The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime.
Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these:
Finally, a friend recently sent me a book I've wanted to read for a while: The Coddling of the American Mind, which civil-liberties lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt expanded from their September 2015 Atlantic article. I have noticed that people born after 1995 don't seem to have the same resilience or tolerance for nuance that even people born a few years earlier have. Lukianoff and Haidt make an interesting case for why this is. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I finish.
Before I link to anything else, I want to share Ray Delahanty's latest CityNerd video that explores "rural cosplaying." I'll skip directly to the punchline; you should watch the whole thing for more context:
Elsewhere,
There is some good news today, though. In the last 6½ hours, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters rose almost 9°C (15°F), to an almost-balmy -3.5°C. The forecast says it'll keep rising another 12°C or so through Sunday. So our first cold snap of the winter appears to be behind us.
I just had a hilarious meeting with a vendor.
We (at my day job) use a JavaScript library for a small but useful feature in our application. We've used it for probably the app's entire 10 year lifespan and haven't given it a second thought. Recently, a security issue showed up on a routine scan, implicating the (obsolete) version we use. So we have to get the latest version, and company policy requires us to get a commercial license to protect our own IP.
So we got in touch with the vendor, which took some doing because this library has existed for such a long time and passed through so many owners.
First problem: the vendor's sales guy didn't have the first clue what our app does, even when explained three different ways. I feel like I spread a little knowledge into the world when I spelled "actuary" for him. I hope he reads at least the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article.
Second problem: after I guessed (inaccurately) how many actual customers use the app, he threw out a license fee of $12,000 per year. I had to choke back actual laughter. I said "well, that's not what we were expecting; are you sure that's the number you want me to take back to our head of engineering?"
In fact, our license costs would probably wind up around $2,000 per year. But given that an entire library of tools like Syncfusion offers would only cost $3,600 per year and would give us all kinds of bells and whistles, not to mention an actual support organization and frequent, predictable upgrades, even that seems high.
So, in conclusion, if you produce a tiny JavaScript library whose functionality can be found in a few dozen other libraries out there, you may want to reconsider requesting a license fee so high that the customer's only rational action would be to swap your library out for another one. If it takes one of our developers two entire days to put in a new library, it would still be cheaper than the requested license fee.
Remember: price is a function of supply and demand, not of wishful thinking.
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?"
Two stories I mentioned previously have updates today:
As long as I've got five minutes before my next meeting, I also want to spike these two for reading later on:
- William Langewische goes deep into the Proud Prophet war game in 1983 that demonstrated the frightening speed that a conventional war in Europe could escalate into total nuclear annihilation.
- A bridge closure in Winnepeg, Man., has allowed the city to redirect some funds to other basic services that it struggles to pay for after years of sprawling infrastructure spending.
Time for my morning stand-up meeting.
Grocery giant Kroger has long drooled over acquiring Albertsons, for the simple reason that competition drives prices towards equilibrium and away from rent-seeking. When Kroger published the list of (Albertsons-owned) Jewel-Osco and (Kroger-owned) Mariano's stores that would remain open in Chicago, magically most of the Mariano's stores didn't make the cut—including the big one just 400 meters from my house.
Today, US District Court Judge Adrienne Nelson (I-OR) blocked the merger, probably killing it for good:
In a decision filed in Oregon federal court Tuesday, Nelson found in favor of the US Federal Trade Commission. The agency had argued that the proposed tie-up violates US antitrust law and that a divestiture of hundreds of stores to C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc. wouldn’t do enough to replace the lost competition.
Nelson’s decision is a major victory for the FTC and its outgoing Chair Lina Khan, who came under harsh criticism from conservatives and business groups for stepped-up antitrust enforcement under the Biden administration.
Ultimately, both chains will likely close some stores, but based on their own independent analyses aimed at comparative advantage, not based on a unified analysis aimed at rent-seeking. This is a good result.
The planet just had its second-warmest November in recorded history, just a hair under last year's record-warmest:
Last year was the hottest on record due to human-caused climate change coupled with the effects of an El Nino. But after this summer registered as the hottest on record — Phoenix sweltered through 113 consecutive days with a high temperature of at least 37.7°C — scientists were anticipating that 2024 would set a new annual record as well.
