The Daily Parker

I've spent today alternately upgrading my code base for my real job to .NET 6.0, and preparing for the Apollo Chorus performances of Händel's Messiah on December 11th and 12th.

Cassie, for her part, enjoys when I work from home, even if we haven't spent a lot of time outside today because (a) I've had a lot to do and (b) it rained from 11am to just about now.

So, as I wait for the .NET 6 update to build and deploy on our dev/test CI/CD instance (I think I set the new environments on our app services correctly), I have a few things to read:

• David Corn reports on how the previous administration's incompetence, if not outright malice, is responsible for 400,000 preventable Covid-19 deaths.
• James Fallows digs into the questions we should ask about China.
• Chicago's City Council looks likely to approve a narrower definition of "restaurant" that would let more bars allow dogs.
• Russian artist Lena Ruseva will make you some MAGA art for just a few thousand bucks. No scam there.

OK, the build has...well, crap. I didn't set the environment correctly after all.

Update: Fixed the build bit. And the rain stopped. But the test platform is the wrong version. FFS.

Update: Well, I have to pick something up from a store before 6, so I'll come back to this task later.

Update: Even though I've had 4 tiny commits of minor things that broke with the .NET 6 upgrade, this hasn't gone poorly. Kudos to Microsoft for providing a straightforward upgrade path.

 Lunch yesterday, at the Iron Duke in Hampshire:

The place is so named because it's on the Duke of Wellington's estate. The current Duke lives just a few kilometers away in a somewhat modest house (at least according to Queen Victoria) whose driveway is 5 km long.

Walking to and from lunch looked like this:

I ended the day at the Southampton Arms as I typically do at least once when visiting the UK. Shortly after arriving and opening a packet of crisps, Marty here came over to investigate:

His attitude toward me shifted a bit when I wouldn't give him any:

I'm flying home this afternoon to my own dog and my own bed, two things I really miss.

I'm leaving the country today, for the first time in almost exactly two years, and I couldn't be happier. I miss my Ancestral Homeland. And the list of Covid-related travel requirements, while annoying, make sense to me. In fact, because I return Sunday, I timed my (£39 FFS!) UK 2-day test to double as my US 3-day test.

Before I take off, and consign poor Cassie to 103 hours of desperate loneliness (albeit with her entire daycare pack), I want to comment on two news stories.

First, the Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society has temporarily waived adoption fees because adoptions have declined 33% in the past three months. "The rescue organization is housing and caring for more than 420 animals and has 140 animals in foster care," Block Club Chicago reports. I foresaw this at the beginning of the pandemic: people feeling lonely and isolated adopting pets that they wouldn't want when the pandemic started to wane. It really pisses me off, but after all, we live in a selfish, consumerist society that views dogs and cats as disposable.

Second, the New York Times reported Monday on how President Biden's infrastructure bill will help Chicago's West Side—but thanks to conservatives in the party scything away hunks of it, it won't help enough:

[T]he protracted negotiations over both spending packages have forced Democrats to cut several initiatives partly or entirely: tuition-free community college, a clean energy standard to combat climate change, billions of dollars for affordable housing assistance and measures to lower the price of prescription drugs.

Places like the West Side may still receive record amounts of federal assistance. But the tug of war leading up to Friday’s passage of the infrastructure bill — and still looming as Congress awaits a vote on the $1.85 trillion social-safety-net package — has delayed the party from what may be an even bigger challenge: selling the investments to voters.

Another issue being closely watched by Chicago community groups, an initiative to replace lead service lines that can cause toxic drinking water, will receive $15 billion in the infrastructure bill and could get another $10 billion in the social-safety-net package, according to environmental groups that have negotiated with lawmakers. That is well short of the $60 billion sought by industry experts and the $45 billion Mr. Biden originally proposed.

I get that legislation takes time, and when your party has a majority of exactly one—and that one is the Vice President—you won't get everything you want. But if Republicans would remember that they represent Americans and not just other Republicans, maybe we could have done better.

All right. Off to the longest doggie day care Cassie has ever experienced...

There's just something about how she sits on the couch that makes me smile:

Cassie's year-end performance review might have to take this sort of thing into account:

My day started before dawn waiting (unsuccessfully) for Cassie to pee in a howling rain storm, and will end late tonight after our penultimate rehearsal before our November 7th concert. So unless something truly catastrophic happens, no real post today.

Tomorrow I'll have something about the book I just finished.

Cassie and I both love these crystal-clear autumn days in Chicago, though as far as I know she spent her first two autumns in Tennessee. Does Nashville have crisp fall mornings? I don't know for sure, and Cassie won't say.

I meant to highlight these stories yesterday but got into the deep flow of refactoring:

• People who adopted dogs during the pandemic have discovered that dogs cost money. No kidding.
• Also, living alone costs more than living with a partner, even though singles have more social contacts and tend to be happier. Again, no kidding.
• It turns out that online "wellness" communities spread huge amounts of anti-vaccine bullshit.
• “This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” said the geosciences department chair at Williams College, causing me to react loudly enough to alarm Cassie.
• The worst airline in the history of the world died pathetically a week ago, and its successor airline managed to launch with truly ugly livery.

I will now make Cassie drool buckets by using salmon skin as a training tool.

No, not the Harold Ramis character; the working cat at Empirical Brewery in Chicago, letting Cassie know who runs the joint:

Oh boy:

• Voters have defeated billionaire, populist Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš through the simple process of banding together to kick him out, proof that an electorate can hold the line against strongmen.
• A school administrator in Texas told teachers that "if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an 'opposing' perspective." Because Texas.
• Oakland Police should stop shooting Black men having medical emergencies, one would think.
• The Federal Railroad Administration and Amtrak have released plans for new passenger train routes from Chicago to other Midwest cities.
• Meanwhile, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to encourage electric-vehicle production in the state.
• New Republic's David Klion says Denis Villenueuve's upcoming Dune adaptation "is the adaptation Frank Herbert's novel deserves," and I can't wait until it comes out on the 22nd!
• As Chicago has stuck to June-like temperatures for the past two weeks, an active jet stream has given the Rocky Mountain upwards of 750 mm of snow and temperatures as low as -10°C.
• Researchers have demonstrated how to reverse-engineer fake photos generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs), a common type of AI.
• Archaeologists have gotten closer to figuring out who massacred a village off the coast of Sweden around 400 CE, and why.

Cassie has bugged me for the last hour, even though we went out two hours ago. I assume she wants dinner. I will take care of that presently.

Some of these will actually have to wait until tomorrow morning:

• Adam Serwer thanks Justice Samuel Alito (R) for confirming Serwer's complaints about the Court.
• A trove of XPOTUS-branded gifts meant for foreign heads of state representing "significant" monetary value disappeared at some point. Can't imagine how.
• The BBC Reality Check column suggests that reports in some journals about Invermectin may have painted an incomplete picture, putting it mildly.
• Cranky Flier explains that Southwest Airlines' recent troubles come from their overextended operations, not from any nefarious actors.
• An Annapolis, Md., couple will likely never walk free again after being arrested for attempting to sell American nuclear secrets to...well, to a foreign government that called the FBI on them. You have to read the FBI's affidavit.
• Chicago ranks 19th out of 20 metropolitan areas in jobs recovered from Covid-19 losses, ahead of only San Francisco.
• Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham has a new tell-all book out, becoming the third Stephanie to write one about the XPOTUS.

And now, I will feed the dog.