The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Monday lunchtime links

Cassie and I survived our 20-minute, -8°C walk a few minutes ago. For some reason I feel like I need a nap. Meanwhile:

Finally, I want to end with Ross Douthat's latest (subscriber-only) newsletter, taking Vivek Ramaswamy to task for suggesting American kids need more intense competition in order for the US to stay ahead of its peers. I'll just focus on one paragraph, where he suggests Ramaswamy's end goal may not be a place we really want to go:

[T]he atmosphere he’s describing in South Korea, the frantic cycle of educational competition, isn’t just a seeming contributing factor to that country’s social misery; it’s almost certainly a contributing factor to the literal collapse of South Korea’s population, the steep economic rise that Munger describes giving way to an equally steep demographic decline. So for societies no less than individuals, it appears possible to basically burn out on competition, to cram-school your way to misery, pessimism and collapse — something that any advocate of intensified meritocratic competition would do well to keep in mind.

As I have more and more contact with kids born after 1995, I find so many of them who either have flat personalities, an inability to function independently, and an alarming lack of emotional resilience, or who have vitality, intelligence, and an ability to function in the world but no ambition. The last 30 years have crushed the elite-adjacent kids whose parents want them to enter the elite, whatever they think "elite" means. As a kid who traveled alone on public transit to Downtown Chicago at age 7, and managed to get from O'Hare security to LAX security without help by age 8, I feel sorry for these incompetent, despondent children.

First significant snowfall of winter

We've gotten about 4 cm of snow so far today, with more coming down until this evening. Cassie loves it; I have mixed feelings. At least the temperature has gone up a bit, getting up to -0.6°C for the first time since around this time on Monday.

Elsewhere:

  • Federal Judge Aileen Cannon (R-SDFL) got overruled again, this time after her corrupt effort to block Special Counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on January 6th.
  • George Will bemoans Congress ceding so much of its authority to the office of the President, especially given who will take that office in ten days.
  • Just three corrupt Chicago cops will cost the city almost $34 million in settlements, making me wonder why we don't pay those settlements out of the police pension fund.
  • Pamela Paul objects to historians opining about politics, which is actually one of the things they've always done.
  • Five years after the pandemic began, we still haven't gotten back in the habit of being out in public, according to Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.

Finally, Maplewood Brewing has started expanding its Logan Square taproom into the other half of the building it occupies. I don't get there often, but I enjoy going back. Can't wait to see what their restaurant looks like when it's done. I also need to get to Cherry Circle Room or the CAA Drawing Room soon, as it looks like the management transition from Land & Sea to Boka may change some things.

The darkest decile of the year has passed

A friend pointed out that, as of this morning, we've passed the darkest 36-day period of the year: December 3rd to January 8th. On December 3rd at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the sun rose at 7:02 and set at 16:20, with 9 hours 18 minutes of daylight. Today it rose at 7:18 and will set at 16:38, for 9 hours 20 minutes of daylight. By the end of January we'll have 10 hours of daylight and the sun will set after 5pm for the first time since November 3rd.

It helps that we've had nothing but sun today. And for now, at least, we can forget about the special weather statement that just came out warning of snow and winds starting later tonight.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

Finally, National Geographic explains how the two cups of tea I drink every day (three in the summer) will help me live to 107 years old.

I do wish he'd shut up

Once again, in the aftermath of the OAFPOTUS's demented press conference yesterday, I need to remind everyone to ignore what he says and watch what he does. He's not as harmless as the guy at the end of the bar who everyone avoids talking to, but he's just as idiotic.

Meanwhile, in the real world:

Finally, the temperature in Chicago dipped below freezing just before 2 am on January 1st and hasn't risen above freezing since then, with no relief in the forecast. Even though we don't expect any seriously cold weather in the next two weeks, it would be nice to have one day above freezing.

Tuesday night link clearance

In case you weren't frustrated enough:

And finally, a new report says that Chicago has the second-worst road traffic in the world, behind only Istanbul, Türkiye, with 102 hours per year wasted in traffic. That doesn't mean 102 hours traveling, it means 102 hours over and above nominal travel times from point A to point B. For comparison, I spent 113 hours total commuting to work last year.

