The Daily Parker

Metra's new fare structure took effect this morning, along with the planned closure of every ticket window that still existed. It was therefore crucially important that the Ventra app (now the only way to pay for tickets) updated properly overnight. Alas:

Commuters faced an extra headache Thursday as the Ventra app crashed on the first day of new Metra procedures and prices, including the closure of ticket windows.

An alert on the Metra website informs riders that the app is down and technical crews are working to solve the issue.

“It’s not the way we would have liked it to go,” Metra spokesperson Meg Reile said.

Metra is working with Cubic, the company that runs the app, to get it up and running as soon as possible, Reile said.

On my train this morning, the conductor announced that he knew the app was down, so we should enjoy the ride. I expect they lost tens of thousands in revenue today.

As of this writing, the app appears to be working! And I have just purchased my monthly ticket for February.

I'll update the Brews & Choos page later today.

A few months ago a Chicago Parking Enforcement Agent (PEA) tried to give me a ticket while I was paying for the parking spot online. I kept calm and polite, but I firmly explained that writing a ticket before I'd even finished entering the parking zone in the payment app might not survive the appeal.

Yesterday I got another parking ticket at 9:02pm in a spot that has free parking from 9pm to 9am. The ticket actually said "parking expired and driver not walking back from meter." Note that the parking app won't let you pay for parking beyond 9pm in that spot. Because, again, it's free after 9pm. That didn't stop the PEA, so now I actually will appeal, and I'll win. But it's a real pain.

Again, I thank Mayor Daley for jamming through the worst public financial deal in the history of the United States.

Meanwhile, I didn't have time to read all of these at lunch today:

• Almost as shocking as the realization that privatizing parking meters games the system in favor of private interests against the general public, it turns out so do traffic impact studies.
• The Illinois Board of Elections voted unanimously to reject an effort to keep the XPOTUS off the Republican Party primary ballot, citing an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that excludes the Board from constitutional questions.
• Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (R) won't win the Republican nomination for president this year, but she will make the XPOTUS froth at the mouth.
• Of course, she and others in her party persist in trying to make their own voters froth at the mouth, mostly by lying to them about the state of the economy, cities, and other things that have gone pretty well since 2021.
• Of course, perhaps the Republican Party lies so much to cover their demonstrable incompetence at governing?
• Christopher Elmensdorf warns that the clean energy bill winding through the Democratic offices on Capitol Hill will lead to endless NIMBYism—not to mention bad-faith blockage by fossil-fuel companies.
• For only $120,000 a year, this consultant will get your kid into Harvard.
• Helmut Jahn's new building at 1000 S. Michigan Ave. looks super cool.

I will now go back to work. Tonight, I will schedule my parking appeal. Updates as conditions warrant.

Walking Cassie to day camp took a lot longer than usual this morning because the freezing rain and near-freezing temperatures after a long cold snap laid a layer of ice over nearly every sidewalk and street in Chicago. She seemed very concerned about my ability to walk, and very disappointed that we didn't take our usual detour to the bagel place to get me some coffee and her a fresh dog treat.

The "wintry mix" has stopped and the temperature has risen all the way to 1.5°C at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, so the walk home may not suck as much as the walk there.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has announced the nominees for 2023 Oscars, with Oppenheimer leading the pack and both Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie apparently snubbed for their work in Barbie.
• Politico takes a deep dive into the psyche of a New Hampshire primary voter who supports the XPOTUS, and finds that he's angry about everything, but he has no clear idea what he's angry about.
• The New York Times Political Memo lays out how the adolescent, schoolyard behavior of the XPOTUS towards Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R).
• Walter Shapiro bemoans the misleading and pointless political reporting covering the Republican presidential nomination.
• Ruth Marcus asks the same question I've been asking (in shocking agreement with some of my Republican friends): What the hell was Fani Willis thinking?
• David Zipper has "spent a lot of time thinking about American traffic safety messaging," and has decided that the new Federal recommendations against funny highway signs make sense.
• The city of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., a charming little town on the Monterey Peninsula where people have to go to the post office to get their mail, may soon get street addresses.
• Strong Towns describes in detail how the Texas Dept of Transportation prevents people from providing input into road projects, despite claiming to welcome it.
• Chicago-based United Airlines has started grumbling openly about Chicago-based Boeing's airplanes, stopping just short of suggesting they might buy an Airbus or two.
• Crain's has a look at how much the proposed Chicago real-estate transfer tax reform will save (or cost) home buyers in different price ranges. TL;dr: It will save money for transactions under $1 million.
• Do sleep aids work? Maybe, some of them, perhaps.

