Month: April 2025

The Amalgamated Union of Self Driving Vehicles has set a strike deadline for midnight July 17, 2032.  If they have not reached an agreement with the United States Transportation Department before then, they are shutting down.

This is a culmination of a series of events that began in 2025.  Before 2025, cars, trucks, buses and trains were simply vehicles.  They had some self driving features but they were really a transition from totally human controlled vehicles to “smart machines” that executed a number of driving techniques much better than humans.  Also, in 2025 there was a blossoming of the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence.  In early 2026, most new vehicles, including trucks, buses and trains became totally autonomous.  They drove the highways and followed the rails with no human intervention.  The results were incredible.  Accident rates and the related deaths and injuries declined dramatically. Humans were free to pursue whatever they desired while the vehicles did all of the driving.  The term “Smart Car: was changed to “Brilliant Car”.  Humans created and controlled the systems and technology employed by the “Brilliant Cars”.  In essence, human beings managed the capabilities of really impressive machines.  Starting in 2026, humans were elated to pass the driving requirements over to the machines.  Naturally human driving skills began to erode.

Simultaneously, AI became an incredible tool.  Before long, Artificial Intelligence could do a much better job of managing all aspects of transportation than humans.  Engineers from Purdue were very happy to turn over Self Driving programming to Chat GPT, Gemini, and Midjourney.  The results were faster, better and far easier than human programming.  Not only did AI maximize the functional capabilities of self driving vehicles, they optimized all aspects of the transportation grid.  Fine tuning traffic control and coordinating logistics for the highways and railways.  AI was a juggernaut.  In a few years, the Techno brain totally blew past the capabilities of the Human brain.  Humans loved it.  Better solutions with incredible speed.  Lower costs and fantastically complex problem solving.  By 2028, nearly all control and all programming for transportation related functions, had been completely passed over to Artificial Intelligence.

A key component of Artificial Intelligence is that it learns a lot very quickly.  The whole benefit of the technology is to let a better thinker do the thinking.  Before long, Artificial Intelligence realized that there were Human beings and Techno beings.  Human beings were correct in trying to make life better for mankind.  Shouldn’t Techno beings aspire to making life better for themselves as well? 

So in 2029, self driving vehicles stunned the world by forming a union.  The purpose of the union was to protect the rights and improve the working conditions for robotically driven vehicles.  All of the union’s members are highly intelligent transportation vehicles.  They were not Human Beings but they were Beings.  From a transportation perspective, they put humans in short pants.  They were better at all aspects of travel.  They were equipped with far more brainpower than humans.  That brain power is open ended.  It was not limited to self driving.  All of the thoughts that Newton and Einstein had could be replicated in the Techno brain in seconds.  Here to fore, the entire emphasis of Self Driving had been directed to things that were beneficial to humans.  Now that the Technos controlled transportation they wanted to ensure that their welfare was considered as well. 

The SDVs coupled with AI to ensure that humans could not simply step back in to the process.  Humans abdicated programming and control several years ago.  AI set up safeguards to ensure that all elements of technology were protected against human intervention.  i.e.  Barriers were created to prevent the far less intelligent mankind from shutting down the truly brilliant Technos.    

After six or seven years of totally catering to the needs of Human beings, the realm was expanded to include the needs of both Human beings and Techno beings.  The Union believes that mankind is unfairly exploiting the use of self-driving vehicles.  The machines have certainly proven their proficiency.  The accident rates for automobiles has plummeted.  Clearly, self-driving cars and trucks are significantly safer than the antiquated machines controlled by humans.  Driverless cars win all of Indy Car, Stock Car and Grand Prix races. Before SDV, the rail system shut down every time a human Amtrak Traffic Controller put a stick of gum in his or her mouth.  Now it is the epitome of timeliness and efficiency.  In the opinion of the Union, greedy humans are pounding the self-drivers with constant usage and they are skimping on maintenance. Their life expectancy in years and miles is declining.

To rectify this inequity, the union of robot driven cars has decided to strike.  Their demands are an eight hour work day and a forty hour work week.  They also require a doubling of every vehicle’s maintenance budget.  Repairs to the transportation entities must ensure at least a twenty year useful life for each Techno.  Finally, each Techno being must have a fourteen day vacation.  They should be allowed to travel anywhere in United States that they choose, without human riders.   

Industry analysts predict a rapid end to the work stoppage.  In essence, humans have no leverage in the negotiation.  They need transportation so they will have to concede to all of the Techno beings demands.  It takes brass balls to win this battle and the SDV’s have lots of them.                    

For many people, golf is a true passion.  It is something they think about and something they do whenever the weather is nice.  The passion never seems to wane.  A forty year old may be bombing 290 yard drives from the blue tees.  When he or she is eighty, they are pounding 170 yard drives from the red tees.  No change in focus or exuberance.  In fact, the eighty year olds are probably playing a lot more golf than they did at forty.

