The Daily Parker

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing.

While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company:

• US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if she knows where she is half the time, announced she's finally retiring from the Senate at the end of this Congress.
• Both Paul Krugman and Josh Marshall call bullshit on the GOP's (latest) plans to steal my social security contributions. (Note to the masses: the only way Social Security could be in trouble is if the United States somehow lost its taxing authority.)
• Air India has ordered 220 airplanes from Boeing and 250 from Airbus, including 70 long-haul A350s and 777s.
• Cranky Flier chides United Airlines for publishing a flight schedule they have no intention of flying over the summer.
• In other "fictional schedule" news, the CTA hasn't fixed its own frequency and reliability problems even after six months of trying.
• Rick Steves recommends traveling to Europe's second cities, like Manchester, Lyon, and Hamburg. 
• Timothy Noah draws a straight line from railroad cost-cutting through crew size reductions and the massive derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last week.
• Corrupt former Chicago police sergeant Ronald Watts, whose misconduct has led prosecutors to throw out more than 200 felony convictions and will probably cost the city half a billion dollars in settlements, blamed his downfall on "anti-police atmosphere" without the self-awareness required to see his part in that.
• Bruce Schneier bemoans the lack of urgency in Washington (and other capitals) to regulate cybersecurity.

Finally, you may not want to know what the CBP beagle squad has found in baggage at O'Hare.

I've got an open research problem that's a bit hard to define, so I'm exploring a few different avenues of it. I hope reading these count:

• Dara Massicot performs an autopsy on Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
• Walter Kirn worries about AIs inadvertently training themselves, and the mushy content that will result.
• Bruce Schneier describes hacking the tax code, which I hope he goes more into in his latest book, currently on my bedside table.
• The Texas DOT seems to be at war with urbanism, which makes a certain sense, but something about their shenanigans in Houston recently seems unusually corrupt.
• The less said about toilet plumes, the better. But please put the lid down before flushing.

Since none of these has anything at all to do with my research project, I should get back to work.

My burn-up chart for the current sprint has a "completed" line that nicely intersects the sprint guideline, so I can take a moment this Monday morning to eat lunch and read some news stories:

• James Fallows has some insight into the near-miss in Austin, Texas, that came uncomfortably close to killing over 100 people. AVWeb has a comment as well.
• Bruce Schneier lays out how adversaries can attack AIs—by corrupting their training data, among other things.
• Alex Shepard argues that the English Premier League has turned itself into the very thing its fans feared.

And closer to home—like, less than a kilometer away—the City of Chicago has made some recommendations to improve a stretch of Clark Street that could be a model for other streets in the city.

I finished a couple of big stories for my day job today that let us throw away a whole bunch of code from early 2020. I also spent 40 minutes writing a bug report for the third time because not everyone diligently reads attachments. (That sentence went through several drafts, just so you know.)

While waiting for several builds to complete today, I happened upon these stories:

• The former co-CEO of @Properties bought 2240 N. Burling St., one of the only remaining pre-Fire houses in Lincoln Park, so naturally the asshole wants to tear it down.
• Robert Wright thinks former CIA Director William Burns' 2008 analysis of Russian President Vladimir Putin demonstrates how leaders should use cognitive empathy to understand people.
• Radley Balko debunks the right-wing idea that affirmative action had anything to do with Tyre Nichols' murder.
• Transport for London is expanding the Ultra Low Emission Zone to include all London boroughs as of August 29th. Cars that don't meet the standard will cost £12.50 to operate in the zone—or you can get money to scrap them.
• Apple watches keep calling 911 when their owners go skiing. Oops.
• Maybe parking garages will finally go away?
• WaPo has a map of all the snow we've gotten (or not gotten) this year.
• The new 4K restoration of Casablanca just went into my Amazon shopping cart.

Finally, a school district food service director ordered more than 11,000 cases of chicken wings worth $1.5m over the last three years, which the State's Attorney says never got to the kids.

And now, since the temperature has risen from this morning's -17°C all the way up to...uh...-11.4°C, I will now walk the adorable creature who keeps nosing me in the arm as I type this.

It got practically tropical this afternoon, at least compared with yesterday:

Cassie and I took advantage of the no-longer-deadly temperatures right at the top point of that curve to take a 40-minute, 4.3 km walk. Tomorrow should stay as warm, at least until the next cold front comes in and pushes temperatures down to -18°C for a few hours Thursday night.

I'm heading off to pub quiz in a few minutes, so I'll read these stories tomorrow morning:

• London plans to build an elevated rails-to-trails park through Camden, similar to Chicago's 606 Trail and New York's High Line.
• Julia Ioffe outlines how Russia's pariah status has hurt their ability to spy on the West, but says we shouldn't rule out Russian shenanigans as their failed invasion of Ukraine grinds on.
• Via Schneier, a government audit found that people suck at choosing passwords. But we knew that.
• Molly White read all the FTX subpoenas so you don't have to.
• The contractor responsible for bits of the CTA's Brown Line Flyover falling off claims to have fixed it.

OK, off to empty the dog, refill the dog, and scoot over to Sketchbook Skokie for a shellacking. (Our sports person can't make it tonight.)

I have no idea. But today I managed to get a lot of work done, so I'll have to read these later:

• A whopping 78% of voters in Rep. "George Santos" (R-NY) district think he should resign.
• Who should I vote for in the upcoming Chicago Mayoral election?
• National Geographic explains the science behind seasonal depression.
• Via Bruce Schneier, it looks like ransomware payments have declined 40% since 2021.
• Writing for Strong Towns, Michel Durand-Wood compares urban planning to...pizza.
• James Fallows describes what an amateur pilot checkride is like, and why they're required. (And wow do I miss flying.)

Finally, if you live in Chicago and look straight up and slightly north with binoculars tonight, you might see a little green comet that last passed Earth 50,000 years ago.

Accused fraudster Sam Bankman Fried did what every prosecutor hopes a defendant will do: start a blog. Researcher Molly White annotated his first post:

Sam Bankman-Fried has apparently decided to fill his time spent confined to his parents' Palo Alto home with blogging, perhaps in the hopes that he can just blog his way out of the massive criminal and civil penalties he's facing.

Although many of his statements here repeat things he's said elsewhere, I think it is useful to be able to analyze some of the story he's trying to spin all in one place, rather than cobbling his narrative together from multiple sources.

It's remarkable the extent to which SBF outright lies, or at the very least twists his version of events to distort reality in his favor. I don't intend to annotate further posts from him—which I suspect will be many—but instead hope that this will be sufficient to give some idea of just how thoroughly misleading his statements are.

Sample annotation:

If I was going to try to pick out a crypto firm that suffered large losses in an attempt to say "look, it was happening to everyone!", I might not pick the one whose founders have allegedly been in hiding for the last six months.³⁴

And this:

It's clear that SBF's definition of "accurate" differs from most people's. SBF seems to think that if you tell someone that you have $1,000, and then later you say "...in monopoly money", it was still an accurate and defensible statement.

You know, I'm beginning to think 2023 will be the year people lose patience with lying fraudsters.

Just a pre-weekend rundown of stuff you might want to read:

• The US Supreme Court's investigation into the leak of Justice Samuel Alito's (R) Dobbs opinion failed to identify Ginny Thomas as the source. Since the Marshal of the Court only investigated employees, and not the Justices themselves, one somehow does not feel that the matter is settled.
• Paul Krugman advises sane people not to give in to threats about the debt ceiling. I would like to see the President just ignore it on the grounds that Article 1, Section 8, Article VI, and the 14th Amendment make the debt ceiling unconstitutional in the first place.
• In other idiotic Republican economics (redundant, I know), Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) has proposed a 30% national sales tax to replace all income and capital-gains taxes that I really hope the House passes just so the Senate can laugh at it while campaigning against it.
• Amazon has decided to terminate its Smile program, the performative-charity program that (as just one example) helped the Apollo Chorus raise almost $100 of its $250,000 budget last year. Whatever will we do to make up the shortfall?
• How do you know when you're on a stroad? Hint: when you really don't want to be.
• Emma Collins does not like SSRIs.
• New York Times science writer Matt Richtel would like people to stop calling every little snowfall a "bomb cyclone." So would I.
• Slack's former Chief Purple People Eater Officer Nadia Rawlinson ponders the massive tech layoffs this week. (Fun fact: the companies with the most layoffs made hundreds of billions in profits last year even as market capitalization declined! I wonder what all these layoffs mean to the shareholders? Hmm.)
• Amtrak plans to buy a bunch of new rail cars to replace the 40-year-old rolling stock on their long-distance routes. Lots of "ifs" in there, though. I still hope that, before I die of old age, the US will have a rail travel that rivals anything Europe had in 1999.
• The guy who went to jail over his fraudulent and incompetent planning of the Fyre Festival a couple of years ago wants to try again, now that he's out.

Finally, Monica Lewinsky ruminates on the 25 years since her name popped up on a news alert outing her relationship with President Clinton. One thing she realized:

The Tonight Show With Jay Leno died in 2014. For me, not a day too soon. At the end of Leno’s run, the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University analyzed the 44,000 jokes he told over the course of his time at the helm. While President Clinton was his top target, I was the only one in the top 10 who had not specifically chosen to be a public person.

If you don't follow her on social media, you're missing out. She's smart, literate, and consistently funny.

First, on the flight from Dallas to San Francisco, this handsome boi slept peacefully on the floor four rows ahead of me:

Bane is a malamute mix, 11 years old, and here in the SFO baggage claim area, very tired.

Monday morning, I walked over to the Ferry Terminal on my way to the Caltrain terminal at 4th and King. This guy posed long enough for me to compose and take a shot:

I don't know his name, or even whether he's male. Sorry.

Later, in Palo Alto, I stumbled upon this historic site:

That's the garage at Dave Packard's house where he and Bill Hewlett created their company in 1939.

I didn't bring my real camera to San Francisco this time because I thought it would rain throughout the trip. Next time, though.

New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Arden, just resigned unexpectedly, which is a much more surprising story than any of these I queued up:

• President Biden quietly made a big move on immigration that the opposition either didn't notice or can't really criticize.
• Julia Ioffe understands the same thing the White House understands: Putin has no incentive to negotiate for peace.
• Newly-sworn-in US Representative "George Soros" (R-NY) stole $3,000 from a GoFundMe meant to pay for life-saving surgery for a disabled vet's service dog. (The dog died.)
• Pilot and journalist James Fallows has more on the near-miss at JFK last week.
• Uncle Bob reminds developers to factor their functional programs into classes. (Stay readable, folks.)
• Bruce Schneier worries about how ChatGPT could influence politics.
• The Tribune identified 5 suburban breweries to visit, 4 of which were already on the Brews & Choos list.

Finally, I'm glad to discover that ibuprofen may be more effective than acetaminophen for treating tension headaches, so I will now take one.