Cadillac has been losing sales and market position for the past three years straight, but thinks it has The Answer.
Want to guess?
If you said electrification, go to the head of the class. It’s the obvious answer, though. As the Lemmings rush toward the cliff, GM wants to be in the lead.
Cadillac head Mark Reuss thinks people will buy Cadillacs if they don’t have engines. Or at least, if they also have batteries (i.e., are hybrids). Because as everyone knows, luxury car buyers are absolutely frantic about the gas mileage delivered by their vehicles and also clamoring for a car that goes half as far and takes five times as long to get going again, the speciality de la Maison of electric cars.
“We’ve got one chance. This is it,” Reuss told Automotive News last week. “We will leave nothing on the table, but we’ve got to get there. … We’re going to get there.”
But where is that, exactly?
EVs constitute about 1 percent of total car sales. Let’s say that rises to 10 percent – via production quotas. GM will need to capture pretty much all of it to even begin to make up for the losses it has already suffered.
And every sale will still be a loss – because no one has figured out how to make money on electric cars.
Money is transferred – from the taxpayer, via the government – to the manufacturer and the buyer. But that is not economically sustainable. If it is economically sustainable, then Huey Long was right and it’s time for an electrified chicken in every pot, paid for by everyone sticking his paw (via the government) into his neighbor’s pockets. It brings to mind that scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the movie starring Chevy Chase and Randy Quaid, where Quad’s character goes shopping with Chase’s character’s wallet and urges him to “pick something real nice” for himself.
In the inbred, insular world of the upper echelons of GM – which moved its Cadillac headquarters to New York City, where most people don’t need to drive and therefore generally don’t own cars, let alone Cadillac cars – this is considered rational thinking.
It is so considered because the upper tiers of GM management (and it’s not just GM) swim among the like-minded, who no longer have a clue what the real world is like nor seem very interested in learning about it.
They are like the peddlers of Toxic Masculinity and Diversity (which GM is, too) and take it as a given thing that everyone out there agrees with their views and if not, well they’ll be dragged along.
The difference here is that GM (like Gillette, which is no longer the “best a man can get”) hasn’t got the power to force those people to buy its products – and many have decided not to.
More will.
Attempting to peddle electric cars isn’t going to work for the same reason that Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to take down the wall around her house or remove the armed security detail which protects her.
Electric cars are a loser.
They are a Potemkin Village on wheels, a facade that will come down once the rickety framework of government mandates and subsidies which supports them disappears and even if not for the simple reason that they are not economically sustainable. You cannot make money selling things at a loss – and if you insist on trying, after awhile, you will no longer be in business. Instead of losing the market, their place.
And because people (most of them) cannot afford to spend 30-40 percent more for a new car, even if they want to virtue signal – and don’t mind going half as far and waiting six times as long to get going again.
Reality eventually bites.
So what will happen is GM will build a fleet of EVs that don’t sell – like previous GM EVs, which all failed and had to be pulled.
And Cadillac will be the first lemming to leap – joyously, perhaps – over the edge of the cliff.
. . .
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“The only nukes attempted to be built in the US required Billions of Public loan guarantees to break ground and are 10 years behind schedule and 3X over budget.”
The mountain of government regulations increases the cost building a nuclear power plant by a factor five and increases the amount of time required to build one by a factor of ten. The solution is to get the government out of the business of all power production.
Pat B says:
***”Nuclear power is the most socialized power source. The french run a 100% socialized state sector for electricity. The only nukes attempted to be built in the US required Billions of Public loan guarantees to break ground and are 10 years behind schedule and 3X over budget.
The only countries building nukes of significance are Russia and China.”***
CONGRATULATIONS, PAT B!!!!!!!!
For ONCE, you said something that is accurate, sensible, and with which I can agree!
I nearly fainted.
With the amount of excrement being spewed from that particular hole, it’s probably just random chance. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
HiJason,
Amen. Have you noticed the pattern? These Clovers are immune to facts, contemptuous of logic and reason. The original/eponymous Clover is a dead ringer for “Pat.” Could be the same people. This is why I refer to them all generically.
Because they’re interchangeable.
Like they all came from the same factory… which in a way, they do.
Government schools.
Confucius say: State monkeys all get banana oil from same place!
(If my post congratulating Pat appears multiple times, it’s because there seemed to be a glitch when I was posting, and I had to post about 5 times, and it still wasn’t showing up)
And Jason? I was actually going to make the ‘broken clock’ comment in that post…I just figured that it wouldn’t be appropriate, since it’s unlikely that Pat’ll be right TWICE in the same day…or even century.)
A broken digital clock is never right. Perhaps that old canard about the broken clock being right twice a day needs to end since most clocks and watches are digital, especially if the clocks on the computers are included in the count.
Depends on how it’s broken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-id_Y6QZMg
AHAhahaha! Good’un, Brian!
I’d say with Pat B., it’s more of a power failure….no display!
And someone removed the time chip and swapped in a random number generator…..
Pat B says:
***”Nuclear power is the most socialized power source. The french run a 100% socialized state sector for electricity. The only nukes attempted to be built in the US required Billions of Public loan guarantees to break ground and are 10 years behind schedule and 3X over budget.
The only countries building nukes of significance are Russia and China.”***
CONGRATULATIONS, PAT B!!!!!!!!
For ONCE, you said something that is accurate, sensible, and with which I can agree!
I nearly fainted.
“What “tax incentives” for SUVs? No such things exist.”
Only vehicles over 10,000 lbs are eligible for Bonus depreciation…
“Heavy” SUVs, pickups, and vans used over 50% for business are eligible for the first-year Section 179 depreciation write-off in the year they are first put to business use. In addition, new heavy vehicles are eligible for first-year bonus depreciation.
“Example 1
Before the end of the year, you buy a new $45,000 heavy SUV and use it 100% in your sole proprietorship business. Your first-year depreciation deduction is $37,000: $25,000 Section 179 deduction + $10,000 first-year bonus depreciation deduction [50% x ($45,000 – $25,000)] + $2,000 “regular” depreciation deduction [20% x ($45,000 – $25,000 – $10,000)].
The $37,000 in write-offs will reduce your federal income tax bill and your self-employment tax bill too. You may get a healthy state income tax deduction too, although some states have refused to go along with the super-generous depreciation rules enacted by the federal government.
In contrast, if you buy a new $45,000 sedan and use it 100% for business, your first-year depreciation write-off will be only $11,160. For a new $45,000 light truck or light van, your first-year write-off would be only $11,560.”
Perhaps you were unaware of the Bush Era Bonus depreciation for heavy SUVs?
Try studying observable reality. It may help you.
Clover,
Apples and oranges – first of all.
The heavy trucks you mention (2500 series and larger) are not subsidized; EVs are. You are describing a business deduction – which is a different thing. These trucks would continue to sell – at a profit – absent any business deduction. Because they are hugely profitable – and because there is real market demand for them.
No money is taken from my pocket to fund the manufacture or sale of trucks.
EVs are being manufactured almost entirely because of mandates – and their “sale” depends on massive subsidies.
You keep writing about “reality” – as if that trumps right vs. wrong. It doesn’t, Clover. It’s just a weak attempt to avoid dealing with right vs. wrong.
Like so many products of government schooling, you have real trouble thinking in terms of principles and concepts; your worldview is blinkered and situational; your morality subjective and solipsistic. You feel and believe. And you evade/avoid/blank out any line of thinking which might cause you to have to deal with the thuggery by proxy you advocate.
Example: You rail against blacks having been enslaved, but advocate the use of force to take the product of other people’s labor to benefit yourself, the essence of slavery as a concept. And after railing against those you style “racist,” you call people – white people -“hicks” and “rednecks” and then deride anyone who lives in he country as a troglodyte.
It’d be funny were it not so tragic.
Once again: I am not opposed to electric cars. I am opposed to being mulcted to finance the manufacturer and “sale” of expensive toys for the virtue-signaling affluent.
…
You’re still bringing a rubber knife to a gun fight!
“The heavy trucks you mention (2500 series and larger) are not subsidized; EVs are. You are describing a business deduction – which is a different thing. These trucks would continue to sell – at a profit – absent any business deduction. ”
Not relative to sedans…
If Heavy trucks were really solving a key market problem they wouldn’t need a special
tax incentive relative to Light trucks or sedans.
Clover,
Your comments once again betray embarrassing ignorance about the car business. Trucks and SUVs are the most profitable vehicles for any car company.
It’s why they make them, you see – even to the extent of cancelling passenger car models to make room in their lineups for more of them.
Manufacturer incentives are used sometimes to increase sales at the end of a quarter (to bump up numbers over a rival, as in the case of the Ford F-truck vs. the Chevy Silverado) but are not necessary to make these vehicle lines profitable. Even when someone gets a $10,000 discount off the MSRP of a truck, there’s still profit margin left. That’s how much money they make on these things.
You’re simply wrong on the facts – again.
Also, the fact that – unlike EVs – these vehicles do not depend on government production mandates and subsidization of sales with tax dollars to prop them up.
Pat, Tesla Motors is working on an electric semi truck. It will be eligible for the same business deduction. The business deduction for heavier trucks does not require the truck be powered by hydrocarbon fuels. It could be powered by batteries or unicorn farts it doesn’t matter. You may object to that carve out but it is universal and thus at least fair across all options.
“We’ve got one chance. This is it,” Reuss told Automotive News last week. “We will leave nothing on the table, but we’ve got to get there. … We’re going to get there.” This makes aboslutely no sense. When someone goes “all in” he puts everything on the table. I think the trutch is, they are taking everything “off” the table, and moving on to the next table and clearing it, as well. Funny thing is, when crooks are under duress, they will actually tell you precisely what their intentions are, and try to make you believe you are hjearing what you want. This guy should be selling sand to the AyRabs.
right on GTC. I believe they have already made a deal with Uncle.
Clover wrote:
“Meanwhile I’m going to go back to patent work in the field.”
Great comments, nice long and lively thread.
But the bottom line is simple: Clover’s hostility toward Eric is based simply on the fact that he’s throwing the wet blanket of truth on his/her Elon Musk Jr. wet dreams.
And nothing infuriates a prog more than a dose of reality.
Hi AF,
Clover went silent, stopped attempting to respond to the factual objections I raised – especially the ur fact about EVs being utterly dependent on mandates and subsidies, which fact undermines every argument in favor of EVs as anything other than subsidized failures.
I also got tired of dealing with a person who accuses others of “racism” – while calling others “hicks” and “rednecks.”
The cognitive dissonance is halting.
Guys like that tend to scatter away like cockroaches from a flashlight when they can’t come up with facts to back their positions, particularly when their knee-jerk ad hominem attacks and accusations of racism/nazism don’t make their opponents back down.
Eric
Your whining about Mandates is whining about reality.
It’s such tedium listening to people who can quote “The Fountainhead” whinge
on about the cruelty of reality.
I don’t hear you whine about Unleaded gas… Remember, that was a “Mandate”.
I don’t hear you whining about how it’s unfair Farm Diesel is untaxed…
How about you go to Iowa and tell Iowa Farmers to stop demanding Ethanol gas?
You can Stand up during a town hall over the next year and
explain how E-10 gas is a terrible mandate and only awful
takers want that….
Clover,
Since you can’t defend mandates on moral grounds – because they’re indefensible on moral grounds – you eruct a non sequitur about “reality.”
Well, Clover enslaving blacks (your pretended third rail) was also once “reality,” too. Does that mean everyone should have just accepted it?
The above is what’s known as a logical argument; the use of a principle to make a point. It is something you seem unable to comprehend.
It gets tedious dealing with people who bring rubber knives to gun fights.
Eric, you’re wasting your time with that maroon. He/she/it is a typical wibble-wobbling self-styled “progressive” that bounces around from one ludicrous position to another with no reason, logic, or common sense – let alone any moral sense.
You’d have better luck having a rational discussion with one of your cats.
“Since you can’t defend mandates on moral grounds – because they’re indefensible on moral grounds”
Eric, do you know what an externality is?
Mandates are routinely used to resolve externalities.
Mandates are also routinely used for efficiency reasons.
Do you find traffic lights to be immoral?
Yes, Clover – I do know what an “externality” is.
And I know you haven’t defined it, with regard to EVs. Probably because you are aware how easy it would be to quantify the fatuity. Do you mean emissions? Of what, exactly – and how much? New IC cars are nearly pollution-free, in terms of the things which actually do cause “externalities” – e.g., smog and health problems. You will probably trot out the C02 canard. Leaving aside the “climate change” nonsense – the dishonest “science” and hyped hysteria – the fact is that EVs depend on electricity and the majority of the generating capacity in the US is coal/oil/natural gas, all of which “emits” C02 and lots of it. This leaves aside the effrontery of forcing ordinary people to subsidize electric luxury-sports cars for the affluent.
In re traffic lights: They often reduce efficiency by interrupting what could have been the smooth flow of traffic… with the “externality” being wasted time and excess energy consumed.
“New IC cars are nearly pollution-free, in terms of the things which actually do cause “externalities” – e.g., smog and health problems.”
I would propose you prove your assertion.
Take any new car, park it in a closed garage, start it up with a full tank of fuel and lock yourself inside
with a bottle of whiskey. Don’t leave until you have finished the bottle. Shouldn’t cause you any health problems.
Clover,
Once again, you reveal that you either don’t know much about the issue at hand or are being purposefully evasive.
The issue you brought up – undefined “externalities” – was defined by me as the vehicle exhaust emissions which can affect air quality (i.e., create or worsen smog) or potentially harm human health. This is the only morally relevant “externality” – but as the saying goes, it’s the dose that makes the poison.
These exhaust byproducts have been so effectively controlled (or converted into harmless compounds like water vapor and C02 through catalytic reaction) that, as regards new and recent vintage IC cars they are an irrelevance as regards things such as smog and harm to human health.
And that is why a new bogeyman – C02 and “climate change” – had to be trotted out. But it’s at best a grossly exaggerated, dishonestly presented fraud which counts on the laziness, ignorance and susceptibility to fear-mongering which addles all too many people.
Your “closed garage” diagram is as fatuous as me urging you to crack open an EV battery case and drink or inhale the contents.
It’s funny how “externalities” only exist selectively. I noticed this many years ago.
In this case nobody considers the externalities of mining the minerals for the batteries and such. They are so considerable that domestic US mines had to shut down because of the regulations to mitigate those “externalities”. Since the materials come from China now nobody seems to care or count those.
Then there is the externality that the electric car’s contribution to pollution is outside the cities where they are used.
The great thing about the EVs is that they externalize all the externalities to other people.
Brilliant riposte, Brent – thank you, sir!
“The great thing about the EVs is that they externalize all the externalities to other people.”
excellent !!
Oh, I know, Pat, right?!
It was like in the 80’s, when everyone was whining about Apartheid! It was just reality! Why couldn’t they just accept it?!
I don’t know why they call them ‘progressives’, when their ideas and behaviors are clearly REGRESSIVE, as amply demonstrated by Pat.
I refer to them as “self-styled progressives” since it’s an honorific they bestowed upon themselves. I sure as hell don’t see anything they want to do as being within any reasonable definition of “progress”.
Hey Nunzio,
Progressives saw the ideal society not as a group of individuals, voluntarily pursuing their own ends, but as a greater machine into which individuals were called upon to serve. In this machine, the elite declared themselves to be “natural” leaders, tasked with dictating the appropriate role played by all others. This elite correctly viewed the classical liberal values of individual sovereignty and responsibility inimical to the progress of the machine. Progressives are, and always have been, authoritarian collectivists. “Progress”, for them, is properly defined by the level of control they exert over the machine.
Interestingly, the modern, race obsessed elements of the alt-right are channeling the early progressives, many of whom were virulently racist and open advocates of eugenics. Ironically, the “intellectual” roots of this movement are neither conservative nor libertarian, but “progressive”.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Evenin’ Jeremy!
