Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. I'd feel differently if some big corporate chain were doing this, but if it's a little "mom & pop"/"hole in the wall" type place, cheap advertising is a neutral-to-positive signal.
> Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it.
Why? When you see a derelict pizzeria, you don't think "they must be devoting all their energy to making good pizzas!". Similarly, that a coffee shop owner uses AI for branding is a big signifier of their laziness or lack of attention to detail.
If I'm lining up to order from a shabby old school bus with a menu in the window written in sharpie on a piece of cardboard, I know I'm a couple minutes away from tucking into some banging tacos.
I loved my first tungsten wedding ring so much I got another one when I remarried. It has a really satisfying feeling of solidity. Your safety concern does not trouble me at all: yes, it's a very hard metal, but it's brittle. You can't cut a stuck tungsten ring loose the way you can a gold ring, but you can easily break it, using a hammer or a pair of vice-grips.
A consequence of this approach is that the insurance industry might as well not exist as far as I am concerned; they have poisoned their entire value proposition. I will not voluntarily do business with people who plan to screw me over.
A rule of thumb is that it's never worth taking out insurance on something that you can afford to replace in full yourself.
Note though that in many cases, insurance is mandated by law. In many states you have to have auto insurance. If you have a mortgage you usually have to have home insurance. The cost of medical treatment is such that a single accident can cost more than your lifetime earnings, essentially forcing an automatic bankruptcy. Indeed, the reason for the auto and home insurance mandates is often to pay for liability coverage in case you get sued for somebody else's medical treatment.
Given the dealings that I've had with the insurance industry, it seems that many companies realize that their function is just to tick the legal box. They have skeleton or nonexistent claims-handling departments that employees are frequently laid off from. The goal is to slow-walk any claims past the statute of limitations, so that nobody gets paid out anyway, but they can continue to collect the premiums because the government requires that everyone have insurance. (But then another phenomena is that people are increasingly ignoring the government too, such that they now offer "uninsured motorist coverage" to make up for cases where you're hit and hurt by someone who illegally doesn't have insurance.)
I buy bare minimum coverage because it has been my experience that you end up screwed in the event of a collision no matter what kind of insurance you have. Insurance companies are in the business of taking your money now and finding every possible excuse not to give it back later; I'd rather keep it in my own pocket.
This is part of the reason I prefer inexpensive cars: buying only what I can afford to pay for outright means there is no loan which would obligate me to carry a comprehensive insurance policy.
The experience you envision does not sound so strange to me, having grown up in an intensely religious subculture which had a sense of truth quite distinct from that of mainstream society. Observing the blatant conflict between different communities' world-views engendered a healthy skepticism which has served me well through life. I think the kids will be all right.
I never got over the BlackBerry. Even after years of typing on glass, I still feel clumsy and uncomfortable. I avoid typing on my phone any more than I have to, because it is an exercise in frustration. I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Clicks Communicator:
Why wouldn't they just blame the nurse anyway? The law always puts somebody on the hook. The nurse's job will be to do what the AI says and take the blame when it fails.
Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.
Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
> I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
I see these all the time here in the Netherlands. Very small cars. Some on the road and even smaller ones people drive on the bike paths. Small motorized vehicles, ebikes and scooters share the paths with regular bikes which works because they have usually at least two lanes, so they are more like tiny roads. Very handy.
Regulation kills the value proposition. You are basically describing a "neighborhood electric vehicle", but US law limits them to 25 mph, and it is not legal to drive them on many arterials, so they are only really useful inside communities which were designed for them.
They really should just open up letting you have a small vehicle everywhere in the country. Sometimes you visit some city or little rural area where they let you drive golf carts or atvs or snow mobiles on the roads, grocery store lots are more full of those instead of bigger vehicles as a result, and the sky doesn't seem to fall down either.
I get it if you live in a dense metro. A car is not worth it in NYC, SF, etc. Other than that it's pretty abnormal for people not to want a car. It's usually some weird anxiety about driving. Not to mention - heaven forbid - you have a family.
They are very popular in china, such as the Wuling ev. In America, they are afraid of them because they are small. They want big cars to have a large crumple area in a crash.
Because most people feel uncomfortable being in the tiny vehicle that sits below the bumber of all the trucks and suvs that surround them. It's one of those things that doesn't work until a large percentage of other people are doing it. Very few want to put themselves in more danger for principled reasons.
And cars started getting bigger because, it was a way to legally classify them as trucks thus saving money for the manufacturer. And then everyone had to follow just to feel safe
And of course this mostly only happened and is far more noticeable in the us than elsewhere when measured in car size and people were convinced to buy the larger cars aka turned SUVs and pick up trucks by marketing. This started to happen in the 2000s
I'm in a 200 inhabitants village in eastern Europe, we have 3 bus stops in the village (so at most you're 10min away from a stop), the bus goes to the closest city every hour from 4:30 to 22:30 except on Sunday (every two hours from 6 to 21), from there you can take a train to every major city in the country, my neighbor is a 76 year old widow who goes to the city by bus regularly and who bikes around a lot. Half of the kids go to school via this bus, many people go to work with it. It's free for kids and retired people too.
When public transportation is designed properly it works fine for the extreme vast majority of people, and taking a taxi for the last mile if you're disabled, obese, lazy, etc. will cost you less than owning and maintaining a car.
I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
>I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co
When the bus (in your example) runs on a hourly schedule, while your car is always there when you spontaneously need it, then that freedom is real and not just propaganda.
