Newsletter

Zero Vision and a Denim Empire

A condom a sheath

B R

07 May 2023 — 4 min read

18 April, 2023 | Tokyo, Japan

For the first time in three continents and two large island nations I woke up with a tremendous hangover. The drinks at Aiiro Cafe were both inexpensive and strong, in stark contrast to Auckland and Sydney. In Santiago they were at least inexpensive.

I woke up and decided to have a light day with two principal goals: visit the anarchist/leftist cafe across the street from the lesbian bar called Goldfinger (from my previous post) and hit up an enormous Muji store to see what they do when they can go hog wild on space.

But on my walk over I encountered something that is going to let me mouth off about Seattle’s garbage attempts at urbanism and pedestrian safety.

Vision Zero “is a multi-national road traffic safety project” with the goal of reducing roadway deaths to, well, zero. Dozens of cities, states, and countries have signed on and, in most of them, deaths have been on a steady decline. Seattle joined in 2015, Tokyo in 2018. Let’s see how they stack up.

Tokyo has a population of ~15 million people and had 117 traffic deaths in 2021, around a 30% decrease from 2020, about 7.8 deaths per million people. How’s it going in Seattle?

Haha, this sucks man. That number is supposed to be going down. (Source: Seattle.gov)

Oh, that’s bad. Both the trend and the number. Seattle isn’t even a million people. I wonder why there is such a discrepanc

Finally, SUVs won’t even need to hop a curb to crush the skulls of children in Pike Place Market. I’m going to create a Waterfront Seattle parody account with headlines like “We’ve heard you, and back by popular demand, we are reintroducing Viaduct Classic. Ground breaking on this Seattle landmark is slated for next year!”

Oh, right.

By the way, I tried using one of the dumbass chatbots to research those numbers and it turned my computer into a house of lies.

This is the new Bing AI app that is now generally available for free with no login or anything. The numbers for Tokyo above are a *complete fabrication*. Ted Chiang is helpful to read on this topic.

Well anyway the cafe I was going to was closed. I never managed to actually go to it while in Tokyo because the times posted on their website didn’t seem to have any relation to their opening hours. I think this is good and extremely on brand.

I’m just kind of glad it’s there. I’m counting this in the ACAB tally, but I’ll get another hit for Japan here too in a subsequent post.

For those that didn’t read my previous description of Muji, or don’t remember, it’s a Japanese store you can find in a few US locations that specializes in unbranded, boring, simple, practical home items and clothing. I’m wearing their underwear right now.

This big multistory flagship version had a couple of kinda cool things.