….or, to put it in more general terms: “Progressivism” is just the current euphemism for communism/socialism/any form of coerced collectivism.
And so true about the racism- only now, the straight white masculine males are now the objects of that racism.
Funny too, that these people are the ones who now champion abortion, such as has recently been strengthened and extended in NY to the point of literal infanticide in NY- when in-fact, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood was a virulent racist whose objective in founding that cause was to reduce the birthrate among MINORITIES!
And also of note is how these progressives support a political philosophy which, everywhere it has been practiced, has resulted in the deaths of millions of people.
No wonder these ‘progressives’ can not tolerate facts; they can use all of the euphemisms, and politically-correct speech, and pithy platitudes of advancing ‘the people’, but such can not hide the misery, poverty, and death that the philosophy which they advocate and work for has caused throughout the world for the last century.
These people are the enemies of humanity- so it is no surprise that they would advocate the enslavement of humanity on a mass scale, by what ever means necessary to accomplish it; and that they so despise the most basic right of any human to be left alone to live their life on this earth as they choose to, and to reap the natural consequences and rewards of doing so.
They’d rather play God- as long as they get to be the ones who can claim omniscience and omnipotence, while freeing themselves to not have to answer to anyone for the choices they make over the lives of others- down to the very matter over who lives and who dies- although they have not created mankind nor the earth..
Disgusting, isn’t it? Talk about hypocrisy! They would rob every man of the right to rule over himself and his own, while they seek to rule over those who have no obligation tov them, other than the misfortune of having been born into the world and in a jurisdiction over which these creeps have violently established power.
Hey Nunz,
Progress for a “progressive” is measured by the amount of control they exert over society; the “deaths of millions of people” is trivial compared to the “perfection” of society. Get with it man!
Cheers,
Jeremy
Ha! Yeah, Jeremy, they’re just ‘getting rid of the people who are preventing them from establishing utopia’!
Of course, if the ones who are trying to violently impose their version of ‘utopia’ on everyone else would just commit suicide, we might come a little closer to actually having that utopia- at least for those of us who leave others in peace, and actually pursue the things that matter to us individually…..
I read a book many years ago- I think it was The Story Of Utopias by Lewis Mumford- It amazed me, how over and over again, people always seem to believe that they can establish a universal utopia by controlling others to a great degree; using violence; and forcing all to conform to one particular economy; way of life; value system; etc. -as if humans are nothing more than rats who will be happy and peaceful as long as some basic physical needs are met…..and that none will mind giving up their own autonomy and individual pursuits for the collective- or if they do, then they are deemed worthy of elimination.
Once again it boils down to the saying I came up with: The problem with a collective is that someone has to run it.
Utopia is achieved when everyone governs himself and does not impose upon others involuntarily. In other words it is the absence of any controlling force. It’s when people grasp, embrace, and practice live and let live.
I’d say it’s also more likely he’s gone back to flipping burgers rather than “patent work” – except that flipping burgers is honest, productive work. The clover in question is most likely a gunvermin paper-pusher who feels perfectly justified in living off the sweat and toil of his neighbors.
Jason, I think you are correct about the burger flipping- ….in one of those commie places like NY with a $15/hr. ‘minimum-wage’ that makes unskilled lazy nincompoops “equal” to productive people who give a damn and actually acquire a marketable skill and learn the habits that make one competitive in the labor market, instead of relying upon robbery by proxy from business owners!
[Way way way off-topic]
Hey Eric,
Did you hear that comrade Andrew Cuomo is celebrating a ‘victory’ of his NY signing into law a bill that allows abortion up until BIRTH- and that if the sprog comes out alive, they can KILL it!
While I don’t think such matters are any bidness of the government (actually, nothing is rightly any business of the government, because gov’t is illegitimate- like most of the sprogs they advocate killing)…it’s pretty darn sick that they endorse, enable and promote [and even force us to fund] this crap!!!!
Cuomo had said back in 2014 “Conservatives are not welcome here[NY]….” and something to the effect that “if you’re conservative, you need to leave”! Ha! I beat him to it, having extricated myself from that filthy dictatorship in ’01. (And would that it could have been sooner!).
As this crap spreads [The attitude, in addition to the specifics and legislation), as everything which starts in NY or CA spreads like cancer to the rest of the country, how long before we see the same everywhere? This stuff will likely start steamrolling after the next commie is elected in 2020.
Disgusting filth. I’m literally out of words.
Just utterly disgusting, reprehensible, evil, devil-spawned, filthy, awful, barbaric, monstrous violation of all morality and decency. You know, I usually try to keep discussions from reaching the Godwin point, but whoever said this legislation created a new Auschwitz was on the right track.
Reminds me of when the “baby chop shop” videos first surfaced. The videos just went to CONgress, which promptly slapped a gag order on the videographers and then stalled around trying to make sure the videos weren’t “edited” until everyone forgot the whole thing. If we still had the same spirit that motivated us to break from England in the first place, every Planned Parenthood in the country would have been on fire within the hour.
Abortionists are some of the most disgusting people in the world. Remember that one who was quoted describing, apparently with some enjoyment, the tactile sensations of killing an unborn child in the womb… how did NO ONE in that room become so sick to their stomach, so violently angry, that they had no choice but to rise from their chair and beat him like a practice dummy? Why is this utter, unbridled evil being allowed to exist?
Amen, Chuck.
I’ve always been of the opinion that such things, while wrong, are not any of the government’s business- as by injecting itself in intimate matters involving people’s bodies, seed, and children, via regulation, be it prohibition or promotion, it constitutes the ultimate trespass against personal sovereignty/privacy/right to be left alone, etc. (And hey, if the wicked want to kill off their progeny…they’re doing us a favor by not reproducing their own kind)
But by promoting and cheering abortion; and cracking open the door to what essentially amounts to the beginnings of state-sponsored infanticide, NY has gone beyond the evils of Nazi Germany.
And what bothers just as much, but seems to have been glossed over for the past 5 years since it was uttered, as I had never heard it before, is Comrade Cuomo’s statement that conservatives are not welcome in NY [Not that any would want to stay in that filthy place!]- which is basically just one step away from the establishment of a religion [All it lacks is official legislation decreeing it].
What Cuomo is literally saying, is that NY is only for people of certain values/beliefs/viewpoints/worldviews. If the tables were reversed, and some Southern pol said the opposite about his own state, he’d probably be executed- and we’d never hear the end of it in the media and from the libtards.
There are times when abortion is needed for the fetuses sake or the mother. But laws like that will be enforced on those unable to defend themselves against it……as always.
One reason for the growing MGTOW is the government intrusion into personal life with men knowing ahead of time they’ll get the short end of any “stick” that arises and there mostly wouldn’t be a “stick” without government.
On “Wild Kingdom” the male animals are displayed as willing do anything to mate and feminism and stuff related to it thus thinks male humans are like that too. But humans aren’t like that. male humans have a rational risk/reward mechanism. Well at least many do. Thus there is a market distribution of what men will put up with or do. For some men it is very little and for some others a lot. The further the cost and risk is pushed up the more men in the distribution fall under the threshold.
It’s as if I were selling a car with certain features, quality level, and reliability level. As the price goes up and the features, quality and reliability went down there would be fewer and fewer buyers. People understand why there weren’t buyers for new Yugos even at a low low price or Chrysler TC at a high price. Somehow people are baffled when the same principle shows up other places.
Has anyone been able to find that seemingly pro-slavery line Pat attributed to Thomas Jefferson?
I was looking for it, so I could see it in context, but I can not find it, even among spurious quotes attributed to TJ. Since Pat never answered my query as to where one could find the citation, I’d bet that he/she/it just pulled it out of their you-know-what…..
Good Mourning E! I have to laugh because as I am reading the RH column of recent posts I see this:
eric: Hi Graves, Don’t insult Luca! These corporate tools are more like the characters out of Atlas Shrugged; banal Babbitts who…
eric: Pat, Rand has nothing to do with this. You keep missing the point. GM is exploiting mandated demand in an authoritarian country…
Ok brother, you have definitely contradicted yourself there, lol! How many hours of No-Sleep are you running on anways? I just though you might appreciate the fact thaty I got a whole 3 hours of sleep myself in the last 36 hours, lol! Just remember, it’s all fun and games till somebody loses an eye!
Is it just me, or does this photo of Ruess look like Lucaa Brazzi minus 100 lbs? The silk tie and the “get that camera outta my face” look on his face just really makes great PR, No? Umm….No.
Hi Graves,
Don’t insult Luca!
These corporate tools are more like the characters out of Atlas Shrugged; banal Babbitts who grease palms and say All The Right Things, in order to avoid ruffling any feathers while raking in as much loot for themselves as possible.
Off topic,
Does anyone out there know how to turn off e-mail notification? I started getting them yesterday out of the blue.
Thanks,
Jeremy
Jeremy,
Just click on the “Manage your subscriptions” link at the end of any of those notifications, and you can choose to unsubscribe from any or all notifications.
Thanks,
Oh wise and generous Nunzio! (gratuitous compliment added to appease wordpress).
Cheers,
Jeremy
***”(gratuitous compliment added to appease wordpress).”***
I will accept it as genuine (To acknowledge said quirk- while denying any of my own, of course!) 😉
Hey Nunzio,
The compliment was genuine.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Aww, I know, Jeremy; and thanks. T’was just using the opportunity for a little jesting with the word-play, Sport*.
(I’ve got the darn RH song stuck in my head now! 🙂 )
Looks like Dunning-Kruger is alive and well here.
Never go full Dunning-Kruger!
I use to chuckle when my physics professor would say “there are only two kinds of people in this world – Scientists and chimpanzees”
He’s probably right.
Atmospheric CO2 is 100% driven by solar activity. Levels were much higher 700 years ago at the solar peak medieval warm period. The highest recorded CO2 was a bit less than 1% at peak dinosaur time period. Dinosaur bones were discovered in Antarctica, fercrysayks. CO2 level is at 0.04% (near plant-starving level) today and is falling thanks to the low solar cooling trend of the last 10 years.
Hi Cambo,
I discovered that (among other egregious things) the temperature measurements taken constitute a cherry-picked sample and that the Antarctic ice cap has increased – which you literally never hear about. That alone ought to be enough to arouse the Stink Alarm.
More generally, any purported scientific phenomena with a name as purposefully vague as “climate change” is inherently suspect on the face of it. I am boggled that most people do not immediately question everything based solely on that.
Global warming (solar activity) causes higher atmospheric CO2 and water.
CO2 and water are plant food.
hydrocarbon exhaust is CO2 and water.
Driving a Boeing 747 full throttle is Fucking GREEN.
Driving a Tesla or Prius is Fucking BROWN.
It’s stupidly laughable that the memorizing chimps call electrics and hybrids “Green”.
Most of the earth surface is desert and frozen tundra…Because the earth if friggin COLD and there is not enough CO2 and water in the atmosphere.
Good Lord, this is just basic 8th grade earth science.
“Peter,
You’ve guzzled the “climate change” Kool Aid. Rather than continue slurping it up, I urge you to take the time to read a bit more about the subject.”
Wibble wobble # 4.
Is that your argument Eric?
Some of your own disingenuous appeal to emotion claptrap?
Do you have any data or science to backup that opinion?
I believe in climate change, just not the SJW cause. If it didn’t change we’d never get a rain in west Tx and it would never stop in Seattle.
Global warming is very real but it began before there were homeo sapiens. The Asian genetics in Native Americans is due to the fact water didn’t cover the land mass between the American continent and Europe and Asia.
Glaciers melted eons before man existed in any significant numbers.
Yes 8S the climate changes hourly. That’s because the planet’s ecosystem is so large and complicated that it can never be in balance. The system will try to strike a balance but external factors, mainly the sun and its behavior come in to play. Were it not for the sun, the planet would be a ball of frozen rock at absolute zero.
Warming is much better than cooling, esp. for growing crops and general survivability.
Hey Jeremy,
“eschatology”
Isn’t that the study of scat?
?
Hey Tuan,
Hah, I suppose obsession with the end of the world could be considered the “study of scat”.
I visited Detroit recently, did a back to back Lafayette vs American comparison. I thunk I liked American just a tiny bit more.
Cheers,
Jeremy
But did you hit Lafayette Coney?
Of course,
It was my “go to” coney forever. Decided to try American, pretty good.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Study of scat? I thought that was Ellafitzgeraldtology?
(((Old NYer cartoon I saw once: Cat sitting on a fence making a racket.
Someone yells out of apartment window: “Scat!”.
Cat starts going “Scoodilybeeebopreediplovejoy….” 😀 )))
This is your electric future according to physical reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RbwOhM6PUk
What do you think now?
Good stuff, Cambo… I’ve been howling into the wind about this for years now!
Most of the time I just feel like a dog barking at the wind and then I realize it takes an IQ of 110 to even begin to reckon physical reality. The average IQ of a Democrat is somewhere around 92. They are more than a standard deviation away from fully human and the ability to integrate physical concepts. They are relatively retarded and not fit for the modern technological world. That’s why they vote to steal from everyone else.
Hi Cambo,
It’s depressing, but I suspect you’re on to something there. Evidence for which can be seen in the uniformly sloppy objections (I won’t call them arguments) that pop up here (and elsewhere) contra what I and others have written about EVs. It’s not a question of disagreement. It’s an inability to understand the nature of the disagreement. To skip right over the fundamental thing – and argue (emote) over some tangential thing.
It makes my teeth ache…
“It’s not a question of disagreement. It’s an inability to understand the nature of the disagreement”
Yes…One thing the little chimps are good at is memorizing what their political owners tell them to think. They cannot even BEGIN to understand the video I linked above. Talking to a Democrat is like talking to a programmed child.
“It’s not a question of disagreement. It’s an inability to understand the nature of the disagreement”
Yes and it goes deeper than that.
An inability to understand that there is a place for disagreement.
An inability to conceive that their position could be wrong.
An inability to recognize that they have ever been wrong in the past.
Of course any opposition to their view is clearly just contrarianism, because they are not wrong, so trying to understand or debate your view is just a pointless waste of their time, so they don’t.
Just public schooled / TV watching retards who can’t reason displaying Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Eric/Cambo,
The Dunning-Kruger Effect?
What or how does that relate to checking to make a lane change and seeing what you expect/want to see?
I’m sure you’ve checked your mirror before passing only to hear the horn of the guy you are about to cut off as you change lanes.
Just trying to figure my level of retardation.
When I was a kid I was landing in Tallahassee and the air traffic controller told me I was cleared to land. He said to call him when I was over the numbers. So I did.
He then asked me what the numbers said. I told him 17. He said to keep going about a mile and a half and I would see runway 18, and the tower he was working.
I was sure I was at the right airport, but they tell me I was suffering from Confirmation Bias.
Last week a friend of mine was plowing the same lot he has been doing for over twenty years. He backed into a light pole. He said he probably did this lot 175 times. Nonetheless, he swears he didn’t see that light pole.
Is this an “accident” or caused by a general dumbing down?
Hi T,
I’m all for checking (and checking again) before making a lane change or any other maneuver that might put me in the proximity of another vehicle or object. I try to maintain situational awareness around my perimeter continuously, as I drive. The only dumbing down tendency I know of is the general tendency toward paying attention to things other than one’s driving and what other drivers in the vicinity are doing (and where they are in relation to you).
Sometimes, of course, things happen. But they tend to happen less (if at all) if one is vigilant!
eric, I saw that self-righteous little twit David “piggy” Hog a couple days ago. He was spewing hate and even began to include “old people” as it was obvious he was speaking of his parents. It seems because they don’t have the time to devote to learning everything about a cellphone and asked a question or two, he couldn’t speak derisively enough about them.
He kept up a rant about old people and I was struck by how truly clueless and immature he is.
Now I kidded my parents and their generation about specific words they said when I was younger than him but it was never derisive and we’d all laugh about some things.
