The Daily Parker

We have a typical cloudy autumn day, good for reading and not so good for long walks with the dog. So I'll read and Cassie can wait for a bit:

• Turns out, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is even more of a scary, right-wing Christian nationalist nutter than most people knew. Paul Krugman concurs, warning that Johnson wants to eliminate the social safety net entirely.
• Actor Matthew Perry drowned in his California home yesterday. He was 54.
• New DNA evidence confirms that the Assateague horses on Delmarva's barrier islands arrived in North America when a Spanish galleon wrecked there 400 years ago.
• Data from Tallinn, Estonia, suggests that even free public transit doesn't keep people from wanting to drive.
• Chicago's first railroad line turned 175 this week. Happy birthday.

Finally, new research shows elucidates the complex relationship between alcohol and orgasms. Apparently there's a sweet spot somewhere in the "moderate drinking" zone. I will leave the details as an exercise for the reader.

I really love the Lakewood-Balmoral neighborhood in Chicago's Edgewater community area. I only had 25 minutes to walk Cassie while my car got serviced nearby, so I didn't stop to photograph everything. But I did snap this at the corner of Magnolia and Bryn Mawr:

And then, just 200 meters away on the 5400 block of Wayne, this:

That's not too creepy, is it?

I spent way too much time chasing down an errant mock in my real job's unit test suite, but otherwise I've gotten a lot done today. Too much to read all these articles:

• Julia Ioffe interviews Ambassador Dennis Ross on the disappearing hopes for a two-state solution in Israel.
• Ruth Marcus wonders whether Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (R) committed tax fraud when he accepted a $267,000 motor home.
• Josh Marshall wonders WTF with House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) black "son?"
• Paul Krugman bemoans the Republican Party for going "full-on extremist."
• National Geographic takes a trip down US-50 in Nevada, the "loneliest highway in America."
• Pilot Jim Fallows explains the trio of scary aviation stories that hit the press this week.
• Pilot Patrick Smith remembers the Boeing 707.
• Ezra Klein ponders Marc Andreesen's odd blend of futurism and reactionary politics.

OK, assuming this build works, I'll have closed 4 story points today—with 4 very small 1-point stories. The harder ones start Monday morning.

I've had a few things on my plate this week, including a wonderful event with the Choeur de la Cathedrale de Notre Dame de Paris at Old St Patrick's Church in Chicago. We had a big dinner, they sang for us, we sang for them, and then some of us hosted some of them in our homes. Tonight I'm hearing their real performance at Alice Millar Chapel in Evanston.

Sunday night I saw comedian Liz Miele at the Den Theater. I'm totally crushing on her and highly recommend you catch her on this tour:

And naturally I have a few photos of Cassie that got imported into Lightroom this morning:

Real post later today, probably around the time the cold front hits.

It's 22°C and sunny right now, making me wonder what's wrong with me that I'm putting together a software release. I probably should fire off the release, but I'm doing so under protest. I also probably won't get to read all of these things I've queued up:

• Peter Hamby expresses concern about the rise of the illiberal left in the younger generation.
• Despite the ravings of Fox News and other right-leaning propagandists, the US economy is actually doing better right now than at any point since Obama was in office, says Paul Krugman.
• Greg Sargent slow-claps "the quiet vindication of Hakeem Jeffries."
• Writing in Lawfare, Susan Landau rolls her eyes that law enforcement has turned to scaring people about child sexual abuse in their latest gambit to break end-to-end encryption.
• Archaeologist and sculptor Oscar Nilsson has reconstructed the face of a 14-year-old Inca girl ritually sacrificed in the Andes about 500 years ago.
• An off-duty pilot riding in the jumpseat of an Alaska Airlines E175 attempted to trigger the fire suppressors on the plane's engines Sunday. No one knows why.
• A literature review study has shown convincing evidence my generation really did have a lot more autonomy growing up.
• Google has changed its maps colors for some users—they're still rolling out the changes.
• Today is the 20th anniversary of the Concorde's last revenue flight. Maybe Virgin Galactic will get its SST off the ground someday?

Finally, Stan's Donuts will open a new store just three blocks from the apartment I moved out of one year ago today. I might have to stop in soon. I will not, however, wash them down with CH Distillery's latest abomination, Pumpkin-Spice Malört.

For my real job, I'm evaluating graphics packages to report (informally) at tomorrow's sprint review which ones I think we should investigate further, so that at the next sprint review in two weeks, I can recommend which one we should buy. These packages cost between $1000 and $6000 per year to license. You would think that helping me choose would top the priority list of everyone involved in the demo and trial process.

