Inspired by a Steve Ramsey video about making a wooden duck pull-toy, I knocked out a wooden duck push-toy. I had a really tough scrap of 2×8 laying around, and the jigsaw had trouble cutting a fine shape out. A lot of sanding ensued, and the wood kept absorbing the yellow latex craft paint I had on hand. I think that would have been fine but I got a can of yellow spray paint and now this duck can be seen from space.
The duck looked easy enough. Sketch out a shape, trace it onto wood, jigsaw …
The wood was thicker than my jigsaw and skills could handle. Much sanding ensued.
The wooden duck’s thirst for acrylic hobby paint could never be slaked, though I think this would have been good enough.
How long should the push dowel be?
The spray paint provides a nice base for clamping the wheels by the axle as they dry.
A bench dog holds the duck by the push dowel as a space heater helps the sealant out in Sunnyvale’s winter weather.
Sinking a hole in the handle for the push dowel. Fortunately, the client is not too picky about precision.
When all was said and done, it was the boys who really brought this project home!
The wheels are just large dowels, and the axle is straight enough to allow a slight wobble. As this was being built for my younger son I gave him the option of push toy or pull toy. He opted for a push toy, and I made the push stick about the right size for him.
Here in 2020, I share an office with my second-grade son. This morning they were talking about Hannukah and making paper dreidels. He got frustrated making his paper dreidel. After lunch, I tried my hand at making a scrap wood dreidel. I used the miter saw to cut a 1×1 stick of wood, then mitered one end into a top. A 1×1 is too small to clamp in a miter saw, and I wasn’t going to stick my hand that close, so I used a “push stick” to hold the piece in place as I mitered it out.
“Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I miter sawed you out today!”
Of course, imperfections can be fixed with the miracle of sanding. “I made it out of clay,” I kept thinking as I sanded it down.
“Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I sanded you this way!”
I popped the top into a bench vise and carefully drilled out a hole. A drop of glue and a dowel rod and the boy had a dreidel. I set him up to paint the letters on. He was a little underwhelmed with the quality of his first time painting Hebrew letters on a small wooden object, but I assured him the point of making a dreidel wasn’t to be perfect but to have a simple toy with which to play.
“When it was dry and ready, with the dreidel he did play!”
Through the afternoon, he practiced his top spinning technique.
It took a few days, a few hours each day, but I completed “day 2” of my first Steve Ramsey build: the Basic Mobile Workbench.
We keep the kids away from the power tools.
The first thing anyone notices is that my workbench is unusually tall. I built it to the same height I set my standing desk and so far, I like it. (I am unusually tall.) Instead of the hassle of wrestling a sheet of plywood and the intimidation of breaking up a sheet of plywood with a circular saw, I nibbled through a pile of wood that has been accumulating in my garage and spent some zen time cutting with a nice hand saw. (As Leah Bolden says: “you can do this!”) The bottom shelf was this old board that changes color and had a line drawn in a decent spot. I resized it with a handsaw and cut out the corners with a jigsaw.
For the longest cut, I set up a simple jig.
I built the interior shelving with scrap wood. I had a lot of 1×12 laying around. For the shelves, I glued two 1×12 boards together. I don’t have a clamp wide enough for the job so I improvised with some bungee. Some of my 1x12s had a 1×2 lip tacked along the side, from a project I abandoned years ago. I thought I might preserve the lip for the shelving, but my first attempt to saw through the assembled pieces met with a nail. Good thing I was rocking the hand saw, I guess.
Some problems can be fixed with a Home Depot run, and sometimes you just have to improvise. The join here isn’t going to hold much weight, so this should work fine.
With the wider shelves, for one I used the remainder of the wood that I had used for the bottom plate, and for the other, I managed to retain the lip on some 1×12, and at the end discovered that the shelf slides out then angles and wedges in a nice spot to hold plans!
TADA!
Part of the challenge is that my driveway and the garage are not flat or level. When doing the shelves I took to checking how “level” the bottom board was, then lined up the shelf supports based on that concept of level. Since they are drilled into end-grain, I took an old board that Tommy broke for taekwondo and used that to add a cross-grain buffer for the casters. I have no idea if this is wise or not. Since my floor is, shall we say, rugged, the basic casters from Steve’s plans feel rinky dink. Perhaps in the future, I’ll upgrade them.
This little buffer place on the bottom of the leg may or may not ensure stability for the caster.
Next project: clean the garage out a little more so I can get started on Steve’s actual six-project course!
It has been two trips to Home Depot. I picked up an impact driver combo set and a 2×4 on my first trip. For the second trip, I realized that I needed yet another 2×4 and that quarantine has become a growing possibility, so I grabbed the lumber for the next two projects, in addition to some star-bit hex screws.
Saturday afternoon was blessed with some pretty nice weather, so I set up shop in the driveway again. But before I tell you that story, I’ll tell a brief story. A few years back, this dad had younger children and even less free time and decided he’d be best off ordering a workbench kit online. The box showed up in pieces, and the Amazon merchant was sufficiently inept about making it right that Amazon gave me a full refund, and I was left with half a workbench kit. The various bits were nice enough that they’ve been sitting in the garage for a few years. This is a long way of saying I had a nice top for the workbench, and I have adapted Steve’s plans to fit that top. And free up a little room in the garage, which is one of the big objectives here.
Last time around, I had cut the cross pieces to 18 10/16″ to fit the workbench top. Between that and cutting longer legs to suit my preferred working height, I had used up all the 2x4s, so I needed another piece for the stretcher beams. Then I realized the cross pieces sit within the stretchers, and I had to trim each cross piece by 3″. Oh, and that I’d need another 2×4 because there are also stretchers at the bottom. All that’s to say that mistakes were made and material wasted. Price of education, I guess.
I chopped several 2x4s. I noticed that not all the cuts were perfectly square, thanks in part, I believe, to an imperfect fence. Close enough for now. I also noticed that the boards are … not perfect. So, I spent a little more energy checking the cross pieces and flipping them to whatever orientation fit the fence most flush. Education.
Then I got to screwing the legs together. Last time I had to drill two holes before sinking the screw. This time, with the impact driver and a set of star-bit deck screws, the drills went into the wood like a knife through warm butter. The deck screws have their own nuance. At first, I have to try and hold them straight as they get started in the wood. After a bit, they tend to sink right in a way, and at the end, the impact drill makes its impact drill noise, and I can get the head just under the wood. Ahhh, flush!
And no more wrestling with a chuck key.
The first corner of the leg assembly is easy enough: make the pieces square, hold them firm, and drive the screws straight. As you get toward the fourth corner, the job gets trickier: lining pieces up square and flush and holding them in the right place gets trickier. On one corner, whenever the screw made it through, it would shove the piece over a bit. Steve makes it look easy, but this mere mortal got to busting out the clamps to help get pieces squared and held still.
