The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

People behaving badly

Just a couple to mention:

  • A jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried of committing the largest fraud in US history. He faces up to 110 years in prison.
  • House Republicans passed a bill that would provide $14 billion in funding for Israel's war with Hamas by taking it from IRS tax evasion enforcement, a move so cynical that Paul Krugman likens it to "the Big Lie." ("Starving the I.R.S. has long been a Republican priority; what’s new is the party’s willingness to serve that priority by endangering national security.")
  • Calumet City, a mostly-Black suburb about 35 km south of Chicago, issued a citation to Daily Southtown reporter Hank Sanders for calling city employees and asking for comment (i.e., "reporting") about major flooding in the area.
  • Chicago Alderperson (yes, that's what they're called now [shudder]) Ray Lopez (D-15th Ward) pulled a Vrdolyak at yesterday's City Council meeting before describing it to reporters as a "shitshow."

Finally, David Brooks offers some advice on "how to stay sane in brutalizing times."

And, almost forgot: It was 25 years ago today that Minnesota elected Jesse Ventura governor, sending my team running the election data at CBS News into a brief panic before we confirmed the result.

How is it Friday already?

I spent way too much time chasing down an errant mock in my real job's unit test suite, but otherwise I've gotten a lot done today. Too much to read all these articles:

OK, assuming this build works, I'll have closed 4 story points today—with 4 very small 1-point stories. The harder ones start Monday morning.

Lunch links

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:

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

Stuff to read later

I'm still working on the feature I described in my last post. So some articles have stacked up for me to read:

And while I read these articles and write this code, outside my window the dewpoint has hit 25°C, making the 28°C air feel like it's 41°C. And poor Cassie only has sweat glands between her toes. We're going to delay her dinnertime walk a bit.

Slow day

As predicted, the weather is great and I'm working from home with the windows open. And I'm doing an open-ended research project that is leaving me with more questions than answers, which is always good.

I haven't spent a lot of time online today, except for the research. But I would like to point out yesterday's Strong Towns post, which hit home almost literally. In most parts of the US, the suburban city plan (aka sprawl) gets a pretty heavy subsidy from urban property-tax payers:

A couple of years ago, I conducted an infrastructure study for the Town of Nolensville, Tennessee, at the request of Mayor Derek Adams, analyzing their tax revenues in relation to their development pattern's maintenance costs. You can find that study here, but I'm sure you can guess what I found, if you're a Strong Towns reader. 

I looked at five different streets, each with a slightly different development pattern. I categorized these streets based on what infrastructure they contained, their levels of density, and their historic context. The final street on the list was a townhome street (consisting of typical 24-foot lot widths, as opposed to the 69- to 114-foot-wide lots of the other suburban streets). All four of the non-townhome lot development patterns resulted in long-term deficits for the city under the existing level of taxation. What's more, I adjusted these deficits to allow for the more expensive homes to contribute more taxes (since their higher assessments would, of course, generate more money in absolute terms), and they still didn't break even. The townhomes, on the other hand, produced a budget surplus of $51.43 per lot.

In the study's conclusion, I discussed how this result may be received politically. In the past, people have moved to towns like Nolensville precisely for the suburban development pattern. Even today, when more urban and traditional forms of community are increasing in popularity, not everybody wants to live in a townhome. Am I advocating some kind of 15-minute city conspiracy to forcibly abolish side yards?!?

No—despite the proven financial and logistical problems with suburbs, I don't think we should abolish them. It could be argued that heavy-handed strategies like that don't fit with our political culture and traditions in this country. Instead, I think we should do something eminently American: we should tell the suburbs to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

That doesn't mean abandoning them. Rather, it's a call for a frank, down-to-earth conversation between the taxpayers and the suburbs; the type of conversation any responsible parent would have with a teenager who's living beyond his means.

Sure, but if you're getting subsidized million-dollar housing, why would you ever vote to pay your actual bill?

OK, lunch is over. Back to the mines...

Layout frustrations

I'm arguing with the Blazorise framework right now because their documentation on how to make a layout work doesn't actually work. Because this requires repeated build/test cycles, I have almost no time to read all of this:

Finally, a group of Chicago aldermen have proposed that the city clear sidewalks of snow and ice when property owners don't. Apparently the $500 fines, which don't happen often, don't work often either.

First sunny day since I returned

We had four completely-overcast days in a row, including one with some blowing snow, so I'm happy today has been completely clear. Tomorrow might even get above 10°C—which would at least get into normal March temperatures. This whole winter has been weird, as the next few will likely be until temperature increases start leveling out.

In other news:

Finally, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders explain how AI could write our laws in the future.

Big sprint release, code tidy imminent

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing.

While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company:

Finally, you may not want to know what the CBP beagle squad has found in baggage at O'Hare.

Time-boxed research

I've got an open research problem that's a bit hard to define, so I'm exploring a few different avenues of it. I hope reading these count:

Since none of these has anything at all to do with my research project, I should get back to work.

Friday night I crashed your party

Just a pre-weekend rundown of stuff you might want to read:

  • The US Supreme Court's investigation into the leak of Justice Samuel Alito's (R) Dobbs opinion failed to identify Ginny Thomas as the source. Since the Marshal of the Court only investigated employees, and not the Justices themselves, one somehow does not feel that the matter is settled.
  • Paul Krugman advises sane people not to give in to threats about the debt ceiling. I would like to see the President just ignore it on the grounds that Article 1, Section 8, Article VI, and the 14th Amendment make the debt ceiling unconstitutional in the first place.
  • In other idiotic Republican economics (redundant, I know), Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) has proposed a 30% national sales tax to replace all income and capital-gains taxes that I really hope the House passes just so the Senate can laugh at it while campaigning against it.
  • Amazon has decided to terminate its Smile program, the performative-charity program that (as just one example) helped the Apollo Chorus raise almost $100 of its $250,000 budget last year. Whatever will we do to make up the shortfall?
  • How do you know when you're on a stroad? Hint: when you really don't want to be.
  • Emma Collins does not like SSRIs.
  • New York Times science writer Matt Richtel would like people to stop calling every little snowfall a "bomb cyclone." So would I.
  • Slack's former Chief Purple People Eater Officer Nadia Rawlinson ponders the massive tech layoffs this week. (Fun fact: the companies with the most layoffs made hundreds of billions in profits last year even as market capitalization declined! I wonder what all these layoffs mean to the shareholders? Hmm.)
  • Amtrak plans to buy a bunch of new rail cars to replace the 40-year-old rolling stock on their long-distance routes. Lots of "ifs" in there, though. I still hope that, before I die of old age, the US will have a rail travel that rivals anything Europe had in 1999.
  • The guy who went to jail over his fraudulent and incompetent planning of the Fyre Festival a couple of years ago wants to try again, now that he's out.

Finally, Monica Lewinsky ruminates on the 25 years since her name popped up on a news alert outing her relationship with President Clinton. One thing she realized:

The Tonight Show With Jay Leno died in 2014. For me, not a day too soon. At the end of Leno’s run, the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University analyzed the 44,000 jokes he told over the course of his time at the helm. While President Clinton was his top target, I was the only one in the top 10 who had not specifically chosen to be a public person.

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