evanvanness

[evanvanness]

A few months with an electric car

I'll be honest, it was a bit of an impulse buy, I didn't do a lot of research.

I was curious and I felt like the performance numbers meant that even if I hated it, then it would likely be worth the experiment.

1. Charging your battery off your wall outlet is surprisingly slow. I get less than a kWh charge over 60 minutes, which gets me a few miles depending how fast I punch it in the acceleration. If I had a long commute, I'd probably need to spend the money to upgrade my wall socket to charge faster. My wife wanted me to, but to be honest I just don't drive enough. It hasn't been an issue.

Gratuituous image from Grok:

2. Electric cars do feel like the future for commuting. They're quick, they're quiet, they're cheaper per mile than internal combustion engines.

3. Electric cars are fun. I feel like it's underrated how basically any electric sports car is faster than _any_ gas supercar at any real world driving. Sure if you're on a track or in the middle of Wyoming and can go 120miles per hour, then a gas supercar is superior. But otherwise, electric is just an unfair advantage.

Again let me repeat. Electric is better performance in real world, every day driving. I was a skeptic, but I was wrong. Electric is definitely better. It's not close.

Electric is definitely different from gas though. There's no roar of the engine. You wouldn't take your fussy toddler out in the electric car to get them to go to sleep.

But they absolutely fly off the line. They get your heart pounding as g forces hit you that could never happen in a gas powered car.

4. I'm far from convinced that electric cars are actually net positive for the environment. Again, I bought it because fun.

Miss me with your partisan arguments either way, I don't care.

A good examination of the tradeoffs is interesting and complicated and acknowledges the imprecision.

5. I do find it concerning that it feels like a computer. In general I'd prefer an analog display and not a digital one for any car. A friend has an 8 year old Tesla and he says his display is already lagging.

This bugs me for lots of reasons. Planned obsolence. Intrinsic insecurity because computer. The continuous overreach of surveillance capitalism is made even worse in modern cars. The ability to brick the computer with an involuntary software update.

6. On that note, I wouldn't buy an electric car except maybe from an established car company (since governments will likely bail them out) or Tesla. Just seems like too much probability that the company goes busto.

I do think that part of why I am far from convinced that electric cars will be good for the environment is that I doubt they last very long. Certainly not as long as a well maintained Toyota. How long does the software get supported? What happens when libraries stop being supported? etc etc.

I don't think electric cars will end up being some anti-consumerism thing like many environmental advocates seem to think. In fact, I imagine it will be the opposite, almost more like a phone that you're forced to upgrade every few years.

I like technology and am a tech optimist but I'm also not blind to the fact that the world is tradeoffs.

7. I learned that you aren't supposed to charge the battery past 80% to optimize for battery life. In general apparently the tighter you keep your range around 50%, the better for battery life. Plus slower charging is also better for the battery.

8. I wouldn't go all electric with a family. Our family car is a 4runner, and those are just incredible vehicles, like almost everything Toyota makes.

An electric car feels like a nice complement to that. But it's hard for me to imagine having an electric car as a family car if you have a few kids. Or even without kids, I suppose, road trips are never going to be the same with an electric car. Where you live and how often you take roadtrips and how organized you are about finding chargers may change this calculus.

If it isn't clear, I love my electric car. But in a two car family, I wouldn't have both be electric. For us anyway, but I think probably for you as well (though circumstances obviously vary widely).

But I definitely think one of your two cars will be electric in the future.

Addenda: I knew I forgot something, and I remember it the moment I got in my car today.

Recharge/recuperation/regeneration/whatever your manufacture calls it.

When you take your foot off the pedal, it naturally recharges the battery and slows the car down. It saves your brakes, it's easier on the car, and it saves electricity.

My car lets me turn this mode on or off, and I basically always leave it on because it's just a superior way to drive.

[evanvanness]

EatPastry Protein Cookie Dough Review

So I see this on sale for ~$2.10 as I am looking for cookies in the supermarket. I turn over the packet.

It promises to crush my craving. Ok I'll try it.

I rip it open as I leave the supermarket. It's about as if a roll of Tums were cut into 5 or 6 equal size chunks.

It tastes like...I'm not sure what exactly. Chalky, not too surprising, it's definitely full of gluten.

It's 5g of protein, which seems hilariously low given the name. But I guess it did get me to buy it.

While generally I like the idea of healthier alternatives, I'm still a bit scarred from my mom trying to force these sort of crunchy alternatives on me as a teenager. There's a bit of an aftertaste which I can't quite place.

