The Daily Parker

At midnight Central European Time about five hours from now (23:00 UTC), the United Kingdom will no longer be a European Union member state.

It will take years to learn whether the bare-majority of voters in the UK who wanted this were right or wrong. My guess: a bit of both, but more wrong than right.

It will also take years to fully understand why the developed world collectively decided to throw out the institutions that brought us the longest period of peace and economic growth in the history of the planet.

It might be like how an airplane actually flies. Until recently, people understood the Bernoulli effect as the mechanism for lift. New research (sub. req.) suggests that lift actually has four different components that work together to keep 200-tonne airplanes airborne.

Increasing wealth inequality, the apex of political power for the Baby Boomer generation (possibly the most selfish and whiny generation in American history), psychological warfare of unprecedented sophistication designed specifically to fracture Western politics...they all go together. And those of us who believe that democratic, liberal government is the best force for making the world a better place despair a little more every day.

Not that anyone was surprised, though many I'm sure were disappointed:

A handful of marijuana dispensaries around Illinois halted recreational weed sales over the weekend and plan to remain closed to the public for part of the week as they deal with product shortages.

Legal weed sales kicked off in Illinois on Wednesday, and customers spent almost $3.2 million at dispensaries that first day. It marked one of the strongest showings of any state in the history of pot legalization. Second day sales reached nearly $2.3 million, the state said.

Dispensary operators say long lines continued to form even after the first day. Over the weekend, certain dispensaries stopped selling recreational product. And for many of them, it is uncertain when they will start again.

Given the availability of marijuana in modern America through, ah, bespoke retail services, why the run on dispensaries? Novelty?

Article the first: Stocks have continued going up relentlessly even though producer prices are also up, exports are way down, and wages have stagnated. This means, essentially, our economy is rent-seeking and not producing.

Article the second: President Trump's tariffs have hurt agriculture and commodities, caused job losses, and hit the most vulnerable people in Trump Country. They haven't helped the economy at all. Question: bugs or features?

Article the third: Michiko Katutani draws direct parallels between the "end of normal" of the 2010s and Richard Hofstadter's "paranoid style."

Article the fourth: The 2010s also had good-looking celebrities pushing (almost literal) snake oil on us, and people bought it up wholesale. Actors and other Dunning-Krueger sufferers made billions on imaginary health and wellness products that helped neither health nor wellness.

So as we go into the bottom of the 10s, this is America today. Can't wait to see the '20s on Wednesday when it's all better.

Paris has essentially shut down for the past 12 days as transport unions protest pension reform:

Au onzième jour de mobilisation contre la réforme des retraites, le trafic restait fortement perturbé dans les transports publics, dimanche 15 décembre. A Paris, le trafic des métros était particulièrement compliqué, avec quatorze lignes complètement fermées.

Dans le métro parisien, les lignes automatiques 1 et 14 fonctionnaient normalement, avec un risque de saturation, de même que les lignes Orlyval, RoissyBus (deux bus sur trois) et OrlyBus (quatre bus sur cinq), qui desservent les aéroports. En revanche, les lignes 2, 3 bis, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7 bis, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 et 13 sont totalement fermées.

Translation: Most of the Metro is closed, most trains aren't running, most buses aren't running, and Paris can barely function.

NPR's Paris-based Eleanor Beardsley has a first-person account on today's Weekend Edition Sunday.

Why is this happening? Here is the Times:

While France’s official retirement age may be 62, the actual age varies widely across the country’s labyrinthine system. Train drivers can retire at 52, public electric and gas workers at 57, and members of the national ballet, who start dancing at a very young age, as early as age 42. That is to name just a few of the stark differences.

It is this sheer complexity that [French President Emmanuel] Macron has vowed to untangle, aiming to standardize 42 different public and private pension schemes into one state-managed plan.

The system is staring at a potential deficit of 19 billion euros by 2025 if no action is taken, according to a landmark report issued by France’s pension czar, Jean-Paul Delevoye.

So Mr. Macron says he wants to merge the disparate systems, public and private, into one state-managed system by 2025.

He also wants to keep the deficit from growing, which Patrick Artus, chief economist of Paris-based Natixis bank, said could be achieved if every worker works at least another six months before retiring.

France isn't the US or the UK, and French unions have tremendous power that unions in the Anglo-American world never had. But years of strikes in the UK during the 1970s drove British voters to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party and the heavy-handed anti-labour policies she enacted.

I don't think France will ever see that kind of anti-union governance. But I do suggest that perhaps this tantrum needs to end so that the government and the unions can work to fix the structural problems that everyone knows exist.

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.