I thought my dad was pretty clueless when I was 15 since he wasn’t clued in to the latest things important to my crowd. He went from being a guy not “up” with it to being one of the most intelligent people I knew when I was 21.
I suspect little Dave may never catch on since the libtards made him their anti-gun twit after the Florida school shootings.
The fact is after listening to him a few minutes he didn’t have a clue about the reality of the situation.
Hag Pelosi and her minions don’t have a clue except I really think she does. It’s one reason I wonder if she is human, not saying that in a facetious way at all. And here’s why: How old does she expect to be when she dies? I don’t believe she’s so clueless as to not know why the 2nd Amendment was written even though no doubt millions of the brainwashed don’t get it.
I get wanting to disarm everyone if you intend to live forever, if you’re immortal compared to humans.
Timelines are important with various species, one reason why I think she and Chuck might actually be aliens as many others have suggested. I doubt intelligent people don’t understand about throwing off the shackles of tyranny. They appear to be duplicitous enough to be other than human. Well, back to my Outer’s and cleaning kit.
This is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine. I must master it as I master my life. Without me my rifle is useless. Without my rifle I am useless. I must fire my rifle true…….
What astounds me is how the public buys into the notion that any “victim” of a given crime is likewise an authority on said crime. By virtue of being a victim, one is merely more experienced in the ability of being victimized. That alone should be a clue as to the victim’s apparent lack of situational awareness regarding said crime. In truth, Hoggy is heralded as some sort of hero for not having been shot and killed, so does that really count as a victim? This bullshit “could’ve, would’ve, should’ve” mentality stems from a greater ignorance of one’s environment. Fearmongering has become a new hobby for politicians and alarmists alike, and I don’t see it waning anytime soon!
What astounds me, gtc, is that that stupid little prick [Don’t know what he looks like; don’t watch TV- but he’s gotta be a little prick!]- if anything- if he had a brain, one would think that HE of all people should realize the utter vulnerability and helplessness of being in a “gun free zone”!
So what does the ass do? He advocates making the entire country a “gun free[for innocent citizens] zone”- so everyone can be a helpless, vulnerable, defenseless little prick like he is!
How the hell did the bullets miss that big of a dick?!
Exactly my point! What fucktards parade a twit like like this and use him to advocate the very policy that got his friends aced? This society is so fucked up when it not only can’t see the stupidity of a defenseless public, but actually goes on a nationwide rampage to make everyone in the nation a target for larceny and murder! Appeasement, the same moronic shit that “Snivel” Chamberlain tried to use to stop Adolf Hitler’s aggression in 1939. Cowering and pleading with thugs only makes them bolder and more violent. Arm every teacher, parent, and student over the age of 16, and stop giving psychotic asswipes an easy target on a silver platter! “Gun Free Zone” might as well read “Come Rob, Rape, & Kill my Helpless Ass”!
“goes on a nationwide rampage to make everyone in the nation a target for larceny and murder! ”
They demand EQUALITY, man, EQUALITY!
God made all mankind, Samuel Colt made all men equal.
““Snivel” Chamberlain”
LOL…Nice!
GTC, Eight, Nunz… Be nice to David Hogg….. do you not realise that he is being set up to one day be one of our Dear Leaders…. at which point comments like these will probably get us all a trip to room 101…..
Hi Nasir,
I cut Hogg a little slack because he’s literally just a dumb kid. Dangerous, though.
Sad thing is, most Repugnantcans aren’t far from the Dumbocraps these days- They might be batting a good 95 or 96 IQ on a good day.
Too bad there wasn’t a scale for morality!
They’d all fail miserably!
You could have a person who isn’t very bright- but who has a high degree of morality- i.e. believes in people’s right to be left alone; believes in the sanctity of private property; freedom of association; etc. and they would be a better defender of liberty and humanity than the most brilliant thinker who possesses a world of knowledge, but who doesn’t give a damn about those simple aforementioned virtues.
The Albert Einsteins and Stephen Hawkings of this world contribute nothing to the fight of man against tyranny- but almost always aid and abet t the enemy, whether by creating technologies which are invariably used for destruction and control; or by destroying culture, by substituting their own fantasies of what should be/might be, for reality and real scientific investigation.
“Too bad there wasn’t a scale for morality!”
There is…Thou Shall Not Steal. That’s all.
It’s not “Thou Shall Not Steal….Except by majority vote”.
Amen to that!
Most Americans would rate a zero on that scale today- while paying lip-service to it, because they have another god before the LORD: The god of State.
“Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are…”
The State- thus man- is their ultimate authority. Thou shalt do no murder…unless the state sanctions it.
Cambo, I think there are two kinds of people who vote democrat. Those that are stupid, and those that are evil. I do not think that a single democrat voter could NOT fall into one of those two categories.
Face it…Political people (especially Democrats/Socialists) are all just fucking evil. Anyone who claims to own you and your income is just plain fucking evil.
…With the possible exception of your own children under the age of 8 🙂
Hi Cambo,
Yes. Indeed.
I am in the middle of a standoff with someone who is a good friend but may not be one much longer – over this very issue. He likes AGWs; has AGW friends – and is on the verge of dating one. He knows this woman is not welcome in my house; that I won’t be around her (or any other AGW) and if their relationship proceeds, becomes serious, it will likely mean he and I stop being friends because we won’t be seeing much of each other any longer.
I love the guy – he’s the type I could call at 2 in the morning to help me get rid of a body – but I cannot abide AGWs. They, for me, represent the apotheosis of all that’s become (as you say) evil about this country.
They are too stupid to figure out whether to embrace AGW or not…Yet the choose AGW. Did they just flip a coin?
Their choice REVEALS that they are inherently evil. The choice was not thought out at all but landed on by using their very instinctive nature. I really don’t think it is just virtue signaling.
Good luck to your friend…especially after she hits menopause. I bet she eats him…figuratively.
Eric,
They could have used your friend in St. Louis.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/questions-surround-killing-of-off-duty-st-louis-police-officer/article_f3592056-3e0f-5e6a-b083-38039a17424e.html#tracking-source=home-top-story-2
Ouch, Eric!
Stay away from that guy- or anyone who is so bereft of vision and common sense that they do not abhor pigs and other government scum.
These kind of people may seem agreeable and not so bad to hang out with on a casual basis, but in the end, their utter lack of love for justice and liberty ends up allowing the forces of this world to turn these people into enablers of the state, and the very thing which we, and all just-minded people hate.
If he dates that pig-ette, even if you no longer bother with him, he knows a lot about you- and even if he only mentions a few tid-bits about you occasionally to the pig-ette, SHE will end up knowing some things about you.
After she F&^$s him over and they break up (or worse yet, if they stay together!) she may well use one of those tid-bits when she or one of her colleagues has nothing better to do.
The more they know about one…the worse it is.
I’ve seen it time and again…. (Too many pigs, or people involved with pigs amongst my relatives- which is why I don’t bother with them. Why would I bother with those who embrace the very thing I most despise?).
The pig who is dating the lady on the block, or who comes to live in the neighborhood, knows all about the neighbors; all about the friends and relatives of the person they’re involved with:
Who smokes pot. Who drives without insurance; Who is behind on their child support; who works “off the books”; Who’s got cash in the house;, etc. Even if the pig in question doesn’t do anything….he talks to other pigs…. and one day, if they “want you” for one reason or another 9i.e. don’t like you; just need to make a bust; know that you oppose pigs; etc.)…or if you have something they want (“What are you going to do, call the police? HAhaha”) ; or if they’re just looking for a good ol’ fishing expedition…
It never goes well for anyone involved with pigs…even those who are removed a few steps from the actual person involved.
Having a close friend who doesn’t share your values, is like dating/marrying a woman who doesn’t share those same values. No good can come of it- and eventually, if you don’t get disgusted with them and their politics/worldview/morality, they will get disgusted by yours (To them, WE are the clueless idiots; infidels; traitors; braindead; problematic; etc).
It may seem hard jetisoning someone whom you consider a good friend- but really, if he can not see the evil inherent in pigs; or is so bereft of morality that he doesn’t care, then I would suggest that the outward things you like about him are a cloak for core issues that would despise if he displayed them- which, in this example, of being willing to even consider dating a pig, is exactly what is happening.
I’ve known people like that too. I’m still in touch with a few- they’re “nice guys”, and always game- but they just don’t care about things like liberty and justice. If they can bounce through life and have a nice vehicle to drive, and a decent house to live in; a little entertainment; a decent job, then everything is hunky-dory. I keep people like that at a distance. They are generic beings. They may not be malicious or disagreeable, etc. but their lack of strong feelings for the stuff that is ultimately most important makes them easily manipulated by the forces of this world, into being the very essence of what we abhor. Such is just not always readily apparent, because of their general easy-going non-threatening, agreeable natures.
I agree with you Nunzio. My sister used to be very distrustful of the State, but then she married a guy who became a coproach. I wasn’t yet an anarchist back then, but I already disliked cops due to the crimes and imoral deeds that so many of them commit. He finally left the force due to a lack of pay raises after ‘serving’ 8-10 years, but he still had cop friends and watched cop TV programs. When I visited on the holidays, I always acted nice to him, but I never felt comfortable.
I then transformed into being an anarchist, and nobody in my family including him liked it when I would point out how evil the State was, or my criticism of cops being allowed to lie.
The combination of being married to a cop and the statistics doctrine their Church taught caused my sister to become one of ‘them’.
I haven’t met or had anything to do with them for nearly a decade now.
Perfect example:
Years ago, someone had moved into the rental trailer just down the road from me. I’d constantly hear their noisy truck starting up…idling for 15 minutes, then driving down the road (you could hear it for miles)…only to return 10 or 20 minutes later. And then 20 minutes or a half hour later, the same scenario would repeat itself…again and again all day long.
I was talking to my neighbor one night, and said “What is up with the new guy in that trailer?! He comes and goes all day long…”- and I explained the scenario.
After 2 or 3 days, I no longer heard the noisy truck. Turns out, unbeknownst to me at the time, my neighbor’s father used to be the sheriff…and I guess my neighbor mentioned the noisy truck scenario to “the right people” and the guy got busted for selling drugs.
All because of one innocent comment, made to someone who has a connection with a former pig. Of course, had I known that, or suspected what the noisy truck guy was doing, I never would have mentioned it to my neighbor- and I feel terrible that it was my innocent comment that led to the guy’s kidnapping (He must be stupid though- sheesh! At least have a QUIET vehicle, so as not to be so OBVIOUS!)- but it just goes to show ya, how the slightest tid-bit of info…the most innocent comment- can have far-reaching affects if some badged ghoul just gets wind of it in the air…..
Will it be a Brave New world or 1984?
Oops, 1984 is already here.
That is supposing we make it …….
“I’m totally convinced the world is run by people who are insane.” John Lennon.
I say this a lot when discussing with other peers (millenials) that “Nature Doesn’t Lie”.
This can be used in various conversations and topics of the day, gender dysphoria fad, global warming, etc.
It’s a lot worse that that, haha.
EV proponents will claim many things, like electric motor efficiency is 95%, etc……
Here’s some ammo:
1. IC engines are roughly 35% eff., so they say E-motor is 95%, what they fail to mention is the power plant that makes the E is roughly 45% eff., then you add in all the losses in distribution and losses of transformers, etc.. and it’s probably worse eff. for E-cars, total.
2. We all know here that range and charging are their problems. Porsche just announced a high voltage super charger that E-people are saying is the greatest thing ever and e-cars are here now. hahaha.
One little look into said supercharger and it is 450kw. This means it needs around 2000amps to do it’s work at 240v (household voltage), and the supercharger is designed for 800v! hahahah. Even at 800v it still needs around 600amps! The wiring for 600amps is approx. 4″ thick. I am no e-expert, but have a basic understanding of the stuff. You can easily see the problems coming. But it won’t stop the propaganda.
3. As Eric has said many times, we are being bamboozled for sure. But they do it all the time. Get t he public to buy in and they will help move crap forward.
Quick example of being bamboozled: I own a large property in NJ. NJ politicians needed a way to reduce or eliminate development in the more rural areas of NJ (the cities were emptying to more rural areas). They sprouted ‘suburban sprawl’ for a while but it went no where. Then they figured it out and claimed ‘save the water’. The public bought in. They passed the Highlands Act which eliminated almost all development, which forced the big boys to re-develop the blighted cities. It worked. The rural land owners were promised compensation for their loss of property rights and loss of value. The money never came, but my property rights were eliminated and my properties value dropped 50% to this day (10yrs). Today, my kids can not build a house on my large property (over 50 acres). Unreal, right? It was never about water, we have more than almost anywhere in the country. It was about moving development by force. The bonus for the big boys is they now get to buy up said devalued land at mucho savings. About 10+ years from now the politicians will claim ‘we need more development in the Highlands’ and the laws will change back, and all the big boys get their cake and can eat it too……………
My own town even bought in hook-line-and-sinker, even after we protected ourselves from big developers by up-zoning. Hard to do, but we found a way to get all the larger land owners to buy in. How it’s supposed to work. I told the council that this Highlands act will not end well, they didn’t care. My town is starting look like a 3rd world country and they can’t figure out why. The last new commercial (non big box, we never wanted those) was built 10 years ago.
“. IC engines are roughly 35% eff., so they say E-motor is 95%, what they fail to mention is the power plant that makes the E is roughly 45% eff., then you add in all the losses in distribution and losses of transformers, etc.. and it’s probably worse eff. for E-cars, total.”
Depends what power plant. If you get a lot of HydroPower or Nukes or Wind or Solar.
Oh and if it’s nuke/Hydro it’s cheap electricity, if the nuke is paid off.
If it’s wind or Solar it’s damn cheap.
The real efficiency question is “What’s the well to wheels output?” that means
looking at the efficiency of oil extraction, then the transport, then the refining,
then the distribution of Gasoline, then the ICE motor burn”…
The real question is ops costs and dev costs. Wind and Solar are now cheaper then
Coal and that’s destroying coal… You can whine all you want but, the economic reality is there and the green eye shade types are now moving in.
Wind and Solar CHEAPER than coal? Were that so, so many UTILITIES, the primary users of coal (even more than steelmaking) would be shutting down their coal generation plants. Instead, they’re lobbying like hell to overcome regulatory hurdles to get them built. Meanwhile, so many utilities, like PG&E and SMUD here in Northern Cali(porn)ia, are no longer sponsoring solar and wind projects due to excess capacity!
Here’s 50 cents worth of ‘free’ advice: Get to know your subject matter BEFORE you spout off, dumbass!
Interesting…
I submitted this comment before….
Lazard says Wind is cheaper then coal…
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/
and coal plants are shutting down.
Clover,
Plants are “shutting down” because of regulatory compliance costs. We are being forced to subsidize your “alternatives,” regardless of the cost.
wind is cheaper then coal…
Check w/ Lazard
Clover,
“Wind” is completely impractical on any scale, for the same reason as solar. Your blind spot (well, one of them) is that you assume cost is no object because you (apparently) have plenty of money to burn on the things you think are “cool.” The problem is that most people haven’t got it – and resent being mulcted to pay for your toys
Wind and solar combined will never come close to meeting US’s E-demand of 10M Megawatts per day. And it’s impossible.
Nuke, oil, coal, nat’l gas, etc.. are the only way.
Nuke is the best way forward.
If I were to design America’s future, it would be Nuke, period. Every other way is much less effective, costly, etc…
Chris, I can’t speak to solar but Texas now has an electric glut on nonpeak hours due to wind.
Of course I only know of one company that makes wind power that takes no subsidy. That should be a red flag that none require subsidy.
Nonpeak electricity in Texas is sold for up to -$8/KWH. Anyone can find the correct figures for wind generated power with ease.
