Tag: imagine-a-world

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Imagine A World Life events Local reporting Software

Meet Meutch

The quick backstory: I love sharing

I enjoy borrowing things from friends. And I love lending to them even more. We all have stuff sitting on a shelf that could be out there helping people! When I lend out my darning supplies, or borrow a board game to try it out, it warms my heart.

My sharing activity is limited by my worry that I’d be spamming my group texts, Slack chats, and neighborhood email list. But I know some people in those groups likely have the item I need and would eagerly lend it.

Surely, I thought, there must be some app for this? I looked for a community lending site for years and couldn’t find one that met my needs. There’s the local Buy Nothing group on Facebook but that’s not what I want – it’s massive, unorganized, and I have to go on Facebook.

In 2024 I found myself with free time as I recovered from surgery and began bringing my vision to life. It started off as a proof-of-concept, then took shape with a name, website, and serious functionality. I’ve been using it with friends and it’s finally ready for the world.

Meet Meutch!

I’m excited to unveil Meutch! The name is short for “mutual aid”.

Meutch provides a set of features that don’t exist together anywhere else:

  1. It accommodates both temporary loans and permanent giveaways.
  2. You share through circles to people you are socially connected with: your neighborhood, faith community, workplace, etc.
  3. It’s uncommercialized. No ads, no data tracking, no fees, you don’t need a social media account – just an email address. To my nerds: the code is open-source.

Meutch benefits its users, who save money, avoid storing more things in their homes, and feel good from strengthening ties with people in the communities.

It also has big potential upsides for the world, as it can reduce consumerism (I’ve gotten items faster than I could on Amazon Prime) and build trust and connections at a time when we are atomized.

Let’s take a peek inside

Here’s the home feed of actual real-world sharing activity:

Beyond watching the home feed, you can browse & search items that people in your circles have posted.

The blue boxes show how far away an item is from you

Here’s my current Meutch lending activity (blacking out my friends’ names):

You connect with others by joining circles. These can be public, private (requires approval to join), or even unlisted. This screenshot was taken from my phone; there’s no native app yet, but it works well on a mobile browser.

It has been a delight to use so far. For instance, I wanted to try the boardgame Forbidden Sky; I posted a request and my friend Aaron saw it and lent me his copy. I played it twice and didn’t like it. I won’t buy it. Success!

Since the loan was tracked on Meutch, we got reminders to return it. Those would have been nice for everything I’ve lent over the years and then lost track of.

Here are some things I’ve lent so far:

  • Hammer drill and drill bits
  • Stockpot for making maple syrup
  • Sashiko clothes mending kit
  • Azul board game
  • Kintsugi ceramics repair kit
  • Project Hail Mary book
  • Pair of sawhorses
  • Balance bike
  • Calico board game
  • Tarp
  • Backpacking equipment

And borrowed:

  • Dungeon Crawler Carl Book
  • A black cape for Halloween
  • Forbidden Sky board game
  • A cat costume for my 2nd grader’s “dress up as a book character” day at school
  • Tools to perform a hydraulic brake bleed on my bike

I’ve also given away a bunch of objects, ranging from native trees that had reseeded in my garden to a roll of chickenwire.

It’s Go Time

So please: join Meutch! Register, join circles, then post requests and respond to others. Subscribe to the digest emails, ideally daily. Then you can see what people are posting and asking for and engage when you want, instead of needing to regularly visit the site to see activity.

I’ll keep improving Meutch, but it’s time to move from “build the software” to “grow the user base.” This is the hardest part! I need help from everyone I know in Ann Arbor to get to an activity level where people find the platform useful. Once we achieve critical mass, the sky’s the limit.

Yes, “in Ann Arbor” – for now. Meutch works everywhere else, but you’d have to bring your own group to lend with. A board game collective in Seattle could create a circle and start sharing today. I would love to see it happen! And I hope someday to help with outreach in other cities. But for now I’m focused on Ann Arbor, since that’s where my local ties are (I hope an Ypsilanti resident will create a circle for Ypsi).

