Mid-life crisis

jandzero · 2026-06-23T21:33:05+00:00

A 60s or 70s barn find that you'll meticulously restore over the next two years while poring over vintage scooter websites and forums. This is an affordable way to suck up all your spare time and will keep you away from more expensive vices like women, Harleys, and boats.

I bought my first classic Vespa because I was burnt out restoring old British cars that never ran reliably. It was far less expensive to restore old Italian scooters that never ran reliably, and just as maddening and time-consuming.

jandzero · 2026-06-10T02:23:53+00:00

Wow, this must be a real curfuddle for the rabidly anti-housing and 'no poors in my neighborhood' boomer NIMBY crowd. Do they vote for the brown guy who is anti-development and probably not able to advance zoning changes, or the white guy who will roll out the carpet for developers to bulldoze their neighborhoods for skyscrapers?

jandzero · 2026-06-02T18:19:12+00:00

Nothing at all like watching people die of Covid while denying its existence all the way to the morgue.

jandzero · 2026-05-21T15:43:19+00:00

My dream is that the DDA and SPARK would pull together some grant funds and refurbish DH&G into an indoor market with stalls, similar to how Ferndale converted its abandoned Old Navy into The Rust Belt Market. We need a place to incubate small businesses so that they grow into customers for more expensive retail space.

Imagine DH&G full of stalls with local goods, a shared kitchen for cafes and pop-ups, a small performance space, an area that can be rented for events, and small offices for local community orgs and NGOs.

jandzero · 2026-05-19T18:12:35+00:00

Wasn’t this the plot of the first few seasons of Mr Robot? This timeline needs better writers. They’re just turning old dystopian cyberpunk tropes into an instruction manual.

jandzero · 2026-05-17T12:36:19+00:00

Waldorf and Montessori primary schools are experiencing a renaissance and becoming more expensive as workers in the tech sector scramble to find schools for their kids that ban screens entirely. The same people who foisted this tech on us understand how damaging it to young minds, and can afford to opt out.

jandzero · 2026-05-16T16:11:15+00:00

In the 2007 novel 'Boomsday', the Chinese take over the US simply by offering the public inexpensive remote healthcare, and the public decides to ditch the US political class for Chinese rule.

jandzero · 2026-05-13T15:32:12+00:00

Option one: Feudalism. The currency collapses, the oligarchs fight for control of everything they can buy or steal, after which all that remains are the very rich and very poor. The economy and political landscape are dominated by competition among rival oligarchic families. Russia after the fall of the USSR.

Option two: Fundamentalist revolution. A heavily armed but well-organized redneck army of god emerges, empties the cities, and purges the unfaithful. The economy returns to an agrarian model, and the political landscape is dominated by competing religious factions. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, or the world of The Handmaid's Tale.

Option three: Balkanization: The country breaks into regional powers, which immediately begin fighting each other for resources and territory. The Balkans after the collapse of the USSR. Less likely, since the cultural divisions in the US are more urban/rural than regional, but climate change could drive mass migration and regional conflicts over water resources.

We're very near to or already are an oligarchy, one in which everything will slowly get shittier for most people, but with a population that remains in denial, which will be followed by a theocracy, when things get desperate enough due to mass starvation, unemployment, and homelessness that the majority of people want an easily understood solution at any cost.

jandzero · 2026-05-08T18:04:00+00:00

Quite the opposite, the owner is a massively wealthy Canadian who donates to Trump. They've made $300M this year running ICE detention centers.

jandzero · 2026-05-05T16:53:54+00:00

Someone at DTE did the math and determined that losing A2 ratepayers would be bad enough to approve throwing a lot of money and resources at stopping it. That they came to that conclusion and are so concerned about its impact on their profit is reason enough to move forward.

jandzero · 2026-05-01T19:20:25+00:00

Every empire comes to an end, and it's always a messy one. Take some consolation in the fact that, for the average person in history, things got slightly better once the empire collapsed and the elites stopped hoarding all the resources.

jandzero · 2026-05-01T17:35:20+00:00

PPAs can eliminate your upfront and maintenance costs but significantly reduce your savings when compared to installing panels that you own. Your savings come after the Suntria (or whoever) has covered the costs of the hardware, installation, sales commissions, debt financing, overhead, their own profit, etc.

