Toyota’s $10,000 Future Pickup Truck Is Basic Transportation Perfection, Road & Track, Mike Austin, November 6, 2023

No screens, no radio. Heck, it doesn’t even have a tachometer. The Toyota IMV 0 is like other modern cars in that it doesn’t have many switches on the interior, but in this case, it’s because there’s almost nothing to turn on and off. Based on the same platform as the Hilux, Toyota’s global market pickup, the IMV 0 starts as a blank template of four wheels, flatbed, and two-door cab….

Most recently, Toyota brought the truck to the Japan Mobility Show to showcase its versatility, envisioning modular units attached to the back that can transform the IMV 0 into a mobile coffee shop, DJ booth, or overlanding RV.

That last bit is very interesting. Flexibility, versatility, small-scale commerce: properly scaled and designed vehicles can be part of that. Price is part of it too. This vehicle isn’t even street-legal in the U.S., but to bring it up to the bare minimum standard wouldn’t cost that many more thousands. The relationship between vehicles and land-use is what interests me here.

Oiling the Chicken Machine, The New Atlantis, Garth Brown, Fall 2023

The arrival of lab-grown chicken in America marks a radical change to the food system, but it is also a logical extension of the progression of agriculture. A chicken breast cultured in a vat and one taken from a factory farm broiler are both products of the same miraculous, troubled system. The single-minded pursuit of efficiency that is largely responsible for this system has caused immense damage to the social fabric of rural communities, to some — though certainly not all — parts of the environment, and to the fundamental connection between place, food, and human beings. But it has also allowed food production to more than keep pace with the demands of a growing population. The modern food system feeds the largest human population ever, at historically low rates of famine.

That’s kind of the whole thing right there.

So is this:

When survey respondents object to lab-grown meat on the grounds of unnaturalness, I think they are having the intuition that atomizing a chicken, extracting the one commercially viable part of it and discarding the rest, is bad in a deeper sense than can be captured by the utilitarian calculus of health and land use. I hope most of them would have a similar intuition if informed about some of the more unsavory details of commercial chicken production.

Also, this is kind of spooky:

More than any other animal, a meat chicken is a factory product. The hen you see pecking around your neighbor’s yard is still a chicken, living a chicken’s life much like chickens have ever since they stopped being wild junglefowl. The bird in the broiler house is something less. It might still have the capacity to scratch and peck, but it will never have the opportunity. It exists solely to convert feed to muscle, though to do so it requires annoyances like feathers, bones, a digestive tract, and a small but recalcitrant brain, from which no amount of breeding will remove certain distinctly chicken-ish desires. It is a unit optimized for the production of lean breast meat, but one that remains frustratingly bounded by its creaturehood.

But read the whole thing. It’s very nuanced and interesting.

What was ‘replying’?, Dirt, Mariah Kreutter, October 9, 2023

We talk like we are haunted. My best friend tells me she’s been ghosted and what she means is a guy replied to one of her texts with something that didn’t require a reply, so she didn’t reply, but he hasn’t double texted, so that’s him ghosting. I ask if it’s possible she ghosted him or, perhaps, they ghosted each other. She glares at me. We debate for a while if a heart reaction and then nothing counts as ghosting. We debate if an “Lol” and then nothing counts as ghosting. I ask if it’s weird that this guy I sort of know replies to all of my tweets and she says it depends on how old he is. I ask if it's weird for me to reply to my ex-boyfriend’s Instagram stories and she says no, unless I do it too much.

That’s just an opening anecdote. Here’s the meat of the argument:

Social media encourages us to think of every thought we have as interesting; it makes everyone else feel accessible, and therefore disposable; it exposes us to endless bad actors, hardening our hearts and compelling us to suspect the worst; it rewards vulnerability, but also incentivizes defensiveness; and, most cogently for the purposes of this essay, it has birthed a distorted and unprecedented form of communication known as the Reply. It is easy to forget how to talk to a person, because you’re not talking to a person: you’re Replying. Everyone involved is either an abstraction, an ideal, entertainment, or part of an annoying crowdsourced search engine. Anyone can barge in on anyone else. Worse, it can be very hard to tell which side of the battering ram you’re on.

This is pretty much the finest explanation of what being on social media does to you psychologically that I’ve ever read. I can vouch for every word of it. This probably explains a lot about a lot. Read the whole thing.

Ghost in the Machine: How Fake Parts Infiltrated Airline Fleets, Bloomberg, Julie Johnsson, Ryan Beene, Siddharth Vikram Philip, and Sabah Meddings, October 11, 2023

The discovery by an alert crew in Lisbon blew the cover off a massive aviation fraud that has left engine makers and their customers in a frantic race to stem the fallout. As a result of the fabrications, thousands of parts with improper documentation have wound up at airlines, distributors and workshops around the globe. From there, they’ve ended up inside jet engines, effectively contaminating a growing portion of the world’s most widely flown airliner fleet.

I actually first read this the day before we flew to Sicily—not the best thing to read the day before a trans-Atlantic flight. It’s one of these unsettling stories that underlines the sheer complexity of…everything. And it reminds me of someone’s pithy reply to one of my articles about lost industrial knowledge: “We can’t build the world we live in.”

Related Reading:

New and Old #113

New and Old #114

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