In November, global temperatures averaged 14.10°C. Last year's global average temperature was 14.98°C. Through November, this year's average global temperature is 0.14°C above the same period last year.
Barring something truly catastrophic in the next three weeks, 2024 will be the warmest year on record, worldwide. And still, Chicago's weather over the next 72 hours will not feel like warm:
Temps return closer to normal for early December on Tuesday and Wednesday, then the real cold air settles in overnight Wednesday into Thursday morning. By the Thursday morning commute, air temps are projected to be in the single digits [Fahrenheit], with wind chills dipping to around -30°C in some locations.
The forecast this close to Lake Michigan predicts slightly warmer temperatures than inland, if you consider that -14°C is, in fact, slightly warmer than -17°C. And yet the medium-range forecast stubbornly predicts a warm, dry week before Christmas:
Weird weather indeed.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran an interactive feature showing you the walkability of your neighborhood, in average minutes of travel time (by any method) to get things you need. They divided most metro areas into 200-meter hexagons and evaluated three criteria.
My current hexagon comes in at 8.2 minutes. The one I lived in a decade ago, in Lincoln Park, is at 5.2 minutes. The best scores of places I've lived in are Brooklyn (4.8 minutes) and Chicago's Near North Side (4.2 minutes). The specific part of the specific suburb where I grew up is the only bit of the town that shows up as blue, with a score of 13.6 minutes.
I could play with this for hours.
Incidentally, the absolute worst place I ever had the pleasure of living was Mason, Ohio, on a project in late 2010. Mason is so bad, in fact, that the Post interactive map doesn't even attempt to measure it.
Today may wind up being the last nice day of 2024, even though long-range forecasts suggest next week may have unseasonably warm and dry weather as well. Yesterday had nicer weather than today, with the temperature hitting 13°C under sunny skies. Yesterday was also the monthly Dog Day at Morton Arboretum in Chicago's southwest suburbs. And one of my friends has a membership.
We took the girls on the longest possible loop through the grounds, 8.7 km, in just over an hour and a half:
Sadly, we were so busy enjoying the day that we forgot to take pictures.
The next Dog Day is January 19th. Given Chicago's normal weather that time of year, we may skip it. Then again, both Kelsey and Cassie really enjoy snow.
Stunning developments in the last 48 hours as Syrian rebels have taken Damascus and dictator Bashar al-Assad appears to have fled the country:
Mr. al-Assad’s departure after rebels opposed to his rule stormed across the country in a lightning offensive was an earthshaking moment in the history of Syria, which has been ruled by his family with an iron fist since the early 1970s. It marked a dramatic breakthrough for rebel factions in Syria that have been trying to unseat him for more than a decade, much of which was marked by a devastating civil war.
For many in Syria, Mr. al-Assad’s fall was a moment filled with hope as they no longer feared the regime that had used oppressive tactics to quash their freedoms. But it was also rife with uncertainty over who will rule Syria next and raised fears of a power vacuum in a country that has been rived with competing factions vying for control of different areas of territory.
The events capped a startling two weeks in which the coalition of rebel groups that had been pinned down in a small corner of Syria’s northwest swept through the country’s major cities, shattering a stalemate in Syria’s 13-year civil war.
The biggest factors in the dramatic shift in power appear to be both Russia and Iran over-extending their own forces and pulling out of Syria:
Hezbollah, the Shia Lebanese movement long backed by Iran in their shared fight against Israel, miscalculated in coming to Hamas’s aid in the war in Gaza by opening a front on the UN-demarcated blue line that separates the Lebanese from their Israeli neighbours.
After almost a year of tit-for-tat cross-border attacks that displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, Israel stepped up its campaign in September. It managed to wipe out much of Hezbollah’s command structure in airstrikes, including its longtime secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, and drove the group’s fighters away from the demarcation zone in a ground offensive.
Assad’s fall effectively severs the weapons, materiel and personnel route from Tehran to Hezbollah, particularly if Syrian Kurdish forces, which have expanded their control of the desert border between Syria and Iraq, remain in position with US backing. Hezbollah, already isolated, will be further weakened, making it more vulnerable to Israeli attack or infiltration.
The rebels promise to have free and fair elections as soon as possible. That would be the best outcome, however unlikely.