With that preface, here is the bug report I filed with Telerik earlier today:

When attempting to install a trial version of the Blazor UI controls, I am unable to progress beyond the Login step. This is unfortunate as without the trial I can't make the case that my company should spend thousands of dollars on Telerik instead of, say, Syncfusion. I have to say this experience is not encouraging.

I examined the conversation between the installer and the mothership using Fiddler. The endpoint dle.telerik.com:443 responded with HTTP202 (Accepted) to this POST:

POST https://dle.telerik.com/metrics/v1/events/errors HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Authorization: Bearer {snip}
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Content-Type: application/json
Host: dle.telerik.com
Content-Length: 1211

{"Type":"HandledError","SessionId":"f2ee3acd-37dc-487a-b5ea-1b2647a2eeb3","Source":"Installer","SourceVersion":"2023.3.1012.0","Timestamp":"2023-10-23T21:10:19.7047547Z","OS":"Windows 10 Enterprise 64-bit v.10.0 ","CLR":"4.8","MachineId":"6uI7wmYbX4Q9h0+vgpSj5xbBF4o=","Exception":{"OS":"Windows 10 Enterprise 64-bit v.10.0 ","CLR":"4.8","MachineId":"6uI7wmYbX4Q9h0+vgpSj5xbBF4o=","Message":"The system cannot find the file specified","Type":"Win32Exception"},"ErrorDetails":"   at System.Diagnostics.Process.StartWithShellExecuteEx(ProcessStartInfo startInfo)\r\n   at System.Diagnostics.Process.Start()\r\n   at System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(ProcessStartInfo startInfo)\r\n   at Telerik.Sso.SsoClient.MakeAuthorizationRequestInBrowser(Int32 port, String appProtocol, String appName, String productCode)\r\n   at Telerik.Sso.SsoClient.GetAccessToken(String appProtocol, String appName, String productCode)\r\n   at Telerik.CommonInstaller.DataAccess.RuntimeServiceClient.GetAccessToken(String appProtocol, String appName, String productCode)\r\n   at Telerik.CommonInstaller.Application.Services.AuthenticationService.Login(String user, String password, Boolean rememberCredentials, Boolean useRemembered)"}

HTTP/1.1 202
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: application/json
X-Frame-Options: DENY
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2023 21:11:55 GMT
Content-Length: 0

So, something is throwing an exception and keeping me from evaluating whether to give Telerik money.

One thing which may be important: the installer requested local disk access that required me to run it as a local Admin account. That account is not the domain account I used to register for Telerik. Not that it should matter; since the admin account has never seen the Telerik account, I would expect that the installer would ask for credentials instead of trying to use non-existent cached credentials.

It occurs to me that a better response to a login failure with cached credentials might be to ask for new credentials. Otherwise the end user might get frustrated and file a very snarky bug report.

Please advise. I'm expecting to give my informal evaluation to my team tomorrow at 3pm CDT/20:00 UTC. I'd hate to exclude Telerik from consideration merely because we couldn't load the free trial.

In other news, Syncfusion (which is more expensive but just requires a set of NuGet packages) and Infragistics (which is about the same cost as Telerik but lacks one feature we really need) have moved up in the rankings.

I'm naming the vendor because my tolerance for bugs in software may be higher than the average user's, but not when I'm trying to install the trial version. Then you get no mercy.

Writing in the current Atlantic, Joe Pinsker points out that emulating the pastimes of happy cultures won't actually create a happy culture:

With the release of each [World Happiness] report, which is published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the question is not which country will appear at the top of the rankings, but rather which Northern European country will. Finland has been the world’s happiest country for four years running; Denmark and Norway hold all but one of the other titles (which went to Switzerland in 2015).

The rankings are reliably discouraging for Americans, who have never cracked the global top 10. We are merely in the upper middle class of happiness—respectable, but underwhelming for a country with our level of wealth and self-regard.

Taking forest walks and foraging for berries do sound delightful, but a focus on activities and habits reduces entire cultures to individual lifestyle trends and obscures the structural forces that make people satisfied with their lives. No quantity of blankets or candles is going to make up for living in an unequal society with a weak social safety net. The folly of fixating on local customs becomes even clearer if you consider the poverty and violence that are common at the bottom of the rankings: No lifestyle blogger is studying Afghanistan, the least happy country in this year’s report, and recommending that readers avoid Afghan pastimes and customs such as flying kites and going to communal bathhouses.

Of course, we Americans have always tried to create happiness from fantasy, so perhaps missing the entire point of the World Happiness Report comes as naturally to us as a trip to Disneyland. I, personally, would experience more happiness if the United States had universal healthcare and more American cities had fast, frequent, and reliable public transit, but hey, I have nothing against your favorite professional sports team getting more points than the other teams they play.