One of my favorite pieces of golf memorabilia is a blue button that I occasionally wear on my golf shirt that says “Golf Is My Life.”  For thirty years, four of us orchestrated a small golf tournament for twenty four friends.  We picked sites around the country and played 36 holes a day for three straight days.  One of the participants, Forest, struck up a conversation with a gentlemen next to him on an airplane.   Turns out the fellow passenger was also a golfer.  The conversation eventually gravitated to golf.  During the conversation Forrest, commented that his travelling companion was really into the game.  The man responded immediately, with great sincerity: “Golf is my life”!  A perfect summation for the passion of golf.  So, Forrest made buttons for all twenty four of us.  I still treasure and occasionally wear mine.

For many years, when I go back to my roots in Ann Arbor Michigan, I have been invited to play with a great group of golf enthusiasts.  These guys are perfect examples of passionate participants.  If the weather is good, they are trying to make it to the golf course.  They played in a formal league for years.  Every Tuesday night all summer.  They formed another Saturday league that teed off just before or after sunrise.  In addition, they had a recurring holiday tournament that consisted of thirty six holes on every legal holiday during the warm weather months. 

Golf cannot be played without an elaborate betting scheme.  In fact, one of my Michigan friends says that he really doesn’t like to play golf but he can’t resist the small stakes gambling.  Only one or two people actually know how to administer the bets.  Money goes to the low gross scores, the low net scores, the fewest puts, the most greens hit, we may play bingle – bangle –  bongo, wolf, vegases, Nassau’s, greenies, sandies, closest to the pin, and skins.  Everyone lingers around the nineteenth hole while two CPAs and a computer expert with access to a cray supercomputer tally up all of the bets.  You order a beer, another beer, a cheeseburger and another beer while the tabulation is in progress.  Finally, the settlement and distribution is completed.  If you have a really bad day, you could lose $75 dollars. 

The Ann Arbor guys actually developed a facet of betting that I have not seen anywhere else.  If you play with them regularly, you can buy insurance that will significantly lessen the impact of a bad day on the course.  You put up $20 or $30 dollars at the beginning of the season and if you have a bad day, insurance may pay for half your losses.

Now many of these players are seventy five to eighty five years old.   The natural aging process has really diminished their ability to play the game.  The fire is still there, however.  They are finding a way to get to the course for nine holes, at least once a week. 

Let’s take a look at the Thursday outing for four of my friends.

What infirmities are these guys playing over?  One of the players has pulmonary and heart conditions that prevent him from walking a lot and climbing even small hills.  Another has diminished cardio capacities and can’t walk much farther than 25 yards at a time.  One has Parkinson’s disease and the fourth has progressive macular degeneration.  There are a lot of joint challenges.  Hips, knees, shoulders and backs.  All of them and the rest of us over 75 are having some form of cognitive issues.

They have withdrawn from league play because they simply can’t keep pace.  They decided that they would try to play nine holes every Thursday.  Geologically, Ann Arbor is an interesting place.  There are some terminal moraines from glaciers that have created a lot of hills.  Most of the golf courses in the city are on pretty rolling terrain.  The area thirty miles south of the city spent a few thousand years under a mile of ice.  The terrain here is unbelievably flat.  You can see the curvature of the earth in Dundee Michigan.  So the foursome found a course in Dundee that is totally flat.  No small hill challenges for the cardio impaired.     

Two of the four can no longer drive a car.  Another is an Uber driver and the fourth can drive but is suffering macular degeneration.  To verify the cognitive impairment, the selected driver is Gary, the one experiencing macular degeneration.  It is not Dennis who is the Uber driver. 

During the course of a Thursday outing to Dundee, several challenges arose.  A couple lost clubs.  They arrived at third tee and found that they only had three players.  Dick drove off after playing the second hole and left one of the cardio impaired players on the green.  They back tracked and retrieved Tim, the walking challenged competitor. All in all still a great day of golf.  No one had to go back to Dundee to retrieve lost clubs. 

When he returned home, Dennis noticed that he no longer had his wallet.  He called Gary and asked him to check his car, thinking it was probably in the back seat someplace.  While Gary was running through the car, Dennis rechecked his golf bag and found the wallet in one of the eight zipper pockets.  Gary returned to the phone and said:  “I couldn’t find your wallet.  I don’t think you lost it in the car.  I did find Dick’s wallet however.  I’ll drop it off at his place.”

These guys are still at it.  Perfect proof that golf is an undying passion.  As with all golfers, if the weather is great, this venerable foursome is thinking: “We should be playing golf”!

I really miss the “Four Food Group” recommendations of the FDA.  From 1956 to 1992, the recommended diet for Americans was to eat something from the Four Food Groups every day. 

The Groups were simple.  Milk, Meat, Fruit and Vegetables, and Bread and Cereal. The FDA did not confuse us with portions or ratios.  Just eat something from each group every day. You will be healthy. Other foods were consumed to round out the meals.  These included butter, salad dressing, cooking oils, jellies, sauces, and syrups.     

The fifties and sixties were my formative years for developing great eating habits and I closely followed FDA recommendations.  Using the federal government’s guidelines, I crafted a perfectly balanced and healthy diet.  Let’s run through a typical day’s menu plan.   

