Recently, whoever owns the Dodge car brand announced that the brand would stop making sports cars in the near future. They will discontinue their line of muscle cars in favor of electric cars. Many other car makers have promised that they will soon cease making cars with internal combustion engines. Reminiscent of the Soviet five year plans, they are promising to be right with Gaia in five years. Like those five year plans this is unlikely to happen, barring societal collapse.
The main reason this will never happen is that electric cars are and always have been a stupid lie against practical reality. The stupidity lies in the fact that at the end of every green scheme lies a smokestack. There is no such thing as renewable energy so that leaves the only way we know to get usable energy, breaking atoms. The lie is that these new cars are better in some way. They are not. In fact, electric cars are inferior at all of the things that make normal cars useful.
This short post summarizes the more obvious problems with eclectic vehicles, but you could write a book on the topic. The cost of ownership is significantly higher to the user and even higher for society, if one thinks mountains of old batteries is a problem that society should mitigate against. Then there is the fact that they will forever be impractical for most people. The biggest problem is they will require trillions in infrastructure changes that will never happen.
Like the eBook, the electric car is a solution in search of a problem. In fact, the eBook is the place to start in order to grasp the lunacy of the EV. Deliberately swept down the memory hole is the fact that the same people who say the electric car is the future also said the eBook was the future. The claim was the reduced cost of making an eBook versus a real book would end printing entirely. The publishers would simply abandon the practice of printing books.
There is the first comparison to ponder. Hidden in the selling of the eBook idea was the claim that you would be forced to burn your paper books in favor of Amazon deciding what you could read. It was a form of the old communist line about capitalist selling the communists the rope they would use to hang them. In this case, the greed of the publishers would be used to enforce the eBook dream. Behind every radical project are men holding pistols, waiting for their chance.
We see an advanced version at work with electric vehicles. First the regime rolled out incentives for battery makers and car makers. Then they rolled out incentives for people to buy these cars. There are incentives for municipalities to install charging stations and find ways to encourage EV use. Now we are into the stick phase where car makers are getting bullied to stop making normal cars. The regime enjoys the carrot and stick approach, but they most really enjoy the stick.
In both the eBook and the eVehicle, we saw form up what amounted to a religious community in support of these novelties. When the eBook hit the scene, the same people who swore Starbucks made great coffee suddenly decided that they could only read off a device. It was the future! The same people who swore eBooks were the future are now saying the same thing with electric cars. They are the same people who swore masks and standing on one foot would prevent Covid.
The electric car and the electric book are two examples of the other side of the moral panic, which is the moral crusade. Both moral the panic and the moral crusade arise from the same desire among the people swept up in them. They are seeking both salvation and a sense of security. On the one hand, they want to be secure from whatever it is that is causing the panic, like climate change or Covid. On the other hand, they want to be seen as a good person, one of the elect.
For a very long time, almost all of human history in fact, religion was the vessel into which these aspects of belief were contained. Religion told the faithful that as long as they were pious they were going to be okay. Maybe that meant an afterlife or maybe it meant justice in this life. If they followed the rules, they would be safe. It also promised a little extra for those who were particularly pious. The public act of piety has been with us since Gobekli Tepe for this reason.
It turns out that reason, appeals to nature and historical inevitability are poor replacements for the supernatural. In the Christian era, the faith supplied all of the spiritual security one needed, because it truly sated the desire. It made clear what one could expect from salvation. Ideology, on the other hand, ironically enough, is like an opioid, in that it provides an initial euphoric satisfaction, but then an insatiable craving for even more of what it promised.
It turns out that we are plagued by these moral crusades and panics because the people behind them are like drug addicts. For them, modernity is an opium den in which the are condemned to chase the dragon for eternity. It is why during Covid so many of them had that same dead expression in their eyes you see from addicts. With their mask firmly on, they were in the only space where they were both free from the agony of desire and the ecstasy of the narcotic high.
Now that the high priest of the electric vehicle has revealed himself to be nothing more than an opportunist, the religion of the EV has been shaken. The people who told us the electrical car was the vehicle to spiritual satisfaction are now turning on the idea as a way to smite the evil Elon Musk. Of course, practical reality will eventually reduce the idea to a niche item, like the eBook. Somewhere, someone like Elon Musk is thinking about the next moral crusade to monetize.
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Lol! Right. Jim in Hawaii here. Six solar panels powers a car in Hawaii. Forever. No gas, no oil, no brakes (regen), no tune up, no muffler, no timing chain, ie, zero maintenance on the electric engine. Gas is $5.00 + gallon, down from $5.50. When the grid goes down, good luck buying gasoline at any price.
Actually my Bolt is a money making machine – I put $5 in my pocket every 20 miles of driving. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Could it be that some of these EV bashing articles are being funded by the oil industry? What are those poor guys gonna do when people don’t need to buy their gas?
You are a blooming idiot! Go back to California where you belong. A true kamaina, not no make believe joke.
I dunno – I like my Kindle. Don’t want an electric car though.
Yeah, this post has a bit of You kids get off my lawn! vibe to it.
I’m the guy who started the Boycott American Women blog, and i admit i was quite a woman hater but i went thru a spiritual awakening and now I’m trying to heal women instead of hurt them. Anyway if you wanna ask me questions or do an interview, just DM me on instagram at tantrahealermaster
Our owners want us all in ” walkable ” cities. whether we want to be there or not.
Would be a lot easier to get us to move there if there were NO cars to buy. development of a new model takes 5 to 7 years. the increasing CAFE requirements mean that the current model cannot be sold . i work for a supplier that sells products to all three big us companies and two of the Japanese companies . they have canceled their forward model development groups for engines. those folks have been downsized. many of the midsized an up vehicles have been discontinued. Engine and trans calibration groups have been eliminated . There will be no putting that toothpaste back in that tube.
so since the elcectrics won’rt work, and the gas won’t be available we will all be verry glad that our forward thinking leaders designed some convienient cubicles for us to liv in that is “walkable” everything we nneed(are allowed to have).
on the bright side china just surpassed germany to become the worlds second largest auto exporter. so we can buy chinese cars if we can’t get into the walkable cities. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-26/big-take-china-made-cars-set-to-edge-out-germany-as-world-s-no-2-exporter
I agree with the skepticism of the EV. I must take exception, however, to trashing the ebook reader. Even so, I do share some of Z’s criticisms, such as Amazon or some other power controlling what’s on a device. There is some truth to that, but it’s far from absolute.
Unlike the EV, an ebook reader probably would pay for itself many times over if used by an avid bookworm, especially if he relies upon free books. This is probably explained by the fact that a physical book, no matter how reassuring its look and feel, will cost money even if it is public domain. In contrast, there is a near-limitless supply of free digital content available online. Some “real” libraries allow electronic loan of current books.
The ereader should be able to display many types of documents, so it can be used for business or school too. Aspiring authors can use ebook editors such as the freeware Sigil; 21st century technology gives all the ego benefits with none of the inventory headaches Thoreau spoke of when he said “I have a library of 800 books, over 700 of which I have written myself.”
I’ve had an ebook reader for many years. It’s only infrequently used as a stand alone reader. While I do buy the infrequent paid ebook*, most of mine are free (public doman) and unrestricted. I can read them just as easily on a PC, an [Android] phone, or the ebook which in my case is also an Android tablet.
That final observation is pertinent: 99% of my “ebook” usage is having it narrate an ebook to me in my bedroom at night. I also could do internet stuff like listen to music, streaming audio and so forth if I wish. The only reason I’m using the ebook for that chore currently is because the previous devices broke. They were cheap Android tablets or old phones that were equally adept at telling me a bedtime story.
*Perversely, there have been times where the ebook version was more expensive than a (second-hand) paper copy of the same title delivered!
The eBook also comes in handy, due to the larger print and better contrast, for the older people (mostly) with eyesight that has declined….
Ah boomers. Unable to appreciate the monstrous cost of things that have a free price. Streaming music and movies, ebooks with cloud stored content. Gee, it’s like they finally created an actual memoryhole for when they take the next step in genociding our people and destroying our culture. “The little mermaid has always been black, who is Hans Christian Anderson, never heard of him.”
“Recently, whoever owns the Dodge car brand announced that the brand would stop making sports cars in the near future.”
Ok, ok. This tells me some things. If I asked a guy if he ‘drives a sports car’ and he said “yeas, a Corvette” – that would not be as bad as thinking Dodge makes any “sports cars.”
A sports car is a 1969 911, spartan, 2 liter engine. Minimal in every way, air cooled, hot dog shaped exhaust that consists of one part. You work on it yourself. ONLY you.
Once dentists and lawyers and that filth got into the market, they ruined it for anyone that ever tuned a set of Webers, yes 40 IDA, more streetable. My younger self firmly believed if you don’t fix it, you do not DESERVE to own it. I still feel that way.
While I have interacted with enough virtue signaling nerds and their, “hey you know what, Ima gunna buy an electric pickup” … to despise them. My direction, vehicle-wise … is BACK in time.
Right now there is another issue, unmentioned. The car makers are making cars that maybe ONE of the mechanics at their stealerships can diagnose, let alone fix. And that might be an over-statement, as these complex pieces of programmed obsolescence require ONE regional mechanic to go between stealerships. That’s how dumb their people are. You might want to own something you can FIX. The Indie shops are all short on mechanics too and just want to do brake jobs to make a living.
LOL
Dear Lord, I’m not sure why all the downvotes.
Good on you for having a point of view and sticking to it.
My folks are on month 6 for parts needed for a fender bender
Knowing how to fix your own stuff also prevents one from being bent over.
I take the down votes as proof of concept. Too many men in this space are here ‘doing something’ while saddled with the slavery of car loan debt.
Why?
Because they are too lazy to maintain and repair their own cars. So they don’t have the confidence to buy an older car, out of warranty. Chicken + shit. Any idiot can go to You Toob and see how to do:
— brake job (save $800-$1,000 each time)
— timing belt change (save $1200.00 each time)
— oil change (save $50 each time and do it more regularly)
Hell, they run ads on ‘tee vee’ for low initiative Normies to scan their ‘check engine light’ at big box stores:
— any idiot can buy an OBD 2 scanner at Amazon for under $40.00.
So when YOU, the same ‘man’ that down voted has to own a car that a lender can shut off and fetch if you miss one payment …. see new cutoff switch laws coming…
… YOU that just before fingers clicked down vote spend time in own nostril(s) …
… you that own a newer car that also serves as a surveillance device, including a black box that can be used against you …
… don’t come here and ‘post’, down vote someone that has not had a car payment in decades and knows what it is like to spend the time, lay out there fixing own and kids’ cars…
… take my advice, squish, and learn something.
“Because they are too lazy to maintain and repair their own cars.”
Amazing, how you’re unable to put yourself into someone else’s situation. Maybe time-value-of-money matters, family time matters, and spending 6-8 hours to do a 1-man brake job on the wife’s jeep is something that maybe, just maybe, not everyone has the time or interest to do.
Why doesn’t everyone do my thing? Because they’re too X!
That’s ‘tarded thinking, that is.
As a former dealership mechanic I’d like to add that diagnosis was considered the worst job, and I think this has a direct impact on the affordability of cars – 7 year payment plans?
Diagnosing is the only part of the job I found interesting, most diagnosis are simple, buuuut:
we had a saying – “if you diagnose more than a half hour, you are working on your own time”. This was because the customer would say: “why don’t you just hook it up to your computer?”. So the current generation of mechanics is very prone to simply doing what the computer trouble codes say – which may not be related at all. The electronic parts are most likely to be a dealer only, high cost part- very dependable on a new car, prone to unusual and/or intermittent problems on an older car.
Such complex systems need to have affordable parts, or you end up melting them down when they get a bit old. Standardization of parts would help a lot – then a mechanic could have an assortment of test parts. Congress and car manufacturers aren’t interested in making things affordable, though – they’d rather make people spend big on stuff they don’t want – electric cars being an extreme end point.
Any discussion of global warming related subjects should include mention that “greenhouses without roofs don’t hold any heat, because convection” . Warm air rises, radiating heat in all directions – once it reaches airliner height there is very little above to hold heat in, but below is where all the water vapor is – the real greenhouse gas, very effective at absorbing heat and convection. It’s as if people have been bullied into not thinking about things by massive propaganda campaigns rendering all of society’s worst problems beyond discussion.
We speak the same language.
I spent over eighteen years hanging around dealerships the last fifteen doing driveability gas, diesel and hybreds. myself. twelve more with independants & two with a city, hated that.
i actually miss it, .the tech not the business.
Still in the world just not the retail end. I’ll never hang it up completely. Building a shop now going to have a 12k two post too stiff to flatback anymore.
Still in the trade just no longer
Being a professional at any trade deserves respect.
down voted for being an old fart. you might want to check the prices on a ’69 911.
For most people today and back then as well something like that isn’t practicle and their not interested. Hell most of todays drivers would have no idea how to set or operate a choke or drive a stick.
My career spanned from conventional ignition & carburators to electronic engine & transmission controls.
Yes there were a lot of bumps during that transition but todays cars are almost generic in the underhood operation and are far superior in almost every way than anything from 1969
Cool factor though, not at all.
Get comfortable with a graphing scan tool and study up on systems most motivated DYI people can be sucessful.
I commend you for being able to work on your own vehicles. I own 6 vehicles (my one weakness for materialism) and the newest is 14 years old. I can’t work on all of them, but I at least have a good understanding of the drivetrains on all of them and can diagnose most problems that arise. Sometimes i can fix them, but sometimes I have to take it to my local mechanic. I am pretty religious about preventative maintenance, so I don’t have a lot of problems in that area.
I hate all the electronic crap on new vehicles. Makes it impossible for an.average guy to work on them and it is just more unnecessary junk that will break and be very expensive to repair.
I am a bit of a Neanderthal when it comes to cars and trucks. I will not own a vehicle with an automatic transmission and the thought of owning an EV makes me sick to my stomach.
I have some pretty cool older vehicles. I worry about what will happen to them when I pass on. Youngsters these days don’t even know how to drive vehicles with manual transmissions. My grandsons are 3 and 1 years old. I’m hoping to brainwash them into appreciating the joy of driving vehicles that require some skill to navigate.
Good on you.
I do agree that there are over engineered electronics, front and rear body moduals come to mind. Networked, shareing sensors etc. All supplied by the lowest bider. When there is a failure on one networked componet it often affects others making pinpointing the faulity componet a swag
Scientific wild ass guess.
But people want more & more bells and whistles or they think they need them.
Or as I like to put it “behind every green energy scheme is an environmental degradation waiting to be unveiled.” I see this all the time in the high desert which is the location of choice for photovoltaic systems and wind farms. It truly is astounding how fast and how often waivers and set asides can be produced in what was previously considered sacrosanct areas. Need a solar plant in an endangered species habitat? No problem, they’ll find it’s really not that critical after all. Every Time.
The point is leftists don’t hold to any of their pieties, they are only useful as cudgels to oppose things and people they don’t like. The error comes in when you try to argue with them using facts and reason. They never used it to begin with and don’t really care anyway. Their religion is also short lived, and today’s disciples become tomorrow’s heretics dependent upon the new revelation.
No Principles, merely Platitudes that can conveniently shift and morph as the situation requires.
This X 50. My entire life I heard the left pronounce how much they care about: jobs, education, healthcare, ‘inclusion’, walkable cities, green spaces, parents rights, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum. Then came a coronavirus with a fractional case fatality rate and *boom* – *all* those things, *all* at once were yesterday’s thing, and utterly destroyed. I realized that, despite everything, I had subconsciously held onto the idea the leftists were the ‘nice guys’, just misguided. Now I know. They hate order, they love destruction, and the rest is just excuses.
They were NEVER nice, but misguided. Vicious tyrants, ruiners, and projectors of their sins is who they are.
It’s who they’ve ALWAYS been.
Right, I see that now. What changed was my perceptions, not the actual reality.
At the risk of defending them, I’d say Leftist ( = Idealist 99.99% of the time) main failing is that they are always enraptured by “tomorrow’s thing,” the shiny idea that looks and sounds good in theory (or at least whim) but hasn’t ever been put to the test. And when in most cases the idea flops, it’s tossed aside and the next shiny toy is unveiled to be played with. Meanwhile, the Idealist doesn’t care (more likely: doesn’t even notice) the wreckage his previous projects have left in his wake.