As an aside, people in general are clueless about power, wind or otherwise. Last year working in a wind generation field hauling rock from a quarry there a codriver said to a millenial who thought he was a truck driver “You need to stay away from those towers, they store electricity in there all night to be used during the day”. No shit said the young dumbass. Sure enough was the reply.
The young guy got this look of consternation or whatever he commonly had rattling around up there. We old hands were hard pressed not to bust a gut. We pointed and laughed about it all day.
I don’t like working under them due to the subsonic sound they make and the huge chunks of ice they shed as temperature rises.
They also interfere with radio waves making communication difficult near them.
“If I were to design America’s future, it would be Nuke, period.”
Nuclear power is the most socialized power source. The french run a 100% socialized state sector for electricity. The only nukes attempted to be built in the US required Billions of Public loan guarantees to break ground and are 10 years behind schedule and 3X over budget.
The only countries building nukes of significance are Russia and China.
CONGRATULATIONS, PAT B !!!!!!!!
Wooooo-hoooooo!
For once, you stated something factual; sensible; ….and with which I agree!
I nearly fainted…..
CONGRATULATIONS, PAT B!!!!!!!!
For ONCE, you said something that is accurate, sensible, and with which I can agree!
I nearly fainted.
CONGRATULATIONS, PAT B!!!!!!!!
For ONCE, you said something that is accurate, sensible, and with which I can agree!
I nearly fainted.
“Wind is completely impractical on any scale”?
Funny 10 years ago Libertarians were shrieking Wind would destroy the grid…
and now “At the end of 2017, Texas had more than 22,000 megawatts of wind power, more than triple Oklahoma’s 7,500 megawatts of wind generating capacity, the second highest in the nation.”
Clover,
Libertarians do not “shriek.” We do object – on factual grounds – to coercive collectivist “solutions.” No Libertarian I know objects to windmills or solar panels or EVs – as such. Free people ought to be free to design and build such things and free people free to buy them, if they wish.
The objection is to forcing them on people and to robbing some people to benefit other people.
Again, I recognize these are principles and concepts your cognitively dissonant mind has trouble understanding.
“Libertarians do not “shriek.” We do object – on factual grounds”
Well Doug is fact free when he claims Coal is cheaper then Wind.
Hi Pat,
Well, we’ll see… note that your civil and reasonable comment didn’t get “Clovered”!
“Wind is cheaper…”
HAHAHAHAHahahahahahahaha!!!!!!
Yet another bumblefuck which must be subsidized and incentivized because it is not economically viable and would therefore not exist but for those subsidies and incentives.
On the other hand, there are many disincentives and artificial hurdles to using coal…and yet it is gladly used, and produces the cheapest electricity available.
I won’t argue it is subsidized. It just doesn’t have to be. The cost of wind generation has dropped quite a bit and now they even qualify for a “green” rating since the old blades are recycled into other products.
It makes sense that if you have an area with reliable winds that it would work – and without subsidies. Conceptually wind power is not much different than hydroelectric, you just have a different (albeit more diffuse) medium providing the flow to run the generators.
Nunzio
“Coal is cheaper”..
If you believe this, you would be investing in Coal mining companies, and coal heavy utilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_coal_power_stations_in_the_United_States
There are 20 coal stations, you should invest into their holding companies.
Clover,
Coal is cheaper – it has been made artificially expensive via regulatory edict. Which is also the reason, by the way that cars cost as much as they do, including your beloved EVs. If they didn’t have to comply with a roster of regulatory rigmarole, they could be light – as well as cost much less. There are brand-new IC cars with AC and most power options available in other countries for $8,000 or so.
Reason? They only have two air bags – and offer less occupant protection in the event of a 50 MPH offset barrier crash. But that doesn’t make them “unsafe” – as in prone to crash. It just means they aren’t as able to absorb impact forces in a crash as a larger/heavier car.
It ought to be between the car company and the car buyer how much punishment a car can absorb if it crashes. In a free country, that ought to be no business of the government’s because the government isn’t our parent – and we are not children. Free adults have a right to choose to drive, say, a very light – and so very fuel efficient – car and risk the possibility of more injury if they have a crash – because it’s their life to risk, not the government’s. People who prefer the greater physical security of a large/heavy – and less efficient – car should be free to buy that type of car. Each free to make their own decision.
Just as I am free to work out/run – and you (if you wish) don’t have to do either of those things, even though it is “healthier” to work out and stay in shape than to be sedentary. My life – and your life. I don’t own you – you don’t own me.
I realize these concepts are not only foreign to a Clover such as yourself but also that you are hostile toward them. Because you believe in being the master of slaves who are forced to do as you say – and also to hand over the product of their labor to you, or to fund the things you desire to be funded… with money you didn’t earn, taken by force from unwilling victims.
You’re a thug, Clover – but a poltroonish one. I doubt much you’d have the guts to do the actual wet work yourself.
Why don’t you come to my house and try to force me to subsidize your EV, for instance. Just you – and me. No gang (the government) doing your work for you.
Would that make you uncomfortable? If so, think about why…
Decent human beings don’t threaten other human beings who’ve done them no harm with violence. They leave them be – and are entitled to the same in return.
Why is that so hard to grok? Why do you object to it?
Hey Eric, I knew a guy who crashed into one’a them offset barriers once! What a dummy! 😉
I think I figured out who Pat is; co-wrote a song once, that went “I am you, and you are me, and we are all together…” -ya know…used to be in a band with George, Paul and Ringo…..
Thanks for the financial advice, Pat- but since I am a subsistance farmer and not a banker, I don’t lend my money out on usury.
And although coal is indeed the cheapest source of energy, thanks to [again…] politicians who use our money to subsidize other less-efficient and more expensive sources of energy, while straddling coal with the aforementioned disincentives and hurdles; and their preferential treatment of and love for the oil companies, the energy market is far from being a free market- so I would not consider it wise for anyone to invest in something that is in a market which is heavily manipulated by artificial political forces.
But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying some of the cheapest electricity in this country which is produced by that coal [With a big thank you to the electric cooperatives of KY. and others who fought vigorously against the Obozo administration, which was trying to eliminate/greatly reduce the use of that coal).
Good luck with your Tesla stock…..
Nunzio,
If you were a true subsistence citizen, you would have a stationary bike with a generator.
Or better yet, a giant gerbil cage to show your devotion to our benevolent rulers.
Be PROUD!!
Be PRODUCTIVE!!
Be OBEDIENT!!
Don’t forget the high fiber diet with the methane generator shoved up your ass.
“And although coal is indeed the cheapest source of energy, thanks to “
Coal is dying worldwide because it’s getting squeezed by Cheap Wind, Cheap PV, Cheap Gas and LED lights…
And there you go again… it is regulatory costs that are killing coal.
Again, Pat, if wind were truly cheaper, it would not need to be subsidized and incentivized, to compete with coal, which is more expensive than it naturally would be if it were not penalized and discouraged by Uncle.
Hi Eric,
Last year I came across Tony Seba’s lecture “Clean Disruption – Why Conventional Energy and Transportation will be Obsolete by 2030” done at Uni of Boulder I think. Would be interested to hear your take on it.
My own interpretation is that the auto execs are convinced en masse that this will occur, as will 70% retraction in auto production, as will decimation of oil industry and a wholesale change in landscape of transportation. This would explain their abandonment of catering to customers of their vehicles (aka “traditional capitalism and knowing your market”.
Is it an inevitability? Will the technological pace be unstoppable? Even if it is wholly dependent of govco regulation and subsidised? Or are the execs under a fatal delusion? We live in very interesting times to be car enthusiasts, for sure.
Part of Seba’s argument is that decentralised power production – like the solar on my roof here in Australia – is taking off at rates that will make a home-charged EV feasible soon. And that pricing will soon be down to easily available levels (in Australia, that’s 20K+ for a Corolla, for example). I know with my own experience, my solar quartered my electricity bill and paid itself off in 3.5 years – I’m looking for home batteries to fall into this range – then a car in that 20K range that I capture the electricity for, will save about 5K in fuel each year. 5K over 4 years = 20K saving, pays off car, roughly; at that rate capital deployed into this car will pay itself off, vs an upgrade to another ICE. Once paid off, that fuel saving of 5K could permit me through my human action (shoutout to Ludwig von Mises) to spend into the economy on other services or goods, or I could save it to earn a higher return, or deploy it to produce a product to create a profit.
There’s also the nationalist interpretation – any country that sees people generate their own electricity for their cars all of a sudden doesn’t need to import the oil via ME oil cartels or mass refineries in Singapore (in Australia’s case) – so that takes a big chunk out of our trade deficit and the money spent will be spent mostly inside our own economy (or better still, build savings to deploy into productive enterprise). Of course, most of our panels are imported, but I can dream we actually make them ourselves. I know the US has shale, but do you see a future where its yield declines?
For the older cars that we love – I think they will remain in country areas. Nothing comes close to the portability and usefulness of liquid fuels when you are 1000km from a major city – or large town for that matter. Here, you can also drive cars on historic plates at reduced rego, once they reach a certain age. So I think pockets of automotive freedom will remain.
That’s my take on it, the cities really do seem to be going full 1984, what do you think Eric?
Hi Jack,
The EV juggernaut is almost entirely artificial, driven by government mandates and subsidies – which ought to concern people because it strongly suggests the inherent infeasibility of the whole thing. If EVs are superior as cars (i.e., enhance mobility, make it easier, cheaper) then there would be no need for the mandates and subsidies. But the car companies see the mandates – existing and pending – and are orienting their business models to work in that context.
It is one thing to use electricity to power a small device such as computer or phone. It is another to use it to power several thousand pounds of car. Battery technology – anything existing or practical – does not even approach the energy density/practicality/cost of gas.
This whole push – and that’s the right word – is about control. The idea is to reduce mobility. The sooner people grok this, the better. There may still be time.
my kid came to me many years ago and said ‘dad, the school is putting in solar panels and it’s great’ haha…. ok son, lets do the math together. he was shocked. he presented a paper and was dismissed as a loonie.
Even my town bought in, called me crazy.
Turns out the entire county got bamboozled and the whole county is now on the hook for $30M. Nice.
I told my council, NEVER take ownership or maintenance of said solar system, we will lose.
It’s coming.
If I remember correctly, you would need a few acres of solar to charge a car……..
“If I remember correctly, you would need a few acres of solar to charge a car…”
You are wrong.
On a typical day, my EV burns 10KWH. So in a 6 Hour solar day, I need
about 1500 watts. The typical panel these days are about 300 watts,
so I need 5 panels.
Now if you drive from Hickville ND to Redneckia SD every day, the numbers may be different, but, most people drive about 20-30 miles to work.
Clover,
You denounce Nunzio for using disparaging terms for blacks… and then let loose the “redneckia” bomb. I suspected as much. You are roiling with racism – toward whites – and ooze contempt for people who don’t want to be “nudged” in the direction you want to “nudge” them. Such people are “deplorables” – as Hillary styled them. For preferring to live their lives as they see fit and not be parented by control freaks such as yourself.
And I see you are an EV owner (well, partially; others were forced to “help” you buy it) and so that’s your motivation – to justify your virtue signaling.
I drive an EV because it’s cool.
Oh yeah, it rocks coming out of a red light.
But, your little burg may not have any traffic lights,
so it’s not a useful feature there.
As for HRC, I have no idea what she thinks. I didn’t vote for her.
Clover,
I’d like to drive a new 911 – it would be very “cool,” too. But I won’t demand you subsidize it, which is the difference between you and I.
Well, one of them.
I am not an effete racist snob; you have proved yourself to be exactly that.
Eric, I prefer “the little burg” Patricio references. They’re much more peaceful and friendly. I’ve noticed the more traffic lights in an area, the more dangerous living there to be.
Being an old hick with my closest neighbors being over half a mile away we seem to have a great deal of civility Patty Boy is obviously lacking.
You can be assured if I use the term “cityslickers”, it probably won’t be a term of endearment.
A small “conventional” car, with a three or four-banger and an old-fashioned manual stick (not that dual-clutch crap that Ford suckered me into buying, deeming it an ‘automatic’, hence why Ford is paying big bucks to fix them for life or buy the cars back, they’re complete lemons) will still be far cheaper to purchase, fuel, and maintain, and fair more VERSATILE than your ballyhooed EV, Pat B.
And you miss the point of the discussion. YOUR choice of an EV is perfectly fine IF you pay for it WITHOUT any tax credits or other “Gubmint” subsides, to yourself AND/OR the manufacturer. And electric DID once exist in significant numbers…about 110 years ago! It was Henry Ford’s Model T that doomed “alternative” vehicles, as they simply couldn’t compete them. Sans “Gubmint” subsidies, they STILL wouldn’t! And it’s arrogant of you to presume the motoring needs of OTHERS. What’s next, you gonna presume to dictate what home one buys or rents, or clothes worn, or whom they screw?
hahahahha. try it. Would love to see your results.
Here’s just a simple search, the source matters:
https://blog.pickmysolar.com/how-many-solar-panels-does-it-take-to-fuel-an-electric-car
https://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/the-true-cost-of-powering-an-electric-car.html
https://solarchargeddriving.com/2018/02/28/how-many-solar-panels-does-it-take-to-charge-an-electric-car/
I picked different answers for a reason. Best of luck.
Couple points:
1. If you are able to do with a 30 mile round trip to work, why don’t you take a bike or ride a bus since you must live in an urban area? If you really care you should be doing that.
2. I happen to live between Hickville ND and Redneckia, SD. It’s a wonderful place where and how all decent human beings aspire to live. Big cities have their charms, but they are lousy places to live. How’s that for perspective?
3. Have you actually tried to use solar panels? I have- they are cost effective to run a few LED lights in some of my outbuildings. If I need to do anything useful in the buildings like run the welder or the plasma cutter, I need a bigly generator burning wonderful liquid batteries. You call them fossil fuels.
4. There have been tremendous gains in solar and wind technology in the last 20 years, partly due to the buckets of money being shoveled into it. This cannot change the fundamental physics of only 1413 watts/sq meter total maximum energy coming to earth from the sun. A decent solar cell of about 1 square meter will be capturing about 100 watts of that. At least the $140/ sq meter ones I and most folks buy.
In short, it aint gonna work. Ever. And wind may be more concentrated, but it still isnt close to being good enough.
But Ernie, don’t you know that super-duper hyper-efficient cost-effective mystical magical solar panels are ‘just around the corner’ in the magnificent future? Silly boy! 😉
Next week you’ll be able to fire-up that arc welder just by aiming your solar wrist watch at the sun…..
Hi Ernie,
“Pat” is a fantasist or propagandist – not sure which. Every fact-based objection/correction is ignored; every logical argument/point (as yours, above) evaded with an effusion of non sequiturs.
People such as “Pat” are believers – in the Heaven’s Gate sense. Might as well argue with Applewhite over the shedding of his container…
Hi Eric, I do agree that it is mandate driven. So perhaps it will all end in tears and the execs will be remembered in Business classes as an example of what not to do. (Holden Australia and the Commodore already are, I’d say!) Things are reading quite like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ at present: if you are in power, you vie with others to see if your loony policy gets enacted over theirs. I do agree it is about control, and the technology seems to do the opposite of ‘setting us free’.
Have you looked at Mazda’s SkyActiv X motors? They alone seem to be developing ICE to its limit (here, anyway) – a compression midway between petrol and diesel, can run on 91, it switches combustion cycle (? iirc).
I like to think the tracks I take (to get to the surf, some 4wd tracks) will be places autonomous electric cars won’t go – there won’t be the volume of demand. But at the same time, if I were going to spend the money anyway and can find an EV that’s manually driven, the 5K in fuel I save can do quite a good remote surf trip each year in, say, a 100 Series petrol V8 Landcruiser!
Also, have you looked into the 5g networks that will be required to maintain this system? Health effects of such?
It’s quite disappointing to realise that if we spent this level of technological development on rocketry and ion thrusters instead of smartphones, social media and the Internet of Toasters, we’d be beyond Mars by now… Looking forward to the 2030 missions at any rate – go USA!
Hi Jack,
It’s worse than Atlas Shrugged – which described society falling into ruin. What is happening is the erection of a company town – on a planetary scale. The majority will work perpetually – keeping their heads down – never owning more than the clothes on their back, to service endless debt. Meanwhile, the handful who run the town will live in affluence, driving their high-dollar EVs paid for by the debt servicing of the masses.
” Battery technology – anything existing or practical – does not even approach the energy density/practicality/cost of gas.”
Wow.. A simple physics based argument that is utterly wrong.
Eric you are probably looking this way “Gasoline 46 MJ/KG. Lead-Acid Battery
0.1 MJ/KG” you see 500X and you promptly stop. A nice elegant argument that
is utterly misleading.
Let’s address cost first. Using your logic… Gasoline $3.00/Gal or about $0.80/Liter
or in mass terms $0.50/lb or $1.20/KG… However Electricity is a lot cheaper. On a volume or mass basis electricity is really cheap”
Oh, I can hear the squawking. Electricity weighs nothing… Electrons have a mass but they are 10EE-31KG… so one electron is 1EE-19 Coulomb, so it’s 1EE12 Coulomb/KG of Electrons. So from an Energy Density. Electricity wins….
Now lets look at cost. My Volt costs 4 cents/Mile to run on electricity and the Camry
it replaced cost 12cents/Mile to run. Camry 30 MPG, Gas $3.00/Gal= 10c/mile +20% for oil changes. I get to change oil about every 18-24 months. That’s why fleet buyers like EVs.
Then there is Practicality. Now maybe off in Hickville it’s 100 miles to get supplies
for the farm but for real americans i’ts about 20. 80% of all trips are less then 40.
I routinely drive to Alabama in a day, no big deal in my Volt.
So, your argument while completely clear to you is utterly wrong, but you are a libertarian. They haven’t been right on anything for 30 years.
Clover … my racist (“redneckia,” “hicksville”) Clover muse…
If, per your pleading, EVs are so spectacularly superior or even competitive on the merits, then why is it necessary to mandate their manufacture (via outright quotas and de facto quotas, such as CAFE) and subsidize them in order to get most people to even consider buying one?
Will you ever answer this simple – and fundamental – question? You won’t, because the answer is devastating to your argument, such as it is.
Your Volt failed. GM cancelled it.
Why? Because although it is a technically interesting car and more practical than other EVs – because it has a gas engine, which effectively deals with the range/recharge gimps which afflict other EVs – it is still inferior in terms of cost of ownership to a conventional IC-powered (exclusively) sedan otherwise similar, such as a four cylinder Civic or even a Camry, that can be bought for about $10k less.
Your Volt only makes economic sense when gas costs three or four times its current price. At some point, that may happen, I grant – but for political reasons. There is so much gas (oil) that if full production occurred, gas would be too cheap to bother selling.
Facts, Clover.
“Why? Because although it is a technically interesting car and more practical than other EVs – because it has a gas engine – it is still inferior in terms of cost of ownership to a conventional IC-powered (exclusively) sedan otherwise similar, such as a four cylinder Civic or even a Camry, that can be bought for about $10k less.”
Sorry, for someone who knows so much about cars, you really don’t seem to know much about market strategy. The Volt was never aimed at Civic buyers, it was aimed at BMW buyers and it was the first time GM started winning 3 series buyers and Mercedes Low end C and E cars.
The volt died when the Cruze was cancelled. Given it shared a body line and many components off that, it was toast the minute the Cruze was done.
Now if you want to make an argument that GM made a mistake with the Voltec drive expansion it would be the ELR. If GM had upgraded the Voltec electronics and stuck it in the Vette, that would have been interesting. High price point, stick a second set of motors in the rear axle, still have the gas engine for long haul. Lots of torque and
you can still drive for hours. If you really wanted to do something,
fun, set up the rear motors for torque steering. it would corner like it’s on rails. The ELR was attempting to fresh up Cadillac but it resonated like the Cimarron.
But, As much as you talk smack, you haven’t been paying attention to
Pikes Peak. That is one of the ultimate performance races and the current record holder is an EV. Smoked the mountain record by a minute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikes_Peak_International_Hill_Climb#Race_records
Clover,
The Volt failed; that’s the reality.
It was being given away – leased at a loss – years before the Cruze got cancelled.
Facts.
And in re Pikes Peak: Winning speed contests is not the issue, Clover. I don’t deny that EVs are very quick. But they are not economical, and are gimped by serious practical problems – which (again!) is why they cannot survive as other than high-dollar boutique cars for the very affluent absent massive subsidies and mandated production quotas.
Facts, again.
If an electric car existed that cost less to own than an otherwise comparable IC car and didn’t afflict its owner with hassles (having to plan around lengthy recharge times, having to worry about reduced range and the effect of using accessories on range) then it would sell, of course. And I’d applaud. Or at least, I wouldn’t object.
But the fact is, no such EV exists – and while you can assert one is “coming,” the fact is it’s not available and hence the necessity of mandates and subsidies.
Facts… which I understand are inconvenient things.
Eric, I’ve been a bad boy. I said a dirty word, actually lots of them, in the biggest boldest capitalized font I could manage. I don’t think it will even be posted…..that bad! I will understand if you don’t because it really does exceed all standards of decency and civility you are trying to maintain here, (despite the insults hurled at everyone by the narcissist directly above your comment here) I’m so ashamed at my lack of restraint 🙁
Hi Graves.
No worries, amigo! The likes of Pat raise the blood pressure of all decent (and coherent thinking) people; she more than deserved it.
Even after I pointed out that calling people “rednecks” and “hicks” is no different than calling them “niggers” or “wops,” she let loose the “hick” bomb again…
I can’t decide if PAT is a Particia, or a Patrick. There’s a kind of androgynous element at work here, I think. PAT, has been very careful not so say anything to suggest male or female, so maqy we have our 1st Trans-Clover here!
Wow my spelling sucks today, lol!
Hi Graves,
I have no idea what Pat’s sex is. I do know she (he) is an authoritarian collectivist, as well as a sloppy thinker and a racist, too!
It’s Pat!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiIXNNfpgLY
Hi again, Graves!
I loved the “real Americans” reference, too. As you know, my drive into Roanoke is just under 70 miles, round trip. So an EV with 150 miles best case range like the Nissan Leaf uses, in effect, half a tank of “fuel” to get me downtown and back. Much worse mileage than a Hellcat. But I can refuel the Hellcat in 5 minutes, anywhere. And if I need to go farther than 70 miles without planning ahead, I can. With the Leaf, I have to think about where I’ll recharge – and have time to wait.
Oh, I could get an EV with more range than the Leaf. I’d just have to pay another $7,000 or so to get into the next-least-expensive one (Chevy Bolt) that has a range of around 200 miles, best case. Or $14,000 more to get into a Tesla 3.
Ah yes, my little chickadee!
GTC, I NEEDED to read that!
This Pat has been running rampant spewing his/her/it’s nonsense like an out-of-control child who is allowed to just babble on and on……the kind that when you see in public, and the parent is not doing a thing, you just have to turn to and say “SHUT UP!!!”.
“I don’t deny that EVs are very quick. But they are not economical,”
You appear like most libertarians to have real problems with math. EV 3.5 Miles/KWH. (Typical).
Electricity 10c/KWH(Median & Declining). EV Ops cost 3 Cents/Mile. Gas car 23MPG (Average Compact 2018) Average gas price $2.92/Gallon ( EIA average Summer 2018) ICE Ops cost 12.7 cents/Mile…
Now in planet arithmetic 3.5 < 12.7 Now in Planet Rand, it's whatever you want it to be, but, I prefer to be part of the reality-based community.
So EVs are quicker and cheaper…
Now if you have to go 40 miles to get to the feed store to pick up the mail, that's a problem, but,
GM doesn't design cars for you.
Clover,
If my math is off – and EVs make so much economic sense – then why is it necessary to mandate their sale and subsidize their purchase?
An EV may cost less to recharge, but the cost to buy the thing is much higher – obviating any economic gain.
If you pay more all told, you pay more.
Which of is innumerate, Clover?
And keep in mind: The true cost of your beloved EVs is much higher than advertised, because of the subsidies built into the price. If you and other EV people had to pay full market price – what the car cost to make plus the usual 3-5 percent profit per car – you’d be paying $45,000-plus for something like your Volt.
Regardless, the fact is GM had to resort to give-away lease deals to get them off the lot. Fact. And that was years before the Cruze got cancelled – a fact which I am confident you’re aware of.
You’re easy meat, Clover – but you’re embarrassing yourself in public.
This is akin to my quandry over a pickup, now that the light at the end of the tunnel is in sight (only 4 more months of child support, spousal support goes DOWN considerably per the settlement in 6 months). Diesel versus Gasoline?
The problem is acute in CA, where thanks to the ironically-named “CARB” (California Air Resources Board), which also has made restoring a hot rod almost impossible (unless you can use an out-of-state friend to straw purchase the parts, wonder if Cali(porn)ia will, like ammo or firearms they don’t like which are legal in all other states, make that a ‘heinous’ crime to ‘smuggle’ in as well!). They’ve so messed up Diesel fuel formulation with that “low-sulfur” crap (which, interesting enough, only the Indonesian crude doesn’t require expensive refining processes to produce, and the Brown family, as in the thankfully term-limited out Jerry Brown, and Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Mr. Blum, have EXTENSIVE interests in Indonesian oil companies, do I detect a connection?), the pump price of diesel is typically HIGHER than even ‘premium’!
Methinks if I used diesel extensively enough I’ve either get a bulk account and hopefully get a cheaper price worth it; OR, invest in a trailer with a fuel drum, and fill up in Idaho or Utah when I go there! Somehow I think even THAT would run into legal or regulatory hurdles once I pulled up to the ‘inspection’ station, which is as close to a state “customs” as one can get.
Considering that a new diesel truck can easily run ten grand over a comparable gas model, along with the much higher fuel prices, why anyone would buy a diesel truck in CA escapes me, though a large truck and a diesel engine are just meant for each other! Like King Edward I “Longshanks”, in choosing a bride for his supposedly effeminate and swishy son, Edward II, picked Princess Isabella, daughter of Le Roi Phillipe le Quarte de France, and later deemed the “She-Wolf of France”, knowing that in order to ensure an heir (Edward III), he’d have to “perform the honors” himself, which may have been what he had in mind all along! (and if indeed Isabella looked like Sophie Marceau ca. 1995, who could BLAME him?).
With new trucks, diesels are no longer worth it, ’cause these modern ‘diesels’ no long possess the characteristics which once made diesels so attractive- like efficiency, durability; simplicity; economy; etc.
Modern ‘diesels’ are so bogged down with delicate high-pressure oil-injection (as opposed to a simple old-fashioned injector pump); computerized el;ectronics which they are totally dependent on; emission controls; etc. that they are a nightmare.
Many large fleets that use the light trucks have switched back to gas, ’cause the diesels are no longer worth it.
They’re not reliable (a sensor or an O-ring gets weak, and the damn thing will no longer start); no longer economical to repair; they don’t last like the old ones did; and they don’t get the good mileage that the old ones did. Today, between the crappy MPGs and the significantly higher price of diesel fuel, there’s really little to no advantage at the pump to owning one of these diesels.
About the only people buying them these days, are urban cowboys who want the full effect for their *real man truck*; and those who routinely tow heavy loads, who need the torque.
I used to LOVE diesels…back when they were real diesels….but you couldn’t give me one of these modern ones. They’re an abomination.
And Doug? How the hell do you stay in that freaking communist state?! Tha’s gotta be about the most tyrannical, communist, freedom-hating places on earth. Makes even NY look tame by comparison.
“If my math is off – and EVs make so much economic sense – then why is it necessary to mandate their sale and subsidize their purchase?”
Why was it necessary to put in special tax incentives for SUVs?
“An EV may cost less to recharge, but the cost to buy the thing is much higher – obviating any economic gain.”
Gas costs a lot…I knew a guy at the Pentagon, was driving his Lincoln Navigator from the Delaware shore to Arlington VA, every day. He was blowing through a tank of gas every other day. At the time, He was spending 300/week on fuel. If there were chargers at work, he could have been been buying $40/Week in Electricity.
I suggested he look into springing for a Tesla.
Clover,
What “tax incentives” for SUVs? No such things exist. You may be referring to manufacturer incentives – but that is just discounting, not stealing my money to pay for your EV.
Anyone who buys a Navigator – or a Tesla – is someone who does not have to worry about money… the cost of fuel is therefore an irrelevance. People who spend $50,000 on vehicles (or even $30,000) aren’t people looking to “save money.”
All you’re doing is virtue signaling.
If you wanted to save money, Clover, a $14,000 Mitsubishi Mirage such as the one I just wrote about makes far more economic (and practical) sense than any EV you can buy.
This car can be bought for around $13k, less than half the cost of the least expensive currently available EV – the $30,000 Nissan Leaf, the price of which is massively subsidized.
The Leaf will never “save you money” vs. a car like the Mirage. It also has significant functional gimps which the Mirage does not. It has a maximum best-case range of 150 miles; the Mirage goes more than twice as far. It takes at least 30-45 minutes to recover a partial charge; the Mirage is fully fueled in less than five minutes.
All facts, not arguable.
So why buy the Leaf?
To virtue signal. Look at me! I am “green”… using other people’s green to finance it.
Funny, Patprick, no one had to give me a subsidy when I bought my used Excursion (And I wouldn’t participate in such a scheme if it were offered).
For many years, one actually had to pay a “luxury tax” when buying a large expensive new vehicle (in addition to the other taxes which one was already subject to).
Even now, the more expensive the vehicle, the more in sales tax and registration/property taxes must be paid.
At one point, back when gas was very high, they were offering a break on sales taxes for the purchase of large vehicles which weren’t selling good, in order to “stimulate sales” and prop-up the car industry- which was yet another product of fascism- the state manipulating the free market and redistributing wealth- intervening in people’s finances- which you seem to approve of when it benefits you or a cause which you support…..
PatPend,if your friend could afford all the other expenses of a Lincoln Land Yacht, I suspect fuel costs were at the low end of the list. I’ll bet, he already knows the advantages of the fuel cost trade-off he is making by not buying an EV for primary transport, or do you not give your friends credit for having the intelligence to decide what works best for them?
He will easily be able to agree that, when the power goes out, he can still start his ride and make the drive home, even in a foot of snow and ice, as opposed to not. I am sure if fuel economy were his top-most priority, a Navigator would not be his prime daily driver. If fuel costs are making his budget tight, he doesn’t have the disposable income for a 2nd vehicle just for fuel savings, bragging rights, or whatever. So if he has to choose one or the other, has has already made his choice the one that apparently serves him best. If he has taken your advice to “spring” for a new Tesla, good for him, I wish him all the best. But wishful thinking won’t help any EV in snow and ice storms, blackouts, extreme cold, time constraints for refueling, etc. But these are factors that exist with EVs now, as they exist, and make a poor argument for substituting them for any IC engine transport today. Fuel economy is 1 very tiny aspect of the picture that just doesn’t justify it happening. Buy what suits your fancy according to your own means and taste, but you can never justify my financial subsidy of your overpriced playtoys.
By the way, Clover: Rand was not a Libertarian. You’ve obviously never read her and know little about her. Try to get your facts straight… on anything.
Please. Just once.
Like the rest of civilization really gives a shit how fast an EV climbs Pike’s Peak……PAT, what kind of altruistic bubble do you live in, and where do the rest of us “Real Americans” get one?
“Like the rest of civilization really gives a shit how fast an EV climbs Pike’s Peak…”
Yeah, you utterly fail to understand why racing exists. I’m just going to quote Big Daddy Don Garlits here ““I feel good, real good,” Garlits said. “Well, of course, developing the electric dragster has been a big part of that.”