You can see this corner put up a fight, until I got a clamp involved.
When assembling the frame, I needed to really push the legs apart to host the last stretcher. A neighbor came by and suggested using a shim to give the clamp something to grip. Finally, the frame was together, and the top just popped right on top, easy, and sufficiently snug.
The stretcher wanted to move in the direction of the blue arrow. The clamps, with the help of a shim, held things right.
I can see all the imperfections. On the one hand, imperfections are kind of a bummer. On the other hand, anyone who creates something tends to have the best awareness of their own imperfections. Fair enough. But more than that: I’m learning. Nobody starts perfectly. The workbench is good enough.
Solid enough but damn these gaps!
The other thing that raises a brow is just how high I’ve built the workbench. I had held my forearms out at 90 degrees and measured the height from there. 46″ is high, and that’s where I set my standing desk when standing. I don’t like bending over. Two open questions are: is a comfortable standing desk height also a comfortable workbench height, and is this narrow workbench going to be stable at this height? The neighbor and I discussed how best one might trim 2″ off the legs beneath the bottom brace. Time will tell.
The workbench will replace the white table on the left. It needs to store some of the more useful stuff there. This will free up enough room to hang another bicycle.
When screwing in the cross pieces, Steve explained why his design has five at the bottom and three at the top. For one, the bottom has to hold the shelves’ weight, but for another, more cross pieces at the bottom lower the center of gravity.
For Day Two, Ramsey’s plans call for cutting up a plywood sheet with a circular saw to build shelving and a workbench top. I already have a workbench top and a cache of dimensional lumber, so I will take my own approach to the bottom shelving. One thing to think over is what do I want to store in the workbench—heavier stuff at the bottom. The workbench kit I had came with some nice, felted drawer bottoms, but half the drawer pieces are missing. I’ll probably just do open shelving and throw in a good number of 1×2″ shims to allow for adjusting the shelf heights.
I enjoy building things. I learned a few things in my uncle’s basement and Boy Scout activities, but my high school didn’t offer shop class. In college, I discovered computer programming, which allowed me to build computer programs quickly, with a fairly low cost-of-entry. Information Technology is also a lucrative career choice.
A few years back, my IT career, aided by the mortgage crisis, helped me achieve the impossible: we bought a house in Silicon Valley! Our one-car garage is just about perfect for anything but parking. I enjoyed puttering on small weekend projects, but soon we had first one kid and then two, and with that, no more free time for extended puttering.
My ambition has still been to have a little workshop where I could build some things. I found a local woodshop that offered classes. I got to build a spice rack. Then their rent went up, and the workshop closed. The classes moved to a local community college, whose administrative procedures leave much to be desired.
Besides, what I really wanted was to get set up at home. For the years of early parenthood, I lacked the time and energy, and often, the budget. The bootstrap from a messy garage to a functional workshop is daunting. After the kids are in bed, sit back in the rocking chair, and flip around YouTube videos.
YouTube served me up some woodworking videos. There’s a lot of dudes out there making things with resin. Whatever. Then Steve Ramsey came along, explaining all the bits and pieces of basic woodworking. Along the way, he gently hawks his online courses. You know, if his regular YouTube videos are so informative and engaging, maybe the $150, what you might expect to pay for a weekend workshop or two at the local shop, might be worth a shot.
With my COVID haircut, flannel shirt, and eyeglasses fit over safety glasses, I am ready to rock the shop!
I am now about 2/3 of the way through the first day of building what Ramsey calls the BMW: Basic Mobile Workbench. The online course is nicely laid out, including diagrams, materials, how-to videos, and cross-references to skills. On my first day, I made a trip to Home Depot for supplies, but the actual work got hijacked by a busted kitchen faucet. Priorities! I spent time poring through the miter saw manual. Anything that can chop fingers off is worthy of a solid understanding.
A week later, today, I made another trip to Home Depot. Having reviewed the materials again during the week, I figured I could use clamps, squares, and, most critically, an extension cord. I carefully unpacked and assembled the miter saw, made myself comfortable with its operation, and got to work trimming 2x4s.
Bootstrapping a workbench: miter saw on a folding table in the driveway.
To build the legs, Steve glues two 2x4s together, then clamps them steady and secures them with screws. Things got frustrating when I tried to screw the 2x4s together. The screw wouldn’t go all the way in. Okay, I can drill a pilot hole. The drill bit got wedged in the wood. I worked it out with my vise grips.
The humble vise grip is an indispensable tool!
Google led me to a link that explained that one needs to tighten all the holes with the chuck to really secure the bit. That helped. Another video had a guy explain that in addition to a pilot hole, you want to drill a slightly larger hole through the top piece of wood. Experience proved this out. So, to drill a leg would require multiple bit changes. I was tempted to run to Home Depot for nicer tools, but it was getting dark. Fortunately, I had enough clamps that, after I struggled through the first leg, I could do the next three legs in a batch. I only had to swap bits three times for the batch instead of for each leg.
Ramsey touches on most of this information in his course material. He shows how he uses some fancy star-bit screws and links to a video that explains how to screw things and what a wonderful thing an impact driver is. I thought maybe his materials could be more explicit: “you should really consider an impact driver, and these cool star bit screws.” However, I appreciate that all the information isn’t served to me on a silver platter. An important part of building things is overcoming challenges along the way. And in an age where many basic problems are quickly solved by asking a smartphone, working through an efficient process to get the legs drilled “the hard way” was very rewarding.
What one lacks in fancy tools, one can make up for with a degree of cleverness.
The Silver Platter was a concern I had with learning basics at a professional woodshop. “Here kid, take this fancy wood we got you and run it through the planar like so before we get to the nice Saw Stop table saw. We’ll make sure you folks get to use the drill press, too!” That is a nice way to put your toe in the water and taste the possibilities, but I am not going to have all of these things in my little garage, so … Steve’s course has the first few projects relying on the miter saw. At the end of the day, the online course puts more responsibility on me as a student. It is more daunting than an off-site shop class, but it teaches me more of what I really need and want to know.
Since I am a Tall Dude, I made my legs longer than in Steve’s plans. I started with 44″, but after squaring off the leg ends, I had to settle for 43 1/2″. This means I need to pick up one more 2×4 to finish off the frame. While I am at the store, that might be a good time to pick up an impact driver, possibly even some fancy star screws.
The garage is a mess, but the BMW project is stacked nicely for the next work session.
As I said, it was getting dark, and my better half had dinner cooking. I couldn’t finish the “Day One” process of screwing the frame of the workbench together, and it will probably be another week before I can pick this up again. I stashed everything neatly away, and I am looking forward to finishing off my first project … before the year is done, for sure!
