The Daily Parker

Before I bugger off to get at least a couple of daylight hours in this sunny, 22°C afternoon, here are the most interesting stories that popped up today:

• Two Boomer economists point out that the Boomers have made an art form of siphoning wealth from the younger generations, meaning we Gen Xers will have to work longer for lower Social Security (state pensions) payments. Typical.
• Chicago's meteorological summer was warmer and drier than normal, the 18th-warmest since 1871.
• Ravinia Brewing Company and Ravinia Festival have come to a settlement that requires the former to change its name, even though the neighborhood predates both of them.
• Police have finally identified a man who died on the Appalachian Trail in 1977.
• The wholesaler taking over the stores that Kroeger and Albertson's planned to divest in order to pass scrutiny for their merger thinks it got crappy stores in the bargain.

Finally, the Chicago White Sox have surpassed their team record for losses, going 31-108 through yesterday. If they lose 13 of the remaining 22 games—which would actually represent an improvement over their performance so far—they will surpass the 1962 New York Mets' record 120 losses in a season. For reasons passing understanding, they're still charging for tickets, with box seats going for $69 and some tickets as high as $309. They have lots of seats left, though, so maybe I'll just take the El down there this weekend to see the Athletics beat them?

Apparently everyone else got over Covid yesterday, too. Or they're just trying to make deadline before the holiday:

• Peter Hamby pulls the fire alarm after reading a leaked polling report showing President Biden's support slipping in key states after last week's debate catastrophe.
• Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe fumes that yesterday's decision on presidential immunity "reveals the rot in the system." Ruth Marcus simply calls the Republican majority on the Court "dishonorable."
• In her dissent in yesterday's presidential immunity case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I) skewered the Republican majority by quoting directly from the Dobbs decision that "[t]his official-acts immunity has ‘no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.’"
• Josh Marshall reminds our side that "[t]he election is about Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the two forces working to overthrow the American republic."
• The Court, meanwhile, declined (for now) to hear a challenge to Illinois' assault weapons ban, though both Justices Alito (R) and Thomas (R) said they can't wait to review it later.
• Paul Krugman would have you say what you want about the tenets of National Front, Dude, but at least it's an ethos.
• The tariffs against Chinese goods put in place by both the convicted-felon XPOTUS and President Biden have started to cost Chicago businesses real money.
• A volunteer group has formed to rescue drowned Divvy bikes from Lake Michigan.
• Chicago restaurant burglaries have jumped in the last two years.
• Hurricane Beryl, now about a day and a half from leveling Jamaica, has become the earliest Category 5 storm in history.
• My alma mater, Duke's Fuqua School of Business, has a new paper explaining why major airlines have switched back to buying planes after leasing them for decades.
• National Geographic explains why alcohol gets harder to clear from your system as you get older.

Finally, the Post analyzed a ton of weather forecasts and determined that forecasting Chicago weather is a lot harder than forecasting Miami's. The only glimmer of good news: today's 7-day forecasts are at least as accurate as the 3-day forecasts from the 1990s.

I'm trying to get home a little earlier than usual, so this will be a lazy post. Stuff to read:

• Hillary Clinton, who has debated both President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, has thoughts on tomorrow night's event.
• Dana Milbank doesn't mourn Rep. Jamaal Bowman's (D-NY) loss last night, and neither do I.
• If you hate corporations, you might want to support President Biden's increase to the corporate income tax as well as to his proposed increase in the share-buyback tax.
• The village of Wheaton, Ill., would rather have 165 car crashes and multiple pedestrian fatalities on a stretch of stroad by a school and retirement community than spend $865,000 on a traffic light. (I mean, better that they didn't build the stroad in the first place, of course.)
• A new report says that cancelling New York City's congestion tax will kill 100,000 jobs.

Finally, today is the 50th anniversary of the very first time a UPC got scanned in a grocery store. Happy shopping.

Via Bruce Schneier's recent essay on complexity, I found a blog post on the work of Ronald Coase, which really resonated:

Ronald Coase observed that an organisation could be considered as a collection of contracts, and asked why, in that case, did organisations even exist. His answer was that contractual relationships have transactions costs. When these transactions costs outweighed the expense of organisation, organisation would predominate. Also, there were limits to transaction; it might be actually impossible to specify what was wanted in a contract, or equivalently, it might cost too much to write it.

As often happens, the first half of this insight was more successful than the second. Since the 1980s, there has been a global trend towards replacing organisations with networks of contracts. The idea that a firm could be considered as a network of contracts was taken up by the management consulting industry, and strengthened from a positive observation to a normative statement that firms should become more so. In as much as anyone bothered with Coase’s corollary, it was simply to say that there was some sort of “core business” in there – presumably it was thought to be the zone in which transactions costs got high enough to demand organisation – and everything else must be contracted out.