Now if you want to shine on Big Daddy, please, be my guest, even at his age, he can probably teach you a few lessons in manners.
Meanwhile I’m going to go back to patent work in the field.
Clover,
If the main advantage of an EV is not economy or practicality – but speed – then it is a toy. And while there is nothing wrong with toys, it is beyond obnoxious to force others to pay for your indulgence.
As I’ve already stated, numerous times: The reason EVs have to be mandated and subsidized is because they cost too much to make sense as an economical alternative to IC-engined economy cars.
This is a simple statement of economic fact.
EVs are high-performance luxury-sport cars for affluent virtue-signalers such as yourself – and being force-subsidized via the tax-mulcting of people who cannot afford them.
These aren’t opinions. These are facts. You can’t deal with them, so you hurl epithets.
Well Eric, here is the answer. PAT is neither Patricia nor Patrick, but PAT PENDING. I suspect we are dealing with someone who lacks any creative talent and can only find purpose in other people’s accomplishments, I.E. a govt. employee.
Racing exists to fulfill a need for gratification in the form of competition, either with one’s self, or others. Satisfaction can also be achieved if one finds such competition interesting, enlightening, or beneficial to others.
Or did you mean something else? Quoting Don Garlits in the context you have here, hardly explains anything regarding EVs OR Pike’s Peak. You seem to be overly impressed with other peoples accomplishments, and equally incensed when others are not. You have no clue what I understand, nor is it my responsibility to enlighten you. Your limp-dicked attempts at prick-waving are more ill-mannered than anything I have put to page, primarily because of the disingenuous and evasive manner in which you respond.
Screw your arrogance, conceit, and disdain for other people, for whom without, you would not amount to a fart in a hailstorm.
BTW, Pat Pend, how do you think an EV would stand up to running in the 24 Hours of LeMans? Or perhaps the Isle of Mann TT? I suspect you were a “fan” of Dale Earnhardt, huh? You probably go in for all the modern cons like Nitrofill, E85, TPMS, Airbags, AutoDrive, Lane Assist, Global Warming, Peak Oil, oh the list is endless I’m sure.
“how do you think an EV would stand up to running in the 24 Hours of LeMans? Or perhaps the Isle of Mann TT”
That’s a really good question…
How would an EV perform at 24 hours of LeMans. It depends if I had a budget and a clever engineering team. Let’s say I had about $25M to field a team, and engineering sponsorship by Tesla.
A VW IDMax racer and a battery swap station from Tesla might be quite competitive, or a Tesla P100D Bar with the Battery swap would be interesting…
It took 10 years for the Electrics to dominate at Pikes Peak, I suspect it would take 10 years for the EVs to dominate Le-Mans.
Isle of Man might be a little rougher. The course has a lot of bumps and high spots, the Suspension design requirements for carrying 1000 lbs of battery would probably require some serious engineering there.
I will note, that Diesel/Electric and
Gas/Electric are now categories at LeMans and the Audi R18 e-Tron has competed there.
The optimization between battery mass, swap time at the pits and the vehicle sizing is something I haven’t done. I’ve been working studying Pikes Peak Racers and drag racers. I’m working up the design for a 300 KW controller I can keep in my shirt pocket when it’s not working.
I’m not a fan of any of the drivers, i’m more interested in the tech, but I find it amusing when aging cranky libertarians lose their minds at the new tech.
Pat b “If Headlights can sell on the merits, why is it necessary to mandate their installation and repair?”
Do headlights exist purely by mandate, or due to an actual need?
Or a better question would be, does correlation equal causality? If you answer is yes, to either, you haven’t learned a damned thing about reality, or how things work in this world.
As far as losing one’s mind regarding new tech, you just haven’t lived long enough, nor have you learned that what is possible isn’t always preferable, nor beneficial.
You crow and preen about your shiny new gadgets, but so far haven’t achieved any more maturity than a child with a new toy. Likewise you will discard that toy for the next new toy, never utilizing eve 50% of the potential of the first, primarily because you really have no actual need for 90% of what you want. You are the perfect example how technology has not done a damn thing to create a better society, but rather has corrupted your sense of community and responsibility for each other as human beings, had you any to begin with. You have no idea what any of our roles and experiences have been with anything, let alone technology and it’s impact on the world we live in. Your tunnel vision is you reality and your rationalization only exemplifies you inability to comprehend how truly insignificant you really are. You pat youself and others like you on the back and say “well done lads, we are going to change the face of the Earth one day”. I have news for you, the Earth doesn’t need your help, and I doubt that you would recognize the opportunity should it present itself., let alone care, unless you were to profit in some fashion or another. In your tireless pursuit for “what” and “how”, you never seem to care “why”, or at best only echo someone else’s reasons for doing anything, so long as you get ahead in whatever little game you have going in your head. One day you may have to explain to yourself “why” your hanging upside down on a meat hook, but I’m sure you will be stuck on the “what” and the “how” of the matter, and the “why” really won’t matter then. Enjoy yourself, you deserve it.
PAT B SAYS “Then there is Practicality. Now maybe off in Hickville it’s 100 miles to get supplies for the farm but for real americans i’ts about 20. 80% of all trips are less then 40.”
I think I can speak for most of us REAL Americans here PAT,
FUCK YOU AND THE ELECTRIC DILDO YOU RODE IN ON!
WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TO CLASSIFY WHO IS AND WHO IS NOT A “REAL AMERICAN” OR A “REAL ADULT” ?? YOU WOULDN’T LAST 24 GODDAMN HOURS WITHOUT ALL THE FOOD, WATER, AND OTHER BASIC NEEDS PROVIDED BY EVERYONE YOU DISRESPECT AND DISPARAGE HERE. ARE YOU SCARED TO DRIVE BEYOND SIGHT OF THE CITY SKYLINE? WELL, YOU GODDAMN BETTER BE! YOUR FUCKING LACK OF HUMANITY IS ONLY GOING TO EARN YOU A MORE VIOLENT, PAINFUL END, I CAN ONLY HOP[E TO GOD I AM THERE TO SEE IT!
See how easy it is, Pat? Does it look familiar, Pat? It should…look in a mirror!
There you have the mentality of these PC twits (aka “Clovers”)…a smug, self-satisfied false sense of SUPERIORITY. If they want to drive an EV, paid for with their OWN money, manufactured by a company that builds car as one Henry Ford did, the ‘old-fashioned’ way (they “urrrnned” it!), and NOT by lobbying “Warshington” for taxpayer subsidies, grant, tax abatements, and tax credits for their purchasers, many of whom are already well-heeled).
The “farmers”, whom work goddamned hard to make a living which largely FEEDS and clothes your likely fat ass, Pat b, took up “pitchforks” and stuck Lord Cornwallis in the ass with them back in 1781 at Yorktown, and would be willing to take them up and stick YOU in the hiney, as well as the other Dummycrats, libtards, and other stuck-up snots whom PRESUME to dictate to others their motoring choices.
Hey PAT! If you really want to stop wasting ENERGY, advocate the cessation of all automobile production for just 1 year. At roughly 80 barrels of crude oil in energy and materials, per unit, what do you think that will add up to, hmmm?
You see, PAT, over-consumption and disposibility is the ral problem facing our society and current economic lifestyle, not “efficiency by the BTU”, or is that not your responsibility either?
“80% of all trips are less then 40.”
Hmmmm, let’s see: 17 miles to town. About 17 miles driving around in town going to all the various places I need to go. 17 miles to return home. I don’t have enuff fingers and toes to figger it out, but I reckon that thar’d be about 50 miles, yesiree Bob!
I actually drive a lot fewer miles here in Bumblefuck, than I did in the NYC metro area; not only that, but in NY, it could take 2 or 3 hours to go 40 miles……
I literally drive a quarter of the miles I used to drive, since moving to the country. And although individual trips may be longer…they take up far less time.
An EV would not be a practical alternative in either environment- considering the weather; use of A/C, heat, defroster, lights, etc. Time sitting in traffic with those things going; or no option if you run out of juice…. Not to mention that EVs can not match a large pick-up/SUV for carrying capacity; towing, etc.
They are strictly city cars…and only for some cities- as in cities like NY where most people live in apartments and park on the street, there is no way to charge them other than at a charging station, since the majority of people do not have driveways, let alone garages!
Hey dude, lay off the strawman-made-up word that Gillette created 4 days ago in its biased commercial i.e “They are like the peddlers of Toxic Masculinity…” There is no such thing as “Toxic masculinity”. Stop peddling this non-word.
Hi Merc,
The phrase is in currency; it’s necessary to use it to deconstruct it.
This is just crude dog whistling from another alt-right knuckledragger…
Don’t you dare buy an electric car, because you might be associated with Liberal left-wing ideologies.
Keep burning that fossil-fuel!
Hi Peter,
I’m always amused when I am accused of being “alt right.” For advocating non-violent, non-coercive free exchange. Live – and let live.
This isn’t about politics, regardless. It’s about economics. And practicality.
Fossil fuels are cheap, efficient, abundant, convenient and clean-burning in modern cars. What’s the problem, exactly?
I have no issue with EVs, per se – just to make that clear (again). My problem is with manufactured demand, via mandates – and with wealth transfer payments (subsidies) to prop up the economically untenable.
Which is what EVs are. Take away the mandates and the subsidies and what do you honestly think would happen to the EV “market”?
Would you pay $40,000 of your own money to buy something like the Nissan Leaf? Which is what it would cost (probably more) if Nissan had to sell it at a price that reflected its actual cost to manufacturer. $40k… for a car that goes a third as far as as $14k Nissan Versa and takes 5-6 times to recover a partial charge vs. the time it takes to fully refuel an IC car…
Be honest now….
I wonder where Peter think the electricity ultimately comes from to charge the EVs?
Stupid ass…..
Thanks, Nunz!
I wonder whether Peter even knows what “alt right” means…
Who said anything about purely electric vehicles, going into the future?
And yes, into the future, the electric vehicles that will be used, will require less power, as the technology improves… smart ass indeed.
Ah, yes; that illustrious future that never seems to quite materialize; in which that technology which “is just around the corner” will allay all fears and solve all problems…and overcome the laws of physics, and the schemes of politicians/tyrants.
Where a mix of fossil-fuel powered engines and electric motors which are also ultimately powered by fossil fuels, will magically achieve the very same things we have now…only at much greater cost, and much less autonomy.
Or will they use hydrogen- which takes more fossil fuel to create the equivalent energy than if that fuel were just used directly? Or perhaps nukular power!- So that we can trade the terrible effects of plant food (CO2) for the joys of killing off half of the earth every time something goes wrong? But of course, nothing will go wrong, because nothing goes wrong in that illustrious future, ’cause people are careful and all…..
Alright, alright- sorry- I know you must just be getting this la-la EV crap from your 6th-grade science teacher, and the talking heads on the tee-vee.
“Ah, yes; that illustrious future that never seems to quite materialize…”
How are you chatting with me?
Smartphone?
I’m using a Samsung tablet right now.
“Alright, alright- sorry- I know you must just be getting this la-la EV crap from your 6th-grade science teacher, and the talking heads on the tee-vee.”
Not at all, and as far as my information gathering goes, I’m a free thinker, that thinks wholistically and chooses a wide range of information sources.
I wouldn’t have a smartphone…..
So, we’ve gone from predictions of colonies on the Moon, to typing to strangers while we have a phone right next to us/in our hand; and the average person being so obsessed by things with screens that they probably wouldn’t notice whether they were living in a colony on the Moon or in a yellow submarine.
If you are a free thinker (as we here pretty much all are) then I find it very coincidental that you would buy into the present hype about EVs, verbatim- that is pushed by the media and the government; or that you would tout technologies which do not exist as possible solutions to problems which also don’t exist.
The one thing we may somewhat agree on, is the US’s wars for oil and other resources- but even that is more of a deception FOR the morons who fight those wars, as China already uses 1.5 times as much ‘lectricity as the US- and thanks to schemes like the Paris Treaty and it’s carbon credits, etc. WE will essentially pay to supply China and India’s rapidly growing energy needs, while forcing our own to decline- so regardless of who is stealing the oil, and whose currency is being used (Not that it matters, as it’s all funny-money) every dirty hand is getting a slice.
Peter,
It is disingenuous to compare a smartphone with a car. The smartphone does not weigh 3,000-plus pounds nor does its battery have to move anything. Batteries are ideal for powering small electronic devices. They are terrible for powering cars because they simply do not and cannot contain sufficient energy to keep the car moving (as compared with gas) and cost too much and take far too long to recharge.
How is it progress to replace a car that can be refueled almost anywhere in minutes with a car that requires 5-6 times as long (best case) using specialized and expensive equipment which only exists in a very few places?
EVs are interesting – but fundamentally, toys.
And even for smart phones the batteries have a lot to be desired. Apple by itself has probably spent hundreds of millions on battery tech. Yet all that, my iphoneSE still gets hot and needs to be recharged at least once per day, more if I am actually using it. Now that its over two years old, the capacity of the battery is only 85% of what it was. It will only get worse. I now take the charger cord everywhere because if I don’t it will run out of power before I return home.
People are crazy to think the majority of cars will be battery powered. It just doesn’t work.
My god, your replies are characterized by your own disingenuous prolix, hypocrisy, bias, appeal to emotion, failure to keep up with the thread of the discussion and general Flim Flam…
In short, just a lot of wibble wobble.
Nunzio was expressing his general scepticism about the progress of technology, or lack of, and I was just merely pointing out smartphones and tablets as an example, as to how far computers have progressed in the last twenty years, along with their power sources.
Have you got it now Eric?
Pepe Bocca, You miss The Point Nunzio has made very clear. It’s the lack of progress made by society, in spite of all the technology, garners skepticism. Your repetetive ejaculation of the phrases “wibble wobble” and “have you got it now” serve to prove his point. You and PAT PEND should go masturbate with your fellow accolites in purple sneakers.
“It is disingenuous to compare a smartphone with a car. The smartphone does not weigh 3,000-plus pounds nor does its battery have to move anything. Batteries are ideal for powering small electronic devices. ”
The correct comparison is comparing a smartphone to an IBM Mainframe computer.
A Mainframe in 1972 had 24K of Memory, 30 MB of disk cost $20 Million and weighed 40 tons. Yet technical progress puts a smartphone at $200 into a pocket sized format with GB of storage.
Cars have on a gas P/W ratio doubled out of the engines in 40 years, while Electrics are improving 7%/year, every year. While you whine about 2008, 10 years have gone by.
Don’t worry, the world is continuing to leave you behind. Has been for 40 years, will continue.
Clover,
Are you ever going to deal with the fundamental question? If EVs can sell on the merits, why is it necessary to mandate their manufacture and pay people to buy them?
This is not “whining.” It is a simple, reasonable question – one which people such as yourself never answer directly, because the answer proves my point.
I have been covering the car business since the early ’90s – and have been hearing the same line… a breakthrough is just around the corner… costs are coming down… etc.
That’s 30 years, Clover…. and today’s EVs are still too expensive – and too gimped – to make it on their own merits.
Fact.
It’s got to be driving you nuts.
“If EVs can sell on the merits, why is it necessary to mandate their manufacture”
If Headlights can sell on the merits, why is it necessary to mandate their installation and repair?
Clover,
This is perhaps the most risible thing you’ve written thus far:
“If Headlights can sell on the merits, why is it necessary to mandate their installation and repair?”
It isn’t necessary.
Headlights did sell long before any requirement – and still would, absent one. Because most people see value in being able to see after dark.
The fact that some people might not buy them – or would attempt to drive at night without them – is a non sequitur, Clover. More than enough people would buy them, at market price, to make them economically viable on the merits and absent any kind of rule or decree – because headlights are useful and even necessary.
Their cost is also in line with their value.