In my career as a Boy Scout, I could have died at least twice, that I know of.
One time in the Boundary Waters, I got a tent that required stakes and guys, but we were effectively camping on ROCKS with a little bit of moss. So, I rolled a few boulders into the right spot to anchor the lines.
This was during the summer AFTER the worst of mosquito season.
I took a canoe out to paddle for fun one afternoon in this little lake but started to get sucked toward a waterfall. Luckily, there was someone nearby to toss a rope and haul me to shore.
Another time in Michigan, I stepped out of a canoe near a landing, and turned out it was deep water that was sucking me DOWN except for my life vest was secure and buoyant. Scoutmaster was near to haul me out of the water.
Honeymooning in Hawaii, I waded out on a beach to ride the waves to shore in shallow water, as I had often enjoyed in Lake Michigan. The surf picked me up, rolled me, and slammed me hard, skull into the sand. Coulda cracked my neck. I took it as a hint from the local deities that this continental tourist should stay onshore, as is my place in the world.
The first thought was we should disband the standing Army. We don’t need one. A Navy, airpower, some Marines and special forces? Sure. We have a National Guard to respond to domestic emergencies. We probably want to maintain and modernize equipment in case we need a war. States can form militias if they like. We can find a lot of Americans who are fond of guns on short notice. If you want to carry a firearm, you get government training, and you’re eligible for the draft.
“Standing armies are dangerous to liberty.†–Alexander Hamilton
You can’t do it all at once. Closing bases and shutting off defense contractors retards economic activity. Twenty years. Spread money around impacted communities.
But what should the government be doing?
Defense wise, we need to focus on Information Security, and, for the main part, climate change and emergency preparedness. The enemy will not land on our shores and defeat us with missiles. They’ll hack our elections and take our power grid hostage. Between the threat of information warfare and climate change, we need resilient logistics. If all the computers crash tomorrow, can we get food between communities? Where does our military-industrial complex go? Logistics.
Rural communities ought to be able to assemble and maintain their own damn tractors and combine harvesters. Right now John Deere tells farmers they can’t fix their own equipment. The government could sponsor Open Source farm equipment and software. Every county ought to be able to assemble, maintain, and carry out most repairs on its farm equipment. Every region ought to have the capacity to build tractors and vehicles, end-to-end.
The US Army is not going to save the world from the threats it faces in this century. American leadership in finding ways to restore the atmosphere to health, while modeling how we can build resilient local communities is what needs to happen.
The president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.
—New York Times
Mr. Jean’s brother took the stand to address Ms. Guyger, he offered only forgiveness.
“I wasn’t going to ever say this in front of my family or anyone, but I don’t even want you to go to jail,†said his brother, Brandt Jean. “I want the best for you.â€
When he finished, he turned to the judge: “I don’t know if this is possible, but can I give her a hug, please?â€
When the judge agreed, Ms. Guyger stood up, walked toward Mr. Jean’s brother and threw her arms around him. As the two embraced, sobs filled the courtroom.
—New York Times
I want your best name for ADUs! Anything and everything would be appreciated!!!
A homelet is a smaller home that lives alongside your single family home. The homelet can house your family, or if you have a homelet to let, the rental income can help support your family.
Does your town have homeless? Consider building homelets!
On a chilly morning, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a fresh omelet fried on the stove in the modest kitchen of your homelet.
Single-Family Rental Bonds
Corporations bought up cheap houses during the Great recession, and rent them to families. “These large companies frequently charge higher rents and are more likely to evict tenants.”
But wait, there’s more:
These homes are not just properties that are rented out to house families; they have been transformed into a new class of financial asset and investment vehicle. According to the NBER study, the homes have been capitalized into single-family rental bonds, which has grown into a $15 billion-plus market.
—Richard Florida, CityLab
You can buy shares in being an oppressive landlord.
I wonder if anyone has the right soul to be a cop. It is a hard hard job and I assume every cop is going to come up short to some degree. Some cops are better and some cops are worse. I try to respect these folks doing their hard work, and I want the failing cops off the streets.
The [Asian Art Museum] show’s lead curators and education staffers I’d met—all but one of whom were white …
. . .
[The founder of the Asian Art Museum] was “the preeminent American apologist for Nazi Germany,†in the words of author Jeremy Schaap.
. . .
Just a few years ago, the British Museum’s Twitter account revealed as much when it shared how it decides to label artwork, tweeting: “We aim to be understandable by 16 year olds. Sometimes Asian names can be confusing, so we have to be careful about using too many.†(Dang, sorry to all those 16-year-old Asian kids with funny names.)
. . .
At one point, a draft of the marketing material [for #WhitePeopleDoingYoga] referred to my work as an “amusing†and “lighthearted†collection.
. . .
One of the museum’s staff members, who was white, came to my defense in that boardroom. He exposed the museum’s hypocrisy by holding up its own branded tote bag that bore only the word “Asian†on it, and as I remember it he said, “I’m a white man walking around San Francisco with this bag that just says ‘Asian’ on it, without ‘museum,’ and it’s completely ‘out of context.’ Why is our bag okay but Chiraag’s is not?†The marketing chief’s response: “Well, that’s our brand, so it’s okay.â€
. . .
The opening parties featured Indian classical music performed by white people, acro-yoga performed by white people, a chanting group mostly compromising white people, and a white couple from Marin teaching yoga for an hour. There was a sprinkle of Brown acts, but the headliner—wait for it—was a white rapper named MC Yogi, who spit about yoga and Indian culture over a beat dropped by DJ Drez, a white DJ with dreads. (Reminder: the largest institution of Asian art in the United States.)
. . .
After more than a month of fine-tuning our plans, the curator said there was one last “hurdle†to clear before approval: The Cleveland museum planned to invite the city’s commercial yoga studios to teach classes and had to make sure the studios felt comfortable in the same space as an installation titled #WhitePeopleDoingYoga.
Not that anyone is going to ask me, and, why should they, anyway? But if anyone asks: white people, we have got to step it up. And sometimes that means shutting up and stepping aside.
My mom fainted the first time she set foot in an American supermarket. I stood transfixed in the cereal aisle. After six long years on Earth, here was a place that understood me. These were cartoon characters, made of pure sugar, that you could eat as a meal. Every box had a toy inside. How could I possibly choose just one?
I ask forgiveness of Hong Kongers if at times I am still that six year old kid, dazzled by what to you is ordinary. You live in a kind of city we Americans can only aspire to, and it’s no wonder you love your home so much you will take any risk to save it.
—Maciej Ceglowski
A man driving a dump truck the size of a house put my son’s life in danger.
The details of what happened unfortunately aren’t that remarkable. It was a perfect storm of road rage, reckless driving, terrible street design, and total lack of any kind of recourse, so basically a normal Tuesday on a bicycle in DC.
