The Daily Parker

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Today is the first full day of the Once Again Felonious POTUS, who wound everyone up yesterday with a bunch of statements of intent (i.e., executive orders) guaranteed to get people paying attention to him again. Yawn.

But that isn't everything that happened in the last 24 hours:

• Jonathan Last argues that maybe the OAFPOTUS just doesn't like Americans.
• Jennifer Rubin reminds everyone to remain vigilant that the OAFPOTUS's mangling of the English language has consequences.
• Jeff Maurer is flabbergasted that the fanatical left wing has left behind "free speech, color-blindness, and meritocracy" on the playing field so that the right could pick it up at their leisure.
• Connor Echols worries that the US has developed a "total security" problem, with the impossible goal of making everywhere safe for Americans.
• In an unusual nontechnical post, The Daily WTF points out that "everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works."
• Bruce Schneier worries that we don't have the tools to deal with the kinds of mistakes AI LLMs will make.
• The 606 Trail, which runs along an abandoned railway right-of-way through several Chicago north side neighborhoods, won't get its promised eastern extension until at least 2027.
• Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who illustrated one of my favorite childhood books, The Phantom Tollbooth, died age 95.

Finally, while Chicago has almost no snow on the ground, which probably helped prevent the overnight temperature from going below -20°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, the same weather system has already dumped more snow on the Gulf Coast cities of Mobile and Pensacola than they have ever recorded. Right now at Pensacola International, they have snow and -4°C temperatures. Climate change science didn't predict this specific event, but it did predict the weakening of the circumpolar jet stream that made this possible. This is not normal (temperatures in Fahrenheit):

My, we've had a busy day:

• President Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 Federal inmates in the largest single-day clemency in American history. Two of them stole millions in massive frauds against Illinois citizens. Josh Marshall doesn't see much clemency.
• Charles Sykes worries that neither major US political party has a clue how to fix our education systems (plural).
• Legalized sports betting has shifted billions from small punters to large corporations, which is why it was illegal for so long.
• Charles Blow muses about making friends after 50.
• Despite freaking out the usual car-besotted subjects, a plan to extend a protected bike lane in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Ill., will actually add parking spaces.
• A downtown Chicago office building constructed in 1928 will become 252 apartments under a plan that received City Council approval yesterday.

Finally, paleobiologists have narrowed the range of Neandertal-Sapiens interbreeding down to a period that peaked 47,000 years ago. Cue the jokes, starting with: "Who knew yo mama was that old?"

The US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow provides me with a long-awaited opportunity to clean out the closet under my stairs so an orphan kid more boxes will have room to stay there. I also may finish the Iain Banks novel I started two weeks ago, thereby finishing The Culture. (Don't worry, I have over 100 books on my to-be-read bookshelf; I'll find something else to read.)

Meanwhile:

• Even though I, personally, haven't got the time to get exercised about the OAFPOTUS's ridiculous threat to impose crippling (to us) tariffs on our three biggest trading partners, Mexico's president Claudia Sheinbaum used our own government's data to call bullshit on his claim that Mexico hasn't done enough to stop the flow of drugs into the US: "Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours."
• The UK will start requiring all visitors (even in transit) to register with their new Electronic Travel Authorisation scheme as of January 8th—similar to how the US ESTA program has worked for the last 16 years.
• Evanston, Ill., my home town, wants to protect bicyclists on one of its busiest streets, which of course has a bunch of stores panicking. (Note to the merchants: bike lanes don't hurt business, and in fact they encourage more foot traffic.)
• John Scalzi mourns the loss of Schwan's Home Delivery and it's bagel dogs.

Finally, as I mentioned nearly five years ago, today's date is a palindrome if you happen to study astronomy. The Julian Day number as of 6am CDT/12:00 UTC today is 2460642. Happy nerdy palindrome day!

The most interesting news I have today comes from the Chicago City Council's Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, which voted 8-5 yesterday to lower the city's default speed limit from 30 mph (48 km/h) to 25 mph (40 km/h). Advocates have wanted this change for years. One influential group, People For Bikes, ranks Chicago 2,279th out of 2,579 cities in the US for bike friendliness almost entirely because of our speed limit. The change would instantly catapult Chicago to the top quintile of their rankings. Oh, and it would save a few dozen pedestrian lives each year.

