As threatened promised, I'm starting to beg for money to help support The Daily Parker and Weather Now. You can go to Patreon and sign up to help us, with special member benefits as you contribute more.
The Daily Parker costs about $5 a day to run (though I hope to reduce that significantly this fall), and Weather Now costs another $10. They're not entirely labors of love, as I have used Weather Now as a demo project to land new work. But after more than five years with the same full-time employer, those days might be behind me—even though the weather never stops.
So, hey, buy me a coffee. I'll put your name in lights!
I got some bad news this morning: my dentist, John C McArthur, announced his retirement as of March 17th.
I started going to Dr McArthur in 1974. In fact, I was one of his first patients after he took over the practice from his father—who was, in turn, the dentist my mother, uncle, and grandparents started going to in 1958. So my family has a long, long history going to his Hubbard Woods office. I mean, 13 presidents long. I'm going to miss going up there.
Moreover, I have never had a cavity. So I would say he had some skills. (Of course, as he would point out, I had good genes, good habits, and fluoridated water, which may have helped.) Going to the dentist has never caused me any anxiety, so I've never really understood why other people dread it.
I mean, I've never gone to a different dentist. I've never even thought about it. What do I ask them? "How many of your patients have you kept free of cavities for 50 years?" I hope his office has a good referral.
Obviously, I knew this day would come. I figured he'd retire during the pandemic, but he kept going, for which I'm grateful. I wish him a long and happy retirement.
Take today's temperatures, for example:
Fortunately, Cassie got a half-hour walk at 7am and a 25-minute walk at noon, just before the cold front came through. And the next couple of days will be...more Spring:
This Afternoon
Snow. Steady temperature around 1. Breezy, with a northwest wind around 45 km/h, with gusts as high as 70 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 90%. Total daytime snow accumulation of less than one centimeter possible.
Tonight
Snow showers likely before midnight, then isolated flurries between midnight and 4am. Cloudy, then gradually becoming partly cloudy, with a low around -3. Windy, with a northwest wind 45 to 50 km/h decreasing to 35 to 40 km/h after midnight. Winds could gust as high as 75 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New snow accumulation of less than a half centimeter possible.
Thursday
Sunny, with a high near 4. Breezy, with a west wind 30 to 35 km/h decreasing to 20 to 25 km/h in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 55 km/h.
Thursday Night
A slight chance of rain before 1am, then a slight chance of snow between 1am and 3am, then a slight chance of rain and snow after 3am. Increasing clouds, with a low around 1. West wind 10 to 15 km/h, with gusts as high as 25 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 20%.
Friday
Snow likely. Cloudy, with a high near 2. West southwest wind 10 to 15 km/h becoming northeast in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
But...it'll be 14° on Monday, 17°C on Tuesday, and 16°C on Wednesday, which will feel a lot more like spring. And Cassie will get more walks.
This quote from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov sums up the last six weeks: "The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision."
Or, as Dana Milbank wrote this morning, the OAFPOTUS has taken less than a week to set the country back 100 years:
Armed with a portfolio of fabricated statistics, Trump judged that “the first month of our presidency is the most successful in the history of our nation — and what makes it even more impressive is that you know who No. 2 is? George Washington.
Usually, such talk from Trump is just bravado. But let us give credit where it is due: Trump has made history. In fact, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that, over the course of the last five days, he has set the United States back 100 years.
Trump on Monday implemented the largest tariff increase since 1930, abruptly reversing an era of liberalized trade that has prevailed since the end of the Second World War. He launched this trade war just three days after dealing an equally severe blow to the postwar security order that has maintained prosperity and freedom for 80 years. Trump’s ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, followed by the cessation of U.S. military aid to the outgunned ally, has left allies reeling and Moscow exulting.
And our erstwhile friends? “The United States launched a trade war against Canada, its closest partner and ally, their closest friend,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday. “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin: a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed more than 1,300 points. Inflation forecasts are increasing (the free-trading Peterson Institute says Trump’s tariffs will cost the typical American household $1,200 per year). Retailers such as Target and Best Buy are warning about higher prices. The Atlanta Fed’s model of real GDP growth, which a month ago saw 2.3 percent growth in the first quarter, now sees a contraction in the first quarter of 2.8 percent.
Russia almost doesn't matter anymore, and wouldn't at all if it didn't have 3,000 nuclear weapons. Yet here we are, taking our victory lap after defeating Stalinism, by giving Putin everything he ever wanted.
It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election!
Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency:
The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.
This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.
Another likely beneficiary is the guy who told Trump to do this: David Sacks. You may know Sacks as the ardent Trump backer and frequent repeater of Kremlin talking points whom Trump named as his “Crypto Czar”, with the “Czar” part really making sense given Sacks’ beliefs. Sacks says that he sold all of his cryptocurrency before Trump took office, but we can’t verify that, because crypto is anonymous. We do know that Sacks’ venture capital firm — the stake in which Sacks has not said that he sold — invests in a crypto fund whose top five holdings are exactly the five cryptocurrencies that Trump wants the government to buy. Sacks is a really lucky dude! It’s like if I was named Blog Czar and then got the government to buy a billion I Might Be Wrong subscriptions, and to be clear: President Trump, that offer is very much on the table.
Molly White also has a few things to say on the subject, with less satire and more technical expertise.
Given the raging corruption coming from the top of the party, is it any surprise that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has cozy relationships with the military contractors her committee regulates?
Meanwhile...