The dump truck driver drove aggressively and blasted his airhorn over many blocks on R Street NW. He was just feet from a half dozen other people on bikes who could do nothing but cringe and hope he didn’t mash us into pulp.
Oliver was terrified, asking me if we can ride on the sidewalk, asking me if we can stop, almost in tears.
After we turned up 18th Street and jumped the light at S Street to get away from this reckless man, Oliver turned and asked, “Can we take the Metro instead?†And that was it. I decided I can’t subject my son to this traffic violence anymore.
The most infuriating thing about this particular incident and many others is that this is how it’s supposed to work. R Street is supposed to be shared by cement trucks, tractor trailers, monster SUVs, dump trucks, and squishy fleshbags on two wheels.
They call it an unprotected bike lane, but in practice, it’s a little bit of extra space that people on bicycles can use as long as no motor vehicles are using it. It’s a design that squeezes us into sharing a narrow road with literal dump trucks.
—Peter Krupa
No protests were authorised in China, the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but Zheng Xiaowen of the China Youth Climate Action Network said Chinese youth would take action one way or another.
“Chinese youth have their own methods,” she said.
—Al Jazeera
On Children Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children are living arrows sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
–Bob Dylan
I took Tommy down to the San Jose Climate Strike on Friday. He enjoyed reading the various signs and trying to make sense of everything. When we got to City Hall, he quickly lost interest, and after a pee break and some ice cream, we headed home.
I’ve been to a lot of protests that blocked a lot of street traffic. The Climate Strike is the first time I recall any motorists Freaking The Hell Out. We were near the head of the march and cars had to sit through a light at a four-lane off-ramp. (Because the South Bay is the kind of place with four-lane off-ramps…) A dude slammed on his horn, we all raised our fists in solidarity, then he jumped out of his car and came running, maybe four car lengths down to the crosswalk, and started arguing with people.
I didn’t stick around for details, as I was with a six-year-old who wanted to read signs further up.
I was thinking. Don’t Go to War? Don’t Hate Gays? Most protests I have been to haven’t asked much of the public. Climate Change is a different beast: if we’re going to make it work, we’re all going to have to make adjustments to bring our energy use into a sustainable place. Some folks find this threatening. But does it have to be threatening?
It does have to feel threatening, not out of necessity for stopping climate change but in order to avoid making systemic changes. We need to make big changes at the level of national policy and international treaty. If you find that threatening, then you need to shift the discussion to the tragic impractical sacrifices the climate extremists are asking of you. Greta Thunberg is looking down on you sternly, in your internal combustion car, getting off the freeway. These youngsters waving signs about saving the Earth are Your Enemy.
The way I describe it: we need to change our policies so that people can live closer to work, and to give them the option to walk or bike or take transit. Sure, we need to electrify our buildings and raise energy prices to discourage careless consumption. When Greta gives us a stern disapproving look she isn’t getting on Your case about Your sloppy recycling habits, her stare is fixed at Donald Trump, and the myriad other world leaders who want to keep strip-mining the planet to burn the carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere, who want to keep you buying cars and driving on wider and wider roads and highways to get anywhere because that is where the money is at. She’s looking down on shitty land-use policies that perpetuate wealth inequality.
We have to do our parts. For regular folks, it is merely a question of trying to live better. The heated rhetoric is for the Powers That Be that Profit from The Status Quo who are willing to fight stern-faced teenage girls in the name of the Almighty American Dollar.
Save your ire for the protestors, Off-ramp Dude. It ain’t about You. It is about all of Us, and especially the High and Mighty, who will need to surrender some Power and Convenience for the sake of our Children.
Last night, the Mountain View City Council enacted an RV ban.
Unanimously.
If I were a Mountain View resident I would make a mental note to "toss all the bums out" at the next election. https://t.co/KM8gdN96OY
For what it is worth, as a bicycle commuter, RVs are not a problem, as long as they aren’t obstructing the bike lane or sight lines, which they rarely are.
… millions of decision variables that affect any solution, including varying road widths, differing bus infrastructures (for example, the presence of wheelchair lifts or child safety restraint seats), students who require the same bus driver every year, students who have monitors, and students who have been in fights and, therefore, need to be on different buses … Emma Coleman
The Anthropocene Is a Joke
There’s an idea kicking around that humanity has created its own geological era, characterized mainly by the rapid change in the atmosphere’s CO2. I like this idea, primarily because it emphasizes the degree of change that is happening, and quick change on a geologic scale is dangerous. The shift we are undergoing now rivals the meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs. I am simultaneously hopeful and skeptical that we will survive.
Yes, the rapid change in atmospheric Carbon is a Big Deal, but on a geological time scale, it is at best an “event” that may one day puzzle some intelligent species. It certainly isn’t a new “era,” and in the grand scheme of geological time, we don’t register and if we were to go extinct in the next few millennia, we would disappear without a trace.
If one wanted to know what a particular 10-, 100-, or 1,000-year span was like, buried in this vastness of time (or, even worse, in some particular region of the continent), good luck.
This astounding paucity can be explained by the fact that there just aren’t that many rocks that survived these extreme gulfs of time, over this vast province. And even among those rocks that did survive, and which are exposed today, the conditions for fossil preservation were rare beyond measure. Each fossil was its own miracle, sampled randomly from almost 200 million years of history—a few stray, windblown pages of a library.
If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory six-mile space rock hurtling senselessly toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell. All we do know is that an asteroid did hit and that the fossils in the millions of years afterward look very different than in the millions of years prior.
The Promethean fire unleashed by the Manhattan Project was an earth-changing invention, its strange fallout destined to endure in some form as an unmistakable geological marker of the Anthropocene. But the longest-lived radioisotope from radioactive fallout, iodine-129, has a half-life of less than 16 million years. If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it.
Plastic, that ubiquitous pollutant of the oceans, might be detectable by analyzing small samples of sediment—appearing, like many organic biomarkers in the fossil record, as a rumor of strangely heavy hydrocarbons. Unassuming peaks on a chromatograph would stand in for all of modernity. Perhaps, perhaps, if one was extremely lucky in surveying this strange layer, across miles of desert-canyon walls, a lone, carbonized, and unrecognizable piece of fishing equipment may sit perplexingly embedded in this dark line in the cliffs.
Dinosaurs in space. All that has passed has passed. If humanity is doomed, or if humanity has a bright future ahead, this will happen. I have a tiny vote in my tiny lifetime, and I vote that my species adapt to the challenges of its time. I want us to survive and thrive, and reach out into space and find the rest of the life that I hope is abundant in the Universe beyond our local star. The final tally of this poll will be smeared into a layer of ash, eroded by wind and rain and crushed by rocks and wholly forgotten in time.
