The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

One year later

A year ago today, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd under color of law:

The NAACP kicked off Tuesday by holding a moment of silence for Floyd at 9:29 a.m. on its Facebook page to mark the 9 minutes and 29 seconds Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck.

Shareeduh Tate, Floyd's cousin and president of the George Floyd Memorial Foundation, told CNN on Tuesday that the family feels uplifted by the racial reckoning, the conviction of Chauvin, and the federal indictment of the Chauvin and the other three officers involved in Floyd's death.

Tate said that while she had wanted to see the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed by today, the family would rather wait until Congress can pass a substantive bill that includes every provision.

It almost seems that not a lot has changed, though. I'm not convinced that policing is per se racist, though the data on police shootings show a pronounced bias against Native Americans and Black people. I also worry that in the current political climate, where an entire political party has abandoned reason and sees any criticism of police as unacceptable, we don't have the space needed to carry on a productive debate on policing.

But we've at least started the conversation. Who knows? In another 20 years we might have something approaching a more balanced view of force. Or we'll have Judge Dredd. Hard to say right now.

Can't find app with name "<function-name-here>"

I hope this helps someone else having this problem deploying a .NET function to Azure App Services.

At my day job, we created a new Azure directory and subscription for my group's product. As the product has gotten closer to release, we realized we needed a more complete separation from the company's Azure assets and our group's. So far, so good. I had some annoyances updating our deployment pipelines, but nothing I hadn't expected.

Then I tried to deploy our one function app. I followed the basic script in PowerShell:

Import-Module Az
Connect-AzAccount
CD c:\source\solution\project\bin\Debug\net5.0\
func azure functionapp publish function-name-dev

The script failed with: Can't find app with name "function-name-dev"

Undeterred, I modified the script:

Import-Module Az
Connect-AzAccount -Tenant 'guid' -SubscriptionId 'guid'
az account set --subscription 'guid'
CD c:\source\solution\project\bin\Debug\net5.0\
func azure functionapp publish function-name-dev

Same result. Googling and searching through Stack Overflow didn't help either. After a lot of experimentation, I finally got an error message that pointed me down the correct path, but only when I tried to create a new function app in the same subscription:

The following tenants require Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Use 'az login --tenant TENANT_ID' to explicitly login to a tenant.

And that was the solution. My new script, which worked fine, now looks like this:

Import-Module Az
Connect-AzAccount -Tenant 'guid' -SubscriptionId 'guid'
az login --tenant 'guid'
az account set --subscription 'guid'
CD c:\source\solution\project\bin\Debug\net5.0\
func azure functionapp publish function-name-dev

I may refine it further as I may have some redundancies in there. But I have now deployed the function app and tested it, much to my satisfaction.

Douglas Coupland is annoyed with Canada's government

The author (most notably of the generation-defining novel Generation X) wants Canada to follow the science and quit screwing over my generation:

People my age and younger got the leftovers – which is fine. AstraZeneca is a terrific vaccine, people! But people my age are used to leftovers. It’s the curse of being Gen X, and it’s not very often I ever discuss Gen X qua Gen X, but I think it’s called for here. For a generation that has grown up knowing their pensions will magically vanish the moment they retire, vaccine leftovers were yet more evidence that the statistical books never seem to balance in their favour and probably never will. When some provinces began turning off the AZ tap this week, I don’t think there was even one remotely surprised 50-year-old in the country.

The fact that the announcement of AZ’s removal from the medical landscape was driven by politics and ineptitude rather than science bugged me so much that I wrote my first ever comment on The Globe and Mail’s website (which counts as some sort of milestone in my life). It said: What? Vaccines are now suddenly magically à la carte? This whole thing is starting to feel like it’s being run by Grade 11 students doing a science project.

But Andrew Potter sees freedom in our generation getting ignored:

It is commonly argued that a generation is formed by the technological ecosystem in which it grows up, and while there’s obviously something to that, what is important for Gen X is not what our technology allowed us to do, but what it protected us from.

