Touring the Valley

Whose Fault is it Anyway?

Before "no fault divorce," people who wanted to dissolve their marriages faced serious obstacles.

Typically, one partner had to go to court and prove that the other partner was at fault. Reasons could include adultery, desertion, extreme cruelty, and habitual drunkenness. The judge would hear the evidence and then decide whether the claim was sufficient to justify granting the divorce. Divorce cases were reported in the newspapers, sometimes in great detail.

There was supposed to be one victim and one villain, so if both parties were deemed to be at fault, the judge might refuse the divorce. Or the judge might decide the situation just wasn't bad enough to warrant a divorce.

Here is a newspaper report of a case from 1845, in which the judge decided the evidence wasn't good enough.

As recently as 1969, a judge ruled that, since both spouses were cruel to each other, they could not be divorced.

In this case from 1848, the court ruled that a spouse's confession to adultery wasn't enough. Because of rulings like this, people who could afford a private detective would sometimes have their unfaithful spouse followed and photographed so they could be caught in the act, in front of witnesses.

In some cases, a couple would privately agree to manufacture a case, just so they could get free of each other. For example, they could arrange for a private detective to "catch" the husband in a hotel room with another woman. Or, a spouse accused of bad behavior might enlist friends to testify against him. Judges took a dim view of these cases. Here is one from 1900.

To 21st-century minds, this 1900 case probably seems like a marriage that should be ended, but the judge did not agree.

Some states had more lenient laws than others. Spouses who could afford it would sometimes go to Nevada and stay for six months (the required residency) and then file for divorce. Those in a hurry might take a trip to Mexico, where divorces were nearly always granted upon request.

Mexico fought back.

In the meantime, courts began declaring Mexican divorces invalid in the U.S.

As noted above, most of the people traveling for divorce were women, as were most divorce-seekers within the U.S. They often found themselves blocked by laws that limited the autonomy of married women. Ironically, lack of control over their own lives may have been a contributing factor to wives' desire to escape their husbands. Then they were blocked by a male-dominated legal system, petitions denied by judges who didn't think their circumstances were bad enough to let them go. In one frustrasting case, a woman who wanted to divorce her husband because of his drunkenness, was denied because he drank only on the weekends. In another, "incompatibility" wasn't sufficient to free a woman whose husband was a Peeping Tom.

For decades, various organizations campaigned for "no-fault" divorce, whereby spouses could end their marriages without needing to make or prove accusations. First legalized in California in 1969, the concept gained support throughout the country. Today, some version of no-fault divorce is available in all 50 states, although some still also offer a fault-based model.

Critics argued that no-fault would lead to a massive surge in the divorce rate. After legalization, there was a temporary increase in divorces, as the backlog of people who had been eager to divorce worked their way through the system. But then the divorce rate gradually dropped. Additionally, studies have shown that the female suicide rate dropped significantly after the introduction of no-fault divorce.

In recent years, some bloggers and politicians have campaigned for an end to no-fault divorce. Many of these people openly admit their intent is to restrict women's choices.

"You Will Ride a Bicycle, and You Will Like It."

A bicycle garage in Amsterdam
Photo by Anthony Tilke on Unsplash

There are a lot of people who quite adamantly believe that every city's air quality, transportation and parking problems could be solved if we would just ban cars and make everyone ride bicycles everywhere. This would make our streets "pedestrian friendly." What they often fail to consider:

Will employers provide showers and changing rooms for workers who arrive sweaty and dirty?
Bicycles also need to be parked, somewhere. Many cyclists obstruct public space by chaining their bikes to inappropriate objects. Can they be stopped?
How will this work for grocery shopping and other errands that require transporting packages or large items?
What alternatives will there be during times of heavy rain, dangerously hot weather, and snow?
Around 20% of people have a physical disability, often one that makes riding a bicycle impossible.
Many elderly people are unable to ride bicycles.
How will we resolve conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians?
Will bicycle culture change the way we dress for various occasions? What will happen to formalwear, including wedding gowns?
Will bike culture be receptive to small electric vehicles (perhaps something like golf carts) for situations where a bike is not a good fit?
Will we still be allowed traditional cars for cross-country trips?

There may be good solutions for these issues, but they require thought and planning, not the knee-jerk defensiveness so many bike enthusiasts exhibit when questioned or challenged.

