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President Trump’s off-the-wall order to reopen Alcatraz ranks right up there on the nonsense list with taking over Greenland, banning paper straws, and slapping tariffs on our best trading partners, along with the rest of the world.
The Rock closed in 1963 because it was too expensive to run. It cost $10 a day to house a prisoner back then, compared to $3 in Atlanta.
Trump said he wants to rebuild and reopen the San Francisco Bay lock-up because it represents a “symbol of law and order.”
His advisors should tell Trump that is not necessary. The country already has a “New Alcatraz” federal maximum security jail in Marion (IN), and “The Alcatraz of the Rockies” (Florence, CO)
Some saw Trump’s Alcatraz fantasy as a means to rile arch-rival Nancy Pelosi, whose district includes the jail. She called the idea “not a serious one.”
But Trump’s real motivation may have come after a South Florida PBS station ran Clint Eastwood’s 1979 thriller “Escape From Alcatraz” while the president was ensconced in Mar-a-Lago.
The country should be thankful that WLRN didn’t decide to air ”Doctor Strangelove.” Had it chose to run that Stanley Kubrick masterpiece, we wouldn’t be around today to debate the feasibility of resurrecting Alcatraz.
One wonders if the president ever checked out another movie classic, John Huston’s “The Man Who Would Be King.” He’s sure acting like one these days.
Kudos to the NYC’s tech sector… The Big Apple has a much more diverse tech sector than other major technology hubs, according to a survey by the Center for an Urban Future.
A quarter (24.3 percent) of the tech workforce is composed of Black and Hispanic employees. While there is room for much improvement in NYC, that percentage well exceeds Boston/Cambridge (10.4 percent), San Francisco Bay Area (8.2 percent), and Seattle (5.0 percent)
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The tech sector has become an increasingly vital pathway for better-paying careers for a broad base of New Yorkers. The tech sector set the pace from 2014 to 2024 in creating 79,563 “well-paying jobs,” topping finance (36,750) and hospitals (21,753). During the same period, advertising lost 1,877 well-paying jobs, manufacturing shed 21,687 and retail cut 53,857 positions.
But NYC’s affordability crisis looms over the tech sector as it does for other parts of the economy.
“The city faces more competition than ever from cities that have developed a critical mass of tech companies and are significantly more affordable than New York, including Austin, Miami, Raleigh, Atlanta, and Nashville,” according to the report.
New York is increasingly the destination of choice for top engineers, data scientists, software developers, product managers, AI talent, and marketing professionals from across the country.
Many mid-level managers, though, are “weighing a move out of New York as they start families, struggling to reconcile the sky-high cost of a family-sized apartment and child care with the desire for a workable quality of life.”
New York has a big mayoral election coming up. Nurturing the continued growth of the tech sector has to be high on the next mayor's to-do list.
Maga Maniacs. A survey on president Trump’s tariff policy shows just how committed MagaLand is to its dear leader.
Less than four in ten (37 percent) of overall respondents support Trump’s tariffs, according to the survey by Navigator Research.
A whole different reality exists in MagaLand, where a whopping 88 percent back the president. Less than half (48 percent) of the GOP's sane wing back tariffs.
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Two in three of respondents overall believe tariffs are raising costs. More than half (55 percent) of non-MAGA Republicans agree that prices are going up, while only 40 percent of the MAGA crowd expect a jump in prices.
The poll has some good numbers. A majority of Americans oppose President Trump’s tariff plan (56 percent), an increase of 15 points since just prior to inauguration.
That number will certainly go up when consumers face product shortages and see empty retail shelves. They will know who is to blame.
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