The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

People behaving badly

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.

Why am I indoors?

It's 22°C and sunny right now, making me wonder what's wrong with me that I'm putting together a software release. I probably should fire off the release, but I'm doing so under protest. I also probably won't get to read all of these things I've queued up:

Finally, Stan's Donuts will open a new store just three blocks from the apartment I moved out of one year ago today. I might have to stop in soon. I will not, however, wash them down with CH Distillery's latest abomination, Pumpkin-Spice Malört.

Sure Happy It's Thursday

I'm iterating on a UI feature that wasn't 100% defined, so I'm also iterating on the API that the feature needs. Sometimes software is like that: you discover that your first design didn't quite solve the problem, so you iterate. it's just that the iteration is a bit of a context shift, so I'm going to read for about 15 minutes to clear my head:

  • Kevin Philips, whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority laid out Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" and led to the GOP's subsequent slide into authoritarianism and ethnic entrepreneurialism has died, but unfortunately his ideas haven't.
  • The US and Qatar have agreed not to release any of the $6 billion of Iran's money that Qatar currently has in escrow for them, which will no doubt make Iran yet another country demanding to know why Hamas attacked Israel just now.
  • The Chicago Tribune digs into Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's $16.6 billion budget.
  • In the wake of huge class-action settlements, two major Chicago real-estate brokers have changed their commission policies, but we still have to see if they'll change their actions.
  • The History Channel blurbs the origins of Oktoberfest, which started in 1810 and ends for this year today. Und nächstes Jahr, ich möchte nach München zum Oktoberfest gehen!
  • Jacob Bacharach says the core problem with Michael Lewis's recent biography of Sam Bankman-Fried is that SBF is just too boring to be the subject of a biography.

Finally, Chicago's heavy-rail operator Metra formally proposed simplifying its fare structure. This will cut my commuting costs by about 11%, assuming I use the day passes and individual tickets correctly. It will have the biggest impacts on suburban riders who commute into the city, and riders whose travel doesn't include the downtown terminals.

Cough, cough, cough

I could have worked from home today, and probably should have, but I felt well enough to come in (wearing an N95 mask, of course). It turned that I had a very helpful meeting, which would not have worked as well remotely, but given tomorrow's forecast and the likelihood I'll still have this cold, Cassie will just have to miss a day of school.

I have to jam on a presentation for the next three hours, so I'll come back to these later:

Finally, no sooner did it open than the new Guinness brewery in Chicago is for sale. It will stay a Guinness brewery, just under different ownership. The Brews and Choos Project will get there soon.

Writers approve contract with studios

The Writers Guild of America membership ratified the contract with the AMPTP yesterday by a vote of 8,435 to 90. The Guild provided a summary of what the contract contains, compared with what the studios didn't accept on May 1st, and it's clear the writers won almost everything they demanded:

The ratification marks the conclusion to the WGA’s turbulent 2023 bargaining cycle, which sparked a historic 148-day strike. After holding a strike authorization vote during a brief break from negotiations in the spring, union leaders officially called a work stoppage of around 11,500 scribes on May 2. As the strike got going, WGA members not only ceased their writing work but also set up picket lines in front of ongoing productions, seeking to shut them down as crew members and other workers refused to cross these barriers in solidarity. The strategy proved to be effective in disrupting day-to-day set work in Hollywood even before SAG-AFTRA called its own strike (which scrapped virtually all production) on July 14.

Multiple stops and starts to the talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers ensued, and in the meantime a broad swath of industry workers were affected: Food insecurity among industry workers spiked as the months dragged on, and some workers reported facing eviction. Ultimately, only the entrance of some of the industry’s top leaders was able to finally break the impasse. Starting in late September, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Disney CEO Bob Iger and NBCUniversal Studio Group chairman and chief content officer Donna Langley began attending regular bargaining sessions and speaking with guild leaders directly. The deal then got wrapped up in a matter of (marathon) days: The WGA announced a tentative deal on the evening of Sept. 24, after a long weekend of negotiations.

Congratulations to the Guild! I hope this is the first of many successes for labor taking back its power from management.

Friday after the cold front

A rainy cold front passed over Inner Drive Technology WHQ just after noon, taking us from 15°C down to just above 10°C in two hours. The sun has come back out but we won't get a lot warmer until next week.

I've had a lot of coding today, and I have a rehearsal in about two hours, so this list of things to read will have to do:

Finally, for the first time in 346 days, the Chicago Bears won a football game. Amazing.

The biggest fraud in US history?