In many ways, we’ve lived through a giant experiment in proving Ronald Coase wrong, which has now failed.

Healthcare in the United States is an especially egregious example of this. Americans, notoriously, spend much more than any other nation, have worse results, and leave lots of people uncovered. People blame, variously, insurance companies, doctors, drug companies, intermediary organisations, public policy, and patients themselves for getting ill. But none of this has ever solved anything. Everyone who has tried to nail down exactly what costs so much money has ended up concluding that the whole system is weirdly expensive and wasteful. That is, of course, the point. Its awfulness is an aspect of the system, not any one component or group of components.

I will have to read more about his work, or even (gasp!) read his work.

Every other Tuesday we release software, so that's what I just did. It was so boring we even pushed the bits yesterday evening. In theory we always have a code-freeze the night before a release, but in fact we sometimes have just one more thing to do before we commit this last bit of code...

And yet, the world outside keeps becoming less boring:

• Paul Krugman thinks President Biden should toot his own horn a bit more.
• Michelle Goldberg reminds us all that the XPOTUS meant "lock her up" literally: "A truism of the Trump era is that every accusation is a confession."
• The Louisiana Supreme Court will allow the white side of East Baton Rough Parish to form their own little whites-only enclave, bless their hearts, while those people no longer get the things that the Parish used to fund, like schools.
• This continues the great Southern tradition of taking taxpayer dollars for private schooling, which now counts in the billions of dollars.
• Windsor, Calif., Planning Commissioner Tim Zahner came away from the Congress of New Urbanism gathering last month with a new understanding of how urbanism affects tourism.
• A new Illinois law will restrict credit-card processors from charging a fee on taxes and gratuities, which the Illinois Bankers Association does not like at all, so it's probably a good thing.

Finally, one of Chicago's oldest and most popular Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms, Angelic Organics, announced this season would be their last. I used to have a subscription, which resulted in a lot more kale than I ever wanted, but also some of the freshest produce I've ever had. They'll be missed.

The US Drug Enforcement Agency has signaled its impending approval for reclassifying THC as a Schedule III drug, which would allow companies to use the US banking system and others to conduct real research on the drug:

Even though the move, which if approved would kick off a lengthy rule-making process, does not end the criminalization of the drug, it would be a significant shift in how the government views the safety and use of marijuana for medical purposes.

It could also lead to the softening of other laws and regulations that account for the use or possession of cannabis, including sentencing guidelines, banking and access to public housing.

For more than half a century, marijuana has been considered a so-called Schedule I drug, classified on the same level as highly addictive substances like heroin that the Drug Enforcement Administration describes as having no currently accepted medical use.

Last year, the Health and Human Services Department recommended to the D.E.A. that marijuana should be a Schedule III drug, which would put it alongside less addictive substances like Tylenol with codeine, ketamine and testosterone, meaning that it would be subject to fewer restrictions on production and research, and that it could be taken with a prescription.

The news made my holdings in Green Thumb Industries jump 20% in the last hour (to, ahem, 3.5% above what I bought them for), and I'm not alone:

Moving marijuana from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III drug doesn't make it federally legal, but it would be a significant change for cannabis businesses and their employees: it would mean instant cash flow with access to banking opportunities, as well as loan opportunities which could lead to much faster expansion of the industry in states where marijuana is legal. It would also open the door to research grant opportunities and, most importantly, end a rigid tax regime that until now has stifled growth in the highly regulated industry.

Shares for Chicago's cannabis companies jumped on the news. Green Thumb Industries shares shot up 21% to $15.22, Verano rose 18% to $5.97 and Cresco Labs went up 16% to $2.54.

Besides instant liquidity, the rescheduling could open up loans, which could lead to much faster expansion of industry in states where marijuana is legal.

Marijuana needs regulation, same as alcohol and codeine; but the fiction that pot was just as dangerous as crack cocaine has always been laughable. I'm glad the US will finally join several of its peer nations in recognizing that.

The satirical newspaper The Onion just got bought by a newly-formed LLC called, yes, Global Tetrahedron. Longtime Onion readers will probably recognize the name; I had to remind myself.

