The Daily Parker

The US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow provides me with a long-awaited opportunity to clean out the closet under my stairs so an orphan kid more boxes will have room to stay there. I also may finish the Iain Banks novel I started two weeks ago, thereby finishing The Culture. (Don't worry, I have over 100 books on my to-be-read bookshelf; I'll find something else to read.)

Meanwhile:

• Even though I, personally, haven't got the time to get exercised about the OAFPOTUS's ridiculous threat to impose crippling (to us) tariffs on our three biggest trading partners, Mexico's president Claudia Sheinbaum used our own government's data to call bullshit on his claim that Mexico hasn't done enough to stop the flow of drugs into the US: "Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours."
• The UK will start requiring all visitors (even in transit) to register with their new Electronic Travel Authorisation scheme as of January 8th—similar to how the US ESTA program has worked for the last 16 years.
• Evanston, Ill., my home town, wants to protect bicyclists on one of its busiest streets, which of course has a bunch of stores panicking. (Note to the merchants: bike lanes don't hurt business, and in fact they encourage more foot traffic.)
• John Scalzi mourns the loss of Schwan's Home Delivery and it's bagel dogs.

Finally, as I mentioned nearly five years ago, today's date is a palindrome if you happen to study astronomy. The Julian Day number as of 6am CDT/12:00 UTC today is 2460642. Happy nerdy palindrome day!

I'm visiting family in the Bay Area today, staying in California for about 38 hours. I leave tomorrow morning early, so I'm back at the charming Dylan Hotel in Millbrae, right by the BART and CalTrain. If you held a gun to my head (or put $10 million in my bank account) and forced me to move to Silicon Valley, I might choose here. It's 40 minutes to my family in San Jose and 25 minutes to downtown San Francisco, for starters. And the Brews & Choos Project works just as well around the Bay as it does in Chicago—with another SF brewery review coming Sunday or Monday.

And I will actually spend time in both places today, taking the just-launched all-electric CalTrain between them.

Tomorrow my flight leaves so early I will have to take a cab to the airport, because the BART doesn't start running until after my plane boards. But as the airport is only 3 km away, I expect that won't cause any problems.

Finally, I'm still cogitating about the election, and getting closer to some coherent thoughts. Harris ran a great campaign with a losing message; we need to think about that. We also need to prepare for at least two years of kakistocracy, perhaps longer. But I'll write more about that when I get back to Chicago.

Today, though, it'll be 22°C and sunny from the Embarcadero to the garlic fields of Gilroy. No time to stay inside a hotel room and blog.

Cassie and I have gotten a full hour of walks today with the promise of more to come, as it's our third sunny day in a row, but today got above 19°C (though only up to 16.5°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ). I had two minor bugs to fix at Weather Now, but mainly I've had meetings today, so getting outside with the dog felt great. And tomorrow: a 42-kilometer walk.

Meanwhile, with 18 days left before the election:

• Paul Krguman explains how the tariffs the XPOTUS wants to impose on us could "wreck our economy."
• The XPOTUS hurled profanity and insults at a bunch of Catholic priests at the Alfred E Smith Dinner last night, because he's, you know, a demented sexual predator who should never have gotten nominated the first time.
• The updated forecast for the coming Chicago winter looks like a mild La Niña, with elevated precipitation but normal temperatures. So, lots of rain.
• A precinct near my house went dry 117 years ago, and the handful of restaurants located within it want to change that.

Finally, the last Chuck E Cheese in Chicago has gotten rid of its animatronic band, opting for video screens instead. The youth of America weep.

Now if the crew repairing every single stair in my courtyard (which seems to involve hitting them all repeatedly with a hammer) would just go the f--- home, I could get some more work done.

The only reaction to last night's debate that I need to share is Cassie's:

Talk about on-the-nose commentary!

Right. Anyway, in other news since yesterday:

• Elaine Godfrey explains what Democrats don't understand about JD Vance.
• Julia Ioffe interviews Justice Dept official Matt Olsen, who heads up the Biden Administration's anti-election-interference group.
• Meteorologists estimate that Hurricane Helene dumped 150 trillion liters of water on Appalachia as it stalled out, with one town in North Carolina getting a staggering 796 mm of rain.

Finally, the New York Times dips into the history of chicken tenders, an American pub staple that (allegedly) turns 50 this year. Love me tenders, love me sauce...

The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week.

I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things:

• Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina), you are much better off than you were four years ago.
• The Illinois Attorney General has filed an environmental suit against Trump Tower for refusing to fix its water-intake system.
• A New York City cop who fought against "courtesy cards" won a $175,000 settlement from the city.
• A developer plans to raze a 175-year-old house in Glencoe, Ill., designed by William Boyington, because we can't have nice things anymore.
• Speaking of not having nice things, after £175m spent and 12 years of construction, the Old Street roundabout in Islington, London, looks...about the same as before.

Finally, the New York Times ran a story in its Travel section Tuesday claiming Marseille has some of the best pizza in Europe. I will research this assertion and report back on the 24th.

The weather today requires that I leave work as early as permissible and take Cassie home the long way. Of course, in order to do that, I have to eat at my desk. (I suppose I could have taken a long lunch, but then I wouldn't have as much time with my dog. Choices.)

Last night I fired up the ol' grill. I am proud to report I have gotten steak grilling just right; this guy was a perfect slightly-rare-of-medium and every bite was juicy and tender:

Dinner tonight (and probably tomorrow) will be leftovers, of course. Breakfast and lunch today were oats and poke, respectively, as I realized that I should probably have as little fat and cholesterol as possible the rest of the day.

This morning, the CTA completed re-routing the #9 Ashland bus to the Ravenswood train station, which ended over 100 years of the bus line terminating by the Graceland Cemetery:

For more than a century, public transit commuters headed north on Ashland Avenue had their ride stop at Irving Park Road before the bus headed east to terminate at Clark and Belle Plaine, near Graceland Cemetery, CTA director of service planning and traffic engineering Jon Czerwinski said.

“This is a routing we’ve followed for a long time. It’s been in place since the Chicago surface lines operated streetcar service here all the way back to 1912,” Czerwinski said.

The route created a gap in service for anyone wanting to take public transit further north. But starting Aug. 25, the #9 Ashland bus will continue past Irving Park Road and now terminate at the newly renovated Ravenswood Metra station, 4800 N. Ravenswood Ave., Czerwinski said.

I caught two of the buses exploring their new neighborhood on my way to the train:

I'll have a link roundup later this afternoon.

The XPOTUS's handlers cut short his appearance this afternoon at the National Association of Black Journalists convention just 2 km from where I'm sitting. The XPOTUS began by insulting the hosts and the panelists. Then, when one of the panelists had just brought up Project 2025 (the Republican Party's blueprint for rolling the country back to the 1850s), the moderator suddenly interrupted and said the campaign had told her to wrap it up. The 37 minutes of Harris Campaign footage the XPOTUS had already provided will have to do, I guess.

In other end-of-July news:

• Julia Ioffe wonders what Kamala Harris's foreign policy will look like.
• Army Lt William Calley, the only American service member convicted of a crime after the My Lai massacre in 1968, died in April.
• Did Coinbase just commit the largest campaign finance violation in history?
• The Exchange Club of Naperville has permanently ended its Ribfest after 35 years, citing the cost of renting the space and declining revenues since the pandemic.
• The US Navy has nearly completed swapping out crews and equipment between the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) and the USS George Washington (CVN-73) as the latter prepares to move permanently to Japan.

Finally, the Justice Dept has accused the Norfolk Southern Railroad of illegally delaying passenger trains, after Amtrak suffered an ungodly 11,500 minutes of delay in just the first three months of this year. "Freight-train interference" is the principal cause of delays for US trains because the country has almost no dedicated passenger mainlines. The freight railroads that own the tracks have a statutory obligation to prioritize passenger trains, but no other incentives to do so. It's about the dumbest way to organize passenger rail anyone could come up with, other than separating out the track from the operations. I mean, we're dumb, but we're not that dumb.

Inner Drive Technology World HQ has cooled off slightly to 32.6°C (heat index 36.8°C) after maxing out this afternoon at 33.3°C. Not that the 7/10ths of a degree makes that much difference. I have a nearly-constant headache and I don't want to go outside. Plus, I've already drunk about 3½ liters of water today.

To avoid the heat and to make sure Cassie and I both got enough exercise, we took a 6 km walk before 7am. The temperature still got up to 26.5°C before too long, prompting me to fill Cassie's bowl with ice water and get myself to the shower even before having breakfast.

Not much else to report, except that I plan to eat the last of the leftover rice I've got in the fridge tonight, well within the New York Times recommended storage interval. That's if the heat doesn't kill my appetite entirely...

Heat makes me cranky. Even though I have good air conditioning, I also don't want to overdo it, so my home office is 25°C right now. Not too hot, but not what I would call super-comfortable. Still, it's cooler than the 37°C heat index that Cassie and I just spent 12 minutes walking in. Adding to the misery: both Chicago airports hit record high temperatures (36°C) yesterday.

The heat wave should break tomorrow night. Until then I'll continue slamming back water during the day and tonics with lime (minus the gin) in the evening. That's right: it's so damn hot, I don't even want a proper G&T. Maybe when it gets below 30°C.

Two things I read today dovetailed unexpectedly. The first, a speech Bruce Schneier gave to the RSA conference on 25 April 2023 and just posted this morning, suggests new ways of thinking about how democracy and AI can work together. A few minutes into the speech, Schneier sets up this critique of market economies:

[T]he cost of our market economy is enormous. For example, $780 billion is spent world-wide annually on advertising. Many more billions are wasted on ventures that fail. And that’s just a fraction of the total resources lost in a competitive market environment. And there are other collateral damages, which are spread non-uniformly across people.

We have accepted these costs of capitalism—and democracy—because the inefficiency of central planning was considered to be worse. That might not be true anymore. The costs of conflict have increased. And the costs of coordination have decreased. Corporations demonstrate that large centrally planned economic units can compete in today’s society. Think of Walmart or Amazon. If you compare GDP to market cap, Apple would be the eighth largest country on the planet. Microsoft would be the tenth.

Shortly after, I came across a BBC article rolling up just how much sushi gets wasted in Japan every day:

Every year on Setsubun, stores across the country stock a holiday sushi roll called ehomaki. At the end of the night, hundreds of thousands of these rolls wind up in the garbage. "Shops always provide what customers want, which means their shelves have to always be stocked," [Riko Morinaga, a recent high school graduate in Tokyo,] says. "This contributes to the food loss problem."

The exact size of the problem is difficult to quantify, because convenience store companies usually are not transparent about their losses. Representatives from 7-Eleven Japan and Lawson, two major chains, told BBC.com that they do not disclose the amount of food waste generated by their stores. Representatives from FamilyMart, another major chain, did not respond to interview requests, but the company indicates on its website that its stores generate 56,367 tonnes of food waste per day. In 2020, the Japan Fair Trade Commission estimated that Japan's major convenience store chains throw away on average 4.68m yen ($30,000; £24,000) of food per shop per year – equating to an approximate annual loss of more than 260bn yen (1.7bn; £1.3bn) in total.

Those numbers may seem fishy, but they represent a huge problem, not just in Japan, but everywhere that retailers feel they need to over-stock perishable food items.

I have a bunch more things queued up from earlier today that I'll link to in a bit. But first I have to stick my head in a bucked of ice water.

Last night at Begyle, getting the scritches:

And this morning, getting the naps: