April 2024
This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.
You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.
Washed Up
Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes?
In a country with roughly 280 million private cars and trucks, can there be such a thing as too many car washes? A growing number of city leaders seem to think so. Unlike stores, restaurants or other businesses, most self-service car washes don’t pay sales taxes to their host communities. And they don’t bring much else to the table in terms of local benefits, critics argue; like drive-through-only fast-food outlets (which have also been the target of local bans), the latest generation of automated facilities provide few jobs even as they pump out noise, traffic congestion and vehicle emissions.
But where neighbors might see a too-crowded market, investors see the beginning of a boom. From the Snow Belt to the Sunbelt, companies are scrambling to add locations and grab a piece of a $14 billion-plus industry. With 60,000 locations across the US, the sector has been expanding at roughly 5% annually, with some forecasts predicting the market to double by 2030. More car washes were built in the last decade than all the preceding years combined.
Ad-Based Warfare
How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin
Which is to say, none of this is an abstract concern—even if you’re just a private citizen. I’m here to tell you if you’ve ever been on a dating app that wanted your location or if you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are 24/7, there is a good chance a detailed log of your precise movement patterns has been vacuumed up and saved in some data bank somewhere that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to. That includes intelligence agencies. It includes foreign governments. It includes private investigators. It even includes nosy journalists.
Rule 34
The Iditarod Is Embroiled in a Controversy Over Moose Guts
”In the event that an edible big game animal, i.e., moose, caribou, buffalo, is killed in defense of life or property, the musher must gut the animal and report the incident to a race official at the next checkpoint. Following teams must help gut the animal when possible. No teams may pass until the animal has been gutted and the musher killing the animal has proceeded. Any other animal killed in defense of life or property must be reported to a race official, but need not be gutted.”
Links
- Fresh eggs
- Just a good’ole laugh
- World’s Fastest Camera Drone VS F1 Car
- ‘Beer me, Obi-Wan'
- Quick Toggling Closed Captioning on Apple TV
- How Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jethro Tull Helped Make ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’
- Human or Not
- 3D Printed Full-Size Macintosh
- Mind the Game with Lebron James and JJ Reddick
- James Collier demonstrates poly rhythms with one hand
- When Your Vision and Hearing Decline with Age
- Hand Signals at The Stork Club
- Dog Poop Golf
- “The quack-attack is back, Jack!"
- Weather forecasts have become much more accurate
Sign Off
Do not hesitate to reply to this month’s email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.
Thanks for reading. Have a great month,
Clay
How kind of you to make your way down here.
A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.