Trying on times. I like shoes I can slip on, because bending over to use my crooked arthritic fingers as shoe horns is painful. So is tying laces. (Oddly, typing on a keyboard isn’t painful, so that’s a counted blessing.) The shoes I’m wearing now are beat-up Sketchers that I bought at Nordstrom for about a hundred bucks five years ago and show their wear.
After doing lots of research, I decided to replace these with the Skechers Men’s Equalizer 5.0 Drayze Hands Free Slip-in Sneaker, sold by Amazon for $60. (That’s one, above.) After I ordered a pair of black 9.5’s last Wednesday, I saw a pile of almost identical Sketchers at Sam’s Club for $35. So I bought a pair of those and found at 9.5 they were a bit too big. So I returned them and got a size 9 pair. Those were too small. I’ll return those too. Then the ones from Amazon arrived on Friday, and I loved them instantly. My feet slipped into them smoothly (partly thanks to that shoehorn shape in the back). They also felt roomy while also hugging my feet, and my heel didn’t rise above the insole when I walked, which is unusual for shoes without laces.
But my wife hated these good ones on sight. Looking back, I should have vetted these with her, because she has taste in clothing (in fact, she’s a pro), and I don’t. So I’m returning these too, and we’ll buy a new pair at an actual shoe store. We’ll do it together, like we did at Nordstrom long ago. Live and re-learn. Anyway, I can still testify that, spousal aesthetics aside, these are great shoes. Really. I rarely give five-star reviews on Amazon, but I would have for this pair.
Still close enough to true. This answer to a Quora question about radio, written a decade or so ago, now has 63 upvotes.
Looks real enough. Under the title Goodbye, Starlink? the headline says China Just Launched a $20 Billion Satellite Swarm — And Elon Might Be Toast, followed by this subhead: Huawei’s 6G Quantum-Crypted Meganet vs. Starlink Isn’t Just a Tech Battle. It’s a Global Internet War. The original is paywalled here at Medium, but you can read the whole thing here at archive.today., which is a handy workaround for paywalled pages. The author’s profile is here, and says almost nothing. Her medium collection is here. Is she real? Is any of this real? Well, I asked ChatGPT “Does Huawei have, or is it planning, a satellite Internet service to compete with Starlink? If so, how far along is it, and what are the differences from Starlink?” It gave me a sourced summary that compared and contrasted what Huawei’s doing with what Starlink already has, and closed with this: “Bottom line: Huawei is already in orbit with prototypes, is planning real-world tests by the end of 2025, and aims to offer a unified, secure, low-latency, sat‑to‑cell and broadband service embedded in its broader 6G vision. It’s not just a competitor to Starlink—it’s architected as part of a next-gen communications ecosystem with deep integration and state support.” Here’s a YouTube video that doesn’t seem far off.
My post yesterday has grown pictures and text. Worth a visit.
In biology they dall it budding. [Did tracking-based advertising just get blown up in Europe?](Did tracking-based advertising just get blown up in Europe?) got too big and non-tweety for this daily post pile, and is now outgrowing on its own.
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