Photo by Maxim Kostenko on Unsplash

Why You Shouldn't Use AI to Write Your Blog Posts

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

I asked Claude, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to write a blog post on "why it's a bad idea to have AI write a blog post. Here's what I got.

Why You Shouldn't Use AI to Write Your Blog Posts

There's a certain irony in asking an AI to make the case against AI-written content. But maybe that's exactly why it works — who better to explain the limitations of a ghost than the ghost itself?

Here's why hitting "generate" on your next blog post is a mistake, even when the result looks polished.

## It Sounds Like Everyone Else

AI language models are, at their core, pattern-matching machines trained on the aggregate of human writing. The result is prose that sits squarely in the middle of everything — competent, inoffensive, and utterly forgettable. Every sentence lands where you expect it to. Every transition is smooth. Nothing surprises you.

Good writing has texture. It has weird detours, strong opinions, and moments where the author's personality bleeds through. AI writing is the literary equivalent of a stock photo: technically fine, but somehow nobody's home.

## Your Readers Can Tell

People are more attuned to AI-generated text than we often assume. There's a particular rhythm to it — a tendency toward tidy three-part structures, over-reliance on phrases like "it's worth noting" and "in today's landscape," and a habit of hedging every claim into meaninglessness. Readers who encounter it regularly develop an instinct for the uncanny valley of the written word.

When someone senses they're reading AI output, the trust evaporates. They're no longer reading *you* — they're reading a statistical average of the internet. That's not a relationship you can build an audience on.

## It Skips the Part That Actually Matters

Here's something most people don't say out loud: the value of writing a blog post is often *in the writing of it*. The research you do, the position you're forced to take, the argument you have to stress-test in your own head before it reaches the page — that's where the thinking happens.

When you outsource that process, you don't just outsource the words. You outsource the thinking. You end up publishing a post you don't fully believe, on a topic you haven't fully worked through, and it shows — even when every sentence is grammatically impeccable.

## It Has No Actual Experience

AI can synthesize information about grief, or burnout, or the experience of launching a startup, but it has never felt any of those things. The most resonant blog posts are the ones where the writer has *skin in the game* — a hard-won insight, a failure they're still processing, a contrarian view they're willing to defend.

AI produces confident-sounding text about experience it doesn't have. That's not a flaw in the model; it's just what the model is. But it means that any post requiring genuine perspective — which is most posts worth reading — will always ring slightly hollow when machine-generated.

## It Feeds the Content Landfill

The internet already has more content than anyone can read. What it's genuinely short on is *good* content — writing that changes how you think about something, or makes you feel less alone, or teaches you something you couldn't have just Googled.

AI makes it trivially easy to produce more content. It does nothing to raise the floor on quality. Every AI-generated post that gets published makes it a little harder for readers to find the stuff that actually matters — including yours, if you're writing it yourself.

## So What's AI Actually Good For?

To be fair: AI is genuinely useful for *parts* of the writing process. Brainstorming angles, drafting an outline, punching up a weak sentence, catching typos — all fair game. Using it as a thinking partner is different from using it as a ghostwriter.

The mistake isn't using AI at all. It's using it to skip the hard part. The hard part — figuring out what you actually think, and finding the words that are true to it — is the only part readers care about.

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*So yes: an AI wrote this post. Make of that what you will.*

Random Observations

Photo by Ondrej Bocek on Unsplash

Every business, every website, every product - they all want me to download their app. Each of these apps does only one thing: serve the interests of that one product or site. I have enough apps on my phone. I can't manage thousands of them, and even if I could, I don't want to.

We now have government officials urging us to dress up for airplane travel.

Actually, People used to dress nicely to fly, back when meals were included, and you could choose your meal, even in coach, and there was room for human legs.

For-profit prisons are an incentive to create more crimes. We now see a government that wants to criminalize poverty, defines protest as terrorism, and that treats misdemeanors like felonies. All to pour more money into the prison industry.

The Republican administration's message to immigrants: When we said "Do it the right way," we were just kidding.

In addition to canceling visas without warning and arresting immigrants who faithfully show up at required interviews and hearings, the regime's agents have grabbed people who were just about to take the oath and become naturalized citizens. They have arrested tourists and denied entry to people with valid visas. Now the "Justice Department" plans to target hundreds of naturalized citizens with the goal of revoking their citizenship.