Finally, I was pleased to see that Amazon and MGM Studios have started development of a TV series based on the first novel in Iain M Banks' Culture series, Consider Phlebas. It's a fun novel, and a good introduction to the series—which makes sense as it's the first one he wrote. I hope it gets to production.
Weather Now v5.0.9194 just hit the hardware, with a new feature that allows you to browse the Gazetteer by finding all the places near a point. (Registration required.) I also added a couple of admin features that I will propagate to every other app I have in production, and made a few minor bug fixes.
Only one minor hiccup: I forgot to add a spatial index to the Gazetteer, which caused searches around a point to take minutes instead of seconds in production. I added the index to the database definition, and after about an hour it had indexed all 15 million locations in the database. So the Nearby Places feature should work perfectly now.
This is one of those things you don't notice in a dev-test environment. The dev-test database only has about 200,000 records in it, so even without the index it only took a moment to find all the places around a point. Nothing like testing in production to find a huge performance miss!
James Fallows highlights how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince of X have put their own enrichment ahead of public safety in ways that will be hard to miss:
In aviation, almost everything about safety is tied to the weather. Likely turbulence, which has caused some recent fatalities. Locations and likelihood of “airframe icing,” which was a cause of the Colgan crash in Buffalo back in 2009. Gusty crosswinds and wind-shear, very low cloud layers, and so many more factors that affect when and where planes can safely fly.
The readings and data for these assessments ultimately come from the National Weather Service, which is publicly funded and is part of the Commerce Department and NOAA. Its offerings are stupendous.
Last week, hundreds of forecasters at NWS and NOAA were laid off by the Doge team. Reportedly this could be as much as 10% of the work force. Just today the American Meteorological Society put out a public statement saying that these and related cutbacks are “likely to cause irreparable harm and have far-reaching consequences for public safety, economic well-being, and the United States' global leadership.”
Why will NOAA, NWS, and the public have to go through all this?
-One reason is personal grievance. By several reports, Donald Trump bears a lasting grudge against the National Weather Service because of “Sharpiegate.” That is when Trump sketched out the future path of Hurricane Dorian with one of his Sharpies, only to be ridiculed when NWS forecasters said, “Well, actually…” These things matter with Trump.
-Another is political zealotry. The Project 2025 manifesto said that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” because it had become “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
-Another is commercial interest, specifically the goal of privatizing weather information. There is a long history of private companies, notably AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, wanting to limit NWS’s or NOAA’s ability to present its data directly to the public. The whole business model for these companies is taking data produced at public expense, and then selling it with their shows or apps or proprietary forecasts. You can read more here.
(Emphasis mine.)
The only thing we have to hope for right now is that enough pissed-off voters in Republican districts will give their representatives enough grief to get them to stop the bloodshed. Unfortunately, as has happened throughout history, sometimes people need to find out before they learn not to fuck around.
Jennifer Rubin gets it right:
Given the scope of the MAGA assault on the foundations of our democracy, many Democrats, responsible media outlets, and concerned Americans have (understandably) been focused on its attempt to obliterate the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment. But we should never lose track of the abject immorality that is part and parcel of an ideology based on vengeful victimhood, conspiracy-mongering, and repudiation of science.
From the outbreak of measles to stalling grants to the pursuit of cures for “diseases ranging from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer's and allergies” to renewing the starvation crisis in Sudan to devasting cuts at the Veterans Administration to dismissal of patriotic, highly-trained trans members of the armed services…we cannot miss this administration’s abject cruelty; its almost-boisterous disregard for human life and dignity.
Republicans pushing these cuts are depriving their constituents of healthcare, consigning rural hospitals to closure, and potentially wrecking the economic lifeline for their communities.
Understand, they are doing this so that Trump, Musk, and the oligarch class can get more tax breaks.
This GOP’s agenda is a moral abomination that no American, regardless of party, should support. If there is anything worth taking to the streets for peaceful protest, it is this sort of massive, regressive redistribution from the already-struggling to the no-amount-is-ever-enough billionaire class.
Of course they are. The entire MAGA project is a giant grift, a version of "let's him and you fight" that distracts from the massive theft of public money—our money. But the cruelty? That's just gravy for them.
The National Weather Service Chicago office released its report on the 2024-25 winter today, the first day of meteorological spring. Highlights:
- Average temperature: -2.6°C (0.4°C below normal)
- Total snowfall: 302 mm (450 mm below normal, 10th least snowiest)
- Total precipitation: 113 mm (42 mm below normal)
They go on:
At Chicago, the average high temperature was 34.1 degrees, which is 0.5 degrees below normal. The average low temperature was 20.5 degrees, which is 1.1 degrees below normal. The mean average temperature for the season was 27.3 degrees, which is 0.8 degrees below normal. 4.43 inches of liquid precipitation were recorded, which is 1.64 inches below normal. 11.9 inches of snow were recorded, which is 17.7 inches below normal.
Daily and top ten monthly records established for Chicago this past winter...
- December: None
- January: None
- February: None
The following top ten seasonal records were set for Chicago this past winter:
** 10th least snowiest winter on record with 11.9 inches of snow.
In other words, an average winter for the cold but a very mild winter for the snow. Nothing too extreme, nothing too nice, nothing too awful.
NCDC predicts a fairly average spring, starting with a fairly normal storm bearing down on us this week. Because it wouldn't be early March without a reminder that our weather doesn't get consistently nice until June.
One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this:
The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy.
All right, the build has finished, so I can now deploy. And for no reason other than I like it, here is a photo of Cassie watching TV with me last night:
