The Daily Parker

The Chicago Dept of Transportation this morning removed and (they claim) preserved the "Chicago Rat Hole" on the 1900 West block of Roscoe St. in the North Center neighborhood. I admit, I never saw the Rat Hole in the flesh (so to speak), but I feel its absence all the same.

Moving on:

• Three Republican Arizona state representatives voted with all 29 Democrats to repeal the state's 1864 abortion ban; the repeal now goes to the Arizona Senate.
• Monica Hesse reminds people who say it's sexist to advocate for US Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire before the end of President Biden's current term that advocates for former Justice Stephen Breyer to resign made much more noise.
• Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter cautions student protestors that blaming Jews for the actions of the Israeli government is crossing a line. Bret Stephens concurs, describing attacks on Jewish students that belie the "peaceful" label of the pro-Palestinian protests.
• NPR stops by historical markers at the side of the road, in all their raucous inaccuracy and frivolity. Like the 600 or so planted by the Daughters of the Confederacy, which offer even less accuracy and frivolity than most.
• Meanwhile, the New York Times tunes into the "crisis" at NPR, which has lost nearly a third of its audience since 2020.
• Four people and a horse needed medical treatment and several vehicles needed repairs in London this morning after five of the King's Household Cavalry mounts panicked and ran from a training exercise, making it from near Buckingham Palace all the way to St Paul's before the Met could corral them.

Finally, are you an extrovert, and introvert, and ambivert, an omnivert, or some other kind of green French thing? National Geographic explains the first four.

Except for the sun blinding me around 5:30 pm every day due to a quirk in my house's architecture (I will eventually fix it with window treatments), I love sunny spring days. Cassie and I have already spent almost an hour outside and we'll spend another 45 minutes or so when I get back from an odd music gig that I'll describe tomorrow or Monday.

I wanted to highlight just one story from earlier this week, by New Republic's Kate Aronoff, with the accurate and delightful headline "Anything Elon Musk can do a bus can do better:"

Whether on electrification or autonomous vehicles, Tesla has long been hailed as a company uniquely capable of revolutionizing transportation, with Elon Musk portrayed as the big brain in charge. A series of high-profile blunders, though—like Cybertrucks with stick accelerators and a wrongful death settlement—have cast doubt on Tesla’s capacity to speed the world toward an electrified future. Policymakers might want to start asking themselves: When it comes to creating a transportation system fit for our climate-changed twenty-first century, what can Elon Musk do that the humble city bus cannot?

Public buses are an unbeatable value. Here in New York City, $2.90 will get you between and within boroughs, usually just a few blocks from your door. A pilot program initiated last fall included one fare-free route in each borough, in the hopes of eventually making buses free throughout. Boston made a number of bus lines fare-free this year, as well. Olympia and many other Washington municipalities have embraced free buses throughout their entire transit system, following the example set in 2019 by Kansas City, Missouri, and Raleigh, North Carolina. Luxembourg offers free public transit nationwide, and several other countries offer free buses, trams, and trains to people under 18, students, and senior citizens.

The cheapest Tesla, by contrast, costs nearly $40,000, which isn’t counting the cost of insurance, financing, and all the other headaches involved in purchasing and owning a car. Elon Musk has allegedly scrapped plans to make what would have been Tesla’s most affordable offering yet, a smaller car slated to be priced at around $25,000. That announcement had already been delayed for several years, reportedly because Musk demanded that his engineers produce a vehicle without pedals or a steering wheel.

Finally, public buses offer something to the challenge of decarbonizing transportation that Elon Musk never can: scale. If the goal of decarbonized transit is to get as many people moving using as little carbon as possible, then it’s wildly more efficient to invest more public resources into electrifying and expanding mass transit options than in helping a billionaire sell more luxury items.

Aronoff doesn't even need to point out that Musk himself has never invented a single goddamned thing. He leveraged a family fortune made in Apartheid South Africa into controlling shares of several companies that eventually all failed, whether completely or just simply never lived up to the hype.

But Aronoff is right. I've visited London 20 times in the last 10 years and only twice have I had to resort to taking a hired car—once when the Southern Rail went on strike the day I flew into Gatwick last summer, and once when I was well pissed and didn't want to wait for a bus in the rain. Trains and buses cover the entire Southeast region, run all night in most cases, and don't cost all that much. Chicago has them too. Who needs a Tesla truck that will cut your fingers off if you try closing the trunk?