“That’s not who we are!”
That’s not in their vocabulary.
Solar plants are a bad joke, even in seemingly ideal locations like North Africa and Nevada:
https://youtu.be/7OpM_zKGE4o
You don’t have to watch a video about the problems with solar energy in Africa. I can save you the time. It’s full of Africans.
The eV dictator people are hard to identify. The car companies are not at the top, and someone else is calling the shots. Either way, all they have to do is tell the government to go screw itself. By saying we must have electric cars, the motor vehicle manufacturers are guilty of being enemies of the people in the form of collaborators.
One way or another, the only way we can get rid of these people is for the United States to undergo a Soviet Union Level Extinction Event. Now the people at the top just won’t leave the stage, for they will decide we are the blame for their collapse. That is when nasty takes on a whole new meaning.
As far dealing with these psychotic and narcissist people, I can imagine that there’s an old saying we have here in Kentucky that will address our problem. That old saying is “That’s what .38s are made for.” Also, that murderous tyrant Joe Stalin was absolutely correct when he said something along the lines that if you get rid of your troublemakers, you stop having problems. It’s gonna get interesting before we see the sun light.
“If you get rid of your troublemakers, you stop having problems.”
A certain power couple from Arkansas took this message to heart. Especially the lady. Thus bringing the word “Arkancide” into the popular lexicon.
I don’t know about this e-book stuff, but your title sent me searching for my Steely Dan “Gaucho” album. Played on vinyl thru a Marantz 2252B receiver and Bose Acoustimass speakers, of course.
The song in question being about – allegedly – Walter Becker’s heroin problem. I love Gaucho as much as I like Aja.
Just listened to the Dukes of September (Fagan at the helm with Boz Scaggs and Michael Mcdonald) play Kid Charlemagne live about an hour ago. You want to see groove – watch that live performance. The ending is just pure groove. The drummer and guitarist are insanely good (as would be expected)
no highs? no lows? must be a Bose! 😛 just kidding!
I need to see more evidence other than the Establishment is turned on Elon Musk that they are actually beginning to role back the idea.
Also, the fact that there won’t be an infrastructure to support widespread use is a feature not a bug. It’s a way to take cars, mobility and freedom away from you and me.
Very few will be able to afford a car. That’s the goal.
Right. I was going to say this. The electric car is not the replacement for the gasoline car. It is the replacement for the car. The goal is to replace cars by public transport
Given SpaceX, Mars, and Twitter (and he who owns Twitter controls the AI of NPL, aka ChatBot GPT ) Musk can rob the Progs all he wants, and Finance too.
I’m very much a “car guy.” I am less skeptical of EVs than I used to be, but I still can’t see how they’re ever going to overcome the hurdles necessary to achieve mass adoption.
EVs are outstanding as toys, I’ll grant — my skepticism in that department has been overcome. And they might make sense as a second car some people, depending on their situation. But I can’t see how they will ever be more than a niche part of the market for the next several decades, due to all their well-known limitations, none of which will be solved any time soon. Madness.
What’s even weirder has been watching the car magazines. They’ve been pushing this stuff nonstop even while their readers scream at them that they hate it. It’s not just a generational thing; I’ve been reading these magazines my entire life and there has always been a generational divide in tastes and they always managed to balance things out — heck, that was half the fun, seeing the old guys and the young guys going back and forth ragging on each other. All that’s gone; now they’re all basically telling a huge chunk of their readers that this is the future and if they don’t like it they can get lost.
What the hell? Car mags used to see it as part of their mission to advocate on behalf of their readers. They would kick up a fuss over every unpopular government intrusion. Now they speak with the pure, imperious voice of the ruling class delivering its royal decree to the masses. It’s what I always imagined hobbyist magazines must have been like in the Soviet Union: “here is the official party line on our hobby, comrades! There will be no appeal.”
Who is the audience for this? Not car guys — even the car guys I know who are into EVs find this kind of thing offensive because however much they love EVs, they are car guys first and foremost. This isn’t a hobby that tends to attract progressive soyboys, after all. It’s like opening up a gun magazine to find the editors telling you that you the Second Amendment is outdated and you should get rid of all your guns except your hunting rifle and revolver.
You’re on point about the car mags. I used to suscribe to all the general interest mags, even Motor Trend which has always been terrible. MT was the first to go woke a while before the others but the others finally joined in. The other 2 mainline ones R&T and C&D both went woke at the same time a couple of years ago, female columnists and editors, whining about the diversity and everything. They became openly hostile to their readership and I bailed quickly. Funny thing is that MT keft sending me mags for months afterwards with bills that I never paid.
My husband and I have three old automobiles: 1987 Olds Custom Cruiser SW; 2000 Chrysler Sebring convertible (6 cyl) and 2011 Nissan Altima. We have a great service station we use for repairs to each of these vehicles and live where there’s not much road salt used or summer heat. We rent cars from Avis to go out of state for business mtgs or extended travel.
I’ve noticed recently that the Wall St Journal Friday “Mansion” feature section’s Car Guy-New Car reviewer (can’t be bothered to go check his name) has been performance reviewing almost only EVs for several months now, most costing upwards of $60K. I guess that’s how he gets paid for his column.
Why don’t we all get golf carts and drive those around for short hops in town, plug ’em in at night like we do at our summer resort island home. We share the road there with automobiles, too. Don’t let them onto the Interstate. It’s wrong for the government to try and twist us into pretzels doing something unnecessarily complicated to achieve an unrealistic dream.
Good summation. I posted a longer winded version of this down thread.
This car is my 2nd car and as a ‘fast toy’ it works well but you are mental to rely on it as a primary driver -especially- if you are a distance driver.
I think more people of our stripe would be embracing of EV’s if they were presented as what they were bumps & warts too rather than this semi-religious thing you described. It puts a LOT of people off and I totally get it.
There are enough videos of Tesla performance model 3s and Model S both smoking Vettes at the track that its ‘speed’ bona fides are without question but much like a Vette was makes a good track toy does not necessarily equate to a practical daily driver in many cases.
The one big difference between Vettes and Tesla is we don’t see a constant stream of videos where Teslas spontaneously ignite, taking everything down near then. And then there’s also Asian drivers putting their Tesla on autopilot and falling asleep. Idiocy doesn’t get any better than this.
Exactly. No car guy who’s driven a Tesla (or raced against one) is gonna throw shade in their direction! There are some truly awesome EVs out there, from Tesla and others.
But it’s a long way from selling Teslas and Taycans to a limited market willing to put up with the tradeoffs involved to selling them to millions and millions of normal drivers accustomed to ICE vehicles. And that doesn’t even begin to address the problem of installing the ENORMOUS infrastructure needed to support it all.
The power grid and battery supplies are only part of it; there’s an entire ecosystem around ICE vehicles that has to be rebuilt to accommodate EVs. The idea they can do all that in 5 or 10 or even 20 years is pure fantasy.
They have to keep the advertisers happy, if all the car companies are all in on EVs, the car mags have to be too
Look at Clarkson/Top Gear for example, for years they hated EVs with a passion, then they didn’t
Exactly. A fun hypothetical is to consider what media would cease to exist if advertising were banned. I suspect most mags and papers would go, most tv channels, most radio stations, and most popular websites. If everyone had to pay their full share of costs for media, the market would condense, and writers and entertainers would be paid way less.
Nowadays, the audience for the “X magazines” is never people who actually like X. The publishing industry across the board is by, for, and about the same people. I’ll leave it to you guys to add the parenz. The gun magazines are a rare exception. I’m sure they’re working on those too. What else? Um, farm equipment magazines? Ok, I haven’t seen one in ages but I’ll bet they haven’t yet run articles about how racist corn is.
Yep Z hit it out of the park.
I’ve been hanging around shops for a long time, so long that I no longer give a damn. . Z is right ev and the green thing is a religion full of zealots who have zero practical skills of any kind.
But for the moment seem to have political power.. my faith in logic and reason prevailing has been shaken as of late but L&R will prevail evemtually because it has to.
Too bad lots of us likely won’t live to see it. In the mean time it’s time to push
it’s coming anyway, monkey wrench untill it hurts. Dirt people will keep theirs warm and fed.
E-books; just checked, I’ve 545 on my computer. On the other hand I’ve over a hundred running feet of paper books shelved.
Many of my e-books came off project Gutenberg. Some I find useful to have in both hard copy and e-book form, for example De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The paper book is a fine read with pages dogeared and margin notes. The E version, using the computer find function, great to research, rediscover thoughts, paragraphs, without thumbing through page after page after page.
E-books won’t, I hope, replace paper but are a useful adjunct.
Electric cars; I’ve nothing against them or anyone that wants one and more than I’d fault 100 foot yacht owners.
I do think there is a place in the market for hybrids, gas or diesel engines to a generator and small battery bank and electric moter on each wheel, -but Smith’s invisible hand, not government mandate or funding deciding if I’m right about that.
Mandated, pushed by, even suggested by government, or a cabal of manufacturers, that’s a different thing.
I’m so old I can remember when the customer was always right and could choose what type of light bulb, toilet, shower automobile or stove he wanted without Big Brother’s approval or permission.
Jim in Alaska: “E-books won’t, I hope, replace paper but are a useful adjunct.”
Being in Alaska, I’m sure you know this better than those of us in the lower 48, but the obvious problem with eBooks is that, maybe 18 to 36 hours after the power grid goes down, an eBook doesn’t even amount to a very expensive paper weight.
Its battery is simply dead.
And lest you lower-48-ers think the grid will never go down in the lower 48, we’ve got an ackshual USAF general predicting war with China in two years:
Air Force General Predicts U.S. Will Be At War With China In 2025: ‘I Hope I Am Wrong’
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/air-force-general-predicts-u-s-will-war-china-2025-hope-wrong/
Top US general warns of possible looming war with China
https://english.alarabiya.net/News/world/2023/01/28/Top-US-general-warns-of-possible-looming-war-with-China
Odds ‘very high’ of U.S. military conflict with China, top Republican says
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/odds-very-high-of-us-military-conflict-with-china-top-republican-says/ar-AA16TdbI
Even if that war with China has only a 25% chance of ever occurring, we’d be talking hypersonic missiles with Electro-Magnetic-Pulse [EMP] weapons taking out the entirety of our power grid within the first 30 to 60 minutes of hostilities [maybe with no more than 10 or 15 minutes’ warning].
You won’t even be able to turn on your computer to read your digitally archived copy of Grandma’s Oatmeal Cookie Recipe.
Once the grid goes down, and all the batteries go dead, and you run out of fuel for your backup generator, you’re screwed.
PRO-TIP: It might be possible to keep an eBook alive if you have a small solar array in your backyard, or on your roof, but even with that [candidate for a] solution, you’d have to learn all about Deep Cycle Batteries…
And you’d have to hope that the Chinese EMP didn’t fry your solar array & your Deep Cycle Batteries [which themselves might explode and cause your house to burn to the ground].
In the absence of an always-on grid, electronics are dadgum near about worthless.
” power grid goes down, an eBook … expensive paper weight.”
Yes, no maybe. I also have my E-books stored on a USB flash drive and a couple of e-paper readers.
Warning though, don’t try to charge a Kobo E-reader off a solar array on a cloudy day if current flow stops because a cloud blocks the sun, it apparently runs the other way out of the Kobo and bricks it. I got mine running again after much effort it it wasn’t easy.
If necessary I’m sure I could charge my Kobo with my little solar panel, but I’d pick a cloudless day and keep a close eye on it.
I’ve also 3 gasoline powered generators on the property and a couple of DC to AC inverters that fit my vehicles. So in at least some situations E-books are still useful without a power grid.
However as I noted in my original post, I see them as useful adjuncts to real books and hence I keep a few of those around as well.
It just dawned on me that we Preppers need to be making physical acid-free PAPER copies of SHEET MUSIC.
If the grid goes down, we’ll be back to playing analogue musical instruments, and we’ll need some sheet music for all but the very simplest of songs.
For classical orchestral & chamber music, there’s an outstanding repository at the IMSLP [formerly known as the “Werner Icking Archive”]:
https://imslp.org
But it’s not good enough simply to download the PDF files; for archival purposes [in anticipation of the grid going down], we will need to have made lots & lots of PAPER COPIES of the sheet music!!!!!
The difference is that if you want a printed book, you can still print out an eBook. You’re not constrained (for the most part) to just reading it on a Kindle.
However, with an EV, you’re utterly constrained to the range of a suitable electric grid, in suitable temperatures, and there’s no way around that short of a tow truck.
I like the recent measure in the Wyoming state house that sets forth a plan to phase out EVs. Not realistic of course, but a good example of Flyover Country’s attitude toward our ‘betters’.
The decision to convert those vehicles from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles was likely driven by demands from Wall Street banks, driven by ESG investing guidelines. If you want access to capital, the lifeblood of every business, then you have to meet ESG investing guidelines. In the car business, that means meeting electric vehicle targets.
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Like your repeated diatribes against canvas sacks, your screed on ebooks bares no resemblance to the reality I’m familiar with, and seems more like an old man angry with clouds. I infer you are using your irrational hatred of ebooks (by the way, Ray Bradbury said people like you were stooges to use computers rather than a good ol’ typewriter) to cobble together a boogey-man so that you can argue against EV’s by comparing them. That’s like a UFO cultist saying “I know the Democrats are evil, I’ve met their kind on Alpha Centauri”.
“The claim was the reduced cost of making an eBook versus a real book would end printing entirely. The publishers would simply abandon the practice of printing books.” Really? Citation needed, as they say. I suppose someone might have said that, but people say a lot of things, don’t they?
I’m reminded of the British musicians unions, who thought records would replace live bands, so they lobbied to have the BBC limited in the amount of recorded music they could broadcast. They never understood that records were advertising, and would stimulate demand for concerts and tours. That’s why rock groups were forced to record those “BBC Sessions” rather than tour England. Wankers.
Ebooks don’t replace printed books, any more than paperbacks rendered hardcovers obsolete. But you need that notion that to make your comparison work, since there ARE people in and out of government who do what to replace gasomobiles, and the ones in govt. can make that happen.
BTW, ebooks are an enormous boom to dissidents. Vast libraries of material that used to be either banned outright or available only in physical locations, only available for distribution by costly printing and mailing (dissident lit by definition has a tiny market), is now freely and instantly available. Collections of dissident ebooks on thumb drive are far less vulnerable that rooms full of heavy paper volumes (Ask the old lady in Fahrenheit 451; or the Institute for Historical Review, whose warehouse was burned down by activists, or Yockey, whose entire run of The Enemy of Europe was destroyed by the Allied occupiers of Germany).
The “Amazon controls your reading” issue is a will ‘o the wisp and a distraction. Amazon has only removed one book from users’ libraries that I know of, an edition of 1984, oddly enough, and that was for copyright reasons, so take the issue up with Sonia Blair (Mrs. Orwell). Where Amazon controls thought is PHYSICAL BOOKS, about 80% of which are sold via Amazon; so when Amazon banned MY books, that was that for mass sales. Now you can only get them from Counter-Currents and Unz.com; of course, the ebook versions still circulate.
Ebooks won’t “replace” printed books any more that books replaced handwriting. I still own lots of books that are rare, finely made or of sentimental value, but I also have about 5000 ebooks, most which were free or a buck (I look for sales). Not only could I not have afforded to buy them, I couldn’t afford to pay for the space to store them. And forget about moving.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pour a hand-crafted beer and wind up my grammophone.
Records have replaced live bands, in a sense. Who do you know that can play an instrument? Once upon a time it was a highly desirable skill, because it brought some basic entertainment into the home, but now you just turn on your electronic device and listen to music, no time consuming acquisition of skill needed.
I realize that isn’t your point, but if you don’t understand this, then do you really understand e-books? However, your point about accessibility to taboo material is valid, but was not intentional. If I remember correctly the Kindle was much more restrictive in the files it would read when it first came out, so they did wish to control what you were able to read. They only moderated because of competition.
A live band was de rigueur at wedding receptions in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Today, it’s a DJ.
