It was a tough decision at Socotra House this morning about The Daily. Fun feature or catastrophic chaos coverage? The 15 Minute County project has a direct relationship to news from across the River about elimination of restrictions on car sales and permitted designs. It fits with the project we are working on about the places we work in Arlington and Fairfax. If we took out the details in either we could slide in Sunday Brunch in the 6th Floor fancy mess deck without much trouble.

It gets noisy in the Conference Room with a group clustered at the South end of the table while Miles attempts to sort out the horrific events around the world that seem related at least in spirit in the shootings in Australia, Rhode Island and Syria.

Holly insisted that Miles run the story about the Kei cars. The Zoomers are pretty excited about the idea of actually being able to afford a new car. The fifteen minute city thing we were all sold by the Urban Planning set was designed but buses and scooters and walking. The Kei cars from Japan may be as exciting as when the wily Germans introduced the Beetle in 1938.

They introduced a bunch of other stuff in 1939 that thankfully did not survive, but the Chairman’s first car

was a 1968 VW Beetle that cost around two thousand dollars and was given to him as a birthday gift.

The new is pretty exciting about the small cars now made legal with the elimination of the CAFE fuel standards and relaxed regulations. The Japanese “Kei” cars look about as practical and may sell for around ten grand. The average US car price has soared to $50,000 under the green regulations.

The GenX and Z interns have been vocal about the student debt they are trying to carry, and the distance between the campus at Big Pink in Arlington and the vibrant senior community in Tysons that the Chairman has arranged with a totally legit partnership with an upstanding non-profit enterprise designed to assit the older community with taxpayer dollars. The Legal Department assures us it is all OK and we can sleep wherever they wish unless woken up by security.

So, we were going to talk about the implications of putting external bodies on motorcycle. This is the one Rocket is looking at. It looks as fast as the F/A-18 jets he used to fly but the MonoRacer 130E fully enclosed motorcycle will let him arrive over at the Harris-Teeter Supermarket off Route 7. And the Ocean Paradise Bar & Restaurant next door. He arrived and departs in dry clothes and un-mussed hair unless he wants to get there quicker and needs to wear the helmet to bang off the disintegrating plastic in case of crashes.

Normally he says he can get by with a ballcap or a combination cover. Anyway, we were going to run a story with a bunch of statistics and citations the kids could get from Wiki or the TAHE box that holds the Archive of the Human Experience that is supposed to provide access to all human knowledge with a voice command.

He could have stepped in, but instead decided to run the story about small cars instead of attempting to determine the various motives involved in those things. And take up the major issue of whether helmets should be required when riding in all those little cars.

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