The Daily Parker

All of these articles look interesting, and I hope I get to read them:

• 538 explains how the Cubs beat Cleveland last night, and how they might do it 3 more times.
• Richard Florida explains how the class divide in the US is only getting worse.
• The DNC is suing the RNC over voter intimidation tactics.
• London's Heathrow is one step closer to getting a third runway.
• Trying to get to Wrigleyville this weekend? The Tribune has a guide for you.
• There's new data about what happens in your brain when you lie.
• Hackers got into John Podesta's email account through a phishing attack.
• Finally, Donald Trump is down a horcrux.

Oh, fun! Another meeting!

Recaps of the debate comprise just a few of the things I haven't had time to read today:

• Who hated Trump's caginess on whether he'd accept the election results if he lost? Everyone: The Economist, The New Republic, The National Review, Talking Points Memo, everyone. 
• Trump's debate performance is being compared to book reports by kids who haven't read the book.
• Pilot Patrick Smith says Trump's airline wasn't that bad for customers, but it never made a profit either.
• Meanwhile, the Cubs beat the Dogders 10-2, which means the series will be decided at Wrigley on Saturday or Sunday.
• Looks like Chicago will have a warm-ish November and a normal-ish winter.
• One of the world's largest data centers, here in the South Loop area of Chicago, will soon be a lot bigger.
• Funny statistic: almost all airport noise complaints come from a handful of people—like the one person in Maryland who complained about Washington Dulles 1,024 times last year.
• Finally, "Hamilton," which I saw Sunday, got a rave from the Tribune.

Back to my meetings.

A couple of milestones today.

First, just a couple of days before my 2-year anniversary with Fitbit, I've earned what they call the "Africa Badge:" I've walked 8,046 km since I joined, which is approximately the north-south length of Africa.

More interestingly, today is the 235th anniversary of Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown, an anniversary Alexander Hamilton may have been aware of when, 15 years later, he slyly accused Thomas Jefferson of having an affair with a slaves. The allegation was true, though few people reading Hamilton's editorial would have believed it, but it may have nudged the 1796 election to fellow Federalist John Adams.

Neither of these things has anything to do with me walking a lot in the last two years, of course.

First, from Crain's, an exploration of the ghost town inside Naperville, Ill., where millions of dollars evaporated when the housing bubble burst in 2008:

At the height of the building boom, Novack estimates, there were 88 homebuilders working in Naperville. "Everyone was building homes then," he says. "It was the best business to be in." The bust took that figure down to "maybe a dozen," Novack says, though in recent years it's grown back to around 30. Homebuilding has been in a trough throughout the region, not only in Naperville. Builders sold 25,105 new homes in the Chicago area in 2006, according to Schaumburg-based industry tracker Tracy Cross & Associates, and in 2015 sold less than 15 percent of that.

If only Alan Greenspan had taken an economic view instead of an ideological one in the mid-2000s and put the brakes on runaway lending. Oh, and if we'd had financial oversight. But Republicans believe in everyone making it on their own: i.e., the richest making it on their own by not having to deal with the protections we put in place in the 1930s and 1940s, the last time this happened.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the incoming Christie administration moved money around the state budget to cut taxes, and he cancelled an enormous Hudson River tunnel project ostensibly to protect the state from cost overruns. The effects of his policies (which are consistent with Republican ideology) were calamitous for public transport. The New York Times explains in detail the effects on New Jersey Transit in particular:

Under the administration of Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, the state subsidy for the railroad has plunged by more than 90 percent. Gaping holes in the agency’s past two budgets were filled by fare increases and service reductions or other cuts. And plans for a new tunnel under the Hudson River — one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in the country — were torpedoed by Mr. Christie, who pushed for some of the money to be diverted to road-building projects. 

The result can be felt by commuters daily. So far this year, the railroad has racked up at least 125 major train delays, about one every two days. Its record for punctuality is declining, and its trains are breaking down more often — evidence that maintenance is suffering.

Midway through Mr. Christie’s first year as governor, New Jersey Transit was spending about $1.35 billion on projects to maintain and improve service. By the middle of last year, that figure had fallen by more than half, to about $600 million.

Again, Republican low-tax, low-service policies benefit the rich (who don't care about public services but do care about taxes) at the expense of everyone else (who pay much less in taxes to begin with but do care about public services).

With 26 days until the election, maybe we should pay attention to down-ballot races and their consequences. You want to make America great again? Quit electing people who don't care about you.

This has been my computer's lock screen image for a very long time. It's hard to believe I took this photo that long ago:

Details: Canon EOS 20D, f/6.3 at 1/250, ISO 800, 18mm.

I took a personal day yesterday to get my teeth cleaned (still no cavities, ever!) and to fork over a ton of cash to Parker's vet (five shots, three routine tests, heartworm pills, one biopsy, $843.49). That and other distractions made it a full personal day.

So as I start another work day with the half-day of stuff I planned to do yesterday right in front of me, I'm queuing up some articles again:

• Then and Now, Armitage-Bissell
• Programming is Hard
• The Founding Fathers' Power Grab
• The Chicago Tribune has endorsed...Gary Johnson? WTF? (More on that later.)
• I'm now 8 entries behind in James Fallows' Trump Time Capsule series.
• Bruce Schneier rounds up and comments on stories about the Yahoo! hacking incidents. (Hint: Yahoo! were stupid.)
• Can Cubs president and former Red Sox president Theo Epstein do it again?
• Why did Trump bumble into Khan 2.0?

