HeyJackass! reports the preliminary yearend tally in Chicago as 734 homicides, 2,936 shot. I’m sure that Mayor Lightfoot is touting that as a significant accomplishment but, as the author observes, there have been 700 or more homicides every year of Mayor Lightfoot’s term. By my calculations that’s the worst tally ever when adjusted for population. By far the greatest percentage of both victims and perpetrators are black and the percentage is even worse when considered by black population. Chicago’s black population has declined substantially over the last several decades. It’s lower than it was 50 years ago as is Chicago’s total population.

The Illinois Supreme Court has issued a stay on the provision of the SAFE-T Act abolishing cash bail. Tim Ward reports at ABC 7 Chicago:

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WLS) — The Illinois Supreme Court has halted the Pre Trial Fairness Act, a provision of the Safe-T Act, hours before it is set to go in effect at the first of the year.

The decision handed means, until further notice, every county in the state must maintain a cash bail system.

The court issued the order Saturday evening, keeping the cash bail system until further notice as the state appeals a judge’s ruling on the matter.

“Throughout the entire state of Illinois, we need to have the same rules, the same protections for every single person no matter where they live,” said Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser.

Earlier this week, a Kankakee County judge ruled that a portion of the Safe-T Act, that ends cash bail in Illinois, is unconstitutional after states attorneys in 65 Illinois counties challenged the new law.

In his 33-page opinion, Judge Thomas Cunnington cited the need for a separation of powers, saying “…the appropriateness of bail rests with the authority of the court and may not be determined by legislative fiat.”

It’s a step in the right direction but I suspect the stay won’t be maintained forever. I question Judge Cunnington’s reasoning in this.

I’ve posted about a number of the lines in my family history but I don’t believe I’ve posted about the Schneiders. My maternal grandmother’s given name was Annunciata Augusta Schneider. She was named for her father, August Schneider, who in turn was named after his mother’s uncle, August Didier. Her given name was Celestine Didier.

My maternal grandmother’s mother’s given name was Mary Jane Flanagan. I’ll write a separate post about the Flanagans. There’s a lot to write about there, particularly my great-great-grandfather Edwward Flanagan. He was in the Civil War, was a cowboy, working on some of the famous trails out west in the 1870s, and then became a cattle grader.

August Schneider was an alcoholic. He deserted the family and he and my great-grandmother were divorced, quite a scandal in those days. My grandmother was the oldest of five children: Sylverius (William Sylvester), Celestine, Edward, and Joseph. Her mother managed to eke out a living as a cook for a prosperous family. That left my grandmother to care for her four younger siblings.

They were incredibly poor. They lived in the cheapest possible housing in St. Louis—a houseboat moored on the Mississippi. One room with just a stove for both heating and cooking. No central heat, no electricity, no plumbing. I presume they dredged water from the river. The stench must have been unimaginable. No wonder my grandmother ran away and joined a vaudeville troupe.

All but one of the Schneider children died relatively young: my grandmother, known as “Joanne” or “Babe” at 51 of a brain aneurysm, Bill (Sylverius) at 28, Celestine at 18, and Joseph at 12. Jennie (Mary Jane) outlived all of her children but my grandmother and Ed. Hers was a tragic life.

Ed was called up for World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. He served in the Navy. He lived to be 96. I met Ed many times. I wouldn’t say we were close but I definitely knew him and was fond of him and his family. His children are my closest living blood relatives other than my siblings.

August lived into his 80s. He died in a poor house on the other side of the river. I’ve seen his grave.

Those are the Schneiders. One of the great mysteries in my family history is how August’s father, William Schneider, and his mother, Celestine Didier, met. Although a third generation American Celestine was a native speaker of French. I presume she also spoke English at least a little but when my mother met her as a very young child she spoke only French. Her family was prosperous and her uncle and guardian August Didier was married into one of St. Louis’s most prominent families, one that went back before the city’s founding. At the time of his death her grandfather’s estate was valued at nearly $600,000 in today’s money.

Update

It has been pointed out to me that I did not represent how awful the Schneiders’ circumstances actually were. The Schneider kids were in and out of orphanages throughout their childhoods, as their parents’ fortunes varied. Ed was quite resentful about that. The youngest, Joe’s, official cause of death was epilepsy. Ed said he died of malnutrition. Celestine’s grave was violated by a graverobber.

