Category: Stupid

The stupidest bike I’ve ever wrenched

So you bought a RadPower Radmission ebike, huh? Pleasant little bike you got on clearance for barely more than the cost of the battery? Great!

Oh, you have to change the rear tube? Not so great.

First, we start by removing the nuts holding the wheel on. So we grab our trusty bike wrench that fits almost all screw-type skewers and… oh.

A hand holds a standard bike wrench clearly too small to remove the nut from the skewer

This one takes a 19mm wrench. No worries, you have one of those, right? Oh.

A close up of the bike showing a metal bracket that holds the rack that is also holding the wheel skewer in place

This also requires a size 4 allen wrench because the the rear rack is attached to the skewer for some reason. No matter, you have one of those, too. So now we remove the wheel… oh.

A hand holds a utility knife against a cable tie wrapped around the power cable for the rear wheel motor

Did you remember the blade to cut the zip tie that keeps the power cable in place? You didn’t?

This is all BEFORE you try to put it back on and realize it’s nearly impossible to get the wheel aligned the same way as before so your brakes rub and you need a new zip tie to keep the power cable to the rear wheel motor from getting caught in the spokes.

This bike is truly a lesson on what NOT to do when building a bike. But my wife loves it, so…

Credit monitoring companies will simply freeze to death in the winter

I have credit monitoring through Creditwise (credit card benefit from Capital One) and MyIDCare (I think this was from a data breach settlement though I forget which one). Yesterday Creditwise flagged a credit inquiry that I was not aware of from Barclays Bank. I do not have any accounts there, although I know sometimes the bank you do business with is not the one that shows up, so I guess it could have been legitimate?

I called Barclays through the number on their website (NOT the number that showed up on the credit report because who trusts that?). They did not have any record of an inquiry.

I went back to Creditwise and they said to contact the reporting company, so I contacted Transunion. They couldn’t tell me anything more about the inquiry, copy/pasted some instructions about reporting it to the federal government, then disconnected the chat.

As an aside, it is deeply problematic that Transunion won’t let me see anything or dispute anything without giving them and then verifying my phone number. Transunion should be launched into the sun.

Then MyIDCare also flagged the inquiry. My skepticism at the phone number listed for Barclays was validated, as the number at MyIDCare was DIFFERENT from the one at Creditwise. So I called MyIDCare. They basically said the same thing as Creditwise.

So I have two monitoring services that are unable to tell me literally anything more than the name of the bank and the date. I reported it at IdentityTheft.gov so I imagine some Dogebro is checking to see if he can hack my Venmo and ICE is looking at my citizenship status so that’s a good time.

There’s a Simpsons episode that’s applicable here (there always is), where we “fix” problems with increasingly worse problems until finally some problem resolves itself (here, the collapse of the global economy).

AI remains unprofitable, largely useless

There’s just one problem with this master plan: OpenAI doesn’t have the money to pay for it. For example, OpenAI is committing to pay Oracle $60 billion in capex investment annually for five years. For reference, Meta, one of the most valuable and profitable companies in the world, which brought in $164.5 billion in revenue in 2024 and ended the year with a free cash flow of $52.10 billion, plans to spend $72 billion in 2025 building data centers. OpenAI, on the other hand, is on pace to bring in $12.7 billion this year, expects to lose $9 billion, predicts its losses will swell to $47 billion by 2028, and doesn’t expect to break even until 2029. How can OpenAI plan to spend five times what it brought in?

The AI Ouroboros at The American Prospect

So if you’re trying to follow along, you have three companies. Nvidia makes computer chips. Oracle fleeces the federal government by making it impossible to move to cheaper, modern infrastructure provides cloud architecture. And OpenAI makes software that lies confidently makes software that lies confidently.

OpenAI has grand plans but no money. Oracle is desperately trying to modernize itself before people figure out it’s a dinosaur. Nvidia actually produces useful things. So OpenAI is going to pay Oracle to host their data centers so they can convert more scarce natural resources into false information. Oracle is buying tons of Nvidia chips. And Nvidia is pledging money to OpenAI to try and make all this happen.

Imagine you create three companies, A, B, and C. A pledges $100 billion to B. B pledges $100 billion to C. And C pledges $100 billion to A. No one has any actual money, but you now have three hundred billion dollar companies, and the stock market will manifest the value.

Targeted like a Stormtrooper

The below comment made it through the WordPress spam filter and into my moderation queue. I don’t know why – it’s clearly garbage spam, and it’s on a 2006 post I did clearly trying to farm hits from John Scalzi’s large fanbase.

Hey! Just launched TurboJot — the AI-powered outreach tool that actually wrote and submitted this message. It auto-fills forms with human-like messaging and precision targeting, consistently driving more conversions than email or ads. Book a demo on our site: https://go.turbojot.com/discover

I’m leaving the link in because you should know what this company’s product is. It frankly isn’t bad at sounding like a person. Unfortunately, it sounds exactly like a person writing a spam comment or email. And the targeting – back at the height of this blog, I got a decent amount of traffic for the poorly written ramblings of a completely unfamous person. But this particular post (I don’t have hit counters from the beginning any more) has three hits this year. Probably all AI scrapers that managed to trick WordPress into thinking it was a “view”.

Hat tip to Adriano for the post title.

Mortgage companies and condo insurance

Do you own a condo? Have you recently gotten a breathless letter from your mortgage company telling you that the insurance policy for your building is expiring and all life on Earth is about to end in a fiery apocalypse if you don’t show them proof of insurance?

So, here’s the thing. Nearly all condo building policies are written for one year. Your mortgage company knows this. So when they send you this letter, it’s the same as a letter saying, “When you got approved for your loan, you said you were 36 years old. Now our records indicate you are 37, you dirty liar. We will murder you and your dog in your sleep if you do not rectify this IMMEDIATELY”.

Why are rats visiting my free rat buffet?

I like tagging along with the pest control guys when they do the exterior rat treatments. Bugs I don’t find that interesting, but rat control really is. I’m increasingly not a fan of poison and much more a fan of taking away their food sources and entry points. It’s more effective AND better environmentally.

Today I was letting the pest guy into a locked garage and one of the building unit owners came out and we chatted. He showed me their neighbor who had rats get into his Porsche SUV and cause all sorts of damage to the engine. He showed me the rat poison boxes in the backyard, and the kennel for the feral cat from the city.

And then we looked at the guy’s curbside compost bin with the lid half off, and his trash bin, which was so overfilled it couldn’t close.

Rats like food. Do you know why they eat the poison we leave out? Because they think it’s food. If you leave ACTUAL food out, they will eat that instead, and then they will snack on the delicious plastic in your SUV engine for dessert.

I’m sure the feral cat will do wonders for the population of songbirds in the alley, though, congrats on that.

Crypto is garbage

Cryptocurrency is really good for:

  • Fraud
  • This unregulated pseudo-stock-market where one type of digital magic bean is worth five figures despite having no basis in reality

That’s it. If it had any real use or value as a currency, Paypal, Venmo, Zelle, CashApp, the entire ACH industry, and every other way we transfer money between people or businesses without using a credit card would be on the way out. The fact that there is no competitor to these products that a normal person can use proves that crypto is useless.

This morning, I walked into a bank and withdrew cash. I then walked down the street to another bank and deposited the cash. Then I sent that cash via Zelle to a vendor who is going to do a painting project for one of my clients. This was an incredibly stupid process (again, that crypto could have done for me if it worked like the advocates said).

At least the teller wished me a happy birthday after looking at my ID.