The Daily Parker

Yesterday's productivity apparently included my nose producing a few billion coronaviruses:

This comes almost exactly two years after my last bout with the disease (that I know of). That one took about 5 days to resolve, so I figure I'll be fine by Tuesday. I've had a couple of colds since June 2022 but tested negative for SARS-Cov-2, though before 2020 I rarely got colds of any kind.

I'll get my next Covid booster in September when flu shots come out, but I think going forward, I'll get one every six months instead of annually. This virus really won't go away soon enough.

I'm trying to get home a little earlier than usual, so this will be a lazy post. Stuff to read:

• Hillary Clinton, who has debated both President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, has thoughts on tomorrow night's event.
• Dana Milbank doesn't mourn Rep. Jamaal Bowman's (D-NY) loss last night, and neither do I.
• If you hate corporations, you might want to support President Biden's increase to the corporate income tax as well as to his proposed increase in the share-buyback tax.
• The village of Wheaton, Ill., would rather have 165 car crashes and multiple pedestrian fatalities on a stretch of stroad by a school and retirement community than spend $865,000 on a traffic light. (I mean, better that they didn't build the stroad in the first place, of course.)
• A new report says that cancelling New York City's congestion tax will kill 100,000 jobs.

Finally, today is the 50th anniversary of the very first time a UPC got scanned in a grocery store. Happy shopping.

Lunchtime link roundup:

• Dr Daniela J Lamas of Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston evaluates how age has affected President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, given that whoever wins in November has a high probability of being the oldest serving US President in history.
• Israel's highest court ruled that the IDF can, in fact, draft all the religious nutters who have avoided doing anything for the benefit of society since the country was founded. Perhaps this will help the country's crushing gloominess?
• A judge sentenced former Chicago alderman Ed Burke (D-14th) to two years in prison and ordered him to pay a $2m fine after Burke's conviction on charges relating to his 50-plus-year career of naked corruption. He becomes the 35th Chicago alderman convicted of corruption since 1973.
• A group of THC-infused drink manufacturers have sued the state of Iowa to prevent a law going into effect on Monday that would criminalize most of their products.
• The Regional Transportation Authority of Northern Illinois (RTA) has voted to create an all-access day pass that would allow unlimited travel on CTA, Pace, and Metra.

Finally, People for Bikes has consistently rated Chicago the worst major US city for biking, principally because of our 50 km/h speed limit. If only we'd lower it to 40 km/h, they say, Chicago would immediately jump in the ratings to something approaching its peers.

I may have my next Japanese itinerary, courtesy of Not Just Bikes:

I've got a performance this evening that requires being on-site at the venue for most of the day. So in a few minutes I'll take two dogs to boarding (the houseguest is another performer's dog), get packed, an start heading to a hockey rink in another city. Fun! If I'm supremely lucky, I'll get back home before the storm.

Since I also have to travel to the venue, I'll have time to read a few of these:

• Jamelle Bouie warns that the convicted-felon XPOTUS has even less preparation for a possible second term than he had for the first. Take, as just one example, his fiscally illiterate idea to replace income taxes with tariffs.
• Megan McArdle argues in favor of eliminating the mortgage-interest deduction.
• Bruce Schneier essays on "the hacking of culture and the creation of socio-technical debt."
• Ronald Brownstein asserts that Chinatown, released 50 years ago Thursday, "explains 2020s America."
• New York City is looking for $5 billion to replace the section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs under the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, rather than looking for a way to remove it entirely.

Finally, the Post examined a Social Security Administration dataset yesterday that shows how baby names have converged on a few patterns in the last decade. If you think there are a lot of names ending in -son lately (Jason, Jackson, Mason, Grayson, Failson...), you're not wrong.

Imagine an overnight train from New York to Miami that takes 12 hours. China just opened a $165 train that does about the same thing:

From Hong Kong to Beijing, the overnight trip takes 12 hours 30 minutes, and it covers roughly the same distance as a flight from New York to Miami or Los Angeles to Dallas. It complements the 8 hour 15 minute day train that has run for years.

The overnight trip to Shanghai takes 11 hours. The corresponding day train takes just 7 hours 47 minutes.

We can have similar rail lines and options, if we choose to. The Federal Railroad Administration has in fact published plans that call for HSR service between cities of similar (or longer) distances. For example, the Midwest Regional Rail Plan calls for high-speed trains between St. Paul and Nashville, while the Southeast Regional Rail Plan calls for high-speed trains between Nashville and Orlando.

Together, the plans would create a single HSR line of about 1,500 miles. So, a family in St. Paul could board a sleeper train in the evening and be at Orlando’s Disney World by mid-morning the next day—rested and ready to go, instead of stressed out from driving and poorer from a hotel stay.

I will grant two things that make this a difficult problem for the US: the fifth amendment and our psychotic relationship with cars. The first requires that the government provides just compensation for any property it takes, and buying the land to create a grade-separated high-speed rail line would not be cheap. China just kicks people off their land.

The second is that we've spent a century subsidizing cars and building our physical environment around cars, which prevents even reasonable people from understanding the basic economics behind highways. (Or, if you're the Chicago Tribune editorial board, the basic understanding of how traffic works.)

Still, it frustrates me to no end that we're not even discussing it.

In the early autumn I'm going to get on a train in London, change in Paris, and get off the train in Marseille, which will take about 7 hours, depending on how tight I want to make the connection between Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon. I'll get to St Pancras about half an hour before the train, very likely from a hotel a few blocks away, and when I get off the train in Marseille, I'll have another walk of a block or two to that hotel. Contrast with my flight home from Marseille, which, including half an hour by transit to the Provence airport, customs, emigration in France and immigration into the UK, will take about the same length of time. And then I'll be at Heathrow, an hour from central London.

I once made it from central Richmond, Va., to a friend's apartment in Murray Hill, Manhattan, in just over 5 hours, door to door. So I know the US has the ability to build real high-speed trains. But will I ever see one in my lifetime?

First, let me just say how lovely it was to wake up to this today, especially as we're mere minutes from the earliest solstice since the Washington administration:

My windows are open, and I no longer hate the world. Which, it turns out, is a perfectly normal response to high heat:

It turns out even young, healthy college students are affected by high temperatures. During the hottest days, the students in the un-air-conditioned dorms, where nighttime temperatures averaged [27°C], performed significantly worse on the tests they took every morning than the students with A.C., whose rooms stayed a pleasant [21°C].

R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania, looked at high school standardized test scores and found that they fell 0.2 percent for every degree above 72 Fahrenheit. That might not sound like a lot, but it can add up for students taking an exam in an un-air-conditioned room during a [32°C] heat wave.

Researchers don’t know why heat affects our cognition and emotions, but there are a couple of theories.

One is that the brain’s resources are being diverted to keep you cool, leaving less energy for everything else. “If you’re allocating all of the blood and all the glucose to parts of your brain that are focused on thermoregulation, it seems like it’s very plausible that you just wouldn’t have enough left for some of these kind of higher cognitive functions,” Dr. [Kimberly Meidenbauer, an assistant professor of psychology at Washington State University,] said.

Yesterday it was still above 31°C when I took Cassie for her last walk. Air conditioning plus a shower helped immensely.

As I mentioned after lunch, a lot of other things crossed my desk today than just wasted sushi:

• Politico reports the results of its latest poll, which, contra many pundits, shows a marked decline in the convicted felon XPOTUS's popularity following his 34 felony convictions.
• NPR describes what it's like living through a 50°C day in Delhi, India.
• Fully 83% of the union representing WBEZ-FM and Chicago Sun-Times employees voted "no confidence" in Chicago Public Media CEO Matt Moog.
• New York Magazine explains why New York governor Kathy Hochul (D) slammed the brakes on New York City's congestion-pricing scheme. Elsewhere in this week's edition, Rebecca Traister asks, "How did Republican women end up like this?"
• An archaeological dig in Mount Vernon, Va., uncovered dozens of perfectly-preserved jugs of preserved cherries in what was once George Washington's cellar.