The former CEO of FTX Trading goes on trial today for making $8 billion disappear in just under three years. Molly White has a precis:

About eleven months ago, the then second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world imploded over the course of only a few days as trust in the company crumbled and it failed to meet a surge of customer withdrawals. It rapidly became apparent that customer money was missing. A lot of it.

Since then, it’s come out that FTX allowed its sister trading firm, Alameda Research, to dip into FTX’s customer funds with effectively no limit to backstop their own trading losses. Much of FTX’s balance sheet was also revealed to be denominated in flimsy crypto tokens worth far less in reality than on paper, and a substantial portion of them had been created out of thin air by FTX itself. And the FTX group of companies had spent money they didn’t have, splashing out for extravagant celebrity endorsements and advertisements, buying real estate, and donating massive sums to curry favor among seated politicians and bankroll the industry boosters running for office.

Altogether, somewhere around $8 billion was gone.

Besides Sam Bankman-Fried, four other high-level executives at the FTX group of companies have been charged, and all four have reached plea deals. Three of them agreed to cooperate with the investigation as a part of their plea, and will almost certainly appear as witnesses at the trial. They were not just Bankman-Fried’s employees and co-workers, but also his friends, roommates, confidants, and, in one case, a former romantic partner.

There’s no question that billions of dollars of customer funds went missing from FTX. Instead, prosecutors are tasked with convincing a jury that they’re missing thanks to intentional fraud by Sam Bankman-Fried. The “intentional” part is the sticky bit, with prosecutors needing to convince all twelve jurors beyond a reasonable doubt that Bankman-Fried intended to defraud people. If even one juror holds out, Bankman-Fried could dodge a guilty verdict thanks to a hung jury — and trying to appeal to just one sympathetic juror may be his only hope in what looks like a pretty overwhelming case against him.

Since his resignation from FTX, Bankman-Fried has tried to portray himself as a colossally stupid man, who was simply too dumb to commit fraud. Unfortunately, stupidity doesn't actually exonerate criminal behavior. He only needs to have intended the actions, not the harm. And from the outside, it looks like he wasn't so much stupid as greedy, immature, narcissistic, and venal.

Get out the popcorn.

Someone call lunch

I haven't had the most productive morning ever, but I should get back into coding after I take Cassie on her lunchtime walk. Meanwhile:

Finally, just look at this wonderful creature who got a bath yesterday. She actually climbed into the tub on her own, and seems to have figured out that getting a vigorous whole-body massage with warm water, followed by an equally-vigorous toweling off, actually feels pretty good.

McCarthy calls their bluff

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) surprised the Crazy Caucus by moving a 45-day spending bill to keep the government open that Democrats could support:

The legislation, which the Senate then passed with broad bipartisan support, marked a stunning reversal after many in Washington expected the government to close at midnight following several failed attempts by House Republicans to agree on spending legislation over the past week.

Ultimately, House Democrats supported McCarthy’s eleventh-hour proposal for a 45-day “continuing resolution” including disaster relief funds, an extension of a federal flood insurance program and reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration. All but one Democrat voted to support the legislation while 90 Republicans voted against it, resulting in a vote of 335-91.

Oddly, the "lone Democrat" happens to be my Representative, Mike Quigley (D-IL), because the bill temporarily halted aid to Ukraine.

Josh Marshall explains that all McCarthy did, really, was to shoot the hostage. Of course, McCarthy's the hostage, so...

At every point this was about the House Republican caucus’s demand to get some new goodies in exchange for not shutting down the government. The only slight ambiguity there is that for some House hardliners the shutdown itself clearly was the goodie. For the House hardliners it was goodies or a shutdown. There was no getting out of that binary choice because Kevin McCarthy refused any solution that relied on Democratic votes.

Then sometime today he decided to allow a vote on a clean resolution relying on Democratic votes. It passed and that was it. That change was really all that happened.

We’ve been on this course of escalating drama for weeks or months, with all the purported big matters of principle, all the tough talk about never backing down. And then they backed down and agreed to get nothing. So it all ended with a resounding “Never Mind.” But not before holding the hold federal government and much of the economy on tenterhooks for weeks or months.

So, good news, the government will keep going. The Supreme Court can start removing more of our rights based on bullshit theories proposed, one suspects, by billionaires, and the rest of us can keep getting on.

With 33 hours to go in the 3rd Quarter...

Somehow, it's already the end of September. I realize this happens with some predictability right around this time of year, but it still seems odd to me.

Of course, most of the world seems odd these days:

Finally, just look at this happy dog and all his new human friends playing a fun game of keep-away...during a professional football game in Mexico. I've watched it about five times now. The goodest boi was having such a great time. I hope one of the players or refs adopted him.