The Daily Parker

The Blommer Chocolate factory, just outside Chicago's Loop, routinely flooded the Near North Side with the delicious odor of chocolate several times per week until environmental laws required them to install scrubbers in their exhaust stacks. Still, every so often, one could smell cocoa cooking when the wind blew just right.

Sadly, that era will end very soon:

The chocolate supplier today announced it will close its manufacturing plant at 600 W. Kinzie St. and relocate its headquarters and local research and development operation to the Merchandise Mart, according to a statement from the company. The production facility, well known for spreading the scent of cocoa throughout parts of the River West neighborhood, debuted as Blommer's original manufacturing plant in 1939.

The move not only marks the end of Blommer's long history on the site, but it also raises the prospect of the 5.5-acre property being sold for redevelopment. The company's plans for the facility are not clear, and a spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

Blommer is the largest cocoa processor in North America and has more than 900 employees, according to the company.

Who knows, though? Marshall Field's manufactured Frango Mints on the 9th floor of its State Street store from 1929 to 1999, when Marshall Field's moved production to Pennsylvania. But Federated Department Stores, who bought Marshall Field's and Macy's in 2005, brought production back to the city in 2009. So Blommer's may rise again—just not on a small lot worth at least $5.5 million that has local developers drooling all over themselves for the confection.

American Airlines says my flight home has a 45-minute delay at the moment (though of course that could get worse). So I just spent 35 minutes walking in a big circle around the southwest corner of downtown San Diego. I don't think I'd ever live here, but I do enjoy the weather.

Meanwhile, as if I don't have too many things on my to-be-read shelf already, the New York Times book editor has released a list of the 22 funniest novels since Catch-22. Maybe someday I'll get to a few of them?

Anyway, I should be home with Cassie in about 11 hours. If she understood English and had any concept of "future," she'd be excited too.

I've got a little time before dinner, just enough to post this:

I didn't collect any snake bites, scorpion stings, or exploding cactuses, but I think I did get a nice sunburn. I'll find out tomorrow.

I've spent the morning getting a demo ready so that I don't have to be on the call at 3:30 am PDT. And now, I'm heading off to do a hike with a few of my co-workers. While I'm hiking, I'll be building up to my daily goal of 10,000 steps, which I make about 97% of the time.

But maybe I don't need that many? National Geographic takes a look:

Getting in 9,000 to 10,000 daily steps cuts risk of death by more than a third and reduced cardiovascular disease risk by at least 20 percent, but even smaller increases showed benefits, researchers found in a study of more than 72,000 people.

“Any activity is good activity. We found the more steps you did per day, the lower your risk of mortality and cardiovascular disease was,” says Matthew Ahmadi, an epidemiologist at the University of Sydney in Australia and one of the study’s authors. “The 10,000 mark is a great target to hit, but even if you aren’t able to hit that, still doing any amount of activity to increase your daily steps can go a long way to improving your health and lowering your risk of disease.”

In fact, highly sedentary people in the study began experiencing a heart benefit starting as low as 4,300 steps per day, when their risk of heart disease fell by 10 percent. Doubling that step count to 9,700 steps a day doubled the benefit.

Let's see how I do today.

Before I take Cassie on yet another 30-minute walk (how she suffers!), I'm going to clear some links:

• Julia Angwin asks the same thing a couple of my friends have asked: why is Congress talking about banning TikTok instead of, you know, governing? (tl;dr: Republicans, who control the house, really don't want to govern.)
• Speaking of sclerotic government, Paul Krugman reminds you that the Republican Party really does want to take away Social Security and Medicare, even as our closest friends and allies guarantee that everyone has social security and medical care.
• WTF is going on with Aaron Rodgers, and has he always been this way?
• Despite having fewer electrified rail miles than Iran, the United States actually has seen record passenger rail miles travelled this year.
• Portland, Ore., has passed a ban on gas-powered leaf blowers, with a phase-out to start in 2026. Oh, would Chicago be so progressive...
• Sierra Jones, writing for Strong Towns, provides five good reasons why we should end highway expansion.
• The Atlantic's Jonathan Haidt warns that we need to change the way children interact with their phones, and quickly.

OK, Cassie has roused herself, and probably needs to pee. Off we go.

What a lucky dog. For her Gotcha Day, after she got a ride in the car to the grocery store (always fun!), she got some grilled chicken from my salad and some belly rubs. She had no idea that I got a lot of grilled chicken, but that's for later.

We then walked 5 km to Horner Park DFA, where she got half an hour of off-leash time:

Another 5 km walk took us to Spiteful Brewing, where she found a 15-centimeter bully stick that some other dog had apparently lost:

Altogether she got almost 3 hours of walks, the previously-mentioned grilled chicken for dinner, lots of pats, belly rubs, and new friends at the dog park and at Spiteful. She is now passed out on the couch, dreaming of unexpected bully sticks.

Leave it to the WGN Weather Blog to trumpet that we've set a new record for days over 15.6°C before March 15th (12). We've also tied the record for days over 240K (75)! In fact, I'm confident that 2024 will tie the all-time record for days over 240K (366), last set in 2020.

Closer to home (ah, ha ha), I still have two claim forms to fill out in the great National Association of Realtors settlement for anti-competitive commission payments, which has gotten the group to make a modest concession to avoid getting sued again:

The National Association of Realtors, a powerful organization that has set the guidelines for home sales for decades, has agreed to settle a series of lawsuits by paying $418 million in damages and by eliminating its rules on commissions. Legal counsel for N.A.R. approved the agreement early Friday morning, and The New York Times obtained a copy of the signed document.

Americans pay roughly $100 billion in real estate commissions annually, and real estate agents in the United States have some of the highest standard commissions in the world. In many other countries, commission rates hover between 1 and 3 percent. In the United States, most agents specify a commission of 5 or 6 percent, paid by the seller. If the buyer has an agent, the seller’s agent agrees to share a portion of the commission with that agent when listing the home on the market.

The lawsuits argued that N.A.R., and brokerages who required their agents to be members of N.A.R., had violated antitrust laws by mandating that the seller’s agent make an offer of payment to the buyer’s agent, and setting rules that led to an industrywide standard commission. Without that rate essentially guaranteed, agents will now most likely have to lower their commissions as they compete for business

The settlement will pay me a few hundred dollars, even though I could argue that during the settlement period I paid over $10,000 in excess commissions. It gets worse: in three deals, the same agency represented both sides, making it even harder to get a discount or shop around.

I think the best structure for a real-estate commission would start with a flat dollar amount and add bonuses for shortening the time on market. Something like, I'll pay you $10,000 plus 1% of anything above list from the sales proceeds if we sell at or above the listing price. I'll pay another $2,500 if we get a buyer within 7 days and the deal is closed within 42 days. But if we don't get a buyer within 28 days or we close for under 92.5% of the listing price, I'm only paying you $7,500.

The days of paying 6% for a sales agent to do one open house and shoot some photos are over.

Getting ready for a work trip on Monday plus (probably) having to do a demo while on the work trip means I spent most of the day getting ready for the demo. In a bit of geography fun, because the participants in the demo will be in six different time zones from UTC-7 (me) to UTC+10 (the client), I got the short straw, and will (probably) attend the demo at 3:30 am PDT.

I say "probably" because the partners on the call may take mercy on me and let me brief them instead of monitoring the technology in the actual meeting. Probably not, though.

So in this afternoon's roundup of news and features, I'll start with:

• Teresa Carr's report in Undark explaining how people in "eccentric time localities" (i.e., on the western edges of time zones) experience negative effects that people east of them don't.
• President Biden's budget proposal includes a $350 million grant to extend the CTA Red Line.
• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the country's most-senior Jewish official, gave a scathing speech in the Senate this morning calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) to resign and hold elections. Josh Marshall puts this in context. (tl;dr: it's a big deal, and Schumer is really the only one in Congress with the heft and history with Israel to make this speech.)
• US Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who faces 18 felony counts in Federal court, may run for re-election as an independent so that he can use his campaign funds to pay his legal bills. Why anyone would give him money to do this I cannot determine.
• Chevrolet and other car manufacturers routinely hand over data about how you drive to a company that then hands that data to your auto insurer, because the US does not yet have anything like the GDPR.
• Julia Ioffe outlines how Ukraine can (sort of) win against Russia if it can hold out until 2025.
• Hopewell Brewing and other Illinois craft brewers have started selling THC-infused beer, taking advantage of a loophole in both the state's brewing and cannabis laws.

