The Daily Parker

I went through the photos I took on my trip to Germany last week and put a couple of them through Lightroom.

Getting coffee in Viktualienmarkt:

A very practical car for city life in post-war Germany, the 1955 BMW Isetta:

The Trödelmarktinsel, Nürnberg:

A better edit of my earlier photo of the main gate at Dachau:

And finally, I had a really great view of the New York metro area on the flight home:

Author Cal Newport examines "one reason hybrid work makes employees miserable and how to fix it:"

f you ask Americans with a desk job what they want, many say flexibility. Specifically, they want control over where that desk is located and when they work at it. Luckily for them, the American workplace is by some measures more flexible than ever before. About half of U.S. workers have “remote-capable” jobs. And Gallup data suggest that a majority of those jobs are now hybrid, meaning that employees can split time between home and the office. Despite this greater flexibility, however, surveys from last year found that Americans were more stressed and less satisfied with their job than they were during the worst of the pandemic.

What explains this paradox? One possibility is that although hybrid work loosens the rigidity of a desk job, it exacerbates an even bigger problem: what I call the “overhead tax.”

Since well before the pandemic, we’ve lived in a world of low-friction digital communication, where passing an obligation to someone else is extremely easy. I send you an email with a simple question—“Hey, can you handle the Johnson contract?”—and a few moments of my effort have suddenly been alchemized into hours of your own. Faced with a growing number of chores, you push what you can onto other people’s plate, and they respond in kind. The result is an onslaught of ad hoc assignments, whipsawing across inboxes and chat channels, that culminates in a shared state of permanent overload.

The problem with overstuffed to-do lists isn’t just the total time required to execute their contents, but the fact that each new commitment generates its own ongoing administrative demands—emails, chats, check-in calls, “quick” meetings. That’s the overhead tax. Before long, knowledge workers find themselves spending the bulk of their time talking about work instead of actually doing it.

Fortunately I don't feel that in my job, for a number of reasons but mainly that I'm building software, not doing sales. But I'm sure that Newport's essay or the book it excerpts will resonate with many of my friends.

Stories for the last day of winter, this year on the quadrennial day when your Facebook Memories have the fewest entries and, apparently, you can't pay for gas in New Zealand:

• Josh Marshall calls out retiring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for, among other things, turning the Senate "into a genuinely Calhounian body in which minority factions exercise a de facto and permanent veto over the majority."
• Steven Rattner calls out the XPOTUS for his destructive economic proposals.
• Ruth Marcus calls out the US Supreme Court for hearing the XPOTUS's ridiculous claims of immunity in mid-April, which "all but guarantees one of two terrible outcomes."
• Matt Ford also calls out the US Supreme Court for giving us a culture of guns.
• The National Weather Service has confirmed 11 tornados touched down in Tuesday's storm, mercifully all as EF-0 except for a lone EF-1.
• James Fallows applauds aviation's culture of safety. Now, if only we could apply that concept to traffic engineering...

Finally, Economist editor Steve Coll got access to hundreds of hours of Saddam Hussein's taped strategy meetings. He concluded that both the CIA and Hussein had no understanding at all about what the other was thinking.

Also, the temperature at IDTWHQ bottomed out at -5.3°C just after 7am and has kept climbing since then. The first day of spring should get it up into the high teens, with 20°C possible on Sunday. Weird, but quite enjoyable.

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ bottomed out this morning, hitting -4.8°C at 10:41 am, and it may even end the day above freezing. So this mercifully-short cold snap won't keep us out of the record books, just as predicted. It's still the warmest winter in Chicago history. (Let's hope we don't set the same record for spring or summer.)

Meanwhile, the record continues to clog up with all kinds of fun stories elsewhere:

• Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has led his party in the Senate since the Cretaceous, announced he will step down from leadership in November, handing some other schmuck clean-up duties after the electoral disaster likely to befall the party on the 5th of that month.
• After the unhinged ruling on embryo "personhood" the Alabama Supreme Court handed down last week, Republicans across the country have fallen over themselves saying they want to protect IVF treatment while they vote against protecting IVF treatment. Jamelle Bouie runs down some of the dumbass things Republicans have said on the ruling, with a cameo from the dumb-as-rocks junior US Senator from Alabama, who sounded more like Nigel Tufnel than usual.
• Aaron Blake pointedly contradicts the usual "bad for Biden" story line by putting President Biden's Michigan-primary win last night in perspective.
• Bruce Schneier looks at the difficulties insuring against cyber crime, one of the problems we're also solving at my day job.
• New York prosecutors said the Art Institute of Chicago exhibited "willful blindness" in 1966 when it acquired art looted by the Nazis, an accusation the museum denies.
• Harry Windsor, the Duke of Sussex, lost his case against the UK Home Office, in which he sued to keep his publicly-funded security detail the same size as it was when he actually did his job as the Royal Spare. The high court (the rough equivalent of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in this case) ruled that the relevant agency had made a perfectly rational decision as the Duke now lives in California, doesn't do bugger-all for the UK, and is a whiny prat to boot.

Finally, Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter took a—gasp!—CTA train to a city council hearing, at which he promised the CTA could be the best transit system in the world if only the State of Illinois would give it more funding. The very last thing I did in Munich on Sunday was to take the S-Bahn to the airport at 7am, so I can assure you money isn't the CTA's only impediment to achieving that lofty goal.

