The Daily Parker

New York Justice Arthur Engoron just handed the XPOTUS a $350 million fine and barred him and his two failsons from running a business in New York for years:

The decision by Justice Arthur F. Engoron caps a chaotic, yearslong case in which New York’s attorney general put Mr. Trump’s fantastical claims of wealth on trial. With no jury, the power was in Justice Engoron’s hands alone, and he came down hard: The judge delivered a sweeping array of punishments that threatens the former president’s business empire as he simultaneously contends with four criminal prosecutions and seeks to regain the White House.

Mr. Trump will appeal the financial penalty — which could climb to $400 million or more once interest is added — but will have to either come up with the money or secure a bond within 30 days. The ruling will not render him bankrupt, because most of his wealth is tied up in real estate.

Of course he'll appeal, but New York doesn't give him many grounds to do so. And given the scale of the fraud he perpetrated on the State, even this eye-watering sum will probably survive scrutiny from the appellate court.

In other news this afternoon:

• Dana Milbank imagines House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) must have some kind of cognitive impairment, because otherwise his behavior would amount to deliberately sabotaging US interests at home and abroad.
• Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in an Arctic prison, shortly before the country's presidential election.
• Writing just before Navalny's death, Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar argues that the "puppets" running at the behest of Russian president (for life?) Vladimir Putin have started to show their own independence from the dictator.
• Guatemalans have put paid their kleptocratic government, electing a reform slate despite heavy odds against them.
• The Economist examines the colossal failure of the UK's HS2 rail project, initially envisioned to connect Europe with Leeds and Manchester, now barely connecting London with its suburbs.
• Spring means horny coyotes in Chicago, so keep your cats indoors and pick up your Chihuahua when you see one.

Finally, the Tribune has a long retrospective on WGN-TV weather reporter Tom Skilling, who will retire after the 10pm newscast on the 28th.

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.

Looking out my 30th-floor office window this afternoon doesn't cheer me. It's gray and snowy, but too warm for accumulation, so it just felt like rain when I sprinted across the street to get my burrito bowl for lunch.

I do have a boring deployment coming up in about an hour, requiring only that I show the business what we've built and then click "Run pipeline" twice. As a reward for getting ahead on development, I have time to read some of these absolutely horrifying news stories:

• Jennifer Rubin wants to know why the House Democrats damning report about the XPOTUS's corruption didn't get more traction. "History tells us that authoritarians traditionally use power for personal gain, leading to a culture of personal corruption."
• Michelle Goldberg lauds President Biden's efforts to "jolt us out of learned helplessness" regarding the XPOTUS. "[T]he best reason to vote for Biden is to stave off the calamity of an encore Trump administration, in which a lawless would-be dictator, proclaiming his own immunity from prosecution and lionizing the violent mob that tried to keep him in power, enacts an orgy of retribution against small-d democrats."
• It's official: 2023 was the warmest year on the planet since we started keeping records. (It was also the 5th warmest year ever in Illinois.)
• James Fallows (of course) has the best run-down of what happened on Alaska Airlines 1282 over the weekend when a door plug blew out at 16,000 feet.

Finally, Cranky Flier examines American Airlines' European operations and singles out its heavy dependence on Heathrow as a key reason why its fares trans-Atlantic are lower than other US carriers. Since I am using one of those really low fares to visit Germany next month, I'm OK with American keeping their fares low.

A small collection:

• The CTA's Yellow Line has resumed service seven weeks after a train hit a stopped snowplow near the Howard station.
• Europe needs more trains, so they're building them.
• Scholars examining some personal effects from a 17th-century shipwreck have some new answers and some new questions.
• A coalition of landlords and real estate companies doesn't want a referendum on the Cook County ballot that could levy a one-time tax on the sale of million-dollar properties.

Finally, in her column on December 31st, Jennifer Rubin suggested people get some perspective on history to understand that the past was much worse than today.

Update: A friend sent this security-cam photo of the first Yellow Line pulling into the Dempster station after service resumed:

Though my "to-be-read" bookshelf has over 100 volumes on it, at least two of which I've meant to read since the 1980s, the first book I started in 2024 turned out to be Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause, which I bought because of the author's post on John Scalzi's blog back in November.