The older I get, the less human beings surprise me. Oh, individual people surprise me all the time, mainly because I have smart and creative friends. But groups of people? They're going to be unsurprising and kind of dumb almost always.

Cases in point:

• The Arizona Supreme Court's decision allowing enforcement of a pre-statehood, Civil War-era abortion law looks even worse when you learn what else is in the 1864 Howell Code.
• Chicago's Loop neighborhood has 6,000 unsold luxury condos, with no more new projects underway, in part because developers failed to predict that 3% interest rates wouldn't last forever. This, to me, looks like failing to predict it will rain in Seattle eventually, because it hasn't rained in a week.
• Forget Detroit and Houston; even ultra-wealthy municipalities like Santa Clara, Calif., have obstinately failed to predict that they would ever have to pay ruinous costs to maintain all the infrastructure they built last century.
• Young women embracing the role of "tradwife" (i.e., becoming a 1950s-style woman of leisure or "stay-at-home-girlfriend") seem destined to unhappy long-term consequences of becoming someone's accessory.
• Author John Scalzi provides advice which even he thinks aspiring authors should already know: don't fabricate quotes by living authors to sell your new manuscript because you will get caught.

Finally, author Gary Shteyngart floats off on the maiden voyage of Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever built, and finds what can only be described as a very specific slice of humanity that would make the Golgafrinchans proud.

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Anyway, here are a couple other stories from the last couple of days:

• A New York appellate judge took all of two hours to toss out a frivolous lawsuit by the XPOTUS seeking to get his gag order removed in the Stormy Daniels case, bringing the world just that little bit more relief from the XPOTUS's endless polysyllabic farts. Jennifer Rubin lists the reasons this case might even stop those noisome emanations for good.
• The Arizona Supreme Court voted 4-2 to allow enforcement of a territorial (i.e., before Arizona became a state) law banning most abortions from the moment of conception that predates the famous gunfight in Tombstone by 17 years. (NB: most Arizona voters favor legal abortions.)
• MP William Wragg (Hazel Grove, Manchester) got kicked out of the Conservative Party for sending other MPs' personal phone numbers to a spear phisher, along with photos of his junk, after falling for a Grindr honeypot.
• Paul Krugman wonders about the persistence of people reporting negative feelings about the economy even though they and all their friends and family are doing great.
• Car and Driver columnist Ezra Dyer identifies the main problem electric cars have getting people to buy them: they're boring.

Finally, Ohio State wildlife and ecology professor Stanley Gehrt has written a book I will have to stop myself (for now) from adding to my ever-expanding shelf of books I need to read. Gehrt spent decades studying Chicago's coyote population and how well they co-exist with us, tagging more than 1,400 coyotes and collaring another 700.

My only complaint about the animals is they don't eat enough rabbits. I live near several suspected dens, the closest only about 400 meters from my front door. I can't wait to read the book.

As for the risks coyotes pose to humans, he lets us know who the real enemy is: “If you were to ask me, ‘What’s the most dangerous animal out there [for urban dwellers]?’, it’s white-tailed deer,” Gehrt said.

A 4.8-magnitude earthquake rattled Hundterdon County, N.J., about 45 minutes ago:

The U.S.G.S. reported that the earthquake’s epicenter was in Lebanon, N.J., about 50 miles west of Manhattan. The shaking was reportedly felt in cities from Philadelphia to Boston.

Several East Coast airports issued ground stops halting air traffic in the immediate aftermath.

The New York Police Department said it had no immediate reports of damage, but sirens could be heard all over the city.

Having experienced a couple of magnitude 4+ earthquakes in California, I know how alarming they are, but also how minor. So it's funny to me watching New York and Philadelphia freak out over this little thing in the same way that it amused me when Raleigh, N.C., got 10 mm of snow while I was there. Even moreso because, according to the USGS, the earthquake hit Manhattan with something like a 3.0 magnitude or less—about the shaking you get from a trip on the #7 Subway.

I especially like the Times reporting that "sirens could be heard all over the city," which, if you've ever spent half an hour in New York, seems akin to "trees could be seen all over the forest."

I hope everyone in the affected region safely rights their lawn chairs and stops their hanging plants from swinging before too long.

