The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Was it stupidity or cowardice? (Both?)

Apparently Republican Maine governor Paul LePage (aka "the country's craziest governor") let "accidentally" let 19 bills become law by "forgetting" to veto them:

As the Bangor Daily News reported Tuesday evening, LePage appeared to be attempting to use the parliamentary procedure known as the pocket veto. By not signing the bills and "pocketing" them, LePage could under some circumstances have effectively vetoed them. In theory, that would have allowed the proposals to die without legislators having a chance to override his veto. But the pocket veto only works if the legislature has adjourned after the end of the second regular session. And there is the rub.

The clerk of the Maine House told TPM Wednesday morning that the legislature, which is nearing the end of the first regular session, has not adjourned. By not vetoing the bills within the required 10-day period, LePage allowed the bills he opposed -- some ferociously -- to become law.

Given that Maine is majority-Democratic, and LePage has deviated somewhat from his campaign persona by becoming a raging right-wing nutter, it seems possible to me that he allowed the bills to become law so (a) he could continue to grandstand on the issues without (b) actually signing bills he knew were pretty good for Maine.

But the actual reason this happened is most likely the omnibus explanation: stupidity.

Sometimes your opponent's own-goals are sweet indeed.

Marriage equality: the software side

Remy Porter at The Daily WTF points out the implementation issues with marriage equality:

In a landmark decision, the United States Supreme Court revised the business requirements and integrity constraints on the marriage relationship, removing some legacy constraints and essentially updating to better reflect the actual needs of their end users. This policy decision now has to be implemented in every state, county, town and hamlet across the country. Every change breaks somebody’s workflow, and this one is no exception.

In the end, this might not be changing requirements, as much as it might be poor assumptions. We’ve all seen articles like Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time and Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. The choices we make in writing software can reveal our own assumptions and biases, and it behooves us in the industry to keep that in mind when interpreting business requirements. @qntm explores that idea from a database design perspective, both before the Supreme Court’s decision, and after.

Porter's post got me thinking about data design for marriage licenses, and the bad designs I've had to implement because of politics.

Happy Pride

The Chicago Pride Parade staging area is at the end of my street, so Parker and I had to at least see it. Money shot:

That's the Stanley Cup, back in Chicago where it belongs.

And just think of the hundreds of couples breaking up this weekend:

"Honey! We can get married now!"

"...um..."

Pride goeth before my apartment

Oh, shit.

Tomorrow will be the most epic Pride Parade in Chicago's history.

It starts four blocks from my house, and the staging area extends down Montrose past the end of my street.

Good thing I'm not going to be exhausted from having a party tonight, or have anywhere to go tomorrow morning...

On the other hand, this is the coolest map I've seen in a long time:

States where Same-Sex Marriage is Legal

Updated 26 June 2015

Know hope.

Marriage equality wins

A few minutes ago, the U.S. Supreme Court announced their 5-4 decision in Obergefell v Hodges:

Held: The Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State.

The entire U.S. is now a marriage-equality jurisdiction. The ruling will take effect in just a couple of weeks, when the Court issues its mandates.

I'm glad this happened in my lifetime. This is great news for all couples, not just same-sex couples.

It'll take a while to digest the opinion and its four dissents (and you'll never guess who dissented).

Thoughts on the Confederate battle flag

A Facebook friend complained this morning that some of her friends had changed their profile photos to the Confederate battle flag, supporting what, no one seemed to know. My response:

It's interesting. We're the only country in the developed world where it's all right for a sizable number of regional governments to put up monuments to a rebellion we put down 150 years ago at a cost of 750,000 lives. Keep in mind, these rebels expressly took up arms to defend one of the two worst atrocities ever committed by an elected government in history. In the country that committed the *worst* atrocity in history, it's a *crime* to display the symbols of the political party that perpetrated it.

Let's follow England's example and mock rebel leaders with effigies and fireworks once a year. They have Guy Fawkes; we have Nathan Bedford Forrest. Except Fawkes was delusional and totally failed in his rebellion, while Forrest knew exactly what he was doing and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans before someone stopped him from doing it. If you think about it, no organization in history is responsible for more American deaths than the so-called Confederate States of America.

I don't know why we're even having this debate. The rebels failed, and slavery with them. And yet they have persisted for another 150 years trying to claw back as much racial inequality as they can. Enough.

