The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

So much Dunning, so much Kruger

It seems like so much of the news I've read today concerns people behaving stupidly, but thinking they're behaving intelligently. Sadly, it's mostly the same group of people:

Finally, people in Bridgeport and other Southwest Side neighborhoods have fallen in love with a rotund beaver who lives with her family on the Chicago River. Some have suggested naming the beaver Lori Heavyfoot or Dam Ryan. I hope she doesn't meet up with one of the city's other charismatic megafauna...

Wednesday afternoon notes

I'm just noting a few things and moving on with my day:

I'm planning to wrap up a new release of Weather Now this evening, too. I'll post snow photos when I do.

Why do upstaters care?

Paul Krugman wonders aloud why people in Upstate New York—who will probably never in their lives drive to SoHo—care so much about the lower-Manhattan congestion pricing zone:

Morning Consult found that while residents of New York City approve of the congestion charge, residents of New York State as a whole disapprove by a substantial margin. What this tells us is that negative views of the charge come from upstaters, people who will almost never pay it or experience its effects.

Which brings me to the most important enemy of this remarkably successful policy, someone who definitely isn’t personally affected: Donald Trump, who told the New York Post that he wants to “kill” congestion pricing (and bike lanes too.)

The first question is, why should Trump be weighing in on this issue at all, let alone trying to force the city to change policy? Aren’t conservatives supposed to believe in local control?

I do wonder whether general hostility to New York is part of the story. Many people, and Trump in particular, are committed to the view that one of the safest places in America is an urban hellscape. A policy that improves life in the city runs counter to that narrative and inspires visceral opposition. And Trump in particular surely wants to hurt a city that has never supported him.

But maybe the biggest reason for Trump’s desire to kill the congestion charge is a phenomenon I identified the last time I wrote about this: the rage some Americans obviously feel at any suggestion that people should change their behavior for the common good.

This is literally why we can't have nice things. Why, as anyone who has traveled to Europe or East Asia can tell you, we have fallen so far behind our peers.

Friday afternoon link roundup

As we end the work-week, we can start our weekend with these little nuggets of horror and amusement:

Finally, Chicago has only gotten 251 mm of snowfall this season, just 3 mm more than the record-lowest 1920-21 season and only 26% of our normal 975 mm. Granted, we still have three more weeks of winter, but nothing in the forecast suggests we'll get a significant snowfall before March 1st. We may get 10 mm or so Saturday night, depending on when the temperature falls below freezing, but the 10-day forecast doesn't have a lot of precipitation in it. I hope we get some good rainfall this spring, though.

Brews & Choos Project: five years in

Five years ago this evening, I hopped a Milwaukee District North Line train after work for Glenview, and walked about 1.3 km to Macushla Brewing at Lake and Waukegan. The Brews & Choos Project had begun.

Since then, I've visited 118 breweries, distilleries, and meaderies in Chicago and another 10 while traveling. Sadly, 20 of the places I've visited have closed. (Let me revise that: sadly, 17 of them have closed, and happily, 3 others have closed.) I visited 25 places in the first month of the project, going all the way to the end of the Union Pacific West line on 7 March 2020. But then the pandemic halted the project for months, until everyone figured out that being outside in warm air was less risky than staying cooped up at home. By mid-2021, I'd resumed a steady pace and had taken at least one trip on every Metra line except the North Central Service, which had to wait until 25 August 2023.

In July 2023 I revised the criteria slightly to bring a few places outside Chicago into the project, primarily because Amtrak can get you to Milwaukee faster than the Union Pacific Northwest Line can get you to Woodstock.

I've used a simple rating system: would I go back? For 72 of the 118 Chicago-area places that are still open, I said yes; for 16, I said Maybe; and for just 10—including the second place I visited on 7 February 2020, Ten Ninety Brewing—I said No. I also started a Top 10 list in 2022.

I also have reported three other criteria that I hold dear: whether the place allows dogs (65), how easily one can avoid televisions (67), and whether the place has outdoor seating (92).

Starting today, I'm revising the rating system. In addition to the Yes-Maybe-No recommendation on each review, I'll be adding a star rating. As much as I liked the 81 places worldwide I rated "Would Go Back," there are differences. And not all of the "No" places are as bad as Crust Brewing in Rosemont. I know star ratings are boring, but with 184 places on the list and hundreds more within walking distance of trains throughout the world, it needs more precision.

So watch for a revised Brews List and Choos Map, and a concerted effort over the next six weeks to visit Bridgeport and Bronzeville, two areas of the city I've neglected.

Finally, I'm happy to report that that Macushla remains open, and continues to brew innovative beers like the HollaPeno Jalapeño IPA, which my Brews & Choos buddy would probably love.

Stay tuned for more Brews & Choos!

No good for any of us

Topping the link round-up this afternoon, my go-to brewery Spiteful fears for its business if it has to pay a 25% tariff on imported aluminum cans. If the OAFPOTUS drives Spiteful out of business for no fucking reason I will be quite put out.

In other news:

Other than the Neil Gaiman thing, which pains me deeply, this all goes to show that President Camacho will be a Republican.

OAFPOTUS blinks, Mexico wins today; Canada wins tomorrow? [Update: today!]

Demonstrating one more time that the OAFPOTUS is all hat and no cattle, the White House announced that it will "postpone" the crippling and needless tariffs he had threatened to impose on our second-biggest trading partner in exchange for...something Mexico would have done anyway. Avocados will continue to flow north, and dollars will continue to flow south.