George Friedman opens his post with a list of the ways that wars end:

1. A war ends when one side lacks the material to continue. Germany’s campaign in World War II ended when it was unable to produce and field the weapons needed to fend off the Allied powers.
2. A war ends when one side’s morale is exhausted – when soldiers and civilians are simply unwilling to bear the burden of war, even if victory is possible. This was the case for the United States in the Vietnam War.
3. A war ends when there is no hope of a radical increase in military power, and when foreign intervention is impossible. In WWII, Britain persevered knowing it could not defeat Germany but reasonably expecting an American intervention.
4. A war ends when the consequences of defeat seem tolerable to civilians. In World War II, the Italian public saw Allied occupation as a preferable alternative. (Conversely, nations will continue to fight when the cost of defeat is catastrophic.)

concluding that the war in Ukraine is likely to continue for a long time:

Over time, then, the sense of the impossibility of victory will trigger peace talks, but not until reality forces it.

I wonder if the war will continue until there aren’t enough Ukrainians between the ages of 15 and 45 to maintain an organized resistance.

As usual I didn’t make it all the way to midnight last night. I’m still planning to watch ABC Chicago’s show. There’s always a dance number that’s fun featuring one of the meteorologists and one of the news anchors.

May we all have a better year in 2023! Setting a low bar, I know.

Expanding on the thoughts in my last post, in her Washington Post column Megan McArdle says that Southwest’s problem is staffing:

How did it come to this? If I had to pick only one factor — one hole in the cheese — it would be staffing. That’s hardly Southwest’s only problem, but it’s probably the one problem that made all the others worse.

The operational efficiency and brand loyalty that made Southwest a case study were built on a foundation of human capital. You can’t run a finely tuned productivity machine with disgruntled, undertrained employees who are phoning it in; you need teams that work together well and solve problems on the fly. Southwest has long been known for its strong corporate culture; as Gary Leff of the indispensable View From the Wing blog told me, “Front-line people, from gate agents to flight attendants, at Southwest Airlines usually seem to like their jobs, which can be a contrast from other carriers.”

which has some resonance with one of the factors I cited in my post—generational shift. Old employees retired and the newer, younger ones didn’t know Southwest’s procedures and operations as well.

The editors of the Washington Post on the other hand blame Southwest’s management for failing to upgrade the company’s information technology infrastructure:

The core problem is Southwest’s failure to modernize its infrastructure. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, told CNN the airline still uses phones and a computing system from three decades ago. While 1990s fashion might be back en vogue for teenagers, that era’s data processors should not be running one of the nation’s largest airlines in 2022. The system was unable to figure out where crews were, making it impossible to match up pilots, flight attendants and planes.

Those two explanations are not unrelated. A more experienced staff might have been compensating for deficits in the company’s IT and the newer staff might have been frustrated with the antiquated programs.

Here’s the “blame” part:

What’s particularly egregious is the fact that Southwest had the money to upgrade its systems but chose to hand it to shareholders instead. The airline recently announced it would pay a dividend again that amounts to $428 million a year. Southwest also received more than $7 billion from the U.S. federal government to shore up its operations during the pandemic. It paid a quarterly dividend for years before the coronavirus struck, signaling to Wall Street that the airline had cash to spare.

In other words, given a choice, Southwest put its investors ahead of its customers and crew. Now, the full ramifications of those decisions are causing massive pain — and what will almost certainly be a collapse of trust from the budget-minded travelers who have consistently ranked it among the best airlines when it comes to customer satisfaction.

I have no way of adjudicating among these explanations. I’m just passing them along.

I would point out that the entire air travel sector is notoriously slow to upgrade its IT. As late as the 1980s the air traffic system being used was one that had been developed in the 1960s, reliant on vacuum tube technology. American and United were still using systems they had developed 20 years previously. Maybe that has changed but I doubt it.

I suspect this is a topic we’ll be stewing about for some time. I have a question: what was the source of Southwest’s problems over the last week?

1. Inadequate investment in their flight scheduling systems
2. Outsourcing
3. Human error
4. Generational change
5. Bad weather
6. Bad luck

Without any insider knowledge my guess is that it was a combination of three or more of those factors.

I don’t think this will break Southwest but it’s certain to be a setback.

I think the two reports cited by Steve Milloy in his Wall Street Journal op-ed probably need more attention:

“Net zero” and its corollary, the “energy transition,” are talked about so often and so loosely that many take them for granted as worthy goals that could be accomplished with greater buy-in from political and business leaders. But two new reports from the utility industry should put an end to such loose talk.

