The Daily Parker

Getting ready for a work trip on Monday plus (probably) having to do a demo while on the work trip means I spent most of the day getting ready for the demo. In a bit of geography fun, because the participants in the demo will be in six different time zones from UTC-7 (me) to UTC+10 (the client), I got the short straw, and will (probably) attend the demo at 3:30 am PDT.

I say "probably" because the partners on the call may take mercy on me and let me brief them instead of monitoring the technology in the actual meeting. Probably not, though.

So in this afternoon's roundup of news and features, I'll start with:

• Teresa Carr's report in Undark explaining how people in "eccentric time localities" (i.e., on the western edges of time zones) experience negative effects that people east of them don't.
• President Biden's budget proposal includes a $350 million grant to extend the CTA Red Line.
• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the country's most-senior Jewish official, gave a scathing speech in the Senate this morning calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) to resign and hold elections. Josh Marshall puts this in context. (tl;dr: it's a big deal, and Schumer is really the only one in Congress with the heft and history with Israel to make this speech.)
• US Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who faces 18 felony counts in Federal court, may run for re-election as an independent so that he can use his campaign funds to pay his legal bills. Why anyone would give him money to do this I cannot determine.
• Chevrolet and other car manufacturers routinely hand over data about how you drive to a company that then hands that data to your auto insurer, because the US does not yet have anything like the GDPR.
• Julia Ioffe outlines how Ukraine can (sort of) win against Russia if it can hold out until 2025.
• Hopewell Brewing and other Illinois craft brewers have started selling THC-infused beer, taking advantage of a loophole in both the state's brewing and cannabis laws.

I will now check the weather radar to see how wet I'm going to get on the way home...

I'm on hold with my bank trying to sort out a transaction they seem to have deleted. I've also just sorted through a hundred or so stories in our project backlog, so while I'm mulling over the next 6 months of product development, I will read these:

• Via Schneier, credit-reporting service Experian patched a security hole in December that allowed anyone to view someone's credit report with "the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number."
• It turned out, an exciting software deployment caused the NOTAM system outage yesterday. (This is why I work very hard to have boring software deployments.)
• Tom Nichols finds it amazing that George Santos (R-NY) is actually a member of Congress.
• Julia Ioffe shakes her head at the permanent crisis Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) engineered for himself.
• Amanda Carpenter tries to see into the bottlenecks that bollocksed up our security services on January 6th.
• Speaking of bottlenecks, the Chicago Transit Authority has decided to "fix" the "ghost bus" problem by eliminating a quarter of its scheduled bus runs.
• Satellite photos show dramatically increased activity around funeral homes in China, belying the Chinese government's Covid death statistics.
• Soulless corporation Hasbro has turned its fangs to Dungeons & Dragons after they determined the game was "undermonetized." I swear on my autographed 2nd Edition Player's Handbook that I will write a longer post about how corporate copyright terms must be shortened to encourage  future creativity as the founders clearly stated in the Constitution.
• Frank Bruni looks at Noma's closing with relief. (I also have not enjoyed my 3-star restaurant experiences nearly as much as the 2- and 1-stars.)
• Ever see a moose shed its antlers? You'll be as surprised as the moose.

And my bank's customer service finally got back to me with the sad news that the thing I wanted them to fix was, and we are so sorry, it turns out, your fault. Fie.

I've been meaning to post this photo from July. No story behind it; I just think it's cool.

The Chicago Transit Authority has concluded a deal worth up to $1.4 bn for 850 new rail cars:

The CTA’s board Wednesday approved the largest single purchase of rapid transit cars in Chicago history, giving the contract to a Chinese rail manufacturer that has promised to build a final assembly plant on the city’s Far South Side.

CTA officials said riders will see several major improvements when the prototype 7000-series cars arrive in late 2019. There will be full-width on-board LED screens capable of giving both of automated time and stop information, and real-time transit information in the event of delays or reroutes.

When the 7000-series cars are delivered in 2024, CTA will have the newest fleet of rapid transit cars in the nation, according to Bonds. He said the average age of a CTA ‘L’ car will be 13 years. By comparison, Boston has an average fleet age of 27 years, Washington, D.C. averages 25 years, New York averages 22 years and San Francisco averages 18 years.

The first prototypes should roll onto CTA tracks in October 2019.