The Daily Parker

The Post's Monica Hesse watched the entire first season of "The Apprentice," now streaming on Amazon. Pray you never have to do this:

A refresher, since it’s been awhile since “The Apprentice” debuted in 2004. The show was a competition in which the prize was a vague job at the Trump Organization.

Upon this viewing, what surprised me the most is how much this show primed the country to think of Trump as imperial. I cannot stress this enough. Fanfares play when he enters the room. Contestants grovel for his attention. His properties, business deals and business acumen are all touted as “the best” and nobody fact-checks any of this.

But there were signs, I’m telling you. Bad signs....

Like Sam. There is a contestant named Sam, and he is terrible — he falls asleep in the middle of one challenge — and for two straight episodes everyone who works with him tells Trump that he is terrible and needs to be fired. But Sam talks a good suck-uppy game and he looks the part, so Trump keeps letting him stay, and anyway 21 years later Pete Hegseth is our defense secretary.

Or Omarosa. As soon as Sam is gone, Omarosa emerges as the next conniving, two-faced villain, single-handedly torpedoing her team’s success in multiple challenges. This time Trump sees it, too, but does he fire her? No. He fires the people he thought should have stood up to her better. Malevolence isn’t a sin, only weakness, and so here we are today watching Trump and JD Vance push around the Ukrainian president instead of the Ukrainian president’s bully.

“The Apprentice” was corporate cosplay, with decisions made based on what would play well with an audience rather than what would do best in a workplace.

Is there any reason, now, for DOGE to set completely arbitrary and legally contested deadlines for millions of federal workers to decide whether to quit their jobs? Any reason for Trump to fire the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center and appoint himself chair? Any reason for the United States to buy Greenland, which is not for sale, or annex Canada, which is not interested?

It’s government cosplay....

I've said it often: having spent the late 1980s and much of the '90s in New York, I have always considered the OAFPOTUS to be a boorish clown with horrible business skills and a schtick I found grating. It turns out, nothing has really changed except his platform.

Ten years ago today, a bunch of these arrived at work:

The Microsoft Surface 3 tablet (shown with optional detachable keyboard) had really great features for its time, with 128 GB of storage and 4 GB of RAM. When I left the company, they let me keep mine, so for the last 10 years it's been the personal device I use at work and the lightweight but fully-functional device I take on the road. My little blue Surface has been all over the world.

It was therefore no small irony that on my Surface's 10th birthday, I got an email from Microsoft:

End of support for Windows 10 is approaching

What does this mean for me?
After October 14, 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide free software updates from Windows Update, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10.

What can I do with my old computer?
Trade it in or recycle it with local organizations.

Will my Windows 10 PC stop working?
No. Your PC will continue to work, but support will be discontinued.

Well, that's disappointing. Inevitable, though. I don't really want to buy a new tablet right now, so I'll just have to keep this one limping along until autumn and get a Surface Pro 11 in October or November. Who knows, maybe the 12s will be out by then?

As forecast, O'Hare had an official high temperature of 26°C yesterday, the warmest temperature recorded there since 4pm on October 30th and the normal high temperature for June 10th. Inner Drive Technology WHQ got all the way up to 23.3°C just after 5pm, so we had all the windows open until the squall line blasted through after midnight.

Today we have a lot of wind and a lot of dust blown up from storms in Texas and Oklahoma. Without the dust, we'd have clear blue skies right now:

Remember what I wrote Thursday about how the air usually looked this time of year back in the 1980s? Today is just a little hazier. Well, OK, quite a bit hazier:

Even Cassie is wondering what that scent is:

That's the scent of climate change, baby. Same as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Fitting that we've got the resurrected zombie corpse of Herbert Hoover in the White House today.

After our gorgeous weather Sunday and Monday, yesterday's cool-down disappointed me a bit. But we have clear-ish skies and lots of sun, which apparently will persist until Friday night. I'm also pleased to report that we will probably have a good view of tomorrow night's eclipse, which should be spectacular. I'll even plan to get up at 1:30 to see totality.

Elsewhere in the world, the OAFPOTUS continues to explore the outer limits of stupidity (or is it frontotemporal dementia?):

• No one has any idea what the OAFPOTUS's economic plan is, though Republicans seem loath to admit that's because he hasn't got one.
• Canada and the EU, our closest friends in the world since the 1940s, have gotten a bit angry with us lately. Can't think why.
• Paul Krugman frets that while he "always considered, say, Mitch McConnell a malign influence on America, while I described Paul Ryan as a flimflam man, I never questioned their sanity... But I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality."
• On the same theme, Bret Stephens laments that "Democracy dies in dumbness."
• ProPublica describes a horrifying recording of Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek's meeting with senior SSA officials last week in which he demonstrated why the OAFPOTUS pulled him from a terminal job as "the ultimate faceless bureaucrat" to head the agency. (Some people have greatness thrust upon 'em?)
• Molly White sees "no public good" for a "strategic bitcoin reserve," but is too polite to call the idea a load of thieving horseshit.
• Author John Scalzi threads the needle on boycotting billionaires.
• Writing for StreetsBlog Chicago, Steven Vance argues that since the city has granted parking relief to almost every new development in the past few years, why not just get rid of parking minimums altogether?

