Note: The old ones wrinkle like the used tissue mentioned in this article, I believe the version 2.0 addresses this but buyer be warned. Still great pants, just require more ironing than I'd care to do post wash.
Huh, can't say I've noticed that on the 4-5 pairs I have. They definitely don't coming out of the dryer looking like they've been ironed, but that's about it.
As regards the loss of optimism about the future: that is also around the time American culture shifted into one more focused on generation-as-island instead of generation-as-link-in-the-chain. I suffer with this daily, and all I can do is work to be otherwise.
As regards the clown-car operation of MotoAmerica, from a distance, well it's still not great but at least no cameramen were almost run down in pit lane! Their website continues to be an embarrassment to website design everywhere, and their VOD layout makes me want to pull my hair out.
Supersport continues to be the Darryn Binder vs Josh Herrin show with Binder currently getting the leg up. This time Darryn hadn't even been to Mid-O before and still won both races. The first race was him learning the track and putting a hard late move in against Herrin in the final lap. What do I mean "learning the track?" he was faster and faster as the race went on; consistently improving with personal best laps. Race 1 is worth watching for this showcase in talent alone.
Race 2 for supersport is a four-way fight for most of the race and here it's worth mentioning Kayla Yaakov. She, a rarity of rarities, appears to be the real-deal in terms of competitiveness as opposed to the usual "look a girl racer!" who runs mid to back pack. She hung on to the top three within a few tenths for the duration. She is consistently faster than Blake Davis, Alessandro DiMario, Ty Scott, and the other boys she raced with in the Twins Cup. Herrin and Binder at the front changed lead several times. Herrin with four to go makes a pass which puts him in the lead for the next pair of laps before purposefully putting himself behind Herrin. The idea being to draft and block pass in the back straight. Darryn goes tight and blocks the move to hold on for the win with excellent racecraft. Yaakov takes Josh Hayes, the oldest man running, in the last lap for third.
King of the Baggers is the Hayden Gillum show and it is great to see him win. He is quite likeable as a personality and hilariously large which makes the bagger a fitting ride for him. This includes overcoming a trash tier start in race 1 to come back from 6th (the field is 11 bikes).
Superbike racing is still ongoing and the championship is surprisingly close between Sean Dylan Kelly, Bob Fong, and JD Beach (?!).
I assumed that the choice of "Britain" over "England" was intentional, less he invite obvious questions of the form "Watts with that list: are you some kind of a dumb Bell or a Loughead?"
"I could get an RMCR to ride locally then get a V85 Strada for longer trips", don't you already have like 49 motorcycles? (would have said "bikes" but I know you also have a collection of pedal power bikes - which will come in handy when the Socialist takeover is complete).
I would grudgingly add France to your list. I know they haven’t produced many physical things of note but they were very early contributors to mathematics and philosophy. There is a reason that as an undergraduate math major in a small liberal arts college, I was required to take either reading German or reading French. They both contributed greatly to the field.
Got a note from my buddy a few days ago about a Hennessy modified vehicle on BaT and how awesome it was and why wasn’t I bidding on it? Politely informed him I would never, ever be interested in anything with that guy’s name on it.
The only experience I have with a Hennessy is through someone locally who owns one. He made it a point to mention how much more power his F150 Venom has than the TRX that was being driven by one of the young ladies who works for me.
The aspect which annoys me most about the "cars are inefficient" argument is that is seems to be solely based on getting to and from a desk job. How many house cleaners out there rely on the personal vehicle to make a living? The car is the literal vehicle to start a small business. If you can think of a one person service business, the car can get you there.
The late Rob Pitts had a great story about a used pickup he sold to a guy with financial troubles. Years later he bumped into that guy, who had made a local trash pickup company with employees, and it all started with a used vehicle.
Tough motorcycle racers? Tough, yes but not compared to professional rodeo bull riders IMHO.
Those guys lead the pack of people who simply have no concern for their personal safety or well being.
BTW and speaking of nutso, check out the front page of todays' Wall Street Journal featuring full color photos of a ninety-seven year old lady wing walking. That has to retire some trophy!!
Great point on the dumbing down of the overall population. All you have to do is take a look at the damage being done to the magnet high schools in Democratic controlled districts. For example Thomas Jefferson HS for Science & Math in Fairfax County VA, previously and for years the number one or two highest performing high schools in the USA, not just Virginia but the whole country. Well the teachers union and the radical leftist Democrats on the county board did not see enough diversity in the student body, so what did they do. They eliminated the testing for admission, they reduced the importance of junior high GPA, they reduced the weighting of referrals, and adopted a wholistic admission process (subjective) plus added guarantees to the top students at all the county high schools (schools that were not equal) plus put limit on the number of students admitted from a single school. See the problem was not that there were to many white students, it was to many Asian and white students. The Vietnamese parents sued and a judge said it was thinly vailed discriminating and told the school board to return to the previous admission merit system but the school board said they could not because they no longer had a contract with the testing company that had administered the admission test, and I kid you not, the judge bought it. Moral of the story the American secondary school system is being dumbed down by Democrats and thie union on purpose.
"...I found 4 more @CollegeBoard employees suspected of being foreign nationals without a green card at the moment of their donation. This brings the total to 5 individuals. Moreover, 16 people are possibly foreign nationals, but I could not identify them....
To the employees of the Ministry of External Affairs of India and affiliated entities who follow me on X, I would like to let you know that I am not afraid of you and will not stop what I am doing.
...
Leaks and perceived unfairness related to university admission tests lead to nationwide protests in India, Mexico, Egypt, Bangladesh, and South Korea. "
Princeton, N.J. — (June 30, 2026) — ETS announced today that it is acquiring ACT... This move combines the strengths of two mission-driven measurement organizations to address the significant challenges facing American education.
...
“Every student deserves a strong education, a fair shot at college, and a path to a good job,” said {Amit Sevak}, CEO of ETS
Darryl Cooper absolutely crushes it this week on Tucker. If Tucker gives you a hate boner for whatever reason, know ahead of time that he doesn't speak much. There be dragons.
My thoughts on the personal automobile—As I am in a network engineering occupation, I tend to look at problems through that lens. I like to begin with the problem we are trying to solve. For personal transportation it is full-mesh connectivity, on demand. The personal car solves this as you can go from any A to any Z any time you want. Other forms of personal transportation have physical and environmental limits. I’m not going to ride a bike the 750 miles from my home in Arkansas to my son’s in Ohio.
Public transportation does not work as you have the last-mile problem to solve as well as the partial-mesh connectivity limitation.
The problem with personal cars is they sit idle 95% of the time on average and are very expensive to acquire and operate. Shared cars seem to be the answer here. Uber addressed this by allowing car owners to leverage their personal autos for it. The problem is, they have to drive them for the trip so it is a drain on their time. Driverless shared cars appears to be the best answer, if we can make them work for most of the use cases.
There are obviously a lot of challenges to overcome. I would gladly swap my personal city car for a reliable automated service at a reasonable cost. Then I could spend my automobile dollars on a fun car for personal enjoyment.
By “shared” I mean used by more than one subscriber where you are paying for the service as opposed to purchasing a personal car. I know it falls into the realm of the rental space where people can be abusive to what they rent.
Edit: These need to be driverless. Lord knows the abuse I have perpetrated on rental cars over the years. :)
Is one going to be available at 5 minutes notice, at any time of day or week? How many robo cars need to be clogging up the roads to meet that requirement?
Is it going to be clean when it arrives? and not coated in various body fluids and other filth?
Is it going to be cost effective? LOL, like Uber? which constantly wants to gouge riders while paying drivers less.
Public transportation (busses, light rail, etc) can work in densely populated cities. BUT how do we retrofit our current cities (other than maybe NYC) to do this? Actually even NYC can't afford their current subway system. NO ONE is going to pay for the massive cost to retrofit our current cities (well the Socialists might try, but will quickly FAIL).
Valid points. I wasn’t implying they are the answer, but some of the answer. I think most cities have proved public transportation usually requires subsidies as they lose money if they try to keep the fares affordable. A lot of that is because government at all levels have shown they can do very little efficiently. It is a very tough problem to solve at scale.
Its not just a govt problem. No one wants to pay for a common use system. And don't even tell me that a corporate owned monopoly system will be any better.
I still want to see how these magical robo cars work at scale in a week long blizzard in the upper midwest. My prediction - they won't, at all. It will be a massive fiasco.
What’s dumb about the “cars sit idle 95% of the time” argument is that the 5% of the time is when (nearly) EVERYONE needs a car. We call it “rush hour” for a reason. So if you assume that most people need a car at some point between say 7 and 9AM and again between 4 and 6PM, you can’t just say “shared cars” because you still need the same capacity. Me owning or not owning my car that I use at that time doesn’t really change anything in the system overall, it still means one human needs one car to go a place at the same time as everyone else. And it probably results in a decrease in efficiency/satisfaction if I don’t own it, without any real offsetting benefit.
Trying to scale a robo car system to meet peak demand with acceptable response time is just impossible. It would quickly devolve into "oh, we can't provide enough robo cars, you need to share your ride with 3 other strangers". basically an inefficient bus system.
Before automation was a mainstream topic, ZIP cars (I think that was the name) had a bunch of cars in Denver. I don't know what caused them to disappear. The only shared system which seems to work are the electric scooters. Those at least get seemingly good use. Of course, the form factor has plenty of shortcomings. Maybe they're just easier to hose down, or just don't get the kind of ass time a four wheel vehicle experiences.
Jack, appreciate the engagement as always. A couple points:
1. Cold fusion would impact Thermodynamics but only that, doing nothing to invalidate Land, Geometry, History, or Human Health pillars. Even then, the ability of our aging and fractious western society to integrate near-infinite-free-energy would be inherently limited. Invention is not the same as distribution
2. Innovation is very right-tail-dependent, and even then much more contingent upon institutional cohesion and executability than median "participation" or some such. This is why China's "gaokao" university entrance exams are so powerful, they can sort 6-sigma applicants whereas SATs can only select 3-sigma at best
3. I guess I'm also more bullish on AI as a tool for critical thinking and intellectual development, even if only for a fraction of a percentage of "us"
If you have enough energy, you can build above and below the street to your heart's content. You can also provide healthy food to everyone. Last but not least, cheap energy leads to technological and sociological process. Or at least it always has up to the present day.
Below the absurd examples, however: if we understood how to safely and inexpensively build to 3km height, the density issue of every city around the globe would be handled. Additional intelligence would be useful there.
If we could engineer the space elevator, that goes a long way towards solving other problems. We are short on intelligence and always will be.
"The latter rider took an ambulance to the pits, refused further attention, got back on a different bike for the next race, and crashed again. Then he went to the hospital."
Think it was John Burns who wrote of seeing Mick Doohan peel back the medical glove under his gauntlet to display what appeared to be bone marrow. I'm almost certain that Jack Baruth wrote something about not racing motorcycles on track because he would wind up dead. In any case, the folks who do this deserve more of my time and attention.
The intelligence wane of the American populace becomes even more perilous when one considers that even on our best days, many of things we take for granted; including flying a plane, installing plumbing, performing orthopedic surgery and designing computer chips are only performed competently by a relatively small percentage of adults.
PSA: Origin made a 2.0 version of their As Seen on ACF USA-made cotton pants, so they're running a closeout sale on the old ones: https://originusa.com/products/moab-stretch-cotton-pant-straight-retired?variant=51015227572502
Note: The old ones wrinkle like the used tissue mentioned in this article, I believe the version 2.0 addresses this but buyer be warned. Still great pants, just require more ironing than I'd care to do post wash.
Huh, can't say I've noticed that on the 4-5 pairs I have. They definitely don't coming out of the dryer looking like they've been ironed, but that's about it.
As regards the loss of optimism about the future: that is also around the time American culture shifted into one more focused on generation-as-island instead of generation-as-link-in-the-chain. I suffer with this daily, and all I can do is work to be otherwise.
As regards the clown-car operation of MotoAmerica, from a distance, well it's still not great but at least no cameramen were almost run down in pit lane! Their website continues to be an embarrassment to website design everywhere, and their VOD layout makes me want to pull my hair out.
Supersport continues to be the Darryn Binder vs Josh Herrin show with Binder currently getting the leg up. This time Darryn hadn't even been to Mid-O before and still won both races. The first race was him learning the track and putting a hard late move in against Herrin in the final lap. What do I mean "learning the track?" he was faster and faster as the race went on; consistently improving with personal best laps. Race 1 is worth watching for this showcase in talent alone.
Race 2 for supersport is a four-way fight for most of the race and here it's worth mentioning Kayla Yaakov. She, a rarity of rarities, appears to be the real-deal in terms of competitiveness as opposed to the usual "look a girl racer!" who runs mid to back pack. She hung on to the top three within a few tenths for the duration. She is consistently faster than Blake Davis, Alessandro DiMario, Ty Scott, and the other boys she raced with in the Twins Cup. Herrin and Binder at the front changed lead several times. Herrin with four to go makes a pass which puts him in the lead for the next pair of laps before purposefully putting himself behind Herrin. The idea being to draft and block pass in the back straight. Darryn goes tight and blocks the move to hold on for the win with excellent racecraft. Yaakov takes Josh Hayes, the oldest man running, in the last lap for third.
King of the Baggers is the Hayden Gillum show and it is great to see him win. He is quite likeable as a personality and hilariously large which makes the bagger a fitting ride for him. This includes overcoming a trash tier start in race 1 to come back from 6th (the field is 11 bikes).
Superbike racing is still ongoing and the championship is surprisingly close between Sean Dylan Kelly, Bob Fong, and JD Beach (?!).
Interesting thesis about the five countries that invent things. I'm assuming you mean the whole island of Britain.
I assumed that the choice of "Britain" over "England" was intentional, less he invite obvious questions of the form "Watts with that list: are you some kind of a dumb Bell or a Loughead?"
"I could get an RMCR to ride locally then get a V85 Strada for longer trips", don't you already have like 49 motorcycles? (would have said "bikes" but I know you also have a collection of pedal power bikes - which will come in handy when the Socialist takeover is complete).
There is no such thing as “too many motorcycles”, my friend.
Yes, I'm aware of that, though in my case its "yes I need yet another bicycle". I was just poking Jack for fun.
I’m just being snarky, I have discovered that for me, two motorcycles is all I can handle.
I would grudgingly add France to your list. I know they haven’t produced many physical things of note but they were very early contributors to mathematics and philosophy. There is a reason that as an undergraduate math major in a small liberal arts college, I was required to take either reading German or reading French. They both contributed greatly to the field.
“Idiocracy” is a documentary.
Got a note from my buddy a few days ago about a Hennessy modified vehicle on BaT and how awesome it was and why wasn’t I bidding on it? Politely informed him I would never, ever be interested in anything with that guy’s name on it.
The only experience I have with a Hennessy is through someone locally who owns one. He made it a point to mention how much more power his F150 Venom has than the TRX that was being driven by one of the young ladies who works for me.
It was an odd interaction.
The aspect which annoys me most about the "cars are inefficient" argument is that is seems to be solely based on getting to and from a desk job. How many house cleaners out there rely on the personal vehicle to make a living? The car is the literal vehicle to start a small business. If you can think of a one person service business, the car can get you there.
The late Rob Pitts had a great story about a used pickup he sold to a guy with financial troubles. Years later he bumped into that guy, who had made a local trash pickup company with employees, and it all started with a used vehicle.
Socialists hate small businesses.
This is well stated. Some jobs require a vehicle and some jobs require a large vehicle.
Add the word "reliable" in there in two places.
Korean vitality? Credit kimchi.
Tough motorcycle racers? Tough, yes but not compared to professional rodeo bull riders IMHO.
Those guys lead the pack of people who simply have no concern for their personal safety or well being.
BTW and speaking of nutso, check out the front page of todays' Wall Street Journal featuring full color photos of a ninety-seven year old lady wing walking. That has to retire some trophy!!
Great point on the dumbing down of the overall population. All you have to do is take a look at the damage being done to the magnet high schools in Democratic controlled districts. For example Thomas Jefferson HS for Science & Math in Fairfax County VA, previously and for years the number one or two highest performing high schools in the USA, not just Virginia but the whole country. Well the teachers union and the radical leftist Democrats on the county board did not see enough diversity in the student body, so what did they do. They eliminated the testing for admission, they reduced the importance of junior high GPA, they reduced the weighting of referrals, and adopted a wholistic admission process (subjective) plus added guarantees to the top students at all the county high schools (schools that were not equal) plus put limit on the number of students admitted from a single school. See the problem was not that there were to many white students, it was to many Asian and white students. The Vietnamese parents sued and a judge said it was thinly vailed discriminating and told the school board to return to the previous admission merit system but the school board said they could not because they no longer had a contract with the testing company that had administered the admission test, and I kid you not, the judge bought it. Moral of the story the American secondary school system is being dumbed down by Democrats and thie union on purpose.
Speaking of testing:
https://xcancel.com/juicystar1908/status/2084376784087273683#m
"...I found 4 more @CollegeBoard employees suspected of being foreign nationals without a green card at the moment of their donation. This brings the total to 5 individuals. Moreover, 16 people are possibly foreign nationals, but I could not identify them....
To the employees of the Ministry of External Affairs of India and affiliated entities who follow me on X, I would like to let you know that I am not afraid of you and will not stop what I am doing.
...
Leaks and perceived unfairness related to university admission tests lead to nationwide protests in India, Mexico, Egypt, Bangladesh, and South Korea. "
Also:
https://www.act.org/content/act/en/newsroom/newsroom-archive/ets-acquires-act-06302026.html
Princeton, N.J. — (June 30, 2026) — ETS announced today that it is acquiring ACT... This move combines the strengths of two mission-driven measurement organizations to address the significant challenges facing American education.
...
“Every student deserves a strong education, a fair shot at college, and a path to a good job,” said {Amit Sevak}, CEO of ETS
This does not surprise me.
Makes me sad.
But does not surprise me.
Darryl Cooper absolutely crushes it this week on Tucker. If Tucker gives you a hate boner for whatever reason, know ahead of time that he doesn't speak much. There be dragons.
My thoughts on the personal automobile—As I am in a network engineering occupation, I tend to look at problems through that lens. I like to begin with the problem we are trying to solve. For personal transportation it is full-mesh connectivity, on demand. The personal car solves this as you can go from any A to any Z any time you want. Other forms of personal transportation have physical and environmental limits. I’m not going to ride a bike the 750 miles from my home in Arkansas to my son’s in Ohio.
Public transportation does not work as you have the last-mile problem to solve as well as the partial-mesh connectivity limitation.
The problem with personal cars is they sit idle 95% of the time on average and are very expensive to acquire and operate. Shared cars seem to be the answer here. Uber addressed this by allowing car owners to leverage their personal autos for it. The problem is, they have to drive them for the trip so it is a drain on their time. Driverless shared cars appears to be the best answer, if we can make them work for most of the use cases.
There are obviously a lot of challenges to overcome. I would gladly swap my personal city car for a reliable automated service at a reasonable cost. Then I could spend my automobile dollars on a fun car for personal enjoyment.
"seem," except when has "shared" anything worked? Even public housing bureaucrats recognize the necessity of "defensible space":
https://www.huduser.gov/Periodicals/CITYSCPE/SPISSUE/ch2.pdf
https://www.huduser.gov/Periodicals/CITYSCPE/VOL1NUM3/hersh.pdf
By “shared” I mean used by more than one subscriber where you are paying for the service as opposed to purchasing a personal car. I know it falls into the realm of the rental space where people can be abusive to what they rent.
Edit: These need to be driverless. Lord knows the abuse I have perpetrated on rental cars over the years. :)
The abuse to rental cars will pale in comparison to the abuse and destruction put on robo cars.
Shared cars are NOT the answer.
Is one going to be available at 5 minutes notice, at any time of day or week? How many robo cars need to be clogging up the roads to meet that requirement?
Is it going to be clean when it arrives? and not coated in various body fluids and other filth?
Is it going to be cost effective? LOL, like Uber? which constantly wants to gouge riders while paying drivers less.
Public transportation (busses, light rail, etc) can work in densely populated cities. BUT how do we retrofit our current cities (other than maybe NYC) to do this? Actually even NYC can't afford their current subway system. NO ONE is going to pay for the massive cost to retrofit our current cities (well the Socialists might try, but will quickly FAIL).
And, not everyone wants to live in such cities.
Valid points. I wasn’t implying they are the answer, but some of the answer. I think most cities have proved public transportation usually requires subsidies as they lose money if they try to keep the fares affordable. A lot of that is because government at all levels have shown they can do very little efficiently. It is a very tough problem to solve at scale.
Its not just a govt problem. No one wants to pay for a common use system. And don't even tell me that a corporate owned monopoly system will be any better.
I still want to see how these magical robo cars work at scale in a week long blizzard in the upper midwest. My prediction - they won't, at all. It will be a massive fiasco.
What’s dumb about the “cars sit idle 95% of the time” argument is that the 5% of the time is when (nearly) EVERYONE needs a car. We call it “rush hour” for a reason. So if you assume that most people need a car at some point between say 7 and 9AM and again between 4 and 6PM, you can’t just say “shared cars” because you still need the same capacity. Me owning or not owning my car that I use at that time doesn’t really change anything in the system overall, it still means one human needs one car to go a place at the same time as everyone else. And it probably results in a decrease in efficiency/satisfaction if I don’t own it, without any real offsetting benefit.
Exactly.
Trying to scale a robo car system to meet peak demand with acceptable response time is just impossible. It would quickly devolve into "oh, we can't provide enough robo cars, you need to share your ride with 3 other strangers". basically an inefficient bus system.
Before automation was a mainstream topic, ZIP cars (I think that was the name) had a bunch of cars in Denver. I don't know what caused them to disappear. The only shared system which seems to work are the electric scooters. Those at least get seemingly good use. Of course, the form factor has plenty of shortcomings. Maybe they're just easier to hose down, or just don't get the kind of ass time a four wheel vehicle experiences.
Jack, appreciate the engagement as always. A couple points:
1. Cold fusion would impact Thermodynamics but only that, doing nothing to invalidate Land, Geometry, History, or Human Health pillars. Even then, the ability of our aging and fractious western society to integrate near-infinite-free-energy would be inherently limited. Invention is not the same as distribution
2. Innovation is very right-tail-dependent, and even then much more contingent upon institutional cohesion and executability than median "participation" or some such. This is why China's "gaokao" university entrance exams are so powerful, they can sort 6-sigma applicants whereas SATs can only select 3-sigma at best
3. I guess I'm also more bullish on AI as a tool for critical thinking and intellectual development, even if only for a fraction of a percentage of "us"
If you have enough energy, you can build above and below the street to your heart's content. You can also provide healthy food to everyone. Last but not least, cheap energy leads to technological and sociological process. Or at least it always has up to the present day.
With enough free energy, we can make a new man!
Below the absurd examples, however: if we understood how to safely and inexpensively build to 3km height, the density issue of every city around the globe would be handled. Additional intelligence would be useful there.
If we could engineer the space elevator, that goes a long way towards solving other problems. We are short on intelligence and always will be.
"Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" to "All Men Are Created Equal"
Foundational Errors
"The latter rider took an ambulance to the pits, refused further attention, got back on a different bike for the next race, and crashed again. Then he went to the hospital."
Think it was John Burns who wrote of seeing Mick Doohan peel back the medical glove under his gauntlet to display what appeared to be bone marrow. I'm almost certain that Jack Baruth wrote something about not racing motorcycles on track because he would wind up dead. In any case, the folks who do this deserve more of my time and attention.
The intelligence wane of the American populace becomes even more perilous when one considers that even on our best days, many of things we take for granted; including flying a plane, installing plumbing, performing orthopedic surgery and designing computer chips are only performed competently by a relatively small percentage of adults.
Fewer than ever, is the scary part.