The Daily Parker

It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election!

Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency:

The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.

This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.

Another likely beneficiary is the guy who told Trump to do this: David Sacks. You may know Sacks as the ardent Trump backer and frequent repeater of Kremlin talking points whom Trump named as his “Crypto Czar”, with the “Czar” part really making sense given Sacks’ beliefs. Sacks says that he sold all of his cryptocurrency before Trump took office, but we can’t verify that, because crypto is anonymous. We do know that Sacks’ venture capital firm — the stake in which Sacks has not said that he sold — invests in a crypto fund whose top five holdings are exactly the five cryptocurrencies that Trump wants the government to buy. Sacks is a really lucky dude! It’s like if I was named Blog Czar and then got the government to buy a billion I Might Be Wrong subscriptions, and to be clear: President Trump, that offer is very much on the table.

Molly White also has a few things to say on the subject, with less satire and more technical expertise.

Given the raging corruption coming from the top of the party, is it any surprise that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has cozy relationships with the military contractors her committee regulates?

Meanwhile...

• The S&P 500 index of large stocks fell 2% yesterday and 3.5% over the last week as the OAFPOTUS started the stupidest trade war in history with our three biggest trading partners.
• Who could have guessed that China's and Russia's foreign-intelligence services have ramped up efforts to recruit US government workers, now that so many of them are legitimately disgruntled? Who indeed.
• American Airlines has cut hundreds of flights from its summer schedule because of the Clown Prince of X illegally firing thousands of government employees.
• Yascha Mounk does not completely understand the new world order yet, but it seems clear to him that we're in a truly historical transition.
• Paul Krugman interviews Nathan Tankus, an expert on the COBOL code that runs the Federal Reserve and Treasury.
• Charles Marohn is infuriated by the OAFPOTUS rescinding Federal approval for the New York City congestion pricing plan, even though he found flaws in its implementation.

Finally, I was pleased to see that Amazon and MGM Studios have started development of a TV series based on the first novel in Iain M Banks' Culture series, Consider Phlebas. It's a fun novel, and a good introduction to the series—which makes sense as it's the first one he wrote. I hope it gets to production.

The US meeting with Russia and not Ukraine to discuss the fate of Ukraine seems unmistakably similar to the Molotov-Ribbentrop discussions in August 1939 that divvied up Poland between the Nazis and Stalin's Russia. The meeting in Riyadh between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seems more focused on a colonial-style mineral extraction concession for the US than on Ukrainian sovereignty. This comes just days after Vice President JD Vance channeled UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (a known Nazi sympathizer) in a speech in Munich just before meeting with actual Nazis.

("'I never thought leopards would eat my face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."—Adrian Bott)

Meanwhile, back home:

• The State Department has decided to cancel most of its news subscriptions, because why would our diplomats need to know what's going on in the world?
• Fortunately (for now), the OAFPOTUS violently dismantling the US government's bureaucracy has gotten in the way of him dismantling the regulations that he claims to hate, further showing (a) how fundamentally stupid he is and (b) how it has nothing to do with regulations.
• Apparently jealous of the OAFPOTUS's successful raiding of public funds for his own benefit, Argentine president Javier Milei and his friends appear to have raked in close to $100 million in what looks like a classic memecoin rug-pull.
• The Chicago City Council may vote today on a proposal to borrow $830 m in an issue that would not pay back principal until 2045, a structure that (a) would result in a constant cash-flow to the private investors of something like $80 m per year and (b) cost the city $2 bn once we finally pay it all back. It would be the dumbest thing the city's government has done since the parking-meter scam.
• Researchers have determined that both work-from-home and return-to-office have drawbacks and benefits, and that mandating all of one or the other isn't great for any company. (But we knew that, even if some CEOs didn't.)
• Beware anyone asking you to send a code that you see on the screen; this is a device-code authentication attack, which is increasing in popularity among your finer criminals.

Finally, one of my least-favorite Brews & Choos stops has threatened planned to open a new brewpub in Irving Park. Crust Brewing in Rosemont wants to bring the same hellish experience to the former Leader Bar at 3000 W Irving Park Rd. Yes, this is a B&C-qualifying location, but no, I won't review it until I run out of other things to review.

