The Daily Parker

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:

• John Adams had some nuanced and deep thoughts about aristocracy and oligarchy that we should keep in mind as the OAFPOTUS forms his cabinet of billionaires, for billionaires.
• Despite my recurring reminder not to give the OAFPOTUS's verbal flatulence any mind at all, Krugman dismantles the argument that nations gain from conquest in the post-industrial age.
• New research adds weight to the theory that our ancestors were prey, not predators, with implications for understanding how we react to threats.
• Krebs is warning about a new scam that uses Google Forms to convince you that the attack is really an official Google security action.

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.

The Chicago Department of Planning and Development has proposed changing the zoning rules along a stretch of Broadway between Montrose and Devon to increase its density while simultaneously reducing its car-oriented ugliness:

The move could jumpstart housing construction, support local businesses and create a streamlined and consistent process for development in a part of town that has seen increased developer attention, city officials have said.

A driving factor in the rezoning is the CTA’s Red Line overhaul between the Bryn Mawr and Lawrence stations, city planner Danielle Crider said. The project is expected to be completed on time in 2025, at which point the CTA will have four properties along Broadway it acquired for construction and will no longer need, making it prime land for redevelopment.

Normally, things like a drive-thru, gas stations or other auto-related businesses could also be developed under a C1-5 zoning, but the planning department would also create a “pedestrian street designation” on the areas with this zoning to prevent certain car-oriented businesses, according to materials from the meeting.

A pedestrian street designation means curb cutouts for driveways are prohibited, parking must be from the alley and the building’s exterior must be on the sidewalk — effectively barring strip malls — according to the department. It’s intended to “preserve and enhance pedestrian oriented shopping districts,” but won’t affect strip malls along Broadway that already exist, materials show.

Naturally, people living in less-dense areas near Broadway like Lakewood-Balmoral are yelling NIMBY. That said, this sounds like an excellent proposal, and a good way to use the Red/Purple El reconstruction to the city's benefit.

I also love that Block Club Chicago pays attention to these things. I've let my Chicago Tribune subscription lapse because the hedge fund that owns it couldn't give two shakes about the neighborhoods near mine.

The Library of Congress has named Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 24 other films to the National Film Registry this week. A quick view of the list tells me I've only seen 5 of them, so I need to start watching more movies.

In other news:

• Former Chicago mayor and outgoing US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel suggests some ways the Democratic Party can get back in the saddle.
• The Chicago City Council finally passed its 2025 budget, a $17.3 bn mess that only got 27 out of 50 votes, and then only because it doesn't have a property tax increase. And we're still paying for police tort settlements out of the general fund instead of the police pension fund, where they should come from.
• Chicago's Christkindlmarket in Daley Center Plaza has been named "the most overcrowded holiday market in the US," in part because the overflow Christkindlmarket at Wrigley Field got cancelled this year due to a single hockey game next week.

Finally, Illinois could, if it wanted to, redirect $1.5 billion in Federal highway funds to mass-transit projects in the Chicago area under President Biden's 2021 Covid relief plan. Unfortunately, a lot of the state would prefer to build more useless highways, so this probably won't happen.

We have warm (10°C) windy (24 knot gusts) weather in Chicago right now, and even have some sun peeking out from the clouds, making it feel a lot more like late March than mid-December. Winds are blowing elsewhere in the world, too:

• The German government collapsed today after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the Bundestag.
• People think the OAFPOTUS transition team are doing a great job for the simple reason that most people don't follow this kind of thing.
• Josh Marshall points out that it makes logical sense that huge corporations would sell out their news divisions in what he calls "the great fluffening" ahead of the OAFPOTUS re-taking office, though it does mean that corruption has already gotten to 1870s levels again.
• Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland (Lib.—University-Rosedale) has resigned in spectacular fashion just hours before the government's fall economic statement, causing embarrassment to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
• LetsEncrypt has rolled out a new service that can update your TLS certificates every 6 days. This means, if your site has a breach, the attackers can do far less damage than they might if they had 90 days to do it.
• Amtrak's $400 million renovation of Chicago's Union Station will begin early next year, with new platforms, new waiting rooms, and many smaller improvements.
• Small towns with deep-sea ports have lost their patience with the ever-larger cruise ships that stop by from time to time.

Finally, the Washington Post says I read 628 stories this year on 22 different topics. That's less than 2 a day. I really need to step up my game.