I'm almost done with the new feature I mentioned yesterday (day job, unfortunately, so I can't describe it further), so while the build is running, I'm queuing these up:

• Philip Bump analyzes the New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan's dismissal of the XPOTUS's bogus immunity claim.
• Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) told reporters he's done everything he promised to do when he took office a year ago, at which point the reporters no doubt collectively cocked their eyebrows.
• Molly White doesn't think Sam Bankman-Fried going to prison will make much of a difference in the crypto industry, especially with the abject stupidity of its investors.
• A section of journalist Megan Kimble's new book City Limits reviews how Patrick Kennedy led the fight to demolish Interstate 345 in Dallas.
• Daniel Herriges argues that not all cities can fix their housing problems the same way.
• Are dog DNA tests worth it? (My vet famously told me "it's very likely to say you have a dog.")
• The US Office of Science and Technology Policy has directed NASA to define Coordinated Lunar Time that takes into account the fact that time moves faster there.

All right! The build pipelines have completed successfully, so I will now log off my work laptop and order a pizza.

We have a truly delightful mix of light rain and snow flurries right now that convinced me to shorten Cassie's lunchtime walk from 30 minutes to 15 minutes to just 9 minutes each time I came to a street corner. I don't even think I'll make 10,000 steps today, because neither of us really wants to go outside in this crap.

I'm also working on a feature improvement that requires fixing some code I've never liked, which I haven't ever fixed because it's very tricky. I know why I made those choices, but they were always the lesser of two evils.

Anyway, elsewhere in the world:

• Jonathan Pie rants about Scotland's new hate-crime law that has everyone from civil liberties groups to JK Rowling up in arms.
• Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) signed off on four office-to-residence projects on LaSalle Street in the Loop. (It's the picturesque street featured in one of The Dark Knight's best stunts.)
• Four Chicago restaurants made the James Beard Awards finals. (I've only been to one of them, sadly.)
• Related to that (if you think about it), Chicago will see its first sanctioned Chicago River swim in a century on September 22nd, over 50 years after the Clean Water Act took effect.
• Vitalii Kovalev, executive chef at several haute cuisine restaurants in New York and Florida turned out to be a Russian spy, who later came down with Havana Syndrome.

Finally, the cancellation of the UK's HS-2 project north of Birmingham has left more than 50 homes empty for two years. Can't think why the affected constituencies have flipped from Tory to Labour, can you?

The Francis Scott Key bridge carrying I-695 southeast of Baltimore collapsed overnight after a container ship collided with one of the support pylons:

Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed early Tuesday after a container ship struck a support column, sending at least seven cars into the Patapsco River, launching a search-and-rescue operation and prompting Gov. Wes Moore to declare a state of emergency.

In a news conference just a few hours after the 1:20 a.m. collision, Baltimore Fire Department Chief James Wallace said authorities are “still very much in an active search and rescue posture,” noting they are searching for “upwards of seven individuals” and that sonar has detected the presence of vehicles in the water.

There was no indication that the event was intentional, Wallace said.

Authorities have not determined the cause, but U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin told The Baltimore Sun in a phone interview that indications point to the vessel losing power, causing it to lose steering.

“What’s been indicated is the vessel lost power, and when you lose power you lose steering,” Cardin said. “But they’re doing a full investigation.”

Video of the accident shows the ship losing power twice and before turning hard starboard directly into the pylon. Engineers who viewed the video said the collapse seemed inevitable once the collision. The NTSB is investigating.

I've got a little time before dinner, just enough to post this:

I didn't collect any snake bites, scorpion stings, or exploding cactuses, but I think I did get a nice sunburn. I'll find out tomorrow.

Before I take Cassie on yet another 30-minute walk (how she suffers!), I'm going to clear some links:

• Julia Angwin asks the same thing a couple of my friends have asked: why is Congress talking about banning TikTok instead of, you know, governing? (tl;dr: Republicans, who control the house, really don't want to govern.)
• Speaking of sclerotic government, Paul Krugman reminds you that the Republican Party really does want to take away Social Security and Medicare, even as our closest friends and allies guarantee that everyone has social security and medical care.
• WTF is going on with Aaron Rodgers, and has he always been this way?
• Despite having fewer electrified rail miles than Iran, the United States actually has seen record passenger rail miles travelled this year.
• Portland, Ore., has passed a ban on gas-powered leaf blowers, with a phase-out to start in 2026. Oh, would Chicago be so progressive...
• Sierra Jones, writing for Strong Towns, provides five good reasons why we should end highway expansion.
• The Atlantic's Jonathan Haidt warns that we need to change the way children interact with their phones, and quickly.

OK, Cassie has roused herself, and probably needs to pee. Off we go.