It seems like so much of the news I've read today concerns people behaving stupidly, but thinking they're behaving intelligently. Sadly, it's mostly the same group of people:

• James Fallows makes it clear the aviation accidents over the past few weeks are not the Administration's fault—but the ones a year from now will certainly be.
• Jeff Maurer likens Elon Musk's wrecking crew to the drunk and sleep-deprived Assemblée Nationale of 4 August 1789; you know, the one that led directly to the French Revolution.
• Josh Marshall theorizes that Musk has employed a bunch of 25-year-old incels to destroy the Government precisely because the infants have no fear of consequences.
• Paul Krugman thanks the OAFPOTUS for "making microbes great again."
• Economist Claudia Goldin has discovered an inverse relationship between fertility and sharing housework, which columnist Heather Long explains is the reason so many people in rich countries have decided not to have kids.
• Cranky Flier can't countenance Southwest Airlines making its first layoffs in history, and puts the blame squarely on the private equity firm they partnered with.

Finally, people in Bridgeport and other Southwest Side neighborhoods have fallen in love with a rotund beaver who lives with her family on the Chicago River. Some have suggested naming the beaver Lori Heavyfoot or Dam Ryan. I hope she doesn't meet up with one of the city's other charismatic megafauna...

It's hard to see the OAFPOTUS's actions towards our two biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, as in the interests of the United States. So far, the White House hasn't actually issued a (probably unlawful) order imposing steep tariffs that would undo our free-trade agreements, but just the threat has caused a lot of damage already:

As I wrote the other day, in the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low.

One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing — a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations’ borders.

But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on — that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate — that is, dis-integrate — reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.

And to think that many people imagined that Trump would be good for business.

We have, by a very narrow margin and with less than a majority of the vote, managed to put the most corrupt and possibly stupidest person in history into this office. If an adversary threatened to disrupt North American trade as much as this clown has, we'd threaten war.

And before you start wondering how long it will take for average Americans to get nervous, well, that's already happened: the only newly-inaugurated president in modern history with a lower approval rating was, of course, the same guy 8 years ago. (He has the highest disapprovals in history right now, though.)

Only 1,449 days to go...

I had about a half-dozen meetings this morning, including one that dragooned me five minutes before another meeting that I had to preside over. The consolations were (a) I took most of them from home, so (b) I got to walk Cassie in sunny, March-like 6°C weather, and (c) when I finally got to the office my view looked like this:

I've got two more meetings starting in half an hour before I can head back to my dog.

I'll deal with all the OAFPOTUS's chaos tomorrow.

While doing a routine upgrade of NuGet packages in Weather Now, I discovered that Montreal-based Xceed Software has acquired a component called Fluent Assertions. They claim they will "will continue to honour free licenses for open-source, non-commercial projects," but they also now spam log files every time the component is invoked with a "buy a license" message.

Well, I don't want all that log spam, I don't want to pay $130 a year for one testing component, and I have no idea how long they will honor the Apache-2.0 license that existed through v7.1 (released yesterday), so I just downgraded to v7.1. (Apache licenses are permanent, so as long as I'm happy staying at v7.1, the new commercial license doesn't apply.)

Also, as Devclass points out, "A common question is whether Fluent Assertions is sufficiently critical to survive as a commercial project. It is well liked, but relatively easy to replace with native .NET functionality that comes for free." So I will be looking into the equivalent packages soon, possibly this weekend when I'm stuck inside most of the time.

Bastards. I mean, I'm happy that the developers finally got paid for their work and all. Still: Bastards.

(Someone posted a bug in GitHub on the change, so if you want to see how many developers this change has angered just in the last 48 hours, it's worth a read.)

A friend pointed out that, as of this morning, we've passed the darkest 36-day period of the year: December 3rd to January 8th. On December 3rd at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the sun rose at 7:02 and set at 16:20, with 9 hours 18 minutes of daylight. Today it rose at 7:18 and will set at 16:38, for 9 hours 20 minutes of daylight. By the end of January we'll have 10 hours of daylight and the sun will set after 5pm for the first time since November 3rd.

