The Daily Parker

A few months ago a Chicago Parking Enforcement Agent (PEA) tried to give me a ticket while I was paying for the parking spot online. I kept calm and polite, but I firmly explained that writing a ticket before I'd even finished entering the parking zone in the payment app might not survive the appeal.

Yesterday I got another parking ticket at 9:02pm in a spot that has free parking from 9pm to 9am. The ticket actually said "parking expired and driver not walking back from meter." Note that the parking app won't let you pay for parking beyond 9pm in that spot. Because, again, it's free after 9pm. That didn't stop the PEA, so now I actually will appeal, and I'll win. But it's a real pain.

Again, I thank Mayor Daley for jamming through the worst public financial deal in the history of the United States.

Meanwhile, I didn't have time to read all of these at lunch today:

• Almost as shocking as the realization that privatizing parking meters games the system in favor of private interests against the general public, it turns out so do traffic impact studies.
• The Illinois Board of Elections voted unanimously to reject an effort to keep the XPOTUS off the Republican Party primary ballot, citing an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that excludes the Board from constitutional questions.
• Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (R) won't win the Republican nomination for president this year, but she will make the XPOTUS froth at the mouth.
• Of course, she and others in her party persist in trying to make their own voters froth at the mouth, mostly by lying to them about the state of the economy, cities, and other things that have gone pretty well since 2021.
• Of course, perhaps the Republican Party lies so much to cover their demonstrable incompetence at governing?
• Christopher Elmensdorf warns that the clean energy bill winding through the Democratic offices on Capitol Hill will lead to endless NIMBYism—not to mention bad-faith blockage by fossil-fuel companies.
• For only $120,000 a year, this consultant will get your kid into Harvard.
• Helmut Jahn's new building at 1000 S. Michigan Ave. looks super cool.

I will now go back to work. Tonight, I will schedule my parking appeal. Updates as conditions warrant.

I grabbed a friend for a couple of Brews & Choos visits yesterday, and through judicious moderation (8-10 oz of beer per person at each stop), we managed to get the entire West Fulton Corridor cluster done in six hours. So in a few minutes I'll start writing four B&C reviews, which will come out over the next three days.

Before I start, though, I'm going to read all these stories that have piled up since Friday:

• Sports Illustrated shut down publication and laid off the entire editorial staff after an entity called "Arena Group" cancelled its license to publish, yet another thing we can thank the American fetish for private equity owning things they have no ability to or interest in running for. (Apologies for the preposition salad.)
• David Brooks, like generations of columnists before him, has had enough of bureaucracy, but conflates the private obfuscatory kind (e.g., private health insurers) with the kind that protects everyone's rights by treating everyone the same (e.g., Federal agencies).
• Penn environmental scientist Michael Mann finally got into court to face two defendants in his defamation lawsuit against climate-change deniers.
• Kurt Anderson mocks Bill Ackman (whom I called "yet another infantile billionaire") as a "brilliant fictional character."
• A delightful individual who sued dozens of women for bad-mouthing him on a Facebook dating reviews group got convicted of two counts of filing a false tax return. (His defense? He was too stupid to understand his own tax returns.)

Finally, the Roscoe Rat (really a squirrel) Hole got its own NPR story this morning. And in my social media I saw a photo of someone proposing to her boyfriend at the rat hole. Color me bemused.

Just a couple to mention:

• A jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried of committing the largest fraud in US history. He faces up to 110 years in prison.
• House Republicans passed a bill that would provide $14 billion in funding for Israel's war with Hamas by taking it from IRS tax evasion enforcement, a move so cynical that Paul Krugman likens it to "the Big Lie." ("Starving the I.R.S. has long been a Republican priority; what’s new is the party’s willingness to serve that priority by endangering national security.")
• Calumet City, a mostly-Black suburb about 35 km south of Chicago, issued a citation to Daily Southtown reporter Hank Sanders for calling city employees and asking for comment (i.e., "reporting") about major flooding in the area.
• Chicago Alderperson (yes, that's what they're called now [shudder]) Ray Lopez (D-15th Ward) pulled a Vrdolyak at yesterday's City Council meeting before describing it to reporters as a "shitshow."

Finally, David Brooks offers some advice on "how to stay sane in brutalizing times."

And, almost forgot: It was 25 years ago today that Minnesota elected Jesse Ventura governor, sending my team running the election data at CBS News into a brief panic before we confirmed the result.

I spent way too much time chasing down an errant mock in my real job's unit test suite, but otherwise I've gotten a lot done today. Too much to read all these articles:

• Julia Ioffe interviews Ambassador Dennis Ross on the disappearing hopes for a two-state solution in Israel.
• Ruth Marcus wonders whether Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (R) committed tax fraud when he accepted a $267,000 motor home.
• Josh Marshall wonders WTF with House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) black "son?"
• Paul Krugman bemoans the Republican Party for going "full-on extremist."
• National Geographic takes a trip down US-50 in Nevada, the "loneliest highway in America."
• Pilot Jim Fallows explains the trio of scary aviation stories that hit the press this week.
• Pilot Patrick Smith remembers the Boeing 707.
• Ezra Klein ponders Marc Andreesen's odd blend of futurism and reactionary politics.

OK, assuming this build works, I'll have closed 4 story points today—with 4 very small 1-point stories. The harder ones start Monday morning.

I love it when something passes all the integration tests locally, then on the CI build, and then I discover that the code works perfectly well but not as I intended it. So while I'm waiting for yet another CI build to run, I'm making note of these:

• Who's dumber than the XPOTUS? His lawyers.
• The city of Chicago has released plans to build a tunnel connecting the existing Bloomingdale Trail with the other side of I-90/94 and the Union Pacific tracks, but they don't expect it to open for about 3 years.
• Developers turned a parking garage into apartments in my old neighborhood, hiding the remaining bits of the garage from the street. I approve!
• Because of Illinois and Chicago taxes, (legal) cannabis in Chicago costs more than just about everywhere else in the country.

Finally, WBEZ made me a shopping list of locally-produced hot sauces. First up: Cajun Queen—apparently available about a kilometer away.

I'm still working on the feature I described in my last post. So some articles have stacked up for me to read:

• The US Senate has the second-highest average age in its 234-year history, with 34 members over 70. The House is the third-oldest, with 72 members over 70.
• Josh Marshall (and The Daily Parker) don't extend that worry to the presidency, however: we're just fine with four more years of President Biden being the oldest president ever.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has cut over the CTA Red and Purple Lines to the brand-spanking-new tracks they laid this year and opened the new (temporary) stations at Argyle and Bryn Mawr, only two years after starting the $2.1 billion project. Meanwhile, the 12-year-long Ravenswood Metra Station saga drags on.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has proposed a surtax on residential real-estate sales over $1 million. I'm for it.
• Where does the term "Chicagoland" come from? WBEZ found out.
• People around the country are finally getting decent examples of cracker-crust, square-cut, tavern-style pizza—the real Chicago-style pie.
• A family that wanted to live "off the grid" in rural Colorado died shortly after discovering that humans built "the grid" to prevent exactly those kinds of deaths.

And while I read these articles and write this code, outside my window the dewpoint has hit 25°C, making the 28°C air feel like it's 41°C. And poor Cassie only has sweat glands between her toes. We're going to delay her dinnertime walk a bit.

As predicted, the weather is great and I'm working from home with the windows open. And I'm doing an open-ended research project that is leaving me with more questions than answers, which is always good.

I haven't spent a lot of time online today, except for the research. But I would like to point out yesterday's Strong Towns post, which hit home almost literally. In most parts of the US, the suburban city plan (aka sprawl) gets a pretty heavy subsidy from urban property-tax payers:

A couple of years ago, I conducted an infrastructure study for the Town of Nolensville, Tennessee, at the request of Mayor Derek Adams, analyzing their tax revenues in relation to their development pattern's maintenance costs. You can find that study here, but I'm sure you can guess what I found, if you're a Strong Towns reader. 

I looked at five different streets, each with a slightly different development pattern. I categorized these streets based on what infrastructure they contained, their levels of density, and their historic context. The final street on the list was a townhome street (consisting of typical 24-foot lot widths, as opposed to the 69- to 114-foot-wide lots of the other suburban streets). All four of the non-townhome lot development patterns resulted in long-term deficits for the city under the existing level of taxation. What's more, I adjusted these deficits to allow for the more expensive homes to contribute more taxes (since their higher assessments would, of course, generate more money in absolute terms), and they still didn't break even. The townhomes, on the other hand, produced a budget surplus of $51.43 per lot.

In the study's conclusion, I discussed how this result may be received politically. In the past, people have moved to towns like Nolensville precisely for the suburban development pattern. Even today, when more urban and traditional forms of community are increasing in popularity, not everybody wants to live in a townhome. Am I advocating some kind of 15-minute city conspiracy to forcibly abolish side yards?!?

No—despite the proven financial and logistical problems with suburbs, I don't think we should abolish them. It could be argued that heavy-handed strategies like that don't fit with our political culture and traditions in this country. Instead, I think we should do something eminently American: we should tell the suburbs to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

That doesn't mean abandoning them. Rather, it's a call for a frank, down-to-earth conversation between the taxpayers and the suburbs; the type of conversation any responsible parent would have with a teenager who's living beyond his means.

Sure, but if you're getting subsidized million-dollar housing, why would you ever vote to pay your actual bill?

OK, lunch is over. Back to the mines...

I'm arguing with the Blazorise framework right now because their documentation on how to make a layout work doesn't actually work. Because this requires repeated build/test cycles, I have almost no time to read all of this:

• The US Surface Transportation Board has approved a merger between the Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern railroads, which will almost certainly bollix up commuter rail traffic in Chicago's western suburbs.
• A Russian warplane downed a US drone over the Black Sea.
• George Will tut-tuts Stanford Law students for shouting down a judge from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
• Sierra Sheppard explains how lazy humans and bad software misallocate tax money to the detriment of urban development.
• Julia Ioffe accuses Republicans of using a desire to confront China as a "veil to abandon Ukraine."

Finally, a group of Chicago aldermen have proposed that the city clear sidewalks of snow and ice when property owners don't. Apparently the $500 fines, which don't happen often, don't work often either.

We had four completely-overcast days in a row, including one with some blowing snow, so I'm happy today has been completely clear. Tomorrow might even get above 10°C—which would at least get into normal March temperatures. This whole winter has been weird, as the next few will likely be until temperature increases start leveling out.

In other news:

• ICANN's blog has a brief post from Kim Davies, who regularly contributes to the Time Zone Database, on how the TZDB actually works.
• US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) squarely blames the XPOTUS for repealing parts of the Dodd-Frank Act that she says would have prevented the Silicon Valley Bank collapse this past weekend.
• Lia Russell outlines how the nightmare "Silicon Valley economy" makes just getting by harder for more people every day.
• In yet another instance of former Chicago mayor Richard J Daley negotiating a really bad contract for the city (but probably a great one for his pals), we still have to pay tens of millions of dollars per year in interest on the 2003 destruction renovation of Soldier Field.
• Helaine Olen bemoans the disappearance of human beings in customer service.

Finally, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders explain how AI could write our laws in the future.

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing.

While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company:

• US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if she knows where she is half the time, announced she's finally retiring from the Senate at the end of this Congress.
• Both Paul Krugman and Josh Marshall call bullshit on the GOP's (latest) plans to steal my social security contributions. (Note to the masses: the only way Social Security could be in trouble is if the United States somehow lost its taxing authority.)
• Air India has ordered 220 airplanes from Boeing and 250 from Airbus, including 70 long-haul A350s and 777s.
• Cranky Flier chides United Airlines for publishing a flight schedule they have no intention of flying over the summer.
• In other "fictional schedule" news, the CTA hasn't fixed its own frequency and reliability problems even after six months of trying.
• Rick Steves recommends traveling to Europe's second cities, like Manchester, Lyon, and Hamburg. 
• Timothy Noah draws a straight line from railroad cost-cutting through crew size reductions and the massive derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last week.
• Corrupt former Chicago police sergeant Ronald Watts, whose misconduct has led prosecutors to throw out more than 200 felony convictions and will probably cost the city half a billion dollars in settlements, blamed his downfall on "anti-police atmosphere" without the self-awareness required to see his part in that.
• Bruce Schneier bemoans the lack of urgency in Washington (and other capitals) to regulate cybersecurity.

Finally, you may not want to know what the CBP beagle squad has found in baggage at O'Hare.