Do you even drive, bro?

This is a personal rant, not a serious essay.

I drive a 2020 Chevy Bolt electric vehicle. All battery. I have used it like a mini pickup truck with a piece of plywood laid over the folded down back seat and banged around the dirt roads of Vermont for the past six years. I have to say that it is the best car I have ever owned. With the weight of the battery pack at floor level it handles beautifully. The acceleration is smooth and quick. It is quiet and vibration free. Aside from the two times I have bottomed it out in the mud it hasn’t required any major repairs (and they were under warranty). I’d buy another.

But still, I have to ask, have any of the designers of the car’s interior ever driven during daylight hours? Have they ever tried to operate a car’s climate controls while in motion? In winter? For that matter, did the designers of the charge port understand the concept of snow?

Some bonehead decided to put a strip of chrome plastic trim across the top center of the dashboard above the touchscreen. It is curved in both the left/right and up/down directions. This means that when the sun is overhead the driver cannot escape a point of blinding solar reflection from the center of the dashboard. That’s an actual safety hazard. I had to get some gray tape and cover it.

Likewise, there is a reflective chrome Chevy bowtie symbol in the center of the steering wheel. When the sun comes in from the upper left or over the driver’s left shoulder that is similarly blinding.

Location aside, why is there any reflective surface on the dashboard anywhere in any orientation? It’s an annoyance and a safety hazard. Anyone driving the car for an hour on a sunny day would notice this. How did this get through the design process? I am at a loss.

The climate controls include a dial for temperature control with a digital display in the middle, a few virtual touchscreen buttons, and a cluster of physical buttons. The virtual buttons can’t be operated with gloves on. I live in Vermont. Several months of the year I have to cover my hands when outside. The virtual buttons also have no tactile response or physical definition, so the driver has to look at them to touch them and to see if they have been activated. The physical buttons also need visual confirmation. The fan up/down buttons need to be located and pushed repeatedly while the driver looks at a tiny bar graph display on the screen. It’s all annoying and a hazard.

And that temperature dial. Why? The display tells me the temperature of a sensor somewhere in the car where my body is not. I have to look at it to see what I have done. And what I have done is pointless. I don’t care if that sensor is detecting 71F or 72F. There are so many variables. What am I wearing? What’s the temperature outside, and have I been out in it? I don’t need 71F or 72F. Depending on the season and my condition I need

Meat locker cold

Kind of cold

Cool

Neutral – whatever it is outside

Warm

Hot

Bread oven

These are all subjective, not numerical values.

Here’s what I want: Three vertical, physical sliders, side by side, in the middle of the dash.

The left hand one is the fan setting, zero at the bottom and 100% at the top.

The middle one is temperature. Meat locker at the bottom, a detent for neutral in the middle, and bread oven at the top.

The right hand one controls where the air goes. Windshield defrost only at the top, feet only at the bottom, and a logical progression of combinations in between, with detents. The middle detent is every vent at once. If they want, it could be a vertical array of physical buttons with a definitive click feel.

They could put a switch at the passenger end of that with direct vent up and recirculation down.

All of these could be operated by feel with gloves on. It really wouldn’t be any more expensive than the instrument clusterfuck they have now.

And then there’s the charge port, or snow funnel. It’s a forward opening door with a push to open, push to close latch. After use in a few precipitation/freeze/thaw cycles it is a punch three times to open, slam twice to close latch. There’s a recess behind the door with the charger receptacle in the middle. It is angled up. Snow accumulates around the receptacle in the pocket space, then melts, and refreezes. It fills the rubber V gasket around the edge and freezes. It gets into the latch mechanism and freezes. It even gets into the plug/receptacle junction and freezes so the charging plug has to be wiggled carefully until the ice breaks free. I have spent a lot of time carefully picking ice and snow out of the charge port. I am sure that every driver north of 35 degrees latitude has done the same.

Could the charge port door open upwards? Like a sort of umbrella? Put something in that deploys above the charge port to keep out the snow. This should not be a revelation to the designers. It’s basic user experience in the snow belt.

As long as I’m ranting about snow and user experience, the aerodynamics of the hatchback are such that the rear license plate is completely obscured after fifteen minutes of driving in the snow and the backup camera is unusable. For that matter, the backup camera becomes unusable due to accumulated dirt quite often. Aerodynamics is a big deal with you guys, unless you want something to look extra cool. Oh well.

As I said, overall, I would buy one again. But really, it’s so frustrating to drive something that got the hard stuff right and face planted on the easy stuff.

Rant over.

Rinsing out your mouth

Here’s a thought experiment with an obvious answer. Imagine you are sitting at the end of a row of seats in an airport waiting area. There are ten people to your right. A man at the far end has a glass of water. He takes a big mouthful, swishes it around thoroughly, and spits it back in the glass. He hands it to the person to his left, who takes a big mouthful, swishes, and spits it back in the glass. This person hands it to the next person, who does the same. By the way, all these people are strangers to each other. And so it goes, down the line, until this murky glass of water reaches you. Do you follow their example? 

Of course not. That would be dangerous and disgusting. There is no way you would mix bodily fluids with strangers. 

But you do. Probably every day. Not with liquid water in a glass, but with vapor in the air. 

Most indoor public places in the U.S. have abysmal air quality. That is, poor circulation, minimal air changes, and no filtration or sterilization. When you inhale in an airport, a classroom, an office, or a restaurant, some of the air you take in has been in the mouth, nose, and lungs of multiple strangers. 

When we exhale, the air we exhale contains microscopic aerosol particles that carry bacteria and viruses and can linger in the air for hours. Even aside from these gifts, hand made in the mucous membranes of people you have never met, there are volatile organic chemicals, fungal spores, pollen, and P2.5 particulates (the kind that lodge deep in your lungs). 

Another thing that people exhale is carbon dioxide. Outdoors, the CO2 level is somewhere around 420 parts per million. Indoors, this level can reach 1,500 to 3,000, or more in poorly ventilated, crowded spaces. There has been plenty of research on the effects of high CO2 levels on cognition. Even 1,000 ppm of CO2 can reduce people’s ability to make rational decisions by 25-50%. People’s ability to think drops in direct proportion to rising CO2 levels. This shows up in poorer outcomes for students, workplace accidents, and diminished productivity. In healthcare facilities, poor air quality results in poor decision making, with obvious results, and secondary infections, with more obvious results. 

Around the turn of the 20^th century, there was a revolution in public health. Cities got serious about dealing with sewage and clean water. People realized that it was important to prevent what comes out the bottom of you from going back in the top of you, and did something about it. Child mortality rates plummeted. Just a few years ago, the few schools that implemented air quality measures at the beginning of the Covid pandemic had significant drops in sickness and absenteeism. 

There are devices called heat recovery ventilation systems. They take contaminated indoor air and, without mixing, preheat or pre-cool incoming fresh air. This saves most of the energy that would be lost to direct ventilation. This kind of air handling is also an opportunity for fine filtration. There are better versions of standard furnace filters that will catch small particles, including the aerosol particles that carry viruses. There are ultraviolet (UV) lights that can be installed in ducting that kill microbes as they float past. There are far-UV lights that can be used directly in a space to lower the microbial burden in the air. 

Then there is the Corsi-Rosenthal box, the simplest, fastest, and cheapest way to clean air, if not lower CO2. It’s made of four 20”x 20” MERV 13 rated furnace filters and a standard 20” box fan, plus a roll of duct tape. There are directions online. You end up with a 24” cube that will plug into the wall and clean the air for about $50. Some companies such as cleanairkits.com are refining the C-R box with nearly silent gamer computer fans. You can have a suitcase sized filter that will cycle the air in a reasonably sized room every five minutes, and you will barely hear it. 

Today, we are still treating indoor air the way we treated water 200 years ago. We have an incredible opportunity to improve our health, the learning abilities of our children, and our own comfort and productivity at work. It’s not really complicated, and considering the economic losses we suffer today from polluted indoor air, it is comparatively cheap. And then there’s the reduction in suffering. Imagine not getting colds or the flu every winter. Not getting long Covid, or any of the diseases that follow Covid. Think about reducing your chances of getting all the other diseases that result from contaminated air. It’s the most obvious and effective public health measure we could implement as individuals, municipalities, institutions, states, and as a nation. 

But of course, like contaminated air, the problem is invisible. People don’t burst into flame when they breathe polluted air. The effects are slow and silent, seemingly random, and apparently disconnected from the cause. The countermeasures have been made into political symbols. Everyone is willing to save pennies today to spend dollars next year. 