Nice going, I was going to make a similar comment. Though Z did make a good point. I was going to mention the 1984 thing; even if it was the only time Amazon recalled an ebook, it proves they can and will do it. And yes, they definitely censor, just look for books by Aleksander Dugin or Kevin MacDonald.
The real problem with ebooks is DRM (Digital Rights Management), the encryption that publishers install to prevent copying. This locks people in to Amazon’s e-readers, unless like me you’ve found a workaround to remove the DRM. Technically illegal, but I do this to consume the book on my third-party ebook reader, which can read books out loud regardless of Amazon’s arbitrary restrictions. (Hey, I’d never pirate a fellow writer’s book.)
Speaking of ebooks, Z should check out gutenberg.org, a huge repository of public-domain works. That’s where I got Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and dozens of others. Gutenburg has at times censored the more controversial works; I had to find “Mein Kampf” elsewhere. But they DID have Hillaire Belloc’s “The Jews” for example.
Agreed it’s not the best comparison, but I’d guess what Z was going after was the artificially inflated prices that the Big 5 publishers put on eBooks (sometimes higher than the print version) then claimed poor eBook sales meant consumers only wanted printed books.
Similarly, The Pointy Heads In Charge point at high gas prices of their own making, and consumer anger over that, and claim this means EVs would be better and cheaper for everyone because they don’t run on gas.
You’re forgetting the original solution in search of a problem…. the Segway. They hyped that like it was the second coming of Christ, and now we realize that most Americans could benefit from a nice walk.
Actually I think Dean Kamen was on to something when he invented the Segway.
If he had just gone a few steps farther; put the wheels one behind the other instead of side by side, let the front wheel articulate for steering and installed a saddle so one could ride sitting, maybe even put a 250cc or larger engine on it instead of an electric motor….
😉
Having seen Segways in use by staff at a busy airport, where it was a day’s hike from one end to the other — they’re bloody awesome for that kind of task, where a scooter is a hazard (due to all the people carrying bags and not really watching where they’re going) but walking is too slow because it’s just too durn far.
The US is, by European standards, majority non-white so do not expect policy concerns to be shaped by previous cultural norms.
Once you’re cucked everything sucks. If you accept the irrationality of allowing yourselves to be eradicated in your own country then you will accept the irrationality of EVs ,2+2=5 etc.
Cuck Center is where you live and how you will be. Embrace the cuck, former Americans.
The plan is that no one will own a car in the future. They will all be hourly or daily rentals. You won’t need to wait for charging. You’ll simply stop at the next car park and change the car for one with a full charge, like the old post horse system. The total number of cars needed in the country will only be the number of cars that are ever on the road at one time. That’s a fraction of what we have now.
It will be two giant corporations who secretly collude to fix prices, and us the government to stifle any competition. One more thing you won’t own, but will you be happy?
The plan, actually, is to ban gasomobiles in favor of EV’s that only the elite can afford. Sort of like airplanes; you’ll notice that they haven’t developed any cheap private planes or jetpacks, so air travel is restricted to 1. commercial (hoi polloi and other kinds of freight) and 2. expensive luxury planes for the elite.
You will drive nothing, get deliveries at your pod, and be happy.
Meanwhile, I was just thinking that there’s a market awaiting a basic but sufficiently powerful gas/flexfuel vehicle, with no more features than a 1960s model, and at a fraction of an EV’s price…
And if your social credit score isn’t high enough, tough luck, buddy.
Sadly, this is the rebuttal to Z’s points about EVs. Actually, this whole EV issue illustrates a kind of, what to call it even? Techno-Marxist Dialectical Method? The idea is to initiate a sort of iterative process that doesn’t ring any alarm bells initially but leads, through a kind of Hegelian logic, to some utterly tyrannical endpoint. The basic process goes something like this:
1. Propose a technological solution to a problem that may or may not be real or very serious.
2. Get the Blue Check shitheads talking about how “it’s inevitable”.
3. Roll out a prototype that sort of works but not really. (Tesla)
4. Let the BoomerCons trash it as impractical and scoff at how it’ll never take hold or be affordable. Many of these critiques will be quite valid and based in sound logic and real-world physics. Z isn’t a BoomerCon but this is where he is at the moment.
5. The REVEAL: This is itself a multistage process but basically the idea is to moot the criticisms of step 4 by revealing that there was never a plan to do anything practical for the average Murrican. In fact (and the Blue Chekists will pivot together on this) it will turn out that wanting an actual valid, practical solution was racist, sexist, homophobic, blah, blah and you are a Bad Person for even thinking that such a thing should be on offer. It will not bother a typical Blue Checkist that just a few months, weeks, nanoseconds prior xhe was saying xhe was going to rush out and buy the new thing and celebrate that American capitalism was able to produce such technological miracles.
6. This is the dream step that Klaus and his followers hope to see. Years of media propaganda combined with bipartisan legislative efforts and multi-billion dollar “public private partnerships” have taken effect and resulted in the old, affordable, practical technology being made unavailable to the masses. This can be accomplished by a whole host of means ranging from crippling “sin taxes” to pressuring manufacturers to just stop making things combined with backroom deals to compensate them for the loss of profitable product lines in the form of lavish contracts with the government to “bridges to the 20th century”. Or maybe let them make the next generation of things for the Russians to use as target practice.
7. The Irony: For Klaus and his class nothing actually changes. They still get to roar along the highway getting 12 mpg in their V12 luxury sedan because they have the money and connections to get one. In fact, their experience of the road is improved. All those savages in their pickups and economy cars are gone, every road is the autobahn, and the speedometer is perpetually bouncing around 300 kph. Oh, and they can still afford a Tesla for when they have to attend their greenie conferences and show they care about the Right Things.
Well imagined, but I’d add:
8. Given the overall societal decay, that autobahn will rapidly degrade into something appropriate to the third world. If it’s surfaced at all, it’ll be loaded with potholes. Driving a luxury vehicle, or even today’s ordinary family sedan, upon such a road will be unthinkable. What little motorized traffic there is will be delivery truck and armored personnel carriers. Maxing out at, oh, say 40 km/h. Maybe 60 on a good stretch.
Good point. Klaus will lament that driving just isn’t fun anymore and use the helicopter for everything.
Fine until the concrete block is dropped on them from the overhead gantry.
Lots of opinions on this one I see. Many people seem to have a good idea of the meta problem this is which is contrary to “sustainability” as it grows it will most definitely more resemble unsustainability as the grid is hammered with these very high draw “appliances”.
There is also a lot of speculation so allow me to offer a definitive source, and this will probably surprise a lot of people. I own a Tesla. 🙂 Newly owned, in fact, just a few weeks old.
However! I am what would be considered an ‘edge case’ in the extreme for why I own this car. I could not have less in common with your average EV driver so I am most definitely not the target market for these vehicles. It did, however, have a set of features I could not find in another ICE car at the same price point now that they’ve all been slashed 20%, so I pulled the trigger.
The primary difference between me and your average EV driver is that if I could turn the car I bought into an ICE vehicle, I would do it tomorrow w/o hesitation. I give approximately zero f-cks about “green energy” and know it for the absurd scam that it is. If you have even a modicum of knowledge about energy density & physics it is patently absurd on its face. Hence, I’m like the ‘anti-EV’ owner in some ways.
My use case, as I said, was very niche. I drive fast cars and must have that performance ability. I also wanted a car that had some advanced driving capabilities. You can say many negative things about the Tesla but they are far and away the most advanced in this space. That comes with some caveats, however. “Full Self Driving” is complete crap and will be for many years to come. It is not even close to ready yet and the fact that its being foisted on the public as ‘beta testers’ w/o their consent disturbs me. Couple years from now it will probably have some of the claimed capability. But the Enhanced Autopilot, on the balance, works -really- well. This means the car on a highway can keep the pace w/ traffic, change lanes, and generally get you from point to point w/o fanfare. Full Self Driving is like driving with an overly anxious teenager who is learning how to drive and requires MORE attention from you, not less. I’ve seen it do things ranging between comical and potentially quite dangerous even in 3 weeks.
There are also 2 types of drivers in the DC area with a diminishing 3rd type (‘normal drivers’). The first type is ghetto driver. Brown people from ghetto dwellers up through illegals. These are the people tailgating you 1 inch from your bumper at 80 mph even though there are 10 cars in front of you. Unsafe lane changes and general stupidity abound because they are low IQ low risk awareness retards. No big surprise there.
The 2nd type is the lefty liberal grass eater. The VAST majority of EV drivers fall into this category. This is the polar opposite. They are overly cautious, hesitant, and like the compliant mask wearing sheeple they are will putt along on the highway at a gingerly 55mph and not a mile over, because… rules. Roads that should be 80mph they will back up for miles because they are frightened and full of anxiety. When you add these 2 elements together its a sh-t show on the highways as they are like oil & water. A very fast high performance vehicle allows me to quickly get away from both, hence, my use case.
The funny part about Tesla drivers are they are generally lefty eco-retards and many of them are sitting on cars that average 300-500hp but they may as well be driving Nissan Leafs or Priuses. Tesla drivers are not so different than Corvette drivers but for diff. reasons. Vette drivers tend to skew into the gray hair demographic because they are the only ones that can afford them. But yet again you have someone sitting on a 500hp mid-engine supercar putting along in the 2nd lane at 55mph. They are legion, as are their Tesla driving counterparts dutifully following behind them in their 400+ HP torque monsters.
Actual drivers using higher end Teslas for purpose are few and far between. That is where I come in. I’ve driven some very fast cars and the one I have now is stupidly fast even for someone use to either massive displacement or turbos.
All that is the ‘good stuff’ now the not so good stuff–
Designed by Techies- They went for a very minimalist design and in some ways that understated vibe is good but in many ways it was taken way too far. Only a sub-continental H1B engineer would design a vehicle with NO gauges on the dashboard either analog or digital. Bafflingly stupid design choice, likewise for the lack of physical buttons. But again, I knew all this before purchase and accepted these flaws. But because you are trying to be ‘futuristic’ not having any damn buttons or a speedometer does not make your car futuristic just goofy. You see this in software all the time hence my H1B comment. They can build something functional but its like it was built by a robot. No one with any practical knowledge or real world experience would design something that way. Robots and Indians do it on the regular…
Range- Utter crap and everyone knows it. I knew it when I bought it but it was 28 degrees here last week and I took at 35 mile trip but lost 51 miles of charge! Imagine Canada! LOL. You’ve never seen a vehicle so temperature sensitive its incredibly impractical anywhere north of New Jersey I’d say due to the horrendous range loss in cold weather.
If you rely on superchargers you are saving nothing and probably paying equal or more than ICE + the wait time. Home charging on a standard 120V AC outlet is equally absurd because it takes days and you now have another ‘major appliance’ drawing constant high amperage power 24×7 for days in a row. Home wall chargers are where it’s at but its another ‘hidden cost’ in that it’s going to set you back $800-2000 bucks to have it installed depending on where you live.
Battery is good for more than 10 years now, earlier models, not so much… You will lose ~10% of range after 10 years if you drive it pretty hard. Less if you are a grass eater. The trade off here is this: the motor, conversely, is good out to 500k miles easy because its absurdly simple compared to an ICE engine. Very few moving parts less than 20 vs 200+ in an ICE car.
I have an ICE vehicle for long road trips and until they build out more infrastructure you most definitely would have to engage in far more careful planning on long journeys especially in ‘flyover country’.
I am ambivalent on Elon Musk, he reminds me of Trump in many ways but smarter. I’m not a feminized liberal effete bitch boy who bases his purchasing decisions on what my friends tell me are the ‘correct’ politics. If someone makes something that has value to me, I buy it. Simple as. Again, if they had an ICE version of this car with this absurdly high performance, advanced navigation, etc. I would buy it in a heartbeat but alas, similar cars are deep into the 80-90+ range right now which I wouldn’t buy on general principle.
I upvoted you for one reason, Corvette drivers. I loathe 99% of them. They buy in a midlife crisis or to fulfill a boyhood dream yet they never drive them to even 10% of the cars’ capabilities. They own one of finest supercars ever made, an equal or superior to anything from Europe but just can’t make themselves extend the car. Apologies to anyone reading this who has one, I hope you at least track it once in a while.
Guys, he bought a Tesla because (I suspect) an EV gets unrestricted use of the carpool lanes, which makes a commute more enjoyable compared to the normal lanes of I-95 which are basically a parking lot between Washington DC and most of the way down to Richmond during rush hour. 😀
I am a subcontinental. The problem is that the bean counters rule the roost.
What happens is that the bean counters hire the sub-cs because they get an “engineer” with the credentials cheaply. But the said engineer has never used the products he is designing/working on.
Imagine a shoe designer hiring a Saharan who has never worn shoes in his life. Then put the said Saharan in charge of designing hiking boots, formal shoes, military boots, waders…the whole range.
It is the same with the sub-cs trying to design high tech products that they have never before used int their lives and sub contracted to India.
A sub-c, who has never flown in a plane, designing the MCAS for Boeing will put cost before safety first and use only one sensor. Because that is what the bean counter in the USA told him to. Cut costs. Anyone who is even remotely involved in aviation will know that redundancy rules with fail safe backups as much as possible.
Same thing with the removal of buttons in a Tesla. Buttons and gauges cost money to manufacture. Removing them makes the product cheap.
Voila. Your buttonless dashboard which makes it impossible to tune a radio on an uneven or icy road. And a sub-c who has never driven a car does not realise the need for a speedometer in a country where cops have radar/lidar guns.
The real push for EV/AI is to develop military police robots, to complement the coming drone swarms, under civilian cover.
The common theme I’ve noticed with all of the current electronic devices is the ability for the regime to change the terms of service on a whim and impose it. Cars are built with computers in them that allow them to be disabled remotely. The web and search engines are fairly good at disappearing content they don’t like. And e-books running some kind of subscription service will only offer the current year books. If they don’t like a book then a few well-formed SQL commands can make it so that book never existed.
This doesn’t have to be perfect either, just annoying enough to get around such that the average idiot won’t do it. That’s why young people don’t do piracy nearly as much as the millennials did, it’s a pain in the ass to diddle around with the current operating systems that try to hide the computer from you. How exactly do you check which processes are running on an iphone, or look at the file system? You probably have to buy the software dev kit from apple for that. In the same vein I’m sure someone could hack their Tesla to knock out all the spyware, but the only people capable will be the minority of nerds who aren’t bug-eating soys who like the idea of daddy gubmint watching them in their car.
At the risk of spouting Con Inc. rhetoric, is there a free-market solution? The ability to remain private on your phone is a constant selling point by manufacturers, although it’s a chimeric ability in the real world. I can’t see a new company being built on the concept of a private, personal vehicle, but might not one of the existing manufacturers stress the independence their owners can expect and use that feature as a tool to capture market share?
Any corporation big enough for you to know its name *is* the government. There’s no “market” for pretending that’s not true.
That would require a free-market and an inability for businesses to lie about whether or not their product actually does what they say it does.
The closest we get in reality is stuff that blocks out Pajeet scammers, but is still letting the CIA dutifully catalog all those disgusting sites you look at in the bathroom at work.
As far as computers go, do Linux, not Windows or Mac.
KGB, classically [1987 through 2021], in starting a large new company, there were two masters before whom you had to prostrate yourself: the Federal Reserve, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
To start a large new manufacturing firm, you needed an Uncle Mordecai somewhere in the banking system [to insure the free flow of fake money to prop up the value of your stock certificates], and you needed an affectation’ed Cousin Steve in the Environmental Protection Agency [to keep the Passive Aggressive Industrial Complex regulators from smothering you to death with paperwork].
But Jerome Powell has turned off the spigot of fake money [at least temporarily], and the fake businesses [Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc] are beginning to collapse.
Furthermore, most guys who were Mechanical Engineering [“M.E.”] majors in college don’t much care for interacting with affectation’ed Cousin Steve from the E.P.A.
BTW, I hate to undermine the legitimacy of a fellow like Elon Musk [goodness knows he’s correct on an whole bunch of fundamentally important topics, such as White total fertility rates], but all it takes is one glance at the “Coverage Map” for Starlink to realize that Starlink was 110% created & financed by the Deep State [to include the pre-Powell Federal Reserve]:
https://www.starlink.com/map
tl;dr == If you wanna start a serious new automobile/truck manufacturing franchise in the 21st Century, then be prepared to become intimately familiar with Lindsay Graham’s Lady Bugs.
