A few years ago I spent several months cutting and hauling brush. The hardest work I’ve ever done. I recently had a few big cedar trees dropped and limbed and decided to bring in some pros. This is how you adios brush piles. The guy driving the front-loader (?) could make it walk and talk. I think our job was their first of ten scheduled for the day. And it’s hot.
I won’t be doing a lot of this (driving across England) but I can see the appeal of this kind of adventure. Who knows, I might develop a taste for this.
I’m discovering a whole world I didn’t know existed.
In West Virginia, the people of McDowell County recently lost their biggest employer – the local Walmart store. The story is bleak.
For Dan Phillips, Walmart was a way of coping with bereavement after his wife died a few years ago. “If you were lonely and had nothing to do, you’d go to Walmart to talk to folk. It was a great social network. […] Now it’s hard to keep track of people, there’s no other place like it where you can stand and chat.”
“I went to Walmart for the walk,” she says. “I went early and I got a cart and I walked all over the store. I loved walking around it. I would walk and talk, talk and walk. I could walk the store all day.”
The photo below is the rebuilt engine in a 1974 Series 3. I’m not a “motor” kind of guy but I do appreciate clean and tidy and these photos make it clear the technicians working for Lucra Cars do as well. When I first started reading about frame-off restorations I knew that was what I was after. Old, but new. Better than new, in fact.
I’m eager to lean over the engine in my truck see the ground. It’s been a long time since I had a vehicle where that was possible.
Two of my last three primary care physicians considered (if only briefly) concierge medicine before retiring from clinical practice. I would have signed up with either of them. Wikipedia:
“Concierge medicine (also known as retainer medicine) is a relationship between a patient and a primary care physician in which the patient pays an annual fee or retainer. This may or may not be in addition to other charges. In exchange for the retainer, doctors provide enhanced care, including principally a commitment to limit patient loads to ensure adequate time and availability for each patient.”
The idea has resurfaced as I search for a mechanic to service the vintage Land Rover I hope to be driving later this year. I’ve found a garage that I think will be able to do routine service and maintenance but what I’d really like to find is a retired (?) craftsman that would like to pick up a few bucks without slaving away every day. Someone who — for a price — would treat the truck like it was his own. Perhaps we rent time at a garage (after hours?) so he’d have a place to work.
This probably isn’t a business because most of the people who invest in vintage automobile a) don’t drive them every day and b) know how to do routine maintenance themselves. And then there are people like me.
Blockchain: the ledger that will record everything of value to humankind
The internet is entering a second era that’s based on blockchain. The last few decades brought us the internet of information. We are now witnessing the rise of the internet of value. Where the first era was sparked by a convergence of computing and communications technologies, this second era will be powered by a clever combination of cryptography, mathematics, software engineering and behavioural economics. It is blockchain technology, also called distributed ledger technology.
This is much more than the financial services industry. Innovators are programming this new digital ledger to record anything of value to humankind – birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, rights to intellectual property, educational degrees, financial accounts, medical history, insurance claims, citizenship and voting privileges, location of portable assets, provenance of food and diamonds, job recommendations and performance ratings, charitable donations tied to specific outcomes, employment contracts, managerial decision rights and anything else that we can express in code.
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978) is a book by Jerry Mander, who argues that many of the problems with television are inherent in the medium and technology itself, and thus cannot be reformed. From Wikipedia page:
“Television has effects, very important effects, aside from the content, and they may be more important. They organize society in a certain way. They give power to a very small number of people to speak into the brains of everyone else in the system night after night after night with images that make people turn out in a certain kind of way. It affects the psychology of people who watch. It increases the passivity of people who watch. It changes family relationships. It changes understandings of nature. It flattens perception so that information, which you need a fair amount of complexity to understand it as you would get from reading, this information is flattened down to a very reduced form on television. And the medium has inherent qualities which cause it to be that way.”