This is something you personally can change. Invest some small amount for a Corsi Rosenthal box or its ready made equivalent for your personal and/or work space. Be an advocate for clean air in the local schools. Clean, low CO2 air would cause a stair step jump in test scores. 

Point out to your employer that they are throwing money away by having their employees suffer from dirty air and high CO2. An average office building costs $2-$4 per square foot annually for utilities. Businesses are always trying to bring this cost down. On the other hand, the cost of the employees that work in that space could be expressed as hundreds of dollars per square foot. Improving the productivity and cognitive ability of those employees by even 5% would wipe out the cost of heating, cooling, and lighting. Basic improvements in air quality can do much better than 5%. 

Clean indoor air is, I was about to say “a no-brainer,” but it is about preserving your brain, along with the rest of your body. Or, may I interest you in a slightly murky glass of water? 

https://www.epa.gov/iaq-schools/evidence-scientific-literature-about-improved-academic-performance

 https://www.nsba.org/resources/asbj/asbj-april-2025/april-2025-students-learn-better-with-clean-air

 https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/office-air-quality-may-affect-employees-cognition-productivity/

Draw pistol, aim at foot.

I grew up in a police-friendly household. My father was a lawyer, an assistant attorney general, and then a judge. He was the only judge in the area who would sign search warrants after hours, so we would have state and local cops in our house in the middle of the night. My dad knew them all. Cops were just part of the landscape. I write this to give you perspective on where my attitude towards law enforcement started out. 

I’ve been watching the police my entire life. I have experienced a slow evolution from support to suspicion. Over the past couple of decades I have come to the conclusion that they aren’t paying attention to their own best interests. 

It’s counterintuitive. They seem like the most self-interested profession in the country. They have powerful unions and the blue wall of silence. They pressure politicians for more funding and less oversight. It’s gotten to the point where they can outright murder people on camera and walk away free. 

Lately it has gotten bolder, if that’s possible. People of color, religious minorities, and LGBT folks have always known that they are vulnerable, but police are taking it to the privileged. Recently a riot cop in LA, knowing he was on camera, casually shot an Australian journalist in the back with a non-lethal round as she was speaking to the camera. ICE agents, without provocation, manhandled and handcuffed a New York City mayoral candidate, again, on camera. Members of Congress aren’t safe from pointless arrest. 

The problem for police concerns their sources of power. They have one tiny power and one giant power. Their tiny power is on their belt. The gun, the nightstick, the taser, the pepper spray, may seem like their big power  because their effect is immediate and dramatic. Likewise their power of arrest and legal monopoly on violence. Not so. 

Their giant power is the idea in the minds of the people that they are a source of justice and safety. That they are the good guys. That they are definitely a better option than their absence. With that power they walk among people who support them, who will obey their orders without reluctance, and who will warn them of danger and assist them. Also a population that will pay their salaries and maintain their numbers. Without that power they are just another bunch of guys with guns. In America that doesn’t make them special. 

The police have been hacking away at the base of that giant power forever, but lately with more fervor. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, confidence in the police is around 51%. It hasn’t gone over 64% in the past 30 years. Broken down by demographics, the police are only above 50% with people over 55, white adults, and Republicans. Even Republicans only go as high as 62% approval. That’s a miserable rating for an institution that is supposedly the instrument of the law and order that Republicans tout. My guess is that even conservatives don’t really trust the police as a force of justice. They just believe that the police are brutal and lawless towards the types of people they fear and hate. 

In this disapproving environment it makes no sense in terms of self interest for ICE agents to show up everywhere in face masks with their badges covered. Wearing street clothes and driving unmarked vans, for that matter. It broadcasts a message of “We are doing something illegal and shameful.” Which, or course, they are. They are openly violating federal immigration laws and the Constitution every day. There is some evidence that ICE is hiring professional bounty hunters at $1,000 per arrest and deputizing unemployed prison guards. It’s red meat for a racist voting base, but not for the majority of Americans. 

That’s bad enough, but videos are now surfacing of random groups of white men in eBay tactical gear impersonating ICE and harassing Hispanic people. Every self-interested law enforcement officer in the U.S. should be alarmed and outraged by this. It’s a direct threat to their safety. In mid-June a man dressed as a police officer murdered a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and shot another lawmaker and his wife, critically injuring them. This was a political assassination and an act of terrorism. It was also a blow to the legitimacy of law enforcement. The Minnesota police had to tell people that they would be searching for the suspect in pairs, and not to open their doors to a single police officer. 

