The Daily Parker

I spent way more time than I should have this morning trying to set up an API key for the Associated Press data tools. Their online form to sign up created a general customer-service ticket, which promptly got closed with an instruction to...go to the online sign-up form. They also had a phone number, which turned out to have nothing to do with sales. And I've now sent two emails a week apart to their "digital sales" office, with crickets in response.

The New York Times had an online setup that took about five minutes, and I'm already getting stuff using Postman. Nice.

Meanwhile:

• David French revisits President Carter's "malaise" speech, which he characterizes as the former president's most prophetic.
• Molly White asks, why isn't Sam Bankman-Fried in jail? (Most likely answer: because the US Attorney's Office are enjoying him making all those incriminating statements online.)
• The mountains outside Los Angeles have gotten heavy blizzard conditions in the past day in a once-in-a-generation storm.
• A few thousand kilometers to the east, Venice has had near-record low tides that have left its canals mostly empty for hours twice a day.
• The electrical engineer heading up Virginia's Marymount University has proposed cutting everything she doesn't understand from the curriculum, ironically demonstrating why the humanities are critical for good leadership skills.
• Long-time Winnepeg, Man., resident Michel Durand-Wood sees the disappearance of a neighborhood park's gardener as an excellent symbol of the "growth Ponzi scheme" perpetrated by highway departments across North America.
• On the other hand, bureaucracy and poor planning have helped make Manhattan's 2nd Avenue Subway the most expensive transit project in the world.

Finally, I've got a note on my calendar to check out the Karen's Diner pop-up in Wrigleyville next month. Because who doesn't want to be abused by servers?

Let's start with combat-actor Jill Bearup explaining how the Netflix-ITV-BBC ban on corsets solves entirely the wrong problems:

Meanwhile, in the modern world:

• The National Transportation Safety Board reported that an axle on the 23rd car of the train that derailed in East Palesine, Ohio, had a bearing temperature 140°C over normal—which is 30°C over "critical." The crew were trying to stop the train when the bearing failed. Perhaps if the train had fewer cars, or more crew, or the proper braking system...if only.
• New York Magazine reports on the 20-something scammers who brought down Three Arrows Capital, and the people who should have known better before loaning them over $3 billion.
• Twitter has decided to shut off SMS-based multifactor authentication for most accounts, and most people don't understand that this is exactly the right thing to do. Use an authenticator app, people!
• I completely agree with Helen Lewis that the entire point of Roald Dahl's novels is his nastiness.
• Food manufacturers, including Kraft and Heinz, have started to squawk that the proposed (and I sincerely hope soon-halted) Kroger-Albertsons merger will lower their margins, which is what happens when monopolies are permitted. (Never mind what it will do to consumer prices.)
• I might have to miss the craft beer festival taking place less than 2 km from my house this weekend. Dang.

Finally, I missed an anniversary yesterday. On 22 February 2003, Saturday Night Live aired this bit of Tina Fey's genius:

Cassie does not like staying inside because of the rain:

We've had rain since about 9am while the temperature has held onto 1°C with two hands and a carabiner, so neither Cassie nor I will get our quota of walks this afternoon. But that does give me extra time to digest all this:

• James Fallows eulogizes his old boss, President Jimmy Carter.
• After listening to yesterday's oral arguments, the Washington Post team covering Gonzalez v Google doesn't think the Supreme Court will overturn Section 230.
• A history teacher wants to help Bloomington, Ill., move past its anti-urbanist land use policies.

Oh, and I had some work to do as well.

I spent the morning going over an API for standards and style, which will result in an uncomfortably large commit before I leave the office today. I prefer smaller, more focused commits, but this kind of polishing task makes small code changes all over the place, and touches lots of files.

