Proud To Be American Again

In my AP English class in High School (a hundred of years ago), the English teacher was always keen to correct us about using using the word ‘proud’ or ‘pride’ in our writing. She said it was negative and she had a good point. Pride tends to get arrogant people in trouble, there is no doubt about that. However, it is good to be proud of the accomplishments of your parents, your children, your organization doing something good for society.

It has been difficult, to say I have been proud of my home country for 30 years (from 1993 or so). America has been lost. The good book says that was is done in the darkness is always going to come to the light. We are finally seeing all the waste, fraud, and abuse hit the wall. It’s great to see it called out and people making efforts to fix America before it goes the way of other ‘empires’ past. (Sorry Rome, etc.)

I am so thankful to be an American. Thankful to be from a country where God is acknowledged freely, new ideas are encouraged, businesses can flourish with the people that build them, and finally where there are people being put in leadership that are not afraid to confront darkness.

Great to see America arising again! God bless America again!

The Reason We Bought Tesla

Nissan Leaf

This exact vehicle is the reason we bought our first EV (electric vehicle) company car. Four years ago, Autobacs, a leading car parts store/automotive chain in Japan gave us a Nissan Leaf as a loaner car while they fixed our ICE (internal combustion engine) car. The Leaf was like driving a radio controlled toy car with such peppy acceleration and ease of use. It was fun to drive.

When it came time to get another company car we looked at Nissan and Tesla EVs. The Tesla was somewhere around 400,000 JPY (or around $4000 USD) more expensive. We opted for the Tesla for two reasons-

  1. We concluded that Tesla was stronger on the software side of things over Nissan
  2. Tesla is a customer so we like to support those who choose our products.

We made an excellent decision. In the three years since acquiring or first test, we have seen Tesla constantly updating their software (12-15 times). Our ICE cars navigation systems never got updated once you drove them off the lot. Most importantly, the range of the vehicle is still 500+km.. three years later. As we looked at the car the other day, the Autobacs executive mentioned that the vehicle (pictured above) is lucky to get 100km on a full charge.

Electric cars are great, but if you haven’t got a solid charging network behind them stick with gasoline. Our Teslas have been all over Japan transporting our engineering team doing service on Japan’s best communication service provider (CSP) CIRCLE Cloud Communications.

Great to see people developing useful products like Tesla.