Canada, meanwhile, has taken a more hardline position on the threat, which James Fallows calls "an international lesson in leadership." Perhaps Canada will agree to increased anti-coca-production efforts in exchange for the OAFPOTUS "pausing" the tariffs that it seems he never really intended to impose in the first place. Because of course he didn't.

The OAFPOTUS is a con man, and this was a grift, just like everything else he does. Or maybe, as Timothy Noah suggested, it's a simple protection racket.

Meanwhile:

And finally, the New Yorker has a cautionary tale about a real-estate deal that (quite literally) went sideways.

Update, 15:52 CST: Yeah, called it. Tariffs against Canada also paused, "in exchange" for Canada allocating 10,000 staff to policing the border—which I'm pretty sure they had already planned to do.

I had to fill my car up

Since I live in a dense urban environment and drive a plug-in hybrid, I can go a long time without buying gasoline.

Last night, I broke down and put 35 liters of gas in the car, because I'm concerned the OAFPOTUS's tariffs against Canada will cause petrol prices to spike in the Midwest. In fairness, I only had 3 liters left, but still: I could have gone another month!

I last filled up coming back from watching the eclipse on April 8th. So I did set a new personal record for time between refueling: 300 days. Sadly, the 2,863 km between fuel stops didn't get all the way to my PR of 3,116 km or the Holy Grail of 3,219 km (2,000 miles). And hey, 1.2 L/100 km (194.3 MPG) really doesn't suck. Since buying the car six years ago, I've spent less than $600 on gas. That also doesn't suck.

Still, I'm annoyed that politics interfered. The OAFPOTUS continues to present as the dumbest person ever to sit in the Oval Office by at least 20 IQ points.

More on the DC crash

Wednesday night saw the worst air-transport crash in the US in 19 years. The National Transportation Safety Board won't have a preliminary report until at least March 1st, but that didn't stop the OAFPOTUS from blaming everyone he doesn't like for it:

In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for imposing what he called “a big push to put diversity” that he said weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.

Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”

But here’s the rub: During Trump’s first term, the FAA began a program to hire air traffic controllers with the conditions that Trump decried.

James Fallows, like most of us, felt absolute disgust after seeing the press conference:

Donald Trump’s press appearance today, designed to advance this slur and fiction, was despicable.

-He made an event that should have been about victims, consequences, investigations, questions, lessons, all about himself. It was strongly reminiscent of his hogging-the-stage early press spectacles about Covid. This was the aviation version of one of his “ivermectin” rants.

-He made his raft of appointees and officials—the new Transportation Secretary, the new Vice President, the unspeakable new Defense Secretary—perform as North Korean-style adulatory lackies, each beginning his statement with admiration and thanks to the Dear Leader and his guidance. This too was a return to the Covid/ivermectin days.

-He did what no one should ever do in the hours after an airplane disaster, which is to presume detailed knowledge of what happened and who was to blame.

-He preposterously claimed that he and his people would always be known as “the best and the brightest,” obviously with no awareness of the sarcastic meaning David Halberstam attached to that term. This is the administration proposing a former WWE figure as Secretary of Education, of Dr. Oz as head of Medicare and Medicaid, of the very worst member of the Kennedy lineage in charge of the health of millions, with Fox News figures as far as the eye can see. He’s right. This era will stand as a symbolic moment in the history of the “meritocracy.”

The least of America’s “merit” problems is the skill and caliber of its air-traffic control cadre.

In fact, if any politician may get the blame for the state of air-traffic control in the US, it would have to be Ronald Reagan. And the OAFPOTUS just disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee and fired the head of the TSA.

Juliette Kayyem points out the obvious:

The precise immediate cause of the crash—which killed all 64 passengers and crew members aboard the airliner and all three people in the helicopter—will not become clear until investigators fully analyze recordings of air-traffic-control communications and the plane’s black box. But the accident follows a long string of alarming near collisions at airports across the country—a pattern suggesting that the aviation-safety systems upon which human life depends are under enormous strain.

In 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration identified 19 “serious runway incursions,” the most in almost a decade. The causes of these events are varied: air-traffic-control staffing shortages, pilot inexperience, demand for air travel, outdated technology. The increase in near misses led the FAA to create a safety review team and issue a rare industrywide “safety call to action” demanding greater vigilance throughout the community. These incidents do not appear to have prompted any major changes in safety practices either nationally or in the Washington area. Last year, the number of serious incursions declined, making the issue seem less urgent.

Safety systems are vulnerable to a phenomenon known in the disaster-management world as the “near-miss fallacy”—an inability to interpret and act upon the warnings embedded in situations where catastrophe is only narrowly avoided. Paradoxically, people may come to see such events as signs that the system is working. In her groundbreaking research on NASA after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, the American sociologist Diane Vaughan faulted the agency for its “normalization of deviance.” The direct culprits in the spacecraft’s fate were faulty booster-rocket parts known as “O-rings.” Vaughn noted that shuttle missions had been experiencing problems with the parts for years, but NASA had downplayed their importance. Engineers were able to normalize O-ring incidents and other safety issues because none had caused significant harm—until one did.

We don't yet know the entire accident chain that brought the Army helicopter and CRJ into a collision. But we have some clues about a system that didn't help—and will get worse with the OAFPOTUS's recent actions disbanding key safety oversight groups.

More meetings, more links in the bank

I had a delightful 2-hour lunch with a friend I've not seen in a while, after a morning of non-stop meetings. I also updated a piece of software that gets deployed tomorrow. I've got about 20 minutes now to jot down all of the things I hope to read later today:

Finally, singer Marianne Faithfull has died at 78. She will be missed.