More on the Confederate battle flag

TPM is doing a mitzvah in its coverage of the decline of Confederate memorabilia. Three articles published today:

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Good riddance to a racist symbol

The Republican Governor of South Carolina today ordered the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol. Josh Marshall lauds the (overdue) move:

[I]t is important to note that the incorporation of the Confederate battle flag into Southern state flags and flying it at capitol buildings isn't some relic of the post-Civil War days. It's quite new. In most cases it goes back a little over 50 years to the 1950s and early 1960s. In other words, the prominent public display of the flag (if not the popularity of the flag itself, though partly that too) doesn't commemorate the Civil War or the Confederacy, it was the emblem of the 'massive resistance' movement of the 1950s and 1960s in which white Southern state government sought to defy the federal government's effort to force desegration, black enfranchisement and formal legal and political equality for African-Americans on the South.

So why did [Sunday's] massacre, horrific as it is, lead - apparently - to the complete collapse of support for flying the Confederate battle flag? It's certainly not that Southern state governments are less conservative or Republican than they were 10 or 15 years ago. Far from it. And more specifically and relevantly, nor are they more progressive on race issues than a decade a more ago. So why? At a basic level, I'm not totally sure, thus my surprise. At some level, of course, it is the sheer horror of Dylann Roof's crime, his totally unambiguous motivation and his open use of the flag's symbolism. There's also a herd affect. Once Nicki Haley decided it was time to bring down the flag it probably became much, much harder for comparable leaders in other states to hold out. But neither explanation, to my mind, really captures the sea change. The best explanation I can think of is one David Kurtz suggested, which is generational. A lot of people who were alive and politically active are no longer with us. And it certainly stands to reason that that generational cohort would have been the staunchest in its resistance to the change.

The United States put down the pro-slavery rebellion 150 years ago at the cost of 3 million American lives. I'm glad the South is finally taking a small step towards adulthood.

Juneteenth: the whole story

Today is the 150th anniversary of the liberation of Galveston by U.S. troops. TPM Cafe has an in-depth look at the event:

The historical origins of Juneteenth are clear. On June 19, 1865, U.S. Major General Gordon Granger, newly arrived with 1,800 men in Texas, ordered that “all slaves are free” in Texas and that there would be an “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” The idea that any such proclamation would still need to be issued in June 1865 – two months after the surrender at Appomattox - forces us to rethink how and when slavery and the Civil War really ended. And in turn it helps us recognize Juneteenth as not just a bookend to the Civil War but as a celebration and commemoration of the epic struggles of emancipation and Reconstruction.

During the Civil War, white planters forcibly moved tens of thousands of slaves to Texas, hoping to keep them in bondage and away from the U.S. Army. Even after Lee surrendered, Confederate Texans dreamed of sustaining the rebel cause there. Only on June 2, 1865, after the state’s rebel governor had already fled to Mexico, did Confederate Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith agree to surrender the state. For more than two weeks, chaos reigned as people looted the state treasury, and no one was certain who was in charge.

Ah, Texas. Remind me again, why'd we let them back in?

Quietly moving ahead at Heathrow?

The Economist's Gulliver blog points out something opponents to Heathrow's third runway may have missed:

In Britain the long-awaited Davies Commission report on a third runway for London is set for release shortly. The main objections to new runways by locals is the additional noise they will suffer. But by the time any new runway gets built in a decade or more, much of the fleet serving London will have been replaced by these new planes that whisper rather than roar. Describing volume is tricky but Bombardier’s new CSeries, a small single-aisle short-haul jet, equipped with Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan engine, was barely audible at times during its flight at just a few hundred yards from the watching crowds. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner (pictured) and even Airbus’s A350 and A380 also made far less noise than would seem possible. Critics will point out that the planemakers do their utmost to make these display particularly silent, nevertheless the results are astonishing.

The noise reduction from new technology is significant. In early jet engines, which were ear-splitting, all of the air was forced through the engine core in which combustion takes place. High bypass systems, with some of the air directed around the engine core, made engines quieter and more fuel efficient. The engine on the CSeries uses a gear, allowing the front fan to turn at a lower speed than the engine core, reducing noise further. The CSeries, 787 and A350, constructed from composite materials, are lighter than their predecessors too, which helps keep noise down.

My new place is directly under the approach path to O'Hare's runway 28C, which opened in October 2013. Residents along this flight path worried that the runway would generate tons of noise. As it turned out, it really didn't, principally because of these new technologies. (Also because landing airplanes make much less noise than departing airplanes.) Someday, I hope London gets another runway, and I hope that people realise sooner rather than later that it won't be nearly as bad as they fear.