Asked whether the person who is believed to have opened their door into the cyclist’s path had been charged, a police spokesperson responded: “It’s not a crime to open your car door.” Per section 1214 of the vehicle and traffic law, it’s illegal for motorists to illegally open their doors into moving traffic. The spokesperson later clarified they were “joking around.” Jake Offenhartz
If you’re wondering how I could leave Google after nearly 10 years, here’s this article. Claire Stapleton sent out e-mail every week about the all-hands meeting, and they were erudite and funny and creative and deeply weird. She was a valuable and important part of the old Google, the place I loved to work and would not shut up about. And because management went into the hands of a Wharton MBA, who hobnobs with fellow alums Ivanka and Donny Jr., whose spreadsheets about profitability don’t have any columns for ethics or culture or values…Google is now HP. The company that used to be a great place to work.
"Uber created a traffic jam, then filled up all the parking. The Museum of Science and Industry was filled to capacity, and children were sent away in tears."
Schneider notes that in Chicago, where 80% of the city is off-limits to multifamily housing, downzoning has been heavily concentrated in white, wealthy neighborhoods. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York’s zoning changes have followed a similar pattern: Poorer neighborhoods get upzoned, allowing for more development, and wealthier ones get downzoned. That means people who are already relatively advantaged have been legally absolved of their responsibility to share their neighborhood’s resources. In DC, Lanier Heights residents organized to ban more housing in their neighborhood by asking the city to downzone it in 2016.
One-size-fits-all solutions are often knocked as ignorant of the concerns of local communities. But localities have a stronger track record of keeping people out—often via zoning—than building enough homes for the people who live there or want to live there. Recent maps from DC’s Office of Planning show how the city’s neighborhoods that are disproportionately zoned single-family are also the neighborhoods that have seen the least amount of new housing.
Plus, as Chicago and New York show, twiddling only particular knobs in certain places says that development is OK in some places (typically disadvantaged neighborhoods) and off-limits in others (typically wealthy ones). Spot or selective upzoning isn’t equitable and won’t make housing more affordable.
A one-size-fits-all upzoning increasingly looks, at this point in time, like a necessary reset button that we will have to push if we are serious about both affordability and climate.
In January, Warren announced what may be the defining idea of her campaign thus far: a proposed wealth tax of two percent on the assets above fifty million dollars of the seventy-five thousand richest families in the country. (There’s a surcharge for billionaires.) She calls this the Ultra-Millionaire Tax, and, during campaign events, she jokes about it in ways that most candidates wouldn’t, for fear of being accused of fomenting a class war. At an event in Salem, New Hampshire, she pointed out that most middle-income voters are already paying a form of wealth tax, through property taxes. “All I want to do that’s different is include the Rembrandt and the diamonds!†she said. A man called out from the audience, “And the yacht!†Warren replied, “And the yacht with the Imax theatre!â€
To illustrate how the tax would work, Warren describes a schoolteacher who has no savings and an “heir†who has five hundred million dollars in “yachts, jewelry, and fine art.†If both of them made a fifty-thousand-dollar salary, they would pay the same amount in federal income taxes. Raising income-tax rates would do nothing to fix this disparity, Warren says, and the very wealthy have numerous tax-sheltering strategies to protect them anyway. Based on estimates by two economic advisers, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, of U.C. Berkeley, Warren’s wealth tax would generate $2.75 trillion in revenue over ten years by having the I.R.S., in the words of her plan, chase down “all household assets held anywhere in the world,†including “residences, closely held businesses, assets held in trust, retirement assets, assets held by minor children, and personal property with a value of $50,000 or more.†Warren proposes using the money to fund universal childcare and pre-kindergarten, to forgive student-loan debt, and to finance infrastructure projects. She frequently says that, even after these initiatives are paid for, she’ll have two trillion dollars left over.
In polls, a majority of voters have expressed support for the wealth tax, including half of Republicans. At events, the idea reliably draws cheers from the audience. “Listen, you got a chance to build a great fortune, and good for you—or inherit a great fortune, O.K., it’s O.K. You got a chance to do that. Good for you,†Warren said in Dubuque. “But, remember, you built that fortune in America, where the rest of us helped pay for the education of all your employees, where the rest of us helped pay for the roads and the bridges so you could get your goods to market, where the rest of us helped pay for the police and the firefighters who were there to keep you safe. We were all glad to pay. We understand that’s how America works. But, when you build one of those great fortunes, just take a little and pitch it back in the kitty . . . so every kid gets a chance in this country.â€
Unsurprisingly, the demographic least thrilled with the idea of a wealth tax is the one that would have to pay it. Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks C.E.O., who is contemplating a Presidential run, called the proposal “ridiculous†and accused Warren of cynically using a sensational idea to generate headlines. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York City mayor, suggested that taxing wealth, as opposed to income, could violate the Constitution.
Question 6 makes me feel cheap. “Walk/Bike” like these are the same marginal thing? I spent a bunch of money to get a family bike with e-assist, so that I can drop off my young children and make the 20 mile round trip commute through your district every day. A lot more people would bike, especially thanks to e-bikes, which extend range, but riding on our roads, with no protection, is terrifying.
For a very modest investment, we could build a network of protected bicycle paths, which would allow residents to ditch their cars, substantially drop their CO2 emissions, and enjoy better health. For those who keep driving, the roads will be less congested. It is a win-win for a very light investment.
The greatest thing that is needed is some imagination on the part of our public leaders.
I am not a spandex-clad bike jockey. I am just a father who feels pain at handing my boys a car-dependent suburbia in the face of climate catastrophe, and I want to help them enjoy a better future. Please, Assembly Member Berman, champion the cause of allowing regular folks, young and old and in between, enjoy the possibility of getting around on two wheels and no tailpipe.
Thanks, -danny
Yesterday I was touched by a NextDoor post, entitled “Speedy man, killed all baby animal!” A woman stopped her car for a Mama Duck crossing the street with her babies. She took a short video, which, fortunately, did not capture what happened next. A man drove through at high speed and killed the babies. The woman cried, and shared her story on NextDoor. The man is universally condemned among the comments left by the neighbors. And of course, the next day, I learn of yet another road atrocity.
Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a man hit a kid on a bicycle, backed up, ran over him again, gave the kid a chance to climb out from under the truck, then drove off with the bicycle still stuck under the truck.
We live our lives in boxes: houses, offices, cars, smartphones, TVs … technologies that are supposed to make the world smaller and more connected, but too often we find ourselves disconnected from each other, and isolated. Some of us “act out” our rage …
I feel like cars are helping to make us lonely rage monsters and that it is great to make an effort to get away from the box, and walk or bike or take transit whenever that is a good option. I try to cast my lot with Mama Ducks and bicycle kids.
