Ryan's Wisdumb

  It's time for another installment in the Old Car Files series.  This week, the old Element treated me to a guessing game I like to call "Why won't you start?".  The game began on Monday night around 8:30 as I was trying to leave my son's Boy Scout meeting.  The engine attempted to start but died immediately.  After that it wouldn't even crank at all.  It just made a little buzzing sound.  My natural first thought is a battery problem, though a few clues did not support that theory.  For one, the headlights and electronics all seemed to work fine, and there was no weak crank attempt.  Since I wasn't too far from home, I called Mrs. Wisdom to bring a battery pack for jump starting.  We hooked that up and it still wouldn't crank.  So, we tried jumping it directly from her car.  Still nothing.  Maybe her old Prius doesn't have enough juice to jump the Element. At this point, some nice men were leaving a meeting at the church parking lot where all thi

There is something wrong with me.  My most recent realization of this came courtesy of the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once .  I sought it out after hearing all the buzz about how great it was.  It started OK but started to lose me about halfway through.  I gave up and turned it off before finishing, something I very, very rarely do.  It had lost my interest.  I don't get why everyone was raving about it.  This isn't the first time this has happened.  Other notable examples of movies that didn't live up to their hype for me are The Matrix , Pulp Fiction (and every other Tarantino movie) and even universally acclaimed classics like The Godfather .  Now I didn't turn any of those movies off in the middle, but I don't think they were as good as the consensus of the masses.  In some cases, I think the movies are watchable or maybe even good, just not deserving of the gushing praise being heaped on them. I typically agree with about half of the selections that ma

  A recent article in The Morning newsletter from the New York Times rekindled a smoldering ember of thought that resides in a corner of my mind.  It has never burned hot enough to inspire me to serious study on the subject, but this time it has at least motivated me enough to write about it.  The topic is growth; how our society and economy are dependent on it, why I think that is problematic, and how it can change.  My thoughts on this subject are not well formed at this time and, unusually for Wisdumb, I offer no answers, only more questions. The Times article covered the aging population of Japan and showed the chart below projecting other major economies and the world as a whole being on the brink of a rapidly aging populous. The article primarily focused on the social impacts of this aging population, in particular that Japan is running out of workers.  It posits the only solution is to bring in more immigrants.  This is what bothers me and stokes that ember in the back of my min