dannyman.toldme.com

2025-11

The Accidental Beauty of a Cybertruck

I saw a beautiful Cybertruck this morning. It belongs to a neighbor a couple blocks over. It is one of a few licensed liveries the neighbor drives. I had seen him washing it earlier and when I came back around it was glistening in the sunlight. It has a wrap that looks dark green at first but it also glistens in the sunlight, and shifts color as you pass by. This morning, there was a vivid pop of color because a few autumn leaves had come to rest on the shining clean windshield. I stopped and snapped a few pictures.

I don’t like the Cybertruck. They’re dumb. But they’re so over-the-top dumb that they’re kinda charming. Like a pug. Those poor dogs who got bred by dumb humans to look so dumb they can’t breathe. But there’s an accidental beauty in the stainless steel. The stainless steel is among the dumbest aspects of the Cybertruck because it stains at the tip of a child’s finger. Anyone who buys a Cybertruck needs to get a wrap from the aftermarket. That means that every Cybertruck has to be done up in its own personality. These rusting toasters of Brutalist uniformity by their very nature are forced to become objects of individual expression.

CyberTrucks are dumb, and as a result, they are sometimes beautiful.

2025-11-05 Wednesday

I have been in the process of disentangling from Big Tech. I’ve been wary for some time. It was Elon’s “Roman Salute” that left me done with buying stuff on Amazon. Shopping around is a little more effort but that and not just buying random stuff when it pops into my head are both gratifying. Less crap.

A few days ago I took the step of deleting social apps from my phone. Discord, Blewski, Mastodon, Reddit, all back up on the shelf of sitting down at a terminal. More time in my own head to work ideas through. Less clutter.

The monkeys are being peeled off my back. I feel a bit more like myself again. I start to feel like thing are more possible again. Let’s keep the feeling going. More life.

As I walked this morning I recalled an informal life goal had been days where I could spend a little time at the coffee shop, then hop on the train to work. I have this now. I am typing these words at my favorite cafe as my coffee cools. Some days I meet a friend for coffee and those are the best. It took time to get here. A tech job where their greater concern is that the work get done, not that I’m present at an office at a particular time. A home not too far from the train station: a bit under 20 minutes to walk. The final piece came, ironically, with the Pandemic, when management saw fit to downsize from a large suburban office site with ample parking to a hole-in-the-wall near the Caltrain. As a Pandemic Parent, though, I Work From Home three days a week, though I have been spending more of those mornings at The Office as well, to help our growing team find its speed.

Some days I make a new friend or two. Thanks to Rutvij and Amin, the above paragraph took somewhat longer to write, but I still made it to the office at a good hour.

The blustery wet weather and a degree of giddiness from last night’s election have made the morning feel like anything is possible.

Train Dreams

I saw the movie “Train Dreams” this weekend. I dragged the family to a small, nearly-empty theater. It felt like something that deserved a theater screen. It is the story of a guy with no family, who grows up in Idaho near the turn of the last century. He finds purpose when a woman introduces herself to him. They build a cabin by the river and have a daughter. There’s no work to be had in town so he’s a migrant lumberjack. Heading out each season to bring down old growth trees. It is hard being away from the people he loves.

One job with the railroad really turns him off future railroad jobs. When he was young, the Chinese had been forcibly removed from his town. Yet when he was out working, “he enjoyed the easy kinship” among men, whether they came from Shanghai or Cleveland. One day he’s sawing a tie with a Chinese guy and some motherfuckers come around, grab the man, and throw him off the bridge. The man’s face lingers in dreams for the rest of the protagonist’s life.

My grandfather grew up in a sod cabin in Montana, his father a Swedish homesteader. Grandpa wasn’t thrilled with the life out there so he rode boxcars to Chicago, and made a new life with his mother’s English name. There was a story I learned from that side of the family, in Upper Michigan, where logging is a major industry, of a relative, a young man, who got crushed to death by logs that had fallen off a truck.

