The Daily Parker

Two articles came out today about dogs. The first, in the New York Times, explores how dogs became so indiscriminately friendly:

In the early 2000s, when Dr. [Clive] Wynne began research on dogs, one of his experiments was a follow-up on the work of Dr. [Brian] Hare who had concluded that dogs were better than wolves or other animals at following human directions. In particular, dogs followed human pointing better than other animals. Dr. Wynne and Monique Udell, an animal behaviorist at Oregon State University, expected to confirm Dr. Hare’s findings.

The wolves they chose to work with were hand-raised and socialized at Wolf Park, in Lafayette, Ind. Dr. Wynne said he found the wolves were as good at following human pointing as the best pet dogs.

Dr. Hare and his colleagues responded by questioning whether the experiments were really comparable, maintaining that dogs have an innate ability to follow human pointing without the special attention the wolves were given. The debate continues.

The second part of Dr. Wynne’s argument has to do with how social dogs are. There is no question that they bond with people in a way that other canines do not. Dr. Wynne recounted an experiment showing that as long as puppies spend 90 minutes a day, for one week, with a human any time before they are 14 weeks old, they will become socialized and comfortable with humans.

The Washington Post reported on economics research that put the economic value of a dog at about $10,000:

For the study, the authors asked nearly 5,000 dog owners about their willingness to pay for a hypothetical vaccine that would reduce their dog’s risk of death from a particular canine virus from 12 percent to 2 percent in a given year.

Rather than simply ask, “How much would you be willing to pay” for such a vaccine, respondents were given specific price points, ranging from $5 to $3,000, and asked if they whether they would be willing to pay that amount.

The end result: a distribution of nearly 5,000 responses that allowed the researchers to identify an average acceptable price point of somewhere between $500 and $900. That’s the cost, in other words, of a 10 percentage point mortality reduction for a dog.

The study's authors intended the $10,000 figure as an approximation. I can tell you, however, that in the year from April 2018 to March 2019, my dog cost considerably more than $10,000. (I'll have the exact figure this weekend.)

Let's see, where to begin?

• The UK House of Lords today agreed to progress the Benn Bill, clearing the way for it to go to the Queen as early as Monday.
• Boris Johnson's brother resigned from Parliament citing a conflict between family and country.
• Yascha Mounk calls Johnson's prorogation of Parliament "the most dangerous assault on Britain's institutions in living memory."
• Political scientist Will Jennings tries to find the Brexit option most palatable to the "median voter."
• Sterling rose to a 3-week high, $1.2319, as traders breathed a sigh of relief that Brexit may be delayed.
• In the same magazine, James Fallows points out that the Fall of Rome "wasn't that bad."
• A Federal employee has come forward with "credible allegations" of misconduct in the annual, legally-mandated federal tax audits of the President and Vice President.
• Bruce Schneier calls out a company called Crown Sterling for being "complete and utter snake oil."

Finally, RawStory has a collection of responses to the President's Sharpie-altered weather map. (This is not, however, the first time the Administration has tried to make one of its Dear Leader's errors be true.) Enjoy.

I'll circle back to a couple of these later today. But at the moment, I've got the following queued up for my lunch hour:

• The Washington Post charitably describes yesterday's press conference in France as "a glimpse into Trump's unorthodox mind." As in, he lied through the whole thing.
• MSNBC says the G7 as a whole (which ended in the aforementioned presser) shows that other world leaders have learned to manipulate the president pretty well.
• Brazil, meanwhile has become the latest country to discover that authoritarian leaders don't know what they're doing and cover it up with bluster and blame-shifting. Oh, and corruption.
• And when those authoritarian leaders (and wannabes) tank the economy, millennials will, once again, get the worst of it. (Though we Xers aren't exactly raking it in either.)
• Via Schneier, Lawfare raises the alarm about the dangers of fake scientific research.
• Adam Gopnik asks, are spies worth it?
• Meanwhile, Riz Virk argues that we need to figure out if we're in a simulation.
• Finally, Microsoft's Raymond Chen takes us back to the days when software used to cost manufacturers a dollar a byte. (That's around when TV producers paid about $1 per foot, or 2/3 of as second, for film.)

That's enough of a queue for now.

...I might have time to read all of these:

• President Trump's new rule, announced by acting USCIS chief Ken Cuccinelli, could radically change who gets to become an American.
• This week is the 10th anniversary of Kanye West's unpardonable dick move against Taylor Swift.
• The UK banned a Philadelphia cream cheese advert because it portrayed a gender stereotype.
• David Dudley argues that the bad mayor in Stephen Spielberg's 1975 movie Jaws explains "all I really needed to know about cities."
• Blogger Charles Phipps provides 50 bits of evidence that we're now living in a Cyberpunk future.
• Ross Douthat argues that sometimes—albeit rarely—you need to take conspiracy theories seriously.
• Peter Brannen points out that, at some point our entire history will be a few millimeters of rock under an ocean, so debating the "anthropocene" is kind of silly.
• Apparently, Ayn Rand has a recruiting problem.
• Fox and Friends doesn't really understand how tariffs work, even though the network they work for seems to get it.
• Rob Sylvan has some great tips for using Adobe Lightroom.

And now, back to work.

The President's properties have fallen on hard times, thanks mostly to the President's politics and his childrens' incompetence:

The PGA Tour pulled out of Doral during the 2016 campaign after the World Golf Championship had trouble finding a sponsor. Cadillac had quit; speculation abounded that no new brand wanted to be associated with a Trump golf course. So the PGA Tour pulled up roots and moved elsewhere: A five-decade tradition of hosting the event at the course, started in 1962, came to an end. NASCAR also pulled out of an event planned for Trump Doral, and business began to dry up at the course.