[And if you don’t already know about Lindsay Graham’s Lady Bugs, then I strongly urge you to remain ignorant of them.]
In line with the thinking of Gary H & Alzaebo & Ploppy above, the Elites want electric cars because a couple of lines of code [which can be uploaded on the fly to your car’s IP Address & Serial Number] turn your electric car into a prison and/or an execution chamber.
As you were cruising down the interstate, did you just mean-tweet about a THOT or a n!g-n0g or a pajeet or a g00k or an LGBTQ, or, G0d forbid, a Chosen?
Suddenly all the doors of your electric car lock themselves shut, your brakes and your steering wheels no longer function, your electric car swerves across the median into oncoming traffic, you hit a 120,000 lb tractor-trailer rig at 75MPH + 75MPH = 150MPH total impact, and that’s the last anyone ever hears from you.
Then the satellite downloads the old code, and reverts the codebase back to “normal”, and covers up the fact that your code had been altered, and unlocks the doors, and restores the steering, and makes any alterations necessary to the trip memory so that no possible forensic investigation could prove that the software had been [briefly] altered.
Apparently this sort of thing was beta-tested on an investigative journalist, named Michael Hastings, in California, back in 2013.
I wonder how long it will take for rapists and hitmen to hack the new automobile kill switches.
Yeah, yeah yeah. And Brandon and his merry men will give M1 tanks to the Ukes and win the war against Russia.
Your “Rule Of Opposites” needs to be expanded with regard to the Usual Suspects. If they say they are going to lick Covid, they are going to unleash a financial and cultural catastrophe. If they are going to beat the Russians in the Kraine, they’ll leave it in charred ruins. If they are gonna save the environMINT…guess what.
I don’t see how strip mining the planet for lithium and filling landfills with mountains of worn out solar panels could possibly harm the environment…
Whenever I point out the scale of the mining necessary to make EV’s work to one of their advocates, I get a dead eyed stare. The fact that the mining is done largely in impoverished third world countries doesn’t even register.
It’s like they think these batteries run on unicorn farts and good intentions.
Well, those are the power sources for their impoverished brains, so they don’t quibble with their extensive, and unending programming in consequence.
There is one really great argument for electric cars which curiously the e car fans never mention. All the petrol stations where I live are owned by Pakistanis. I like to point out to colleges who own electric cars how much I admire their racism, but simply can’t justify spending that much money just to signal my dislike of south asians.
Here in the EU the plan is to outlaw all sales of all cars with combustion engines until 2035. I can imagine how well this is going to work.
There’s a very palpable ivory tower sensibility to our managerial clouds these days, a mindset of snapping one’s fingers and making it so by mere command, without regard for or respect to complex systems that took a lot of people a long time to establish. You see it all the time if you’re paying attention, it shows up in a lot of ways, the push for EVs but one.
They’ve never known a world without every convenience, and take that for granted. It is unfathomable to them that they might suffer consequences for reordering it on a whim. A few of them are no doubt malevolent, but most of them are just extremely dumb. As dumb as posts.
They will neither see nor accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. It will always be the fault of “capitalism,” “colonialism,” or “racism.”
The elites live in a world where magic is real. By spellcasting in the media and using their vast wealth to influence politicians they are able to make wars, change economies, destroy religions, and even cause an entire race to commit suicide. It’s no wonder then that they become blind to the physical limits the universe will eventually impose. For most things they mearly speak the words and things that are unimaginable to you and I become real for them.
It gets worse. They’ve been ordered constantly, from an early age, by pop culture, woke education, and their magic negro Obama The Precious, to “change the world,” without regard to whether or not they were qualified to change anything more complicated than their underwear.
This is part of how you get vast armies of idiots who think it’s a good idea to turn off the economy to save grandma, without any understanding or even conception of what the consequences of that could be.
So why should it be surprising that they think EVs are going to be a solution to anything
It used to be a big joke that Miss America contestants would talk about how they wanted to “change the world” or “create world peace” during the interview segment. Yet now, you can’t get a job as a high school or university commencement speaker if you’re not going to pepper your speech with similar exhortations.
There’s a curious psychology among the younger demographic of the woke. Every now and then I’ll run into some ad or article about how “we” need to “re-engineer the X” system. Most recently, I saw an example where X was food. These things are invariably written by some xirl or bitch-boy who couldn’t make it past high school algebra and couldn’t re-engineer a loose lugnut back onto a wheel bolt. The same people are invariably in favor of gun confiscation, severe speech restrictions, mandatory vaxxing, rationing and bans on a host of ever shifting “bad” items.
Do these people have some sense of how helpless, incompetent, and *powerless* they actually are? Perhaps they do and this is actually what fuels their authoritarianism and fantastical notions of “re-engineering” a world they barely understand.
Such people have always existed but what seems to have changed is that no one today ever teaches them humility. Instead they’re taught that every problem is shallow and when a solution isn’t immediately forthcoming there is some malevolent human agent in the way. Feelings of personal powerlessness and incompetence do not result in being encouraged to learn and improve one’s self but being encouraged to feel vicariously powerful through association with a tyrannical State.
Young Communists were instructed like this too. If Comrade Stalin’s plans are not working out, it can only be due to “wreckers” or “anti-Soviet agitation”. That turned out really well too of course.
J. Zoar you always have good insights. The racist thing exists partly as patronage for a specific faction.
Still, the deplorable, racist, clinger epitaphs probably exist in large part to get rid of us dimwits whose common sense and grounding in reality get in the way of their fantasies. We stood in the way of eradicating poverty for decades while they eradicated real wealth.
We stood in the way of equal outcomes and environmental justice too. We are a convenient scapegoat. Time to get uppity and show them the sharp end of the horn.
The Clouds, being intelligent yet idiot types, fail to realize that their existence is only possible as a product of the current system.
They seem to believe the current system exists as a result of their work product, which is an utterly delusional worldview.
Where is the evidence that car-makers are being bullied into announcing that they will be abandoning IC vehicles? I don’t claim to know what their motivations are, but there are other obvious possible explanations, at least some of which are more plausible than bullying. As far as electronic media are concerned, the fact that I read your pieces on a tablet undercuts your argument about ebooks.
Oh, I dunno 🤷🏻♂️ MBlanc46, there’s this from California:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/25/california-bans-the-sale-of-new-gas-powered-cars-by-2035.html
With a link to the CARB regulation.
And here’s a list of US states with a wild hair up their bottoms to match CA:
https://ww2.motorists.org/blog/15-states-plan-to-ban-gas-powered-cars-is-your-state-next/
Then there’s this from the EU:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/economy/20221019STO44572/eu-ban-on-sale-of-new-petrol-and-diesel-cars-from-2035-explained
But no, no government coercion at all. 😒
Are you smoking crack? California, New Jersey, New York, Britain all have outlawed the ICE engine by 2035. You make cars that have a minimum 10 year lead time on design and massive capital investment – tens of billions of dollars. Why invest anymore in a product that will be outlawed before it gets to market or whose sales to profitability won’t materialize by the time it can’t be sold?
The California market alone is so huge that economies of scale dictate that you can’t make ICE cars for markets where they are still legal.
See all the other points here about how utterly stupid the Cloud People are.
You can still buy a new ICE car on the 31st of December 2034 and continue to drive it until the wheels fall off
Assuming it all goes to plan, which we all know just won’t happen
Mazda is a perfect example. Around six years ago they developed an engine that combined the fuel economy of a diesel, with the horsepower of a V8. I believe it displaced 3.4 liters, had close to 300 horsepower, all while getting a whopping 70 mpg on the highway. Uncle Sugar flat out told them don’t bother bringing it here, we won’t allow it for sale.
It also seems to be the rebirth of the train transportation zealots, with their famed rail project in California crashing up against the rocks of reality. No longer pitching a shinkansen to go from D.C. to L.A. now it’s about super chargers installed every twenty feet to drive a demand that doesn’t exist. Much like their public transportation dreams, it might be forced to kinda, sorta work in a monoethnic, high trust, highly capable society, but in a land where people make sure their take is full and drive through some areas as quickly as possible schemes that involve stopping for hours at a time in unknown areas is just not feasible, for example.
Gotta say, I think trains are a great way of getting around. In the city, no traffic. In the countryside, you get to enjoy the scenery. Kind of doubt it’ll ever catch on again in America, though, barring a partial collapse. Much faster to fly, much more convenient to jump in a car instead of observing a train schedule.
For better or worse, America just wasn’t built for trains. And Europe mostly wasn’t built for cars.
In the last half of the 1800’s it was built for trains. Getting from point A to point B in hours instead of taking a few uncomfortable days had to be an bewilderingly positive development. But the automobile managed to shave even more time off that trip by going directly from your front door to your destination. No more to the station early, only to wait for a delayed train; no more stopping at multiple towns along the way.
Eh, I wouldn’t look to the current train wreck that is the US rail system as a paradigm.
As KGB stated, the US once had passenger and freight service that was quite good, and served towns that would never dare dream of interstate or flight service.
There’s no one who gets on public transportation in the U.S. and thinks “yeah I want more of *that*”
That is very true. In all likelihood, anywhere in North America, if you live in a small city or large town that dates to the 19th century, it likely had a train depot. Even tiny settlements along a railway had limited service.
And right now in Japan the Shinkanzen is not fast enough, so they are building a Mag Lev line
Never been to Japan but whrn they finish the Msg lev, I might make the trip
I love the morons that are always nattering on about high speed rail. They’re so dumb that they dont realize that air travel is our high speed rail.
I would seriously consider a plug-in hybrid if it was done right. Commute to work and around town on the battery (assuming cheap charging was available). But a gas engine that turns on for longer trips.
But most of the models that were on the market seem to have been pulled in favor of all-electric models.
the new Prius is just what you describe.
What happened at Toyota, the new Prius actually looks good
The life span of the battery/cost of replacement remains the big question to me with a hybrid. I buy cars with the intention of driving them a long time. Currently getting around in a 21 year old Toyota, that I’m beginning to think about replacing. I have similar aspirations for the next one.
Hell, just get yourself a golf cart. That’s what all the beautiful people in my neighborhood do. They’re such virtue signaling maniacs.
Toyota’s CEO is stepping down because he was a hybrid enthusiast and recognized the limited utility and feasibility of all electric cars. Toyota, as the lone holdout advocating for hybrids, has been under enormous pressure to get with the all electric program and ditch their hybrids.
BerndV: Toyota has ruined their vehicles – even the ICE ones. There was a massive multipage survey they sent out 3-5 years ago (which I never bothered to complete) all about what features most mattered, etc. The soccer moms all did fill out their surveys, and Toyotas are now good little mommy cars with all the surveillance tech, and safety warnings and buzzers and control features. Both my husband and I wish we had kept our 2018s and loathe the 2020s we are driving (recently paid off both leases). As soon as we have the extra cash they are both getting traded in for an older (2010-2017) four-wheel-drive Toyota truck and SUV. I realize these still have some of the same features, but not nearly as many, and we just don’t have the tools or experience to repair/upgrade the 1990-2010 models.
I like the idea of an electric car for around town things. Range is not an issue for that. Also, going to the gas station is annoying. Run a 220v to the garage and you’re done. I know this doesn’t work for most people, but it doesn’t have to.
There are a million other liberal ideas that suck for everyone, but this one only sucks for some people.
works until you are parked in the grocery store parking lot with a car full of groceries on a hot day and your batteries are dead. How you gonna push the car to the charging station, or will another EV car owner in the same lot have a really long extension cord??
You make it sound like EVs don’t come with charge indicators.
If you’re rich enough, sure, why not. It is not, and in my lifetime will not be, a viable option for the working class
Yes. The EVs will work for some time in limited trips. To and from work or to and from the grocery store. Where I would disagree with their usefulness is the long term cost. The batteries will not last long term. When they are no longer useable the car becomes a large appendage with no value. The battery replacement will not be cost effective for most people. The car becomes junk.
planned obsolescence
Absolutely.
Range is not an issue for normal commutes. Where I work, nearly every dude has a pickup truck as their primary commuter. Call me an eco-fascist, but nobody needs that much metal and oil for a daily commute. If your commute is under 100 miles a day, and you do errands on the weekend, having at least one EVs is fine. I drove a Nissan Leaf 10 years ago and if you have some degree of low-time preference, no problem.
“nobody needs that much metal and oil for a daily commute”
Who are you to tell people what they “need”? Nobody “”needs” and EV, either. Nobody “needs” a car at all; humans existed for millennia without them.
If YOU want to drive an EV, fine. Nobody’s stopping you. The problem is that people like you think you have the right to dictate that other people do exactly what you have chosen to do.
To each according to their needs? Not so much an eco fascist as an eco Marxist. Those contemptible pickup truck drivers may actually have other uses for their trucks besides commuting and don’t want to buy, garage, and insure a second car for commuting just to please smug midwits. While a second electric car may save on end user oil and gas, the energy used to charge it along with the mining and production costs to manufacture it easily outweigh the ostensible oco benefit derived from acquiring a second electric car simply for commuting. Try to actually think before you type.
Marko: Woke bs. Once we relocate my husband will no longer have any commute (work remotely from home) and I won’t be going into town more than once every couple of weeks. Regardless of distance, no way an electric vehicle will make it to the end of the 3.5 mile gravel road to our uphill driveway. And even now, in the burbs, we have had to rent pickup trucks (because like fools we sold our older son’s old one years ago) to gift furniture to friends and our kids that we soon won’t have room for.
“no way an electric vehicle will make it to the end of the 3.5 mile gravel road to our uphill driveway. ”
You may be surprised. I live up a mountain dirt road and experience harsh winters. I’ve got an ICE RAM and Jeep but I also have an EV SUV with AWD and air suspension. The EV handles the dirt roads, snow and ice up my mountain as well as my Jeep and better than the RAM.
FYI, I got the EV for 2 reasons: 1) fun acceleration and short trips and 2) self-reliance (I’ve got a shit ton of solar, batteries and 1k gallon propane for generator to charge the vehicle if they ever decide to f#ck with the fossil fuel supply).
Jeez, there’s a lot of “muh hemi V8” in the comments today
If you only use the EEV for around town use, you will never put enough mileage on it to recuperate the energy and emissions invested in making the car. The battery will be useless by then.
If someone wants an EEV, go for it. I have no problem with it. I have a problem with outlawing more affordable options and putting upward price pressure on a huge number of commodities across they supply chain that will increase costs not just of cars, but many goods across the entire economy.
From a materials perspective this project is pure insanity.
It’s more evidence that profits no longer matters to corporations. There is no business case to discontinuing the only 2 Dodge vehicles that have sold in the past 20 years.
Remarkably similar to a command economy. They make stuff that nobody needs in the wrong quantities. You can get free, unlimited food at the communist grocery store, but only energy drinks are in stock and there is never any meat.
This is driven by smug, urban liberals, who see themselves as the elite. They imagine a future where there are no bad-whites roaming the country roads in big, coal rolling trucks with confederate flags. For themselves, the Good and Compliant People means that they will always have plenty of electric cars provided to shuttle them across their transit friendly, park-filled, diverse 15 minute city.
What it really leads to, is nobody being able to drive anywhere, except for the real elites who will be able to use their electric cars. Liberals are useful idiots but not included in the elites’ bigger schemes, and will end up with no personal transportation at all, same as everyone else. Delusions of grandeur from urban liberals really is very dangerous for society.
Side note: it’s interesting how yet again the green insanity tramples over “equity”. The owners of HEMI Chargers are generally quite melanin-enriched. They are cutting out a big diverse portion of their customer base, who obviously have no interest in buying the E-Charger.
The upper management clouds at the auto companies don’t really care if they run the companies into the ground. They have all the money they need and golden parachutes so they’re doing what it takes to get the approval of their fellow clouds.
If they can’t sell product and their emplayees lose their jobs it’s no matter to them. One of the worst features of the GAE since WW II has been no penalty for failure. No matter what the elite does they move onward and upward to better things. Mitt Romney and our flag officer approve of this.
GM got $20 billion from the government in 2009 when it should have gone bankrupt.
Nice “work” if you can get it…
“There is no business case to discontinuing the only 2 Dodge vehicles that have sold in the past 20 years.”
