becausechemistry

I lived downtown for a couple of years and drove north on Illinois street to get to work. This swerve as it crossed 16th street and the corresponding confusion to drivers just about killed me a few times.

Indianapolis built the central mile square of streets aligned with magnetic north, but then the rest of downtown aligned with true north. It’s almost aligned, which causes problems at that border.

Fast enough for me, I guess. Faster than a ballpoint but not as fast as a rollerball. But a rollerball would turn what I do into an unintelligible smear, so I’m sticking with the gel.

Yep, it uses gel ink.

The Zebra G-450 is my daily driver. It feels sturdy, the click is satisfying, the ink basically can’t smudge, and it’s inexpensive. The refills are cheap too, and I’ve gone through maybe ten of them (writing lots of stuff in lab notebooks for work).

It doesn’t have that “buy one expensive thing that lasts forever” prestige because it’s not expensive. But I can’t wear this thing out.

I drive a 2019 Fiat 500e as my daily getting-around-town car. A little more than “barely even a car” but it gets about 80 miles on an overnight charge from a normal 110V outlet.

I would love a small sedan that’s got 200+ miles of range, fast charging, and isn’t made by a company run by a fascist. Nobody seems to want to make them at any price.

Mirror universe? No, this is the universe of LLM slop factories making soulless ‘art’ while humans have to keep doing the mundane stuff.

Net positives mean something, though. We want a 10/10 solution, but saying an achievable 6/10 is the same as no change at all is exactly what the people who oppose us want us to think. That if we can’t get rid of every car on the road, we might as well have done nothing. That’s terrible! Of course we can make things incrementally better!

We all want cars to generally go away from what should be walkable areas. Replace them with public transit and bikes and just walking. That kind of culture shift is going to take generations. Less smog and carbon dioxide being spewed into the air is a good thing. (Provided the trend towards solar and wind power continues.)

I think it’s possible to accept that, while a city without cars obviously preferable, the electrification of vehicles is still a net positive given the enormous inertia of car culture.

If you’ve never seen this done to a horse, don’t.