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The gas pedal habit that costs you 40% of your tank
Eight habits fleet drivers swear by, three parenting mistakes a teacher wants gone, and what two burger seeds did in 90 days.
Greg Sullivan
August 20, 2026 • Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes
“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”
― Miles Kington
In this issue of The Daily Good, we go looking for people who know things the rest of us just guess at. Truck fleets buy more gas than anyone alive, so their eight habits are worth stealing outright. Then a teacher who spends all day with other people's kids names the three habits she would end tomorrow, and a gardener discovers what a Quarter Pounder can grow.
Smart Spending
The people who buy fuel by the tanker load have opinions about how you fill up.
Want to know how to get the best deal on anything? Go to the people who buy the most of it. And nobody buys more gas than truck fleets.
With diesel hitting $5.03 a gallon earlier this year, fleets have gotten obsessive about squeezing more miles out of every tank. Kelly Soderlund walks through eight habits that work just as well in a Honda Civic, starting with the simplest one: ease up on the gas pedal. Hard acceleration and heavy braking can slash fuel efficiency by as much as 40%.
The rest include a five-minute check most drivers ignore, one sneaky way money disappears at the pump, and a mileage trick that can flag trouble before it becomes a repair bill.
There’s something thought-provoking about the way the doused light and the sun play together in this image by GOOD reader Tom Proietti, taken during a Lake Ontario sunset near Rochester, NY.
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For all of human history, “aging” meant accumulating senescent "zombie cells."
These old worn-out cells no longer do their job, gathering in us, sending inflammatory signals to healthy cells, accelerating signs of aging like joint discomfort, brain fog, and low energy.
But in 2015, a major breakthrough occurred. Scientists at Mayo Clinic discovered plant-derived compounds, called senolytics, that help our bodies naturally eliminate these zombie cells.
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How do you actually drive when nobody's watching?Truck fleets optimize every single mile. The rest of us have instincts. |
And what did we learn?
I wanted to know what motivated GOOD readers to get out the door and go on that walk.
A dog with strong opinions about the schedule (40.5%)
Someone waiting for me with that look on their face (26.6%)
The next episode of that amazing podcast (7.6%)
A streak I refuse to break (25.3%)
GOOD reader Bpedigoboard lives firmly in the majority. “My mini doxie climbs right up my body and stares into my eyes until I ‘take the hint’”
Section | Courtesy of Upworthy
What happens when you plant tomato seeds from a McDonald's burger? | ||
A man planted tomato seeds from two McDonald’s burgers. Three months later, whoa. | ||
“I expected this tomato to grow,” James Prigioni said, “but I did not expect this.” | ||
By Annie Reneau | ||
In many ways, fast-food restaurants feel like the opposite of a backyard vegetable garden. But one gardener has tied a McDonald’s hamburger directly to a garden harvest in a way that even surprised him. | ||
James Prigioni makes popular gardening videos on YouTube. In one, he wanted to see if he could grow a whole tomato plant by planting the seeds from a tomato on a McDonald’s burger. He picked up a Deluxe Quarter Pounder with cheese, pulled out a tomato slice, and removed two seeds. After rubbing the seeds on a paper towel to remove the protective coating, which can inhibit sprouting, they were ready to plant. | ||
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Voices
She spends all day with other people's kids and has thoughts.
An elementary school teacher and mother of three who posts as @earlyedventure got on TikTok and skipped the diplomacy entirely. "Throw away the iPad. I'm sorry, I don't care what you say. The data is undeniable." Not exactly a gentle nudge toward screen limits. More like a eulogy for the tablet.
In this story by Mark Wales, the receipts arrive fast. A 2024 study in JAMA Pediatrics linked tablet use in young kids to more anger and tantrums, while researchers have found screen time can cost toddlers as many as 1,000 spoken words a day. She sees the downstream version of that math every morning, in a room full of children arriving with a very different set of skills than the ones the job requires.
But the iPad is only mistake No. 1. Mistakes No. 2 and No. 3 are the ones that might make parents shift in their seats. Her closing pitch is less a parenting philosophy than a plea from someone who has to live with the results five days a week, in a job that already asks a lot of the village nobody has anymore.
On August 20, 1911, a telegraph operator on the 17th floor of the New York Times building tapped out seven words and then sat back to wait for them to come home. The message read, "This message sent around the world," and that was the whole idea. The Times wanted to know how long an ordinary commercial telegram would take to circle the globe, with no special treatment and no shortcuts.
Sixteen and a half minutes. The message ran west out of Times Square through San Francisco, hopped the Pacific to the Philippines, then continued through Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Bombay, Malta, Lisbon and the Azores before crossing the Atlantic and landing back in the same operator's hands. It traveled more than 28,000 miles and was relayed by 16 different operators, any one of whom could have dropped a letter and turned it into gibberish.
President Theodore Roosevelt had sent a faster round-the-world message in 1903, but his was an official dispatch given priority on the wires. The 1911 run proved something arguably more impressive: the planet was now genuinely wired together for ordinary commercial customers, not just presidents. The building that message left from still stands. It's One Times Square, where the ball drops every New Year's Eve.
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Until tomorrow, stay safe and go easy on that gas pedal.