In particular, what we were protected from was surveillance. I don’t know a single person I grew up with who doesn’t thank their lucky stars that there were no cellphones with cameras around when we were growing up, that there was no Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or TikTok. I can’t imagine what it is like to grow up under the glaring distributed panopticon of social media, knowing that all your friends, everyone at your school, and even your parents are watching your every move, judging your every utterance.  

In retrospect, it is obvious that the Gen X obsession with authenticity was anxiety caused by the growing rumblings of a culture in transition. The old technological ecosystem that fuelled the counterculture was gone, but the new web-enabled environment that made authenticity irrelevant hadn’t quite yet arrived. Gen X was the last generation to possess genuine subcultures that were able to remain somewhat unmolested by the digital meat grinder.

That is why when you hear a Gen Xer talk about being the “latchkey” generation, they aren’t really complaining — they’re bragging. There’s another word for the neglect being described here, and that’s freedom.

I've watched that technological transformation from the inside, having had an online presence since 1986. My feeling: they're both right.

Draining the lake

Lake Michigan and Lake Huron water levels have dropped every month for the last 10, to about 60 cm below last July's record levels. The lake system is still about 60 cm above its mean level, but at least we can see our beaches again:

The receding water has been welcomed by some beach towns and lakefront parks that weathered destruction in recent years. A group of Great Lakes officials estimated at least $500 million of damage in cities last year.

The shift doesn’t mean shoreline communities are in the clear. Many are still working to preserve what’s left of disappearing bluffs, repair crumbling paths or get ahead of the next rise.

Changes in water level are driven by precipitation, runoff and evaporation. Lake Michigan topped the long-term average in 2014 and last year set a string of monthly records, hovering near the 1986 record high. Highs and lows have come and gone throughout the historical record, and climate change may bring increasing variability between the swings. But it’s still too early to say if the lower trend will continue.

The Park District has also, finally, repaired the fences at Montrose Beach, to the delight of lake-loving dogs all over the city.

Hiking

Cassie and I took on a stretch of the Ice Age Trail near La Grange, Wis., this afternoon:

She is snoring peacefully on the couch now, and probably will continue doing so for many hours.

Note to self: bring more water for the dog next hike.

How to talk to the vaccination-wary

I confess to some difficulty talking to people who exhibit willful irrationality. If you don't want to wear a mask or get a vaccine because you somehow equate that with a political party, I don't know what to tell you. But for the people who may just have some irrational fear without making a political statement about it, the New York Times has a helpful interactive training article for you.

In other news, an iceberg slightly larger than Long Island broke away from Antarctica this week. So that's fun.

Brooding about cicadas in suburban New York

Long Island went from idyllic farmland to completely urbanized in 75 years, thanks in part to Robert Moses inability (or unwillingness) to comprehend that any form of transport existed except automobiles. Massive, car-driven development spread inexorably down the Northern and Southern State Parkways, and the Long Island Expressway, covering all those farms and forests with concrete and Walmarts. Even when I spent four years of college there in the early 1990s, one could still find open space east of Ronkonkoma.

Alas, in the past 17 years, all that open space has disappeared, and with it the Brood X cicadas:

Development, pesticide use and the presence of invasive species are destroying historic populations of Brood X cicadas, while climate change spurs bugs from different broods to come up years early, experts say. The disruption of these cycles means some places that were expecting cicadas this year will miss out, while others may be surprised by an unscheduled emergence.

Although these changes are likely happening across the cicadas’ range, they’re particularly visible on Long Island, said Chris Simon, a professor at the University of Connecticut who has been studying cicadas for over 40 years. Long Island was once New York’s last remaining stronghold of Brood X. But the population there has declined in recent decades, and was nearly absent during the last mass emergence in 2004. At the same time, some of the area’s Brood XIV cicadas — scheduled to come up four years from now — may make an early appearance this year instead.

