Chris Correa, an employee of the St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball team, hacked into the computer system of the Houston Astros. Over a period of two years he stole useful information about Houston’s trade talks, draft evaluations and analytical research. He was tried and sentenced to 46 months in prison. Yesterday, MLB fined the Cardinals $2 million, money which will go to the Astros organization, and it took away two of the team’s high draft picks in the upcoming amateur player draft. No other other people in the Cardinals’ organization were prosecuted for misconduct, but MLB commissioner Rob Manfred…
Author: Lloyd Graff
I had never been in a trailer park before, at least that I can remember, but I have watched episodes of Netflix’s Trailer Park Boys, as well as every single episode of Breaking Bad with Walter White in his 1986 Fleetwood Bounder encapsulated meth lab on wheels. So I readily agreed when my friend Jim asked me to photograph some of his Florida parks. I also accepted because I know that Jim is an enigma to the typically absent mobile home park owner who is driven purely by vast profits derived from curtailing expenditures on park necessities. He proudly takes extreme…
I’ve started this piece several times over the last two weeks, and each time I got deflected and went on to something else like eating, watching TV or reading email. I’ve been stuck as a writer because I was writing to fill space, not because I had anything to say. So today I sat down at the library and decided to be authentic. No politics, no sports, not much business. Just stop thinking so much, and let my unconscious write the blog. And I still feel stuck. What do you do when your mind keeps drifting, and you just want…
Last weekend I took a Uber downtown. After a few minutes of chit chat, my driver told me he was an immigrant from Syria who came to the U.S. five years ago. I asked him how he felt about our incoming President, expecting to get a strongly negative earful, but I was surprised by his response. First, he said he agreed with Donald Trump that our borders need to be more secure. As an immigrant who came to the United States through a legal process it makes sense that he would prefer that others do so as well. He said…
Maybe the pen is mightier than the sword, or so it seems in the worlds of crime and, lately, politics. What with the Russians hacking the election and Hillary’s emails, cyber security has been on the front page for months. The theft of millions of Yahoo! personal accounts and the shenanigans of banks everywhere make headlines, but countless less notorious larcenies take place every minute and have since the start of e-commerce. There is little law enforcement can do for the everyday case. Unlike an old-school armed robbery or breaking and entering where a gun or a crowbar is the…
This is my first Swarfblog of 2017 and it’s not about the Cubs. I am grateful to be able to continue writing it and grateful you are willing to devote your valuable time to reading it. I take neither for granted. Every day I wake up I feel I am a blessed survivor. When I write a piece worthy of putting my name on it (I do throw away a lot of crap I write), I feel a real sense of satisfaction. ****** I think 2017 has a chance to be the best year economically since the 2008 meltdown. Some…
I’ve seen a lot of change in my lifetime. Cubs winning the World Series. The Berlin Wall falling. The Internet altering work and pleasure. And on my birthday this year, I read the announcement that the Jackson Park Golf Course and the old South Shore Country Club in Chicago are going to be turned into the Pebble Beach of the Midwest, and huge national golf tournaments will be played on it. Tiger Woods, at the urging of President Barack Obama, is going to design the course, which will be adjacent to the Obama Library. If Tiger does his job well…
As a headhunter who recruits in the fields of engineering and manufacturing, I can often judge in a matter of seconds whether a candidate could be a good fit for a particular position. When a resume fails to include a sentence identifying or describing the candidate’s current or former employer, he risks being eliminated for a position for which he could be eminently qualified. If the candidate has worked for a manufacturer of hula-hoops while I’m searching for a Quality Engineer with experience in the rocket launching industry it is not important for me to know about his previous employers.…
I’ve been talking to a lot of smart people and reading some well-researched material so I can pretend I know stuff that you don’t already know. One thing I really wanted to get my brain around is whether well-paying manufacturing jobs will be “coming back” to the United States. My conclusion – old jobs are not coming back, but millions of new jobs will be created. Some will pay well, others will not. People will be rewarded for being industrious, flexible, creative and well-prepared for being able to add value in the cracks where automation and artificial intelligence have not…
In the fall of 2015 Michelle and Matt Hertel gave birth to a baby girl and a 5-axis CNC milling machine in Montana. Their baby girl, Ruby, is flourishing and so is their other baby, the Pocket NC 5-axis mill, which sells for $4,000 naked, out of their small factory in Bozeman, Montana. Before they moved back to Big Sky Country where they grew up, Michelle and Matt lived in the Seattle area. Michelle was a mechanical engineer at Boeing, and Matt was a night shift machinist at Electroimpact Corporation, which makes enormous automation equipment for the aerospace industry. He…