Keep Pedaling Us

Musings about life on two wheels

  • Government Waste & the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

    Tl;Dr: The administration has shut down a government program that protects citizens from bad businesses because it’s wasteful? Really? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFPB) is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector. CFPB’s jurisdiction includes banks, credit unions, securities firms, payday lenders, mortgage-servicing operations, foreclosure relief services, debt collectors, for-profit colleges, and other financial companies operating…

  • Broken Promises: part 1

    Tl;Dr: Shout out where Trump’s actions violate campaign promises There’s not much that will be more effective than showing Trump supporters how their support is being used in ways they didn’t vote for. Here’s a great example: Trump’s Political Platform promises “Make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!”. The theory goes…

  • What’s wrong with eliminating government waste?

    Tl;Dr: Who decides what’s waste? A: the program needs to be legitimate, fair, and governed or it’s just fraud. Trump campaigned on a promise of reducing governmental wasteful spending and fraud. The appeal is obvious and universal: we pay taxes,  we want those dollars to be spent well. This is called “Motherhood and Apple Pie”…

  • Networked States and the Fediverse

    Tl;Dr: If the problem is centralized governance, why isn’t de-centralized ‘federated’ options the answer – like Lemmy? One wing of the Trump coalition is working towards Dark Enlightenment, and wants to create Networked States: de-centralized micro-nations that allow authoritarian rule and ‘easy Exit’. Who ever ‘owns’ the Networked State sets the rules, anybody who joins…

  • Confederacy of Dunces, Snowcrash & MadMax

    This post is about Dark Enlightenment, one of the ideologies in Trump’s coalition of crazys. Note: this is a work in progress… Not very polished. Tl;Dr: In Snowcrash Neal Stephenson wrote about neighborhood City/States with different laws. Dark Enlightenment wants to crash the U. S. to make this real, so they can live in Ayn…

  • A brief & incomplete thought

    Capitalism rests on the assumption that accumulating wealth and human interests are aligned. That may be true at smaller scales, but it sure doesn’t seem all that aligned at the scale of 300m Americans… In part I’m thinking about how our government is suddenly shifting towards oligarchy. You may think this is straight up democracy…

  • Vienna 2025 Recap

    A bit more info here later…

  • It’s always never enough

    Taking care of a family estate is a job bigger than you have time for, no matter how much you have. Huge gratitude to great friends & kind strangers in Vienna. M’s Grandfather passed away in early January – over 100 years old. He had 2 flats in a building downtown that his family built.…

  • Executive Orders: Gish Gallop

    Our new president has made a lot of strange executive orders. This technique is called Gish Gallop ‘presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available.’ It’s a way of distracting or confusing…

  • Vienna is chilly mit warm friends

    So lovely to visit a place with wonderful friends. It all started with H. meeting us at the airport. We have personal business with him, but he didn’t have to do that. He invited us to Sunday Dinner, and has been incredibly helpful to us in many others ways. Seeing W. & C. was always…

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