In September, the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arm of the U.S. electric utility industry, released a report titled “Net-Zero 2050: U.S. Economy-Wide Deep Decarbonization Scenario Analysis.”

The EPRI report concludes that the utility industry can’t attain net zero. “This study shows that clean electricity plus direct electrification and efficiency . . . are not sufficient by themselves to achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions.”

In other words, no amount of wind turbines, solar panels, hydropower, nuclear power, battery power, electrification of fossil-fuel technologies or energy-efficiency technologies will get us to net zero by 2050.

Even to achieve “deep decarbonization”—which isn’t net zero—by 2050, EPRI says, “a broad portfolio of options that includes low-carbon fuels and carbon removal technologies will be required.”

But “low-carbon fuels”—efficient biofuels—don’t exist. “Carbon removal technologies” aren’t possible to scale up, and if they were, it would cost about $1 quadrillion—a million billion dollars—at today’s prices to remove the 1.6 trillion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said needs to be sucked “out of the atmosphere even after we get to net zero.”

There’s more. The EPRI report states: “This study does not include a detailed assessment of factors such as supply chain constraints [and] operational reliability and resiliency” of a net-zero electricity grid.

How a net-zero grid could be built and function would be an issue worth studying if it were possible in the first place. But it simply isn’t.

So, barring some unforeseen miracle technology, “net zero by 2050” won’t happen.

The curious thing about the report is that it has largely remained an EPRI secret. There has been no media coverage of it. I found out about it only after I filed a shareholder proposal about net zero with the electric utility Alliant Energy. The company offered the report as a defense against my proposal that management explain how it planned to reach its goal of net zero by 2050.

The other recent report is “2022 Long-Term Reliability Assessment” from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a government-certified grid-reliability and standard-setting group. NERC concluded that fossil-fuel plants are being removed from the grid too fast to meet continuing electricity demand, and that is putting most of the country at risk of grid failure and blackouts during extreme weather. The U.S. just got another taste of this during the Christmas electric-grid emergency.

So there you have it: We are dangerously dismantling our electric grid while burdening it with more demand in hope of attaining the goal of “net zero by 2050,” which the utility industry has admitted is a fantasy.

In that context it’s probably worth taking note of Akio Toyoda’s recent remarks:

Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda said he is among the auto industry’s silent majority in questioning whether electric vehicles should be pursued exclusively, comments that reflect a growing uneasiness about how quickly car companies can transition.

Auto makers are making big bets on fully electric vehicles, investments that have been bolstered by robust demand for the limited numbers of models that are now available.

Still, challenges are mounting—particularly in securing parts and raw materials for batteries—and concerns have emerged in some pockets of the car business about the speed to which buyers will make the shift, especially as EV prices have soared this year.

“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Mr. Toyoda said to reporters during a visit to Thailand. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”

While major rivals, including General Motors Co. and Honda Motor Co., have set dates for when their lineups will be all-EV, Toyota has stuck to a strategy of investing in a diverse lineup of vehicles that includes hydrogen-powered cars and hybrids, which combine batteries with gas engines.

The world’s biggest auto maker has said it sees hybrids, a technology it invented with the debut of the Toyota Prius in the 1990s, as an important option when EVs remain expensive and charging infrastructure is still being built out in many parts of the world. It is also developing zero-emission vehicles powered by hydrogen.

“Because the right answer is still unclear, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just one option,” Mr. Toyoda said. Over the past few years, Mr. Toyoda said, he has tried to convey this point to industry stakeholders, including government officials—an effort he described as tiring at times.

In the past I’ve pointed out that in general technological progress does not proceed at a predictable rate, Moore’s Law notwithstanding. I do have one question for those who believe we can rely on rapid technological progress to make what is impossible now possible in ten or twenty years. If that’s the case why do anything at all about anthropogenic climate change? Why won’t technological progress solve the problem for us without adopting our adopting electric vehicles or increasing our utilization of solar and wind power? And how do you know that?

I find the breastbeating and bloviation about some guy in New York getting elected to Congress who ran on a passel of lies incredibly tedious. I am shocked, shocked to hear about politicians lying. I could probably fill this page with jokes about politicians lying going back 200 or more years.

The only thing about it I find engaging is that I will find it interesting if New York Democrats find a way of criminalizing lying in politics. Stay tuned.