According to tax documents reported by the Washington Post, the club’s net operating income dropped 69 percent between 2015 and 2017. During a 2017 visit, the Miami Heralds’ sports columnist noted barely any golfers on the course and listened forlornly to crows and the wind whistling. “I went there and it was so empty you could shoot a machine gun,” another golf writer, Rick Reilly, told Rolling Stone.

If Michael Cohen was right when he said Trump ran for president as a “marketing exercise,” then the experiment has massively backfired.

But hey, if you want, you can sign up for the "caddy girl" auction at the Doral's upcoming strip-club event this weekend.

Just a few head-to-desk articles this afternoon:

• Washington DC's mayor has informed the President that the city's special security fund has no more money in it, thanks to the 4th of July Trumpaganza and the fact that the Trump inaugural committee hasn't reimbursed the city the $7.3 million it's owed since 2017.
• The economy seems to keep expanding despite a lack of inflation, according to the Fed. That might have something to do with wages not rising very much. We can tell these things are related because retailers have started to raise prices as minimum-wage laws force them to pay workers more.
• Josh Marshall summarizes how cities have a structural disadvantage in the politics of industrialized countries, despite having many more people than rural areas. There is no quick fix to this, either; it's how first-past-the-post representation always works.

I'm going to continue writing code and trying not to think about any of this.

Beloved humor magazine of my childhood and my father's Mad Magazine will effectively end its 67-year run with the August issue:

Sources tell [The Hollywood Reporter] that after issue 9, MAD will no longer be sold on newsstands and will only be available through comic book shops as well as mailed to subscribers. After issue 10, there will no longer be new content in subsequent issues save for the end-of-year specials (those will be all-new). Beginning with issue 11, the magazine will only feature previously published content — classic and best-of nostalgic fare — from its massive fault of the past 67 years. DC, however, will also continue to publish MAD books and special collections.

The venerable humor magazine was founded in 1952 by a group of editors led by Harvey Kurtzman. Although it began as a comic book, bimonthly issues were published and became the norm for the satirical content. MAD, with it's always memorable covers featuring the gap-toothed Alfred E. Neuman, has been highly influential on successive generations of comedians, artists, writers and performers.

Fweep. So long, and thanks for all the jokes.

Starting today, my state has some new laws:

• The gasoline tax doubled to the still-too-low 10¢ per litre. Oh my stars. How could they. Ruination. (You will detect more ironic tone if you read my post from yesterday about how much gasoline I use.) For comparison with other OECD countries, the UK adds 57.95p (73.3¢) per litre, Australia gets 41.2¢ (28.6¢ US), and even Canada levies 45¢ (34¢ US). But hey, we doubled the tax, so now we can pay for our state pension deficit fixing our infrastructure.
• Cigarette taxes went up to $2.98 a pack, and e-cigarettes now have a 15% excise. Also, we raised the legal age to buy tobacco to 21, though you can still have sex and get a drivers license at 17 and sign a contract at 18, so kids still have lots of ways to ruin their lives. (Former governor Bruce Rauner vetoed these measures last year.)
• Schools now have to provide 5 clock-hours of instruction to count as a "school day." Having gone to Illinois schools as a kid that provided 6 to 7, it's hard for me to grasp that until today, schools only had to provide 4.
• Finally, our $40 billion budget took effect today, the first time in 5 years that a state budget has taken effect on the first day of the fiscal year.

This is what happens when the party that wants to govern takes power from the party that wants to shower gifts on their rich friends. More on that in my next post.

I saw this on the video monitor of an elevator I took heading back to my desk just now, and laughed out loud with all the derision I could muster (I was alone in the elevator):

This debt could force you into bankruptcy, and it’s not student loans

No shit. Student loans have huge barriers to discharge in bankruptcy in the US, so it's unlikely they would show up as "the cause" of bankruptcy actions.

I'm not sure what CNBC's goal was, but my guess is to counter the talking points from some of the Democratic primary campaigns about forgiving student loan debt.

So says urbanist Pete Saunders on the economic bifurcation in Chicago:

[T]he two economic narratives emerging across two wildly different sets of Chicago neighborhoods are being reflected in changing demographics. The downtown and Near North Side, stretching from the Loop to neighborhoods such as Bucktown and Logan Square, has boomed in ways similar to superstar cities such as New York, D.C., Seattle, and Austin, while large stretches of the rest of the city have suffered from decreasing middle class populations, disinvestment, and in the worst cases, abandoned property and increased crime.

“On its own, the portions of the city that includes the Loop, north lakefront, West Loop, and Logan Square have the population of San Francisco, are about the size of Manhattan and nearly as dense, and have been booming,” he tells Curbed. “It’s as safe, vibrant, and walkable as any of the other cities you’d associate with success.”

[R]ecent economic growth has been unevenly distributed. According to recent UIC research, in 1970, roughly half the city was considered middle income. In 2017, that distinction applied to just 16 percent of Chicago. Income segregation and extreme, concentrated poverty have become more pronounced. Saunders called it Global Chicago versus Rust Belt Chicago.

“A few years ago, I published something on my personal blog that characterized Chicago as one-third San Francisco and two-thirds Detroit,” he says. “I caught some flack from Rahm Emanuel for that, and I get it. Nobody wants to be associated with Detroit; it’s my hometown, so I know how that goes.”

Saunders recently pointed out on his blog that we Gen-Xers started the Back-to-the-City movement, ultimately blazing a trail that our Boomer parents and Millennial (and now Gen Z) followers benefited from.