Category: Me Myself&I

By steamrolling local taxi operations in cities all over the world and cultivating cheerleaders in the business press and among Silicon Valley libertarians, Uber has managed to create an image of inevitability and invincibility.

Journalism is about trolling 24/7 now. Uber is bad etc but first and foremost, people use that stuff all the time. All the fucking time. That’s how Uber became huge in the first place. It was such a small thing barely 5 years ago. We all made them insanely big because that ride-sharing shit is ultra-convenient. Starting an article about Uber by immediately spitting in their faces by implying that this is all because of lobbying, crazy SF libertarians and such, is not journalism. It’s trash. Boo Uber doesn’t make money. Netflix isn’t either. Tesla just barely started to? But those are for a certain slice of the population. Uber is used by everyone, from the prostitute at the corner of a dark boulevard to teenagers going back home to Bel Air’s heiresses going out.

You can be mad at how much money Uber raised or argue how they will replace drivers with level-5 cars (which is when they’ll be able to make profit) but the service itself? Leave it alone. We needed it.

Also maybe y’all could stop investing in businesses solely based on growth, wins-it-all promises? Maybe.

There was this older man at my day job. I was helping him set up his tablet. I noticed that every time I would open a browser and focus on the address bar, the four letters “milf” would show up.

At some point, I told him: “you know, you can set up your browser in what is called Incognito Mode, that allows you to search for things privately”. His eyes opened large, looking at mine straight into my soul like I had understood him at the deepest level.

I showed him how to do it. He never came back.

I can’t even imagine the amount of filth his tablet’s RAM has processed. I saw him a couple times in the streets since. He looked visibly tired. He’s travelled a lot on the intertubes. I could tell.

I’m sorry.

Me: hey my old man, listen.

Him: hey, you know I’m gone.

Me: yeah I know, we’re all hurting still. But yo, I got to tell you about what’s going on in France.

Him: you ain’t even there, stupid.

Me: right but the PSG tho.

Him: what about it.

Me: well, it’s owned by Qatar now. It’s one of the wealthiest sport club in the world. They only have 3 French players in the default rotation. They have 4 Brazilians. They paid one of them 222 million euros for him to play for the PSG.

Him: godddaaaaamn. Are they winning?

Me: sort of. They won everything in France.

Him: Champions league title?

Me: noooo lol

Him: so they fucking suck. Bums. What the fuck. How much??? What the fuck.

Me: *giggles*

It’s a great article on why restaurants have gotten so loud. Finally, someone is pointing out those super-dumb high ceilings inside buildings. They create awful acoustics and are absolutely the worst in terms of cooling/heating efficiency. But hey, “luxury” right? FOH

Acousticians can be expensive, and many retail designers figure that they can get away without one.

It’s creepy how this race to efficiency and profit kills things we’ve been doing that are so anchored in our habits, like trying to make a space feel good, that we don’t even realize when we break said habits. There’s just a way too big focus on numbers these days. For everything.

Also a bit sad to realize that this article was written by Kate Wagner, from McMansionHell fame, which means that we’re really like two people caring about acoustics and Quality of Life in houses. Mental Five, Kate.

Meanwhile, I worked on the two additions I would build on my future estate: an audio lab (ok, just a cube to make sound and music in it) and a workshop (ok, just a rectangle to build stuff in it). GOALS BRUH

Back in the days when I was young, in 2007, I was actively reading about cannabis. We had hit a crazy drought in France for a few years and no good weed was available. Some was laced with piled glass (to make it look like it’s full of THC crystals), that’s how bad shit was. I was looking to grow some ganja. I was looking at the absurd laws in place. I bought a whole system with lamps and all and asked my parents if I could grow some at the family house: no one says nothing, I’m gardening and smoking clean stuff, everybody wins. My dad was fast to say no (him: “it’s illegal!” me, under breath: “you a bitch”). My mom was kind of alright with the idea. She’s the OG gardener. Moms always show up at some point.

Anyway. 2009, California. Weed problem solved.

2010s, I see two indie game developers quit game development to start weed businesses on the west coast. Both are white men. Happy for them, personally annoyed.

2018, I see billboards about cannabis. I see new, white people-owned cannabis dispensers with VALET PARKING. Soon they’ll have bottomless mimosas for when you buy over an eighth on Sundays.

You can’t understand how hard that shit hits. I’ve read so many stories of black and brown people getting their lives fucked upside down for a joint in a car on a Friday night. I’ve been ostracized so much for smoking weed and not indulge with beers. I’ve probably been judged as a drug addict, soon to go down the path of some other shit because that’s what black and brown people do: they do drugs until they OD, right? The amount of shame carried by all of us, the absurd tactics to hide, minimize what society is telling us is really, really bad but is in the reality of facts, absolutely not. Even a HBO show about black LA barely mentions marijuana but has the cast drink alcohol day in day out.

And we’re *all* aware of that bullshit. It’s so weird when you  think about it.

So for years you play that stupid game of hide & seek and all of a sudden, it’s legal and Forbes has articles on those white ladies in Colorado making mad money selling buds. The same ladies that would call the cops on us when we were smoking too close to their front yards. It’s not like “oh, the irony” it’s more like “what the actual fuck is this, fuck everything”.

How come weed isn’t fully legal in the entire country when it is in a growing number of states AND Canada? At this point? How come?

How come they haven’t freed all the people in jail for possession right the fuck yesterday?

