The Daily Parker

Getting down to Whitestown, Ind., yesterday took about 4 hours and 45 minutes, including a stop to empty Cassie, which isn't great but isn't nearly as bad as I'd feared. Getting home, however, taught me about the limitations of Google Maps in a way I'm not likely to forget.

Here's the first leg of our return trip, from Whitestown to just south of Wolcott, Ind., a distance of 109 km:

That took us 3 hours and 41 minutes, an average of 29.6 km/h. People ride bikes faster than that.

You can see spots where we got off Interstate 65 and followed Google's instructions to take alternate roads, because I-65 had an average speed of a portly beagle. (I'm not making up the comparison. I'm talking about a specific beagle.)

As it turned out, though, Google had no data at all about the alternate roads until people started driving on them. So when Google said "take County Road 50 N to County Road 500 W" because it thought no one was on those roads, that was true until Google told 300 people to take them.

That made getting back on I-65 a new kind of hell as stoplights set up to admit the 2 or 3 cars usually going through an intersection completely failed to clear the 5-km line of cars trying to turn.

We finally learned our lesson, too late, after we gave up on Google Maps and lit out on US-231 towards Wolcott. From that point until we got onto the Dan Ryan expressway in Chicago we averaged about 90 km/h. We ignored Google and paralleled I-65 until it looked like the Interstate had finally cleared up.

The other thing we learned was, if there's a 40-minute line for the bathroom, leave. We found a couple of gas stations with no lines just 5 minutes from "Hub Plaza" on the map above.

And as a bonus, we got to see a magnificent sunset over the fields of central Indiana that we would not have seen from the Interstate.

The total return time from Whitesville to Chicago was 6 hours and 48 minutes.

Next time I travel through rural parts of the US, I'm going to go back to the navigation skills I learned before we had satnav in every car.

One more thing: if the US had the same level of technology and similar transport policies as our peer nations (not to mention China), I would simply have gotten on a high-speed train in downtown Chicago and gotten out in Indianapolis 90 minutes later. Alas, American transportation is still stuck in the mid-1900s, with no likelihood of advancing—especially in a reactionary state like Indiana.

But just to be clear: it was totally worth it. There is nothing like seeing a total solar eclipse. I'm already thinking about going to Spain in 2026.

A 4.8-magnitude earthquake rattled Hundterdon County, N.J., about 45 minutes ago:

The U.S.G.S. reported that the earthquake’s epicenter was in Lebanon, N.J., about 50 miles west of Manhattan. The shaking was reportedly felt in cities from Philadelphia to Boston.

Several East Coast airports issued ground stops halting air traffic in the immediate aftermath.

The New York Police Department said it had no immediate reports of damage, but sirens could be heard all over the city.

Having experienced a couple of magnitude 4+ earthquakes in California, I know how alarming they are, but also how minor. So it's funny to me watching New York and Philadelphia freak out over this little thing in the same way that it amused me when Raleigh, N.C., got 10 mm of snow while I was there. Even moreso because, according to the USGS, the earthquake hit Manhattan with something like a 3.0 magnitude or less—about the shaking you get from a trip on the #7 Subway.

I especially like the Times reporting that "sirens could be heard all over the city," which, if you've ever spent half an hour in New York, seems akin to "trees could be seen all over the forest."

I hope everyone in the affected region safely rights their lawn chairs and stops their hanging plants from swinging before too long.

I'm almost done with the new feature I mentioned yesterday (day job, unfortunately, so I can't describe it further), so while the build is running, I'm queuing these up:

• Philip Bump analyzes the New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan's dismissal of the XPOTUS's bogus immunity claim.
• Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) told reporters he's done everything he promised to do when he took office a year ago, at which point the reporters no doubt collectively cocked their eyebrows.
• Molly White doesn't think Sam Bankman-Fried going to prison will make much of a difference in the crypto industry, especially with the abject stupidity of its investors.
• A section of journalist Megan Kimble's new book City Limits reviews how Patrick Kennedy led the fight to demolish Interstate 345 in Dallas.
• Daniel Herriges argues that not all cities can fix their housing problems the same way.
• Are dog DNA tests worth it? (My vet famously told me "it's very likely to say you have a dog.")
• The US Office of Science and Technology Policy has directed NASA to define Coordinated Lunar Time that takes into account the fact that time moves faster there.

All right! The build pipelines have completed successfully, so I will now log off my work laptop and order a pizza.