Finally, Taylor Swift fans have roundly rejected Ticketmaster's monopolistic gouging by flying to Europe to catch the Eras Tour, often saving so much money on tickets that it pays for their travel. I personally know one such Swiftie who took her honeymoon in Stockholm, where Swift played earlier this year. It turns out, Europe has stricter rules against the kind of parasitic behavior Ticketmaster perpetrates on Americans.

Heat makes me cranky. Even though I have good air conditioning, I also don't want to overdo it, so my home office is 25°C right now. Not too hot, but not what I would call super-comfortable. Still, it's cooler than the 37°C heat index that Cassie and I just spent 12 minutes walking in. Adding to the misery: both Chicago airports hit record high temperatures (36°C) yesterday.

The heat wave should break tomorrow night. Until then I'll continue slamming back water during the day and tonics with lime (minus the gin) in the evening. That's right: it's so damn hot, I don't even want a proper G&T. Maybe when it gets below 30°C.

Two things I read today dovetailed unexpectedly. The first, a speech Bruce Schneier gave to the RSA conference on 25 April 2023 and just posted this morning, suggests new ways of thinking about how democracy and AI can work together. A few minutes into the speech, Schneier sets up this critique of market economies:

[T]he cost of our market economy is enormous. For example, $780 billion is spent world-wide annually on advertising. Many more billions are wasted on ventures that fail. And that’s just a fraction of the total resources lost in a competitive market environment. And there are other collateral damages, which are spread non-uniformly across people.

We have accepted these costs of capitalism—and democracy—because the inefficiency of central planning was considered to be worse. That might not be true anymore. The costs of conflict have increased. And the costs of coordination have decreased. Corporations demonstrate that large centrally planned economic units can compete in today’s society. Think of Walmart or Amazon. If you compare GDP to market cap, Apple would be the eighth largest country on the planet. Microsoft would be the tenth.

Shortly after, I came across a BBC article rolling up just how much sushi gets wasted in Japan every day:

Every year on Setsubun, stores across the country stock a holiday sushi roll called ehomaki. At the end of the night, hundreds of thousands of these rolls wind up in the garbage. "Shops always provide what customers want, which means their shelves have to always be stocked," [Riko Morinaga, a recent high school graduate in Tokyo,] says. "This contributes to the food loss problem."

The exact size of the problem is difficult to quantify, because convenience store companies usually are not transparent about their losses. Representatives from 7-Eleven Japan and Lawson, two major chains, told BBC.com that they do not disclose the amount of food waste generated by their stores. Representatives from FamilyMart, another major chain, did not respond to interview requests, but the company indicates on its website that its stores generate 56,367 tonnes of food waste per day. In 2020, the Japan Fair Trade Commission estimated that Japan's major convenience store chains throw away on average 4.68m yen ($30,000; £24,000) of food per shop per year – equating to an approximate annual loss of more than 260bn yen (1.7bn; £1.3bn) in total.

Those numbers may seem fishy, but they represent a huge problem, not just in Japan, but everywhere that retailers feel they need to over-stock perishable food items.

I have a bunch more things queued up from earlier today that I'll link to in a bit. But first I have to stick my head in a bucked of ice water.

Cassie and I just got back from a short walk around the block. We did a 45-minute walk at 7:15, when we both could still tolerate the temperature, but just now my backyard thermometer shows a temperature of 33.1°C with a dewpoint of 23.3°C, which gives us a heat index of 38.5°C (101.4°F). Honestly, I prefer winter to this.

The National Weather Service predicts the heat wave could extend through the week.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• John Heilemann asks, why do we give a crap about who the Republicans nominate for vice president this year?
• Linda Greenhouse muses about "how John Roberts lost his court."
• Maryland governor Wes Moore (D) today announced pardons for 175,000 marijuana convictions that will affect 100,000 people.
• After buying the famous "Eamus Catuli" buildings just off Wrigley Field's right-field wall on Sheffield, a group of property owners plans to tear down landmarks and replace them with an ugly 18-unit condo.

Finally, author Edward Robert McClelland visited all 77 community areas in Chicago, and lived to write about it.