There is rising resistance to the unidentified gangs snatching people, ICE or not. Unarmed groups of people are facing down the masked pseudo-cops. There is an ongoing resistance to police brutality and overreach. Every week there is another video online of some out of control cop either shooting, beating, intimidating, or humiliating somebody. For every cop that does this there are ten cops knowing that it happened and at best doing nothing, at worst obstructing justice. If police keep acting like criminals and can’t be visually distinguished from criminals, then what? 

At some point a sufficient mass of people will decide to act. The question is what form that action will take. With luck this will be a reform movement. ICE will be disbanded. After all, we made it from 1776 to 2003 without it, and it has become completely lawless. Police departments will get citizen oversight with real teeth. Qualified immunity will be weakened. Federal, state, and local  law enforcement will raise recruitment standards and improve training. And so on. Police will hate this and fight it. They will cling to their obvious, yet feeble version of power. 

Without luck, well, I don’t want to think about what will happen without luck. 

Law enforcement officers of every kind need to stop and think about their relationship with the people they supposedly serve. All of the people; not just the wealthy and the white and the likeminded. It’s on them to change that relationship from adversarial to cooperative. They need to think about their tiny power and their giant power. It’s not just the moral thing to do, it’s the self-interested thing to do.

Disney and the DOD

I heard a thing recently about when the Walt Disney corporation hired the McKinsey group to advise them on cost cutting. It’s important to note that among amusement parks Disney had a stellar reputation for safety. The McKinsey people visited the parks, talked with employees, and did the math. They advised Disney to cut back on maintenance and safety inspections. It was overkill, they said. There was plenty of room to make adjustments without endangering anyone. 

There was an exchange between a Disney safety inspector and a McKinsey employee that is telling. The McKinsey boffin said, “Why do you check the lap bars every day? You haven’t had a malfunction in 20 years.” (The lap bars are those padded bars that fold down over ride passengers to keep them from catapulting into space.) The safety employee replied, “We haven’t had an accident in 20 years *because* we inspect them every day.” 

The result was entirely predictable. Disney visitors started to be injured, disabled, and even killed on the rides. Pieces flew off and hit people. Lives were ruined. The Disney reputation for safety was gone. 

Just yesterday, I read about the latest DOGE cut in the federal government. The Department of Defense just ordered a 50% cut to what is called The Office of the Director, Operational Testing and Evaluation (DOT&E). The office acts as a kind of Consumer Reports for things that go boom. Also things that fly, float, drive, communicate, encrypt, clothe, heal, and feed. They hire private companies to test various types of hardware and software and report back on how it performs. Engineers of all kinds test to make sure that the flying things stay in the air, the driving things stay on the ground, the booming things go boom when, how, and where they are supposed to, and the software resists the attacks of Russian and Chinese hackers. 

A relevant news report. 

We can have a discussion about how much we spend on the military and how we use the military, but I think we all can agree that whatever it is that we are spending money on should actually work and be safe for the personnel using it. Of course, to the barely post-pubescent hackers of DOGE, budgets were made for arbitrarily cutting in half. Quality assurance isn’t a requirement for consumer software, so why should it be for an aircraft navigation system? An image comes to mind of a cartoon character sawing off the branch that it is sitting on. 

Alcoholic sex offender, failed nonprofit director, and Fox news host turned Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, intends to save $300 million a year by halving the DOT&E staff and cutting contracts. He has not presented any estimate of how much money the Pentagon will lose per year due to nonfunctional hardware, or more importantly, how many military personnel will be injured or die due to equipment failure. Or, for that matter, whether we will lose a military conflict because the enemy hacked our control systems. 

Perhaps the cost cutters could focus on the 145 golf courses owned and operated at a loss by the DOD?

The DOD hasn’t done a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round since 2005, even though the DOD estimates that it has upwards of 20% excess base capacity. Closing and combining bases could save $2.7 billion annually.

There is a crowd of journalists and think tanks pointing out ways that the Pentagon is wasting money. Much of that waste has to do with private contractors overcharging the DOD, often for underperforming products. There is also a bad habit among members of Congress; horse trading for billion dollar contracts for ships and planes the DOD doesn’t even want, but that inject money into the congressmember’s home state.

