The Daily Parker

It turned out that I had an actual task today. Two, in fact. Both were pure stupidity on my part. And both completely scotched my goal of doing nothing worthwhile for four days.

First, I had promised something to my team at work before I left, but didn't realize until I checked email this morning that, well, the task was not completed. (Notice the subtle use of passive voice there.) So I had that task, which took half an hour.

Second, mentioned forgetting a few vital items in my luggage, so I had to buy them. And I paid a stupidity tax. The cost of one hat, two pairs of shorts, one pair of sandals (which I didn't already own and therefore had planned to buy here anyway), and one bottle of sunscreen was two hundred bloody dollars. In other words, I paid a 100% tax on bad packing.

So to compensate for having to do things today, after accomplishing both tasks I put on my new shorts, sunscreen, and sandals, then walked the 800 meters from my hotel to the opposite side of Maho Beach and watched planes land for three hours. I need to point out that along the way, I walked through the Caribbean Sea. My new shorts got seawater on them. I think this is exactly what they're for. Especially since the seawater was about the same temperature as the air (27°C), and unlike walking through Lake Michigan on any day except that one day in the beginning of September when everything lines up perfectly, it felt really good. (My feet are, in fact, still wet.)

I also met a few good people, had a few good drinks, and learned that the best airplane landing of the week occurs tomorrow around lunchtime when KLM flight 785 lands. It's a 747-400, the largest plane that flies here. If I have to stand out in the rain, I'm going to see this thing land.

Of course, this means I now have a plan. Even though I came to this island with the explicit goal of not accomplishing or planning anything, except maybe reading a book or two, I just can't help myself. The Dude is onto something...I just can't get there yet...

My plan is:

• Tomorrow: sleep late, eat something, walk across Maho Beach, take photos of the 747 landing, walk back to my hotel, change my shoes, walk somewhere else (possibly Marigot or Phillipsburg), have some drinks.
• Saturday: sleep late, walk somewhere (maybe even take a bus and then walk), read something, walk somewhere else, read some more, have some drinks.
• Sunday: sleep late, shove things into my suitcase, walk somewhere, retrieve my suitcase, go to New York, have some drinks.

Understand that "have some drinks" is an ongoing activity. And the happy accident is that the room I got for cheap through Bookings.com includes free drinks.

Someday, and that day may never come, I will do nothing for an entire week. Meanwhile, this is the least I can do right now. Baby steps.

I'm sitting in the only spot in my hotel that has free WiFi, with a dozen or so other people doing the same thing. Plus, it's possible this is the slowest WiFi in the world (I'm getting 150 kbps). These things make it easy to get out of the building, into island air that's currently 27°C.

I know, I said to people I wouldn't use the internet, but I actually needed a map and some local info that the giant book of wristwatch advertisements guidebook didn't actually tell me.

Plus, I forgot three somewhat useful things, so I'm waiting for the shops to open. Which I think they are now. So I can get the shorts, sunscreen, and hat I need to go for a hike, as the shorts, sunscreen, and hats I have back in Chicago (current temperature: -17°C) are kind of useless here.

Since I intend to be useless here, but I don't want to overheat or get sunburned, and all 300 emails that came in overnight have finished downloading, off I go.

I'm all set to go to a warm little island this afternoon, except for this:

Light snow continues to fall across the Chicago area with more moderate bands of snow close to and along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Moderate snowfall in the past hour has brought the Midway Airport total up to 148 mm.

Winter Storm Warnings and Advisories across the Chicago area continue in effect until noon today. Snowfall is slowly diminishing here as the center of low pressure has already tracked up the Ohio River valley into southwestern Pennsylvania.

Snowfall reports are rolling in early this morning – it looks like totals will range from 50-75 mm along the Illinois-Wisconsin border to 125-175 mm south of Interstate-80. Chicago’s official observation site at O’Hare had recorded 125 mm so far at 6AM with Midway closing in on 114 mm. Across central Illinois snowfall totals are running 150-225 mm.

When I took Parker out a few minutes ago, we practically sledded down the back stairs, then I just let him porpoise through the snow drifts in our back alley. Three minutes later, my cuffs and gloves were damp, and my hat had proved inadequate against the whistling, windy snow.

I do not want to spend the night in Miami. I really don't. All I want is for my flight out of Chicago to leave close to on-time. I'll deal with walking into my Caribbean hotel room in winter boots.

If most of what Jason Harrington wrote in Politico last week is true, I'm disappointed to have my suspicions confirmed:

Each day I had to look into the eyes of passengers in niqabs and thawbs undergoing full-body pat-downs, having been guilty of nothing besides holding passports from the wrong nations. As the son of a German-American mother and an African-American father who was born in the Jim Crow South, I can pass for Middle Eastern, so the glares directed at me felt particularly accusatory. The thought nagged at me that I was enabling the same government-sanctioned bigotry my father had fought so hard to escape.

Most of us knew the directives were questionable, but orders were orders. And in practice, officers with common sense were able to cut corners on the most absurd rules, provided supervisors or managers weren’t looking.