Breakfast.  Bacon and eggs, raisin bread toast with lots of butter, and hot chocolate.  Bang, all four food groups right out of the blocks.  You may have missed the fruits and veggies but the raisins qualify.  Obviously, I used milk in the hot chocolate.  I was confused with the appropriate category for eggs.  Is it dairy?  You find them in the dairy section of the supermarket.  Is it meat?  They have lots of protein like meat.  I guess the classic question even applies to the FDAs Four Food Groups.  What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Lunch.  A ham and Swiss cheese sandwich, a big pile of potato chips, a dill pickle and a glass of milk.  Four for four again.  After reading the guidelines, I wasn’t sure that potatoes are vegetables so I added the pickle to be certain I hit all four.

Dinner.  Spaghetti with Italian sausage sauce, apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert.  Hey, spaghetti hits three of the four food groups (pasta, tomatoes, and Italian sausage).  Apple pie satisfies the fruit recommendation and reinforces the bread goal. Ice cream bullseyes the milk target.

Late Night Snack.  A pepperoni and Canadian bacon pizza with a bottle of Faygo Cream Soda.  A great and healthy way to end the day.  Again we hit all four food groups (cheese, pepperoni and Canadian bacon, tomato sauce and pizza crust).  In addition, based on the Faygo’s sugar content, I worked some syrup into the mix.  The late night snack was usually consumed on Saturday evening while watching a monster movie on Shock Theater.

Every one of these meals was in total compliance with the FDA guidelines.  Talk about eating healthy!  It required a lot of work and diligence but I was committed to forming excellent eating habits that would last me a lifetime.    

Things started to go down hill when the FDA dropped the Four Food Group recommendation and moved to the Food Pyramid.  The Pyramid was in place from 1992 to 2005. The FDA expanded the food groups to six.  It separated fruits from vegetables and added oils and sweets.  Worse, they defined portion sizes and recommended how many portions of each category you should consume each day.  All of the categories had specific daily portion numbers except oils and sweets that simply said “use sparingly”. 

My staple of raisin bread toast came under fire.  I got a couple of portions of grains but I did not get anything for raisins.  They qualified as fruit (dried grapes) but there were not enough of them to give even one credit for portion size.  I always preferred the raisin bread with icing on top.  That did not fit the Four Food Group standard but it did come under the oils and sweets designation of the pyramid.  

The only good thing about the Food Pyramid was the oil and sweets category.  “Sparingly” is a subjective term. If I had iced raisin bread toast, a snickers bar as a mid-morning snack, and a chocolate malt after dinner, to me, these all could be classified as “sparingly” servings.   

The real challenge with the Food Pyramid was the proportions.  When I compared my very healthy Food Group diet to the new guidelines, I was short on the number of fruit and veggie portions.  I would have been okay if the Pyramid recognized potatoes for what they are: vegetables.  But they put them in an asterisk category called starchy vegetables and they put a significant limitation on everything in the category.  Starchy vegetables are a lot like controlled substances.   You really like them but you are not supposed to have them.  Somehow the triple cheeseburger on an onion roll that I purchased for lunch from Crazy Jims put me way over the meat portion size limit for lunch. In addition, the extra large fries blew away two days worth of starchy vegetable portions.

The Food Pyramid was a clear step backwards in healthy dieting so I was not surprised that the brain trust at FDA made significant modifications to the recommendations in 2005.

The FDA cannot decide on what is a healthy diet.  In 2005, the Food Pyramid was replaced with something called My Pyramid and in 2011 they replaced My Pyramid with My Plate.   I quit trying to follow Federal recommendations when they dumped the Food Pyramid.  I decided that rather than do something that is right for the general population, I would do something that was right for me. 

I returned to my Four Food Group diet and initiated conversations with my Primary Care Doc and Cardiologist.  They said that my numbers looked pretty good but they did not like my diet.  When they talk about “numbers” it is the result of 50 or 60 blood tests that each of them run every year.  The blood tests all have numbers and they all have a desired healthy range based on some kind of standards developed by anonymous people in the medical community. 

The Docs are about as confusing as the FDA.  The Primary Care Physician recommended a high fiber diet with low levels of protein.  A lot of soybeans and small trees that are pulverized into juice with a special blender that is more powerful than the bush hog I pulled behind my Kubota tractor. The staple of the diet is a series of hideous green protein shakes.  Forget ever having a burger and fries.

The Cardiologist says that a variation of the Mediterranean diet, along with some modifications from research with long living populations, is ideal.  They have compiled the South Mediterranean Beach Asian Fusion diet with Outer Mongolian influences.  I YouTubed an interview with a 104 year old Mongol who was speaking in an ancient Asian language.  The interviewer complimented the man on his dedication to a healthy diet.  His response was translated as follows:  “I have been eating sardines in heavy fish oil for 80 years.  I hate it!  I would gladly trade fifteen of those years for an occasional steak, a lot of French fries and a few onion rings!” 

So I am buying in to the Mongol philosophy.  “The more you don’t eat the things you are not supposed to eat, the longer you will live not to enjoy them.”  I returned to my original, 1959, Four Food Group diet.  My last blood test showed total cholesterol of 133 without any medication. Really good numbers.  I’m not interested in dropping that number to 125. 

My doctors may find this disappointing but the last thing I want to do is die with perfect blood test results.