So while I have my (late) lunch, I'm taking a break to read some news:

• Chicago's El got color-coded route designations 30 years ago today. No more Howard-Dan Ryan line; now it's the Red Line.
• Web hosting service GoDaddy disclosed a years-long compromise that included attackers adding malicious code to their source repositories.
• Via Bruce Schneier, The Intercept explains that photos you crop in Microsoft Office (and other applications) aren't so much cropped as windowed, with tremendous security implications.
• Why are today's college students struggling so much?
• The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered Norfolk Southern Railroad to bear the costs of cleaning up East Palestine, Ohio.
• Archaeologists discovered the remains of a Roman amphitheater in what is now Guildhall, London.

Finally, the Securities and Exchange Commission has fined the Mormon Church $5m for failing to disclose its holdings as required by law. As the Church has some $32 billion in holdings worldwide, that $5m fine will sure sting.

In honor of thus august holiday, Aimee Mann has painted portraits of our worst presidents:

And Ezra Klein argues in favor of the current president's re-election:

There is no end of commentary gently — and not so gently — urging President Biden to act his age and step aside. And all else being equal, I share that sentiment. I don’t think we want a president ending his second term closer to 90 than he is to 80. But all else is never equal. And the commentaries that focus solely on Biden’s central weakness — his age — are missing his mounting strengths.

Biden’s age has carried some quiet benefits. One is that he has deftly bridged Democrats’ generational and demographic gaps. The Democratic Party has in recent years become younger, more liberal, more educated and more online. Biden’s politics were formed in a past era, when blue-collar workers were still a core constituency and liberal was often an epithet.

Then there is what Biden will have in 2024 that he did not have in 2020: a record of his own. He has passed the largest infrastructure, climate, science and technology investments in a generation. Unemployment is 3.4 percent — its lowest level since 1969. Inflation is coming down. (I think Biden’s 2024 chances will revolve around whether the labor market remains tight as inflation ebbs more than they will revolve around his age.) He has rallied a steady coalition against Russia and helped Ukraine keep its resistance alive. He has turned Trump’s inchoate anger toward China into a suite of policies to make America and its allies less dependent on Chinese manufacturing and to actively slow China’s technological progress. Biden hasn’t gotten any younger, but he has a purchase on the present and an argument about the future that he didn’t have in 2020, and one which no other Democrat (or Republican) has now.

Of course, time and chance happeneth to us all...

An Illinois hobby group seems to have lost one of its hobbies recently:

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a hobbyist group that launches hydrogen-filled, radio-equipped pico balloons and tracks them as they fly across the world, has declared one of its balloons “missing in action.”

The balloon stopped transmitting signals when it had been set to fly near the area in Canada where a military fighter jet shot down an unidentified object last week.

If the time-and-date fit is more than a coincidence, the balloon never stood a chance: The hobbyists use large, plastic party balloons that cost as little as $13 for their scientific fun; the military reportedly took the UFO out with heat-seeking missiles.

The balloon, identified by the hobbyist club as K9YO, had already circumnavigated the globe six times.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command did not immediately respond to calls and emails requesting asking about the downed object.

Poor little balloon. But hey, it's good to know that a $3m missile can take out a $13 balloon.

The most accomplished former President of the past century has decided to spend his last few days at home in Georgia:

Former President Jimmy Carter, who at 98 is the longest living president in American history, has decided to forgo further medical treatment and will enter hospice care at his home in Georgia, the Carter Center announced on Saturday.

“After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention,” the center said in a statement posted on Twitter. “He has the full support of his family and his medical team. The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”

The center did not elaborate on what conditions had prompted the recent hospital visits or his decision to enter hospice care. Mr. Carter has survived a series of health crises in recent years, including a bout with the skin cancer melanoma, which spread to his liver and brain, as well as repeated falls.

The former president lives with his wife, Rosalynn Carter, 95, in a modest ranch house that the couple built in Plains, Ga., in 1961.

Mr. Carter has defied illness and death for years, outlasting two presidents who followed him as well as his own vice president. He became the longest-living president in March 2019 when he passed former President George H.W. Bush, who died the previous November.

