Smart Spending

Eight stealable habits America's fleet pros use to outsmart the gas pump

Tricks pulled straight from the cab of a Mack truck.

Think you're hurting when you pump 15 or 20 gallons of today's expensive gas into your car? Imagine pumping 300 gallons into the bottomless tanks of a Mack truck. At $5.03 a gallon for diesel, that's a $1,500 fill-up. Fuel already devours nearly a quarter of a commercial fleet’s operating budget.

Which is why the trucking industry has thrown cameras, sensors, and software at one question: how do you stop wasting fuel? They’ve found real answers, and as Kelly Soderlund reports, what's good for the Mack truck is good for the Corolla. She’s rounded up eight habits the pros swear by, including the surprisingly steep cost of "warming up" your engine, the math of a single underinflated tire (every 1 PSI you're missing is quietly costing you 0.4% of your fuel economy), and the one fueling habit that's reliably the most expensive way to fill your tank.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared the delightfully unbelievable-but-true story of a couple that got to foreclose on the bank.

I had to ask, which corporate villain are GOOD readers nursing a grudge against? Almost half of you can’t stand the streamers that keep “adjusting” their prices. Why do they only adjust them up?

• The bank that "couldn't find" your wire transfer for nine business days (14.7%)

• The airline that called your missed connection "an act of God" (11.8%)

• The cable company that scheduled a tech for "sometime Tuesday" (30.9%)

• The streaming service that raised prices to fund a show nobody asked for (42.6%)

Voices

She became an influencer at 80, her husband became the internet's new boyfriend

A 30-second clip of one ho-hum errand has the entire internet asking the same question.

After a long career as an artist, 80-year-old Alice Williams pivoted to Instagram. When the follower count climbed, the PR packages started showing up. Nice. And then her husband, Don, walked up the driveway with his arms full of boxes set to a No Doubt song, and the internet quietly lost it.

In a piece by Mark Wales, the comments tell the story better than any caption could. "I don't think I've ever seen a better video in my life." "Where am I supposed to find a man like this???" One 93-and-a-half-year-old commenter asked, hopefully, if he had an older brother.

It's not about the boxes. It's about what the boxes mean: someone showing up, again, for the person they've been showing up for all along.

Health

The green flag dinner that came with one anatomical surprise

A sweet gesture, a confident chef, a failure of anatomical attention to detail.

Look, I get it. New relationship, going well, you want to do something special. A homemade dinner is a beautiful instinct. I would not have personally chosen "health-themed meal" as the theme, but hey, you do you.

What's that? You've crafted the menu around a specific organ? Bold. Sure. And which organ are we honoring tonight? Her prostate? Wait… Her prostate?

Sir.

In Adam Albright-Hanna's write-up, actress and filmmaker Alexandra Sedlak walks through her slow-motion realization with the comedic precision of someone who knows she's about to deliver a great closing line. I can only assume she returned the favor the following week with a thoughtful little brunch for his uterine health.

On April 30, 1993, two CERN administrators in Geneva signed a short, almost embarrassingly modest document titled "Statement concerning CERN W3 software." It was addressed "to whom it may concern." In two paragraphs, it released the source code for something called the World Wide Web into the public domain. No fanfare, no press conference, no champagne. Just a memo and two signatures.

The web had been quietly humming along since 1989, when British physicist Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system to help CERN scientists share data. By 1993, it was working, but barely catching on. The breakthrough was less technical than legal. A rival system called Gopher had recently announced it might start charging licensing fees, and the academic world panicked. CERN saw the opening, took the opposite approach, and made the Web free forever. Within months, Gopher was a ghost town, and websites were multiplying like rabbits.

The directors who signed the memo, Walter Hoogland and Helmut Weber, were not exactly household names then and still aren't. Two physics administrators with a stamp and good instincts gave away what is now arguably the most valuable software ever written, and they did it on purpose. Today, over five billion people use the thing they let go of.

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