The Daily Parker

In a form of enlightened laziness, I often go into my company's downtown Chicago office on Friday and the following Monday, avoiding the inconvenience of taking my laptop home. It helps also that Fridays and Mondays have become the quietest days of the week, with most return-to-office workers heading in Tuesdays through Thursdays.

And after a productive morning, I have a few things to read at lunch:

• The Economist says a lot of nice things about Chicago, including that we have an almost inexhaustible source of fresh water just a few blocks from where I'm sitting.
• Crains figured out that "middle income" in Chicago means $56,000 to $156,000, representing the 33rd and 75th income percentiles in the city.
• The Washington Post runs the numbers on the Speaker election, correcting something I had assumed already because I forgot that Kevin McCarthy has lost a few other votes for Speaker in the past.
• Brian Lindsey runs the numbers on global fertility and finds a decline in children per woman that could save the planet.
• Strong Towns explains how a few well-planned lines of paint can save a city.
• Electric cars have much better acceleration than ICE-powered cars, which could turn into a problem.
• Japan has a slow-motion scenic train that I want to see.

Finally, National Geographic digs down to find explanations for the disappearances of five ancient cities, and what that might tell us about our own culture.

We've now got two full years between us and 2020, and it does look like 2022 got mostly back to normal.

• The Daily Parker got 487 posts in 2022, 51 fewer than in 2021 and 25 below median. As usual, I posted the most in January (46) and fewest in November (37), creating a very tight statistical distribution with a standard deviation of 3.45. In other words: posting was pretty consistent month to month, but down overall from previous years.
• I flew 10 segments and 16,138 flight miles in 2022, low for the 21st century but about average for my lifetime.
  
• Once again, I visited only one other country (the UK, of course), but 8 other states: North Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin, California, Texas, and Michigan. In 2023, I plan to visit a bunch of new countries, but we'll see. Altogether I spent 107 hours traveling.
• I walked Cassie for a little more than 369 hours, somewhat fewer than in 2021 (422) but still an average of over an hour a day. It's about half as much as she wanted.
• I got 4,537,290 steps for 3,693 km of walking, a little below 2021 but about average overall. I only hit my step goal 327 times, though, due to no longer getting worked up about missing it in bad weather. I still averaged 12,393 a day, which doesn't suck.
• I drove 5,925 km on 144 L of gasoline, for an average of 2.4 L/100 km (96.4 MPG). The last four months of the year I used only 4 L of gas over 1,179 km, meaning I'm heading into 2023 with a nearly-full tank I last filled on August 21st. I do love living in the city!
• I worked 1,894 hours for my real job, including 1,260 from home and 580 in the office. The remainder went to conferences and work events. Plus, I spent 103 hours commuting, all of it by public transit (see above re: gasoline use).
• My commitment to the Apollo Chorus went up by a third this year, with 318 hours overall split between rehearsing and performing (220 hours) and my responsibilities as president (98 hours). Last year I spent 57 hours on rehearsals and performances and 71 hours on board stuff, but the first half of 2021 we were still virtual. In the last full year before the pandemic, 2019, I spent 200 hours overall (27 for the Board, 144 on rehearsals and performances, 29 for the fundraiser), so we really did do more this year than in years past.
• Finally, reading stayed the same, with 27 books started (cf. 28 in 2021) and 24 finished (cf. 23 in 2021)—both numbers exactly at median for me. But I watched a whopping (for me) 56 movies and 50 TV show seasons or miniseries. Yeek.

So, yeah, except for the permanent, post-pandemic shift to working from home 2/3 of the time, 2022 really did get back to normal in most ways. I'll take it. Here's to continued normal in 2023!

Speaking of loathsome, misogynist creeps, former Bishop of Rome Joseph Ratzinger died this morning, as groundbreaking journalist Barbara Walters did yesterday.

In other news showing that 2022 refuses to go quietly:

• The House Ways and Means Committee released the XPOTUS's tax returns for tax years 2015 through 2020, re-confirming his incompetence, malfeasance, and incompetence at malfeasance. One looks forward to the Justice Department's take on them.
• Pilot and journalist Jim Fallows digs into the Southwest Airlines meltdown this week as the company claims that it finally rebooted the Compaq 386 running its crew scheduling software yesterday and hopes to have the TRS-80 hosting its reservations BBS working by tonight.
• A new company has added another level of parasitic metaphor to the Web3 idea by offering to buy worthless crypto assets so that their owners can take tax write-offs. (Until an asset is sold, its tax value remains what you paid for it.)