Next up: an analysis by the New York Times showing that parking minimums dating back to the 1960s require that a new apartment building going up a block from a subway station in downtown Brooklyn has to have exactly 193 parking spaces, even though most of those spaces will likely never have cars in them. New York City has a mix of support and opposition to removing parking minimums, correlating almost exactly with the MTA subway map. This particular "transit-oriented" apartment block will have almost 200 unneeded parking spaces, though, because traffic engineering in the US hasn't progressed since 1961.

Finally, the Washington Post yesterday praised the simple townhouse, such as currently occupied by Inner Drive Technology's World Headquarters:

The new American Dream should be a townhouse — a two- or three-story home that shares walls with a neighbor. Townhouses are the Goldilocks option between single-family homes in the suburbs and high-rise condos in cities.

n the United States, [medium-density housing options] are scarce — they’ve been dubbed “the missing middle” because we need more homes of this size and spacing. And it’s here that we find townhouses.

The United States needs more homes — 3 million to 7 million, depending which expert you ask. In many parts of the world, the obvious solution would be to construct high-rises; however, financing and liability challenges for U.S. developers have meant almost no new condo construction since 2009.

I approve. Except for the four days of pounding, sanding, sawing, and yelling in Polish that I've experienced as my townhouse complex refinishes the stairs to the houses surrounding our courtyard, it's the perfect size and configuration for us. Yay townhouses!

Apparently everyone else got over Covid yesterday, too. Or they're just trying to make deadline before the holiday:

• Peter Hamby pulls the fire alarm after reading a leaked polling report showing President Biden's support slipping in key states after last week's debate catastrophe.
• Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe fumes that yesterday's decision on presidential immunity "reveals the rot in the system." Ruth Marcus simply calls the Republican majority on the Court "dishonorable."
• In her dissent in yesterday's presidential immunity case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I) skewered the Republican majority by quoting directly from the Dobbs decision that "[t]his official-acts immunity has ‘no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.’"
• Josh Marshall reminds our side that "[t]he election is about Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the two forces working to overthrow the American republic."
• The Court, meanwhile, declined (for now) to hear a challenge to Illinois' assault weapons ban, though both Justices Alito (R) and Thomas (R) said they can't wait to review it later.
• Paul Krugman would have you say what you want about the tenets of National Front, Dude, but at least it's an ethos.
• The tariffs against Chinese goods put in place by both the convicted-felon XPOTUS and President Biden have started to cost Chicago businesses real money.
• A volunteer group has formed to rescue drowned Divvy bikes from Lake Michigan.
• Chicago restaurant burglaries have jumped in the last two years.
• Hurricane Beryl, now about a day and a half from leveling Jamaica, has become the earliest Category 5 storm in history.
• My alma mater, Duke's Fuqua School of Business, has a new paper explaining why major airlines have switched back to buying planes after leasing them for decades.
• National Geographic explains why alcohol gets harder to clear from your system as you get older.

Finally, the Post analyzed a ton of weather forecasts and determined that forecasting Chicago weather is a lot harder than forecasting Miami's. The only glimmer of good news: today's 7-day forecasts are at least as accurate as the 3-day forecasts from the 1990s.

Lunchtime link roundup:

• Dr Daniela J Lamas of Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston evaluates how age has affected President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, given that whoever wins in November has a high probability of being the oldest serving US President in history.
• Israel's highest court ruled that the IDF can, in fact, draft all the religious nutters who have avoided doing anything for the benefit of society since the country was founded. Perhaps this will help the country's crushing gloominess?
• A judge sentenced former Chicago alderman Ed Burke (D-14th) to two years in prison and ordered him to pay a $2m fine after Burke's conviction on charges relating to his 50-plus-year career of naked corruption. He becomes the 35th Chicago alderman convicted of corruption since 1973.
• A group of THC-infused drink manufacturers have sued the state of Iowa to prevent a law going into effect on Monday that would criminalize most of their products.
• The Regional Transportation Authority of Northern Illinois (RTA) has voted to create an all-access day pass that would allow unlimited travel on CTA, Pace, and Metra.