A good public-private partnership

I just spent 15 minutes on TaxAct preparing and filing Punzun Ltd.'s 2024 taxes. It helps that it's an S-corporation and made almost no money last year, but still.

Intuit still doesn't have the Schedule K-1S part of TurboTax ready, however, so I can't file my personal taxes yet.

For those of you in countries with reasonable ways of doing things, I want to file my personal taxes because I overpaid all year, and the government owes me a non-trivial chunk of money. In order to do that I needed to file Punzun Ltd.'s taxes to get the form declaring how much I made from Inner Drive Technology. In your country, I'd bet the government does all this for you, don't they?

Friday afternoon link roundup

Somehow it's the 3rd day of 2025, and I still don't have my flying car. Or my reliable high-speed  regional trains. Only a few of these stories help:

I'm also spending some time looking over the Gazetteer that underpins Weather Now. In trying to solve one problem, I discovered another problem, which suggests I may need to re-import the whole thing. At the moment it has fewer than 100,000 rows, and the import code upserts (attempts to update before inserting) by default. More details as the situation warrants.

Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024

The 39th President of the United States died at his home in Plains, Ga., yesterday:

The Carter Center in Atlanta announced his death, which came nearly three months after Mr. Carter, already the longest-living president in American history, became the first former commander in chief to reach the century mark. Mr. Carter went into hospice care 22 months ago, but endured longer than even his family expected.

“To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning — the good life — study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith and humility,” [President] Biden, the first Democratic senator to endorse Mr. Carter’s long-shot 1976 bid for the presidency, said in a statement. “He showed that we are great nation because we are a good people.”

Other than interludes in the White House and the Georgia governor’s mansion, he and his wife, the former first lady Rosalynn Carter, lived in the same simple home in Plains for most of their adult lives and each of them passed away there, Mrs. Carter in November last year.

Carter was by far the most successful former president in history. Paul Krugman reflects on his accomplishments:

The truth is that luck plays a much bigger role in politics than we like to think.

The late 1970s would have been a difficult time for the economy no matter who was president. For one thing, the great productivity boom that doubled U.S. living standards over the generation that followed World War II had sputtered out, for reasons we still don’t fully understand.

On top of all that, persistent inflation before Carter took office — inflation that was in part due to irresponsible policy under Richard Nixon — had made the economy vulnerable to wage-price spirals. Many labor contracts had cost-of-living allowances that caused oil shocks to feed into labor costs; more generally, expectations of future inflation had become unanchored.

Reagan lucked out on his timing. The really bad stuff happened early in his presidency, and things were improving by the time he ran for reelection. Improving, not good — both unemployment and inflation were substantially worse during “morning in America” than they were at the time of the 2024 election. But Reagan benefited from the sense that the worst was over, and his reputation has been, um, inflated by decades of right-wing hagiography.

Luck, then, plays a big role in politics. It hasn’t always favored Republicans. Bill Clinton won thanks to a sluggish recovery that wasn’t obviously Bush the Elder’s fault; I’m not at all sure that Obama would have won if the 2008 financial crisis had been delayed a few months.

I met Carter once, at university. He came to Hofstra's Carter Conference in 1990. I quite literally bumped into him as he came out of the campus library, and his USSS detail allowed me to walk next to him for a good 400 meters before gently moving me aside. He even signed the question I'd prepared for the conference on a 3x5 note card that I still have.

I'm sorry he's gone. He was the kind of person we need right now.

Boxing Day links

Because Christmas came on a Wednesday*, and my entire UK-based team have buggered off until Monday in some cases and January 6th in others, I'm off for the long weekend. Tomorrow my Brews & Choos buddy and I will hit three places in Milwaukee, which turns out to be closer to downtown Chicago by train than a few stations on the Union Pacific North and Northwest lines.

Meanwhile, read some of these:

Enjoy the weekend. I'll have three Brews & Choos Reviews up before the end of the year, plus the 2025 sunrise chart for Chicago.

* That was also The Daily Parker's 9,500th post since the "modern" blog began in November 2005.