I will now check the weather radar to see how wet I'm going to get on the way home...

My Garmin watch thinks I've had a relaxing day, with an average stress level of 21 (out of 100). My four-week average is 32, so this counts as a low-stress day in the Garmin universe.

At least, today was nothing like 13 March 2020, when the world ended. Hard to believe that was four years ago. So when I go to the polls on November 5th, and I ask myself, "Am I better off than 4 years ago?", I have a pretty easy answer.

I spent most of today either in meetings or having an interesting (i.e., not boring) production deployment, so I'm going to take the next 45 minutes or so to read everything I haven't had time to read yet:

• Cognitive psychologist Amber Wardell listened to US Senator Katie Britt's (R-A-87.63657988865225L) reply to President Biden's State of the Union address, and explains how Britt's "phony fundie voice" fits into the right-wing Christian Nationalist worldview she promotes. Hint: Britt wasn't talking to you or me.
• Fulton (Ga.) County Superior Court Judge has quashed three of the XPOTUS's charges because, essentially, Fani Willis's office didn't draft the indictment with enough detail.
• Tori Otten admires the way House Democrats deftly cornered special counsel Robert Hur, forcing him to admit the vast differences between the way President Biden and the XPOTUS handled classified documents.
• Yulia Navalnaya reminds the West that Russian president Vladimir Putin isn't actually a politician; he's really a gangster.
• The Illinois Supreme Court has declined to hear, and thus let stand, an appellate court ruling that keeps the Bring Chicago Home referendum on next Tuesday's ballot. Large real estate companies and some large businesses oppose the plan, which would tax them more and use the money to pay for affordable housing.
• Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson has ignored the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago's offer to house migrants for free, and I would like to know why.
• Los Angeles police warned residents that burglars have started using Wi-Fi jammers to bollix up wireless security systems.
• Michigan will start building its section of the Marquette Greenway Trail, a 93-kilometer bike path that will eventually (late 2027) connect New Buffalo, Mich., with Chicago.
• Chicago passed 21°C yesterday for the fifth time in 2024, the earliest we've ever had as many days above that temperature since records began.

All righty then. I'll wrap up here in a few minutes and head home, where I plan to pat Cassie a lot and read a book.

A friend posted on Facebook that Billy Joel's album Glass Houses came out 44 years ago today. That means it's as far behind us as the 1936 Olympics was from Billy Joel at the time. A horrifying pun war followed, but that has nothing to do with the horrifying fact that people have known "You May Be Right" for 44 years.

And speaking of things that happened a long time ago, it turns out the President's memory is just fine, thank you, despite what Republican Special Prosecutor Robert K Hur said in his memorandum last month:

A transcript of a special counsel’s hourslong interview of President Biden over his handling of classified files shows that on several occasions the president fumbled with dates and the sequence of events, while otherwise appearing clearheaded.

In a report released last month, Mr. Hur concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Biden with a crime after classified documents ended up in an office he used after his vice presidency and in his home in Delaware. But the report also portrayed Mr. Biden, 81, as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” touching off a political furor amid his re-election campaign.

Mr. Biden’s lawyers, who were present for five hours of questioning over two days, have challenged the damaging portrait by Mr. Hur, a former Trump administration official. But the transcript had not been publicly available to evaluate Mr. Hur’s assessment that Mr. Biden’s memory has “significant limitations.”

But Mr. Hur made a particularly striking assertion in stating that Mr. Biden “did not remember when he was vice president.” As evidence, Mr. Hur quoted him as saying, “If it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president?” According to the report, Mr. Biden displayed similar confusion on the second day of questioning, asking, “In 2009, am I still vice president?”

The transcript provides context for those lines. In both instances, Mr. Biden said the wrong year but appeared to recognize that he had misspoken and immediately stopped to seek clarity and orient himself.

I wonder how Hur would have done in a similar situation? And can you imagine how the XPOTUS would handle a deposition like that? Oh, wait—we don't have to imagine it, we have ample evidence of his inability to get through one without falling apart completely.

Before I start ranting more about the way the press treats President Biden's occasional (and rare) senior moments versus the way they treat the XPOTUS being unable to string together a coherent though, I'll go back to the original topic and leave you with Weird Al's eloquent response to Glass Houses: