Star Tribune
If Uber and Lyft let Minnesota down, maybe Metro Transit will pick us up
Faced with threats from Uber and Lyft to exit — Ubxit? — the city on May 1, the Minneapolis City Council plans to wait until summer before it requires rideshare companies to pay drivers a minimum wage.
This buys Minnesotans more time to figure out who will pick us up when Uber and Lyft let us down.
A whole crop of startups have approached city officials, mounting challenges to established ride shares and the dictionary. MOOV. Hich. Pikapp. Wridz.
But maybe Minneapolis’ hottest new rideshare is its oldest: Get ready to ride the Büs.
Metro Transit has everything. Wheels. An app. Drivers who earn a living wage.
Braced for Ubxit, I hopped on a bus this morning, headed for downtown Minneapolis.
When I lived in south Minneapolis, I took light rail or biked to work almost every day. When I lived downtown, I walked to work. But now there’s a river between downtown Minneapolis and me — and figuring out which of the eight bus stops within two blocks of my house would get me across the Mississippi seemed like a hassle.
Readers, I am here to report that the commute was not, in fact, a hassle. I plugged my address and my destination into the Metro Transit trip planner. It told me where to go, when the next bus would arrive and how long the whole trip should take. The bus was quiet and friendly and the driver was patient while I waved my phone at every surface except the ticket reader.
I’ve heard nothing good about the light rail since the pandemic, so I half expected the Blue Line to be actively on fire when I hopped aboard.
Readers, it was noisy but it was fine. Nobody was shooting up. Nobody was pooping on the seats. Online comment sections may have left me with unrealistic light-rail expectations. I settled back for the thrill of speeding past all the cars waiting at all the red lights on Hiawatha Avenue. Gridlock is for people who don’t ride the rails.
The midmorning trip downtown cost two bucks and involved one transfer to the Blue Line. It took about 40 minutes — 15 of which were spent waiting for the train on a sunny bench.
I could have driven downtown and parked in half the time, at five times the cost.
If I hailed an Uber, it would have run me somewhere between $15 and $27 at that time of day. But I don’t think I’ll be using Uber anytime soon. Companies that pay their CEOs $24 million don’t get to whine about minimum wages for drivers.
Is the bus perfect? Nah. The fact that Uber and Lyft were able to tie the entire state in knots exposes huge gaps in our transportation infrastructure. It would be nice if there were more routes, more buses, more trains, more taxis, more bike paths, more rideshares and more car-shares to get us where we’re going.
But come July 2, the bus will be there for us. Even if Uber and Lyft are nowhere to be found.
Star Tribune
Trump wanted generals like Hitler’s and said Nazi leader ‘did some good things,’ John Kelly claims
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff is warning that the Republican presidential nominee meets the definition of a fascist and that while in office, Trump suggested that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ”did some good things.”
The comments from John Kelly, the retired Marine general who worked for Trump in the White House from 2017 to 2019, came in interviews with both The New York Times and The Atlantic. They build on a a growing series of warnings from former top Trump officials as the election enters its final weeks.
Kelly has long been critical of Trump and previously accused him of calling veterans killed in combat ”suckers” and ”losers.” Still, his new warnings came just two weeks before Election Day, as Trump seeks a second term vowing to dramatically expand his use of the military at home and suggesting he would use force to go after Americans he considers ”enemies from within.”
”He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,”’ Kelly recalled to The Times. Kelly said he would usually quash the conversation by saying ”nothing (Hitler) did, you could argue, was good,” but that Trump would occasionally bring up the topic again.
In his interview with The Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing ”German generals,” Kelly would ask if he meant ”Bismarck’s generals,” referring to Otto von Bismarck, the former chancellor of the German Reich who oversaw the unification of Germany. ”Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump. To which the former president responded, ”Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
Trump’s campaign denied these stories on Tuesday, with Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, arguing Kelly has ”beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated.”
Polls show the race is tight in a string of swing states, and both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are crisscrossing the country making their final pitches to the sliver of undecided voters.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate who served 24 years in various units and jobs in the Army National Guard, quickly used the interviews to assail Trump on Tuesday night.
Star Tribune
Officials await word on whose remains were found in camper that burned in Aitkin County
Officials are awaiting word on whose remains were found in a camper that burned overnight this week in northern Minnesota.
The Aitkin County Sheriff’s Office said it was alerted about 8:15 a.m. Monday by a caller about the camper having caught fire roughly 10 miles north of McGregor at a residence in Shamrock Township.
Law enforcement showed up and found the remains inside, the sheriff’s office said. They have since been sent to the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office for identification.
The State Fire Marshal is heading the investigation into what led to the fire.
You hear a lot of women saying they’d rather be alone in the woods with a bear, not a man, because they considered the man to be more dangerous.
I always chose the man, because my interactions with men have generally been positive, and a man wandering through the woods seemed likely to be a hunter or a naturalist or just someone out enjoying nature. Someone reasonable. Someone more likely to harbor a save-the-maiden fantasy than a desire to harm. Bears, on the other hand, if they have it in their head to attack, there is little you could do but try to survive.
A recent visit to Ely’s North American Bear Center changed my mind. Not that I think less of men, but that I think more of bears. Black bears, at least.
The Bear Center provides refuge to three black bears, at least one of whom would have been otherwise euthanized. There’s Lucky, abandoned or orphaned as a cub, who was begging for food near Madison, Wis., and who came within an hour of being put down before a rescuer whisked him off to Ely. There’s Tasha, fat, sleek, and gorgeous, discovered in 2015 in Kentucky trying to nurse on her dead mother, who was believed to have been hit by a vehicle. And Holly, separated from her mother during an Arkansas fire, and who had slipped off to hibernate before our visit.
The bears were fascinating, delicately lipping up cranberries and shelling out nuts with their back teeth during our visit. We learned that their sense of smell is seven times stronger than that of a bloodhound, and that they can smell through an organ on the roof of their mouths.
In fact, sometimes they’ll stand erect and open their mouths – which looks threatening, but it’s really just to get a better sense of their surroundings, said Spencer Peter, assistant director and biologist at the center.
Hollywood trains them to stand like that for movies, he said. “But they’ll dub in the sound.”
