And thank you for transporting our family safely all these years.
Author: <span>Jay Torres</span>
We Need to Talk About Trader Joe’s
★But behind the kitschy grocery chain’s public face, with its superficial good vibes and Hawaiian-shirted cashiers, is a litany of thorny ethics and questionable business practices surrounding how it handles sourcing and packaging certain private-label ethnic food products.
Smart Words From Smart People · Collab Fund
Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money and Same As Ever collected some very enlightening quotes. Some that resonate with me.
★“I would say the most dangerous thing in the world with a 12-year-old is to try to be his friend. But the worst thing with a 40-year-old is to try to be their parent.” – Chris Davis
“Happiness is that feeling you get right before you need more happiness.” – Don Draper
“People with very high expectations have very low resilience.” – Jensen Huang
Marvel Animation’s X-Men ’97 | Official Trailer
Holy forking shirtballs.
★California Today: The best-loved bridges in California
The NY Times has a great California-centric newsletter. They often pose questions to readers to then reply and then share those results. They recently asked readers, what was their favorite bridge in California? Of course, people replied with the Bixby Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge. My favorite bridge? The San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.
I lived in the Bay Area for almost 10 years, and the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge is the best. It’s so long, you feel as if you’re alone on a large body of water. And at certain times of the year, the commute home often had amazing sunsets.
I can now say I’ve been quoted in the New York Times. Oh, and here are some sunset pictures from the bridge that I took through the years.
Tesla Drivers in Chicago Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather
In the New York Times (unlocked article):
In a painfully chilly parking lot in Chicago on Tuesday, Tesla drivers huddled in their cars waiting for a charge.
I understand that I’m privileged that I live in California and that I’m able to charge my EV at home. However, for people who live where it gets to below 0 temperatures and who can’t charge at home, they have to rely on Tesla’s supercharger network or another DC fast charging solution.
We had to do this with our first EV. Since we lived in an apartment, we had to top off at DC fast chargers.
“It ends up being very difficult to make battery electric vehicles work in very cold conditions,” Mr. Brouwer said. “You cannot charge a battery as fast or discharge a battery as fast if it’s cold. There’s no physical way of getting around.”
There’s no way to get around the way how a battery works in cold weather. But we do need to have better access to level 2 charging so people can charge at home overnight.
This is an infrastructure problem, not an EV problem.
★This Warriors Crisis Is Real, And Change Is Coming
Ann Killion in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Though Bob Myers won’t admit it, this is exactly why he was ready to leave last year. He could see the unraveling coming, the painful dismantling and uncomfortable choices that lay ahead.
I was talking to a colleague who is also an NBA fan. He and I agree: Bob Myers saw something that not necessarily everyone else did. The 2022 championship was an unexpected surprise and the chances of getting another one with the current roster was not likely. So he planned his exit. Smart man.
★Scott Galloway on Elon Musk
Scott Galloway on the Pivot podcast on the lack of governance at Elon Musk’s companies:
I think the key issue here and what I would describe as the learning or the takeaway for young people, and that is the most important thing you can have in your life is people who love you and serve as guardrails. And to have people idolize you is different than having people who love you. And I think the guy has a lot of the former and not a lot of the latter, and as someone who has participated in interventions, they don’t invite powerful, important people to those interventions. They invite people who love you, and this is turning into a cautionary tale along the lines of Tony Hsieh, because you have a guy who, as far as I can tell, is living alone, doesn’t have a close relationship with a romantic partner or his children, and is, quite frankly, just fucking off the rails, and if, at the age of 52, You don’t have people in your life who can sit you down and you listen to, cause you know that it’s not that they got rich because of you. It’s not because they think you’re just so fucking awesome and can land rockets on two surfboards. It’s because they just full stop care about you. If you don’t have that, especially men, you literally can lose it all.
I’d keep an eye out for this Musk guy.
★A Cultural Critique of the Tesla Cybertruck
Victoria Scott for Road and Track:
From all of these eras, certain models—from the exotic to the every day—seem to be perfect windows into our country’s ego and id; they show what it values, and what it fears, at the moment of its release. The ‘57 Chevy, with its vast expanses of gleaming chrome—and its ads full of perfectly-trad-beautiful gleaming white smiles and white faces—became shorthand for the rock n’ roll Fifties; the stainless-steel Delorean DMC-12 and the unreliability underneath its gleaming sci-fi exterior came to represent the hollow futurism of the Reagan Eighties.
Which neatly brings us to the Tesla Cybertruck and the fraught present.
Such a sharp piece on how we ended up with a car like the Cybertruck being an actual vehicle.
We saw one for the first time the other day. It is a big vehicle.
Doug Demuro Reviews A 1995 Toyota MR2
I always forget about this car, mostly because you never seen them anymore, but I love that Doug reviews these rare and special cars from the 80s and 90s.
★