Events

A friend pointed out that, as of this morning, we've passed the darkest 36-day period of the year: December 3rd to January 8th. On December 3rd at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the sun rose at 7:02 and set at 16:20, with 9 hours 18 minutes of daylight. Today it rose at 7:18 and will set at 16:38, for 9 hours 20 minutes of daylight. By the end of January we'll have 10 hours of daylight and the sun will set after 5pm for the first time since November 3rd. It helps that we've had nothing but sun today....

Once again, in the aftermath of the OAFPOTUS's demented press conference yesterday, I need to remind everyone to ignore what he says and watch what he does. He's not as harmless as the guy at the end of the bar who everyone avoids talking to, but he's just as idiotic. Meanwhile, in the real world: Block Club Chicago interviewed Mayor Brandon Johnson in the wake of the City Council barely passing his 2025 budget by a vote of 27-23. Perry Bacon Jr. blames President Biden's overconfidence for the failures...

In case you weren't frustrated enough: Paul Krugman outlines all the ways Republicans are trying to enrich themselves at your expense by privatizing everything. Jeff Atwood worries that we may lose sight of the American Dream. Author Paul Theroux warns that expatriation has its own set of challenges. Charles Marohn believes that flooding the market with cheap homes in every neighborhood can end homelessness and reduce housing costs for everyone else. And finally, a new report says that Chicago has the...

I just spent 15 minutes on TaxAct preparing and filing Punzun Ltd.'s 2024 taxes. It helps that it's an S-corporation and made almost no money last year, but still. Intuit still doesn't have the Schedule K-1S part of TurboTax ready, however, so I can't file my personal taxes yet. For those of you in countries with reasonable ways of doing things, I want to file my personal taxes because I overpaid all year, and the government owes me a non-trivial chunk of money. In order to do that I needed to file...

Crain's reports this hour that the Evanston City Council has approved a 31-story, 447-unit apartment building right next to Inner Drive Technology World HQ v2.0: Chicago-based Vermilion Development has submitted a zoning analysis application for a 447-unit, 330-foot-tall building at 605 Davis St., with ground-floor retail space, according to a report from the city manager. If built, a tower of that height would eclipse Orrington Plaza, currently Evanston’s tallest building at 277 feet. The suburban...

I keep thinking of this clip from Remains of the Day: The "gentleman diplomacy" conducted by British nobility in the 1930s exemplifies the maxim "any sufficiently-advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

In February 2022, a US Navy amphibious assault ship—basically, a smallish (250-meter) aircraft carrier—sailed from Pearl Harbor to San Diego without using electronic navigation: With the approval of the Essex’s commanding officer (CO), Captain Kelly Fletcher, her navigator (coauthor and then–Lieutenant Commander Stanton), and the lead navigation instructor from Surface Warfare Schools Command in Newport, Rhode Island (coauthor Walter O’Donnell), the Essex tested its own proof-of-concept for navigating...

Somehow it's the 3rd day of 2025, and I still don't have my flying car. Or my reliable high-speed  regional trains. Only a few of these stories help: James Carville admits he got the 2024 election wrong. Matt Ford thinks "John Roberts is imagining things." A new book by Anita Say Chan equates the tech-bro culture with 20th-century eugenics. Molly White examines Elon Musk's war on Wikipedia. The US Surgeon General has called for adding cancer warnings to alcohol labels. Brazil's experiment in abolishing...

The Times morning newsletter highlighted a story from Tuesday about yet one more example of people who have come to believe something that is not only crashingly stupid, but potentially fatal: [A] small number of spring water aficionados...believe untreated water, or “raw water,” contains enriching minerals that are removed from tap water during the purification process. The trend, however, alarms health experts, who say that spring water devotees are taking unnecessary risks. The country’s robust water...

After my general statistics for 2024, here are the books and media I consumed since 2023. Books I didn't read as many books in 2024 as in 2023, mainly because they were longer. Any one of the Culture novels is the equivalent of 3 or 4 times The Outsiders, for example. The 30 books I started (and 26 I finished) included: Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. An excellent handbook for the kakistocratic country we now live in. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. I hope this does not become a handbook...