In the news today:
- Brian Beutler reminds history buffs that in "the median experience of tyranny" life doesn't change much right away.
- Paul Krugman mines the data to understand why gold prices have soared in the last couple of months. But, he argues, "holding gold isn’t an alternative to holding currency. It is, instead, an alternative to holding bonds, which pay interest."
- Jeff Maurer reminds the smitten that, no matter how well-intentioned, activists are just "dumb assholes like you and me:" "[T]he actions of some progressive groups become less baffling when you imagine that their goal isn’t to advance for their cause, but rather to appear to advance their cause while keeping their job and improving their social standing."
Finally, the Post examines the age-old question, why is there always one side of town no one wants to live in, and why is it always downwind of the 19th- and 20th-century factories?
While on a Brews & Choos mini-adventure yesterday, I learned that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has leaked that she won't seek re-election. This comes just a day after Democrat Catelin Drey flipped Iowa Senate district 1 from +20 OAFPOTUS to +5 Democratic. (Drey's win also breaks the Republican Party's supermajority in the Iowa Senate.)
You may also remember Senator Ernst responding to her constituents alarm at HR 1* and its effects on their ability to remain breathing by saying "we're all going to die" and doubling down with a tin-eared video from a cemetery the next day.
Then, just a few minutes ago, I heard Scott Simon on NPR interviewing California Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) who proposed splitting California into two states along the coast because poor Republican politicians can't get any of their programs through, given they make up only 39% of the state's electorate. "It's not fair!" he whined. "The Democrats don't care about the smallfolk!" He then went on to list three different ways the OAFPOTUS has screwed his district, suggesting the Democrats did it.
Gallagher's proposal would create a Democratic-majority state and a Republican-likely state, with the coastal part having 30 million of the state's 40 million residents and 80% of its GDP. He neglects to mention that this would increase Republican representation in the US Senate by net +2, further diluting national Democratic power. Plus, the putative interior state would become a brand new taker state, as the coastal part would increase its relative payment imbalance to the Federal Government while the new interior part would need even more outside money to stay afloat. He also ignored the many other semi-serious proposals to divide California into three states, which would increase Democratic representation in the Senate by net +2 while increasing the population-to-Senator ratio of everyone in the State. Does Gallagher support that plan? No? Why not?
Also yesterday, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington threw out the majority of the OAFPOTUS's tariffs, but stayed the ruling until October 14th. (For a complete list of the administration's losses for the week, I give you Amanda Nelson.)
Welcome to the "find out" phase.
* I'm just not going to call the thing by the juvenile and stupid name Republicans gave it.
This weekend, I expect to finish a major personal (non-technical) project I started on June 15th, walk 20 km (without Cassie), and thanks to the desperation of the minor-league team on the South Side of Chicago, attend a Yankees game. It helps that the forecast looks exactly like one would want for the last weekend of summer: highs in the mid-20s and partly cloudy skies.
I might have time to read all of these things as well:
Meanwhile, my birthday ribs order got delayed. One of the assistant butchers backed into a meat grinder, so they got behind in their work. He was the biggest ass in the shop until he recently got unseated, so I don't feel too bad for making him the butt of my jokes.
G'nite.
Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer describes a method of creating legislative districts that is provably and undeniably fair, even as he acknowledges that the nature of American politics would make adopting it nearly impossible:
Back in 2004, soon after earning my Ph.D., I found myself in the Harvard Society of Fellows chatting with a Supreme Court justice. I asked what single problem math or economics could solve for the Court. The answer was instantaneous: Give us an objective yardstick for political maps.
After months huddled around a whiteboard with a sharp graduate student, Richard Holden, fueled by too much bad Harvard Square coffee, we created a measure we call the “Relative Proximity Index.”
Picture every voter as a dot on the state map. First, we pin down the geometric minimum — the most compact way to bundle those dots inside the state’s jagged borders into its exact number of congressional districts, each with equal population, whether that means wrapping around Florida’s panhandle or hugging Georgia’s slanted shoulder. Then we compare the map the legislature actually draws to that floor. The ratio is the Relative Proximity Index. An R.P.I. of 1 means you’ve hit the geometric ideal; an R.P.I. of 3 means voters within a district would live — on average — three times farther apart than necessary.
