The Williston Area Recreation Center is so enviable that if you don't live in Williston, it could make you wish you did.
It's been open less than two weeks and already more than 3,000 people have purchased memberships, 30,000 people have been through the facility, and the doors never stop swinging or the phones ringing.
Ever since the Bakken oil boom turned the town into an expensive, grinding industrial and construction zone, it hasn't been so easy to live in Williston.
The rec center didn't magically make all the town's growing pains go away, but it did make life there a whole lot better for a whole lot of people.
The designers of the $76 million rec center thought of everybody and everything possible for a population of 35,000 on its way to 50,000 and getting younger and hipper all the time.
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Deep Pockets?
The New York Times is reporting:
The pensions of millions of Americans are being threatened because of trouble in a part of the retirement world long considered so safe that no one gave it a second thought.
The pensions belong to people in multiemployer plans — big pooled investment funds with many sponsoring companies and a union. Multiemployer pensions are not only backed by federal insurance, but they also were thought to be even more secure than single-company pensions because when one company in a multiemployer pool failed, the others were required to pick up its “orphaned” retirees.
Today, however, the aging of the work force, the decline of unions, deregulation and two big stock crashes have taken a grievous toll on multiemployer pensions, which cover 10 million Americans. Dozens of multiemployer plans have already failed, and some giant ones are teetering — including, notably, the Teamsters’ Central States pension plan, with more than 400,000 members.
In February, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal multiemployer insurer would run out of money in seven years, which would leave retirees in failed plans with nothing.
“Unless Congress acts — and acts very soon — many plans will fail, more than one million people will lose their pensions, and thousands of small businesses will be handed bills they can’t pay,” said Joshua Gotbaum, executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal insurer that pays benefits to people whose company pension plans fail.
“If Congress allows the P.B.G.C. to get the money and the authority it needs to do its job, then these plans can be preserved,” he added. “If not, the P.B.G.C. will run out of money, too, and multiemployer pensioners will get virtually nothing. This is not something that can wait a few years. If people kick the can down the road, they’ll find it went off a cliff.”
So far, efforts to keep multiemployer plans from toppling, and taking the federal insurance program down with them, are giving rise to something that was supposed to have been outlawed 40 years ago: cuts in benefits that workers have already earned.
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A Note For The Granddaughters
My favorite newspaper, and the only "thing" I subscribe to is The Wall Street Journal. Having said that, I refuse to read the weekly Mansion section, and I seldom read the Off Duty section in the weekend edition.
I hope the granddaughters always stay grounded. I hope they have a life. In a Q&A column, "The Fixer," a reader asked (and I kid you not):
I recharge my iPhone on my nightstand while I sleep. In a perfect world, my bedroom would be gizmo-free, but in the meantime, do you have any suggestions for concealing the cord?The question was ridiculous -- this guy apparently has never traveled to Ethiopia, the Sudan, or downtown Detroit.
Even more ridiculous was the fact that the "fixer," a Michael Hsu, actually spent almost the entire column answering the question (I have yet to read the answer; I can't wait to see what he writes).
I'm wrong. Even more ridiculous was the fact this question even made the column. Obviously the "fixer" doesn't get many inquiries, or as is more likely, the "fixer" is a Steven-Colbert-wannabe and makes up his own questions.
Okay. Here's the answer, in brief:
- a) get an expensive, cool-looking dock for the iPhone; or,
- b) drill a hole in the nightstand and hide the iPhone in the drawer