One tip: I’ve added “share” buttons to circles and public giveaways and requests to spread the word about Meutch. These generate links that render pretty previews to people viewing the links from outside of Meutch.

These links are the best way to share Meutch resources on other social networks. For instance, you could share your request to Nextdoor, create a circle for your neighborhood and send it to the group’s email list, or post a giveaway link to Facebook. You get the attention on your post from those other networks while managing the activity on Meutch.

For example, I want a plastic mat for an office chair. Do you have one? The share preview page looks like this:

You can even share temporary links to your own items with people not yet on Meutch. So when someone posted to the Common Cycle email list, “does anyone have a bike repair stand I can borrow?” I was able to send them a link to my bike stand:

I’ve prioritized privacy in designing Meutch and you would have no way to tell that I have this item listed for loan unless we belonged to a shared circle. This share-link mechanism gives me a way to bypass that briefly for a single item when I want to.

That’s enough of me showing it. Go try Meutch yourself!

I’ll even bribe you! Kind of.

How else can I boost user engagement now? The most common strategies used by new tech companies are off-limits to me. I’m not going to create fake users and upload dummy items, the way Reddit founders populated their site using pseudonyms at its launch. And I can’t offer cash bonuses to active users, the way a startup with millions in venture capital backing can.

Here’s my incentive idea for Meutch: at the start of every month in 2026 I’ll make a donation to a local mutual-aid-type charity of $1 for every user active on Meutch in the prior month, up to $500. “Active” means you:

  • Belonged to at least one circle with other people
  • Took at least one action: posted a request, added an item, borrowed an item, or responded to someone else’s request or giveaway

This incentive isn’t restricted to people in Ann Arbor. Folks elsewhere might need to recruit a local circle to start sharing with, but I’ll count anyone active, anywhere.

I piloted Meutch in April with some friends from my co-working space. They told others and we got to 17 users who took actions last month. I’ve just donated that much to Common Cycle, Ann Arbor’s community bike repair nonprofit.

Seventeen bucks is measly, I know. I can put Common Cycle back onto the list later. Help me grow that number in the meantime!

My deep gratitude to those of you who share Meutch with your friends and neighbors at this critical early stage. I will be self-promoting Meutch now that it’s officially launched, but your word-of-mouth is much more effective and less awkward. If this project takes root, it’ll be because of you.

See you on Meutch!

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Biking Imagine A World Local reporting

Envisioning the Hutchins Avenue Bikeway

It should be obvious, but I am speaking as a resident, not as an employee of the city.

Five years ago I wrote a long and detailed post making the case for a protected bike path on Ann Arbor’s North Maple Road. The city added bike lanes shortly after, which were much better than the prior situation and not as good as what I’d hoped for.

Since then I moved across the city to Hutchins Avenue. After years of driving, biking, and walking around the neighborhood, I’ve realized it’s an ideal candidate for a protected bike facility.

I’ve meant to write this post for a long time but was burdened by the idea that it had to be as robust as what I’d written before. That changed when I listened to episode 73 of the Ann Arbor AF podcast: Civic Therapy, Transportation edition. It reminded me of the need to simply do what’s right. I might get details wrong here that a transportation planner would fix in implementation – I’m not a pro – but here’s what I’m dreaming of and some of the reasons it would work.

The Vision

I’ll take any piece of this I can get, but at its best, this would be a protected bike facility beginning at the south end of Hutchins, at Stadium Boulevard. It would run north to Davis or Princeton, at which point it would jog one block east and continue north on Fifth St. Then it would run up to Bach Elementary. From there users could pick up the William St Bikeway and head into downtown.

Both Hutchins and Fifth are in need of resurfacing and a bikeway spanning both would connect outlying neighborhoods to the downtown network of protected bike lanes.

Here’s what the full version would look like. It might make more sense to connect Hutchins and Fifth on Davis, given that Davis is wider than Princeton and it’s a four-way stop.