And just a couple of blocks from me, Uncharted Books will reopen next week after the state closed it down for failing to file a required sales-tax form. For months. They might want to fire their accountants for this, as the state requires every business that has taxable sales to file the "quarterly sales tax report" every 3 months. I hope their soon-to-be-former accountants also filed their income taxes...

What a delight to wake up for the second day in a row and see the sun. After 13 consecutive days of blah, even the -11°C cold that encouraged Cassie and me to get her to day care at a trot didn't bother me too much.

Unfortunately, the weather forecast says a blizzard will (probably) hit us next weekend, so I guess I'll have time to read all of these stories sitting on the couch with my dog:

• The House Select Committee on the January 6th Insurrection referred the XPOTUS to the Justice Department on four criminal counts.
• Incoming Rep. George Santos (R-NY) of Long Island appears to have fabricated everything in his resume.
• In what for anyone else would count as an own goal, the Clown Prince of Twitter ran a poll over the weekend that revealed 57% of Twitter users want him gone.
• Freddie DeBoer wants the word "unhoused" gone.
• Timothy Noah equates Sam Bankman-Fried's story with Charles Dickens' Hard Times, one of his funniest and most satirical novels.
• The Ukrainian Army has a helpful video out showing Russian soldiers how to surrender to a drone.
• Mesa, which operates regional jets for American, United, and Delta, faces strong headwinds due to pilot shortages and American ditching them for its wholly-owned regional airline.

Finally, one of my college music professors died this month. Herbert Deutsch co-created the Moog synthesizer and taught at Hofstra University for 40-plus years.

Argentina just won the 2022 World Cup by lining up and taking free kicks at a French goalie in a fitting end to one of the most corrupt and deadly sporting events in history. At least the 2026 World Cup will take place in countries with (reasonably) strong institutions and existing infrastructure.

All the expense, the hype, the scandal, the drama...and in the end, it came down to penalty kicks. It's like having track meet decided by guys jumping one hurdle at a time, or by putting a guy on 2nd base at the top of the 10th inning in a desperate attempt to make baseball more exciting. (Oh, wait...)

France didn't win, but Argentina didn't either, really. Nor did the 6,500 dead construction workers, the athletes, the gay fans, or the 90% of the people living in Qatar who will never have citizenship because, like most petro-states, the Qataris have a form of Apartheid that FW de Klerk could only dream of.

So who really won this evening? FIFA officials, of course. The Qatari elite (for now; in 10 years they will look upon their works, and despair). The bribed European officials who didn't get caught. And probably Lionel Messi, who gets a better send-off this evening than Zidane did, I suppose.

The only appropriate response to FIFA is not to watch. Even John Oliver conceded as much, before admitting he'd watch. Everyone's individual choices make corruption on this scale work. I just wish people would internalize that.

But in Qatar, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

I can't quite draw a line between all of these stories, but it feels like I should:

• Elon Musk suspended several top journalist's Twitter accounts last night while ranting about nonsense "assassination coordinates," making the money-losing media service less relevant by the day.
• The XPOTUS made a "major announcement" about...a hilariously pathetic NFT project that lost value within minutes of its release.
• Mazars—the only firm sketchy enough to do the XPOTUS's taxes—decided crypto firm Binance was just too toxic for them.
• Thomas Friedman shakes his head about Israel's continuing slide into theocracy, and how incoming (criminally-indicted) prime minister Binjamin Netanyahu will accelerate its instability and corruption.
• Strong Towns engages in a thought experiment: what if we used the same Federal Highway Administration polices that cleared "urban blight" in the 1970s for moving downtown Kansas City parking lots out of downtown? (Hint: hundreds of millions of dollars more economic productivity.)
• Amtrak has ordered 73 rail cars from German manufacturer Siemens that will bring the Northeast Corridor up to the comfort and speed of 2010s-era British commuter trains starting in 2026. At this rate, Amtrak's Midwest service might get to current Continental European levels of service by the 2060s.

Finally, a million-liter aquarium in a central Berlin hotel collapsed spectacularly today, causing millions of euros of damage. No people were hurt but 1,500 tropical fish drowned or froze to death in the aftermath.

Theodore Schleifer examines the intellectual and ethical upbringing of Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old indicted yesterday for perpetrating one of the biggest frauds in history:

Of all the potentially unanswerable riddles underpinning the Sam Bankman-Fried saga—why did Sequoia invest in a mop-topped kid who played video games during a diligence call; were Alameda and FTX ever really separate?—perhaps the most vexing is how the mastermind of this whole legal and ethical imbroglio was the offspring of two beloved legal scholars who were obsessed with ethics, in an effective-altruist Petri dish focused on analytical rigor, civic-mindedness and, crucially, consequences. How could a family so committed to doing the greatest good for the greatest number end up depriving so many people of so much happiness—and then see their son get arrested?

The optics are complicated for Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, who flew to The Bahamas amid the collapse of FTX and have remained there to counsel their son, almost as if he were a therapy patient or a legal client. Meanwhile, people on The Farm have been gossiping about how neither parent has any courses at Stanford next year: Joe canceled the one class he was slated to teach over the winter semester, and Barbara is listed as an emerita professor. (She has written that she “hopes” to make a return to teaching in the future.)

Sam has gone out of way to absolve his parents of any culpability in his financial misdeeds, telling Andrew Ross Sorkin at last month’s Dealbook conference that they “bore no responsibility” for the collapse of FTX. “Anyone close to me, including my parents and employees and co-workers who fought with the company to push forward, they were hurt by this,” he said. “I feel really grateful for the support my parents are still giving me throughout all of this.”

And yet the truth is that both parents, whether they bear responsibility or not, are deep in the barrel with Sam. As Reuters has reported, official property records show that Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried were the named owners of a $16.4 million beachside “vacation home” in Old Fort Bay, part of a broader real estate portfolio owned by FTX and senior executives totalling hundreds of millions of dollars. “They may have stayed there while working with the company sometime over the last year,” Sam told Sorkin, though he denied knowing any details about the $300 million worth of real estate that FTX and his parents bought in the Bahamas. (Joe and Barbara have said they’ve been working to return the property to the company for some time.)

I mean, all the ethical rigor in the world won't help if your son is a sociopath.

Clearly, I have to get my priorities in order. I've spent the afternoon in the zone with my real job, so I have neglected to real all of this:

• Lawyers who don't subscribe to the radical right-wing theory of constitutional originalism shouldn't argue it to the Supreme Court.
• If Republican US Senate candidate Herschel Walker really got into law school, I'll eat my own JD diploma.
• British architecture protects against cold, damp weather, but not the heat that global warming will bring to the island.
• I have no problem with Sam Bankman-Fried continuing to run his mouth (and his Twitter feed) because I like it when the Justice Department has an easy case.
• In the US, we need to bring back mixed-use developments.

Finally, because only one guy writes about half of the songs on top-40 radio, modulations have all but disappeared from popular songs.

Meteorological winter begins in the Northern Hemisphere today. In Chicago right now we have sunny skies and a normal-for-December 2°C. And any day above freezing between December 1st and March 1st works for me.

Meanwhile:

• Eric Levitz explains why four railroad unions might go on strike next week. Hint: greedy private equity investors.
• Adam Conover explains why so many major retail chains have gone bankrupt in the past few years. Hint: greedy private equity investors.
• The pilot who crashed his Mooney into an electricity tower in Maryland last week confirmed that low visibility contributed to him flying several hundred feet below the minimum approach altitude clearly marked on the approach plate he clearly wasn't reading. Hint: that's what approach plates are for.
• Tina Nguyen hypothesizes that the XPOTUS has already lost the 2024 election. Hint: it was never about the office, it's about the grift.

Finally, on a whim I looked back at my posts from 10 years ago, and I came across this painful memory of debugging an Azure 1.8 deployment. And 15 years ago we got our first snowfall of the season. Ah, memories.

Despite coming in "later and cost[ing] more than originally expected," construction on a new Terminal 2 and revamped Terminal 1 will start soon:

Under the latest plan, two new remote satellite terminals will be the first to open, in 2027 and 2028, off the existing Terminal 1, where most United Airlines flights are located.

Once that is done, full-scale work will begin on the centerpiece of the project: the demolition and reconstruction of Terminal 2, which will be converted into a combination domestic and international terminal. That will locate customs and related facilities at the center of the airport, and not at the exiting, somewhat remote Terminal 5, as is the case now.

Officials had estimated the project's estimated cost at $8.5 billion—but that's in 2018 dollars, when the plan was unveiled and approved by the City Council under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

In August, the city had new estimates, with the original $8.5 billion plan projected to cost $9.8 billion. Along with other previously approved and additional projects, the total for O'Hare's overhaul was slated to cost $12.1 billion.

Fortunately, Federal money—not my city property taxes—will pay for it.

I just hope it takes less time to build than the railway platform by my house.