Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

I am once again asking for competence

As a car enthusiast, one of the pain points is needing a third party to perform service to your car. Which is entirely unavoidable unless you’ve got a garage with all the tools possible. It is a pain point because competence is difficult to find. I’m not even asking for attention to detail; I just want the job done correctly! I don’t expect another person to treat my own car as nicely as I do.

The sad reality is, you live long enough and you’d no doubt been burned by some automotive repair place. I can remember an auto body shop failed to remove a rubber trim before repainting a damaged panel (denied responsibility.) Then there was a shop that scratched up the interior whilst installing window tint. When I recently got the GTI tinted as well, another tint place had to redo the job three times. At least they gave me a discount in apology, which is why I’m not linking to their website.

Because competence is not often encountered, I do well to remember the ones that perform to par. I recently changed the wheels on the GTI, retaining the same set of tires. The tire shop I chose did the job exactly as prescribed. They even filled the tires correctly to the specified pressure on the door jam. And made sure each rubber stayed at the same corners as before, so as to not mess up the wear rotation. When you find capable shops like this, you make sure to continue patronizing.

Some additional shoutouts: the parts department at Volkswagen of Marin has excellent communication. The America’s Tire location in Milbrae has done over half a dozen set of tires for me over the years and has yet to disappoint. ZTF Automotive is the best indy VW/Audi mechanic in the Bay Area.

Unfortunately, we can’t all be Thanos and do it ourselves.

Stay put and wait

With AI companies buying up all the world’s memory chip supply, it’s tough out here for the average Joe buying or building computers. Our combined economies of scale cannot begin to match a batch order from the likes of OpenAI. So of course you have entire chip companies saying they are bowing out of the consumer business altogether. There’s more than enough money serving B2B. Because fuck us, that’s why.

Just today the base model Mac mini is marked as unavailable at the Apple Store. Too many people are buying them to run LLMs locally. Higher tier models with increased memory and storage are backordered for months. Other manufacturers have computers to sell you immediately, but they’ve raised the pricing tremendously in response to the chip shortage.

It’s simply not a good time for the computing enthusiast. First was the GPU pricing squeeze from years back, and now another critical component is seeing highly inflated prices. If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period, other components will surely be affected as well. These companies cannot swallow increased logistics costs for very long. Amazon Prime free shipping might go from two days to four.

As I type this out on my 2021 MacBook Pro, I guess numerically speaking I can use an upgrade. But the current aforementioned computing landscape is so constraining that I reckon it’s prudent to keep waiting if possible. Thankfully the first generation of Apple Silicon chips remain eminently powerful and efficient, even some five years later. I have to say it was smart of me to have the foresight to spec for 32 GB of RAM when I bought this laptop. Even as successive macOS releases use more and more resources, this M1 MacBook Pro is still not running out of memory space.

The memory chip shortage is also affecting memory card prices. I’ve been looking to buy higher capacity SD cards for my camera, but the pricing has ballooned 30 to 40% in the past month. I guess I don’t need the additional space anymore! I rather offload the camera more often than pay the inflated pricing.

Staying put and waiting is the play right now.

Say no to black wheels

One of the famous lines from the cult movie The Fast and the Furious is: “…overnight parts from Japan.” As if it were really that easy and quick to get car parts. Perhaps it indeed was back in those days, but in our modern tariff-filled turbulent times, the wait can be excruciating. And you’ll pay more for the product, too.

Unless of course you took advantage of Black Friday deals like I did. On the day after Thanksgiving 2025 I bought a set of wheels for my then new-to-me MK7 VW Golf GTI. It wasn’t anything special, just the same exact wheel as the original set that came with the car, but painted silver. The factory wheels were painted in black. I absolutely detest black-colored wheels, and don't understand why it is the current fashion in automotive-dom.

You look at the wheels of most new cars on sale, and the wheels are likely painted black. Why spend the R&D money at all on intricate wheel design when it all gets lost in a black circle. Worst, after a fresh coat of brake dust, black-colored wheels look like a decaying, rusting piece of iron. No thank you.

That was why I was determined to get different set of wheels. Thankfully Volkswagen sells the same design in silver, so that was the obvious choice. I am too old to be fussing with fitting aftermarket wheels. OEM is the best. They’ve certainly spent the most money developing the parts.

It wasn’t until last week that the wheels I ordered back in November of last year, arrived and ready for pick up. Five freaking months of waiting, because the wheels are made in Germany, and these days importing anything from outside the U.S. seems to be a hilarious crap-shoot. Overnight parts from Japan in 2026? It’ll probably get stuck in customs.

I don't have money

These days I am seeing a lot of FL5 Honda Civic Type Rs on the road. It’s a real curiosity because one, Honda does not produce many, and two, the Type R is rather expensive. A cool low $50K when it’s all said and done (got to pay the tax man, you know), and then there’s the super high insurance premiums. (Thanks to the totally not a war in Iran, gas is not cheap either.)

How are folks affording these cars?! The demographic of Type R buyers skews young, mind you. This isn’t a case of boomers buying cars they can easily budget for. I myself can mathematically afford an FL5, but I simply would not be comfortable plucking down that much money on mere transportation, even if it looks and performs awesomely.

Perhaps I’ve aged out of being irresponsible with money vis a vis cars. I’ve done it, thankfully financially recovered from it, and have no desire to do it again.