What happened here is horrible and yet it happens every day. I am glad many of us stopped to take note and commiserate with Veronica. I hope we can all try to be a little kinder.
Warren is bursting with what we might call “charisma†in male candidates: She has the folksy demeanor of Joe Biden, the ferocious conviction of Bernie Sanders, the deep intelligence of fellow law professor Barack Obama. But Warren is not a man, and so those traits are framed as liabilities, rather than strengths.
It’s significant that the “I hate you; please respond†line of political sabotage only ever seems to be aimed at women. It’s also revealing that, when all these men talked about how Warren could win them over, their “campaign†advice sounded suspiciously close to makeover tips. In his article, Payne advised Warren to “lose the granny glasses,†“soften the hair,†and employ a professional voice coach to “deepen her voice, which grates on some.â€
Warren really is an intellectual, a scholar; moreover, she really is running an exceptionally ideas-focused campaign, regularly turning out detailed and exhaustive policy proposals at a point when most of the other candidates don’t even have policy sections on their websites. What’s galling is the suggestion that this is a bad thing.
The “schoolmarm†stereotype now applied to Warren has always been used to demean educated women. In the Victorian era, we called them “bluestockingsâ€â€Šâ€” unmarried, unattractive women who had dared to prioritize intellectual development over finding a man. Educators say that 21st-century girls are still afraid to talk in class because of “sexist bullying†which sends the message that smart girls are unfeminine. Female academics still report being made to feel “unsexual, unattractive, unwomanly, and unnatural.†We can deplore all this as antiquated thinking, but even now, grown men are still demanding that Warren ditch her glasses or “soften†her hair — to work on being prettier so as to make her intelligence less threatening.
Warren is accused, in plain language, of being uppity — a woman who has the bad grace to be smarter than the men around her, without downplaying it to assuage their egos. But running in a presidential race is all about proving that you are smarter than the other guy. By demanding that Warren disguise her exceptional talents, we are asking her to lose. Thankfully, she’s not listening. She is a smart woman, after all.
On average, cars left 10 inches (29 cm) less room when cyclists were using painted cycle lanes, 12 inches (30cm) less room when there were rows of parked cars along the curbs, and 15.7 inches (40cm) less room when a road had both parked cars along the curb, then a painted cycle lane. (In other words, cars left cyclists the most room on stretches of road with no painted cycle lanes and no parked cars.)
“We know that vehicles driving closely to cyclists increases how unsafe people feel when riding bikes and acts as a strong barrier to increasing cycling participation. Our results demonstrate that a single stripe of white paint does not provide a safe space for people who ride bikes,” said Dr. Ben Beck, lead author of the study.
Over time, my husband and I started to suspect that Sam’s musings on doxxing and other dark arts might not be theoretical. One weekend morning as we were folding laundry in our room, Sam sat on the edge of our bed and instructed us on how to behave if the FBI ever appeared at our door.
Mr. Smart Phone sized me up — an elderly, decently-tailored gentleman with a walking cane — and thought I would immediately be on his side. He walked towards me and started to complain about how the gray-haired man and his hippie van were parked overnight on the street.
“Okay,†I said, “but why are you surveilling him?†It was a loaded question for Mr. Smart Phone. He knew “surveillance†was still not totally cool in San Francisco. As he was continuing towards me, his jaw hardened and his eyes grew cold. He said nothing. So I asked him another question, even though I knew it would be even more provocative. Like I said — I’m an idiot. We live in times when even the most everyday altercations can turn deadly. But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
“I’m curious — I’ve lived in this neighborhood for a long time and I don’t recognize you,†I said. “How long have YOU lived here?†Since he was applying residency standards to the man in the hippie van, I thought it was a legitimate question. But Mr. Smart Phone didn’t. “Fuck you!†he exploded, just a few feet from my face. Here I was trying to calm things down and they were quickly spiraling out of control.
Just then a neighbor whom I’ll call Maria, whose fluffy little dog often plays with Brando, came to the rescue. “Why are you bothering people with your phone?†she bravely asked the menacing man. “We don’t like that sort of thing in our neighborhood.†And with that show of neighborhood solidarity — that clear expression that Mr. Smart Phone was violating our more tolerant community standards — he sheepishly backed down and walked away.
The hippie van-owner then hurried over to Maria and me and thanked us profusely for our intervention. “This gives me hope about our city,†he said. “You can’t treat people the way this dude was treating me — like I don’t belong here — like I don’t have a right to exist. I’ve lived in San Francisco for 35 years. I was a social worker, but I lost my home. I’m only going to park here for a couple more days, then I’m leaving the city.â€
The spate of milkshake attacks in the United Kingdom follow on from the story of Australia’s “Egg Boy,” a swoopy-haired teenager who cracked an egg on the back of far-right lawmaker Fraser Anning’s head at a news conference in March. Following the attack, Egg Boy was punched in the face by the senator, as security officials scrambled to control the situation.
Last month, political eggings continued in Australia. Prime Minister Scoo Morrison was hit on the head with an egg – although on this occasion it failed to crack.
In Britain, it is believed that milkshakes have become the preferred weapon of choice as attackers sipping shakes appear far more inconspicuous than bystanders clutching eggs.
The trackball was invented 11 years before the mouse, in 1952. It was invented by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff as part of a computerized battlefield information system called DATAR, initiated by the Canadian Navy. It used a standard five-pin bowling ball as its trackball, which is smaller than the more common 10-pin bowling ball.
"We need someone like Joe Biden, who’s a shining example of electability, and who has only lost two presidential elections before this one. Or even Beto O’Rourke, a person who can really unite people of all shades of white."
“And then there is the ever annoying parking in the cycle lane.”
AT LAST! A bit of Dutch infrastructure that sucks in a way that an American can relate to!
I love watching these vehicles but it also makes me frustrated that the most cutting edge American bicycle infrastructure is already obsolete in the Netherlands. :)
In late 2014, Lieutenant Graves said he was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.â€
He said he was stunned to hear the pilot’s words. “I almost hit one of those things,†the pilot told Lieutenant Graves.
The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit. It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.
The near miss, he and other pilots interviewed said, angered the squadron, and convinced them that the objects were not part of a classified drone program. Government officials would know fighter pilots were training in the area, they reasoned, and would not send drones to get in the way.
“We have helicopters that can hover,†Lieutenant Graves said. “We have aircraft that can fly at 30,000 feet and right at the surface.†But “combine all that in one vehicle of some type with no jet engine, no exhaust plume.â€
Lieutenant Accoin said only that “we’re here to do a job, with excellence, not make up myths.â€
The ambulance arrived, and the paramedics started treating the bleeding man for shock. A police officer took my statement, and the knife. I washed my hands at some point. Then my date and I got in a Lyft to the Palace Hotel.
We walked into a scene reminiscent of Versailles. A pair of models in red gowns stood in banded hoops from which one could pluck a champagne flute. There was food, dessert, wine, music. Dancing pandas. Live bands. A silent disco. Women in gowns, men in suits and tuxedos. A casino, with the buy-in going to a local charity. The night glittered. This time next year, I whispered, our heads will all be in baskets.
In many ways, the train crews practice railroading as it was done a century ago, from assembling the train in the yard and coupling one car to another, to climbing down to the tracks to maneuver heavy hand switches. As they lumber along through the dense urban landscape, passing highways, parks, cemeteries and shopping centers, the freight trains draw curious stares.
“The surprise on people’s faces when we go through their L.I.R.R. station — they’ve never seen anything like it,†said Alex Raia, a 50-year-old engineer, as he worked the throttle and brake on a 2,000-horsepower diesel locomotive to thread it between tight rows of sooty freight cars in the Glendale yard. He likened the task to “playing a game of chess every day.â€
The railway also handles so many cars of flour and beer that Mr. Bonner has nicknamed it “the pizza-and-beer railroad.â€
During peak beer drinking times — think St. Patrick’s Day and the Super Bowl — that can mean 30 rail cars of beer a week — each car can hold 3,500 cases — including Modelo Especial and Corona that has rumbled by train all the way from Mexico.
I would prefer if I could take a bus to work, because then I would have a great swatch of time for reading. I have instead, on the bicycle, been listening to podcasts, which is sometimes difficult amid heavy traffic, but whatever.
On 99% Invisible, I was digging on the story of Froebel’s Gifts. Froebel pioneered the idea of kindergarten in the 19th century. Along the way, he developed the first educational toys. Starting with a soft ball of yarn at 6 weeks old, and progressing to more and more interesting objects, along with an educational curriculum where the objects could help teach a kid important concepts of how the world works. Before Froebel’s gift, kids basically played with whatever leftovers the adults had: the carpenter’s kid played with scrap wood, for example. When the idea was brought to America, our Capitalists seized upon this idea that parents and schools might be willing to pay money for objects that children would play with. Froebel gifts are cool and all, but how about an endless buffet of TOYS!?
Anyway, they claimed that early 20th-century design was influenced by Froebel, as Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Le Corbusier each learned important geometric concepts in Kindergarten. Fuller conceived of the buckyball in kindergarten and Wright kept a set of blocks on his desk to inform his creativity.
The fact that I most dug is that around the time kindergartens were taking off, the very first playgrounds were created. And the very first playground was a “sand garden” where they got a huge pile of sand and dumped it in a vacant lot for the kids to play with over the summer. Over time, the “sand garden” became a smaller component in playgrounds which featured other things like swings and slides. Today the giant pile of sand is maybe a sandbox. When Tommy was a baby, there was a sandbox down at Murphy Park. I found it a nice place to lie down as I was often sleepy back then. They took the sandbox out when they fixed up the park. We have come so far … but, I feel that in one respect, Max has been cheated.
On Monday the Planning Commission recommended redevelopment of the old AMD HQ into 1,051 luxury units. A fellow asked me if it would help the working class. I explained that the folks who can afford the new units won't be competing with workers for more modest accommodations. https://t.co/z4iKpzEJ9Y
The last election seemed to go “choose between the politics of the late 90s, where we are super careful not to take any positions based on strong principles, just middle of the road stuff that doesn’t offend or inspire anyone, or vote for the guy who will tell you whatever you want to hear, lie to you with a straight face, while he grabs your pussy.”
Why did that second guy do far better than anyone believes he deserved? Because he speaks “straight” to the concerns of a lot of Americans and he doesn’t give a fudge whether his solutions offend your delicate moderate middle of the road do nothing sensibilities.
Now we have Warren and Bernie and AOC and dozens upon dozens of other Democrats who have taken the clue that the electorate is hungry, not for some kindly sooth-saying grandparent, but for someone who is willing to speak up for their beliefs, even if they make some folks feel uncomfortable.
I voted for Clinton. Both of them. But even in the 90s, I yearned to vote not for some warmed-over middle-of-the-road do-nothing compromise, but for leadership that spoke to and acted from convictions. Uncle Joe used to appeal in those days, but now he’s the warmed-over establishment.
I’ll vote for him in the general, if that is what we got, but Trump is good at beating up on the establishment, and I think we’d do better to ride with someone who isn’t afraid to speak truth to power, to have a point of view that doesn’t focus test well with every last median-income household in Nebraska, someone who has plans to make up for all the time America has lost bending over backward to accommodate the right wing.
Remember Obamacare? That’s Romneycare. The uninspiring mush of consensus. It is adequate for liberals and hated by conservatives. Well, you know what? Screw those ungrateful jerks. If we’re going to have a system of universal healthcare that offends them, we might as well have at the very least a Public Option. (For example.)
I’m tired of compromise. Tired or compromise with right-wing extremists. And when it comes to the collapse of our planet’s climate stability, there’s no room for compromise and consensus anyway. We are decades behind on preventing a disaster that is beginning to truly unfold upon every last man, woman, and child on the planet and we have to stop Appealing to the Middle for the Politics of the Possible and engage instead in Policies of Necessity to make our planet and our country better for everyone.
The registered owner of the 2010 Toyota Corolla is Isaiah Peoples of Sunnyvale. Law enforcement sources confirmed Wednesday that Peoples, 34, was still in police custody.
An extensive thread regarding a tragic incident in Sunnyvale on April 23: 8 folks were deliberately hit by a car driven by an Iraq war vet, who is allegedly suffering from PTSD, and was allegedly targeting the victims because he thought they were Muslim.
Warren explaining the wealth tax: "How many people here own a home?" Most hands go up. "You’ve been paying a wealth tax for years. They just call it a property tax. I just want their tax to include the diamonds, the yachts, and the Rembrandts."
The thalidomide tragedy was averted in the United States because Dr. Kelsey, alone and in the face of fierce opposition, did her job. Her perspective was educated, fresh and unique. If there had been no thalidomide crisis, the United States, with the rest of the world following, would still at some time have brought pharmaceutical regulation into the 20th century. But thalidomide created one of those moments when something had to be done. It could not be ignored in 1961-62, and it led immediately to a better and stronger regulatory system. Maybe someone else would have stopped thalidomide in the United States had Dr. Kelsey not been assigned the NDA, but, interestingly, no one else stopped it anywhere else until it was too late. Dr. Kelsey was the only person in the entire world who said no. She said no to a bad drug application, she said no to an overbearing pharmaceutical company and she said no to vested interests who put profits first. She was one brave dissenter. In the end, the question is not what made Frances Kelsey, but why aren’t there more like her?
I don’t know what to do to help. There’s an informal memorial at the corner. You could leave some flowers there. A family member passing by will have another sign of love.
I think that driving with a bit of love, as posted above, is good advice. As a bicycle commuter who carries kids on a bike in mixed traffic, seeing the pictures of twisted bicycles and backpacks in an intersection I travel often was really disturbing. We need better bicycle infrastructure in Sunnyvale so that people can get around safely. Until then, when you’re behind the wheel of a car please do take a moment to appreciate the folks around you. Slow down and in a moment of frustration try to take a deep breath and count your blessings.
The girl in the coma, and all the victims, and I think even the perpetrator are all carrying different kinds of wounds. Please share your prayers and compassion with them and also for everyone on the road.
-Danny
A note I posted on NextDoor
I am now sending @ewarren a few bucks a month. She's my favorite. Her web site barely mentions Climate Change but aside from that, she's been grinding away on progressive policies forever. She has a laundry list ready to go, and frankly, I just LIKE her.https://t.co/Xe48jwPLWb
The Earth’s climate is usually very erratic. Decades of drought, then decades of flood, for example. Humans have existed for a few hundred thousand years but only after the last Ice Age, when the planet hit an unusual period of climate stability, did humans manage to achieve agriculture and civilization.
I keep trying to rationalize an optimistic outcome, but as best I can read the situation, we are at a crucial point in history where humanity understands that we have an existential challenge that can be solved only through a spirit of shared sacrifice and cooperation. We know what adaptations we need to make to maintain these stable climate patterns, but so far we have not demonstrated a collective will to make these adaptations. The window of opportunity is shutting more and more rapidly. Mainly due to complacency, we’ll miss the opportunity, the climate will continue to deteriorate, agriculture will fail, and the long and delicate supply chains required to sustain technological civilization will fail. All in the next few decades.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe civilization will make it through the century. The last century was pretty dire, too, but we managed to avoid the worst outcomes. But my feeling is that civilization will collapse, in my lifetime, and that most of humanity will die, at first through war and tyrannical government but mostly of starvation. Humans, as a species, will survive. A few of the remaining hunter-gatherer tribes will adapt to the crisis. They will be joined by several new tribes peopled from refugees of our failing civilization.
Humanity will muddle through on a hostile planet amidst a mass extinction. Tens or hundreds of thousands of years will pass before the Earth enters a new stable phase. Agriculture and civilization will re-emerge, perhaps a bit faster due to whatever technological clues we leave behind, perhaps a bit slower and more sustainably, due to our having robbed them of the easiest fossil fuels. Perhaps there will even be a memory, perhaps uncovered through archaeology, and an understanding of The Fall of our First World Civilization. If we fail to survive this century, it is my hope that our distant descendants will avoid repeating our mistakes.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of years from now, our descendants will re-establish technological civilization, and they will find these well-preserved artifacts on the moon.
The video of Vasquez looking up from her phone in horror, realizing that Herzberg had just been hit while she looked away from the road, is a glimpse at the terrors that the future may hold. Until full autonomy is completely validated, human-in-the-loop automated driving will encourage us to take ever more liberties with our attention while failing to protect the next Elaine Herzbergs. This is a limited problem in the context of autonomous vehicle “safety drivers,” who are now increasingly well-trained and partnered up while testing, but it shows the problem that seems to be underlying the deaths of drivers using Tesla’s Autopilot. Now that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system appears likely to be released to some customers before it’s even validated, another company seems ready to put its own customers in the position of being untrained and unsupervised safety drivers.
Yes, Vasquez had a level of responsibility behind the wheel, but Uber also had a responsibility not to put a single individual in a highly automated car for 10 hours at a time with no supervision. Because full autonomy is taking longer to deliver than promised, the temptation to deliver nearly-full autonomy while telling drivers to maintain awareness will be hard to resist but Vazquez’s look of horror should be a reminder to everyone of the risks of such systems. It certainly makes the prospect of Tesla’s customer testing downright terrifying.
Why do AV testing in Phoenix? Because identifying pedestrians and cyclists, especially at night, is difficult for self-driving vehicles. In Phoenix, “not only is the weather consistently good, but there aren’t many pedestrians or cyclists on the road as there are in other cities.” The article then goes on to endorse the adoption of thermal image sensors.
By masking its bikes as TVs, VanMoof, a Dutch manufacturer that exports bikes to customers overseas, has seen the damages reduced by 70-80 per cent. Taco Carlier, the co-founder of VanMoof, told The Independent: “We came up by the idea because we had lots of damage, especially with shipments in the USA.”
For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons. Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.
Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the can be of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.
“They’re critical, and cost almost nothing for the airlines to install,†said Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the aviation consultancy Leeham. “Boeing charges for them because it can. But they’re vital for safety.â€
I can understand that new and advanced safety features, which may cost a lot of money to develop and install, might cost extra. But if you’re throwing in a computer that will read a sensor to take over control of the plane, it seems insane to charge extra to indicate when the sensor might be malfunctioning.
The conventional wisdom is that comfortable middle-class middle-aged people who have achieved a degree of financial security–people like me–should become more Republican at this point in their lives. I think this is reasonable, because after all if the system has worked well for you, then it must be a pretty decent system, and you’d like to maintain the status quo.
But I do not see that the system works. I made it through college, and after some trouble, I have found a career that pays well. California’s Real Estate market–the fact that I could never afford my own place–left me feeling disconnected from where I lived. This influenced a certain recklessness in my personal life. We only own a house through due to thrift, good luck, and the near collapse of the American economy a decade ago.
The system is broken and with the bombastic, militant, anti-government Right Wing, it feels like we are drifting ever further from solutions to increasingly urgent problems. Climate Change being the biggest of Big Deals, but we really should provide everyone with healthcare, basic welfare, access to education, and generally spend less effort on military might and more on working collaboratively with the rest of the world to improve the lot of humanity. If anything, in my comfortable years, I am growing more radical in my lefty sentiments.
Even if I wanted to maintain the status quo, the Republicans are no longer the party for that. The platform is to bankrupt the government through tax cuts and excessive military spending, in order to teach Americans the gospel that Government Isn’t The Solution. The only good Republican President I have known in my lifetime was President Clinton. He winnowed down government spending, especially military, to the point of a balanced budget. Then there was Welfare Reform, which is a thing Conservatives like. He didn’t start any (major) wars. (That I can remember.)
The status quo barely works for me just barely. And Climate Change is a growing burden that is going to hurt my kids far more than it already hurts my generation. The stable pattern that I value most is that the Earth will continue to provide for humanity. As a middle aged, middle class, uncomfortable person who supports the status quo, it is the radicals speaking out for good stewardship of Earth, and the radicals speaking out for the idea that people should be free from want and free from fear that most appeal to me.
