Op Eds and Milwaukee Life

Living in a World Without Walls   Published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel    September 16 2012   “You have zero privacy,” Scott McNealey, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, said in 1999. “Get over it!” He wasn’t kidding.  Privacy is gone.  But ordinary people do not yet “get”  the full implications. We still live as if [...]

Privacy? Never again. Our option? As Scott McNeeley of Sun Microsystems said years ago, “Get over it.” A good friend, a well known information security expert, was asked this morning whether or not one can still do something to have privacy. He said, “When people who are serious ask me what to do to prevent [...]

A few of us silverbacks were sitting around the coffee shop talking about the newest generation. Someone mentioned the sense of entitlement we hear about these days, how they were raised to think that one opinion was equal to another, that everyone should be making a hundred thousand dollars a few years out of college, [...]

The Milwaukee 7 and their supporters and allies are struggling to give birth to a new vision for Milwaukee and South-east Wisconsin. They are getting it almost right … but “almost” doesn’t win a cigar. They are trying too hard to turn what isn’t into what is and what is into what isn’t. The Milwaukee [...]

Get a move on, Milwaukee! By RICHARD THIEME Posted: April 29, 2006 Icame to Milwaukee in 1987 as the head pastor of a downtown church. In my sermon at the installation service, I named two issues that I believed were critical to Milwaukee’s future, economically and spiritually – race relations and the kinds of jobs [...]

Will Wisconsin decide to compete in 21st century? The Business Journal of Milwaukee – June 24, 2005 by Richard Thieme How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Just one, says the old joke, but the lightbulb has to really want to be changed. The same is true for Wisconsin in the [...]

We’re living longer and longer, but we still treat boomers as if they’re busted. It takes society a while to catch up with itself. One thing changes – and it might be a really big thing – but institutions with deeply ingrained habits don’t see that they’re out of step … until the gap widens [...]

“It’s different in Wisconsin” The first time I heard that was as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during a political science course. I had lived until then in Chicago and when I raised issues based on my experience with the Richard J. Daley machine, the instructor laughed at my naiveté and spoke of [...]

Americans tend to be sprinters.  Hair-trigger reflexes at the ready, we wait at the line for the gun, and when it comes, we shoot out of the blocks and burn it up. The wars we fought in the Gulf, in Panama, Somalia, Grenada, were sprints. We broke that tape and returned to our homes. Now [...]