To answer Z’s statement “Recently, whoever owns the Dodge car brand” that is Stellantis:
https://www.stellantis.com/en
Stellantis is the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA Group, a French firm centered around Peugeot.
(Italian and French cars together. Noodle THAT one out. 🤨) Chrysler came along for the ride because they were tied at the waist to Fiat.
“The principal activity of Stellantis is the design, development, manufacture and sale of automobiles bearing its 16 brands of Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Citroën, Dodge, DS, Fiat, Fiat Professional, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, Mopar, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, and Vauxhall.”
This is why I call them the Isle of Misfit Toys of the automobile industry. They’re like American Motors Corporation writ large. The problem for Chrysler and Dodge is the 300 (introduced 2005), Charger (Introduced 2006) and Challenger (introduced 2008) ride on a platform that’s closing in on 20 years old. The last year I have solid sales numbers:
300 (2022) – a tick over 14K units
Charger (2021) – over 78K units
Challenger (2022) – over 55K units
That’s not huge numbers. Yeah the dies and stampings and such were amortized a long time ago, but that’s niche numbers. Today at Eric Peters site (who Z linked to) he reported Toyota sold 367K RAV4s in 2022. And that’s ONE Toyota model.
So Stellantis will keep Ram because nobody in Europe builds pickup trucks, they’ll keep Jeep because of brand recognition, and Chrysler and Dodge have to adapt a “platform” another car company already has.
Chrysler is slated to be EV:
https://www.chrysler.com/chrysler-innovation/airflow.html
Dodge gets something called the Hornet, a hybrid SUV out of Stellantis’ parts bin, and then allegedly will go electric:
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/dodge-charger-daytona-srt-banshee-ev-concept-debut/
I suspect Chrysler and Dodge are sink-or-swim at this point.
I don’t like the loss of the cars, but the platform upgrade has to make money back or they’re not going to do it. The 2008-2023 Challenger is going the way of the 1970-74 E-Body Challenger and Barracuda for the same reason: We’re not recouping enough to warrant a replacement.
I’m reminded of the plastic containers disaster. The industry proudly told the regulators they could recycle all the plasticky crap. Turns out a lot of it they can’t, what’s produced isn’t really good for much but being more trash later, and there’s so little demand for recycled plastic it ends up in the landfills or the oceans anyway, where it leaches away forever.
Stupid, greedy Corporate America will tell the Dumbass Government whatever it wants to hear, and what Dumbass Government wants to hear is these stupid and hopelessly inefficient electric toy cars are The Future.
They should incinerate plastic if they won’t do away with it and people won’t stop consuming it. Probably would be better for the environment.
ironically, when pop came in bottles America had a widespread recycling system that actually worked.
Let e again bang the oil drum for garbage gas: superheated steam turns everything with a carbon chain into ultra light, sweet oil (thermal depolymerization).
Trash, fuel, chem; into products, back into energy to make products, a 90% efficiency recycling chain. Plus, we can clean up the trash choking the waters.
Prepackaged TDP plants are being made in India. I’m thinking of outlaw refineries and hobo scrappers here, paid in cash to clean up the trash: the new black market economy. Eventually, pay off the local gangs, aldermen, and city councils in barrels of black market oil and recycling contracts.
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The scale of the problem is enormous. The US uses 350 million gallons of gasoline a day. 1 gallon of gasoline has 34kwh electric equivalent. Even after adjusting for efficiency and taking the efficiency at face value, which is not even true, the scale is still enormous. There are like 105 million passenger vehicles in the US.
Just how with EVs, the emissions are moved from the tailpipe to the generating station, the inefficiency is also moved mostly out of the car to the generating station and all other aspects of the grid. Even combined cycle gas generation is not all that efficiency. I’ve read they can be 60% efficient, but google says 50% efficiency is the norm.
Jalopnik is reporting it now costs more to drive 100 miles in an EV than from gasoline, even charging at home.
https://jalopnik.com/driving-100-miles-in-an-ev-is-now-more-expensive-than-i-1850031874
If this insanity keeps going on, the price of electricity has nowhere to go but through the roof.
What are we going to do with all the gasoline we produce and will continue to produce even if every passenger vehicle in the US is electric? Probably sell it to China. Producing gasoline is a byproduct of producing diesel, kerosene , heating oil and other oil products.
I think I heard pharma is another industry that grew out of the problem of what to do with byproducts. Do you know if that’s true?
No. I’ve never heard that, but I don’t know much about pharma.
Quick internet search, this is what comes up. Not proof, but it sounds like good evidence:
https://context.capp.ca/articles/2019/feature-petroleum-in-real-life-pills/
Wish I could remember where I heard that.
It’s called “Rockefeller medicine”: this is why he created the licensing schools and AMA, so he could push oil-based pharma and allopathic trauma surgery, that is, “cut-and-dope” corporate controlled medicine.
Funny, I want to say I heard it in an organic chem class in college, but I’m not sure. It was of course presented as a positive thing.
Now, let’s not be too hard on either petroleum or Rockerfeller’s ghost. For all its faults, without petroleum and similar feedstocks for industry, for all practical purposes modern life would be impossible.
But are eBooks really deadend niche items? Libraries across AINO–and other places, I assume–are pulping their printed books, replacing their shelves with “study spaces” and computers, and purchasing digital books. I loathe eBooks, but I fear they are being imposed upon us, largely against our will, just like every other horrendous Leftist innovation.
Ebooks are huge on campus, but I think that’s because they’re like everything on campus — a huge scam. University Presses are all subsidized, so they can make a lot more money by selling the Ebook at *almost* the price of a physical book, without having to print a physical book. There’s also Etextbook rental, which is an even bigger scam — you get the “book” on your device for the semester for “only” $50, as opposed to an open-ended download for $90. Do the same thing for each new “edition” — meaning, they switched a few commas around on page 397 — and watch the money roll in.
(The last college I taught in, you’d think you were in a sports bar if you accidentally wandered into the library. All the physical books were in a dusty corner in the basement; everything that wasn’t a “study carrel” (=a meeting room for socialization) was a big screen tv with ESPN on it. This was a few years back, fyi).
The college textbook scam is something the Mafia would flinch at doing. The professors will assign their books and their friend’s books, even when the class requires reading a few pages. The book itself would go unread if not for the class assignment. Of course, the books themselves are wildly over priced.
My econ professor added tear-out homework pages in the back of his book. This eliminated all the alternative markets for his book – resale, low cost (made in India), as well as the ebook. He only accepted homework with the correct paper (nonstandard paper) and perforation tearing.
He was an econ professor for a good reason.
During my many years as a professional student (pardon me, for “enrichment”) I was able to strike back at the evil empire — sort of. It turned out 95% of the time, the “obsolete” older cheaper edition of that required text would do just fine. And for the parts that changed? Just borrow/photocopy a class mate’s or do the same at the library, where there were always reference copies on hand. Obviously this was back in the genuine book days.
Ah, that takes me back to taking my Calculus textbook back to the campus bookstore for their rebuying program. Nope, new edition, apparently that year they must have unearthed some lost texts from Sir Issac Newton that describe a superior ordering of homework problems.
I’ve gotten good use out of these textbooks though over the last 20 years, they make a handy makeshift monitor stand.
Ebooks are fine, but I enjoy paper—or did enjoy paper until the eyes went bad with age. Now my ebook presentation devices allow for some amelioration and I continue to read.
What ebooks allow is access to subject matter here-to-fore unavailable because of low demand. Most of the stuff I have read in the last decade or so would have never have been available to me if only on paper. This is *not* a minor thing for those on the DR.
Correlated: Most of the music I listen to is long “out of print” and would have been unavailable in old fashioned record/CD stores. But thanks to streaming music it’s now just a click away. It’s good for the artists and record companies too, as they weren’t making any money off those old out of print albums before, but now they are, at least a little bit.
I hear musicians complain about the meager earnings from streaming, but it must be worth something, judging from how brief Neil Young’s very publicized boycott of Spotify was.
And this all matters, both in literature and music, because with clown world giving us nothing but trash in the present, if we don’t have access to the old stuff then we don’t really have anything.
There is very little music, no matter how old and/or obscure, that you can’t find on CD on eBay. That’s where I get and OWN my music. CDs don’t disappear when some streaming service decides the music isn’t diverse enough or goes belly up.
“Most of the stuff I have read in the last decade or so would have never have been available to me if only on paper.” This is not just because of low demand. Try finding a paper copy of Camp of the Saints. My digital repository of samizdat is far larger than I could accumulate in paper. The key is they are not “eBooks” in the sense of coming from Amazon, who can indeed control your Kindle. They are primarily PDFs and epubs, with some docx and text files.
One of the best things about libraries is browsing the books. If libraries go to ebooks it raises the question of why have libraries at all?
I was visiting a friend at Yale back when they converted one of their libraries into an e-library. No one was there. It was just a weird physical space that had no obvious purpose.
Eliminating the librarian profession wouldn’t be a bad thing. It’s mostly stocked by women and sissies who hate anything free of degenerate conformity.
Years ago, I dated a woman whose sister was in college for “library science” which is a real thing that exists. I spent an evening socializing with librarian scientists. It reminded me of the one time I tried acid.
“It reminded me of the one time I tried acid.”
Sounds like an entertaining topic for a blog post!
Speaking of former dates, I dated a lady with a Master’s in library science. When she was working on her degree, most of the students were as crazy liberal as you might imagine. They called her a “lipstick librarian” because she was conventionally feminine.
If you’ve been in a library lately you’ll notice that librarians represent the profession most violently resistant to doffing their face nappies.
The library at the university where I work has what I call Propaganda Valley. On either side of the main entrance are temporary wall panels bedizened with various items of Leftist hagiography and indoctrination. Given that we’ve just passed MLK Day and are now embarked upon Blak Hisree Mumpf, I don’t suppose I need to tell you the nature of the accursed gauntlet at the present. It is all I can do not to rip all of that garbage to shreds as I walk by.
True, but that’s a fairly recent development. Libraries used to be run by professionals. They also employed a lot more males. When I was in grad school in the 1990s there were a bunch of longhaired quasi-hippie dudes whose full-time career was working in the university library. They wore wear flannel shirts and boots while checking out books.
Not too long ago libraries were really neutral in terms of content, you could literally read anything.
I am blessed to have such a public library system where I live — it’s so good it actually has “The Turner Diaries” and George Lincoln Rockwell’s “White Power” in the stacks, even today.
Controlling the medium of cultural reproduction controls the reproduction of culture. Physical books can be trashed to make way for digital and then digital copies can be conveniently lost or edited. We have already seen movies and TV shows modified to ‘reflect modern sensibilities.’ Physical books are a memory repository that operate as a stumbling block to rewriting history.
The advent of the eBook helped crack the Big 5 publishers’ vertical distribution monopoly. As a result, white male authors the NY houses wouldn’t give the time of day were able to make an end run around the gatekeepers and reach wide audiences.
Few talk about it because publishing isn’t as sexy as the film or music industries. But book publishing is the one area where the Right has retaken a decent amount of ground.
Before anyone asks, I’m not talking Twitter pundit or self-help grifters. We’re talking mega best sellers like Nick Cole, Jason Anspach, and Chris Kennedy who out-earn legacy pub’s diversity pets.
I saved this quote for many years (seriously, almost a decade). It is from Boris Alatovkrap, posting on Zerohedge (back when Zerohedge comments were great).
“In cave in rural France is painting circa 5000 BC, and is tell story. One day is rain much and lightening is loud and scary. Leader of cave community is explain danger of lightening and is predict end of world if citizenry is not work hard for stopping of lightening. Every citizenry of community must bring it portion of berries and meat for sacrificial god and make incantation. Leader of cave community is so very smart, is not help hunt and gather, but is must make strategy and ‘guide’ community for self-preservation technique. One day, citizen is look up and see is still lightening, but is look around and is still alive. Other is still alive. Lightening is come and go, and community is survive. Citizen is make comment at cave meeting and next day is ‘fall’ in tar pit.
Leader of cave community is explain danger of tar pit and is predict end of world if citizenry is not work hard for prevention of tar pit…”
There is one major upside to eBooks: the ability to carry an entire library on a single device. It’s hard to deny the extreme convenience of that. As a Gen-Xer who spent most of his life reading physical books, however, I prefer print over screen.
Could the push for electric cars possibly be a scheme to impoverish the rabble?
I believe the real push is for self-driving cars. If you do not drive yourself, you can only go where they allow you. And, of course, you are always tracked.
The tracking doesn’t seem like much of a motive for EVs or self driving. Everyone is already tracked through their phones and their ICE cars. Even if it’s an older ICE car and a driver who left his phone at home, they have the license plate reading cameras out there, more all the time.
Yes, I meant that as a bonus. But think of how much our overlords can control your movement if you can only drive where a program allows you to. And, for the record, some of us leave our phones off, but transport is a necessity. And I agree with Z on the library. In my truck, I always keep a Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night, at the moment). That is for waiting somewhere. No one needs that much as one time.
I should mention that my Folger editions of Shakespeare fit in my jacket pockets. Plus, I annotate my books, a habit I have from good English teachers. I carry a pen and can mark them up as I enjoy. Yes, I realize you can mark up an ebook, but it is not the same.
I have never met anyone who had a genuine need to carry a library around with him. The reason for this is no such person could exist, as a person in need of a whole library at his disposal would work at a library.
The whole library at your disposal begs the question of library content. A whole library of DR material is a valuable resource. If on a flash drive, then it may be distributed with ease.
Somewhere Z-man all of your commentary is being stored. It will come in handy for those not yet on our side of the divide.
The trouble is it is being stored by the FBI and will be sued at my heresy trail.
Yep, that is a problem—but one you’ve accepted to chance for the “cause”. We are all in the same boat to a greater or lessor extent.
At the rate this is going the trail phase is going to be bypass directly to burn at the stake.
I don’t care to carry more than one book with me when traveling, though air travel being what it is I often need more than one. If I have my (big) phone I always have my book(s) to draw upon.
Another point is that I will often draw upon book quotes I’ve highlighted for “sh!tposting”, very helpful in ebook format.
That being said, if the ebook idea was completely scrapped it wouldn’t be the end of the world by any means.
Having flown all over the world and slept in airports all over the world, I carry two books with me. I also have a tablet, so I could download something in a pinch. I am not against eBooks. They have a place. I just prefer the physical book for all the reasons that have been mentioned a million times by now. What I use the kindle book for is the stuff that is significantly cheaper than the book and the material you read and discard. I have ben Shapiro’s work on my tablet, for example.
E-books are useful because you can download unlimited books for free as pdf’s from various internet sites.
I never really had an issue with them, but eventually switched back to paper books because it just isn’t as satisfying swiping on a tablet and it led to more distractions.
Okay. Maybe a whole library is unnecessary. Nonetheless, if you’re the type to bounce back and forth between a dozen or so books at a time, having them all on one device is a lot easier than physically lugging each one around. And again: I prefer a hard copy myself.
Only in a time and place of excessive affluence can a person possess infinite leisure time to read at will and endlessly; and often purely for entertainment and distraction (like watching TV endlessly and automatically). But we are descended from people who got up in the morning not knowing where their next meal would come from and only those sufficiently motivated to seek out food got to survive and reproduce, which was a daily routine we now call work. Are we really advancing as a civilization (or species) when we now carry enormous deadweight among our population; people who just sit around and distract themselves with various unproductive entertainments (video gaming anyone)? We are headed for colony collapse in a self-driving electric auto while playing a video game on the cell phone.
Gobekli Tepe? The subject of ancient technology and lost civilizations is one that has much relevance for the DR. Some day, future societies may look at European engineering marvels, festooned with Arabic and African glyphs, and wonder, “Did colored men actually build these or did they inherit them?”
“No longer functioning European engineering marvels,” to be precise.
There’s a reason why there is such a panic around the “Ancient Apocalypse” show as well as the resurgence in Atlantis theories.
I can just look at these things, and know who built it. It’s WyPepo. Especially Derinkuyu and the sites in Turkey. Only WyPepo would come up with the crazy but intriguing ideas behind these things. I think our opponents know too, at least on an instinctual level, which explains their discomfort at the ideas.