In my view, the R.P.I. is the most attractive measure of gerrymandering. While it focuses on compactness to the exclusion of other criteria, it is a simple, easy-to-understand approach. It does not require an opaque computer algorithm to draw thousands of maps for comparison, and it does not rely on an assumption that a fair map will produce proportional representation (which may not be true, depending on how the parties’ constituencies are distributed geographically).
This fight hits home for me. I moved to Texas at age 5 and stayed through college. We pride ourselves on straight shooting. But the facts — who lives where — don’t match the tall tales coming out of Austin. One district hugs the Rio Grande for well over 500 miles, from San Antonio’s outskirts almost to El Paso. That’s not state pride; it’s sleight of hand. “Don’t mess with Texas”? Fine. Stop messing with Texas, and with the blue states preparing to respond in kind.
He calls my objection "fatalistic." I'd say "historical," but sure. I would wholeheartedly endorse a fair method of redistricting like this, just as I wholeheartedly endorse non-partisan redistricting commissions and expanding the House of Representatives to about 700 members. (Not to mention DC statehood.)
With one of our parties headed toward fascism and another one getting shut out of power through the kind of political skulduggery we haven't seen since the 1850s, I'm afraid this proposal will have to wait a few years.
Just look at that cold front, wouldn't you? And notice how the dewpoint dropped hardly at all:
The same thing happened at the official Chicago station at O'Hare, where the temperature dropped from 31°C to 22°C in 15 minutes, while the dewpoint went up. At least the forecast predicts tomorrow will be lovely.
In a related note, the OAFPOTUS's and the Republicans' 40% reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped the agency's Atlas 15 project, which will have a ripple effect through urban planning and disaster management for decades:
The tool is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlas 15 project — a massive dataset that will show how often storms of a given duration and intensity could be expected to occur at locations across the United States. The project was intended to be published in two volumes: one that would assess communities’ current risks and a second that would project how those risks will change under future climate scenarios.
The release of Atlas 15 had been long awaited by civil engineers, regional planners and other groups that use NOAA’s precipitation frequency estimates to develop regulations and design infrastructure. Many parts of the country rely on decades-old data to determine their rainfall risks, and there is no authoritative national dataset of how rainfall and flood threats will rise in a warmer world.
But work on Atlas 15’s climate projections has been on hold for months after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered a review of Volume 2 this spring, according to current and former NOAA officials with knowledge of the project.
The review of Atlas 15 is among a number of efforts by the Trump administration to curb climate science. The administration dismissed the scientists responsible for writing the National Climate Assessment — a congressionally mandated study typically published every four to five years — and dismantled the program that oversees the reports. In a budget document submitted to Congress last month, Trump proposed zeroing out funding for NOAA’s climate research and eliminating many of the agency’s laboratories and institutes.
Do you know that more Republican voters live in areas negatively affected by climate change than Democratic voters? Neither did they.
We cannot comprehend the damage this administration has already done to the United States. And they plan to do so much more.
I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things:
- Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it."
- Linda Greenhouse condemns the pervasive cruelty of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Tom Homan: "Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other” — people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society."
- Paul Krugman explains more cogently than I did why the Republicans cutting NOAA will hurt everyone: "Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money. They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting 'La, la, la, we can’t hear you.' "
- The inconvenient evidence includes a growing realization in Mediterranean countries that their summer resorts are no longer habitable in the summer: "Across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and beyond, sand-devouring storms, rising seas, asphyxiating temperatures, deadly floods and horrific wildfires have year after year turned some of the continent’s most desired getaways into miserable locales to get away from."
- Ilya Shapiro, constitutional studies director at the Manhattan Institute, believes both the left and the right have got Amy Coney Barrett all wrong: "She’s an originalist with a strong devotion both to constitutional text and institutional procedure. But she’s also a stickler for prudence in the face of novelty. The one thing Barrett is zealous about is upholding the rule of law..."
- A group of mayors from the Chicago suburbs has decided they don't like the very same public-private partnerships between railroads and their surrounding areas that created many of the same suburbs: "Real estate could be the recipe for long-term fiscal sustainability for [the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, making some of the current revenue mechanisms only temporary and reducing the risk of a repeat of this year's fiscal cliff. [But y]ou can’t protest government overreach of private property rights, and then defend zoning in the same paragraph."
