Pretzel stands.
The arcade attached to the FYE.
Invader Zim merchandise at Hot Topic.
Going to the food court with your friends and you're all eating something different.
Hot Mrs. Fields cookies.
Seeing those weird little trees from the above on the second floor.
All gone.
I saw this and I had to look up what happened to 19 year-old Kenneka Jenkins.
Kenneka went to attend a party in a hotel room at a Crowne Plaza hotel near Chicago on the evening of Sept 8, 2017, and was found dead in the hotel’s walk-in freezer the next day.
The cause of death was determined to be hypothermia — there was no evidence of trauma or foul play. She had a blood alcohol level of 0.112%, as well as the epilepsy drug topiramate in her system and it appears she had become heavily intoxicated, somehow stumbled into the freezer, passed out and froze to death.
The credit card used to book the hotel room for the party Kenneka was attending was fraudulent and connected to identity theft, and the people who were hosting the party were members of a Chicago gang. And the walk-in freezer where Kenneka died did not lock and was equipped with a working safety latch that assured it could be opened from the inside so no one could be stuck inside it.
However, her family sued the hotel for $50 million arguing that the hotel was negligent in not locking the kitchen area to keep drunks from staggering into it, and the hotel settled for $10 million. After her family got that payday, they installed the custom gravestone in the picture last year, on what would have been Kenneka’s 27th birthday.
People on H-1B and other visas were told their final green card interview had to happen in their home country. Many booked flights, left jobs and families, and showed up ready.
Now those appointments are being canceled with zero notice. No explanation. No timeline. They’re stuck overseas, stressed, and no one will say what changed or how long this lasts.
This is blowing up for a reason. Families and careers on hold while the system stays silen
My dad grew up in one of the most rural parts of NC. Thanks to the Duke Talent Identification Program, which ran a talent search across the rural South to find and uplift smart American kids, he was thrown an intellectual life preserver. He then double majored in math and CS, and went on to get his finance PhD.
That program doesn’t exist anymore.
Now, when a top university wants stem talent, they import it en masse from Asia, and fasttrack those immigrants to high paying US jobs. How many brilliant rural kids are out there now (in the “flyover states” @agupta smeared) waiting for a life preserver that never comes? Neglecting American STEM talent was one of our most egregious errors.