Also, the “Native Americans” were not the first people in the Americas, but that can’t be made widely public because the regime would lose one of their whitey bashing tools.
I wonder what could have happened in South Africa that led to this problem:
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/South-Africas-Energy-Crisis-Could-Spark-A-Political-And-Economic-Disaster.html
I know your comment was intended as a rhetorical question. Still I cannot resist rhetorically answering. 🙂
A few years back, after a South African airline (?) had gone out of business, a commenter on a blog said something like “We all know why it happened, but we aren’t allowed to say it.”
Electric cars are fine in Asia and ok in Europe except the autobahn. America just has a uniquely horrible amount of suburban sprawl that demands the range and refueling time of an internal combustion engine. But in more dense regions (think Korea or Java) with very short commutes but high pollution, electrics make the most sense.
Even solar cars would work if everyone lived in pods in maximally dense cities, living like a Palestinian. Think about that one.
Downvotes, but keep in mind that Northeast Asia is very oil-poor and short-burst electric transportation can be a good niche workaround.
And yet, who actually wants to live that way?
Meanwhile, DoD-sponsored Chicom researchers have raised the efficiency of solar-to-hydrogen production to a scorching 9%:
https://ece.engin.umich.edu/stories/cheap-sustainable-hydrogen-through-solar-power
9% folks, we are saved!
“It turns out that we are plagued by these moral crusades and panics because the people behind them are like drug addicts. For them, modernity is an opium den in which the are condemned to chase the dragon for eternity. It is why during Covid so many of them had that same dead expression in their eyes you see from addicts. With their mask firmly on, they were in the only space where they were both free from the agony of desire and the ecstasy of the narcotic high.”
Opiates of the masses, indeed. In their own way, these types are every bit as pathetic as the poor bastards hooked on Oxycontin. The psychic damage just isn’t as obvious as emaciation and rotten teeth but if anything is worse. I’m sure the excerpted reference above to “those behind them” in regard to the latest moral panic includes the herd who follows and you meant as much.
The seamless transition from Covid to the Ukraine and now to…whatever, but obviously the high from Eastern Europe is waning, is mind-blowing and horrifying to watch. And as one moral panic melds into the next, the previous is memoryholed and forgotten along with all its falsity. Hitler and Stalin never had it so good. The gods that failed are never re-examined in any meaningful way since the rush is to new shiny God thing.
I would like to think otherwise, but there is no way this doesn’t end in suffering and mass death. Addiction is just slow suicide, after all. Maybe this is overly optimistic, but saner opportunists seemed to have grokked the Ukraine War was leading to their annihilation and decided to dry out on that one. We can hope, anyhow, but something along these lines (if not that) will happen. Mass famine is a good candidate, frankly, and again assumes we do not all die beneath a mushroom cloud.
Re: link to Peters.
“There is a creepy consanguinity between the marketing and selling of the “masks” and then “vaccines” – and the marketing and selling of electric vehicles. It makes you wonder whether there might be a relationship . . .”
Once or twice the plague, I saw a masked person driving a Tesla, and it struck me as funny how neither had a face lol.
*during* the plague ugh
Electric cars and “trucks” are worse than useless, except in certain, tightly-defined niches. They’re incredibly wasteful on a cross country trip, since you’ll have to waste your time waiting for your glorified golf cart to charge for an hour or more every few hundred miles. Also, if you read the small print, you’ll find one of these “rapid” chargers can damage the battery with repeated use.
Internal combustion engines are so much more efficient and cheaper to boot. It takes 5 minutes to refill the average gas tank. They can last for hundreds of thousands of miles if the oil is changed and other maintenance is done properly.
Like in your iPhone, once the battery is shot, the device is useless. Manufacturing these batteries requires LOTS of lithium, which requires horrific, polluting leaching pits where if a bird alights in one of these, it dies instantly and horrifically. Then there’s the cobalt being hand mined by eight year old kids in Africa, but don’t let that stand in the way of your soulless car, virtue signaler.
The rich dicks who once drove BMWs as a status symbol now drive Teslas. The thing that makes me so mad about Teslas and other EVs is we all subsidize these ridiculous machines with tax breaks. It’d be no different than if you subsidized your neighbor’s Porsche.
And the math is not friendly to an all-EV fleet either. The grid can’t handle a little ice storm or “polar vortex” that happens EVERY winter, but it can handle hundreds of millions of glorified golf carts charging every night? Right. When we’re decarbonizing the electric grid, shutting down those evil coal plants because they offend Gaia, we’re going to have LESS generation capacity ready to fill in any gaps in the grid.
It’s already starting to fall apart. The word is getting out that these things are $100k paperweights. The “trucks” can’t tow anything for any distance. If you leave it outside and it’s excessively hot or cold, you’ll come back to less charge than before. I left my Prius outside on a 12 degree day and it worked like a champ with no loss in range.
It’s depressing about Dodge. Those Hemis sound very sweet.
“It’s depressing about Dodge. Those Hemis sound very sweet.”
Last fall I traded my Ford Mustang in on a later model Dodge Challenger. All black, including the wheels and minimal chrome on the car. No big audacious stripes and blacked out windows.
I’ve had two compliments on my car’s appearance in the last week from my wife’s friend who saw the car in our driveway, and a complete stranger who saw me park and exit it and told me “That is a BEAUTIFUL car!”
Goodness knows what Stellantis, the Automotive Isle of Misfit Toys that owns Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram will dream up for Dodge going forward but the “planned” car is an EV that kinda/sorta evokes the first Gen (1966-67) Dodge Charger. And will have a V8 exhaust “note” piped out of a speaker. 🤦🏻♂️
Or not, because rumor has it Stellantis will offer an ICE option with a 3.6L twin turbo V6. 🤨
Who knows? For a 2024 introduction it’s a little too late to be futzing around with the powerplant. But I’ll bet if the Charger EV ever shows up most folks won’t say it’s beautiful.
I also have a Challenger, in my case a much brighter color with matte black hood. It gets compliments every time a I drive it and can be crazy fast if you let it. Its been very reliable and is a hoot to drive. I used to do the European car thing, I broke myself of that habit on a cross-country drive when I realized it would have been a lot better in a V8 muscle car.
Around here the melannin enhance prefer BMW, Lexus, Audi and MB for some reason. That’s another reason I got out of Euro cars.
By Euro, I guess you mean engineered in Europe. Would not surprise me if most parts are made elsewhere.
Lexus is Japanese. It looks like a Euro car but actually works.
Forgetting the yet unsolved problem of fueling and storing “electrons”, the EV vehicle concept is a amazing advance wrt performance and maintenance. (Yep, that’s being said by a person who drives a turbo charged pickup truck which runs on good old gasoline.) That’s what will cause their (EV) widespread adoption when the main problem of the “battery” and recharging are solved.
Think about it. Put a motor on each wheel. The torque derived. The 0-60 times. The lack of moving parts in an ICE vehicle and no transmission to boot. No oil changes to forget about. Drive one and see.
What the problem is, as always, is the government pushing the adoption before the technology is perfected—at least to the voluntary acceptance of the “free” market. Remember, it was the Fed’s that outlawed incandescent light bulbs in favor of cfl’s when everyone in the scientific/engineering community was breaking balls perfecting led technology. Where are cfl light bulbs today? The free market won out in the end. So it will eventually be with EV’s—but not what’s being made and forced on the market today
You’re forgetting weight and safety problems with EV cars and especially trucks. My industry depends on trucking and although I don’t know for sure, payloads of tractor trailers will probably be lessened by 10-15000 pounds to account for battery weight. It won’t take long before you’ll have to add to your fleet to make the same volume of shipments.
No, I excluded the present *problem* of current battery technology. One of those problems is indeed weight. Now of course, one can be accused of unrealistic assumptions in order to make the argument. I accept that criticism. But I also maintain that I’ve not told anyone to go out and buy the damn thing either.
The electric motor and torque applied directly to the wheels is amazing. Only the small part about the source of energy is a problem. The lack of moving parts is cool. But the mechanically complicated ICE is now engineered to last way longer than the simpler drive train of the EEV. Those pesky batteries don’t last.
The EEV is kind of emblematic of our time. In isolation, zoomed way in it is this fantastical whiz-bang thing. Zoomed out and looked at in context from a practical perspective it is almost absurd. The datastore engines at Facebook are amazing as are the AI libraries like PyTorch. The distributed caches at Twitter and solutions to network cliques and other problems are impressive. But, for what? Your newsfeed and ads attached to it?
The Fed-debt-IPO with dollars crashing back on shore may have something to do with it. It’s a mess. It is a fixable mess but it requires serious people to do it. Mayorkas, Garland, Klain, Rice, Yellen … the only thing they seem serious about is expressing their misanthropic psychopathy through making ever bigger messes.
But there is good news
“In Q4 2022, typical mid-priced ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) car drivers paid about $11.29 to fuel their vehicles for 100 miles of driving. That cost was around $0.31 cheaper than the amount paid by mid-priced EV drivers charging mostly at home, and over $3 less than the cost borne by comparable EV drivers charging commercially,” Anderson Economic Group (AEG) said in an analysis.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fuel-costs-electric-vehicles-overtake-gas-powered-cars-study
Ebooks can be altered, or their license revoked after purchase. But no one reads eBooks much anyway, except for pulp fiction.
Electric cars can have their software updated after purchase, much of “your” e-car is technically under license and is alterable by the true owner. But no one drives their e-car much anyway, because charging hassles, so it’s nowhere near as practical as a IC car.
Pay more. Get less. It’s never really yours anyway.
I’m starting to see a pattern here.
Some carmakers are doing subscription services for heated and cooled seats. Haven’t paid your shekels to the company store? No more heated and cooled seats for you!
And what’s to stop governments from shutting down your car for whatever excuse they can muster?
They don’t need an “excuse” as in demanding the auto maker disable your vehicle, or all vehicles. The new law passed wrt building back better (via credit card) has a section in it requiring all cars made in the near term future to have a dIsabling ability built in and provided to the local law enforcement agencies. What can go wrong…
> Electric cars can have their software updated after purchase, much of “your” e-car is technically under license and is alterable by the true owner.
If you want to know what a dystopian hellscape looks like, see what they did to tractors.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3661434/remote-bricking-of-ukrainian-tractors-raises-agriculture-security-concerns.html
Imagine someone bricking your car because you didn’t update your software.
Chet: I’ve been reading online complaints about John Deere tractors and all their proprietary software for months now. No tinkering, must be taken to authorized dealer for any and all updates, etc.
Bricking of cars is definitely the future. As others have noted, all cars’ black boxes already track your speed, trajectory, location, etc. – and those who believe they’re not already being monitored are those still wearing masks while driving ‘their’ vehicles.
I use my kindle for cheap fiction that I don’t choose to buy a paper copy of – and I don’t trust Amazon in the least – yet, to my great surprise, the Covington books I bought and read in 2015 are still on my device and available for perusal whenever I choose. I’m not getting rid of any of my books though (although I groan at the need to start packing and storing most of them).
One is confusing “ebooks” and the concept with Amazon’s “Kindle” device and Amazon’s support of such. One does not need Amazon for electronic book publication and reading.
The universal standard for publication is “epub”. Kindle now reads epub formatted books and there are several programs available to read such formatted publications, are well as reading/converting “doc” and “PDF” formatted papers.
The aspect of computer controlled vehicles—and who owns/controls the software involved—is not solely a problem of EV’s. All vehicles, including ICE, for at *least* the last decade have the same problem. I drive a 9 yo Jeep. It has perhaps a half dozen *main* computers to control all the crap for pollution as well as engine and transmission.
At first, I thought the e books were kind of cool – order the tome and it shows up on the kindle like magic. After a while, I got sick of them. It turns out I like turning pages and going back to possibly re-read a previous passage, or jumping ahead to the index – all cumbersome with a kindle. So no more for me. Oh, and happy first day of black history mumph – only 27 more to go, although, frankly 27 minutes would be plenty.
In AINO, every mumpf is blak hisree mumpf. February is unique only in that it is officially designated as such.
The problem with BHM is that it stretches out a “story” that can be adequately told in a day! 😉
I got an email from the increasingly vile Red Cross the other day asking me to donate blood in honor of BHM, for which they’d give me a $10 Amazon card. However, they reccomended that I then use that $10 to support a black-owned business.
If ever an organization deserved to be exsanguinated…
Yeah, I stopped donating after 9/11 when I found out they were not using all the solicited funds for the 9/11 “victims’, but rather buying new computer systems and holding back some of the money for “future” emergencies. That was probably my first sense of an organization’s grifting the public.
If it’s a major institution in AINO, it is part of the anti-white power structure. And all the big charities are major instutitions.
Blacks are historical only to the extent that they are in contact with historical peoples, i.e. Muslims and whites. Without us, they’re nothing more than illiterate savages scrabbling for grubs in the jungle.
usNthem: I resisted getting a kindle for a long time, but now I find it extremely convenient. But, like you, I like to re-read passages and find it difficult to find things I remember but took no note of the electronic ‘page’ number. I really enjoy the ebook’s portability – if I have to wait in the car for any reason or at the doctor or anywhere else. Everyone else is pecking at their phones; I read my kindle. And as an old fart, I greatly appreciate the ability to change the font size and the backlighting feature.
The problem with paper books is that what I wanted/needed to read was no longer “in print” and was in these times of repression impossible to attain short of traveling to another country and searching their libraries.
Compsci: That, too. I got very tired of trying to get books via inter-library loan and having to go through the woke librarian and the vibrant residents playing games on all the library computers. Amazon, for all its many flaws, eliminated that problem for me. We have hard copies of a number of dissident tomes – even got a few replacements after hubby left one on a plane three years ago.
Fun facts about how dumb EVs are:
Apparently EVs eat tires 20% faster due to the extra weight from the batteries and instant torque from the motors.
It’s known that fast charging cables are attractive targets for copper thieves. To reduce the amount of copper used, some stations are using lighter gauge wires that are underrated for the current being passed.
Great, except the lighter gauge wires suffer resistive losses that create a significant temperature rise. So, these cables are already less efficient.
The brilliant engineering solution to the temp rise is to place a cooling jacket around the cables. So now you have more complexity, more points of failure, more supply chain issues, and even less efficiency.
Apparently the undersized cables with cooling jackets work so well they’ve helped, “fry,” dozens of EVs across the country.
Don’t get me started about the Hummer EV taillights, which cost a cool $6100 before install labor and taxes. The way things are now, I’d bet they book you for a cool 8 hours on the install.
The EV batteries cannot be recycled economically. It is possible but only at great expense.
As Z notes, this will never end. It can’t.
The addiction is feeling morally superior to the rubes, particularly, white working and middle class. This naturally requires them to always be out in front of normal people on some issue, whether gay marriage, transgender, EV, etc. But it also requires them to pick something Normies resist against, at least at first.
As always with these people, they not only need to be different (and, thus, in their minds better) but also need an antagonist to make them the hero in their story. Normies play the role of the ignorant and cold-hearted locals who push against the hero’s attempt to make the world better.
For those of you unlucky enough to have watched a few Nice White Lady movies, you’ll know the plot. With every fad, these people get to play out their NWL movie. Unfortunately, every fad has to be something so stupid that Normies reject it because the fad will hurt that society.
The fact that the fad will hurt society at large, of course, means nothing to the ruling class which will buy its way out of the damage, so they just push forward until Normies are either forced to accept the fad or so brainwashed that they now think that it’s a good idea.
Rinse and repeat. Except that over time, these fad make society worse and erode Normie’s trust in their rulers, both of which will cause trouble at some point.
“The addiction is feeling morally superior to the rubes,” which Citizen notes, seems to be inbuilt into whites, perhaps most strongly in the Puritan strain. We can only manage this problem, not solve it.
Is this quality common to all races? Is there any race that has it worse than us?
Universal male conscription seems like it might reduce this tendency. Is there an equivalent social program for the ladies to reduce this tendency?
A failed painter addressed this issue explicitly.
“A failed painter addressed this issue explicitly.”
Another example of how he borrowed from the Anglos. Scouting is good. Shame what happened to it.
How well would universal conscription work in a nation where approximately 15% of Whites, 30% of Browns and 40% of Blacks are too dumb to meet even the low bar of roughly 8th grade level education/IQ? And I haven’t even gotten into health issues (obesity, drug use) and criminal record.