OK, my day is officially begun. To the mines!

My goal yesterday was to walk at least as far as I did back in June, when I hoofed it from Uptown to Highland Park (28.95 km, 4:32:52, 32,595 steps). Well, yesterday I didn't, for a couple of reasons: first, I'm recovering from a cold. Second, it was 5°C warmer yesterday than June 16th. And third, I started later in the day, so I had less time to do the trip. Also I was a bit stupid: around hour 3½, I hit the wall, but didn't realize I had, until I finally stopped in a convenience store and downed a pint of Gatorade. Miraculously, I felt better in minutes. Who knew?

My totals yesterday: 24.37 km, 3:54:25, 25,570 steps on the walk and 32,354 for the day. At least that total count for the day was my second-highest daily step count. Could I have done another 7,000 steps? Maybe. But I was so hot and so done, and nothing was chasing me.

I also need to complain that technology failed me. My Fitbit Blaze lost contact with my phone four times, resulting in me having to reboot both once and to reset the Fitbit three other times. Observe:

The Fitbit lost its connection with my phone (and thus its GPS) at 7.75 km, and I didn't notice until I stopped for Gatorade. Which really, really irritates me. That's about half a kilometer and about 600 steps that didn't get counted.

Garrett Epps, writing for The Atlantic, warns that the advent of Trumpism comes mainly from an erosion of our collective understanding of and belief in the reasons our Constitution was written in the first place:

Trumpism is the symptom, not the cause, of the malaise. I think we have for some time been living in the post-Constitution era. America’s fundamental law remains and will remain important as a source of litigation. But the nation seems to have turned away from a search of values in the Constitution, regarding it instead as a set of annoying rules.

But even if America is spared President Trump, will the pathologies of the last year simply dissipate in a burst of national good feeling? Hardly. Trump was not a meteorite who has unexpectedly plunged to earth out of the uncharted depths of space; he is the predictable product of a sick system.

The corrosive attack on constitutional values has come, and continues to come, from the right. It first broke into the open in 1998, when a repudiated House majority tried to remove President Bill Clinton for minor offenses. It deepened in 2000, when the Supreme Court, by an exercise of lawless power, installed the President of their choice. It accelerated when the inadequate young president they installed responded to crisis with systematic lawlessness––detention without trial, a secret warrantless eavesdropping program, and institutionalized torture.

Whatever is taught in school, the Constitution never was (in James Russell Lowell’s phrase), “a machine that would go of itself;” what has made it work is a daily societal decision that we wish to live in a constitutional democracy. In 1942, Judge Learned Hand warned that “a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save.”

And as if on cue, yesterday the Man Himself made another broadside against the 6th and 5th amendments (without, one assumes, knowing that he did):

In a speech on Monday, Donald Trump expressed his displeasure that Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspect in the recent New York City bombings, will receive the full legal protections afforded to him by the federal Constitution. Trump specifically zeroed in on the fact that Rahami, a naturalized U.S. citizen, will presumably be provided a lawyer, as the Constitution requires. “He will be represented by an outstanding lawyer,” Trump complained with palpable chagrin. “His case will go through the various court systems for years and in the end, people will forget and his punishment will not be what it once would have been. What a sad situation. We must have speedy but fair trials and we must deliver a just and very harsh punishment to these people.”

Slate's Mark Stern goes on to remind readers that John Adams and James Madison made the 6th Amendment right to counsel a bedrock of American jurisprudence for some pretty good reasons. But neither Trump nor his supporters really care about those reasons, because in their limited imaginations, they can't see how taking away those rights for some people will almost certainly result in taking away those rights for them as well.

My new LG G5 is now a brick, so I'm back to my slightly-cracked G4.

Yesterday, the phone got hot, stopped responding to inputs, and rebooted itself twice in three hours. That's usually the sign of a runaway app. So upon turning it back on, I manually rebooted it to clear running apps (it auto-loads apps that were running when it resets), and all seemed fine.

Then sometime while I walked home from Wrigley it shut itself off completely and has not yet woken up.

Fortunately T-Mobile was able to move my SIM back to my old phone. Unfortunately the photos I took at Wrigley were on an encrypted SD card which is now unreadable because the decryption keys are hardware-based. (The whole point of the encryption scheme is to prevent an attacker from moving the data to a new phone.)

T-Mobile says I should have a replacement G5 by Monday.

At work, I typically sit at an east-facing window on the 35th floor of the Sears Willis Tower. Here's my view:

That means I can often see Michigan, Indiana, and everything in between, including very large boats out on the Lake. For the last half-hour I've watched a huge white thing slowly steam South, wondering what it was. It turns out, there's a website for that. And the boat is, in fact, pretty big:

So the 138-meter Glostrander is puttering southward at 19 km/h towards South Chicago. Good to know. (You can see the boat in the photo above just to the left of the Board of Trade building. It's the white horizontal sliver close to the horizon.)