OUR PLACE

The mapping of our lives.
At one time cartographers influenced the development of civilization, population, and life with their drawings of where things were.  Nothing has changed except the cartographers, with their sharp pencils, paper, and ink are long gone.  Now, it’s a digital mapping process that does this.  Google makes eight billion dollars a year by putting businesses onto its online map data screens.  Cell phone companies indicate ideal great Wi-Fi coverage where they don’t have almost any at all (note that the Geneva Lake area is indicated as fully five-star Five-G covered by all the cell phone companies when none have that!).

Politics is not the only place where giant lies are being told and believed.  The cell phone situation around the lake (all nine of the local towers are now turned off!) has only gotten worse, even while the GSR has been writing about it for five years now.  Because they have a bigger voice, these huge few companies that have gotten together, then they are believed, no matter that most of the public, even in the local area, sits holding phones where calls are regularly dropped allowed to be connected at all.

Incidentally, the author of this article, the newspaper’s publisher, has gift items and maps for people who drive up to his house because Google maps give these visitors the wrong address.  Google, when finally reached (it took two weeks of constant harassment) said they will fix their geographics problem next year.  Next year!

 

The unacceptability of the road work situation.
It will never be calculated just how much in revenue was lost to businesses around Geneva Lake because of super long and super-incompetent road work.  Highway 50 is still one lane in both directions to and from Lake Geneva. It’s one lane to and from Richmond, down across the line in Illinois.  Now it’s Highway 50 totally closed on Highway 50 to and from Delevan and Lake Geneva.  Is there some arcane plot to isolate Lake Geneva, and the other lake communities, from outside visits, participation, and business?  These construction projects are killing the lake communities.

How can this be stopped?

Years ago, a single American company called Bechtel was hired to build four-lane freeways across all of Saudi Arabia and then Columbia down in South America.  They built those freeways, including interchanges, lighting, and even landscaping, at an average of one mile per day.  That was from ‘scratch’ in hot sand and then through the hot jungle.  Bechtel is an American company.  America had such capability and still has, but what happened?  Profits happened.  Why build at that speed when even more money can be made with ‘change orders’ and ‘cost overruns’ as capability is denied or lied about.

The work on Highway 50, between Lake Geneva and Kenosha, is a travesty and it is a travesty that is being committed right in the face of everyone living along the way or driving through.  Nobody works.  The same is true of the bridgework being done between Lake Geneva and Richmond, Illinois.  There’s nobody working.   You can count the equipment and humans moving in single digits every day.

This is an old crime that should have a new name: “Grand Theft Highway.”  The companies that were contracted to do this work will slowly complete the projects as snowfalls.  How convenient.  They will pave over the cracked, patched, and idiotically mixed materials they lay down, with a thin covering of asphalt.  The asphalt will crack and decay through only a few winters and summers and then the same Grand Theft Highway thieves will be back.  The argument to rehire them to do it all over again will be solidly and fundamentally based on the same sad old refrain; ‘they’re the only thieves we have.’

PERSON OF THE WEEK

Eric Carl, Ivy's Oh So Sweet Shop

Eric Carl and his wife Diana own the “Ivy’s Oh So Sweet” ice cream shop on Main Street in Richmond. Eric Was a pleasure to meet and gives his wife all the credit for their wonderful little shop and its delicious treats.

 

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