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608 the magic of having no car

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Guys, there is a secret world hiding right in front of you. It is an incredible, diverse, entertaining, joyful, healthy, and all around amazing awesome world.  What world are we talking about? Why the walker's world of course. That little known globe we all live upon, but barely tread upon.  Let me start with full disclosure. I own a car. It's a work truck. Technically my wife went to the dealership and all that stuff, but my name is on the papers various places and it's parked outside my house and I can use it pretty much whenever I want to, so yeah, I have a car. Or at least we have a car.   But for years of my life, I lived without a vehicle. Sure up until 16 I was forced to be car-free, but I'm talking about the years that I've had a license but chose not to drive.  When I moved from suburbia into a big city, parking tickets were the first thing that told me to get rid of the vehicle I had at the time, a Volkswage
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607 thinking about big trucks

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Our thoughts tend to be influenced by what's happening around us. It's a bit unavoidable.  If you're at the beach on a hot sunny day, you might find yourself thinking about swimming, swimsuits, ice cream, or even sharks. Sure, you might think about work too, but maybe a lot less than you'd think about it if you were say, at work.  When I lived in the Bay Area, I thought about all kinds of things. But when it came to focusing my thoughts in writing, I often found myself thinking about technology and the future. There was a lot of technology there, and generally California is culturally fifteen years ahead of the rest of the United States. So, you're kind of living in the future.  We can argue that point, and surely Miami and New Orleans are innovating culture. New York, too. There are little pockets all over the place. But on average California is ahead. Anyway, that's beside the point.  The
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606 AI versus the real guy

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Have you been keeping up with the advancements in AI? I haven't. There's a lot going on, and I don't have any skin in the game.  Let's see, OpenAI dropped ChatGTP a bit less than 2 years ago, after years of rumbling from inside Google about chatbots passing the Turing test, and some cool image generators. Flash forward to today and we've got AI search built into our phones, image generators built into Photoshop, although I haven't used that old standby in years, and AI generated movie clips.  Next comes the full on deluge of AI stuff: first, slick looking misinformation and endless rambling, then more, and not being able to quite tell, then the dragon eats its own tail and we're back to making petroglyphs. In the meantime, we shall dabble. One of these days I'm hoping to be able to feed one of the dead screenplays I've got sitting around into an AI and then sit back and watch the movie. All the basics of that experience exist
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605 buying an ebike on Alibaba

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In the current world of ebike purchasing in the US, you have basically two options. Buy a bike online from a reseller (direct to consumer "brand") who buys their bikes from China, or buy a bike from a retail shop who buys their bikes from a bike manufacturer (retail "brand") who buys their bikes from China.  Yes, there are other options. Like a couple brands that make their stuff in the US (from foreign parts) or in Europe (from German, Japanese, Chinese, or perhaps French parts). Or buying used.  Or... What about going directly to China, yourself? Perhaps you've heard of Alibaba? I have, but I've never used it.  Alibaba is an early success on the e-commerce scene, sort of like eBay, but for buying new junk made in China. It's founder, Jack Ma, has penetrated Western consciousness, partly because he's a billionaire, and partly because he got in hot water with the state, wound up on some sort of house arrest, and ha
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604 more and more micro-mobility options

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Have you seen that meme comparing the traffic created by ICE (internal combustion engine) cars versus electric cars?  Spoiler alert: they make the same amount of traffic.  See, we've got two issues conflated here, and honestly, EVs as we know them aren't a fantastic solution for either one.  First is the issue of global warming and CO2 emissions. Electric cars promise no tail pipe emissions and high efficiency. Sounds good. And if you're using renewable energy for your charging, even better. But then there's the awkward, um, manufacturing phase, and the fact that your average EV is kinda heavy, because batteries, and has a bit more "stuff" in it than your average ICE car, all of which creates, um, pollution while being manufactured, and then, uh, disposed of in the not-to-distant future because, uh, we haven't exactly figured out how to recycle EV batteries, or how to fix them so they go longer safely, or at
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