How come it isn’t legal in France, the biggest consumer of cannabis in Europe? The president is fucking 40 years old, he smoked “when he was younger” and he’s acting like he can’t legalize. Fuck that president. And fuck all of y’all out there, minimizing this massive societal problem while downing bottles of booze.

How come Portugal, which legalized everything and has great results from it (reducing ODs by more than half), is not the poster child of what the fuck the whole world needs to do?

It’s hard not to be mad at this disaster. All of that for a fucking plant. An awesome, armless plant.

I was thinking about the future of bicycles. I saw that spokeless prototype and was super into it. But the more I read about it and the more it became obvious that it doesn’t work. It’s a beautiful concept and it looks rad as fuck. That’s it.

Spokes exist for a very good reason. Bicycles are old. Tons of very smart people tried to make them better and in 2018 we’re still riding on wheels with spokes and air in tires. It simply is the best balance between performance and cost.

I bought my bike in 2009, nine years ago. I changed the handlebar because I’m a bullhorn typa dude but I haven’t changed anything else besides changing tubes and tires when needed (maybe every two years when not riding over glass/getting shit stolen).

I rode around 14,000 miles (22 000 kms) without an issue AND about zero maintenance. That’s how good the current bicycle technology is! That’s how reliable it is. Excruciating heat, rain, super rough concrete, hills, potholes, my weight, every single day. No problem. Designers need to listen to the real world and what previous designers and engineers created.

I want some Kaneda bike-looking bicycles with built-in lights and spokeless wheels with airless tires as much as the next hipster or whatever. But the reality is that they’re kind of just a dream. Our world’s physics is telling us that we can try but 200 years of collective experience (first bicycle, 1818) is telling us that we already have the best tech.

And that’s pretty beautiful. We can just enjoy riding and only care about enjoying.

When I was skating my old place, a few months ago.

That sudden displacement was rough. I needed some good memories. This is a good one.

Virtually five years that I haven’t seen parents, family and friends outside listening or watching them on a monitor from time to time. What it does is that I want to touch, grab their faces so much. Make sure that they’re real for real. Did this shit actually happen? Adopted by white people and shit?  It’s so weird now. It’s hard.

Things are not going so well over there. Family disputes, conflicts that I don’t get. It’s whatever. My parents describe the sad state of the little neighborhood that I grew up in. There was many stores. You could buy vegetables, pencils, tools, toys, salami, horse meat, fabric, potato salad. A thriving boulangerie where people would line up on Sundays for one of the best baguette on earth, I’m not kidding. The boulangerie hold the fort for a while other businesses where disappearing but now it’s basically gone. All that is left open every day is a drug store, a pizza joint used as a front to sell cannabis and a bar tabac which sells cigarettes and alcohol. I told my parents on Skype thinking about Alfred in Atlanta, “hey, drugs are lucrative”. They nodded like they hadn’t made the connection between what was sold on that corner of one of my hometowns.

About two-thirds of the world’s manufacturing capacity for lithium-ion batteries, those most commonly used in electric vehicles, is in China, according to consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

People put that on the fact that European car manufacturers were never into electric cars, but I kinda disagree. It’s more complex, yet simple.

To make lithium-ion batteries, you need all the cobalt you can. Who is mining that cobalt? China. Where? In DRC. What was DRC’s relationship with Europe? Colonized, brutalized, terrorized for about 75 years, up to 1960. Do you think Europeans can just stroll in and start mining in the 2010s? Hell to the no. So they have to deal with China. China does business with the US, has an enormous market itself, doesn’t need to cut deals with Europe on scarce minerals. The end.

Simply put, China’s economies of scale and European’s past colonization destroyed the ability for the old continent to compete on battery manufacturing.

I like how karma is hitting Europe in new markets. But make no mistakes, China is not interested in environmental standards. China just does business (you know they build roads and shit all over Africa in exchange of all the minerals they need for electronics, right?) and they think that electric cars are hip, and in demand. I don’t think they think more than that.

Some analysts say Europe’s last hope may be to take the same approach as it did with Airbus (EADSY) in the aviation industry. The plane maker was created by merging a clutch of existing firms and is now the only serious challenger to Boeing (BA) in the United States.

Doing the same for electric batteries "could be a game-changer for the EU’s auto industry," Montgomery said.

If only Europe had been able to replicate Airbus in every segment of the economy… But also, I think it’s too late (it’s about who has control of resources; not Europe). Just continue to make gas-powered cars more efficient but way more importantly: reduce the amount of cooling and heating needed in buildings and homes. That will do great to planet earth and that’s what matters.

It barely makes the news.

I keep thinking about the victim’s grandson. He’s twelve. He was six when Trayvon Martin was murdered. He was eight when Mike Brown was murdered. He already had a sense at that time, that this is extremely scary and wildly unreal with Barack and Michelle up there. Imagine.

Today he’s a young teenager. He simply walked in a store with his grandfather to buy some stuff. He came out running, calling his mom because a white man just shot his grandpa in the back of his head for obviously no reason besides the Reason. I think that would make me, at his age, extremely angry. The kind of anger that never, ever goes away. The kind of anger that will raise hell. Someday. It doesn’t matter when. In the future. How do you trust the world around you when something like that happens and no one really cares? It unleashes so much darkness, and we will pay for it. I’m sick.

Yesterday, Police Fatally Shoot Black Security Guard Who Detained Shooting Suspect. Black people killed by mistake and mass shootings really have become weather news. “Oh, another one” we think, grinding our teeth. “Right, that’s the trial for which horrible killing/hashtag again?” All those deaths are avoidable and facts show that only white people are responsible for them. I’m sick.