The Daily Parker

Just a few items for my reading list:

• The Supreme Court's Republican majority have invented a new doctrine that they claim gives them override any action by a Democratic administration or Congress.
• John Ganz thinks all Americans are insane, at least when it comes to conspiracy theories.
• Chicago's Deep Tunnel may have spared us from total disaster with last week's rains, but even it can't cope with more than about 65 mm of rain in an hour.
• Oregon's Rose Quarter extension of Interstate 5 will cost an absurd amount of money because it's an absurdly wide freeway.

Finally, for those of you just tuning in to the multiple creative labor actions now paralyzing the film industry, the Washington Post has a succinct briefing on residuals, the principal point of disagreement between the suits and the people actually making films.

The Screen Actors Guild/AFTRA voted to strike today, halting most TV and film production worldwide (and even ending the Oppenheimer red carpet). The Times explains:

About 160,000 television and movie actors are going on strike at midnight, joining screenwriters who walked off the job in May and setting off Hollywood’s first industrywide shutdown in 63 years.

The leaders of the union, SAG-AFTRA, approved a strike on Thursday, hours after contract talks with a group of studios broke down. Actors will be on the picket line starting on Friday.

“What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor,” said Fran Drescher, SAG-AFTRA’s president. “When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors who make the machine run, we have a problem.”

While some actors do get $15 million for a single movie, most just do their jobs and hope they get a fair wage. They also hope that the studios will pay them when their work gets re-run, which still happens on network television but not, it turns out, on streaming services:

In December, 2020, in the depths of pandemic winter, the actress Kimiko Glenn got a foreign-royalty statement in the mail from the screen actors’ union, sag-aftra. Glenn is best known for playing the motormouthed, idealistic inmate Brook Soso on the women’s-prison series “Orange Is the New Black,” which ran from 2013 to 2019, on Netflix. The orchid-pink paper listed episodes of the show that she’d appeared on (“A Whole Other Hole,” “Trust No Bitch”) alongside tiny amounts of income (four cents, two cents) culled from overseas levies—a thin slice of pie from the show that had thrust her to prominence. “I was, like, Oh, my God, it’s just so sad,” Glenn recalled. With many television and movie sets shuttered, she was supporting herself with voice-over jobs, and she’d been messing around with TikTok. She posted a video in which she scans the statement—“I’m about to be so riiich!”—then reaches the grand total of twenty-seven dollars and thirty cents and shrieks, “WHAT?”

When “Orange” premièred, ten years ago this week, it broke ground in multiple ways. ... A decade on, however, some of the cast feel disillusioned about how they were compensated, both during the original run and in the years since. Television actors have traditionally had a base of income from residuals, which come from reruns and other forms of reuse of the shows in which they’ve appeared. At the highest end, residuals can yield a fortune; reportedly, the cast of “Friends” has each made tens of millions of dollars from syndication. But streaming has scrambled that model, endangering the ability of working actors to make a living.

Netflix didn’t share its viewership numbers (and still mostly doesn’t), making it harder for the actors to negotiate higher salaries. But the “Orange” cast could tell that the show was a megahit from their overnight fame.

Despite the Beatlemania-like fame, many cast members had to keep their day jobs for multiple seasons. They were waiting tables, bartending. DeLaria continued doing live gigs to keep up with her rent.

We saw this with video recordings and cable. We'll see it with the next technology that comes along. Because as in all fields, the owners of the businesses want to make money, and if they can get labor (or anything else considered "supply") cheaper, they do.

Pity the Emmys won't have a script this year. Or actors. Or, possibly, a telecast.

The first day of a sprint is the best day to consolidate three interfaces with three others, touching every part of the application that uses data. So right now, I am watching most of my unit tests pass and hoping I will figure out why the ones that failed did so before I leave today.