Other events in the past day or so:

• Among the labor-rights wins on Tuesday was a tweak to wage and hour laws that will qualify millions more Americans for overtime pay.
• Despite having earned the title "Useful Idiot of the Year" a couple of times already, we haven't heard the last of US Representative Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) because her district's voters are just as stupid as she is. Tina Nguyen piles on.
• Julia Ioffe interviews Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt about the rise of anti-Semitism in left-wing student protests. Charles Blow speculates that the protests could come to Chicago for the DNC.
• Microsoft has released the source code to MS-DOS 4.00, which came out in (I think) 1988, just a few days before the 4.01 bug fix.
• The Civic Federation of Chicago, a government watchdog group, has recommended combining the Chicago Transit Authority, PACE (the suburban bus company), and Metra into a single regional organization.

Time to fetch Cassie from school.

The forecast today called for a lot more rain than we've had, so Cassie might get more walkies than planned. Before that happens, I'm waiting for a build to run in our dev pipeline, and one or two stories piqued my interest to occupy me before it finishes:

• Jennifer Rubin grabs the popcorn as the XPOTUS finds himself not really helped by his first criminal trial. Mary Trump says it's because the world finally sees him for the loser he's always been.
• The Federal Trade Commission has issued a sweeping ban of non-compete agreements, which will no doubt crash against the reactionary US Supreme Court in about five years. But it's a good statement.
• Speaking of SCOTUS, Ari Berman frets in his new book that American democracy may have reached a tipping point with the current reactionary crop on the bench.
• Walter Shapiro paints a picture of the Republican abortion win as a car that caught the speeding car.
• Jerry Useem traces Boeing's decline from an airplane company to a finance company, but suggests a way it could return to its better self: by having executives spend time on the shop floor, like they used to.
• Charles Marohn does the math to explain how multi-decade mortgages and the 10-year interest rate trough have trapped the real-estate market in its current high-cost, low-volume state.

Finally, after a couple of months of incoherent babbling, Voyager 1—now 24.3 million kilometers from Earth, 22.5 light-hours away, after 46 years and 7 months of travel—has started making sense again. Well, hello there!

A whole knot of miserable weather is sneaking across the Mississippi River right now, on its way to Chicago. It looks like, maybe, just maybe, it'll get here after 6pm. So if I take the 4:32 instead of the 5:32, maybe I'll beat it home and not have a wet dog next to me on the couch later.

To that end I'm punting most of these stories until this evening:

• US Representative and professional troll Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wants you to think she isn't serious, except when she is. I would say, when her IQ gets to 80 she should sell. Tina Nguyen has more inside baseball on MTG's bomb-throwing.
• The Biden Administration has a dilemma with electric cars: let cheap Chinese models in and risk losing the election, or keep them out and postpone climate action. (The article skips over the incompetent management at American auto makers as one of the causes of this problem.)
• Gail Collins looks at the abortion debate and wonders, where's the debate about guns?
• Via Bruce Schneier, the attempted infiltration of the XZ project has other open-source maintainers in a near panic about their own code, and they have discovered other attempts at undermining the security of everything that way.
• Charles Marohn unpacks the speculation that rents seem close to collapse even as house prices keep going up.
• Caitlyn Zaloom reviews Benjamin Herold's new book about the "unraveling of America's suburbs," awakening to a problem Marohn has shouted from the rooftops for many, many years.

Finally, if you have an extra $500 lying around and want to buy a nice steak with it, Crain's has options ranging from 170 grams of Chateau Uenae rib-eye steak (and a glass of water) at RPM on down to a happy hour of rib-eye steak frites for eight at El Che. The txuleton at Asador Bastian for $83 seems like a good deal to me, even without three other people or a bottle of wine to bring the bill up to $500. But the Wagyu? Maybe if I get a bonus next year. A guy can dream.

A cold front passed this morning right after I got to the office, sparing me the 60 km/h winds and pouring rain that made the 9am arrivals miserable. The rain has passed, but the temperature has slowly descended to 17°C after hanging out around 19°C all night. I might have to close my windows tonight.

I also completed a mini-project for work a few minutes ago, so I now have time to read a couple of stories:

• The voir dire in the XPOTUS's porn-star-payoff criminal trial forced him to listen to a lot of jokes about himself (plus a warning from the judge to shut up).
• His other criminal trial could hit right after Labor Day, which will make the last few weeks of the election season more interesting than anyone wants them to be.
• Molly White finds AI somewhat useful, while the Canadian Parliament finds the Tories' use of AI to gum up the legislative process somewhat douchey.
• Most economists believe that personalized pricing will make everyone's life easier, while almost everyone else wants to punch those economists.
• Aurora-based Oberweis Dairy declared bankruptcy, just a couple of years after the bankrupt gubernatorial campaign of the current owner's father.

And now, back to the next phase of the mini-project...