Finally, in a recent interview with Monica Lewinsky, Molly Ringwald said that John Hughes got the idea for Pretty in Pink while out with her and her Sixteen Candles co-stars at Chicago's fabled Kingston Mines. Cool.

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.

A longtime Daily Parker reader asked this about yesterday's post:

"The Daily Parker costs $4.87 per day" -- I'm really hoping that's a misprint, because that's almost $150 a month, which is ten times what I pay for my web hosting package which comes with unlimited domains, a full email service (IMAP+SMTP over TLS), click-to-install WordPress and MySQL database creation, SSH access to the back-end Linux machine, and excellent customer support.

Also -- and I *really* hate to say this to a fellow IT professional -- your web site often seems rather slow. So much so that I'd built a mental image of it running on an old PC in a corner of your apartment, and I'd put the slow response times down to the latency of a hard disk spinning up from idle.

So, he's not wrong: The Daily Parker right now is slow and buggy. And expensive*. (Ironically, when it was literally running on a PC in the corner of my apartment prior to 2013, it ran like Jesse Owens.)

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to October 2015, when I deployed the current version of this blog. From the blog's separation from braverman.org in 2005 until 2015, it ran on DasBlog, a .NET 1.1 blog engine that worked most of the time and had a few features I liked. I dragged it kicking and screaming up to .NET 2.0 and later .NET 4.0, and there it stayed.

After 10 years and dozens of tweaks, I decided to modernize by moving to BlogEngine.NET, which I also forked and modified. This engine runs on .NET 4.8, which I had to shoehorn into an Azure App Service when Cloud Services went away a couple of years ago. BlogEngine.NET had modest performance problems when it had a nice virtual machine all to itself, as Cloud Services weren't too different from on-premises hardware. But Azure App Services don't quite work the same way, such that many of the performance optimizations in the BlogEngine.NET code actually cause performance headaches in App Services. For example, at app start, the engine loads the entire blog history into memory, because in 2007, when the project began, memory was fast and disks were slow. (NB: The Daily Parker has over 9,700 posts spanning 27 years.) Also, the code runs entirely synchronously, so under load it spins up more and more threads until it just collapses from exhaustion.

So here we are: running a very old blog engine on a nearing-end-of-life version of .NET that everyone is tired of.

But, aha! There is a solution, which I've been kicking around for almost as long as I've had a blog, and which I finally have the skills and time to work on. I'll simply build my own. It'll be idiosyncratic, sure, but it'll be fast and it'll be cool.

Or maybe I'll go back to DasBlog, now that someone has rebuilt it in .NET Core.

Nah. I'm going to write my own. Target date: October 15th, ten years after I released this version.

* It's actually now around $3.34 per day after a Microsoft Azure pricing change on February 12th which just showed up in the cost management tool today. The costs break down as follows: App Service type B2, $2.49; storage (media and event log), 52¢; database (serverless type B), 33¢. So, around $100 per month.

The Weather Now gazetteer import has gotten to the Ps (Pakistan) with 11,445,567 places imported and 10,890,186 indexed. (The indexer runs every three hours.) I'll have a bunch of statistics about the database when the import finishes, probably later tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. I'm especially pleased with the import software I wrote, and with Azure Cosmos DB. They're churning through batches of about 30 files at a time and importing places at around 10,000 per minute.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• The OAFPOTUS will likely get nowhere with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for the same reasons no one else has: Putin doesn't negotiate in good faith.
• Former US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman explains how Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and his allies have enriched themselves at the country's expense, as a warning about what is starting to happen over here.
• French president Emmanuel Macron had to correct the OAFPOTUS more than once in a press conference yesterday that I'm sure one of them remembered and the other did not.
• Clown Prince Elon Musk stepped on a rake over the weekend in part because his prank email to every Federal worker could very likely cause some Justice Department lawyers to face sanctions.
• James Fallows explains how Musk's Maoist vandalism of the US Government will have catastrophic consequences in aviation sooner rather than later.
• Will the known charlatan Dr Mehmet Oz truly divest himself from his financial interests in Medicare- and Medicaid-related companies now that he's been tapped to head the Federal agency that runs both? Ah, ha ha, ha. How droll.
• Chicago Public Media has come out as strongly as they can against Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's proposed $830 million bond sale. (I mentioned the bond sale last week.)
• According to Newsweek, a poll found Johnson's approval rating at 6.6%, lower than Rod Blagojevich's approval when the legislature removed him from office in 2009. (A Daily Parker reader joked that Johnson is now less popular than chlamydia.)
• Medium-term inflation expectations in the US have surged to levels we haven't seen this century, prompting Paul Krugman to ask why the markets don't seem to care (hint: Upton Sinclair).
• Craft distilleries in Illinois have their hopes pinned on a bill making its way through the state legislature that would remove restrictions on how they can operate tasting rooms. I'm also hoping the bill passes.