The Bell Curve always exists, although it’ll vary for different populations, times and places. Mustache Man had a far higher quality population to draw upon. So did we.
I’ve always felt Musk was nothing more than a cynical and opportunistic huckster who knew how to milk the US government, and by implication the US taxpayer.
These are tech panaceas being proposed as a response to problems created by tech. It’s said that the devil proposes fake solutions to real problems and I feel that’s the case here. The oil age is gradually coming to an end and there’s no replacement for oil. I’m reminded of Alice Friedemann’s little book, “When Trucks Stop Running.” We’re in for an era of degrowth and the siren song of electric vehicles and renewable energy shouldn’t delude us.
The difference between now and earlier periods of history was there was always something to replace a declining resource. When the forests of Europe became denuded, coal took over. When coal started to decline, oil took over. Right now I see nothing to replace oil.
I’ve shifted from using AWFL to AFL.
It’s become clear that the problem hysterical component of Western society is not limited to one ethnicity.
Good analysis. At the risk of sounding cheeky, you might be entirely correct, that it will be “nothing” that replaces oil. Of course, that is not the choice most people would vote for. Problem is, Reality is not democratic and will impose whatever comes next whether the voters like it or not. Optimists will wish for a miracle new energy source, perhaps fusion, that would indeed seem a miracle. That would indeed be welcome but it remains wishful thinking.
An overlooked issue is how quickly a change happens; usually slow is easier to manage/accept. That would seem the normal case with “progress.” Trouble is, for adverse changes, Fate often insists events transpire in chaotic, unpleasant ways.
We are ruled over by Cloud people whose utopian dreams, even if they could be stripped of any nefarious intent, are about as realistic as what Cat Fancy was concocting in their Berlin bunker in spring of 1945.
The standard long haul semi-truck has a range of almost 2000 miles with full tanks. Last I checked, the current E-trucks are getting at best, 300 miles on a full charge. In what world is this a feasible system for national transportation of goods?
For example, every morning at my workplace there is a line of semi-trucks loaded down with replacement aircraft parts that are repaired on the east coast. These trucks drop off the fixed parts then load up faulty ones for the 2800 mile trip back to the repair facility. Anyone who preaches the gospel of EV as a valid technology for the near future is merely an ideological zealot, or charlatan grifter who is on the take.
That’s just the beginning. Think of what you’d need to do to the power grid to allow everyone to have an EV. It’s laughably impossible, and everyone, including non-tech people like myself, know it.
At some point, this fad will die out if for no other reason than reality will punch it in the face. But it won’t matter. The ruling class control the microphone so the whole affair will be shoved down the memory hole.
Meanwhile, real problems are not being addressed.
‘Colorado River in Crisis’
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/colorado-river-in-crisis
I once took a road trip with someone in my normal car who then took a shorter road trip with someone in an EV. I asked him which is preferable and without a moment’s hesitation, the answer was the normal car, no hesitation. Actually, the EV road trip sounded horrible. First of all, you have to plan your whole trip around the chargers. The range is not as long as they say it is, so you have to take relatively frequent 30+ minute breaks, usually in a barren parking lot. If the charging station is non-operational (more common than you’d think), you have to go to another one that is miles away and could easily be SOL and full of anxiety as the battery meter ticks down. This is opposed to a normal car, where a 5 minute detour off the highway means you are ready to go for another few hundred miles. You don’t even save money, the cost to charge your battery is comparable to filling up a tank of gas!
Of course, to an elite, this sounds great. I am sure they have contempt for prior elites who built out this amazing infrastructure that gave people freedom of movement. They want total control. I remember reading something about a town on Cuck Island, maybe Oxford, that designated a bunch of zones that they decreed have “everything people need” and mandated that the peasants of the town are not allowed to go into a different zone most days. This is of course for Gaia, but it also has the convenient upside of the town being in control of your life and where you can go. The truth is, though, it’s mathematically impossible to generate enough electricity to power an entire country’s fleet of cars. The elites don’t want us in cars, they don’t want us on planes, they want us in a pod and eating the bugs. Getting rid of automobiles is part of the plan and EV is just a feint.
The next thing will be “Oh, sorry, but the grid can’t handle all of the EVs charging, so we’re going to curtail when you can charge your EV.”
Then the next will be “Oh, sorry, but EVs are actually bad for the environment. So no more EVs. Ride the bus or a bike or walk, prole.”
“they want us in a pod and eating the bug…”
Goodwhites really don’t care where you live or what you eat: they just want you silent, out of sight or dead (the last would be the easiest for them).
…unless the power goes out, a pipe breaks or a jogger robs you at gunpoint.
Be strong. Be prepared. Tighten up your groupings. Make real friends in your neighborhood. Pray.
They don’t care if a jogger robs you at gunpoint. You should not have caused the jogger to internalize white supremacy which caused the jogger to rob you.
Learn the rules Mow – though they can and will change.
How many fads can I have shoved down my throat? I have friends who are successful engineers convinced that we need to switch to electric vehicles. I ask them where the energy will come from to power all of those vehicles and they just have a blank look in their eyes. As if I’m asking a silly question that can be waved away. And these are licensed PEs!
The worst part is accepting they will never have a realization that their idea was wrong. They will shell out the cash for a 60k car, and will simply complain about the chargers not working or the chargers being stripped for copper or the fact that the price rates for electricity weren’t properly implemented. It’s like they lack the ability to think big picture, and are constantly looking at individual trees with no understanding of the forest.
They could have a loved one die because the car wasn’t fully charged on the way to the hospital and they would simply tell themselves that a regular car could run out of gas as well.
Ask your PE friends something like,
“When you run out of charge on the interstate, do you plan to hitch to the nearest charging station for a can of electricity?”
I know. I know some technically brilliant people who will say, “We better put all of our resources into the energy transition or there won’t be an earth.” Our education system is broken.
The other night I was with a youngster who strokes to Elon Musk and whose identity is tied up in Tesla and other brands. He asked me why I am pessimistic. I explained that I am not pessimistic and why. The explanation included a run down of the incredible energy abundance we have and how much more we could have if we would unshackle nuclear energy R&D. I explained my pessimism was due to the utter stupidity of the non-elite elites who are needlessly wrecking things.
There are people who do not engage in discussion to uncover the truth but to win a side they are committed to. The response to the energy thing was that there is only 50 years of oil left. There was a smug satisfaction because that, you see, meant Tesla is the future. I had been checkmated. I asked him if there are only 50 years of oil left why he is an optimist. He was bewildered. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if we only have 50 years of oil left, there will be no diesel to dig up the materials to build Teslas and that in that scenario, Armageddon would truly be upon us, and he as a feckless soy bugman wouldn’t make it many days in that apocalypse.
We left the restaurant and it was pouring out. I told the young buck and my lady to wait under the awning while I went to get the car. He smugly said, “If you had a Tesla it would come pick you up!” I looked at him and said, “What kind of man wants his car to drive him around and take away opportunities to be kind and chivalrous to his lady?”
I think we slap labels on institutions and believe the label. Top schools have a label, but more and more, the people who go through them have no idea how anything works and so little idea how to think through anything they can’t even recognize dogma when it is biting them in the neck.
The response to the energy thing was that there is only 50 years of oil left.
Just like they said 50 years ago.
Your engineer friends are very much like my healthcare friends. These are people who understand genetics/virology/immunology better than most anyone, yet they dutifully wore the masks and echoed the company line on distancing and the vax. Of course, they spent much time bitching about it, but they were all very obedient.
All the same people are bought into the climate nonsense just as hard. It really doesn’t give me much hope for the future.
I used to wonder why history books spent so much time on talking about individual leaders since obviously they didn’t do all of the work.
But since then I’ve realized that history really can be summed up by discussing the handful of leaders, because society’s leadership is truly the driving force, not the common man.
If society’s leadership is disconnected from reality like ours is, then the common man will also be disconnected from reality. If society’s leadership is grounded and noble, then that trait will be reflected in the common man as well.
How true. There are even books about such. One I believe concentrates on only a 1000 people across the course of history.
Reminds me of when the guy who wrote The Martian was interviewed and how experts in their fields reacted to his fantastical plot line. Within their own discipline they thought it was absolute bunk, but they thought that anything outside of their discipline seemed perfectly plausible.
Gell-Mann amnesia effect?
The problem with most healthcare friends (and any friends in specialized fields) is most do not do the primary research themselves. They rely on work of “experts.”
The major exception are the despised profession. But then, lawyers know experts are people hired to say what your client wants to hear.
Mark P. Mills and Michael Kelley, both accomplished engineers, have gone through the cost the project would entail. The transition won’t happen because it can’t happen.
I do think the issue is a good one for determining who is fit for a position in the new regime. Anybody who adores Musk, (Shapiro, Rubin, countless others), as some advanced capitalist and genius with an alchemical ability to see science that nobody else can, is out. Anybody who calls BS on that project and points out the patent stupidity and un-scientific and anti-engineering reality statement Musk makes, (Mills, Kelley, P. Luckey, the Toyota family, Peters … …), is suited for a seat. Opportunists like Mary Barra who correctly called BS, then signed up for the subsidies and joined the chorus of civilizational wrecking liars are out too.
I think my favorite cognitive dissonance by Musk the subsidy truffle hound is the idea that he will terraform Mars, yet we need his EEVs, solar panels and battery packs to save the earth. Can’t we just terraform the earth too?
I suspect part of Musk’s motivation for buying Twitter is that powerful people and rising voices started openly criticizing him. When “Fossil Future” was released Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey were a part of the book release promotion. A rule in Silicon Valley is that you do not criticize the top dogs and you do not call out their grift. The negative implications of the EEV/solar-panel/battery-farm grift are so catastrophic both economically and ecologically that they started challenging Musk to debates and subtly but openly calling out his game.
“It seems that what Elon is really good at is finding a business that is about to be the beneficiary of huge government subsidies and building something around it.” – Palmer Luckey
In any case, metallurgical coal, copper, nickel, aluminum and other stocks are doing great. The EEV scam is a great opportunity to make money off of the massive under supply of materials required to make it happen. We are going to need a lot of diesel to dig up the copper that doesn’t exist in sufficient quantities and a lot of met coal to smelt the stainless steel and aluminum to make those cars. Perhaps this is the path to the first DR person with a wad of money to help the effort. Profit on the way up, short it on the way down. The regime has weaknesses that can be exploited.
Another funny thing about Musk is the women in his life. He sure picks the diversity loving wokesters. His wife. His daughter – not picked but you get what I mean. The most aggressive diversity sermonizer I have seen, and I have worked with many, is his COO of SpaceX. I bet Musk believes in diversity when it gives him political cover and inside connections to government contracts that meet diversity goals.
We don’t need a new elite to form a new regime. We need an elite period. America got Chalmath Palapeepeepatapeetyah and Japan has the fourth generation of Toyotas. The next regime will have to learn some lessons and create something that is stable and honors tradition without ossifying.
I don’t disagree with the observations that Musk is an opportunist. His real genius probably lies in his ability to exploit those opportunities. As for Twitter, I’m still in a wait and see mode, but he has certainly done a great service to our side by exposing the corruption involved. Much like Trump, he’s not perfect and may not really be Our Guy, but he has helped in his own special way.
Where I am an adamant Musk supporter is in his rocket work. I don’t think he’s given enough credit for what he’s done there. Not only has his systems revolutionized the field, but his total “engineers” approach to problem-solving is a fresh slap in the face to NASA and the US government. In my mind, as long as he keeps the rocket work going, I’ll always give him a pass on the other stuff.
I don’t know enough about his rocket contribution and its value. I accept it is that good.
What we need to caution against is giving people a pass for doing massive damage to society with one hand and doing something potentially valuable with another.
Musk validating the CAGW and energy transition premises is a massive negative and that project will do massive damage to our society. Musk is an engineering leader. The setback he is making to nuclear energy by saying preposterous lies that solar energy can make the same amount of energy on the same amount of land as a nuclear reactor is hugely damaging. The public admires him and believes this and inspired youth grow up in a lie. The damage that does cannot be underestimated and it cannot be ignored.
As for space, the jury is still out for me. I don’t see how humans on Mars are good for us. At what cost and for what benefit? It hasn’t been explained to me. If it has been explained I would love a pointer to the good analysis.
What I can foresee in our use of space as a net good is if it is extremely practical. That is to say, if it gives us access to abundant resources at a net profit then I am all for it. It would seem that robotics used in space to find and mine materials of use to us on earth at a profit is an endeavor worth pursuing.
So far, I hear talk of space tourism and being an interplanetary species so that kids can interact on Stitch between Mars and Earth, or even just because. I am not sold on that.
We got into this mess because we didn’t hold our supposed elite to a standard. I am not sure we even know what standards are anymore. Musk’s work with rockets may be commendable. It doesn’t undo the tremendous damage his lies and triangulations and opportunism have done in the area of energy and transportation. That Musk’s rhetoric delays further our progress on nuclear energy when he could single handedly unlock support for it is unconscionable. The waste of building solar and battery based energy machines is unconscionable.
I hope that space is an endeavor that is a net good. I hope we have bots finding and mining materials for our benefit and profit someday. If that happens, those machines will be powered by nuclear engines. If we unlock nuclear energy to its fullest potential, we probably don’t need to mine space for energy sources – there are plenty here on earth.
As long as we tolerate a guy who destroyed the playground and brainwashed the school children because he is good in rocket club, we are going to struggle to flourish. We need a new standard. Whoever sets and holds that standard will be anointed the leaders of the new regime.
What we need to caution against is giving people a pass for doing massive damage to society with one hand and doing something potentially valuable with another.
Perfect description of what makes normiecon such an easy mark for Con, Inc.
With you on the rocketry angle. Pure science is NASA’s forte; their committment to advancing propulsion technology has fallen into desuetude. When I was in fucking high school, there was some serious talk and research into forms of nuclear propulsion, and I, artsy fartsy musician that I was, was inspired enough by these visionary concepts to write a term paper on them (wrote away to NASA for booklets on same, maybe I still have some of that stuff stashed with my academic memorabilia from 5+ decades ago). Once the principles of gravitational sling-shotting from earth to other places in the solar system were well grounded, it seems that other active propulsion solutions got shelved, sadly.
Maybe it’s down to my latent “new frontier” heritage that we needed to get out there into interplanetary space, and stir shit up, finding what there was to discover, and thereby activating new paradigms for our people to explore. I think that that is a good thing. If only we could have gotten the little hats off of our necks, and worked with the Russians, what could we have accomplished along these lines? That’s pretty much off the table now. You fuckers go over there, and be the Chosen People all by your lonesome; we will be the People Who Chose, and then see where that gets us. Wouldn’t it be lovely to think so?
Until that propulsion system or gravitational sling shot can get us close to or past c, and the shell we travel in can take the stress, Mars, maybe Venus is as far as we get. Anything less would require that passengers to be relatively self-sustaining for generations without killing each other. Unless you trust HAL.
The worst part of electric is the price tag. The average electric car costs over 50,000 dollars, and the usual middle class strategy of getting cars used is now closed, as the most expensive part, the battery, only has a ten year lifespan. Say bye to the teenager who leaves the house and buys a couple thousand dollar clunker for his first taste of independence, or a family with 5 kids getting a beater van for 10k and running it to the ground. Now everyone has to pony up for a car that is about 1/3 the price of their mortgage.
As for Uber-like autonomous driving, good luck putting car seats in those things, or driving to Grandma’s across the state, or any other thing your average family with small kids wants to do. The anti-natal effects of this will dwarf the drop in fertility caused by car seats.
The EV is a great example of Chesterton’s fence. Once you go through the list of problems of the EV and what would be required to solve them, the IC engine starts to make a ton of sense. It turns out that the internal combustion engine was the good enough and cheap enough solution to a series of problems with regard to replacing horses as our primary transportation. Lots of people tried alternatives to the IC engine and those failed the fitness test.
Now, I am not categorically opposed to EV’s. They may have a niche. I cannot think of one off the top of my head, but maybe in an environment where you would not want car exhaust.
Can I stick up for EVs? Thanks.