We have a truly delightful mix of light rain and snow flurries right now that convinced me to shorten Cassie's lunchtime walk from 30 minutes to 15 minutes to just 9 minutes each time I came to a street corner. I don't even think I'll make 10,000 steps today, because neither of us really wants to go outside in this crap.

I'm also working on a feature improvement that requires fixing some code I've never liked, which I haven't ever fixed because it's very tricky. I know why I made those choices, but they were always the lesser of two evils.

Anyway, elsewhere in the world:

• Jonathan Pie rants about Scotland's new hate-crime law that has everyone from civil liberties groups to JK Rowling up in arms.
• Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) signed off on four office-to-residence projects on LaSalle Street in the Loop. (It's the picturesque street featured in one of The Dark Knight's best stunts.)
• Four Chicago restaurants made the James Beard Awards finals. (I've only been to one of them, sadly.)
• Related to that (if you think about it), Chicago will see its first sanctioned Chicago River swim in a century on September 22nd, over 50 years after the Clean Water Act took effect.
• Vitalii Kovalev, executive chef at several haute cuisine restaurants in New York and Florida turned out to be a Russian spy, who later came down with Havana Syndrome.

Finally, the cancellation of the UK's HS-2 project north of Birmingham has left more than 50 homes empty for two years. Can't think why the affected constituencies have flipped from Tory to Labour, can you?

Remember this XKCD from 2020? With a little help from what researchers think may be the Russian government, that little brick wobbled a bit in the past few days:

The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux.

It was an incredibly complex backdoor. Installing it was a multi-year process that seems to have involved social engineering the lone unpaid engineer in charge of the utility.

I simply don’t believe this was the only attempt to slip a backdoor into a critical piece of Internet software, either closed source or open source. Given how lucky we were to detect this one, I believe this kind of operation has been successful in the past. We simply have to stop building our critical national infrastructure on top of random software libraries managed by lone unpaid distracted—or worse—individuals.

The Economist has it in the King's English:

xz Utils is open-source software, which means that its code is public and can be inspected or modified by anyone. In 2022 Lasse Collin, the developer who maintained it, found that his “unpaid hobby project” was becoming more onerous amid long-term mental-health issues. A developer going by the name Jia Tan, who had created an account the previous year, offered to help. For more than two years they contributed helpful code on hundreds of occasions, building up trust. In February they smuggled in the malware.

Jia Tan’s patient approach, supported by several other accounts who urged Mr Collin to pass the baton, hints at a sophisticated human-intelligence operation by a state agency, suggests The Grugq.

Analysis by Rhea Karty and Simon Henniger suggests that the mysterious Jia Tan made an effort to falsify their time zone but that they were probably two to three hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time—suggesting they may have been in eastern Europe or western Russia—and avoided working on eastern European holidays. For now, however, the evidence is too weak to nail down a culprit.

Sleep well...

Ah, just look at it:

Rain, snow, wind, and general gloominess will trundle through Chicago over the next 36 hours or so, severely impacting Cassie's ability to get a full hour of walkies tomorrow. Poor doggie.

If only that were the worst thing I saw this morning:

• The XPOTUS called for an end to the war in Gaza, but without regard to the hostages Hamas still holds, irritating just about everyone on the right and on the left.
• Knight Specialty Insurance Company of California has provided the XPOTUS with the bond he needed to prevent the Manhattan District Attorney from seizing $175 million of his assets, which makes you wonder, what's in it for the insurer?
• Related to that, Michelle Cottle analyzes the Republican Party's finances and concludes that the XPOTUS is destroying them.
• These are the same Republicans, remember, who are threatening to block money needed to re-open the Port of Baltimore and replace the Key Bridge.
• Massachusetts US District Judge Allison Burroughs has ruled that a case against the private air carrier who flew migrants to Martha's Vineyard may proceed, and the case against the politicians who paid for the flight could come back with an amended complaint.
• Charles Marohn argues that cities using cash accounting, rather than accrual accounting, end up completely overwhelming future generations with debt they would never have taken on with an accurate view of their finances.
• But of course, the prevalence of the city-killing suburban development pattern in the US has an upside of sorts: everywhere you go in the US feels like home.

And after all this, does it surprise me that Mother Jones took a moment to review a book called End Times?

Few people could have said this better:

Through next weekend I'm going to have a lot to do, so much that I've scheduled "nothing" for the back half of next week going into our annual fundraiser on April 6th. I might even get enough sleep.

I hope I have time to read some of these, too:

• Eileen O'Neill Burke has won the Democratic Party primary for Cook County States Attorney (called a District Attorney just about everywhere else), and is therefore the presumptive successor to outgoing CCSA Kim Foxx.
• Andrew Sullivan sees the XPOTUS hawking $59 Bibles as the apotheosis of Christianism.
• Dana Milbank expresses alarm at the XPOTUS's "glitching."
• Molly White summarizes Sam Bankman-Fried's sentencing hearing earlier this week, with just exactly the right amount of snark. ("I can't believe that post-collapse media tour came back to bite him.")

Finally, submitted without comment: Grazie Sophia Christie, writing in New York Magazine, advises young women to marry older men.

Today is the 45th anniversary of Three Mile Island's partial meltdown, and the day after Sam Bankman-Fried's total meltdown:

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency mogul who was convicted of fraud, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday, capping an extraordinary saga that upended the multi-trillion-dollar crypto industry and became a cautionary tale of greed and hubris.

Mr. Bankman-Fried’s sentence was shorter than the 40 to 50 years that federal prosecutors had recommended, but above the six-and-a-half-year sentence requested by the defense lawyers. A federal probation officer had recommended 100 years, just under the maximum possible penalty of 110 years behind bars.

His sentence ranks as one of the longest imposed on a white-collar defendant in recent years. Bernie Madoff, who orchestrated a notorious Ponzi scheme that unraveled during the 2008 financial crisis, received a 150-year sentence in 2009. He was in his 70s at the time and died 12 years later. Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of defrauding investors in her blood-testing startup, Theranos, was sentenced to 11 years and three months in 2022.

Molly White had some thoughts on this earlier in the week:

Bankman-Fried [tried] to argue that no money has been lost thanks to his fraud, mostly based on the argument that the bankruptcy team has estimated that creditors will receive a "100% recovery". In a later letter, he even submits that he tried to help the bankruptcy team recover assets. Incredibly, he includes in his evidence to support this claim the screenshots of his January 2023 message to Ryne Miller — despite the fact that Judge Kaplan already determined that his arguments that the message was just an attempt at being helpful "d[id] not appear, on a preliminary basis, to be a persuasive reading". Kaplan later decided that the same message was one of two instances in which Bankman-Fried had tried to tamper with a witness, and rescinded his pre-trial release.

Bankman-Fried's arguments regarding losses were rebutted by the prosecutors in several different ways and, somewhat awkwardly, also rebutted by the very same bankruptcy team he quoted to support his claims that customers would be reimbursed at 100%.

[Prosecutors did] not seem optimistic about Bankman-Fried's future prospects, writing that "A sentence that resulted in the release of the defendant while he is at a working age would leave open the very real possibility that he perpetrates again."

If he serves the minimum time possible, he'll get out in his mid-50s.

Former US Senator Joe Lieberman (D, maybe?–CT) and Al Gore's running mate in 2000 has died:

Joseph I. Lieberman, the doggedly independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, becoming the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died March 27 in New York City. He was 82.

The cause was complications from a fall, his family said in a statement.

Mr. Lieberman viewed himself as a centrist Democrat, solidly in his party’s mainstream with his support of abortion rights, environmental protection, gay rights and gun control. But he was also unafraid to stray from Democratic orthodoxy, most notably in his consistently hawkish stands on foreign policy.

His full-throated support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the increasingly unpopular war that followed doomed Mr. Lieberman’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and led to his rejection by Connecticut Democrats when he sought his fourth Senate term in 2006. He kept his seat by running that November as an independent candidate and attracting substantial support from Republican and unaffiliated voters.

His transition from Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 on the Democratic ticket to high-profile cheerleader for Republican presidential candidate John McCain eight years later was a turnaround unmatched in recent American politics.

Meanwhile, in other news:

• Stanford University sophomore Theo Baker expresses alarm at his classmates' growing anti-rational beliefs.
• Slate's David Zipper analyzes what the Baltimore bridge collapse will do to the city's traffic.
• The Economist reviews the lasting influence (or surprising lack thereof) of Steven Levitt's Freakonomics books.
• The Chicago Dept of Transportation announced major construction on Division Street that will include new protected bike lanes and replacement of two bridges.
• The National Transportation Safety Board has released its final report on the crash of a one-third scale B-29 in Kokomo, Indiana, last year.

Finally, the Atlantic's Faith Hill wonders, why do we date the same person over and over again?