The Pentagon could save a lot of money by buying and having fewer things and paying less for them. It’s the worst false economy to cut the program that ensures that they work.

Barbies and Pencils

 People who are paying attention are worried about the effects on the U.S. of the Trump tariffs on China. Just today the White House floated the idea of reducing them from the present 145% to 80%. That level would still be crippling to trade. Administration officials have made public statements about children not needing so many dolls or pencils, but that’s beside the point.

If you want, you can see the effect for yourself. Here’s a link to an international ship tracking site, with the focus on the Port of Los Angeles.   Each arrow is a ship. This port should be swarmed with container ships from China, but it is a maritime ghost town. Compare to the Port of Shanghai. 

There’s roughly a 30 day transit time between the Chinese coast and the U.S. west coast, so given the timing of the tariffs, this makes sense. For a standard container ship it’s another two weeks to the Port of Houston and another ten days beyond that to New York City. The final run of normal shipments from China should end around the beginning of June.

As the title says, it’s not just Barbies and pencils. China produces a large percentage of the world’s Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API). Those are the chemical compounds that do the actual work in a prescription or over the counter drug; the ibuprofen or hydrocortisone or penicillin itself. From Drug Patent Watch:

“For the United States, China supplies approximately 17% of API imports but only around 6% of overall pharmaceutical imports15. However, these aggregate statistics mask important variations across product categories. For certain essential medications, particularly older generics with thin profit margins, dependency on Chinese APIs may approach near-totality.”

For some OTC drugs, China has essentially a monopoly.

 

(Credit: Apollo Academy )

Even a 17% drop in API supply would create critical shortages. China also is a major source of medical instruments and supplies such as syringes and sterile coverings for diagnostic instruments. They sold us about $15 billion of that equipment annually as of 2024. They sell us the majority of our supply of nitrile gloves.

There is the issue of circuit boards. These are sheets of insulating material with patterns of electrically conductive material printed on them and various electronic components soldered to them. They are in everything from your coffee maker to your car, as well as agricultural equipment, industrial controls, and consumer electronics. China has 43% of the world market. I am thinking about the complex nature of modern ag equipment such as combines for harvesting wheat and corn. What happens to a farmer in the Midwest when a circuit board in a combine fails during harvesting and there are no replacements? It’s hard to analyze what devices have Chinese circuit boards and which of these is an annoyance versus a crisis. Even industries with a robust presence in the U.S. have digital controls running on Chinese made circuit boards.

While I’m on the subject of agricultural equipment, John Deere has a lot of production facilities in China.

And then there is manganese, a mineral absolutely necessary to steel production. It is also an element of modern battery chemistries. There is no domestic production of manganese in North America. The U.S. and Canada mined out all the good ore by 1970. 70% of our supply comes from China. That will be hard to replace. Likewise the obscure mineral scandium, used in high strength aluminum alloys for aerospace. We get 68% of our imported scandium from China, with no domestic production. I will stop here on the rare earth minerals, but they are coming mostly from China and they are essential to a number of industries.

I don’t have any precise conclusions about which portions of our economy are the most vulnerable to a cutoff of trade with China. It seems as if vital bits of almost every sector are reliant on Chinese imports. For example, we get about 7% of our fasteners (nuts and bolts, rivets, screws, etc.) from China. Not a majority of our supply by a long shot, but a sudden 7% deficit will disrupt the market.

As I noted above, the flow will stop in the beginning of June. Modern economics is about financial efficiency rather than resilience, so there is generally the least possible inventory of finished goods, parts and materials. We’ll feel the effects within the month. I’ll bet there will be sudden backtracking on tariffs. Even so, the travel time across the Pacific is still there. Even if the Trump administration reverses itself by the end of June, and the Chinese decide to play nice, *and* the Chinese manufacturers jump right on the shipping again, it will be early August before a container ship reaches the Port of Los Angeles. And that would be with a one or two month backlog to be made up. It would be September before ships started arriving on the east coast. That’s an absolute best case scenario.

I don’t know what to tell you to do because I don’t know exactly what will be affected and by how much. Some of everything. Do what you can to prepare for a recession. Prepare for shortages of pharmaceuticals, especially over-the-counter and generic. Expect high prices for a lot of ordinary consumer goods. Expect a lot of Trump voters to say “I didn’t vote for this!” Prepare to say, “Yes. yes, you did. You absolutely did.”