The Daily Parker

Every morning I get an email from The History Channel with "this day in history" bullet points. A couple stood out today:

• Two hundred years ago today, the American whaler Essex lost a fight with an 80-ton sperm whale. Only five of the twenty crew survived.
• On this day in 1945, 75 years ago, the Nuremberg trials began.
• In 1985, 35 years ago, Microsoft Windows came out.

And now, the sanity. Via author John Scalzi, (conservative) attorney T. Greg Doucette explains why the president will leave office on January 20th no matter what chicanery he tries to steal the election:

While I wait for my frozen pizza to cook, I've got these stories to keep me company:

• Jakob Nielsen has updated his classic article "10 usability heuristics for UI design."
• Steve Coll tries to figure out what the president gets out of contesting Biden's win.
• Paul Krugman looks at the way half the country ignores the science in ending the pandemic and despairs at how we can forestall climate change.
• Patrick Smith reminds us that we've gone more than 19 years since the last major US air carrier crash, which shows us how far aviation safety has come in the last 50 years.

Going to check my pizza now.

Also known as: read all error messages carefully.

I've just spent about 90 minutes debugging an Azure DevOps pipeline after upgrading from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5 RC2. Everything compiled OK, all tests ran locally, but the Test step of my pipeline failed with this error message:

##[error]Unable to find D:\a\1\s\ProjectName.Tests\bin\Debug\net5.0\ref\ProjectName.Tests.deps.json.
Make sure test project has a nuget reference of package "Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk".

The test step had this Test Files configuration:

**\bin\$(BuildConfiguration)\**\*Tests.dll
!**\*TestAdapter.dll
!**\obj\**

I'll save you all the steps I went through to determine that the .NET 5 build step only copied .dlls into the ref folder, without copying anything else (like the dependencies definition file). The solution turned out to be adding one line to the configuration:

**\bin\$(BuildConfiguration)\**\*Tests.dll
!**\ref\**
!**\*TestAdapter.dll
!**\obj\**

Excluding the ref folder fixed it. And I hope this post saves someone else 90 minutes of debugging.

Tom Scott explains why Denmark's cell phones do not display the legal time in the country:

In an earlier video, he explains the hell of writing time zone software. (I've already done this, and it works pretty well.)

I dropped off my completed ballot this afternoon, so if Joe Biden turns out to be the devil made flesh, I can't change my vote.

Tonight, the president and Joe Biden will have competing, concurrent town halls instead of debating each other, mainly because the president is an infant. The Daily Parker will not live-blog either one. Instead, I'll whip up a stir-fry and read something.

In other news:

• Chris Christie continues the tradition of Republican politicians not understanding something until it happens to them directly by imploring people to wear masks now that he's out of a week-long stint in the ICU.
• Former White House Counsel Bob Bauer and Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith suggest six ways to protect the rule of law once the president leaves office. Separately, University of Chicago law professor Ryan Doerfler explains how to "make the Supreme Court safe for democracy."
• TNR's David Daley takes us through the "Republican plot for permanent minority rule."
• Illinois hit a record number (4,015) of confirmed Covid-19 cases today.
• We don't actually have to have a surge of Covid-19 cases; we can stop it.
• Google explains how their popular times and live busyness information feature works.
• Metra has sued Union Pacific for lost ticket revenue as their contract lurches toward an end.

Finally, a pie-wedge-shaped house in Deerfield, Ill., is now on Airbnb for $113 a night. Enjoy.

From Andrew Marantz at The New Yorker:

In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem. In [former UK Liberal Democratic Party leader Nick] Clegg’s recent blog post, he wrote that Facebook takes a “zero tolerance approach” to hate speech, but that, “with so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This metaphor casts Zuckerberg as a hapless victim of fate: day after day, through no fault of his own, his haystack ends up mysteriously full of needles. A more honest metaphor would posit a powerful set of magnets at the center of the haystack—Facebook’s algorithms, which attract and elevate whatever content is most highly charged. If there are needles anywhere nearby—and, on the Internet, there always are—the magnets will pull them in. Remove as many as you want today; more will reappear tomorrow. This is how the system is designed to work.

“It’s an open secret,” Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist for the company, recently wrote, “that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention.” Zhang left Facebook in September. Before she did, she posted a scathing memo on Workplace. In the memo, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News, she alleged that she had witnessed “multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales”; in some cases, however, “we simply didn’t care enough to stop them.” She suggested that this was because the abuses were occurring in countries that American news outlets were unlikely to cover.

Nothing surprising in the article, but Marantz adds a lot more detail than most people have realized.

With 58 days until the election, the noise keeps increasing. Here's some of it:

• Jeffrey Goldberg reports from multiple sources that the president referred to wounded soldiers as "losers" and "suckers" for serving the country. The administration moved quickly to lie about this.
• Andrew Sullivan calls the president a "metastasizing cancer."
• Catherine Rampell suggests ways to talk to right-wingers about the president's failures.
• Nick Martin asks, "how did 'if I die, I die' become this country's mantra?"
• Ross Douthat wonders "how many lives would a more normal president have saved?"
• A pro-president boat parade on Lake Travis, Texas, caused so much wake that several of the boats sank.
• Ken Griffin, the richest man in Illinois and therefore the one most likely to lose some money that he can never possibly spend, has donated $20 million to defeating the graduated income tax proposal in the state.
• Los Angeles has selected a new streetlight design, which is pretty cool.
• A bunch of 12-year-olds have discovered that the Edgenuity learning platform has easily-defeated grading algorithms.
• David Benioff and DB Weiss will adapt Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem for Netflix.

Finally, The Smithsonian describes how Greg Priore managed to steal priceless documents from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, because he was in charge of security for those items.

This is my 55th post this month, and the fifth month in a row in which I've posted over 50 times. That brings my 12-month total to 581, the third record in a row and the fifth record this year. I guess Covid-19 has been good for something.

Here's what I'm reading today:

• Authorities in Tampa have charged 17-year-old Graham Clark with masterminding last month's massive Twitter hack.
• The Atlantic's David Graham says the president is trying to destroy the election's legitimacy.
• George Will points to the relationship between authoritarianism and emotion.
• Two large restaurant groups in Chicago and 40 smaller restaurants have sued 19 insurance companies for not paying claims related to state-ordered closings.
• The New Yorker's Masha Gessen believes "Homeland Security was destined to become a secret police force."
• New Republic's Jake Bittle bemoans "the Right's increasingly unhinged fight against Black Lives Matter."

I'm excited to add a notch on the Brews and Choos project in a few hours. Check back tomorrow.

First: the difference between how Garmin handled a global outage that lasted 5 days, and how SendGrid managed one that lasted 5 hours. SendGrid handles billions of emails per day, including for Microsoft and other massive companies. So SendGrid going down didn't inconvenience a few athletes and pilots; it crippled Fortune-500 companies' marketing departments. (And it delayed a scheduled release on my own team.)

Within about an hour of their outage, SendGrid created an incident response page to which they posted updates every half-hour. They clearly stated what was going on and how they were trying to fix it, even as they were discovering for themselves what had happened:

Contrast that with Garmin, who still haven't really explained what happened or why it took so long to resolve the outage. (They finally declared their remediation "complete" yesterday, almost 6 days after the outage started.)

Second: the difference between how Germany (and other rich countries) have handled Covid-19 and how we have. Josh Marshall looked into the numbers:

The head of Germany’s equivalent of the CDC told reporters today that he’s “very concerned” about the rising case numbers in the country and accuses Germans of becoming “negligent” in their adherence to mitigation measures. He has good reason to be concerned.

Today Germany reported 638 new cases of COVID. That comes out to .76 cases per 100,000 residents. Let’s round that up to 1 new case per 100,000 for good measure. (The need for round numbers will become clear.)

Today New York State had 3 cases per 100,000. So Germany is concerned by 1/3 the number of cases as we have in New York state, a state which is probably controlling the disease as well as any other state in the country.

Florida today had 43 cases per 100,000. Florida’s outbreak is more than forty-three times the size relative to population.

To state the point baldly, Germany is very concerned about a rise in cases that would still be dramatically better than any other part of the United States. They’re ramping up border restrictions to get things back under control and chiding the population to redouble its collective efforts.

[S]eeing this as, "well, look, everyone’s having problems." Or "we’re not the only ones having new outbreaks" or "we can’t go back to shutdowns…" ... only captures how Americans are having a hard time grappling with just how many universes away we are from what is happening in other countries which are comparably affluent, industrialized and able to mount an effective response.

We’re failing that badly.

Anthony Fauci was on BBC just now, struggling not to call the president out on his criminal negligence. Only 98 days until we can vote the bastard out.

Even as Garmin picks up the pieces from what they now admit was a massive ransomware attack, bulk email provider SendGrid has gone down spectacularly.

I use SendGrid, as does my company, for status emails and such.

Here's my problem, though: I have a code update to put out that specifically targets a bug in SendGrid's .NET library that they claim to have fixed. My automated build pipelines won't release new code unless all the unit tests pass. Right now, the SendGrid tests fail sporadically, and at least one fails every time the tests run.

Ah, technology.