Or, my mother would say: “Everybody has money. It’s you who don’t have money.” That’s probably true. Sure it’s easy to run credit and get into debt in America for shiny things, but the fact is there’s also statistically a lot of people out there with money. The median income in the San Francisco Bay Area is mathematically apparent. So it actually should not be a surprise that I encounter a large concentration of FL5 Civic Type Rs on the road around here.

It’s just frustrating sometimes that my better financial senses are restricting the possible experiences that I can pursue as a car enthusiast. That is why, out of spite, out of jealousy, and simply as a cope: I’ve stopped watching YouTube videos of cars I cannot begin to afford. Another unobtainable special edition Porsche 911? Watching about it only brings sadness.

That's just your opinion

There’s some naysayers out there who say spending thousands of dollars on plane tickets to Guangzhou, only to not explore anywhere else in China, is a waste of money and time. These people’s vision of traveling is to do as much as possible and visit as many places as possible. PTO is a precious commodity, is it not? You can lounge around and eat right at home. No need to spend so extravagantly.

Good news is, I live for me. Forcing myself to travel differently just because of the opinions of others would be peak inauthenticity. It’s like wanting a child soon as your friend group start popping out babies. Memetic tendencies that served us well ancestrally - you don’t want to be the caveman that sticks out - are no longer necessary. We can and should live how we want to, unheeding the conscious and subconscious influence of others.

I travel because I want to spend time living in places that I like. I could spend two weeks in Seoul and do nothing but hang out, walk around, and eat. The touristy stuff isn’t a must-do. The goal isn’t to check as many boxes on the landmarks list. If it were, I’d have gone to Europe many years ago, instead of visiting China every single year since 2014.

Waste of a plane ticket? Absolutely not. That’s like saying renting a place - versus buying a home - is throwing money away. It’s all transactions that we simply don’t agree on the value in return. You maximizers out there surely cringe at doing relatively nothing in a foreign city for two weeks. I on the other hand reckon that’s a lovely time. Besides, anything is better than working, right?

Well, maybe not

I absolutely wouldn’t mind living in Guangzhou. What would I do for a living? Well, what would anyone do in China who speaks perfect English? I’d end up in the sector of the service industry that’s frequented by foreigners. A front desk person at a western branded hotel, perhaps. I reckon earning money should not be a problem.

The main problem is obviously the lack of citizenship. I mean, I had citizenship - I was born in Guangzhou. However, the Chinese government does not recognize dual citizenship. My Chinese nationality was forfeited soon as I became an American citizen. It seems the only American citizen who can be a Chinese national at the same time is Olympic gold medal skier Eileen Gu. And that is why I dislike her. Not because she “betrayed” the U.S. to ski under the five stars. But only because she’s got the dual citizenship that nobody else can have. Perversely unfair.

Oh well. For all its benefits - great food, complete safety, living under the great Chinese firewall is frustratingly difficult for someone like me who is used to American Internet. I cannot imagine life without access to YouTube - entirely blocked in China. Sure there are VPN apps, but their functionality relies entirely on the benefaction of the ruling communist party. If they decide one day to block them all, they can and will.

Kpop is also effectively banned in China, thanks to troubled relations between China and South Korea. As a massive purveyor of Korean music, that’s not going to work for me. It’s not about access to songs; that’s not the problem. The issue is the lack of concerts on the mainland. South Korean acts are currently banned from holding performances in China. Have you noticed that BTS - arguably the most popular boy band on the planet - is going on this massive world tour, and there isn’t a single Chinese city on this list? I’d be pretty pissed if I were a Chinese Kpop-head. I have to leave the country every single time I want to see my favorites perform.

Living in China would clash too much with my preferred forms of entertainment. I want my Hollywood movies unmutilated by censors. Would Grand Theft Auto 6 - if it ever releases - even be available in China?

Under pressure

Mustn’t forget to check your tire pressures periodically! Even the most sealed up wheel and tire combination will lose air overtime. Especially those us driving around in internal combustion cars. In these troubled times of exorbitant gasoline prices, every bit of conservation helps. You are figuratively throwing money away if the car is running lower than optimal tire pressures. Friendly reminder the prescription is on the front driver door jam.

I wonder how many people who can otherwise install chargers at home are kicking themselves right now for not having an electric vehicle. Notorious PG&E shenanigans aside, the likelihood of electricity rates going up 25% over a span of weeks is practically impossible. Not so, as we are seeing with gas prices. Fully electric vehicle owners are sure to be pretty smug right about now.

If this war with Iran goes on for long enough, the paradigm of how the United States view EVs might permanently switch to the positive. The federal EV tax credit expiration was a setback for growth. Those that want an EV probably already bought one. However, consistently elevated gas prices can be incentive enough for those outside the fence to consider opening the gate. Especially those with considerable commutes.

Ride-share and delivery drivers, too. There’s no way the apps are benevolent enough to raise the prices - and therefore the commission for the drivers - to accommodate the sudden spike in gasoline. Nor would customers be cognizant enough to tip more. So the workers will just have to eat the additional, not unsubstantial, variable cost. When the margins are already purported to be minimum wage levels, who’s going to deliver DoorDash to make zero dollars?

Those food delivery drivers already on those zippy electric scooters must also be pretty smug right now. President Trump got rid of the EV tax credit, but his war with Iran just might re-reverse the tide of adoption. The longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed, the more of an accelerant it is for Americans switching to electric motivation.