I did this type of commute before where I had to catch the bus to work, which was also once every hour, and the anxiety during my early morning routine to not miss the bus was crazy since missing it meant one more hour of wait, compared to the freedom of jumping in my car without a fixed schedule while also saving 1h/day of time compared to the public transit, the difference was night and day, not propaganda.
Now if I had a train/subway to work, where I could sit down, and it ran every 15 minutes or less, then yeah, fuck driving and public transport all the way, but nobody sits in traffic for fun, but because of all options for their commute, driving is the better option.
Then let's keep on fucking the planet, and let's keep on moving 70kg of meat over 30km per day on average with 2500kg of steal, 400kg of battery, etc. super efficient and sustainable!
YES, unless you wanna build me public transport from your tax money, let's! If you want people to stop fucking the planet with driving, then you need to stop fucking their lives with hellish public transport commutes and improve it till it's bearable.
I have only one life on this planet, and it's much shorter than the planet's life, therefore I need to make it a good and comfortable one while it lasts not sacrifice it for nothing, while China and India keep lighting the planet on fire and my boss is chauffeured in luxury cars and has 3 vacation homes. You need to (have the wealthy) lead by example and sacrifice themselves too before you ask the same from the working class!
If you wanna save the planet, then first talk to China and India, talk to politicians and corporate billionaires with private jets and yachts making a killing from forcing everyone into office 5 days/week and dodging taxes so that cities lack funds for infrastructure, not to the working class keeping the world running and feeding their families.
>we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
Didn't you just say you can get around fine on the bus? Can't you just get a car if it suits you?
For me personally it's nice to have a car. It would certainly be tough if I had less resources and public transit would be more appreciated.
Seattle, late middle age. Kid just started high school. My wife has a large e-bike with a passenger seat, but replaced it with a cargo basket a couple years ago after the kiddo outgrew it.
I didn't say that scooters were a solution for everyone, you may note. I don't think there ought to be one solution for everyone, but given the option of micromobility, I really have no use for autonomous vehicles.
The famously small conurbations and the reality that Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year. They have cars and public transit for the rest.
I'd add that these discussions tend to handwave the reality of safety when you're on an open platform movie at high speeds, the reality that not all people are physically able, and a lot of others issues that the vocal "cars are the devil" folks don't engage seriously with.
It's getting really old, and it increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "kill all pitbulls" crowd.
> Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year.
They very much bike all year round, even in the north where it regularly gets to -20C(-4F) in winter. Biking in snowy sub-freezing weather is really not a big deal as long as you maintain the bike paths as well as the streets.
Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used. The only time I can recall where people I knew who usually commuted by bike didn't do so was during an unusually heavy snowstorm. They instead had to walk about half a kilometer to/from where the city had managed to plow the streets and take a taxi. That was decades ago.
> Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used.
I don't live in Finway or Norway. It would be nice to be in a country that accepted a more pescetarian / fish-based diet. It might help with the able-bodied reasoning given elsewhere for car driving.
But I live in the US. Here in the US, the loudest advocates we have for biking are groups like Critical Mass. Up in Chicago they have a winter biking campaign. But we know how Critical Mass is perceived by people on the fence about more biking investment. It's a radical group. So discussion digresses into sidewalk safety issues and identity politics. And yes, sidewalk safety impacts people, falls are dangerous for many populations. But all that media bandwidth means simple messages of celebrating biking and transit get lost. There's only limited time on the news.
This isn't an isolated issue. I honestly think that's by design. At this point, in 2026, it's not an accident.
So you have people like me, jobless pervert civil libertarian hipster techbros being the group advocating for more biking. What do you think is going to happen US?
Waymo will be the same thing.
It will be turned into a drama show about saving people feom drunk driving accidents, a very good thing. But then there will be pushback about it encouraging more drinking among the population and increasing rates of domestic abuse. A very horrible and tragic thing.
And some of us will be going to a food pantry wondering why it can't be a more bike oriented endeavor and knowing the truth in our hearts. The US wants drama, even after Trump is gone. And that drama takes focus from just rolling out programs to encourage love of public transit and biking. Media saturation matters. And I don't believe anymore.
So, I'm sorry, Chicago or up north doesn't seem like a great choice personally. It's not healthy for me to dream about up families up there. I'll be biking out west.
Scandanavians have been getting around without cars for millenia. Nobody had even heard of a car until just over a century ago.
Car dependent infrastructure is definitely not helpful for the physically disabled, as well as those too young, too old, and too poor to drive a car. This and a lot of other issues that the vocal and active "cars aren't the devil" crowd don't engage seriously with.
It's getting really old, and increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "Pitbulls make great family dogs" crowd.
Hospitals at the dawn of the 19th century in Europe were generally places only poor people in desperate situations went to give birth because they were hives of disease transmission.
The notion that doctors should wash their hands between treating one patient and the next was met with ridicule. Doctors were insulted by the suggestion that their hands might be unclean, so mortality rates for childbirth in hospitals were horrendous. The idea of handwashing emerged and died many times before it finally caught on, and then only at the behest of vigorous campaigning over a generation.
There is a long list of hidden costs and negative externalities associated with car dependent sprawl as well, they are well studied, but nobody want to hear that their hands are unclean. This idea one should be washing their hands a dozens times per shift is patently absurd. Physicians would be wasting hours a day just washing their hands! How would we be able to treat all these patients?
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