The taste was ok, I guess. It was somewhat sweet. Just nothing really like cookie dough.

My craving was not crushed, I went back in the store for real cookies, which I guess says it all.

[evanvanness]

Ziki - no seed oil Greek/Mexican fast food in Austin

Right before I accidentally quit posting, I wrote a rambling post about wishing there were new fast food concepts. Here's one called Ziki. I saw it in this tweet:

It claims to be Greek with a bit of Mexican, but most of the fare is standard fast food, as seen above, a la chicken sandwich and chicken fingers. The kicker seems to be a pledge of no seed oils.

Austin seems to be a good place for new fast food chains. I'll have to try it. It's not cheap, but I find the no seed oils pledge interesting.

[evanvanness]

Milei on Milei

If you want to understand how Javier Milei thinks about things, I recommend this recent interview. Interviewed by a Brit from Bloomberg who asks questions in English.

So if you don't speak Spanish, you'll need to generate subtitles from youtube, which won't be perfect but should be directionally correct.

[evanvanness]

The transformation of Zuck

For the release of Llama 3, Facebook put out some press releases, but Zuckerberg did two podcasts

I watched this one:

Agreed with Zuck on a lot. While he might be long-term bullish on AI, he's not some Malthusian doomer screaming about regulation (to benefit himself) in the name of "saving humanity."

[evanvanness]

Biglia reveals AFA putting him at injury risk to save money

Former Argentine midfielder Lucas Biglia has a long interview in La Nacion. Interesting throughout if you speak Spanish (or translate it), but one bit caught my eye:

...no puede ser que los jugadores deban tomarse dos o tres aviones y tardar 20 horas para llegar a la Argentina. Poné un chárter en Madrid que traiga a todos juntos’, le decíamos. A mí, una vez me tocó hacer Milán-Franckfurt-Buenos Aires, cuando desde Milán hab��a vuelto directo, pero el pasaje salía más barato haciendo la escala. Llegué el martes al mediodía, me entrené el miércoles y jugué el jueves, y no fui a la prensa a decir que casi no había pegado un ojo y estaba liquidado. ¿Vos escuchaste quejarse a algún jugador? No, porque todos queríamos estar en la selección.

Roughly translated:

no way should player have to take 2 or 3 connection and take 20 hours to get to Argentina [for national team duty]. Charter a plane in Madrid to bring us all together. One time, I had to do Milan to Frankfurt to Buenos Aires, when there was a direct from Milan but the ticket was cheaper with connections. I got there Tuesday at noon, i trained Wednesday and played Thursday and i didn't go tell the press that i hadn't caught a wink of shut eye and that I was totally destroyed. Did you see any player complaining? No, because we all wanted to be on the national team

It's insane that football players making millions a year are getting put on flights with multiple connections to save a small amount of money. You'd think there clubs would intervene and pay for the flight because it easily pays for itself with decreased injury risk.

Given that Biglia said this happened under Chiquia Tapia and that he was in Milan, he was already in his 30s, where injury risk spikes and recovery time is much longer.

Lots of rumors over the years about bad organization from AFA (Argentine football association), including rumors at one point that Messi was considering quitting he was so sick of it.

Interesting to see it show up in interviews even now, years later.

[evanvanness]

What I've been listening to lately

It's _andalucia plays_ by Slowdive, on repeat:

It's a mood, more than a song.

Lazy summer day, maybe rainy, swells, patter, plodding. Melodic melancholy shimmering toward beauty.

[evanvanness]

Isn't it time for some new fast food concepts?

Hamburgers, chicken sandwiches (and offshoots such as wings/fried chicken), tacos/burritos, pizza, sandwich/salad. I'd guess that's easily 95% of fast food revenue in this country, and probably greater than 99%.

Lately there are some salad franchises that seem to be in expansion mode, though I would guess that's more do to high margins than volume and also is limited to geographic locations with relatively affluent demographics.

Halal Guys have taken the lamb cart urban classic and turned it into a growing franchise with a few hundred locations, though it's substantially more expensive than the lamb carts.

There was that grilled cheese concept on Shark Tank once upon a time. Looked it up: arguably it's just a sandwich/salad place now, and has less than 10 locations.

What could be a hit?

Idea mode (throwing out crazy ideas):

Calzones

Crepes

Hot Dogs

Empanadas

Pierogies

Soups

Gumbo

(not on the list: corn dogs!)

Take these in reverse order:

Gumbo: maybe I'm crazy, maybe I miss my late grandmother's gumbo, but I feel like there's space to find a few distinct gumbos, pre-cook them and then serve 'em up very quickly at a premium but with low operational complexity at the moment of purchase. Okra is amazing y'all, and Gumbo is literally an African word for Okra -- this can cross racial divides.