That is not what I'm reading today at lunch, though. No, I'm reading a selection of things the mainstream media published in the last day:

• Economic historian Guido Alfani examines the data on the richest people to live throughout history, like Alan Rufus of England, who held lands in the 1090s worth about 7% of English GDP.
• The US Census Bureau released an analysis of the diversity of places in the US, finding the least-diverse census tracts in Indiana and the most-diverse in Anchorage, Alaska.
• The Post has an interactive feature on the melting permafrost in Siberia, and how it's accelerating climate change. Meanwhile, Illinois had its 3rd-warmest December in history, 4.2°C above the 1991-2010 normal temperature.
• James Fallows reports on yesterday's collision at Haneda Airport (with an update just this afternoon) in Tokyo that left five Japanese Coast Guardians dead.
• Returning to John Scalzi, he has a new film review today in Uncanny Magazine in which he laments all the homework he had to do to understand Marvel's new movie The Marvels.
• Charles Marhon worries that we're trapped in a perpetual housing bubble.

Finally, for $1.7 million you can live inside a literal brick oven. The fifth-floor penthouse in the former Uneeda Biscuit building on Chicago's Near West Side includes several rooms with brick ceilings that were, decades ago, the ovens that cooked the biscuits. Cool. (Or, you know, hot.)

Wouldn't that be nice? Alas, people keep making them:

• Harvard University president Claudine Gray finally threw in the towel.
• Researchers at Rutgers University have identified clear patterns in TikTok hashtags that suggest direct Chinese Communist Party interference with the app.
• Though the WMO and NCDC haven't confirmed it officially, 2023 appears to have been the hottest year on record—and 2024 will be warmer.
• Vishaan Chakrabarti, the former director of planning for Manhattan, outlines a plan to make room for a million more New Yorkers, while Charles Mahon likens the current housing shortage to an imaginary world where the government subsidized expensive shoes (it makes sense).
• Because of the runway arrangement and urban density surrounding Chicago's Midway Airport, Southwest Airlines will continue to struggle whenever Chicago has weather.
• Author Samuel W Franklin excoriates the corporate culture of "creativity" that somehow elevates Elon Musk over Mozart and da Vinci.

Speaking of excoriation, David Mamet has a new memoir about his 40 years in the LA film industry, Everywhere an Oink Oink. (Expect to find that on next year's media roundup.) And I still have to read Linda Obst's Hello, He Lied, which I keep forgetting to liberate from my dad's bookshelf.

Last year continued the trend of getting back to normal after 2020, and with one nice exception came a lot closer to long-term bog standard normal than 2022.

• I posted 500 times on The Daily Parker, 13 more than in 2022 and only 6 below the long-term median. January, May, and August had the most posts (45) and February, as usual, the least (37). The mean of 41.67 was actually slightly higher than the long-term mean (41.23), with a standard deviation of 2.54, which may be the lowest (i.e., most consistent posting schedule) since I started the blog in 1998.
  
• Flights went up slightly, to 12 segments and 20,541 flight miles (up from 10 and 16,138), the most of either since 2018:
  
• I visited 5 countries (the UK, Czechia, Austria, Slovakia, and Germany) and 5 US states (California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Indiana, and Michigan). Total time traveling: 156 hours (up from 107).
• Cassie had more fun last year than 2022 as my team went from 2 to 3 days in-office (meaning more time at day camp). She got 372 hours of walks (up from 369) and at least that many hours of couch time.
• Total steps for 2023: 4,619,407 steps and 3,948 km (average: 12,655 per day), up from 4.54m steps and 3,693 km in 2022. I hit my step goal 341 times (327 in 2022), which wasn't bad at all. I also did my longest walk ever on September 1st, 44.45 km.
• Driving? I did several trips to Michigan in the summer, but still only drove 5,009 km (down from 5,925) on 87 L of gasoline (down from 144), averaging 1.7 L/100 km (136 MPG). That's the best fuel economy I've ever gotten with any car for a full year. I last filled up July 30th, and could conceivably go through January on what I've got left in the tank, but it's always best to keep your tank full in super-cold weather.
• Total time at work: 1,905 hours at my real job (up from 1,894) and 73 hours on consulting and side projects, including 640 hours in the office (up from 580), but not including the 91 hours I spent commuting (down from 103). How did I add 60 hours in the office while cutting 12 hours off my commute, I hear you ask? Simple: I live closer to the Metra than I used to, and the 6-10 minutes a day adds up.
• The Apollo Chorus consumed 247 hours in 2023, with 166 hours rehearsing and performing (cf. 220 hours just on the music in 2022). We had fewer performances and an easier fall season, which made a huge difference.
• As for media consumption, I'll leave that to its own post tomorrow.