Credit: Google Maps

The Rationale

Location & Connectivity

  • Schools: this provides a safe route for students and staff to ride to Pioneer High School. A friend of mine who teaches at Pioneer rides to work via Fifth-Princeton-Hutchins. It would also provide a safe route to and from Bach Elementary School.
  • Parallel to Seventh: for people unwilling to use the narrow bike lanes on Seventh – which is most people – this would be a low-stress alternative just one block over. I see many bike commuters and joy riders on Hutchins and Fifth already.
  • Connects Neighborhoods to Downtown: on the podcast linked above, Donnell Wyche imagines a protected bike network that would enable his kids to bike from their home on Scio Church Road to the downtown library to play the Summer Game. This would get most of the way there, as it almost links up with the buffered bike lanes on Seventh between Stadium and Scio Church.

The Physical Street

  • Resurfacing needed: both Hutchins and Fifth have stretches rated as “very poor” on the city’s pavement conditions dashboard and the bikeway installation can coincide with their resurfacing.
  • Plenty of room: Hutchins is wide, with parking on both sides of the road for most blocks. Residences have driveways and as a result the street parking is underutilized. The same is true for Fifth. To make room for the bikeway, parking could be removed on one side with no meaningful impact on residents.
  • Addresses a sidewalk gap: currently there’s no sidewalk on the east side of Hutchins north of Potter and no sidewalk on the west side south of Potter. A child riding to school on the sidewalk has to cross the street here just to continue.
Continue reading “Envisioning the Hutchins Avenue Bikeway”
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Climate change Cooking Imagine A World

Upgrading from a Gas Stove to Electric Induction

I saw that “gas stove ban” is the topic of this 24-hour news cycle (Terrain has a good recap and analysis) and I realized I hadn’t blogged about ditching my gas stove. It’s an opportunity for to drop some timely #content.

In March 2022 we had a bunch of electrical work done on our house. It was built in 1914 and had knob-and-tube wiring in the walls. Which meant we couldn’t blow insulation into the walls due to the fire risk and paid too much for homeowners insurance. So we got new wiring and insulation, increasing comfort and peace-of-mind and saving money each month on heating/cooling and insurance.

We took advantage of the timing to get a 240V line run to the kitchen and upgraded our stove from a Viking gas range & oven to an electric induction unit. It’s been great. Here are some pros/cons of the change for me. I’m skipping the obvious ones you’d find in general comparisons like, it’s good that my cooking doesn’t involve fossil fuels and the indoor air is cleaner and it was bad to have to buy some new cookware.

Pros

  • Spills/boilovers are easy to clean up. I boiled over oil (!) while deep-frying corn dogs and it was no big deal.
  • My kids can take a more involved role cooking since there’s no flame and less heat.
  • In general there’s less cooking heat in the kitchen. Whereas excess heat from the Viking oven once melted a salad spinner that was sitting nearby.
  • More precise temperature control and more powerful output. I benchmarked flame vs. induction for time to boil 1 quart of water, that could be its own post but induction won.
  • More digital controls in general. Maybe a fancier gas range would have had automated stop-baking times, I dunno, but mine was Viking brand and it didn’t even have a temperature readout on the oven.
  • Visual indicators make it less likely that I leave a burner on low and forget about it.

Cons

  • A bit of a learning curve.
    • On a gas stove I’d turn off a pot of rice or hard-boiled eggs and leave the residual heat to finish the job. I’ve learned that on the induction, I need to leave it on low.
    • And I had perfected stovetop popcorn in my old stockpot, which wasn’t induction-compatible. Now I’m learning the nuances of cooking popcorn in a stainless steel pot.
  • I liked my old range better as a pot-drying rack at the end of the night. There were more nooks and crannies to wedge the pans in and water drops didn’t pool.

Overall, the induction range has been an improvement and I am pleased to be rid of my old stove. Some of the changes involved in decarbonizing our lives and society are uncomfortable, e.g., facing a reduction in air travel. But this one has been a simple upgrade for our kitchen and our lives.

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Climate change Imagine A World

The Unusual Cost Structure of Geothermal Heat Pumps

Since writing my post Planning for a Heat Pump Furnace in Michigan, I’m getting closer to taking the plunge. I’ve learned some interesting things along the way, most of all about geothermal, which was not on my radar at first. This post looks at the near- and long-term costs of geothermal heat pumps and the incentives they create.