[T]he only people who hated the body-scanners more than the public were TSA employees themselves. Many of my co-workers felt uncomfortable even standing next to the radiation-emitting machines we were forcing members of the public to stand inside. Several told me they submitted formal requests for dosimeters, to measure their exposure to radiation. The agency’s stance was that dosimeters were not necessary—the radiation doses from the machines were perfectly acceptable, they told us. We would just have to take their word for it. When concerned passengers—usually pregnant women—asked how much radiation the machines emitted and whether they were safe, we were instructed by our superiors to assure them everything was fine.

In one of his blog posts, Harrington points to "the neurotic, collectively 9/11-traumatized, pathological nature of American airport security" as the source of all this wasted effort and money.

I've always thought TSA screeners are doing the best they can with the ridiculous, contradictory orders they have. It's got to be at least as frustrating for them as it is for us. Harrington pretty much confirms that.

Cranky Flier explains:

You might think that airlines hate when they have to bump people, but that’s not really true. They hate when they have to involuntarily bump people.

These are bad. If the airlines can’t get enough people to volunteer to take a later flight, they are forced to bump people against their will. Naturally, that means that there are going to be some angry people who don’t get on that airplane.

[T]he penalties for involuntarily bumping someone have gone up a lot.

Not only can the penalty now be 4 times the value of the ticket, but the cap has been raised to over $1,000 (and rising). With the potential cost going up, airlines have had to get more conservative on how much they overbook.

He lays out some more details about how airlines work it out.

As feared, Montreal-based Bixi, who supply many cities including Chicago with bike-share systems, has filed for bankruptcy protection:

The development was announced Monday by Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre and reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Company and the Montreal Gazette.

Three years ago, the Montreal City Council rode to the rescue of Public Bike System, also known as Bixi, by approving a $108 million bailout package.

It included a $37 million loan to cover the company’s operating deficit and $71 million in loan guarantees Bixi hoped to use to expand into other cities.

On Monday, the CBC quoted Coderre as saying his city would seize control of the troubled company’s $11 million in local assets, rather than sink even more money into it.

Peter Scales, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation, said in the statement: “Divvy, Chicago’s bike share system, continues to operate as normal, and current operations will not be impacted by the announcement that Public Bike System (PBSC) has filed for bankruptcy.

The Divvy Bikes website has no information yet.

Oh, don't die, Divvy. Don't die.

Krugman outlines how the state of North Carolina cutting unemployment benefits has completely failed to encourage people back into the workforce:

The idea behind cutting benefits is that we are “paying people to be unemployed”, and that tough love will force them to go out and create jobs. It’s never explained exactly how greater desperation on the part of the unemployed will, in fact, lead to higher overall employment. Still, you could imagine that an individual state might gain some competitive advantage against other states by cutting wages. What you actually see in North Carolina, however, is nothing....

The unemployment rate did fall — but this was due to a large drop in the labor force, as the number of people looking for work fell. Why? Well, a likely explanation is that some of the unemployed continued to search for work, and were therefore counted in the labor force, despite low prospects of finding a job in a depressed economy, because such search is a requirement for those collecting benefits. Take away the benefits, and they drop out.

[I]f there were anything to the theory that cutting unemployment benefits encourages job search and somehow translates into higher employment even in a slump, harsh policies should work better at the state than at the national level. But there is no sign at all that North Carolina’s harshness has done anything except make the lives of the unemployed even more miserable.

I've asked some friends in Raleigh and Charlotte for comment.

Andrew Sullivan, commenting on evidence that requiring visas keeps tourists away, explains why arriving in America generally sucks for most people:

This may seem trivial, but it isn’t with respect to American soft power. Most [of my readers] are American citizens, so they don’t fully see what it is like to enter the US as a non-citizen. It’s a grueling, off-putting, frightening, and often brutal process. Compared with entering a European country, it’s like entering a police state. When you add the sheer difficulty of getting a visa, the brusque, rude and contemptuous treatment you routinely get from immigration officials at the border, the sense that all visitors are criminals and potential terrorists unless proven otherwise, the US remains one of the most unpleasant places for anyone in the world to try and get access to.

And this, of course, is a function not only of a vast and all-powerful bureaucracy. It’s a function of this country’s paranoia and increasing insularity. It’s a thoroughly democratic decision to keep foreigners out as much as possible. And it’s getting worse and worse.

Even for returning U.S. citizens, our border can be a pain in the ass. This is why I am overjoyed to have a Global Entry endorsement. But even though I've seen the lines, I've never experienced coming here as a foreigner. My experiences in most other countries—Russia being the most memorable exception—have been completely benign. Plus, only a dozen or so countries require me to get a visa before arriving. Only Norwegians can visit more countries visa-free than we can.

Has anyone out there had a negative experience at our border?

Another shot from Christmas afternoon, as promised:

Check these out:

• Calculated Risk posits the 10 most important questions about the U.S. economy in 2014.
• Chicago History maps out some fun bits of street trivia, including this: One street crosses under the same El line four times. Name the street and the El line.
• The Dictionary of American Regional English is exactly what it says on the tin, and it's fun.
• Not sure you want to go on that trip but want to lock in the airfare for up to a week? Buy a call option on the fare.
• McDonald's may have had a big-tobacco moment recently when it shut down an internal employee wellness site because it labeled a McDonald's cheeseburger meal an "unhealthy choice."

More later, including, I expect, more photos of the ocean. Why? Because ocean.

Update: Speaking of the ocean, via George Takei's Facebook feed comes this gem. Just read the product reviews.