member in the public sector than in the private
Think twice before taking the Ice Bucket Challenge -- or donating
How far a dollar goes in the cheap seats
Lower housing costs go a long way in the Midwest and elsewhere
Public figures, private pictures, and a big security mess
Were the private pictures of people like Jennifer Lawrence and Rihanna stolen from a cloud-backup service, or directly from their computers? However it happened, it's a big breach of their privacy and a warning to people to take thoughtful precautions in the interest of good technology hygiene.
Russia is re-posturing against NATO
Use two-step verification on your critical Internet accounts
Services like e-mail should require more than just your password to get in. It's not hard to do, and it could save you a world of distress.
Self-driving cars are on the streets of Washington, DC
Germany bans Uber
Radio show notes - In for Jan Mickelson on WHO Radio - September 3, 2014
Listen again to the first-hour interview with the author of "Driving Honda" or to the second-hour discussion about making sure the celebrity nude-photo leak doesn't happen to you.
Be on the lookout for scams hitchhiking on the celebrity nude-photo leak
Lots of layoffs at USA Today
Something like 10% of the workforce is gone
Google gets smart -- teaming up with a pharmaceutical maker
They're going to focus on drugs related to diseases that hit the elderly. Google has an inherent skillset at anything involving lots of computation, and drug-making is one of those subjects. They won't be the world's dominant search engine forever, so finding ways to apply their core skillset in other areas is a very wise decision.
How seriously will we take NATO obligations to protect the Baltic states?
Fair news on the productivity front
The second estimate says that US productivity went up by an annualized 2.3% in the second quarter. More would be better, but at least it's something.
"Seinfeld"-themed hockey jerseys to hit the ice for one night
Who cares that Oklahoma Joe's isn't in Oklahoma?
Changing the name of the renowned barbecue joint just because it isn't in Oklahoma anymore seems like a really stupid idea.
Rules for eating sushi
(Video)
"Mission Statement" by Weird Al Yankovic
(Video) If it sounds a little too close to reality, that's a sign your organization's leadership is just fiddling around
On the demand for $15-an-hour fast-food workers
Is the minimum wage too low? In short, it's certainly too low for a comfortable full-time wage -- but that's not the point. Minimum-wage work should be entry-level work for people without many skills. Ideally, it should be a very low barrier to entry for young workers to get their first jobs. Make the minimum wage too high, and we create a system in which there are few if any opportunities for young people to get thir first jobs and start developing a track record for basic job skills, like showing up to work and following instructions. That, by the way, is a terribly unconstructive thing to do; a high unemployment rate for young people (especially young men, in their teens and early 20s) is a terrible thing for a society to have. Nobody wants young men hanging around with nothing to do and no reward system for behaving well and making something better of themselves. If we want to make life better for people who are older or more experienced but still earn minimum or near-minimum wages, we need to ask: "Why are they earning so little?". If the answer is that they are unskilled or under-skilled (which it may be), then we need to find ways of training them for higher-wage work. If it's because they are just filling some of their free time with low-wage work as an alternative to sitting around and watching television, then raising the legal minimum wage might only take away opportunities that some people use to help themselves to a higher standard of living. If it's because the economy is weak, then raising the legal minimum wage may only serve to accelerate investment in automation and other alternatives to human workers, thus ultimately putting people out of work even faster. If it's because the workers are unmotivated or disinterested and aren't delivering high-quality work, then raising the wage isn't going to change the value they create -- it will only accelerate that process of their replacement. Raising the minimum wage dramatically only looks superficially like a solution to a lot of problems...we need to really address what's keeping people at low wages and not putter around the margins.
You may be better-off taking notes by hand
The rise of laptops and other computers in the classroom may cause people to lose something of their education in the translation. Students may also be finding themselves distracted by their devices during boring lectures. But at the same time, we have such marvelous tools available and at our easy disposal that any teacher, lecturer, or professor should be ashamed to give a lecture that bores their students. If you're in front of a room full of people, you should consider it a privilege to share your enthusiasm for a topic with the people in the room -- and be eager to put everything we know about teaching (and in the era of TED Talks, Edward Tufte, Pecha Kucha, the Khan Academy, and the Gates Foundation's work on education, we know a whole lot about good teaching) to use producing lectures that engage students. There's really no excuse for giving a bad lecture anymore.
A foreign policy so incompetent it actually enlists Iran as an ally?
What's called ISIS/ISIL/QSIL (but what should be called "Al-Qaeda Land", which is what it really is) is now such a meaningful threat to Iran that they're willing to coordinate with the United States on military force to try to push it back. That's Iran -- the country with whom we haven't had diplomatic relations in 34 years. The Al-Qaeda problem has gotten so large (at least in part because the Obama Administration has failed to come up with a solution) that it's actually driving long-divided national interests together under an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend foreign policy. That's not the same as detente.
NATO will organize a "rapid reaction" force
It's supposed to be capable of getting reinforcements to an ally country in 48 hours. While this is apparently an improvement, it doesn't sound fast enough. The Baltic states surely would like to know that the cavalry would come in a matter of hours, not two days.
One of the last real farms inside West Des Moines is about to turn into a housing development
No need for over-worry about urban sprawl, though...the whole metro area has basically expanded about four miles westward in the last 20 years. That's hardly enough to cause real, legitimate alarm.
China takes a step back on democracy in Hong Kong
"[O]nly candidates approved by a nominating committee" (composed of mostly loyalists to the mother state) will be allowed to run for the job of Hong Kong Chief Executive. That's not democracy -- it's selection from a restricted menu. And if that's how they're treating Hong Kong, which is supposed to be under a whole other system from mainland China ("one country, two systems"), then they certainly have no intentions of loosening political control over the rest of the nation. It should not escape our attention that China is making bad choices on the political front (by tightening, rather than liberalizing), and on the economic one as well. Just one example: China's been harassing Japanese auto manufacturers (specifically Toyota and Honda) both officially and unofficially, meanwhile buying into control of European automakers like Peugot. Not that Peugot is necessarily a bad automaker, but Toyota and Honda are much better -- and they actually would have something to teach their Chinese partners. The Chinese system as we know it cannot go on forever -- and when it falls apart, it's going to be a global mess.
The nation's hardest and easiest places to live
Based on health, income, and education factors, the Upper Midwest looks pretty fantastic overall in a New York Times analysis.
Hard Rock Casino in Sioux City brought in $7.2 million for its first month
That appears to be their net revenues from gambling, before expenses.
Latest poll puts pro-independence group a hair ahead in Scotland
September 18th is coming fast -- and then we'll know whether Great Britain is going to remain a union including the Scots. Funny how a sense of disillusionment with centralized government (Washington, London, Brussels...) is universal.
Reviving a cultural mascot
WGN Radio is reviving a cartoon bird named "Chicago" as its station mascot, and bringing it to life all over the place, including with a Twitter account (@wgnbirdchicago). Quite a contrast with companies that spend all kinds of money acquiring others and then eliminating their brands altogether (thus erasing the value of all of the goodwill for which they had paid in the first place).