EVs, in contrast, are unnecessary – just for openers. One can get around not only perfectly well but better and cheaper in an IC car than in an EV.
This is the key fact – which you either aren’t smart enough to grok or to dishonest to concede.
EVs simply cost far too much relative to any “savings” in re fueling them – and have functional gimps on top of that which make them unappealing to most people. Put another way, there are too few people willing to spend their own money on EVs to make them viable without mandates and subsidies.
These aren’t my opinions, Clover. They are facts.
How many times must I explain this to you?
An even more fundamental problem with EVs, is that since they require just as much energy to propel them as a convential vehicle of the same weight and aerodynamics, and since that energy ultimately comes from the same sources whether it powers an IC-engined car and is burned at it’s point of use, or whether it powers an EV and is burned remotely at a generator, why do greentards BS themselves that somehow EVs are ‘zero-emission’ and will somehow save the earth from the catastrophe which they have been led to [falsely]believe will occur due to those emissions?
OHhhh…so they mean that the EVs produce no emissions where THEY happen to- so they can live in densely-populated cities and enjoy a ‘clean’ environment, while relocating their waste/pollution to somewhere else- like where the hicks and rednecks live, because ‘they’re ebil’ dontchyahknow?!
That is like farting in someone’s face and claiming it doesn’t smell because there was no sound; or decrying the enslavement of schvatzes, while supporting the universal slavery of everyone. (Oh, wait…Pat does that!)
Headlamps Pat? That’s the example you want to use. Ok Pat, headlamps were one of the first things government meddled with. It froze headlamp design and performance to 1939 technology. It essentially stayed that way with little change until 1986! Even now many aspects of head lamp regulations are still the dark ages.
….And before incandescent headlamps, people would hang lanterns on buggies, and afix them to trains…because there was a genuine need- and you don’t have to prod people to fill a genuine need.
Morning, Nunz!
People like Pat are paralytics; mentally gimped. Yet belligerent know-it-alls, at the same time. Cognitively dissonant defectives who are so badly tetch’d in the head that they will actually (as in Pat’s case) not notice let alone be embarrassed by the hypocrisy of hurling the “racist” bomb and then, almost in the same breath, their dismissal of people who have expressed disagreement with them over an issue that has nothing to do with race as “hicks” and “rednecks.”
Hi Ya, Eric!
The sad thing is: Pat’s MENTALity/behavior/modus-operandi has become the norm in this day when people just parrot what they are bombarded with by the government schools and media. People who can actually see the chinks in the armor; who can think; who can spot the contradictions and absurdities of the propaganda, and who care enough so as to not just ‘go along to get along’, have become rare.
It’s hard to believe that it wasn’t always like this. Just a few generations ago, this crap could never fly because even the most country-fried rube had enough grounding in reality so as to not be bamboozled by ridiculous concepts and fairy tales.
At least that’s what my wife/sister says… 😉
Hey Nunz! I believe they are what is referred to as “technozombies”, correct me if I’m wrong. Aldous Huxley nailed society on the head more than 5 decades ago.
Gee, another “free thinker” with the exact same opinions as the universities, media, government, and everyone else. Interesting how the people that defend EVs also happen to support authoritarianism, collectivism, socialism, leftism, etc etc etc.
Did Samsung, or Apple for that matter, FORCE anyone to buy “Smartphones”, or tablets, or a goddamned thing? No, they designed, manufactured, and SOLD them, COMPETING in the marketplace! It’s the desire to build better and/or cheaper precisely because it’s “Brutal” out there…innovate or perish!
From Wonderland, the same place as his knowledge of fuel sources and physics. Some how “technocrats” will alter the Earthly reality (i.e. gravity, friction, etc.) that it takes “x” amount of energy to do “y” amount of work. The rationalization that it will “one day” do so, is used to justify having what they want, when they want it, and with the help of “other people’s money” if possible.
The more Utopians that join in the “vision”, the less they will have to listen to the objections of others who do not care to fund, even partially, their fantasies.
The govt. is their tool to force others to financially support that which they otherwise would not.. …peer pressure, with the armed support of Uncle.
Once I realized that what we are told is not what is desired everything made sense. There’s the sales pitch and the sales pitch does not have to make rational sense it simply has to get people to buy in without knowing what they are really buying into.
I keep repeating myself but it’s not the electric cars the powers that be want nor do they want wind and solar or anything else they claim to be for. They want want ever will have the technocrats managing society. Whatever can be controlled, rationed, measured, etc.
Remember the old goal? “Too cheap to meter”. Whatever happened to that? Roads and sidewalks heated with electricity to melt the snow. What happened to that goal? Well that goal didn’t serve the purposes of the utopians and the power structure so it went away. That’s an old time free market idea. We will make everyone not poor by making everything cheaper and cheaper.
But where’s the control in that? How does one engineer a society where everything is so cheap people can get by on their own? Can’t be done.
So we get what we get today instead.
Technologies are pushed because they offer control. Technocrats know these things won’t work for today’s standard of living. They aren’t supposed to. But they do give technocrats power and more power to those that control the technocrats.
EVs; solar; wind, etc- not just control….but more importantly [to them] an excuse to let the old technologies and infrastructures crumble. And once that is gone…it can not be replaced, for it took 100 years to build, at a time when society was homogenous, and wealth was easily created, and a good deal of freedom was still extant.
I think they are just using all of this not-ready-for-prime-time technology as an excuse to let those old infrastructures collapse; knowing ull well that there will be no viable replacement for them (their ultimate goal) and no way of resurrecting what was lost.
that prong of attack does seem to exist however I don’t think it is working that well. A lot of people are still learning the older technologies all on their own.
Ultimately force will need to be applied to get rid of the old.
If you want some heartwarming things to watch checkout the youtube videos where people are pulling vehicles out of fields, yards, and junkyards and getting them running again.
I watched a couple of a series where an early 80s Mustang is pulled out of a junkyard and eventually put back on the road. Sometimes it’s just someone with a salvage business looking to sell the vehicle but in any case its being done.
I’ve seen some videos on Youtube like you mention, Brent. Most of ’em are BS. They show ya someone finding an older car that isn’t rusted away, and whose body isn’t dented up, and then they manage to get it running — thumbs up, and kudos and all of that– but what they don’t show is the tens of thousands of dollars it would take to make that heap into even a modest daily driver- i.e. replacing all the seals and weatherstripping, etc. in an old car that sat that long; the automatic tranny blowing out after having been dry for a decade; the knock that soon develops in the motor (which is the reason the car was junked in the first place, if it wasn’t totaled) ; the insulation cracking off of the brittle wires that have been exposed tro the elements for a decade or two; etc.
Not to mention that if the car or it’s parts might possibly be of any interest to more than one person in the world, the yard is going to part it, or sell it whole for a whole lot.
It’s like the pawn shop show a friend was telling me about T’other night…or the one where they show people buying the contents of storage units….reality is quite different.
It’s like this vid I watched a few days ago: These two guys travel from GA to OH to buy an early 80’s crew cab Chevy with an enclosed car-hauler box on the back (The thing is like 40′ long!)- in really nice original condition- been ditting a few years.
I’m thinking maybe they paid a few grand for it. Turns out, they paid $20K !!!! THEN, before they get ten miles, it quits on them. The previous comes and helps ’em out; they change the fuel pump. It quits again. So they run it off of a portable fuel tank, as the truck’s tank is probably full of crud. Then they blow a tire.
Turns out, these clueless fools are MAD at the guy who sold it to them, because of these little minor problems that should be expected with any old vehicle.
But they fly in, and think they can hop in a 30+ year-old vehicle that’s been sitting for years, and just drive it back to GA from OH as if it’s brand new.
I mention that just to illustrate the utter clulessness of the people making these videos- doesn’t matter if it’s Hollywood fantasy or real people, the visions one gets watching these things, vs. reality, is quite stark. (And most of the commenters on the above-mentioned video were siding with the clueless purchasers of that truck!)
In reality, there’s a lot to do on an older car that was kept reasonably well….never mind one that’s been junked or abandoned in the woods. (Continued)
(Continuation)….But having said that Brent, what I meant when I said “No way of resurrecting what was lost”, is that once the factories that build ICE cars are shut down; once; once the science of manufacturing engines evaporates; once the electrical, and mechanical and design (etc.) engineers become scarce; once the gasoline distribution network crumbles; once experienced mechanics are gone, etc. etc. it is not something that can just be picked back up on and set back in motion again- as it depends on many disciplines and specialties; many specialized facilities; many skills- it’s not as if someone can just go out and build a car from scratch with raw materials.
Jjust think of all the industries and disciplines involved!
And since the stated goal of these enviro-nazi policies is to destroy capitalism…..doesn’t it look like this is exactly what is happening?
I was listening to a commentary on The Simpsons cartoon once- and the speaker was talking about how they are computer animated now; and how that he preferred to have them hand-animated, but that the industry switched to computer animation, and as a result, it is now impossible to find anyone who possesses the skill to hand-draw them.
And that’s just a simple thing compared to manufacturing a car, and all of it’s related support systems to make driving inexpensive and feasible.
Heck, imagine trying to find a bookkeeper today who knows how to operate an old mechanical adding machine- or someone who knows how to fix that machine; or who could manufacture a new one if your old one got busted beyond repair…
Or a secretary who was adept with an old Underwood typewriter!
And even those things would be relatively hard to bring back if/when the electronics crash….as how many today are experts on the workings of that adding machine, and could get together with someone who could design the machinery to build the parts…who could find the guys to assemble and wire it all up and make it work properly, etc.?
Hey Brent, just out of curiosity: Do you know how to use a slide rule? (I’ll bet YOU do!)
I met a 16 year-old last year who can run a CNC machine. I was pretty impressed….but to do machining and cutting by hand? He’d be clueless…..
There are a few people every aspect of making this or that. A car can run on ethanol if need be. No need for big oil if things get that bad. People in Cuba kept their cars going for decades without any infrastructure worth a damn.
I’m not talking about making cars nice again here. I’m talking about getting so go from A to B. You don’t need specific factory like weather stripping and trim bits to make a car do its job.
It’s going to take killing a lot of people to fully break things. It’s going to take force. That’s all I am saying.
Poverty, big brother, and communism won’t be enough.
Brent, No rust in Cuba.
Most of the viable old cars here are gone already.
Newer ones are too delicate, with all of the electronics/turbos/10-speed A/T’s to last like the old ones did.
Most of the viable old ‘uns are already at a premium- even just as drivers. It’ll get worse as people catch on that the newer ones don’t last/are too expensive to keep going (This is somewhat happening already)
And thank the Chimp, for Cash-For-Clunkers.
But I was really talking about resurrecting the industry, in my initial post.
If this EV BS continues, 10 years from now, there will be no car industry in America. It’ll all be cell-phones on wheels, made in China and India….and like I said, once the industry and infrastructure are gone, it ain’t coming back any time soon- even if all regs were removed.
Unfortunately, Detroit is a dying dinosaur, nearing the end of it’s long James Cagney-like death march. 🙁 (Or, more properly- it has committed suicide- with help from Uncle).
I love too, gtc, how they want to “save the earth” so badly- always at the expense of others- and so long as it involves complicated technologies which don’t even exist; and foster more control and surveillance- but the idea of simply not traveling around so much- i.e. living and working in the same places or close proximity; living near one’s family and friends; living in the type of environment in which you enjoy being most of the time; living a sustainable lifestyle that doesn’t involve driving/traveling tens of thousands of miles per year, is just not an option that is on the table….
Funny how that is, eh?
Shouldn’t people who believe that cars are ruining the earth, give up driving one, and live in such a manner that they can walk/ride a bike where ever they need to go?
Something is wrong here. Instead of THAT, they want to change and or limit how and what we drive, and what it costs us to do so….and even if we ignore the moral implications of that, it still accompklishes nothing, as ultimately, just as much energy is still used…only in their prefered model, the by-product of that energy use is discharged remotely, rather than at the source- so that those of us who lead clean lives in the sticks, and drove very little, can be straddled with the exhausts which they have been freed from in their cities.
It’s all about redistribution.
Redistribute the wealth.(Make someone else pay)
Redistribute the pollution.
Globalization has made it very difficult for extended families to live near each other in the west because one place doesn’t have most everything any longer.
There are some anti-motoring people who live without cars. Some. But there are many of them who are also control freaks and demand you live as they have chosen. They make walk the talk but they are still busy body control freaks.
I’ve lived here in Blacksburg & Christiansburg since I moved here in 1989 to go to VPI (now calling itself VA TECH :P). I have witnessed a lot of decent people turn into awful people due to the crap social environment of this place and the corruption of college money in a rural area. One favorite was my Calculus instructor who was age, very attractive, intelligent, self-assured, mature. Wouldn’t know her to talk to her now, just another SJW with a hate for cars or nearly everything that has supported her lifestyle for the pat 3 years.
I don’t get how people think they got to be where they ALL are without the vast industrial and social network that once made this country strong and a damned great place to be. On top of that, doing all they can to undermine the foundations of everything as if “only using the local farmer’s market” and banning motorized transportation would save the planet. You what would save the planet? Annihilation of the human race, and some crazy fuck might just try it, or worse a quantum computer developed by MI*T or any of the other “geniuses” who are going to worship their own “magical” creations. I know my imagination hasn’t even scratched the surface, but I still do what I do as I watch others turn prosperity into utter chaos and misery. It honestly doesn’t have to be this way.
GTC, the West is committing suicide. The communism/socialism which had been ever so subtly and gradually pushed for more than half of this country’s existence, has been ingrained enough now so that there is no resistance to it- and thus has been on the fast track for the last few decades, and is now in the home stretch.
People send their kids to these filthy schools, when they are at their most impressionable period- not knowing or caring what is taught to them- only caring if they will have a good time getting drunk and laid; and if they will get a piece of paper that will make them another face in the vrowd of 50 million others so they can compete for some $35K a year government job (Including their daughters, who will never be fit wives/mothers- but rather, just “partners”).
I love too, how these people, like the stupid cunt teacher you mentioned, feel free to deprive their charges of the opportunities and lifestyle which they can now enjoy due to that capitalism which they so despise….but how they themselves will not give up their Prius to ride the bus; nor their nice home in the ‘burbs for an apartment in the ‘hood amongst those wonderful “underprivileged minorities” whom they profess to love so much (I mean, why live among these dreadful “raciss” white people, when ya can live in Crackville and enjoy the company of the people whom they tout as being so superior?)
The kids coming up today have no chance. This stuff is pounded into them from every side- through social(ist) media; Hollywood; and academia. With all the technology and “communication”, no one has time to think anymore. They can not go 10 minutes without the outside stimulation of artificial sights and sounds which shape their reality more so than the world before their eyes.
The Babyboomers and Gen-Xers are almost as corrupted too.
Like Lenin said, conquered from within- and 99.8% of the population are ignorant of what has happened, and would deny it has, till their death.
There will be no revolution for liberty; the only revolution we will see here, is the cultural revolution which is already well underway….and we’ve already lost that one. All we can do at this point, is avoid capture. We’re among the minority whose minds who have escaped the capture of NWO- but they’re making it so that if you don’t avoid bodily capture, then they have your mind and your body, because the body requires property and liberty to keep the mind alive and free.
Hi Graves,
We all know this “type.” They want sacrifices to be made, all right – but not by them. The austerity (or expense) is always to be imposed on others – who cannot (as an example) afford a $30,000-plus electric car, but never mind. Let them walk or move into an apartment. They can’t afford that, either? Let them eat cake – so to speak.
This psychosis abounds. It manifests in other areas, too – the obvious one being with regard to guns. The gun-grabbers want to grab your guns – not theirs. Or at least, not the guns of the goons who provide them protection.
I suspect this is going to come to blows.
Eric, the overlords have already got 95% of the public blowing them….
Hiya Nunz…
Yup; have you been following “Pat’s” posts? Her mouth must be awfully sore.
