The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

So much Dunning, so much Kruger

It seems like so much of the news I've read today concerns people behaving stupidly, but thinking they're behaving intelligently. Sadly, it's mostly the same group of people:

Finally, people in Bridgeport and other Southwest Side neighborhoods have fallen in love with a rotund beaver who lives with her family on the Chicago River. Some have suggested naming the beaver Lori Heavyfoot or Dam Ryan. I hope she doesn't meet up with one of the city's other charismatic megafauna...

We'd be pissed if an enemy did this

It's hard to see the OAFPOTUS's actions towards our two biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, as in the interests of the United States. So far, the White House hasn't actually issued a (probably unlawful) order imposing steep tariffs that would undo our free-trade agreements, but just the threat has caused a lot of damage already:

As I wrote the other day, in the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low.

One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing — a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations’ borders.

But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on — that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate — that is, dis-integrate — reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.

And to think that many people imagined that Trump would be good for business.

We have, by a very narrow margin and with less than a majority of the vote, managed to put the most corrupt and possibly stupidest person in history into this office. If an adversary threatened to disrupt North American trade as much as this clown has, we'd threaten war.

And before you start wondering how long it will take for average Americans to get nervous, well, that's already happened: the only newly-inaugurated president in modern history with a lower approval rating was, of course, the same guy 8 years ago. (He has the highest disapprovals in history right now, though.)

Only 1,449 days to go...

Yay meetings!

I had about a half-dozen meetings this morning, including one that dragooned me five minutes before another meeting that I had to preside over. The consolations were (a) I took most of them from home, so (b) I got to walk Cassie in sunny, March-like 6°C weather, and (c) when I finally got to the office my view looked like this:

I've got two more meetings starting in half an hour before I can head back to my dog.

I'll deal with all the OAFPOTUS's chaos tomorrow.

Privatization of key software component

While doing a routine upgrade of NuGet packages in Weather Now, I discovered that Montreal-based Xceed Software has acquired a component called Fluent Assertions. They claim they will "will continue to honour free licenses for open-source, non-commercial projects," but they also now spam log files every time the component is invoked with a "buy a license" message.

Well, I don't want all that log spam, I don't want to pay $130 a year for one testing component, and I have no idea how long they will honor the Apache-2.0 license that existed through v7.1 (released yesterday), so I just downgraded to v7.1. (Apache licenses are permanent, so as long as I'm happy staying at v7.1, the new commercial license doesn't apply.)

Also, as Devclass points out, "A common question is whether Fluent Assertions is sufficiently critical to survive as a commercial project. It is well liked, but relatively easy to replace with native .NET functionality that comes for free." So I will be looking into the equivalent packages soon, possibly this weekend when I'm stuck inside most of the time.

Bastards. I mean, I'm happy that the developers finally got paid for their work and all. Still: Bastards.

(Someone posted a bug in GitHub on the change, so if you want to see how many developers this change has angered just in the last 48 hours, it's worth a read.)

The darkest decile of the year has passed

A friend pointed out that, as of this morning, we've passed the darkest 36-day period of the year: December 3rd to January 8th. On December 3rd at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the sun rose at 7:02 and set at 16:20, with 9 hours 18 minutes of daylight. Today it rose at 7:18 and will set at 16:38, for 9 hours 20 minutes of daylight. By the end of January we'll have 10 hours of daylight and the sun will set after 5pm for the first time since November 3rd.

It helps that we've had nothing but sun today. And for now, at least, we can forget about the special weather statement that just came out warning of snow and winds starting later tonight.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

Finally, National Geographic explains how the two cups of tea I drink every day (three in the summer) will help me live to 107 years old.

Divers and Sundrie News on a Cold Thursday

My, we've had a busy day:

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?"

Tuesday afternoon article club

Before I bugger off to get at least a couple of daylight hours in this sunny, 22°C afternoon, here are the most interesting stories that popped up today:

Finally, the Chicago White Sox have surpassed their team record for losses, going 31-108 through yesterday. If they lose 13 of the remaining 22 games—which would actually represent an improvement over their performance so far—they will surpass the 1962 New York Mets' record 120 losses in a season. For reasons passing understanding, they're still charging for tickets, with box seats going for $69 and some tickets as high as $309. They have lots of seats left, though, so maybe I'll just take the El down there this weekend to see the Athletics beat them?

Whoo boy

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

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.

Long but productive day

I'm trying to get home a little earlier than usual, so this will be a lazy post. Stuff to read:

  • Hillary Clinton, who has debated both President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, has thoughts on tomorrow night's event.
  • Dana Milbank doesn't mourn Rep. Jamaal Bowman's (D-NY) loss last night, and neither do I.
  • If you hate corporations, you might want to support President Biden's increase to the corporate income tax as well as to his proposed increase in the share-buyback tax.
  • The village of Wheaton, Ill., would rather have 165 car crashes and multiple pedestrian fatalities on a stretch of stroad by a school and retirement community than spend $865,000 on a traffic light. (I mean, better that they didn't build the stroad in the first place, of course.)
  • A new report says that cancelling New York City's congestion tax will kill 100,000 jobs.

Finally, today is the 50th anniversary of the very first time a UPC got scanned in a grocery store. Happy shopping.

Networks of contracts waste a lot of money

Via Bruce Schneier's recent essay on complexity, I found a blog post on the work of Ronald Coase, which really resonated:

Ronald Coase observed that an organisation could be considered as a collection of contracts, and asked why, in that case, did organisations even exist. His answer was that contractual relationships have transactions costs. When these transactions costs outweighed the expense of organisation, organisation would predominate. Also, there were limits to transaction; it might be actually impossible to specify what was wanted in a contract, or equivalently, it might cost too much to write it.

As often happens, the first half of this insight was more successful than the second. Since the 1980s, there has been a global trend towards replacing organisations with networks of contracts. The idea that a firm could be considered as a network of contracts was taken up by the management consulting industry, and strengthened from a positive observation to a normative statement that firms should become more so. In as much as anyone bothered with Coase’s corollary, it was simply to say that there was some sort of “core business” in there – presumably it was thought to be the zone in which transactions costs got high enough to demand organisation – and everything else must be contracted out.

In many ways, we’ve lived through a giant experiment in proving Ronald Coase wrong, which has now failed.

Healthcare in the United States is an especially egregious example of this. Americans, notoriously, spend much more than any other nation, have worse results, and leave lots of people uncovered. People blame, variously, insurance companies, doctors, drug companies, intermediary organisations, public policy, and patients themselves for getting ill. But none of this has ever solved anything. Everyone who has tried to nail down exactly what costs so much money has ended up concluding that the whole system is weirdly expensive and wasteful. That is, of course, the point. Its awfulness is an aspect of the system, not any one component or group of components.

I will have to read more about his work, or even (gasp!) read his work.