- At the same time suburban mayors rant against better transit, their residents have clogged half the side streets in Chicago to get around Kennedy Expressway construction this summer. Of course, better transit would obviate all those car trips that cause the congestion in the first place, but let's not think too hard about that.
- In some parts of the country, though, street designs from the Netherlands have become more popular as planners and citizens see how much safer they are for everyone.
- Patrick Smith takes a look at last month's Air India crash and fears the worst: "[I]f the [fuel] switches were moved to CUTOFF manually, the billion-dollar question is why? Were they moved by accident, or nefariously? Was it an act of absurd absent-mindedness, or one of willful mass murder, a la EgyptAir, Germanwings, and (almost certainly) MH370."
- Google announced a new partnership with electric truck maker Rivian to use Google Maps for navigation.
- New studies suggest that we have crooked teeth because our diet changed: "With softer diets came less mechanical strain on the jaw. Over generations, our mandibles began to shrink— a trend visible in the fossil record."
Finally, a number of commentators have experienced a healthy dose of Schadenfreude watching the OAFPOTUS's rabid followers turn on him, including Adam Kinzinger, Josh Marshall, Dan Rather, and of course, Jeff Maurer. It's not exactly "the blood of Marat strangles him," but as a centrist, I am enjoying this part just a little. (And in fairness, Kinzinger, a Republican, believes that the administration's policies will do more damage to the party than this nonsense about Epstein.)
As Crash Davis said to Annie Savoy all those years ago: A player on a streak has to respect the streak. Well, I'm on a coding streak. This week, I've been coding up a storm for my day job, leaving little time to read all of today's stories:
Finally, Ernie Smith, who also had a childhood pastime of reading maps for fun, examines why MapQuest became "the RC Cola" of mapping apps. Tl;dr: corporate mergers are never about product quality.
I've just finished updating the Weather Now gazetteer, the database of geographical information that connects weather information to locations. This involved re-importing 283 countries and 4,494 administrative divisions from the National Geospatial Information Agency, plus 25,668 weather stations from the National Climate Data Center and 20,166 airports from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Most of these places already existed in the gazetteer, so they just got freshened up from the latest releases of the NCDC and FAA data. And, as I previously complained, the Country and Division records got their correct GEC identifiers.
Next up: a bunch of minor bugs and enhancements on the Place Info and Airport Info pages, so you can actually see the updated geographical data.
First, though, I'm going to take Cassie on a 30-minute walk. It's overcast and gloomy, but the temperature has held at just under 1°C for the past few hours. We won't have the chance to spend 30 minutes outside again until next Thursday if the forecast -18°C temperatures occur.
I've been working on a long-overdue update to Weather Now's gazetteer, the database of places that allows people to find their weather. The app uses mainly US government data for geographic names and locations, but also some international sources. This matters because the US government has a thing called "Geopolitical Entities and Codes (GEC)," which superseded Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) publication 10-4. Everyone else in the world use International Standards Organization publication ISO-3166 for country codes, which also doesn't have any of the same identifiers for places smaller than countries that the FIPS and GEC standards to.
Unfortunately, even though the US adopted an updated standard (FIPS 104-1), it doesn't exactly match ISO-3166.
This has caused a bit of extra work to refactor my import code to use both GEC and ISO identifiers for countries—plus the old FIPS 10-4 codes. The geographic data sets I'm going to add to Weather Now in the next couple of weeks use random assortments of the three standards.
All this just means that I have to do several hours more work than I anticipated before I can start importing other sources. But first up, when I do, will be the United States Geological Survey list of about a million places. That will make searching for weather in the US a lot more effective.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran an interactive feature showing you the walkability of your neighborhood, in average minutes of travel time (by any method) to get things you need. They divided most metro areas into 200-meter hexagons and evaluated three criteria.
My current hexagon comes in at 8.2 minutes. The one I lived in a decade ago, in Lincoln Park, is at 5.2 minutes. The best scores of places I've lived in are Brooklyn (4.8 minutes) and Chicago's Near North Side (4.2 minutes). The specific part of the specific suburb where I grew up is the only bit of the town that shows up as blue, with a score of 13.6 minutes.
I could play with this for hours.
Incidentally, the absolute worst place I ever had the pleasure of living was Mason, Ohio, on a project in late 2010. Mason is so bad, in fact, that the Post interactive map doesn't even attempt to measure it.