The sun passed directly overhead the equator just past 4am Chicago time, marking what many people call the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. And because it's March in Chicago, this is what Cassie and I squished through on her way to dog school this morning:
And this was the view from my train into the Loop half an hour later:
Of course, this being March, I can see from my office window that the sun is about to come out and melt every last snowflake from the ground before I pick Cassie up from dog school:
Let me zoom in and enhance, because it may not be clear what's going on here:
The area east (to the right) of the blue line is cloudy; to the west it's completely clear. The white stuff you see between the black lines is snow, which will almost entirely melt because of the clear skies and warming temperatures. It should get up to 4°C today and 13°C tomorrow--more than enough heat to let us forget this unfortunate precipitation ever happened. In fact, the temperature didn't even fall below freezing at Inner Drive Technology WHQ overnight, halting its descent at 0.1°C and holding steady under the clouds.
Ah, spring!
It wouldn't be a day ending in "y" without people looking at some stupid thing the OAFPOTUS said and asking "why?" Or, you know, lots of people:
Finally, not that I complain about the weather enough already, but just look at the cold front that came through yesterday around 7:30pm:
I got caught outside wearing just a sweater and was quite unhappy. As in every March, we just want warmer weather already. Like, you know, yesterday afternoon.
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?
Stuff to read:
- Forgetting (or just plain ignorant) that we have a Coast Guard better suited to the task of guarding our coasts, the OAFPOTUS has ordered the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely to the Texas-Mexico border.
- The OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X, apparently not seeing the connection between weather forecasters and weather forecasts, have illegally fired 10% of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff just as a violent tornado outbreak killed 40 people in the Midwest and South.
- The administration's attacks on universities fit the Orban plan of creating a failed democracy, so naturally the OAFPOTUS has doubled down on them.
- Krugman points out that all of the above administration malfeasance has had a depressing effect on the US economy by reducing demand for our key exports, not least of which includes the $50 billion foreigners used to spend to get American educations. (He also has a good, long explanation of how inflation works, if you subscribe.)
- Surprising no one but still an illegally-targeted exercise of Federal power, the Federal Communications Commission has demanded to see the contracts between a number of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System stations and their acknowledged donors.
- The Waterbeach development outside Cambridge, England, has a new car-free housing complex—though it's still a 10 kilometer walk from the nearest railway station.
- Pilot Patrick Smith wishes the public would have a better sense of perspective about the safety of air travel, while acknowledging that it has seemed a bit rockier than usual.
Finally, thanks to reduced funding and deferred maintenance, the Chicago El has seen slow zones balloon from 13% of its tracks to 30% since 2019. Fully 70% of the Forest Park branch has reduced speed limits, making the trip from there to downtown take over an hour. But sure, let's keep funding below the minimum needed to function, and keep the CTA, Metra, and Pace all separate so they can each fail in their own ways.
Who doesn't like the fun and adventure of spring weather in Chicago? I mean, you don't see temperature graphs like this coming from Los Angeles:
At 5:07 pm on Friday—only about 40 hours ago—it was 23.3°C, I had all my windows open, and I had a polo shirt on when I walked Cassie a few minutes later. Now it's 1.2°C, the temperature has dropped steadily since 3pm yesterday, and I'm about to put on a winter coat because it's bloody snowing.
This week we'll continue to whipsaw around the freezing mark, with forecast high temperatures of 11°C tomorrow and 18°C on Tuesday, followed by forecast lows of -1°C Wednesday night and 0°C on Thursday night.
Eventually we'll have consistently warm temperatures, and in fairness the snow isn't sticking. But March really knows how to torture us.
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.
It's 21°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and 22°C at O'Hare right now. In addition to being the normal high temperature for May 20th, that reading at O'Hare is the warmest since 11pm on October 30th. The forecast for O'Hare predicts a high near 26°C, which is normal for June 10th.
Which is all a long way of saying: I'm about to change into a polo shirt, take Cassie for a walk, and open every window in my house—not necessarily in that order.
By the way, the eclipse last night was really cool. I only wish I could have fallen back asleep more quickly after getting up to view it.
When the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X turned their attention to the Environmental Protection Agency this week, it hit Chicago almost immediately:
President Donald Trump this week ordered closures of offices at the Environmental Protection Agency that help low-income communities overwhelmed with pollution.
It’s unclear how many positions will be cut in Chicago, but union officials estimate it may affect 20 to 30 of the roughly 1,000 EPA regional employees. Most significantly, the order ends a practice of “environmental justice” at the agency that has responded to people threatened by pollution in urban and rural areas.
“Environmental justice simply means ensuring the communities most disproportionately impacted by pollution are protected,” said Nicole Cantello, president of the union representing EPA employees in Chicago and across the Midwest. “The core mission of the EPA is simple: Protecting human health and the environment.”
Of course the Republicans want to cut these programs: it will allow their friends in polluting industries to create more externalities. Or, rather, to return to the way it was before the EPA existed, when industries happily shifted their environmental remediation costs to the public.
As an illustration, here's a photo I took 40 years ago this week:
Notice the lovely, warm colors behind Lauren. That's not an artifact of Kodachrome or of the scan; that's what the air around Chicago looked like in 1985. Since then, those orange skies have completely disappeared (except when we get hit with wildfire smoke from out west), and we all breathe a lot easier. That's what the EPA and the Clean Air Act did.
When anyone lies that the EPA "costs too much," get the person lying to you to admit that deaths and illnesses that result from pollution cost a lot more in the aggregate. That's the whole point of externalities. And that's what the OAFPOTUS wants to bring back.
It seems Elon Musk tanking Tesla's brand value may lead to some very bad consequences for him and for the car company he pretends to run:
Donald Trump transformed the White House into a car dealership to save Elon Musk’s floundering Tesla stock—to keep him from defaulting on his massive loans.
Trump took a shot at being a shady car salesman Tuesday during a press event for Tesla at the White House. The president posed for photos behind the wheel of a Tesla he apparently can’t drive with a grinning Musk, remarked with astonishment that “everything’s computer” in the futuristic vehicles, and even read from what appeared to be a sales pitch sheet listing prices for different Tesla models.
Trump’s rather unpresidential measures to boost Tesla’s floundering stock could serve a greater purpose: keeping the not-so liquid Musk from defaulting on his loans.
In a 2024 SEC filing, Musk was listed as holding a whopping 238,441,261 shares of Tesla stock that were “pledged as collateral to secure certain personal indebtedness.” At the time, he held 715,022,706 shares in total, according to the filing, meaning that roughly one third of Musk’s shares were serving as collateral for his loans.
The Daily Show had a ball with this.
In all seriousness, though, it highlights Musk's crashing lack of qualifications for the job—any job, really. Two SpaceX rockets blew up in quick succession this year, Xitter is destroyed, and who even thinks about the Boring Company anymore?
Musk is the greatest living advertisement for a real inheritance tax we have had since the House of Bourbon.