It helps that we've had nothing but sun today. And for now, at least, we can forget about the special weather statement that just came out warning of snow and winds starting later tonight.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• Jennifer Rubin snarks that the media have just now noticed that President Biden's economic policies worked better than expected—certainly better than Canada's.
• The Dept of Justice has sued six large landlords for fixing rents using a controversial bit of market-analysis software.
• Josh Marshall points out that the fundamental business model of social media companies makes it nigh impossible for them to do any real content moderation.
• The wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes in Los Angeles County came from years of overdevelopment and months of drought.
• A zero-day exploit of Ivanti VPN appliances has already affected dozens of companies.

Finally, National Geographic explains how the two cups of tea I drink every day (three in the summer) will help me live to 107 years old.

My, we've had a busy day:

• President Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 Federal inmates in the largest single-day clemency in American history. Two of them stole millions in massive frauds against Illinois citizens. Josh Marshall doesn't see much clemency.
• Charles Sykes worries that neither major US political party has a clue how to fix our education systems (plural).
• Legalized sports betting has shifted billions from small punters to large corporations, which is why it was illegal for so long.
• Charles Blow muses about making friends after 50.
• Despite freaking out the usual car-besotted subjects, a plan to extend a protected bike lane in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Ill., will actually add parking spaces.
• A downtown Chicago office building constructed in 1928 will become 252 apartments under a plan that received City Council approval yesterday.

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?"

Before I bugger off to get at least a couple of daylight hours in this sunny, 22°C afternoon, here are the most interesting stories that popped up today:

• Two Boomer economists point out that the Boomers have made an art form of siphoning wealth from the younger generations, meaning we Gen Xers will have to work longer for lower Social Security (state pensions) payments. Typical.
• Chicago's meteorological summer was warmer and drier than normal, the 18th-warmest since 1871.
• Ravinia Brewing Company and Ravinia Festival have come to a settlement that requires the former to change its name, even though the neighborhood predates both of them.
• Police have finally identified a man who died on the Appalachian Trail in 1977.
• The wholesaler taking over the stores that Kroeger and Albertson's planned to divest in order to pass scrutiny for their merger thinks it got crappy stores in the bargain.

Finally, the Chicago White Sox have surpassed their team record for losses, going 31-108 through yesterday. If they lose 13 of the remaining 22 games—which would actually represent an improvement over their performance so far—they will surpass the 1962 New York Mets' record 120 losses in a season. For reasons passing understanding, they're still charging for tickets, with box seats going for $69 and some tickets as high as $309. They have lots of seats left, though, so maybe I'll just take the El down there this weekend to see the Athletics beat them?

Apparently everyone else got over Covid yesterday, too. Or they're just trying to make deadline before the holiday:

• Peter Hamby pulls the fire alarm after reading a leaked polling report showing President Biden's support slipping in key states after last week's debate catastrophe.
• Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe fumes that yesterday's decision on presidential immunity "reveals the rot in the system." Ruth Marcus simply calls the Republican majority on the Court "dishonorable."
• In her dissent in yesterday's presidential immunity case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I) skewered the Republican majority by quoting directly from the Dobbs decision that "[t]his official-acts immunity has ‘no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.’"
• Josh Marshall reminds our side that "[t]he election is about Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the two forces working to overthrow the American republic."
• The Court, meanwhile, declined (for now) to hear a challenge to Illinois' assault weapons ban, though both Justices Alito (R) and Thomas (R) said they can't wait to review it later.
• Paul Krugman would have you say what you want about the tenets of National Front, Dude, but at least it's an ethos.
• The tariffs against Chinese goods put in place by both the convicted-felon XPOTUS and President Biden have started to cost Chicago businesses real money.
• A volunteer group has formed to rescue drowned Divvy bikes from Lake Michigan.
• Chicago restaurant burglaries have jumped in the last two years.
• Hurricane Beryl, now about a day and a half from leveling Jamaica, has become the earliest Category 5 storm in history.
• My alma mater, Duke's Fuqua School of Business, has a new paper explaining why major airlines have switched back to buying planes after leasing them for decades.
• National Geographic explains why alcohol gets harder to clear from your system as you get older.

Finally, the Post analyzed a ton of weather forecasts and determined that forecasting Chicago weather is a lot harder than forecasting Miami's. The only glimmer of good news: today's 7-day forecasts are at least as accurate as the 3-day forecasts from the 1990s.