While the unit tests run, I have some stuff to keep me from getting too bored:

• The XPOTUS keeps confirming every theory about his behavior, this time that he only wants to run in 2024 to postpone the consequences of actions.
• Even those of us who support Ukraine in kicking the Russian invaders out of its sovereign territory think they simply can't join NATO right now.
• Julia Ioffe wonders why the fuck several retired government officials met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, less because she thinks they're old white men who have never set foot in Russia, and more because Lavrov hasn't got the power to negotiate a discount at Macy's. (In fairness, she published her post hours before one of them, Richard Haass, went on NPR this morning to hawk his new book.)
• Media strategist Julia Alexander scratches her head about the CBS-ification of Prime Video.
• Meanwhile, the streamers and studios have decided to let the writers go broke before resuming talks with them in the fall, regardless of what the actors do.
• Pro Publica took a second look at the hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and now they're not so sure it's correct.

Finally, the 2023 Emmy nominations came out this morning. I need to watch The White Lotus and Succession before HBO hides them.

Update: 2 out of 430 tests have failed (so far) because of authentication timeouts with Microsoft Key Vault. That happens on my slow-as-molasses laptop more often than I like.

The Writers Guild strike seems remote from people watching streaming shows right now because the big streamers still have a lot of film ready to go. That, and most viewers don't even understand many of the things the writers have demanded. Hollywood Reporter recently got 14 writers from the ABC show Happy Endings to talk about how having all that experience in one room made it a better show—and how the "mini-rooms" and siphoning creative control to line producers who have never written so much as a short story are making most shows unwatchable:

I was talking to a writer on the picket line who is a supervising producer under an overall deal and she had been meeting up until the strike to go run shows — and she has never been on set one time. I said, “Ask yourself: Why do they want you to get this title of showrunner if you don’t have the experience to do the job?” That’s the real question, right? Because they want to create this fake position where the line producer is really in charge and they don’t show the showrunner the budget. They want to change what a “showrunner” is because they know they can’t do the job without everything we laid out of how you become a showrunner. They don’t want showrunners like there used to be. There’s a reason why they’re starting to restrict access of information to showrunners. This feels, sadly, like a bigger plan beyond just the staff size issue where they’ve said, “Oh, it’s a budget thing.” I was not sold on the minimum writer requirement at first.

If they limit your ability to make changes in the budget, they can control exactly what happens. On my most recent show, I had to fight for the writers to go to set for their episodes. And it was one of those issues where if I had not had access to the budget — which some showrunners are reporting that they do not have access to anymore — I wouldn’t be able to say, “Let’s find this money somehow.” Or when they told me that what I wanted to shoot was not shootable, then I wouldn’t be able to say, “No, it is shootable, but we need to shoot a shorter episode.” So unfortunately, it just allows people to control things on a studio and network level where they have people that work for them versus showrunners where sometimes they feel showrunners are off doing their own thing.

How many times have we seen a show that doesn’t totally make sense by the time we get to the end? It’s because you didn’t have a room of people breaking that story together, writing that story together, rewriting it together. You didn’t have ambassadors for each episode following it through to production, remembering those things so that if something’s getting rewritten in episode seven, the person who wrote episode two is like, “No, that’s going to screw up a thing that we started over here.” There isn’t a lot of thought that goes into it because these aren’t little movies. It’s not the same medium. You see a lot of people complaining about television now, that it’s not how it used to be. And everyone’s wondering why that is. And I personally think this is why that is.

On these mini-rooms, all the writers go off to script and aren’t paid for the week that they’re writing. If that were me, I would not be putting in my best effort because I’d be running around trying to find another job while I’m also expected to write the script. You turn it in and you’re like, “Good luck, I hope it works out for you,” because you’re not getting paid to rewrite it. And they’re all being written at the same time, so if your show is serialized, then your showrunner is left with these eight Frankenstein scripts that they have to make sense of as you’re going into production. You’re being set up to fail. If you are a first-time writer, if you’re a writer of color, if you’re a woman, that shit is 10 times harder for you because you’re not allowed to take up space in that way, so you have to eat it and keep going, and eventually you burn out. And those writers didn’t learn anything and the showrunner is put in an unfair position. All of it is bad.