Soups: Really I just put this here for

The Soup Nazi (Seinfeld reference aside) was a real shop and while soup probably isn't going to be super successful in warm climes, it's probably also a fairly high margin business. Downside: even after being probably the most famous Seinfeld episode and the soup supposedly being amazing, the business went nowhere. Though...that's actually common in small businesses. Enterpreneurship is hard, even when you have a great product!

Pierogies: I threw this on here because I once subsisted on frozen pierogies, as I was saving every penny to start a business. I could see someone nailing a concept with unique stuffing, as well as unique sauces and accompaniments.

Empanadas: we're getting into the territory of "what is a sandwich?" "what's the difference between an empanada and a pierogie?" Nearly every Latin American country has their own style of an empanada.

Hot dogs: once an American staple, somehow in the early 90s, the hot dog got FUDed hard as waste pork products and has been in decline since. Even when people use all beef, it can be a hard sell. Still, I think there's something there.

Crepes: if you've been to Paris, you know what I'm talking about. Every other block has a cart or a hole in the wall serving delicious crepes, and they're just a few Euros. The closest I know of is a Texas chain called Sweet Paris that is pretty good, but somewhat inconsistent. It is very female-coded and upscale, featuring both meals and dessert crepes. I've had both great meals and mediocre meals, but they were all multiples more than a few Euros.

Calzones: there was a chain in the northeastern US in college towns that was insanely popular. Every pizza chain tried to copy it and failed, because they couldn't replicate the amazing calzone. I don't quite understand why, but that calzone was to die for.

tldr on this post: I'm tired of the Great Stagnation in American fast food.

[evanvanness]

A month without caffeine

Since I got sick and skipped a few days of caffeination at the end of the year, I've kept my streak going.

My mate looking empty and forlorn:

Getting the first few days out of the way made the first couple weeks easy. Sometime around week 3, I felt like I needed a bit of a spark that some caffeine might have provided, but it wasn't a major loss either. Just needed to focus on sleeping better.

Caffeine free tea when I wake up (and sometimes before bed) has been enough. Also try to get out in the sun as soon as I wake up, which has been mostly possible given our mild Texas winters.

The last week has been miserable due to surgery, but if anything caffeine would have likely made it worse. I certainly don't think it would've made it better.

Surgery is supposed to improve my sleep (gotta improve that Oura sleep score), so I feel like at some point it's important to run the experiment of how I sleep without caffeine. So why not now, when t's easy?

But I gotta say, I am missing my mate.

[evanvanness]

Pot Pies or my ode to the (new?) KFC pot pie

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things was the Swanson Chicken Pot Pie.

I didn't have it very often, and I'm not sure why. I guess it was a treat, and packaged frozen food was relatively speaking much more expensive than today, but it still can't have been that expensive. But apparently it was expensive enough that we didn't have it often, despite the fact that I loved it.

At some point in my early adulthood I picked up my beloved Swanson pot pie and...hated it. I tried it a few times again, and never liked it.

I order pot pies occasionally, because I dream of loving a pot pie again.

I am always disappointed. Usually I am very disappointed.

But today on a whim, I decided to chase the dragon once more. I ordered the KFC pot pie

I loved it. The crust was flaky and perfect.

The flavor was what I wanted. Perhaps I should try again when my sense of taste is not impaired, but I am pretty sure I'll still like it.

For $6.29, not only a good meal but I finally had a pot pie that tasted like my childhood and brought lots of fond memories.

[evanvanness]

Toffifay

Whenever I go down the candy aisle of the grocery story, I feel like it has declined since my childhood. There's less options.

There are improvements, of course. Lots more higher-quality chocolate (mostly European; I want to be clear as someone who has done the tour at the Hershey chocolate factory at least a dozen times that this sentence pains me to write!)

So I try new things sometimes.

Toffifay is apparently a German candy (called Toffifee over yonder), though I didn't know this until after buying and trying it.

Here's the tray:

A cross section view:

It's ok. As I discovered recently, the hazelnut doesn't seem to add much. It does give some texture.

So it's a shell with some caramel and some nougar with a nut and chocolate on top. In a way it's sorta a candybar in a shell and with different proportions.

I'm not going to be a regular buyer. In fact, I'm writing this review for the same reason as I wrote about BuffBurger. After I ate it, I realized my wife had bought this before...and I had forgotten.

[also yes, I immediately wrote about taste the day after saying my tastes were impaired. But I jotted down these notes before surgery.]

[evanvanness]

"90% of the taste comes through your nose"

I'm not sure where that particular factoid comes from, but somewhere in the mid to late 90s this got repeated everywhere to the point where everyone believes it.

A cursory Google search did not turn up any conclusive evidence, so my guess is that it's like many things from the era just before the internet went mainstream: there's a journal article somewhere, the MSM picked it up (and probably exaggerated it) and then it spread as people wanted to sound smart at cocktail and dinner parties.

---

As mentioned, I had surgery recently and so my nose is blocked. Literally zero ingress, only now with some effort can I expel any air through my nose.

I mostly can't taste food. Which is an odd sensation when you are hungry but know you can't taste it.

But then sometimes I do taste it. It took me a bit to figure out how exactly, but after thinking about it a lot, I think I have it right. At least for this case.

Because my nose is blocked, sometimes what's in my throat manages to hit my olfactory sensors on the way up my nose, because it is just air. But since it's blocked, some flavors don't make it at all, and some do.

Sometimes I drink something carbonated and get no flavor until after I've swallowed, presumably because the carbonation somehow releases upwards even after swallowing.

But it's still a very different taste profile than normal.

That's my theory anyway, but having done some small-scale experiments over a few days, it fits the facts better than anything else.

[evanvanness]

"You're getting sacked in the morning"

There are nearly 100 teams in the top 4 divisions of English football, also generally known as the Football League.

The top 2 are both in League Two (that is, the fourth division...yes, English football nomenclature can be complicated!), and I have no idea how they've managed to survive that long. It's probably a good story. Accrington Stanley in particular is a punchline in England for a certain age because of a TV ad that made some light-hearted fun of it.

The longest tenured manager in the top 3 divisions is Jurgen Klopp, who lifted Liverpool out of midtable and won them a title. Then it's Pep Guardiola, who has had the most successful run ever in the history of the sport.

But just look at that. Out of almost 100 clubs, only 8 have a manager that has lasted longer than 4 years.

If you were to pick a leading football country where managers are probably the most stable, it'd probably be England.

Not even joking: a future post will likely show some of the tenures of managers in Brazil, and it is...almost insane. They hire managers in with players they didn't pick who got the previous manager fired. Then they fire them...only to rehire them a year later.

From a management perspective: it's important to move on when you make a hiring mistake, but it's also important to make sure you don't fire someone who is superlative at their job just because they had a run of results against them in an insanely high-variance, low-margin job.

Update Jan 26: Klopp is quitting at the end of the season. Somehow in 23 years of managing he never got fired. I don't like the guy, but you have to respect that.

[evanvanness]

Jon Stewart's 2020 Irresistible movie

Today Jon Stewart announced that he will return to the Daily Show, so I figured I'd watch his movie Irresistible.

Jon Stewart is funny. The Daily Show was funny.

This movie is not funny.

How can that be? My best guess is that Jon Stewart's jokes need... Jon Stewart. I realized this when I realized that my biggest laugh of the movie was during the end of the credits where they showed Stewart's interview of former FEC Commish Trevor Potter. This isn't even part of the movie!

Joke after joke had something there. The jokes must've been funny in the screenplay but they didn't land onscreen. Now to be fair, maybe I'm just not a big fan of Steve Carell, but most of the jokes from other people didn't quite land either.

The plot was ok, there's a twist at the end. It's not like you couldn't potentially see it coming. Stewart had set the movie up just a little too perfectly as the left's Hillbilly Elegy post-2016 election.

Overall if you're a huge Jon Stewart fan, you might like this movie.

Otherwise, it's forgettable.

[evanvanness]

Aranet4 review: I love it

When the world first began to open up post-pandemic, lots of friends at conferences brought along the Aranet4, which is a CO2 monitor.

This is it, for scale, it's about as big as a table coaster:

The idea was that a CO2 monitor is a good proxy for whether you're at risk of Covid contagion. If there's lots of CO2 in the air, it means you're likely in a poorly ventilated place and your risk of infection goes up exponentially.

I was never particularly COVID19 paranoid (but never got it either!), so I didn't buy the CO2 sensor until a few weeks ago.

Now I'd probably say that the aranet4 is my best purchase for $150 in awhile.

What if CO2 makes you dumber, not just at risk for sickness?

Aranet points to a 2015 study by academics at Harvard, SUNY-Upstate, and Syracuse University showing significant cognitive decline with elevated CO2 levels.

This graphic is from Aranet:

Digging into the details: the methodology is that they took 24 workers over a 6 day period and tracked how they did using standardized computer tests. 3 of those days were at ~500 ppm, 2 days were at ~1000ppm, and one day was at ~1400ppm.

Here is a screenshot in the study of the visualization of those days (Green+=500, Green=1000, Conventional=1400)

Or if you want more detail:

Interesting to see the raw data and note how higher CO2 affects specific things more than others.

Having read through the study, I think Aranet's description of "1000-1400 ppm brain cognitive function decreases by 15%" is not particularly well supported in terms of science, but in terms of a marketing claim it is...well, reasonable. Sometimes you gotta extrapolate.

===

C02 levels are roughly determined by amount of space, number of people and ventilation.

So what have I learned and why do I like the aranet4?

Open a window in the car.

Our family vehicle is a fullsize SUV, so it's a bit bigger than a compact car or a sedan. It doesn't matter, you could drive a Suburban and you still need to circulate air if the whole family is in the car.

I'm convinced that much of the kids arguments can be traced to high CO2 levels, because it only takes 5 minutes until you're at ~1400 if you have the windows closed. If you're on a long drive, you can get up to quite high levels.

How many times do you remember someone saying "it's time for some fresh air" and opening a window when you were a kid? And then usually the situation calmed down?

CO2 levels even get elevated after 15 minutes with just 2 people.

Open a window now and then. Refresh the air. It doesn't take much to change your air quality.

2. Gas range on = high CO2 in the whole house

As I'm writing this, the monitor spiked from below 1000 to 1350. My wife turned the gas range on, and my monitor picked it up even though I wasn't particularly close to the kitchen.

3. Lots of people = over 1000. Lots of people and poor ventilation = 3000.

As the graphic above indicates, outside you're generally in the 450-500 range. As soon as you go inside in most modern buildings, you're talking 800-1000, even if you're more or less by yourself.

If there's lots of people and indoors, you're over 1000, even if it's a massive meeting hall with huge vaulted ceilings.

This was ~40 minutes into a ~40 person meeting in a ~1000 sq ft room.

4. It takes a long time for all the rooms in my house take to reach an equilibrium measurement after I leave a window open.

I don't know anything about fluid dynamics apparently, but I figured it would happen relatively quickly. It doesn't. The room with the open window changes quite fast, but other rooms take a long time.

I've had a lot of fun in my few weeks with this CO2 monitor, running small-scale experiments (hey, what if I turn the bathroom fan on and leave the CO2 monitor two rooms away?). I feel like I've learned some important lessons and awareness that will stick with me, even if I lost the monitor tomorrow.

Easily worth the $150 for me, if I make better decisions as a result of having fresher air, then it will be an incredible return on investment.

[evanvanness]

Napoleon, a short film review

Rarely does a film clock in at 2 hours and 40 minutes and yet end up feeling both too long and too short.

But it does. This feels like a film that should've been either cut down under 2 hours and made more romantic or done the director's cut with more biopic.

As it is, the film simply doesn't really have enough romance to fit in that genre -- how they ended up loving one another after a rocky start seems under explored.

Nor does it really have enough history or character development of Napoleon himself. Sure eventually we get into his lust for glory, but we don't really know where it comes from. Hints are dropped but that's all we get - and presumably those hints refer to scenes on the cutting room floor?

That said, there are some great war shots and I wouldn't be surprised if it wins some awards for cinematography and the sort of things that film geeks care about. If anything, I am underselling the movie in this aspect, I am just not a directorial geek.

As a final note, I feel like I've seen Joaquin Phoenix play the sort of quiet and unrelateable character who grows on you so you like him towards the end, and I felt like there was some of that. But this doesn't really fit the story, which ends with exiled Napoleon watching two girls sword fight with sticks and realizing that his glory was less than he thought.

It talks about 3 million killed in his wars, and yet any kid watching this will think, "the way you become legendary is to seize power and start wars."

We need more epic films about entrepreneurs and less about vainglorious politicians.

[evanvanness]

"Luxury" tea

Since I've been off caffeine since late December, I've replaced my yerba mate with caffeine free tea when I wake up and then again before bed.

Without realizing it, I got the equivalent of topshelf tea (ie, it was ~$7 for a box instead of ~$3.50).

I was first tipped off because when I opened the packet, it said multiple times that this was a "tea sachet" not a tea bag. Maybe you can't really see it in the picture, but it is pyramid shaped.

Ok, whatever.

However, the string on the tea bag is too short, so every time I put the tea bag sachet into the water, the label falls in too.

Never buying this brand again.