The movie was filmed last year but to see Americans as migrant workers, amid racial violence … the history of a hundred years ago feels fresh. There’s a very soft-spoken scene near the end of the movie, when he visits a “big city” and sees men in a space capsule on a color TV in a store window. He’s never used a telephone. “What’s this?” he asks the woman next to him. “They’re in outer space.” He then notices their reflection in the window, and she confirms they are seeing themselves. It had been a decade since he’d bothered to look at himself in a mirror. The woman is Asian.

The story is of a guy who lives an unremarkable life that is in keeping with his time. I enjoy the human time machine. “Barry Lyndon” and “Lawrence of Arabia” are movies of men living noteworthy lives. “To Live” and “A Man Called Ove” are similar portraits of unremarkable men. Also in the theme is “Ikiru.” Both “A Man Called Ove” and “Ikiru” have been remade in English. “Ikiru” means “To Live” and the Western version is “Living” which is all to say I am not the only person who enjoys this genre. Even if the small theater is empty when I go.

Bicycle Dreams

2025-11-15 Saturday

I feel that a lot of folks are upset that a few Democrats ended the Shutdown. I share some disappointment. I think the aviation delays coming into the holidays would have created a lot of pressure on the Republicans to make a compromise. Instead the Democrats who signed a deal put their party on a tactical retreat: President Trump was eager to hold back food from poor people for political leverage. (Just in case you haven’t already seen that he is evil.) So, the compromise is we’ll pull back on Healthcare for the moment, and in exchange, SNAP is funded through September, and the government through January. Come January, if the healthcare subsidies haven’t been fixed, there will be a crisis underway for 22 million Americans, and nobody need go hungry when the Democrats stand firm.

Republicans, for their part are like “gee we want people to have heath care but we have to do something about the growing expense! Obamacare is fundamentally flawed! We have to reform it somehow, which we have been promising for the past decade. We have sketches of an idea of how we might could do that.” And I’m like “yeah … Obamacare is what you get when you insist on having for-profit companies stay in the middle of the healthcare system so they can figure out how to save money. You could of course have a ‘public option’ but the private companies (supposedly infinitely superior to the government) said there was absolutely no way they could compete with the Federal government …” Which is to say, the rest of the world seems to have found ways to moderate healthcare costs and the answer is Socialism.

I know a guy whose health insurance premium for next year is set to go up $30,000. My hope is that by March some deal has been worked to end the First Government Shutdown of 2026 that fixes his out-of-pocket costs. But, whomever is paying for it, a family’s health insurance should not be that expensive! Reform is needed, but the current political class isn’t going to deliver it. The best we can continue to hope for is that the government throw money at the problem until we eventually elect decent leaders.

Here’s the deal. I have fancy private enterprise health insurance. One of the local clinics has a soaring central atrium crowned by a Chihuli sculpture. I think there is a decent case to be made that art and positive aesthetics are healing, and maybe Chihuli cuts a deal for a medical facility, but the extravagance, while nice, seems wasteful. I also visit my wife where she works, providing government healthcare to low-income people. There’s no Chihuly. Just the grim cost efficiency familiar to anyone who has spent some time in government services.

There shouldn’t be two systems: one for the wealthy and one for the poor. Whether you write code or hang drywall, you ought to be able to go to a reasonably nice facility and receive the same quality of care. Why is this not the case? For much of our history, Americans have been taught that while “all men are created equal” also “not really” because someone has to pick the cotton and someone else needs to be removed to create new farmland for the settlers. This is why, so far, we can’t have “socialism” — because some people are less.

What the immigration raids are showing, though, is many, and maybe most Americans no longer hold that broken truth to be self-evident. The awareness is growing that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights: among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We need our political leaders to catch up with this.

But equality isn’t a concept the elites like. Opportunity for All may be great for economic prosperity but it is no way to sustain the political power of an Oligarchy that writes the checks that fund the elections.

America, we totally can have nice things open to all!