Remember this time. By the '30s, you will hate everything about television if this keeps up.

On this day in 2000, during that more-innocent time, Beverly Hills 90210 came to an end. (And not a day too soon.) As I contemplate the void in American culture its departure left, I will read these articles:

• Anna Nemtsova rubs her hands in glee along with Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelinsky in watching the Kremlin's worst fears about Ukraine come true.
• Henry Grabar blames the killing of Jordan Neely on conservatives' willful failure to address homelessness and mental illness for the last 50 years.
• National Geographic traces the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language after lying dormant for 2,000 years.
• The Chicago Tribune editorial board, never the most progressive group of people in Chicago, warn of doom and gloom coming from Mayor Johnson's administration.
• Timothy Noah is in awe of the CEOs of two failed banks who testified to the Senate yesterday for their ability to avoid taking any responsibility for the failures.

Finally, a new genetic study suggests that "modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent." Cool.

I did not watch the CNN town hall with the XPOTUS on Wednesday night. I do feel bad for the journalists who had to, starting with the Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler:

For more than an hour, former president Donald Trump sent forth a torrent of false and misleading claims during a CNN town hall. Here’s a roundup of some of the more notable ones, arranged by subject matter.

“I took in hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes from China.”

Through the end of his presidency, Trump-imposed tariffs garnered about $75 billion on products from China. But tariffs — essentially a tax — are generally paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, who in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers who use Chinese materials in their products. So, ultimately, Americans footed the bill for Trump’s tariffs, not the Chinese. Moreover, the China tariff revenue was reduced by $28 billion in payments the government made to farmers who lost business because China stopped buying U.S. soybeans, hogs, cotton and other products in response.

“I had every right to under the Presidential Records Act. You have the Presidential Records Act. I was there and I took what I took and it gets declassified … it says you talk, you negotiate, you make a deal. It’s not criminal, by the way.”

As Collins noted, this is not what the PRA says. Under the PRA, a president has a lot of leeway to deem something a presidential paper while he is president. But the possibility of such give-and-take ended when the clock struck noon on Jan. 20, 2021. “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President,” the law says.

Pages and pages of this follow. That poor reporter. Tom Nichols sees a silver lining:

Watching Trump for any extended period of time is enervating and deeply uncomfortable. The man is a quivering bag of weird verbal and physical tics. And when he gets rolling, listening to a Trump speech is like standing nearby while someone throws a match into a box of cheap bottle rockets: When the fusillade of annoying noise, misfires, duds, and smoke is over, all that’s left is a general stink in the air.

This discomfort is exactly my point: If you want to stop Donald Trump from returning to power, putting him on TV is the way to go. But doing so requires either that you hand him a microphone and let him immolate himself, or that you sit him down with a reporter who will not let up on calling out his lies and fantasies until he melts down.

Last night, however, CNN chose one of the worst possible options. Instead of a candidate interview, CNN Chairman Chris Licht apparently thought it would be a great idea to cast Trump in a remake of The Jerry Springer Show, complete with vulgar jokes, hooting fans, and a mild-mannered host—in this case, the CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins—stuck with the thankless of job of trying to intervene in the shouting and angry finger-pointing. Instead of an important one-on-one interview with a dangerous and malevolent demagogue, CNN presented another episode of Trump’s ongoing reality show.

The Economist's Lexington agrees:

And so american politics came to this: the day after a jury concluded in a civil case that Donald Trump had committed sexual abuse and then defamed his victim, he preened on national television as the front-runner for the presidential nomination of the party of family values and law and order, of American greatness and American pride. Mr Trump’s gall should not surprise anyone, of course, not after his success for seven years in defining Republican values down. Yet what a degrading spectacle it was.