The UN has made the World Happiness Report 2023 available free online, just in case you want to see which 14 countries ranked higher than the US in this year's report. Only one of them is an active war zone right now.

I did a thing yesterday:

Yes, the pizza at Barnaby's in Northbrook, Ill., is really that good.

Today will be a bit lighter.

Last weekend I made approximately 5 liters of chicken soup due to an unfortunate decision midway through the process to add more salt. Given the saltiness of the soup I put in mason jars, I recommend a 3:2 ratio of soup to water, meaning I effectively made 8 liters of soup. Most of it is in my freezer now, in convenient 250 mL jars, one serving apiece.

Suffice it to say I have had chicken soup for lunch 3 times this week. It is, however, very delicious. Except for over-salting it (which is easily corrected and preventable in future), I know what I'm doing.

Elsewhere in the world, things are not so delicious:

• Alex Shepard says the real reason House Republicans can't elect a speaker—Jim Jordan (R-OH) just failed for the third time in as many days—is because they don't have "any actual objectives beyond stymying the Biden administration and blocking liberal priorities."
• Andrew Sullivan throws up his hands at a party unfit for government.
• Dana Milbank chuckles at the Republicans wanting to "go to Gettysburg or something," which most people remember as the place the slave-owning South effectively lost their rebellion. "Washington isn’t broken," he writes. "The House of Representatives is broken — because you and your Republican colleagues broke it."
• Possibly related to the House GOP, Arthur Brooks outlines the "Dark Triad" type of malignant narcissist, and how to avoid them.
• Possibly related to that, Molly White continues her coverage of the SBF trial, today focusing on the confusing defense his lawyers have outlined.
• Speaking of malignant narcissists, which I guess would have to include all the preceding bullet points, Jeffrey Toobin (yes, that Jeffrey Toobin) warns that the XPOTUS is going to get someone killed. (Does Toobin not remember insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt?)
• Continuing with today's theme, Paul Krugman looks at Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter as a model of how an economic nexus dies.
• I don't usually go in for celebrity stuff, because things like the Post's review of Britney Spears' memoir remind me how horrible celebrity actually is.
• Moving off the narcissism theme: Sky News explains why workers have hung a bale of hay from London's Millennium Bridge.
• Chicago's Metropolitan Brewing has filed for bankruptcy, so the Brews & Choos Project will try to stop in for one last lager on Sunday.

Finally, today is the 50th anniversary of both the Sydney Opera House opening and Nixon's (and Bork's) Saturday Night Massacre. One of those things endures. The other does too, but not in a good way.

Travel writer Rick Stevens points out that European cities made deliberate choices to become walkable. American cities can do that too:

You know, it's funny, when Americans are in Europe, they marvel at the energy and the people friendliness of the urban cores. But oftentimes, they don't put it together. 

But you walk around these towns—you walk around Rome, you walk around Copenhagen, you walk around Amsterdam and Warsaw—and think, “Where are all the cars? There's just happy people.” I was in Copenhagen once when they were really getting into this: people were walking around the streets wearing plywood cut out the size and shape of a car. And they would walk down the sidewalks in the streets, walking, taking up as much space as a car to make the point. And now when you look around, you realize there's no traffic in Copenhagen downtown. Stop, where are the cars? No cars. Where are the vehicles? 200 bicycles. You stop anywhere, you can see 200 bicycles, but you don't even notice them. And that's how people got there.

I think we have the infrastructure, but the priority for the infrastructure is not people, it's cargo. For Seattle or Portland in Europe, there would be a train every half hour. I wouldn't need a schedule, I would know that at 10 minutes after and at 40 minutes after, there's a bullet train going from my town to Portland, and it would have maybe five stops along the way. It would go 100 miles an hour, and it'd be affordable, it would build community, it'd be sustainable. But what happens when I take the train to Portland from Seattle? It stops in the middle of nowhere for 20 minutes because it's waiting for a freight train to go by. So, our priority is that kind of commerce. I've given up on taking the train to Portland; now I drive. It's just because I'm not cargo: If I was cargo, I'd love to be on a train. But I'm a human being. So, I have to wait.

When [an American city] vacates at night, it becomes dangerous. You get afraid when there’s no people out, and it causes people to have to travel more, and spend more time in traffic to get in and out of work. It doesn't lend itself to a vital community. So, what do you have? You've got a situation where, after dark, the urban core is just a scary, depressing place, and in a lot of cases in Europe, it'd be a thriving place. It's pretty simple, isn't it? People live there. There's public transit, and it's not ruled by cars.

Will the US and Canada ever figure this out? I hope so, and in my lifetime. I grow less optimistic every year.