Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.)
Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era:
Let's hope tomorrow's mood is a different Far Side comic...
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.
Thank you, Pfizer-BioNTech, for helping my body recognize and eliminate the SARS-Cov-2 virus in only five days:
I've got 5 Brews & Choos stops planned over the long weekend. This helps immensely. And stay tuned: this summer I'm also planning to investigate some of the 12 breweries and distilleries in downtown Milwaukee. (It's only 80 minutes away by train!)
Yesterday's productivity apparently included my nose producing a few billion coronaviruses:
This comes almost exactly two years after my last bout with the disease (that I know of). That one took about 5 days to resolve, so I figure I'll be fine by Tuesday. I've had a couple of colds since June 2022 but tested negative for SARS-Cov-2, though before 2020 I rarely got colds of any kind.
I'll get my next Covid booster in September when flu shots come out, but I think going forward, I'll get one every six months instead of annually. This virus really won't go away soon enough.
Lunchtime link roundup:
Finally, People for Bikes has consistently rated Chicago the worst major US city for biking, principally because of our 50 km/h speed limit. If only we'd lower it to 40 km/h, they say, Chicago would immediately jump in the ratings to something approaching its peers.
First, let me just say how lovely it was to wake up to this today, especially as we're mere minutes from the earliest solstice since the Washington administration:
My windows are open, and I no longer hate the world. Which, it turns out, is a perfectly normal response to high heat:
It turns out even young, healthy college students are affected by high temperatures. During the hottest days, the students in the un-air-conditioned dorms, where nighttime temperatures averaged [27°C], performed significantly worse on the tests they took every morning than the students with A.C., whose rooms stayed a pleasant [21°C].
R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania, looked at high school standardized test scores and found that they fell 0.2 percent for every degree above 72 Fahrenheit. That might not sound like a lot, but it can add up for students taking an exam in an un-air-conditioned room during a [32°C] heat wave.
Researchers don’t know why heat affects our cognition and emotions, but there are a couple of theories.
One is that the brain’s resources are being diverted to keep you cool, leaving less energy for everything else. “If you’re allocating all of the blood and all the glucose to parts of your brain that are focused on thermoregulation, it seems like it’s very plausible that you just wouldn’t have enough left for some of these kind of higher cognitive functions,” Dr. [Kimberly Meidenbauer, an assistant professor of psychology at Washington State University,] said.
Yesterday it was still above 31°C when I took Cassie for her last walk. Air conditioning plus a shower helped immensely.
Tom Nichols says it's past time to quit disregarding the convicted-felon XPOTUS's disordered mental state:
For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.
Sure, it seems funny—Haha! Uncle Don is telling that crazy shark story again!—until we remember that this man wants to return to a position where he would hold America’s secrets, be responsible for the execution of our laws, and preside as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. A moment that seems like oddball humor should, in fact, terrify any American voter, because this behavior in anyone else would be an instant disqualification for any political office, let alone the presidency.
Worse, the people who once managed Trump’s cognitive and emotional issues are gone, never to return. A second Trump White House will be staffed with the bottom of the barrel—the opportunists and hangers-on willing to work for a reprehensible man. His Oval Office will be empty of responsible and experienced public servants if the day comes when someone has to explain to him why war might be about to erupt on the Korean peninsula or why the Russian or Chinese nuclear forces have gone on alert, and he starts talking about frying sharks with boat batteries.
The 45th president is deeply unwell. It is long past time for Americans, including those in public life, to recognize his inability to serve as the 47th.
I mean, who said it better, the convicted-felon XPOTUS, or Gabby Johnson?
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.
Cassie got a bad result from the lab yesterday: a mild giardia infection. It's a good-news, bad-news thing: The bad news, obviously, is that she can't go to day camp (meaning I can't spend a full day in my downtown office) for at least a week. The good news is that she's mostly asymptomatic, unlike the last guy. So we just went to the vet again, got another $110 bill for dewormer.
But at least she wasn't crated for three hours with her own diarrhea. Poor Parker.
In other good news, bad news stories today:
Actually, they're all bad-news stories. Apologies.
Cassie and I just got back from her vet, with a good 2 km walk in each direction and treats at both ends. The semi-annual wellness check was only $88, and pronounced Cassie in perfect health. Even her weight (25 kg) is exactly what it should be, so I can start adding a little kibble to her meals if we walk a lot.
Of course, the heartworm pills were $230 and the fecal test was $107, so not everything about the checkup was great. Le sigh.
Also, it's warm today: 27°C for both walks, which is more like June 14th than May 13th (normal high: 20.9°C). I even had the air on last night. But I can see a cold front approaching from the west, with an expected temperature crash around 6pm and temperatures barely above 10°C (March 24th!) tomorrow. I'm glad we got our walks in already—looks like the first thunderstorm could hit before 3pm.
And check back tomorrow and Wednesday for two more Brews & Choos reviews from this past weekend, including a brand-new brewery that just opened 2 km from my front door.