We are still in the development phase. It’s only been 10 years or so that EVs have been “a thing”. I agree that the gov’t is astroturfing demand of EVs, and the people touting our electric future are purple-haired progressive gaia-worshippers. It makes one reflexively opposed to it.
And yes, there is a smokestack behind every EV. At least for now. But the whole reason for electric vehicles is to reduce emissions. Cars are a good start. The brightest minds are not in politics, but they are in technology. We are in a transition phase where we need the dirty energy to power the clean, and it seems ridiculous, but eventually – and this is a worthy goal – ALL energy will be clean(ish). I don’t like the messengers, but I do like the goal. The world has 8 billion people so we’re bound to have smart people who can figure this out.
I would prefer a hybrid approach for now…EVs or hybrid vehicles for normal people/commuters. For people who need trucks, internal combustion engines. But keep the ICE limited to people who need the range and the towing capacity. Put the gas stations in out-of-the-way areas. I hate gas stations anyway. (The fewer Wawas and QTs the better. And imagine a commute free of diversity stops.) There is no reason to be draconian here. There is plenty of oil left. In time, somebody might (big MIGHT) solve the battery issue(s). But I see no reason we can’t “encourage” normal commuters to have vehicles that are > 50 mpg.
Also, I like e-books. Anyone who has moved more than once knows what I mean.
I agree they have their niche and I wouldn’t propose banning them, they are really not a solution to any real problem.
As long as we need other oil based fuels, we’re going to get gasoline. That gasoline is not going to be pumped down a well, it’s going to be sold and burned.
Electric cars, according to Jalopnik, are already more expensive to power than an ICE.
Article “Driving 100 Miles in an EV Is Now More Expensive Than in an ICE”
EVs are nowhere near as efficient as EV evangelists like to say they are. They love to concentrate on the main motor they ignore all the other losses in the system. When all is said and done, it’s probably under 50% efficient.
The price is likely to increase dramatically of both the EV and the electricity necessary to power them. Barring some major battery breakthrough, the cost of batteries has nowhere to go but up. The price of electricity has nowhere to go but up. We would have build hundreds of new power plants to keep up with this demand and I don’t think we’re going to do that in the near future.
Without a major nuclear breakthrough, there is little chance all electric will be “clean” or maybe not even clean-ish, whatever that means (I’m assuming it means like natural gas, lower overall emissions). Now we’re going to be adding many millions of new stoves and don’t think oil heat would escape the green-wienies, though it’s possible heat pumps would be more efficient than burning natural gas or heating oil directly. BUT, it would still mean terawatt hours of additional electric load.
What are all us city denizens going to do about charging these things? We ain’t got garages.
Electric vehicles have unfortunately entered into what I call the “salad trap”. As we get poorer, and our capitalists mismanage stuff more, what should be a worthy alternative gets priced out.
Consider: everyone should be eating salads and veggies instead of subs and burgers and fried chicken right? So why is a salad priced >= than a factory-farmed meatwich at any given restaurant? Given the corpulence and unhealthiness of Amerifats, we should be subsidizing and promoting veggies, so that if a burger costs $3, the salad should always be priced less. And I’m not talking some sh*tty iceberg lettuce abomination. At least a Caesar salad would do the trick.
Same for EVs. I understand the battery is expensive, but why can’t we just mass-produce 1982 VW Rabbits with electric engines? Why do we need all the cameras and sensors and gobbledygook? I think we could manufacture a decent EV for $10k. But our capitalists instead push SUVs and trucks, which now have comparable prices to EVs. And you know what Amerifats will go for…
As for the charging issue, yeah I haven’t figured out the solution for city residents without garages. I just assume everyone has a 2-car garage like myself. But Tars, we can’t just hold back progress because of your home choice!
The question that never gets answered is why are we wasting resources making the EV as good as the current cars? Let us assume we make the great leap in material science that allows for fast charging batteries that do not also fast discharge in an accident. Let us also sort out how we reconfigure the power grid to support EV’s. We also conquer the environmental impact of getting the material to make and dispose of batteries. Finally, we solve the geopolitical problems with sourcing the needed materials.
Where are we? We end up with cars that sound different and look weird. That is it. For the normal person, nothing has improved about this item in terms of its utility. In fact, it opens the door to more control over their life. The environment is not cleaner, energy demand is not diminished, efficiency is not improved. To what end?
I drive a BMW i3 hybrid, has a range of maybe 60/70 miles electric after that its petrol generator can be used (or before if the battery is below 75%), I can use public chargers but never really bother, I just use petrol on the long trips
Anyway I bought it for €18K about two years ago, so far I calculate I have saved over €5K in fuel costs
I don’t care about global warming or what ever Greta is calling it these days. I just hated paying €1.30 a litre for Diesel, it was €2.10 a litre a while back, so the savings continue to accumulate
In Ireland the government want 100% of new cars sold to be EVs by 2030, but it won’t happen IMO, they will never build the grid or the generating capacity to charge them all
You can all hate me if you want 🙂
There is no equivilence between an EV and a hybrid.
I have a friend who owns an older I3. I’ve ridden in it a few times and drove it once. It’s impressive, as any BMW should be. Humor: the one and only time I drove, the car’s “emergency” gas engine/alternator refused to start, stranding us. Dealer serviced car, multi-thousand dollar repair bill, and couldn’t find a problem with the charging system. 🙂 In fairness, this was an older, high mileage car.
Looking at the fuel cost numbers, what you are saving is the artificial cost of diesel called taxes.
Underground iron mines are generally run using electric trains or cars / golf carts (CO2 exhaust + enclosed spaces = dead canaries/ miners). Works pretty ok.
There are zero (and will always be zero) electric Komatsu / Volvo/ Euclid heavy lift dump trucks for the real above ground work.
I laugh at the electric big rig stuff because were sorted this problem long ago. Electric locomotives exist and have existed for a long time. In order to make them work it requires massive amounts of electricity and the locomotive to be attached to the grid at all times. This worked for human transport too, as in subways and busses in urban areas. In other words, the battery problem was solved by a very long extension cord.
Putting an electric motor under load is pretty much the same as a dead short. This drains batteries quickly. Anyone who has used battery powered drills knows this. Pushing your car around is one thing. Pushing around a 40 ton rig is another.
I’m pretty sure diesel electric trains are still a big thing. The “prime mover” on the train is a diesel engine which generates the electricity to run the train. A quick google search shows they are most of America’s train fleet.
On the east coast you see a fair number of electric locomotives. It is more common in Europe. In fact, this is why Russia is attacking the Ukraine power grid. They are knocking out train service to the front. Once you get away from cities then it is diesel-electrics.
“Putting an electric motor under load is pretty much the same as a dead short. This drains batteries quickly. Anyone who has used battery powered drills knows this.”
And yet, I’ve not used a plug in drill for a decade, only battery. Heck, I had my last house remodeled and the workmen used no plug-in electrical devices, only battery drills and saws. Of course, they had a charger plugged in and a couple of spare batteries to switch off to.
The niche being filled here was obvious, the corded devices restricted movement and that caused excess time spent on the job, hence increased costs.
Similarly, EV’s will be used where they are more efficient.
No there are a few Volvo (I think) heavy lift dump trucks, you can look it up on youtube, in some places it can work because of the difference in weight of the loaded and unloaded truck can be used to charge the battery using regen breaking
Electric vehicles do indeed have a niche, except it’s mostly not on earth, which I think explains Musk’s interest in them.
An electric car makes a lot of sense on Mars, where an ICE isn’t an option. This is just Elon’s way of getting the taxpayers to fund his R&D.
I’m guessing this also explains his Boring Company venture. Radiation makes living on the surface of Mars an uncomfortable proposition, so living underground is a necessity. It’s good of Los Vegas and other cities to step up to the plate and fund Musk’s efforts in this direction.
I find when considering the motive behind Musk’s projects, a good first question to ask is, “Of what use will this be on Mars?”. Most of them make a lot more sense for Mars than they do on earth.
Musk would do better spending time developing an alternative rocket propulsion system for his “trip to Mars”. Of course, you can’t sing the siren song doing the hard work of solving the basic problems. Engineering is sooo boring.
The only alternative that might work is some kind of Nuclear rocket, not really something a private company does unless NASA is helping
Musk’s Mars rocket might launch (and explode) next month
As a longtime reader of SF and in later years of philosophy, I still chuckle at the undying human zeal to find that nirvana, that Utopia, that Promised Land, where all human problems vanish merely because one has moved away from the bad place. This desire is at the heart of most human religion as well as most social and political systems.
Even if we were supplied with a pristine Earth II and free transport of ourselves and our belongings to it, does anyone really believe we would not soon turn it into a world remarkably similar to our own, with all its good and bad points?
This has already been mentioned here; the joke about why not terraform Earth?
“But wherever I have gone
I was sure to find myself there
You can run all your life
But not go anywhere”
— Social Distortion
Even if we were supplied with a pristine Earth II and free transport of ourselves and our belongings to it, does anyone really believe we would not soon turn it into a world remarkably similar to our own, with all its good and bad points?
That’s like saying “everything born eventually dies”. Of course they do and of course we will. The important part is what happens between those two events.
Your analysis overall seems good, yet already is out of date. America’s average single family home now costs $416,000 and is well into seven digits in some markets. [source: Google search]
Instead of posting about the con-men and crazies in regards to this belief in all things good with electric universe, read James Kunstler;s piece on his experiences with his home system. Decent fellow that wanted to embrace it all for the right reasons for self sufficiency. After this I will never be part of any of this.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/its-not-working/
Short read
I do not care about him or his troubles. Sorry.
It was not about him personally but the obvious lunacy and stupidity of anyone embracing this nonsense. Actually I’m astonished with his honesty.
It’s well worth reading as it points out the problems with so-called renewables. As Z man says, there’s a smokestack at the end of all renewable energy, and often a dependency on hard-to-find rare earths. Renewable energy is a hashish dream.
“there’s a smokestack at the end of all renewable energy,”
The True Believer could care less, though. It is pretty well settled that much recycling does more environmental harm than good (primarily through wasted energy) but that hasn’t caused a moment of reflection. “I’m saving the planet” is such hubris and such a big dopamine hit that no amount of logic and facts will triumph. Pol Pot’s high body count simply was proof of his righteousness and these folks are no different.
“The regime enjoys the carrot and stick approach, but they most really enjoy the stick.”
Reminds me of the Al Capone line: “You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.”
Sorry, this was meant to reply to the main article.
” It pisses me off because I should have known better.”
— Lol, I guess calculators were widely in use when he got the solar system installed back in…2013.
In his defense, I suspect much of his original motivation in installing this system was to lessen dependency on the outside world – while still retaining some good things – in a coming time of societal/economic collapse. The fly in the ointment was the limited lifespan of the solar and battery components of the system, something not knowable without a real world test over a span of a few years. Live and learn.
Did he never own anything with a battery? That’s one of the infuriating things with EVs as it’s as if these clowns have never even owned a cell phone.
Yes, that seems a flaw in many of these off grid or indeed most “renewable” schemes. Already stated is the “there’s always a smokestack…” quip (new to me). Apparently the Kunstlers and other Preppers think that additional solar panels and other supplies will magically re-appear after the Collapse has occurred. I recommend Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” as (hopefully) a humbling study of the utter complexity of even the most mundane consumer goods.
https://fee.org/media/14940/read-i-pencil.pdf
Imho the elites know the electric car is bogus. It’s just a back door way to get Americans into public transport., to get our energy use per capita down to European levels.
Frankly, I do not think they have a plan. Like the mobs wearing masks, they get swept up in these things, but in their position they get to be the high priest, rather than one of the people in the pews. That and it pays well. Global commerce is now tuned to monetize social fads. They see something picking up steam and they rush to front of it in order to profit. Once the fad ends, it is off to the next cause.
The universal mistake of all right-wing politics is to assume agency and reason to the other side.
It’ll be as you say, Z: all things to all people! A grift, a corporation, and a cult.
It will end badly too.
Good point. The other thing to notice about many of the fads, cultural and commercial, is that they are all the pipe dreams of the 60s. They had to change the world. They had to replace the evils of industrialism and capitalism with Gaia beneficence and equity.
On their way out they are going to make it happen one way or another. The Gen Xers who joined in are just money grubbers. The millenials and zoomers behind them, are true believers to an extent far surpassing the coastal elite hippies. The demographics and outcome of Fetterman’s election are signs of what they are going to do.
We are dealing with fanatics and reality departed weirdos. The 60s and its utterly stupid moralizing ideas and the imbecilic fanatics who believe and proselityze them are with us until some powerful apostates prepared to make Kent State look like child’s play step up and restore sanity and order.
They don’t have a plan, but they have ideas. Well that’s probably giving them too much credit. Vague aspirations maybe? Pushing vast numbers of people into public transport is definitely among their many aspirations. There is no way an electric car future could possibly exist with a 1 for 1 exchange for gas vehicles. Not form an energy deliver standpoint, or an infrastructure standpoint. Even the extraordinarily dense people advocating for EVs have to realize this.
I think they work from a vague image of a future where everyone lives in buildings made of glass a stainless steel. Everything is clean and neat and most important, free of all coercion. I touched on this in the Monday post. Radicalism, at its heart, is the dream of escaping the human condition, which is a world free of coercion.
Some one ordered a “dense” population; alas, the factory misinterpreted the instructions 😀
“Frankly, I do not think they have a plan. Like the mobs wearing masks, they get swept up in these things”
The end users — i.e., the lesbian sociology professors driving EVs to campus to lecture on the oppression of the heteronormative patriarchy — may not have a plan, but other people most definitely do.
The FedGov/EPA and the engineering staffs of GM and Ford are absolutely making deliberate decisions to replace internal combustion vehicles with EVs. Billions upon billions are being invested in this decision, and billions of dollars of tax credits and offsets are being granted.
Now, these people are not entirely stupid, they know as well as we do that the grid cannot support every ICE vehicle being replaced with an EV. They know that EVs have shorter range and less practicality. They know EVs cost more and rely upon the the availability of scarce resources like lithium. They know EV batteries eventually deplete and need to be recycled or disposed of.
If they know all of this and persist anyway, then exactly what is their plan? It logically cannot be to make personal transportation cheaper and more widely available to everyone.
Those people planning to replace IC engines are doing so because the boss said to do it. the boss is doing it because that is the current grift. If wind powered cars became a thing on twitter, look for some Elon Musk to promise that sail cars are the future. GM will then get on that grift.
Spiritual movements are not driven by practical concerns. This is a category error all right-wing movements seem to make.
Z: “Spiritual movements are not driven by practical concerns. This is a category error all right-wing movements seem to make.”
This.
We cannot begin to understand what it is that motivates the sh!tlib personality until we abandon all Common Sense and instead start trying to analyze the phenomena by examining psychological & pseudo-religious explanations.
They know EVs cost more and rely upon the the availability of scarce resources like lithium. They know EV batteries eventually deplete and need to be recycled or disposed of.
You sort of answered your own question. What good (to GM) is a vehicle that can be easily maintained and repaired by the owner or non-GM tethered techs, that can run for years, maybe decades, when you can force a market for new expensive things that need to be replaced regularly?
Yes. They don’t want you driving electric cars. They don’t want you driving at all. They want you in your pod eating bugs or dead. Preferably dead.
I have a friend who mortgaged his home to buy an EV and install the charger in his garage. I attempted to sway him away from the purchase but, like the Zman points out, it is a religion to these people. He used to brag about his car and inform me of all of the benefits of EVs. Every time I speak to him now he is noticeably less enthusiastic about his Tesla. It turns out the laws of thermodynamics are a bitch.
The stupid burns.
How many sets of tires has he gone through on his Tesla?
At least one set in less than two years and basically only going to and from work. He no longer informs me of his adventures with his Tesla.
“laws of thermodynamics are a bitch”
Truer words are rarely spoken. I’d also add the laws of gravity, inertia, etc.
This is why they always want to “tax” co2 rather than ban it all together. That way the rich can keep using it. If filling the gas tank takes $500, we can’t afford it. But the wealthy can afford to just pay the 500 bucks.
If hydrocarbon fuel is becoming more scarce, or at least harder to get out of the ground and refine, increased use of public transportation would inevitably happen anyway. Accelerationism is a weird mindset.
South Park Smug Alert is perfect example.