Finally, People for Bikes has consistently rated Chicago the worst major US city for biking, principally because of our 50 km/h speed limit. If only we'd lower it to 40 km/h, they say, Chicago would immediately jump in the ratings to something approaching its peers.

It's a gorgeous Friday afternoon in Chicago. So why am I inside? Right. Work. I'll eventually take Cassie out again today, and I may even have a chance to read all of these:

• A Florida man set himself on fire across the street from where the XPOTUS was sitting through jury selection, apparently to protest the lack of mental health care in the US.
• Josh Kovensky draws a straight line from the XPOTUS's narcissistic need to cast everyone who disagrees with him as an enemy to be defeated to his lawyers trying to undercut the bedrock principle of impartial jury trials.
• Graeme Wood says Iran has handed Israel an opportunity, so what will Netanyahu do now? Julia Ioffe wonders the same thing.
• Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) admitted (perhaps unintentionally) in a recent Politico interview that he, more than anyone else in the country, caused imbecilic grandstanding rather than actual legislating to become the main measure of Congress in some districts, like his own.
• The Governor of Illinois joined the Daily Parker and the Chicago Tribune editorial board in demanding that the city fire Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter, who (to give just one example of why) takes a chauffeured car to his office which is adjacent to an El station.
• Uri Berliner's resignation from NPR continued to generate op-ed columns, with Eric Wemple taking him to task and Andrew Sullivan taking Katherine Maher to task.
• Edinburgh, Scotland, recently opened a 3-kilometer, £23 million bike path that not everyone in the capital wants.

Finally, a milestone of sorts. The retail vacancy rate in downtown Chicago continues to climb as a longtime institution on North Wells finally closed. That's right, Wells Books, the last adult-entertainment store in the Loop, has closed.

Divvy, Chicago's bike-share program, seems to have some issues lately. For about two weeks now, almost no electric bikes have shown up on the app. This one, for example, clearly needs some TLC, and it's invisible online:

I counted half a dozen in my neighborhood that have dead batteries. My friends in other neighborhoods describe similarly grim situations, or worse: one rack in Lakeview had nothing but broken bikes, and showed 0 available on the app.

Divvy's Twitter feed doesn't provide much insight, either. They can only repeat "we'll have our Operations Team check it out!" so many times before it becomes self-parody.

On top of the subscription price increase that took effect last week, I and other users have gotten a bit annoyed. Divvy, what gives?

I love it when something passes all the integration tests locally, then on the CI build, and then I discover that the code works perfectly well but not as I intended it. So while I'm waiting for yet another CI build to run, I'm making note of these:

• Who's dumber than the XPOTUS? His lawyers.
• The city of Chicago has released plans to build a tunnel connecting the existing Bloomingdale Trail with the other side of I-90/94 and the Union Pacific tracks, but they don't expect it to open for about 3 years.
• Developers turned a parking garage into apartments in my old neighborhood, hiding the remaining bits of the garage from the street. I approve!
• Because of Illinois and Chicago taxes, (legal) cannabis in Chicago costs more than just about everywhere else in the country.

Finally, WBEZ made me a shopping list of locally-produced hot sauces. First up: Cajun Queen—apparently available about a kilometer away.

I'm in my downtown office today, with its floor-to-ceiling window that one could only open with a sledgehammer. The weather right now makes that approach pretty tempting. However, as that would be a career-limiting move, I'm trying to get as much done as possible to leave downtown on the 4:32 train instead of the 5:32. I can read these tomorrow in my home office, with the window open and the roofers on the farthest part of my complex from it:

• Judges occasionally get facts wrong, but they really hate being corrected, and it affects everyone.
• Wisconsin governor Tony Evers (D) used his line-item veto on a Republican-drafted education bill to supplant the legislature's goals with the general public's.
• North America's car-dependent culture disproportionately requires people least able to afford cars to have them.
• Speaking of car culture, Chicago is experiencing its worst air pollution in 11 years this summer.,
• E-bikes are fun and useful transport, but they also explode sometimes.
• In addition to breaking CNN and HBO, David Zaslav has now corrupted GQ.

Finally, does day drinking cause more harm than drinking at night? (Asking for a friend.)