But, unfiltered by his aides, Mr Trump damaged himself in the town hall for purposes of a general-election campaign. Mr Biden was fundraising off the event as it ended (“Do you want four more years of that?” he asked on Twitter) and within half an hour his team released an ad interleaving Mr Trump’s musings about the beauty of January 6th with images of violence that day. Should Mr Trump win the nomination, his boasts about overturning abortion rights would haunt him, along with many other remarks, some of which may also enhance his growing legal jeopardy.

The Times expands on that last point:

Mr. Trump described for Ms. Collins how he had apparently taken materials from the White House not only on purpose, but in plain view of the public.

“When we left Washington, we had the boxes lined up on the sidewalk outside for everybody,” he said. “People are taking pictures of them. Everybody knew we were taking those boxes.”

Mr. Trump’s attempts to play down or explain away his handling of the documents came at a moment when Mr. Smith’s office was increasingly homing in on the key question of whether the former president sought to hide some of the documents in his possession after the Justice Department issued a subpoena last May demanding their return.

Finally, James Fallows indicts CNN for its complicity in this nonsense:

—The least cynical explanation for why CNN offered Trump this opportunity is that they are trying to ingratiate themselves with Trump and his GOP. Perhaps a “re-centered” CNN could occupy the space opened by chaos at Fox?

—The more cynical explanation is that for CNN’s leadership the difference between spectacle and news was meaningless. A live Trump show would draw an audience and make headlines. Which is part of the defense its new CEO, Chris Licht, reportedly offered on a staff call today.

Fallows includes a bit from his 2016 interview with primatologist Jane Goodall, which really sums up the CNN town hall and, in fact, anything that the XPOTUS does in public:

“In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,” Jane Goodall, the anthropologist, told me shortly before Trump won the GOP nomination. “In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.”

In her book My Life With the Chimpanzees, Goodall told the story of “Mike,” a chimp who maintained his dominance by kicking a series of kerosene cans ahead of him as he moved down a road, creating confusion and noise that made his rivals flee and cower. She told me she would be thinking of Mike as she watched the upcoming debates [between Trump and Hillary Clinton].

Yes. The XPOTUS has normalized chimpanzee behaviors in American politics.

So, who else is excited for the 2024 election?

The clouds have moved off to the east, so it's a bit warmer and a lot sunnier than yesterday. I still have to wait for an automated build to run. For some reason (which I will have to track down after lunch), our CI builds have gone from 22 minutes to 37. Somewhere in the 90 kB of logs I'll find out why.

Meanwhile, happy Fox News On Trial Day:

• Jennifer Rubin foresees years of aftershocks from the Tennessee legislature's expulsion of two Black members last week.
• Why are right-wingers making up conspiracy theories about vegetarian food, now?
• Jaime Green re-reads Carl Sagan's novel Contact.
• WeWork has closed its four-floor Chicago office (one of several in the city) while facing a claim in Cook County Circuit Court for $360,000 in back rent.
• Vox's culture reporter Aja Romano muses about how the third season of The Mandalorian has given the Star Wars franchise "a Baby Yoda problem."
• The New Yorker interviews Luis von Ahn, creator of the Duolingo language-teaching app I'm using to prepare for an upcoming trip to Czechia.

Finally, I've started reading The Odyssey, so I applaud National Geographic's article this month on the history of the ancient world in which Homer set the poem.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the US Food and Drug Administration signing off on Pfizer's miracle drug, Sildenafil. The drug helped raise Pfizer's profits and keep them up for years, until competitors like tadalafil and vardenafil popped up and made significant market penetration.

And on the 5th of next month, WGN-TV in Chicago will turn 75. The eponymous World's Greatest Newspaper that owned WGN radio and TV for most of their lives, the Chicago Tribune, reminds us that WGN's biggest star for decades was a clown.

As I'm feeling a bit under the weather, I will defer intelligent comments until later. Until then:

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: