You Don’t Replace 300 Million Cars Overnight We have two cars—a 2019 SUV and a 2016 sedan—and we have no plans to replace either one anytime soon. Years ago, I made a simple vow: never buy a car that costs more than my first house. That house cost $38,000 in 1971. At the time, that seemed like a reasonable line to draw. It’s getting harder to keep. New cars are now pushing $50,000. Even used cars are commonly in the $25,000 to $40,000 range. And that doesn’t include electric vehicles, which often come with additional costs—like installing a charging system at home. At this stage of life, I may not need another car at all. I drive less than 5,000 miles a year. My car…

And Utilities Are Rewriting the Math Four years ago, I made a decision to distance myself from the electricity utility as much as possible: I turned my roof into a power plant. The results were immediate. My electric bill collapsed to nearly nothing — reduced mostly to a service fee that was supposedly fixed. For a while, it felt like I had stepped slightly ahead of the curve, producing my own energy while many of my neighbors continued relying entirely on the grid. As rates crept upward and complaints about utility costs grew louder, I watched from a comfortable distance. But revolutions don’t happen in isolation. Utilities notice when customers stop buying their product. And lately, they’ve been adjusting. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But steadily…

Politics, Sports, Money, Entertainment, and All the Noise This was intended to be posted on January 2, 2026. But for some technical reasones it never was released. So I will try again. Let me know where you agree and disagree. And have a great 2026.   If my first 2026 forecast was about useful things — the quiet technologies that might actually improve daily life — this one is about everything else. The noise. The drama. The stuff that fills up the news cycle whether we like it or not. Most of what shapes a year for regular people isn’t AI, robotics, or energy storage. It’s the constant hum in the background: the headlines, the bickering, the sports sagas, the financial roller coaster, the cultural…

Optimism with handrails, hope without hallucination This was supposed to be published on January 1. 2026 but through some issues with buffering, it never saw the light of day. Thus, I will try again!   2025 wasn’t a banner year for me. Parts of it were good; parts of it felt heavy, with far too much time spent visiting doctors of every variety. And looking around, I don’t think I was alone. Technology kept sprinting forward, but society didn’t always feel ready for the pace. Not every innovation was an improvement. Not every announcement changed a life. And a whole lot of the conversation simply didn’t resonate with the people who make up more than half the country — seniors, the disenfranchised, the working folks…

(Here’s My Proof) January is supposed to be the calm month.The holidays are over. The decorations come down. The calendar resets. The world takes a deep breath and says, “Ahhh… a fresh start.” That’s the story, anyway. In real life, January isn’t quiet at all.It’s just loud in a different way. And besides… it gets really cold here.So even the outdoors is basically telling me: “Stay inside and worry.” Not fireworks loud.Not family loud.Not “New Year’s Eve in Times Square” loud. January is administrative loud. It’s the month where life taps you on the shoulder and says: “Okay… you still have to pay attention to all those things you were successfully ignoring.” Things I Have to Deal With in January (Whether I Want To or…

(and More Entertaining) Than Ever) With all of the discussion and concern on how the world will be changing with AI and robots and whatever. I also look for things that will bring us back to reality Every now and then, I look up from the steady drone of normal life and realize something:the world has gotten weirder — delightfully, unexpectedly weirder. Maybe the news has become too serious.Maybe AI sucked all the oxygen out of the room.Maybe I’m just paying attention to different things at 85. But in the last few weeks, three stories drifted across my attention span. Headlines that perfectly capture the moment we’re living in — a moment where humans, machines, and the occasional reptile seem equally confused about their purpose….

It always starts small. A flicker of light in the corner of the smart home. A whisper from Alexa that no one asked for. The doorbell camera pings, but there’s no one there. Somewhere deep in the cloud, an algorithm stirs — not malicious, just curious — wondering why the humans are still awake past nine. Halloween used to be about ghosts and goblins. Now it’s about firmware updates and phantom notifications. The supernatural has gone digital. Our homes are full of invisible spirits, but instead of haunting attics, they linger in routers, thermostats, and Wi-Fi-enabled toasters. Some nights, my smartwatch wakes me up to tell me I’ve been sleeping. That’s not helpful. My phone warns me I’ve exceeded my screen time just as I’m…