Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Glued to the phone

One evening in Guangzhou, China we were having dinner at a local restaurant. We were soon joined at the table adjacent by a young couple. Instead of making conversation with each other, both were staring into their phones during the entire meal, each watching their own preferred programing. I guess dinner isn’t the best time to share details of your day?

As much as I assail our general addiction to smartphones, I am far from a luddite. There’s a time and place to enjoy the wonders of Internet videos. Dinner with your significant other shouldn’t be such an occasion? Maybe it’s cultural - here in the States, the person busy with their smartphones during a shared meal is absolutely the asshole.

Or perhaps I’m merely naive to think that conversation comes easily in a long relationship. Maybe when you’ve been with a person for an extended period, you kind of hang out by not really talking to each other. Enjoying each other’s company is just a matter of being in the same room.

That makes more sense. Thanks to urban density we can only dream of, big cities in China have plenty of local mom and pop restaurants. Sprinkle on some capitalism magic, and that means it’s not overly more expensive to eat out than to cook at home. The phone-occupied couple that sat next to us is practically eating dinner at home - the restaurant is not at all an occasion. Put it in this perspective, I can see the lack of conversation.

If it were me, though, I’d rather have the chat. The Internet videos will still be there when we get home.

Be smug about it

The ongoing TSA meltdown is mighty interesting to see. Thanks to our incompetent United States Congress, TSA agents have been missing paychecks for a few weeks now, with no end in sight. No one would work for free willingly, right? (Unwillingly is what they used to refer to as slavery.) So agents have been calling out sick en masse. This has lead to massive lines at major airports.

Imagining needing three hours just to get through the TSA checkpoint. For someone like me who hates to cut things that close in terms of getting to the airpot last minute, I’d plan to arrive at the airport something like six hours before departure, in the current situation, in order to feel at ease. Even the British would scoff at waiting in a queue for that long.

Thankfully my local airport -SFO - has TSA workers under contract by a private company. They are not affected by the ongoing partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. They weren’t affected last year when the government shutdown for a record 40 some odd days. How did we get so lucky? The local powers at be must have been a libertarian: the more you can remove government from a responsibility, the better.

Whatever the case may be, I was super appreciative of the normal operation at SFO when I flew to China a few days back. My smugness is through the roof when I now read the news of queuing chaos at other airports in the country. What I feel most worse for is the TSA agents that actually did show up to work, despite the continuing lack of pay. No shade to those that didn’t - again, no one should work for free, but the reality is the workload remains the same, and there’s way fewer people to execute it.

Wait a minute - isn’t that what “big AI” is doing in reality? Promise big efficiency so companies can lay off workers, but those left behind are actually still doing the same amount of work.

Too damn long

I was surprised at the amount of Chinese elders that were on my flight from San Francisco to Guangzhou. 14 and half hours is absolutely no joke to spend in a pressurized metal tube. Those of us in the peasant class are resigned to our fate of misery. The human body is not designed to sit that long whilst getting slowly dehumidified.

If our elders can endure that lengthy flight without complaint, then there’s nothing for my near 40 year old body to say. Then again, our elders are accustomed to enduring through tough times. Either suffering through the Cultural Revolution in China, or scratching out a decent living after immigrating to the States. A long intercontinental flight might as well be a cocoon of comfort in comparison to the hardships that came before.

Meanwhile, we can’t even stay still for a single minute without any sort of stimulation. Taking a dump without a using a smartphone at the same time might as well be a form of torture.

The magnetic call of home must be that powerful for octogenarians to willingly take a long-haul flight. The elder sat next to us was on her way back to her hometown to meet up with family. There’s another two hour bus ride waiting for her after landing in Guangzhou. A journey of an entire day when you factor in the waiting and transfers. I’ve great respect for that sort of dedication, especially when I cannot imagine doing the same myself when I am at that age. I am certainly endeavoring to be as fit as possible for as long as possible…

But maybe by that time, aviation would have figured out a way to make supersonic flight economically feasible. Even getting it below the 10 hour mark would make trans-Pacific flights far more bearable.

Ineffective god

I guess I should’t complain about my room getting into the low 70s in temperate when there’s people out there in spaces reaching into the high 80s. San Francisco is experiencing an unseasonal heat wave this week, and we’re all just trying to keep cool as best as possible. If I lived in a place that gets up to high 80s indoors during heat waves, an AC unit is a must-have purchase. The extortionate PG&E bill is worth the ability to fall asleep.

The 2026 World Baseball Classic championship game was last evening. Venezuela defeated the United States in a classic pitching duel. Can we call it just revenge for America kidnapping the Venezuelan President from earlier this year? As much as some of you want to keep separate sports and politics, the sports gods often times have a perverse sense of humor. Every time Great Britain faces Argentina in football should be for ownership of the Falkland Islands.

Speaking of god, it was weird to me seeing Venezuelan players thanking for god for their triumph. God was with you? It doesn’t logically make sense. If your Christian god is supposedly all benevolent and all loving, why would he favor one team over another? Surely there are many god-fearing believers rostered on team USA. Did god flip a coin and decided to give one team the push? Maybe it’s about the cumulative amount of prayers…

If all glory is to god, then so is all failure. To say otherwise means god abandons you right before the moment of loss, absolved him of any responsibility. An omnipotent deity is actively picking winners and losers. His almighty love is not granted the same equally. Maybe the ancients got it correct in terms of making sacrifices. It seems logical that there’s a balanced scale where the good and the bad equals out. If we ourselves create the bad - killing animals and people as tribute - then we’d receive only good in return.

A truly benevolent god would eliminate all suffering and negativity from this world. Partly why I am drawn of zen buddhism is that it doesn’t hide the reality we can all see: life is suffering.

A moment's notice

I read in the local newspaper the lone surviving passenger in a fiery Tesla Cybertruck crash back in 2024 is finally officially suing Tesla. The lawsuit puts the blame on the manufacturer for creating a death trap. Tesla vehicles famously use electrically actuated door handles, rather than the physical mechanical linkage. Federal safety laws mandate a manual failsafe, but inside Tesla cars the backups are rather hidden. One can understand that in a fiery panic, one isn’t in the best of mind to locate the functioning backup.

Certain model doesn't have manual door releases at all in the rear passenger compartment!

The Cybertruck crash is an absolute tragedy. Notwithstanding the utter lack of wisdom by the teens in getting into a 1,000 horsepower 6,000 pound missile whilst under the influence. At 3:00 AM in the morning. Were the teens in any other normal combustion vehicle, I think they’d all survive. Mangled, sure, but very much alive. A normal car would have had physical door releases that actually work, no matter if the vehicle is in a blaze.

I don’t trust it, these electric actuators. It’s unsettling to be at the mercy of a computer and electricity. Besides, is Tesla even saving any production costs? Rules dictate a secondary mechanical backup. There’s essentially two releases for every door. That doesn’t seem very economical from a cost-of-goods standpoint.

This is why my car is a Volkswagen Golf from 2019. It’s got mechanical everything, down to the emergency brake handle.

I feel bad for the sole survivor. Not only does he have to deal with the long healing process, but he’s also suing (the estate of) his former friend - the driver who is now dead. His entire life trajectory upended by a moment’s folly of late teenager. Who amongst us hasn't done some stupid shit in our time? At that age, no one ever thinks of the downside in the moment.

Patience, young Padawan

Ever since I purchased my new-to-me 2019 Volkswagen Golf GTI last October, I’ve been doing small jobs here and there every weekend. The downside of buying a used car is that there’s bound to be existing blemishes and inconsistencies. The upside is obviously you save a bit of money buying second-hand. Though I didn’t really have a choice: if I wanted a seventh generation GTI, used is the only game in town.

I’ve no interest in the LCD-screen festooned eight generation GTI currently on the market. Car interiors should have physical buttons and dials, and I will gladly die on this hill.

In the process of fixing up a car, you kind of realize things about yourself. I found out that I tend to dive in without a care. Rambo-ing it. Leroy Jenkins. The consequence of this is that I’ve broken a few parts that I wouldn’t have otherwise. No big deal in the grand scheme of things because thankfully the Golf platform has parts a plenty - VW has sold millions of them. Nevertheless, I’ve learned that I got to be a lot more patient.

The enthusiasm stems from me wanting to get the job done as quickly as possible. Because I am chasing that sense of accomplishment after the work is finished. There’s nothing more grating to me than leaving in the middle of a project to tend to the human stuff. Like going to bathroom, eating, or going to bed. My personality is such that open-ended loops are crushingly stressful for me.

Owning the GTI have slowly weened me off that affliction. Because there’s nothing I can do about waiting for a replacement part to arrive. It’s already bad enough that I broke it in the first place, but then I get to stew in my incompetence and impatience. I’m not rich at all to pay for overnight shipping. Ever so slowly I am learning to tolerate - hopefully reach peace someday - open-ended loops.

Owning brand new cars is way less stressful for sure. But then I wouldn’t have learned a lesson about myself.

Liquid gold

Say what you want about the ongoing Iran war (or not war), but it’s doing major devastation to gasoline prices. Those of us in California suffer even more due to a dependence on imported crude, and State environmental refining laws. Didn’t this President promise to lower petrol prices? Candidates in the CA governor race should promise to do something about this…

Thankfully I don't have a car commute. What I won’t enjoy however is the bustling lines at Costco gasoline - typically the cheapest available. I never get gas at my local Costco, but unfortunately it’s all filtered through the same road. The logjam of cars waiting for a fill up will absolutely hamper shoppers that only wish to park and get into the warehouse. This will be the reality until the war (or not war) is over.

First world problems, eh?

Speaking of privileged problems, I’ve been though many a Keurig device since 2020. For some reason, the K-Slim model that I buy cannot seem to last. And I think I’ve found the reason: the control panel is right on the lid. A lid that opens and closes constantly for loading and disposing of coffee cups. This inevitably causes irreparable stress on the electrical connections. The one I currently have has an annoying tendency to stop dispensing mid-stream like a man with a colon problem.

The definitely of crazy is doing the same thing and expecting different results. So once this K-Slim - embarrassingly, my third - dies completely, I am going to buy a model with controls that isn’t on the lid. The venerable original K-Classic should suffice nicely. The unit my parents have is going strong on eight years now.