(Also, I just realized that This Is Spinal Tap turns 40 on Saturday. Wow.)

It's official: with two days left, this is the warmest winter in Chicago history, with the average temperature since December 1st fully 3.5°C (6.3°F) above normal. We've had only 10 days this winter when the temperature stayed below freezing, 8 of them in one week in February. This should remain the case when spring officially begins on Friday, even though today's near-record 23°C (so far) is forecast to fall to -6°C by 6am. And that's not even to discuss the raging thunderstorms and possible tornadoes we might get as an energetic cold front slices through tonight. By "energetic," I mean that the NWS predicts a drop by as much as 16°C (30°F) in one hour around 10pm.

Not to worry: it'll be 17°C by Sunday. (The normal high temperatures are 4.7°C for February 27th and 5.4°C for March 3rd; the records are 23.9°C and 26.7°C, respectively.)

Meanwhile, I don't have time to read all of these before I pack up my laptop tonight:

• While the XPOTUS has barely gotten the support of 60% of his own party in the last three primary elections this cycle, despite literally everyone knowing he'll be the nominee, Josh Marshall expects a week of Biden In Trouble™ articles if Biden fails to win by 95% in tonight's Michigan primary.
• Right-wing nutjob lawyer Ken Cheesbro has a not-so-secret-anymore Twitter account in which he made certain admissions that will very likely result in a perjury charge or two.
• Republican 11th Circuit judge Kevin Newsom criticized the "traditionalists" on the US Supreme Court for straying far from originalism in remarks last week at Harvard.
• Jennifer Rubin adores New York Attorney General Letitia Jones's "fire in the belly."
• Claire Potter reviews Matthew Lassiter's history of the War on Drugs and finds "the suburbs made the War on Drugs in their own image."
• Asia Mieleszko reminds the haters that Dallas used to have a walkable downtown, until they paved it over.
• Biologist David Gruber imagines what first contact with an alien civilization might look like, when the civilization in question is that of terrestrial sperm whales.

And now, back to getting ready for the Sprint 103 release. That's a lot of sprints.

As fun as my trip last week was, having this last night was awesome:

I've also got my windows open, because we just set a new record high temperature for February 26th of 19.4°C. Of course, it may snow tomorrow night, because it's still winter until Friday.

OK, back to work...

As planned, I took a day trip to Nürnberg, which required a 70-minute high-speed train that cost more than I'd planned. In fact, if I'd planned which trains to take, and bought the tickets last week, I could have saved about $50. Of course I had no way to predict today's amazing weather.

First, about that train. In Europe, a 244 km/h train is bog-standard:

From Munich to Ingolstadt it tools along at a leisurely 160 km/h, but after Ingolstadt, they put the hammer down, as you can see in the GPS readout in the upper-left corner.

And I am glad I took the trip, because Nürnberg is gorgeous:

It's also where Johannes Pachelbel committed his musical atrocities just over 400 years ago:

True story: at my wedding many eons ago, I hired a string quartet, and told them they would not get paid if they played anything by that guy. They stuck with Mozart, Haydn, and some Satie at one point, if memory serves.

Finally recovered from jet lag, our hero takes a 6-kilometer walk along the Isar and through Glockenbachviertel:

As the sun set, it found a gap in the clouds which I hope means tomorrow it'll come out for a while. You can see a little bit of it here on the Paulaner Brewery:

(I didn't stop in; any Brews & Choos stops on this trip will come tomorrow, in Nuremburg.)

The Theresien-Gymnasium:

And back at Marienplatz just as twilight became night:

Now, off to find a beer.

Since I learned how to drive a car, I've wanted to pick up a BMW in Munich. The European Delivery program allowed Americans to buy a made-to-order car at their local dealer, pick it up in Munich, drive it around Europe for up to 6 months, drop it off at an Atlantic port (Antwerp, I think), and drive it home from your local dealer about 12 weeks after that. Because of tax incentives from the German government and other factors, the purchase price of the car and delivery to your local dealer cost almost exactly what it would cost without picking it up here.

Sadly, it appears that program has ended, in part because of the pandemic, but also because BMW now builds most of its North American cars in North America. You can always go to Spartanburg, S.C., I suppose, but that isn't quite the same thing.

If I ever get a huge bonus or win the lottery, I'd buy a BMW anyway; specifically, the 330eX, their 4-wheel-drive plug-in hybrid. I'm sure my Prius Prime gets much better efficiency (and costs about half what the 330eX would), but having owned two BMWs before, I can assure you a BMW is much more fun to drive.

So with no way to buy a BMW this weekend, I at least got to the source:

And continuing a theme of this weekend, I got there on a fast, quiet, modern subway train:

Unrelated to anything transportation-related, I have an update on Cassie and her friend Butters from the latter's humans. Both girls like food:

And they both like naps:

Now that I've had a quick lunch of Schweinswurst, Käse, Oliven, und ein Shoko-croissant, I am going to take a walk through the Isarvorstadt neighborhood just to my southwest.

Updates, on dogs, trains, and walks, as conditions warrant.

I'll have more and better-finished photos when I return to Chicago. Here are three quick phone edits from today.

The Neue Rathaus in Marienplatz, near my hotel:

The main gate to the prisoner camp at Dachau:

The main road in the Dachau prison camp:

That was not a fun visit, but it was necessary.