Finally, we might have gotten to Peak Rat Hole. Residents of the 1900 block of West Roscoe have gotten fed up with all the people coming to see the 30-year-old dead squirrel impression on their sidewalk. Perhaps the wedding took things too far?

A small collection:

• The CTA's Yellow Line has resumed service seven weeks after a train hit a stopped snowplow near the Howard station.
• Europe needs more trains, so they're building them.
• Scholars examining some personal effects from a 17th-century shipwreck have some new answers and some new questions.
• A coalition of landlords and real estate companies doesn't want a referendum on the Cook County ballot that could levy a one-time tax on the sale of million-dollar properties.

Finally, in her column on December 31st, Jennifer Rubin suggested people get some perspective on history to understand that the past was much worse than today.

Update: A friend sent this security-cam photo of the first Yellow Line pulling into the Dempster station after service resumed:

I don't usually do link round-ups on Saturday mornings, but I got stuff to do today:

• Josh Marshall is enjoying the "comical rake-stomp opera" of Nikki Haley's (R-SC) primary campaign.
• The Economist pokes around the "city" of Rosemont, Ill., a family-owned fiefdom less than 10 km from Inner Drive Technology World HQ.
• The New York Times highlights the most informative charts they published in 2023.
• The Chicago Tribune lists some of the new Illinois laws taking effect on Monday. My favorite: Illinois will no longer bar marriage licenses for out-of-state same-sex couples whose home jurisdiction prohibits same-sex marriages.
• The CTA plans to build out 10 blocks (2 km) of "community space" under the new Red/Purple Line trestle under construction in Uptown and Edgewater.

Finally, two restaurants in Chicago—well, one restaurant and one infamous hot-dog stand—have joined forces to create the Chicago Croissant, which "features a char-dog rolled into a pastry lined with mustard, relish and onions. Definitely no ketchup. It’s topped with poppy seeds and celery salt and garnished with a tomato, pepper and pickle." This, they claim, is a breakfast food.

Climate scientist Rollie Williams explains the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's not-so-secret plan to get "every molecule" of hydrocarbons out of the ground:

Seriously. You can almost hear them twiddling their mustaches and tying the maiden to the tracks in this one.

Ordinarily I'd quote Upton Sinclair, but the government of KSA completely understands the thing. Then again, with temperatures on the Arabian peninsula routinely cresting 45°C and sometimes exceeding 50°C, what do they think will happen if their plans to burn all those fossil fuels succeed?

I can't yet tell that sunsets have gotten any later in the past two weeks, though I can tell that sunrises are still getting later. But one day, about three weeks from now, I'll look out my office window at this hour, and notice it hasn't gotten completely dark yet. Alas, that day is not this day.

Elsewhere in the darkening world:

• Mike Godwin, the person who postulated Godwin's Law, believes that invoking it as regards the XPOTUS is not at all losing the argument: "You could say the ‘vermin’ remark or the ‘poisoning the blood’ remark, maybe one of them would be a coincidence. But both of them pretty much makes it clear that there’s something thematic going on, and I can’t believe it’s accidental."
• Julia Ioffe watches with growing horror at Ukraine's looming money cliff.
• The rings of a 200-year-old tree in Arizona show just how bad last summer was.
• The Federal Highway Administration has revised the MUCTD after 14 years, this time after actually listening to people who don't drive cars.

Finally, Tyler Austin Harper shakes his head that university administrators and other people of limited horizons completely misunderstand why the humanities are important:

If we have any hope of resuscitating fields like English and history, we must rescue the humanities from the utilitarian appraisals that both their champions and their critics subject them to. We need to recognize that the conservatives are right, albeit not in the way they think: The humanities are useless in many senses of the term. But that doesn’t mean they’re without value.

It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter. ... At the same time, a generation of Ph.D. students is eyeing current hiring practices and concluding that the only research that has a prayer of landing them a tenure-track position relates to questions of identity and justice.

Instead of trying to prove that the humanities are more economically useful than other majors—a tricky proposition—humanists have taken to justifying their continued existence within the academy by insisting that they are uniquely socially and politically useful. The emergent sales pitch is not that the humanities produce and transmit important knowledge, but rather that studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy.

The whole essay is worth a read.

I guess not all of the stories I read at lunchtime depressed me, but...well, you decide:

• Writing in the Atlantic, Rogé Karma weaves together the threads of white backlash to civil rights laws, the Democratic Party's cultural elitism, and a series of global crises, to explain why the US uniquely among its peer nations has made such a hash of the post-1970s economy.
• Georgetown public policy professor George P. Moynihan, who studies government bureaucracies, lays out how the XPOTUS intends to destroy the civil service if re-elected next year.
• A simian truck driver following GPS instead of looking outside her cab windows may have destroyed one of Illinois' last 19th-century covered bridges.
• Today I learned about the history of Gretna Green, Scotland, where people go to elope.

One happy(-ish) story, as I didn't have to travel this past weekend: the TSA reported that on Sunday they screened more people (2.9 million) than on any single day in history. And of the 100,000+ flights scheduled between Wednesday and Sunday, carriers cancelled only 201 (0.2%). Amazing.

I have tickets to a late concert downtown, which means a few things, principally that I'm still at the office. But I'm killing it on this sprint, so it works out.

Of course this means a link dump:

• The XPOTUS has a hate-hate relationship with life.
• After a damning ethics report, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has announced he won't run again, which is too bad because it would have been an easy D pickup.
• Speaking of Republicans in Congress, why do they behave like adolescent boys all the time?
• Israel is seeing a rally-around-the-flag effect, with the odd wrinkle that everyone hates the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud).
• The Post has decided to show people the horrific things 5.56mm rounds do to a body, as their public editor explains.
• George Packer looks at why political writing, in general, sucks.
• Where do all the stolen catalytic converters go?
• A train crash at the Howard St El station injured 23 passengers, and somehow distracted the cops on the scene from a shooting a block away.
• It will take Caltrans 3-5 weeks to fix the I-10 freeway in Los Angeles after a fire last week, with about 300,000 vehicles diverting each day.
• After Elon Musk's latest anti-Semitic garbage, author John Scalzi has left Twitter for good.

I promise to write something substantial tomorrow or Saturday. Promise.

I hope to make the 17:10 train this evening, so I'll just note some things I want to read later:

• Monica Hesse can't help making fun of the dude-bros in the US Senate who think they're still in middle school. Guess which party they're in?
• Julia Ioffe interviews National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
• Last night I finished Jake Berman's The Lost Subways of North America, and this morning I read Veronica Esposito's (positive) review for The Guardian. I recommend this book too.
• The New Republic interviews James Fallows about the uptick in aviation near-misses lately.
• National Geographic cuts through the mythology and history of Paul Bunyan.
• I did not feel the 3.6-magnitude earthquake that rattled central Illinois this morning, because who really feels a 3.6?

Finally, Molly White looks at the ugly wriggling things under the rocks Sam Bankman-Fried's trial turned over: "Now that Sam Bankman-Fried has been convicted in one of the largest financial fraud cases in history, the crypto industry would like people to please hurry up and move on. The trial is over, and it’s just so dang inconvenient that Bankman-Fried so publicly ruined the general reputation of an industry rife with scams and frauds by making it seem as though it is an industry rife with scams and frauds."