In all, not a bad year. I hope the trends continue for 2024, though I do expect a few more blog posts this autumn...

Yeah, I know I've posted this nonsense before. Kiritimati atoll (pronounced "Christmas" because the missionary who named the place had a broken typewriter) and Kiribati changed their time zone to UTC+14 in 1994 so that they could be the first place in the world to enter the 21st Century. So while the wall-clock time on Kiritimati is the same as the wall-clock time in Hawai'i, Kiritimati and Kiribati are a full day ahead.

Anyway, it's now 2024 in the Pacific/Kiritimati time zone. Happy new year!

I don't usually do link round-ups on Saturday mornings, but I got stuff to do today:

• Josh Marshall is enjoying the "comical rake-stomp opera" of Nikki Haley's (R-SC) primary campaign.
• The Economist pokes around the "city" of Rosemont, Ill., a family-owned fiefdom less than 10 km from Inner Drive Technology World HQ.
• The New York Times highlights the most informative charts they published in 2023.
• The Chicago Tribune lists some of the new Illinois laws taking effect on Monday. My favorite: Illinois will no longer bar marriage licenses for out-of-state same-sex couples whose home jurisdiction prohibits same-sex marriages.
• The CTA plans to build out 10 blocks (2 km) of "community space" under the new Red/Purple Line trestle under construction in Uptown and Edgewater.

Finally, two restaurants in Chicago—well, one restaurant and one infamous hot-dog stand—have joined forces to create the Chicago Croissant, which "features a char-dog rolled into a pastry lined with mustard, relish and onions. Definitely no ketchup. It’s topped with poppy seeds and celery salt and garnished with a tomato, pepper and pickle." This, they claim, is a breakfast food.

I can't yet tell that sunsets have gotten any later in the past two weeks, though I can tell that sunrises are still getting later. But one day, about three weeks from now, I'll look out my office window at this hour, and notice it hasn't gotten completely dark yet. Alas, that day is not this day.

Elsewhere in the darkening world:

• Mike Godwin, the person who postulated Godwin's Law, believes that invoking it as regards the XPOTUS is not at all losing the argument: "You could say the ‘vermin’ remark or the ‘poisoning the blood’ remark, maybe one of them would be a coincidence. But both of them pretty much makes it clear that there’s something thematic going on, and I can’t believe it’s accidental."
• Julia Ioffe watches with growing horror at Ukraine's looming money cliff.
• The rings of a 200-year-old tree in Arizona show just how bad last summer was.
• The Federal Highway Administration has revised the MUCTD after 14 years, this time after actually listening to people who don't drive cars.

Finally, Tyler Austin Harper shakes his head that university administrators and other people of limited horizons completely misunderstand why the humanities are important:

If we have any hope of resuscitating fields like English and history, we must rescue the humanities from the utilitarian appraisals that both their champions and their critics subject them to. We need to recognize that the conservatives are right, albeit not in the way they think: The humanities are useless in many senses of the term. But that doesn’t mean they’re without value.

It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter. ... At the same time, a generation of Ph.D. students is eyeing current hiring practices and concluding that the only research that has a prayer of landing them a tenure-track position relates to questions of identity and justice.

Instead of trying to prove that the humanities are more economically useful than other majors—a tricky proposition—humanists have taken to justifying their continued existence within the academy by insisting that they are uniquely socially and politically useful. The emergent sales pitch is not that the humanities produce and transmit important knowledge, but rather that studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy.

The whole essay is worth a read.