Life-long friend Richard Peck (RP) with his 1971 Chevy truck. Almost certainly, at some subconscious level, this kindled the flame of my desire of an old truck. For reasons unknown, RP got rid of his truck. Like snipping off a couple of feet of your soul because you don’t need it anymore.
George K. spotted this beauty in Columbia, MO yesterday. I had heard rumors there were some older Land Rovers up there but this is the first sighting.
UPDATE: Got in touch with the owner of this 1969 Series IIa. “It is largely original except the frame has been replaced and the charging system upgraded with an alternator. I just use it around the farm and for hunting and fishing. I bought it off the estate of an obstetrician in Pennsylvania. The doc used it to get around the mountains to deliver babies.”
We started the day with Barb taking me to pick up the newest addition to our automotive fleet. She has been fully supportive of getting an old pickup truck but had only seen photos of the new ride which she immediately proclaimed the Official Truck of the Bittersweet Garden Club.
I used the truck for some errands this morning before meeting George for lunch and a quick ride in Minty Fresh (we were unable to come up with a gayer name). George observed I was dressed the part for a beat up old pickup and there would be no need to add some Carhartt gear to my wardrobe.
Next it was a half hour at the Department of Motor Vehicles where I got a set of historic plates for the truck, followed by a safety inspection. A few (relatively) minor things need fixing before we do much driving (not that we’ll be doing much) but she has 40 years of wear and tear, some of which will get fixed, most will simply add character. I did use up a roll of Gorilla Tape on the seat which will have to be replaced or repaired eventually.
It was fun banging around in the truck but it will — for me — always have back-up status. Used for chores that would otherwise fall to Barb’s Lexus or my Land Rover. I was missing the Rover by the end of the day.
Gonzo Mechanic George Tergin went with me to “take a look” at the old truck I’ve been trying not to buy. It’s a 1977 Ford F150. Straight six engine. Manual 4-speed in the floor. Beat to shit, but in a good way. The current owner got it from a guy in Colorado who was, I think, the original owner. It looks…lived in…but that’s a topic for another post. Mechanic George saw nothing that alarmed him and gave me the green light. We tried to dicker a little but I had my checkbook in my hand, so…
Now I have two trucks. The pickup is called Minty Fresh (by the guy who sold it to me) because… it looks like mouth wash? Once it’s got plates and all that it will live in a storage unit from which Barb and I will retrieve it it for hauling, yard and garden work, or — god forbid — when the Land Rover is in the shop.
Don’t know what the original owner did with the truck but the bed is beat to shit (“distressed”). Driving this truck will up my Testosterone Index by five or ten points. Watch this space for updates.
“In his book “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” Kai-Fu Lee, a well-known artificial-intelligence expert, venture capitalist and former president of Google China, argues that China and Silicon Valley will lead the world in AI. But his highly readable book covers a lot of other ground as well, and among the most interesting insights are his descriptions of the differences between Chinese and Silicon Valley tech culture.” (Washington Post review) Not quite finished but here are some excerpts:
If artificial intelligence is the new electricity, Chinese entrepreneurs will be the tycoons and tinkerers who electrify everything from household appliances to homeowners’ insurance. […] Ambitious mayors across China are scrambling to turn their cities into showcases for new AI applications. They’re plotting driverless trucking routes, installing facial recognition systems on public transportation, and hooking traffic grids into “city brains” that optimize flows.
China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. […] The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.
Adoption of mobile payments happened at lightning speed. By the end of 2016, it was hard to find a shop in a major (Chinese) city that did not accept mobile payments. […] By the end of 2017, 65 percent of China’s over 753 million smartphone users had enabled mobile payments. […] It got to the point where beggars on the streets of Chinese cities began hanging pieces of paper around their necks with printouts of two QR codes, one for Alipay and one for WeChat. […]
For 2017, total transactions on China’s mobile payment platforms reportedly surpassed $ 17 trillion—greater than China’s GDP. […] Data from mobile payments is currently generating the richest maps of consumer activity the world has ever known, far exceeding the data from traditional credit-card purchases or online activity captured by e-commerce players like Amazon or platforms like Google and Yelp. […] Recent estimates have Chinese companies outstripping U.S. competitors ten to one in quantity of food deliveries and fifty to one in spending on mobile payments. China’s e-commerce purchases are roughly double the U.S. totals, and the gap is only growing.
U.S. federal funding for math and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google’s own R& D budget.
Between 2007 and 2017, China went from having zero high-speed rail lines to having more miles of high-speed rail operational than the rest of the world combined.
It no longer makes sense to think of oneself as “going online.” When you order a full meal just by speaking a sentence from your couch, are you online or offline? When your refrigerator at home tells your shopping cart at the store that you’re out of milk, are you moving through a physical world or a digital one?In the United States we build self-driving cars to adapt to our existing roads because we assume the roads can’t change. In China, there’s a sense that everything can change—including current roads. Indeed, local officials are already modifying existing highways, reorganizing freight patterns, and building cities that will be tailor-made for driverless cars.
Much of today’s white-collar workforce is paid to take in and process information, and then make a decision or recommendation based on that information—which is precisely what AI algorithms do best.