Does cost matter? It shouldn’t, but it does. At a societal level, the urgency of electrification is well-established. Humanity must replace fossil-fuel-burning equipment with electric alternatives and the grid that powers them must be converted to running on renewables. The future is grim if these things don’t happen.

In the face of ecological collapse, it shouldn’t much factor into the equation whether electrification costs somewhat more or less than continuing to spew carbon. At least, not at a societal level.

But for individuals faced with replacing an old gas furnace, of course cost is a deciding factor. As I got price estimates and read, I made a spreadsheet for some basic cost comparisons of geothermal vs. high-efficiency gas heat (with electric A/C). The result surprised me.

Continue reading “The Unusual Cost Structure of Geothermal Heat Pumps”
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Biking Data analysis Local reporting

One Year of the William St. Bikeway

A year ago, Ann Arbor opened its first protected bike lane & cycle track: the William St. Bikeway. From my individual perspective, it’s been a huge hit. My family bikes on it to reach the downtown library, NeoPapalis Pizza, and the university. I see it used by other cyclists, skateboarders, and scooter-riders, snow clearing was decent last winter, and it’s only infrequently blocked by parked cars or trucks. Car traffic on William is calm and not noticeably backed up.

Construction of the city’s next protected bike lane is well underway, on First Street. And the city experimented this fall with temporary bike lanes around downtown, some of which have been great. The Division St. Cycle Track provides a divided, protected two-way bike highway without affecting car travel and it intersects conveniently with the William St. Bikeway, opening up travel in all directions. The William St. Bikeway was the proof point that made these other installations possible.

So it improved my family’s experience biking downtown and paved the way for other infrastructure. Did it change people’s behavior? In my post last year about the Bikeway, I displayed a snapshot of the Strava cycling heatmap that I took on November 1st, 2019. I grabbed one today, November 2nd, 2020, to compare. Here’s last year (see the old post for interpretation):

Continue reading “One Year of the William St. Bikeway”
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Climate change Local reporting Politics

It’s time to hit pause on proposed I-94 Operational Improvements

The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) is considering possible improvements to I-94, south of Ann Arbor. The timing is lucky: they were still in the study phase when the impact of COVID-19 emerged and there’s time to hit the pause button. For fiscal and environmental reasons, and to meet its stated goals, the state should indefinitely halt any investments in this stretch of highway.

Background

This project would add capacity to the stretch between Ann Arbor-Saline Road and US-23 pictured here:

Source: MDOT

MDOT’s objectives for this stretch include accommodating an increased volume of traffic. They seek to “reduce recurring peak period congestion along the corridor and improve travel time reliability” as well as “provide reasonable capacity to address existing and 20-year forecasted 2045 traffic demand along the corridor.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the case for spending millions to improve traffic flow on this stretch. We can no longer afford this project, but luckily, we also no longer need it.

Continue reading “It’s time to hit pause on proposed I-94 Operational Improvements”
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Climate change Politics ruminations

Imagine a world without oil and gas

It’s stuck with me since I saw it in the Myrtle Beach airport in July. A young man wore a drawstring backpack printed with the slogan “imagine a world without oil and gas.” Under that it said, “IOGA WV”.

I first read this phrase the way I would if I had uttered it: as an aspirational call to imagine a world without oil and gas. Something like AOC’s “Message from the Future” or the Transition Handbook, whose featured blurb notes that “most of us avoid thinking about what happens when oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive)” [more on this later].

When a search for “IOGA WV” revealed it to be the Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia, I realized the phrase was meant differently. There aren’t many hits when you Google that sentence, but they mostly come from oil & gas interests. The phrase on the backpack is meant not as a serious call but as a statement of ridicule: life is unimaginable without oil and gas.

The phrase captured my imagination, in part because I’m amused by its Janus word nature: its two meanings are opposites. But also because in the way I first read it, it’s a succinct, elegant clarion call to dream as we must. In the effort to move beyond fossil fuels and preserve a habitable planet, it’s likely that our imagination, not technology, will be the limiting factor.

Continue reading “Imagine a world without oil and gas”