In the past, Long Island has been the easternmost place that can lay claim to this eminent brood. As far back as 1902, New York’s state entomologist recorded Brood X cicadas in both Suffolk and Nassau counties, said Dr. Simon, who has been studying cicadas on Long Island for over 40 years. Their reign continued through 1987....

The brood was absent from more places where it was expected, including in the towns of Shirley and Oakdale, and made only a brief showing in other locations, such as Connetquot State Park, a 3,700-acre reserve south of the Long Island Expressway, said Dr. Simon. Steep declines like this often lead to a complete disappearance, she said — without strength in numbers, the whole population can be devoured.

This year, Dr. Simon and other researchers are encouraging people in and around Long Island to go searching for the insects, and to use an app, Cicada Safari, to report any findings. If they do show up, it will likely be in early June. But she is not optimistic. “I’m afraid that they’re going to be completely gone,” she said.

Chicago's Brood XIII should emerge in three years. I can't wait. At least here, we haven't destroyed their habitat as thoroughly as Nassau and Suffolk Counties have destroyed Brood X's.

Wednesday evening roundup

Happy Wednesday! Here's what I'm reading before my 8pm meeting, now that my 6:30pm meeting just ended:

And finally, the New Yorker's Tom Papa introduces you to "asshole cat behaviors."

The walls close in a little

The New York Attorney General's office has tightened the screws on the Trump Organization:

"We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time," Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement.

James' years-long probe into Trump's charitable foundation led to its dissolution in 2018. More recently, her investigation into whether Trump's business had inflated the value of its assets for the purposes of tax breaks and loans came to a head in October when Eric Trump, the president's son and an executive at his business, sat for a pre-election deposition.

Aaron Blake speculates on what this could mean:

Perhaps the most significant consensus among former New York state prosecutors I reached out to is that it makes some kind of criminal charges appear more likely than previously known. That doesn’t mean those charges will definitely come or implicate the former president personally. But it’s the kind of statement that James’s office would have known full well would land with some force — and potentially create an expectation about where all this will lead.

Tax fraud would seem to potentially come into play here, given the extensive New York Times investigation into tax schemes Trump engaged in as far back as the 1990s — schemes the Times went as far as to say included “instances of outright fraud.” But the report also noted that much of what it described happened too long ago for criminal charges to be brought.

It’s also fair to ask why this statement was made public. Prosecutors generally don’t disclose such things and will wait for actual charges to be brought before publicly commenting. But in a high-profile case such as this, the former prosecutors say, it was potentially only a matter of time before such a phase of the investigation would be known publicly. The attorney general’s office notified the Trump Organization of the new phase last month, The Washington Post’s Shayna Jacobs and David A. Fahrenthold report.

I've consistently said I don't expect to see the XPOTUS behind bars, nor do I want that outcome. I think it sets a scary precedent for any democracy to jail a former head of government for anything short of violent crime. Don Junior, Jared, and Melania, however, should spend some time in Danbury. The New York AG and New York County DA may well send them to Queensboro instead.

Why do we go through this every year?

Washington Post columnist Helaine Olin argues for a simplified tax filing procedure in the US:

Filing taxes is a time-consuming, bureaucratic chore that the Internal Revenue Service estimates will take the typical American 11 hours. Nationwide, that works out to some 6 billion lost hours a year, according to T.R. Reid, author of the 2017 book “A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System.”

The thing is, filing taxes just doesn’t have to be this hard. In 36 countries, the nation’s tax agency sends eligible residents a pre-filled return, and asks them to sign if they agree with the amount that’s indicated is owed or should be credited to them. Japan does this. So do Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and others. A 2018 German study found that the pre-filled forms raise tax compliance.

So why not us, you ask?

The short answer: the United States took the British penchant for time-wasting activities and dialed it to 11. The longer answer might have something to do with Intuit's $5.7 million lobbying effort over the past two years.