Events

As someone with both student debt and mortgages, our encroaching deflation (and consistent below-target inflation) frustrates me. Take a look at this special report by Crain's showing how bad the problem of student debt has become in general: The share of college grads owing at least $30,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars jumped from 6 percent to 30 percent in the eight years ended in 2012, according to the College Board, while the average debt of new graduates in Illinois ballooned 85 percent, to...

Wow, I missed a yuge milestone a couple weeks ago. It turns out that a stupid post on March 7th was the 5,000th Daily Parker post since the blog launched as a pure blog in November 2005. I don't usually miss those things. I must be distracted...

Jeff Atwood uses a complaint about how computers have ruined chess forever to make an important point about security: What's not clear in this table [of exponentially decreasing dollars per gigaflop] is that after 2007, all the big advances in FLOPS came from gaming video cards designed for high speed real time 3D rendering, and as an incredibly beneficial side effect, they also turn out to be crazily fast at machine learning tasks. Let's consider a related case of highly parallel computation. How much...

I've been running around all day and only have a couple of minutes to list some things I've read on my phone while running around. All day. New Zealand voted 56-44 to keep its existing flag. But the 44% suggests there will be another flag referendum in a few years. Chicago 9th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale wants to kill your ride-share service. Because why deregulate taxis when you can over-regulate cars? Chicago lost its fight to renegotiate public employee pension payments, so I expect my property taxes...

Microsoft launched and then quickly shut down an AI customer service bot this week after the Internet taught it bad habits: The aim was to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding,” with Tay able to learn from her conversations and get progressively “smarter.” But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers, who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide. Microsoft has now...

Multiple news outlets reported today on preliminary Census Bureau numbers for the last year showing Chicago lost more population than any other city in the U.S.: Census Bureau figures released today show the five collar counties gaining 5,084 residents, not enough to offset the 10,488 decline in Cook County during the period. The population of DuPage and Lake counties decreased slightly. That left Cook County with 5.2 million residents and the six-county region with 8.4 million. Let's make fun of that...

Via Fallows, I'm now reading the transcript of Donald Trump's recent meeting with the Washington Post editorial board. It's...I don't even know how to describe it. He makes no sense. Example, from early on: [Fred] HIATT [WaPo editorial page editor]: The root of many people’s unhappiness in Baltimore was the perception that blacks are treated differently by law enforcement. And the disproportionate – do you think it’s a problem that the percentage of blacks in prison is higher than whites, and what do...

Skipping Mitt Romney's dig that Trump's wives have been foreign-born because "there are jobs that Americans won't do," it's becoming obvious that Trump has a problem with women mocking him. New Republic's Jeet Heer explains: An old-fashioned sexist boor, Trump tends to divide the world into a simple binary: men are rivals to be bested and women are potential sexual conquests. When he’s confronted by a strong, assertive woman outside the mating arena, his synapses tend to short-circuit, leading him to...

Crains reported today that a 0.93-hectare hunk of Addison Street directly across from Wrigley Field will finally become the nightmarish eyesore in the neighborhood the Ricketts family always wanted: The deal was completed after two foreclosure suits against the seller of the site, Steven Schultz of Preferred Equities, were resolved, Rossi said. By gaining control of the 2.3-acre site, the M&R venture is on the verge of starting a development first announced by Schultz in 2007, before a real estate crash...

Stuff to read later: New Republic asks, if so many people hate Hillary Clinton, why is she getting more votes than any other candidate running in either party? Paul Krugman expands on the thought that the Republican Party made Trump possible. New York Magazine wonders why we're not talking about the GOP disasters in Louisiana and Kansas, when their national candidates are still running on those failed platforms. The Chicago River is getting cleaner. You still never want to fall in, though... Cranky...