So far today, Cassie has gotten almost exactly 10 km of walks, including a swing through the Horner Park DFA. This is a happy dog:

We also passed by a controlled burn in Winnemac Park:

They burn out the natural prairie areas periodically to help them grow back stronger. My only concern is that I believe there are several families of coyotes in the park. I hope they didn't lose their homes, or worse.

The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime.

Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these:

• Andrew Sullivan shakes his head at "the dumb luck" of the OAFPOTUS.
• On David Roberts' podcast, Dan Savage muses on "blue America in the age" of the OAFPOTUS.
• Ross Douthat worries that "it's going to be normal to have extreme beliefs."
• Amtrak has announced it will bring brand-new Alstom train sets into Acela service this spring, bringing the top speed of the route up to 250 km/h—at least for the Trenton-to-Newark segment. (At this rate, assuming no improvements in European train service, Acela should reach comparable speeds in the 2050s.)

Finally, a friend recently sent me a book I've wanted to read for a while: The Coddling of the American Mind, which civil-liberties lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt expanded from their September 2015 Atlantic article. I have noticed that people born after 1995 don't seem to have the same resilience or tolerance for nuance that even people born a few years earlier have. Lukianoff and Haidt make an interesting case for why this is. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I finish.

Before I link to anything else, I want to share Ray Delahanty's latest CityNerd video that explores "rural cosplaying." I'll skip directly to the punchline; you should watch the whole thing for more context:

Elsewhere,

• Josh Marshall implores people, one more time, stop giving the OAFPOTUS head space when he says dumb shit.
• Fareed Zakaria marvels at how weak Russia has become.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) continues the long tradition of high-ego, low-skill politicians completely failing at their jobs.
• ProPublica exposes UnitedHealthcare's internal process to lower its own costs (read: increase its profits) by systematically failing autistic children.
• Forget pipelines and fracking; data centers specializing in crypto mining have become the biggest threats to the environment.
• In March, Transport for London will raise Tube fares about 5%, for example raising the daily cap on zone 1-2 fares from £8.50 to £8.90.

There is some good news today, though. In the last 6½ hours, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters rose almost 9°C (15°F), to an almost-balmy -3.5°C. The forecast says it'll keep rising another 12°C or so through Sunday. So our first cold snap of the winter appears to be behind us.

My, we've had a busy day:

• President Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 Federal inmates in the largest single-day clemency in American history. Two of them stole millions in massive frauds against Illinois citizens. Josh Marshall doesn't see much clemency.
• Charles Sykes worries that neither major US political party has a clue how to fix our education systems (plural).
• Legalized sports betting has shifted billions from small punters to large corporations, which is why it was illegal for so long.
• Charles Blow muses about making friends after 50.
• Despite freaking out the usual car-besotted subjects, a plan to extend a protected bike lane in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Ill., will actually add parking spaces.
• A downtown Chicago office building constructed in 1928 will become 252 apartments under a plan that received City Council approval yesterday.

Finally, paleobiologists have narrowed the range of Neandertal-Sapiens interbreeding down to a period that peaked 47,000 years ago. Cue the jokes, starting with: "Who knew yo mama was that old?"

Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran an interactive feature showing you the walkability of your neighborhood, in average minutes of travel time (by any method) to get things you need. They divided most metro areas into 200-meter hexagons and evaluated three criteria.

My current hexagon comes in at 8.2 minutes. The one I lived in a decade ago, in Lincoln Park, is at 5.2 minutes. The best scores of places I've lived in are Brooklyn (4.8 minutes) and Chicago's Near North Side (4.2 minutes). The specific part of the specific suburb where I grew up is the only bit of the town that shows up as blue, with a score of 13.6 minutes.

I could play with this for hours.

Incidentally, the absolute worst place I ever had the pleasure of living was Mason, Ohio, on a project in late 2010. Mason is so bad, in fact, that the Post interactive map doesn't even attempt to measure it.

Also, kudos to the UK Home Office. I just applied for my UK Electronic Travel Authorisation, paid my £10 ($13.06), and almost immediately got approved. It helps that (a) I just entered the UK twice in September with the same passport, and until the UK decided Americans could use the EU passport lanes, I was in the UK Registered Traveller programme. So they've vetted me quite a few times already.

When will I next go there? I hope January. I haven't said a lot about it, but I moved to a new practice at Milliman on November 1st, and half my team—not to mention, my boss—are in England. I really need to meet them in person before too long. The other half of my team are in Seattle, where I also need to go soon, when I can work it out with my friend who brought Hazel through my house when they moved out there.

So, I'm aiming for Southampton in January and Seattle in February, because who doesn't love passing north of the 48th parallel in the winter?