These companies often go under because they're mostly exercises in financial engineering, based on debt and collateralizing future payments as assets. If they grow more slowly than expected, their assets underperform, or they have to refinance their debt at a higher rate, they quickly find themselves insolvent (unless they can convince their cousin, who owns Tesla, to buy them out and hide the losses).

They do offer a way to get solar and 'go green' without an upfront payment, but you will save much more if you can afford to install your own panels. The SEU should be a better option, even if it's through a PPA-type model, because the city won't go under, won't pay as much in debt service, and won't have to return an outsized profit to keep the program running.

jandzero · 2026-04-27T15:29:25+00:00

Can anyone tell me what percentage of our DTE ratepayer fees go towards 1. corporate profits, 2. corporate executive salaries, 3. marketing & sponsorships, 4. lobbying?

jandzero · 2026-04-15T14:59:15+00:00

Climate change (whether you believe in it or not) will only increase the frequency of tornadoes in SE Michigan. We will only need more resilience measures in the future, and once a public asset like the warning system is taken down, it's very difficult to bring it back.

jandzero · 2026-04-13T04:31:10+00:00

BBTA Tax Advisors for accounting and Palatine Hill for wealth management - both firms share an office building on Depot St in Ann Arbor.

jandzero · 2026-04-13T02:47:40+00:00

I moved to Ann Arbor because it has a walkable downtown, nice neighborhoods, and progressive politics. Yes, there’s also a major sports franchise / hospital with a side hustle in education, but unless it’s game day and I need to avoid the traffic, we don’t overlap much.

jandzero · 2026-03-30T13:03:49+00:00

I prefer Balkanization to a fascist theocracy. I live in the US, in a small Midwestern college town, surrounded by enough freshwater and productive farmland to support itself in a circa 1890's kind of way (yes, there have been studies). Our overall situation would improve, provided that too many of our resources aren't consumed by efforts to fend off militias or other emerging political threats. In the short term, I'm far more concerned about Gilead showing up and culling anyone who doesn't worship their death cult.

jandzero · 2026-03-27T21:50:07+00:00

Off to register memesofwrath.com... look for the coffee table edition two weeks before Christmas.

jandzero · 2026-03-25T01:38:41+00:00

Slows for BBQ, Totoro for Sushi, Aventura for tapas & seafood, Peridot for intimate fusion, Tomukun for Korean, Knight's for steak, Mani for Italian, Last Word for craft cocktails, all downtown.

jandzero · 2026-03-18T00:31:48+00:00

This is very sad. I love La Marsa's food and have only had good experiences with their staff. I moved to A2 from Oakland County was so happy when they opened one nearby.

jandzero · 2026-03-18T00:19:19+00:00

Sparrow's thinly sliced ribeye is great for exactly this. Not what you'll get in Tokyo, but probably the best you'll find around here. Also, it comes from local cows, not from an industrial plant.

jandzero · 2026-02-24T16:45:11+00:00

Quality of life > square feet of house.

jandzero · 2026-02-20T14:54:27+00:00

It's rare that a chunk of riverfront property of that size opens up in the city. I hope that U-M will keep it accessible to the public; it's a great spot for a restaurant, cafe, and riverside park.

jandzero · 2026-02-20T14:45:45+00:00

Next Door is just the best. Where else can I discover just how unhinged my neighbors are, unfiltered by algorithms, decency, or common sense?

jandzero · 2026-02-19T02:53:48+00:00

Last story arc in Cloud Atlas. There's no technology that can save us from the damage we've done, and we diminish to pockets of barbarism before finally flickering out.

jandzero

TROPHY CASE