I met him once, at university, literally bumping into him as he came out of the library with his security detail. The USSS seemed amused, and let me walk next to him for about a hundred meters before I peeled off. I did get him to sign a note card for me, and later I got to ask him a question—the one I'd written on the note card he signed—at the speech he gave later that day.

He's a mensch. I'm sorry to see him go.

The Centers for Disease Control released its biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System report for 2021, and things do not look good:

Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide, according to data released on Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found.

The rates of sadness are the highest reported in a decade, reflecting a long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic.

“I think there’s really no question what this data is telling us,” said Dr. Kathleen Ethier, head of the C.D.C.’s adolescent and school health program. “Young people are telling us that they are in crisis.”

No kidding, says writer Kate Woodsome:

Solutions start with compassionate, radical honesty: American kids are unwell because American society is unwell. The systems and social media making teenagers sad, angry and afraid today were shaped in part by adults who grew up sad, angry and afraid themselves.

One in 5 [adults] — nearly 53 million people — had a mental illness in 2020, ranging from anxiety to depression to bipolar disorder. Nearly 28 million adults had an alcohol use disorder. As many as 3 in 100 people will have a psychotic episode in their lives. We are running companies and the country, serving time and raising families, and we, too, need a sense that we are cared for, supported and belong.

It can be hard for adults to believe that, especially if our own childhoods suggested otherwise. As kids, 61 percent of adults in the United States experienced abuse or neglect, grew up with poverty, hunger, violence or substance abuse, experienced gender-based discrimination and racism or lost a parent to divorce or death. These stressors contribute to chronic health problems, mental illness and substance misuse down the line.

If not you, then someone you know is doing their best to stitch up those invisible wounds.

Similar thoughts from Jill Filipovic:

It’s perhaps not surprising that significant numbers of girls and LGBTQ kids are hopeless, despondent, and potentially suicidal given that large numbers of girls and LGBTQ kids have been raped, sexually assaulted, and bullied. It’s not surprising that teenage girls and LGBTQ teens have absorbed the broader cultural backlash currently being waged against them, with abortion rights being rolled back, LGBT rights under attack, and the very basic right to read and learn suddenly hot culture war issues. Too many American teenagers have just spent far too long in isolation as schools shuttered, then remained only partially open, and as the usual activities of teenage life were suddenly slowed or halted. And then teens reentered a world of other under-socialized adolescents who had also missed crucial months or even years of social development, and had spent much more of their time in online spaces.

I live about 300 meters from a large public high school. Sometimes when I walk Cassie past it in the morning I see hundreds of kids queueing up outside the doors. It took me a while to realize they have to go through metal detectors and bag searches to get in. An entire generation of high school kids has grown up in prison. No wonder they're sad and anxious.

I see a connection between all of these.

First, the city has accepted six proposals to convert office buildings on LaSalle Street to apartments. I used to work in one of them, so that should be interesting. These will go through community review, and will cost over $1 billion, but could bring almost 2,000 apartments to the Loop.

Second, Zurich Re and Motorola have separately sued the Chicago suburb Schaumburg, Ill., one of the most dismal suburban hellscapes I've ever seen, to get the $100 million in tax breaks the village promised before the pandemic. The village offered these incentives to get the two corporations to build sleek new office buildings surrounded by parking lots that they hoped would bring in $300 million a year in secondary benefits to the village. Then came the pandemic. Since no one really wants to go to Schaumburg voluntarily, everyone is SOL here.

Finally, a man recently won a $91 million settlement after a car crashed through a 7-11 in Chicago and injured him. It turns out, a car crashes through a 7-11 on average 20 times a day in the U.S., in part because the company doesn't want to spend the $2,000 per store to put up bollards, and in part because cars and people should not occupy the same infrastructure at the same time.

What do these things have in common? They're all points in evidence that pedestrian-focused urban development makes a lot more sense than the horrific car-focused alternatives.