Finally, in February 1852, a man calling himself David Kennison died in Chicago. He had clamed to be 115 years old, participated in the Boston Tea Party, and hobnobbed with the great and good in the early days of the Republic. And in the proud tradition of people giving undue acclaim to total charlatans, the entire city turned out for his funeral—173 years ago yesterday.

The US meeting with Russia and not Ukraine to discuss the fate of Ukraine seems unmistakably similar to the Molotov-Ribbentrop discussions in August 1939 that divvied up Poland between the Nazis and Stalin's Russia. The meeting in Riyadh between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seems more focused on a colonial-style mineral extraction concession for the US than on Ukrainian sovereignty. This comes just days after Vice President JD Vance channeled UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (a known Nazi sympathizer) in a speech in Munich just before meeting with actual Nazis.

("'I never thought leopards would eat my face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."—Adrian Bott)

Meanwhile, back home:

• The State Department has decided to cancel most of its news subscriptions, because why would our diplomats need to know what's going on in the world?
• Fortunately (for now), the OAFPOTUS violently dismantling the US government's bureaucracy has gotten in the way of him dismantling the regulations that he claims to hate, further showing (a) how fundamentally stupid he is and (b) how it has nothing to do with regulations.
• Apparently jealous of the OAFPOTUS's successful raiding of public funds for his own benefit, Argentine president Javier Milei and his friends appear to have raked in close to $100 million in what looks like a classic memecoin rug-pull.
• The Chicago City Council may vote today on a proposal to borrow $830 m in an issue that would not pay back principal until 2045, a structure that (a) would result in a constant cash-flow to the private investors of something like $80 m per year and (b) cost the city $2 bn once we finally pay it all back. It would be the dumbest thing the city's government has done since the parking-meter scam.
• Researchers have determined that both work-from-home and return-to-office have drawbacks and benefits, and that mandating all of one or the other isn't great for any company. (But we knew that, even if some CEOs didn't.)
• Beware anyone asking you to send a code that you see on the screen; this is a device-code authentication attack, which is increasing in popularity among your finer criminals.

Finally, one of my least-favorite Brews & Choos stops has threatened planned to open a new brewpub in Irving Park. Crust Brewing in Rosemont wants to bring the same hellish experience to the former Leader Bar at 3000 W Irving Park Rd. Yes, this is a B&C-qualifying location, but no, I won't review it until I run out of other things to review.

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:

• James Fallows makes it clear the aviation accidents over the past few weeks are not the Administration's fault—but the ones a year from now will certainly be.
• Jeff Maurer likens Elon Musk's wrecking crew to the drunk and sleep-deprived Assemblée Nationale of 4 August 1789; you know, the one that led directly to the French Revolution.
• Josh Marshall theorizes that Musk has employed a bunch of 25-year-old incels to destroy the Government precisely because the infants have no fear of consequences.
• Paul Krugman thanks the OAFPOTUS for "making microbes great again."
• Economist Claudia Goldin has discovered an inverse relationship between fertility and sharing housework, which columnist Heather Long explains is the reason so many people in rich countries have decided not to have kids.
• Cranky Flier can't countenance Southwest Airlines making its first layoffs in history, and puts the blame squarely on the private equity firm they partnered with.

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...

Punzun Ltd. (an Illinois corporation doing business as Inner Drive Technology) turns 25 today! I set up the corporation before I moved back to Illinois from New York, so that I could take either a contract or full-time job when I got here.

I can scarcely believe I've been back nearly 25 years.

And 25 years ago—this was months before Bush v Gore, remember—I would not have believed that these would be the news stories I'd care about in 2025:

• The unelected winger specifically tasked with destroying our soft-power Agency for International Development is, no surprised, a Christianist fundamentalist.
• One of the software blogs I read, The Daily WTF, took space out of its usual lineup today to castigate Elon Musk's disastrous technical implementations in service of destroying the US Government: "Musk's 'algorithm' really is...a 5-step plan of bumper-sticker business speak that ranges from fatuous to incompetent...."
• Ezra Klein talks about how the right thinks of most people as "NPCs"—non-player characters in the gaming world.

Finally, on this Presidents Day, let's return to Washington's farewell address for just a moment:

All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Towards the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts.

Can't say what made me go back to that source today...