:O = blower’s cramp, do you get it? hahaha!
Furthermore it’s about the government robbing you in the form of taxes and then giving it to millionaires who Model the Model S and to virtue signaling liberals who purchase the Model 3.
It is another form of tyranny.
” To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” Thomas Jefferson.
“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom.
Hi Peter,
Lovely – but what has that to do with whether EVs make practical or economic sense?
Wibble wobble # 2.
JohnZ was expressing his ideology, of libertarian thought, and his repulsion of so-called tyrannical governments, with that quote from Thomas Jefferson.
And i was just reflecting on that, with a quote of my own, from one of my favourite philosophers, Krishnamurti, and his take on freedom and liberty.
Have you got it now Eric?
” To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” Thomas Jefferson.”
“To Keep a man in slavery for his natural life and that of his children is my profit”–Thomas Jefferson…
Somehow a man who kept slaves, is really not my idol for anything involving freedom
Clover,
What Jefferson did – or did not – do is immaterial as regards what is being done.
Funny.
It’s amazing how Libertarians quote Jefferson as some sort
of wonderful expert on Freedom as he stood there with
his whip and gun in hand.
Libertarians whining about how taxation is immoral slavery but
slavery? Oh Slavery, that was something to forget about.
All those psuedo-libertarians with the confederate flags and screaming “Free-dumb” whining about the Tyranny of the Federal Government but then saying “Jefferson Davis, well that slavery thing was really individual choice”…
I’d really like once for some psuedo-libertarian to say “Slavery was an immoral institution. Slavery was Evil. Slavery was wrong and corrupted labor markets”… None of them will.
Clover,
Whether Jefferson himself was perfect is irrelevant as regards the validity of the quote in question.
Note that no one argued Jefferson was an avatar of moral perfection.
I’ve railed against slavery – all forms of it – for decades. You, on the other hand, only object to certain varieties of it.
So you give an historical example of how politicians and the social elite are hypocrites, and this is news? I don’t think any of us here “idolize” any politician, nor any hypocrite, not even the ones that are not politicians, for that matter.
No, I gave an example of how Jefferson engaged in a moral crime before God and Man.
Every Libertarian goes on and on about the Evil Slavery of Taxes and Mandates. Then suddenly they get all wishy-washy moral relativist and you have to understand the time…
I bet you can’t stand up and say “Slavery was wrong, it was evil, it was immoral and that it needed to be ended immediately by any means neccessary”.
Clover,
Agreed, slavery was a hideous evil… and still is. Yet you endorse it. For what else is forcibly taking the product of my labor, or asserting ownership over my person by controlling me, telling me what (as an example) I am allowed to do with my money if not slavery?
Think, Clover: Government (that is, other people – who constitute its apparatchiks) decree what we may and may not do with our very bodies; claim a large portion of the product of our minds and bodies; decree – at bayonet point – whom we may and may not associate with, do business with and how we are allowed to live our lives in general. We are not allowed to ever fully own anything except the clothes on our backs and other trivial personal possessions, because we are forced to pay never-ending taxes for the conditional privilege of being allowed to use things like our homes and cars and so on. In fact, the government is the entity which truly owns our homes and cars and so on.
That is the functional essence of slavery, Clover. You – like other government-schooled bots – are blinkered by your indoctrination and only see “slavery” when it is the more obvious chattel variety. But it is a distinction without much difference.
And those differences grow smaller and smaller on account of people like you, who demand an increase in the slavery of others, for their benefit – not realizing that by doing so, they also further enslave themselves . ..
Your “hick” antagonist, from “redneckia.”
“Agreed, slavery was a hideous evil… and still is.”
So are you willing to stand up and say “Lincoln and the Republicans were right to send the Union army to the south to burn and slaughter the slavers until they surrendered and signed the 15th Amendment.”?
Are you willing to stand up and say that around your neighbors there in Hickville?
“Government (that is, other people – who constitute its apparatchiks) decree”
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,,,,
Take it up with your congressmember.
Clover,
You apparently do not know much history – other than the hagiographical account, at any rate. Lincoln was a virulent racist (easily documented) and all for maintaining slavery (and offered to do so) provided the Southern states did not secede (as the colonies seceded from the British empire).
Few in the North were willing to fight to “free the slaves.” There were draft riots. They fought to enshrine the union – and a centralized state.
Grant’s wife owned slaves – and held them until the end of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the North…. it was a war measure, intended to militarily undermine the South.
Facts.
In re “consent of the governed.” Read Spooner. I don’t recall consenting to it. Where is my signature on a contract – one not signed under duress?
And, again… “hickville.”
This from the guy who accuses me of racism. Fascinating.
“Lincoln was a virulent racist”
Well that makes all Republicans virulent racists because Lincoln founded the party…
as for hickville. It’s a place, not an ethnic nationality. All you have to do is move, get some shoes, take a shower and nobody will know
Clover,
You evade dealing with the fact that the war was fought by the North not to end slavery but to consolidate the union. It was not a noble crusade; it was power politics – and Lincoln was as determined as Nathan Bedford Forrest that blacks be kept in their place.
As far as Republicans: I am not defending them – you were.
And you triple down on the use of derogatory terms for whites that are in the same category as “nigger.”
What a vile person you are.
Pat,
“I bet you can’t stand up and say “Slavery was wrong, it was evil, it was immoral and that it needed to be ended immediately by any means necessary”.”
Every libertarian believes that slavery is wrong and evil, that you think otherwise indicates that you are unaware of libertarian theory. BTW, libertarian thinkers and writers such as Lysander Spooner, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, etc… were at the forefront of the abolitionist movement.
Opposition to slavery is inherent in the concept of self-ownership which, along with the non-aggression principle, forms the basis of libertarian theory. Yes, every libertarian agrees with all of the above quote except the final qualification. It is immoral, for instance, to murder hundreds of thousands of non “slavers” in pursuit of that goal.
Jeremy
“Every libertarian believes that slavery is wrong and evil,”
Yet you say nothing when Nunzio espouses the ideas that slavery was not wrong.
Clover,
A person who repeatedly derides others as “hicks” and “rednecks” has lost any standing to virtue signal on the matter of racism.
And where, prey tell Pat, did I ever espouse the idea that “slavery is not wrong”?
I said that those in the past who viewed jigs as not quite human “may have been on to something”- but then countered any idea of condoning slavery by stating that I would not even treat an animal that way.
You, on the other hand, continue to advocate and advance slavery for all; only through the auspices of the state instead of by that of private plantation owners and businesses- but what you advocate is no less slavery, and no less of a crime.
YOU only oppose private slavery, and when it is imposed on moolies- but are more than content to tolerate and promote it when it is applied to all at the hands of certain men who you deem to possess moral rights which the rest of us don’t possess, just by reason of the fact that some cast a vote for them.
You are honestly the most hypocritical person I have ever encountered….
Funny, Pat- you seem to be repulsed by the idea of limited slavery which was practiced in the past- but yet you advocate the very same thing on a broad basis today; only, I suppose you would justify it by citing the fact thaty today the slaves can cast a vote for which master they prefer.
You don’t seem to realize that there is no real difference between confiscating a part of the fruit of someone’s labor vs. standing over them with a whip and just giving them back some scraps after the work is done.
You don’t seem to realize that there is no difference between a court deciding who raises your children, and forcing you to pay for the ‘privilege’, as opposed to a plantation owner selling your children or otherwise decreeing their disposition.
You don’t seem to realize that there guns wielded by badged hooligans ; SWAT teams and prisons are no better than overseers and whips and bloodhounds when used against those who have not done violence to anyone nor their property.
Or maybe you just don’t care- as long as some outward facade of in-their-best-interest is maintained; and facilities are monolithic and clean; and the violence which you know is there, is usually kept just below the surface……
You think Jefferson is a hypocrite (and no one here idolizes him)- but YOU are just as much of a hypocrite, if not more so.
And Jefferson wasn’t necessarily being hypocritical. One has to remember, that most didn’t consider knee grows to be quite “people” back then. [They may’ve been on to something there! 🙂 ]
Although, such is not a justification- as I wouldn’t treat an animal that way……
Is that quote even real??? I’ve been Googling and can not find such attributed to Tommy J. Perhaps it’s from a revisionist history book…the kind which villifies all white men; glorifies communists and tyrants; and says that 90% of famous people who ever lived were gay……
” One has to remember, that most didn’t consider knee grows to be quite “people” back then. [They may’ve been on to something there! ? ]”
Please say this in public, on any street in America.
Surprise, surprise! So you advocate violence and censorship for the expressing of unpopular ideas- just like you advocate violence in order to control everything else.
Well, you’re defending the people then with whom you have a lot in common, because such people have a proclivity towards violence. Perhaps you are even one of them, since you love violence so muc, and delight in mob-rule and censorship of public speech, “gnomesain?” [Hehe, borrowed that one from Eric!]
Still waiting for a citation for that Jefferson quote, Pat.
Ah yes…the mantra of the LIBTARD…when nothing else works, place the RACE CARD.
Jefferson did what many like him did…owned SLAVES. SO EFFIN’ WHAT? That was the practice of HIS day, NOT ours!
I’m sure a libtard smartass like yourself would have quickly gotten challenged to a duel, as was ALSO the custom of the time, and caught a bullet, and died a pompous fool.
“Fossil fuels are cheap, efficient, abundant, convenient and clean-burning in modern cars. What’s the problem, exactly?”
Well, if you abandon your US-Centric view, you might realize oil is priced in Dollars which are quite expensive for countries that don’t print dollars. Countries like China
or switzerland or India or Japan. So let’s say China looks at Oil as a big expense,
paid to terrorist supporting muslims in the Arab World. Those Oil Sheiks spread money around to people like Bin Laden and party in Miami, they don’t rocka in Osaka.
So, China has already decided that all cars in China will be Electric, and China is the worlds largest car market and China is the market GM is chasing for.
Now if you believe GM shouldn’t chase markets overseas, you are welcome to
voice the idea that GM shouldn’t compete in international markets but if you believe
US companies should make products that will sell overseas, then you should cheer
Cadillac in trying to get into the biggest car market in the world.
“Well, if you abandon your US-Centric view, you might realize oil is priced in Dollars which are quite expensive for countries that don’t print dollars. Countries like China.”
I was going to make that point too.
As an Australian, who has spent some time in the US, and compared that experience with developing countries I’ve also lived in, I find it breathtaking, as to how ignorant Americans are, in regards to what else is going on in the world.
Featured on TV here in Australia last year, was a brief 5 minute TV clip, from some Variety Show in the US, where they decided to go on the street, with a map of the world perched on a tripod, and ask people passing by, where different countries are in the world, and the answers were so pathetic, it was extraordinary.
Until, this one woman came along and couldn’t point out her own country on a global map!
How are those mandatory vaccines going for you down there? And your environmental police banning turbos on cars?
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/children-anti-vaccination-movement-leads-to-disease-outbreaks-120312#1
How are those whooping cough outbreaks going for you?
I don’t ordinarily care for social darwinism, but, I figure
if you have antivaxxers, have their kids all go to the same schools. A few waves of measles, chicken pox, rubella and pertussis should resolve them as a social problem.
Abstinence is not a inherited genotype and neither is anti-vaxxing.
Clover,
Pretty much everyone here – excepting coercive collectivists such as yourself – is opposed to government schools, believes parents are responsible for their kids only and have no right to parent other people’s kids, without the consent of those kids’ parents.
So: Vaccinations are up to the parents; other parents ought to be free to associate (or have their kids associate) or not as they see fit.
Which they can’t do without the threat of social services kidnapping their children under auspices of “neglect” or “child abuse”, more govt.excuses to trample our civil liberties.
Why worship the state and its “experts”? Laziness?
The idea that vaccines are all good is absurd. But anyone who does so much as look at the real information (oddly enough filed with the government) knows that vaccines are a risk and reward equation.
The side effect possibilities, even the severe ones, are known. We’re just supposed to pretend they do not exist. There’s a reason why government takes the liability for vaccines and makes it exceedingly difficult to collect. In any sort of fair civil court vaccine manufacturers could be bankrupted. But as a result of not having liability we have numerous vaccines for illnesses that had been greatly reduced in incidence and were easily treated. But the risk of the vaccinations, especially the compound risk, remains.
And remember government pretty much forces all or nothing on vaccines. Because it only allows things like religious exceptions. Not ‘well this one is worth the risk but this one is not’. So we have things like mandated chickenpox vaccination. Of course that means mom or dad doesn’t have to take a few days off work for jr’s illness. Herd productivity. Which is why the life changing side effects don’t matter, because the overall herd productivity increases. So what if a few people are damaged when the herd makes more money for the owners?
Nor do we advocate “free education”- unless the person providing said education voluntarily agrees to do provide it, whether directly or by paying for it.
Pat, will you take personal responsiblity if the truth ever comes out about someone’s kid dying from SIDS; or their life being greatly diminished due to autism; or them getting cancer at some point due to one of those filthy vaccines which you would force upon them?
[Yes, cancer. Many older doctors have stated that they never saw a case of cancer in an unvaccinated person!)
What about those people who died from the Swine Flu in the mid 70’s? The one thing all of the fatalities had in common, was that they had all been vaccinated. No unvaccinated person died.
No, you wouldn’t take responsibility….you’d just say “It was the best information we had at the time” or “they didn’t tell us the truth” or “I was deceived”- and I doubt you’d even feel any guilt that what you advocate prevented others from doing what they knew to be right; and which would have saved their/their child’s life or health.
As opposed to vaccines as I am, I would NEVER advocate prohibitibing you nor anyone from vaccinating themselves or their charges. Why do you think it is your moral right to decree the opposite?
Does the concept of a human being being free to make his own decisions, and to live his conscience before God [or the Devil, or “nature” or whomever] mean absolutely nothing to you?
Pat,
So – essentially – we should accept more restrictions and expense, for the sake of “fightin’ trrr”?
Will the elites in government also accept similar restrictions and expense applied to themselves?
China is an authoritarian state and EVs dovetail nicely with that because they are far more easily controlled than IC cars.
“So – essentially – we should accept more restrictions and expense, for the sake of “fightin’ trrr””
Well, if the GOP voters would have stopped the Bush administration
from building the TSA, demanding REALID, putting checkpoints everywhere, building armored shells on every federal building and spending $3 Trillion fighting Terrorists, you might have a point but
until GOP voters stop supporting Torture, TSA and paramilitary cops everywhere, i’m not going to believe that complaint.
But, i’m just saying as far as gas/diesel goes, people in China don’t like paying for that stuff in dollars.
They can pay for it in Yuan for all I care…but in the ‘workers’ paradise, the hundreds of millions toil for chump wages and the local oligarchs have gotten hugely rich! You’d been surprised how many BILLIONAIRES are Chinese. The fruits of a ‘managed’ economy.
And if living in a socialist dictatorship is so appealing to you, perhaps you go there and try it out for yourself.. No? Well then we don’t really give a rat’s ass how you much admire the attempts by US business to emulate their policies!
To your first point, regarding your membership of the alt-right, I’m referring to your economic arguments, not your broader social position… it seems to be a common thread, and that is, whenever I argue a specific point with people of the alt-right, they go off on various misdirections and irrelevant tangents.
If you don’t like the tag, alt-right, maybe I can change it to avid Ayn Rand fanatic.
“It’s about economics.”
Fair dinkum?
“Fossil fuels are cheap, efficient, abundant, convenient and clean-burning in modern cars. What’s the problem, exactly?”
Really?
And where is your broad-based scientific data to backup that assertion?
Let’s assume you are correct, then you are wilfully ignoring one important fact, and that is, it is not renewable and it is finite.
And for the remainder of your rebuttal, you drift off into other alt-right talking points, regarding socialism, and how subsidies are considered government handouts, and it’s my taxes paying for that, and I want my free markets… yadda yadda yadda
“…to prop up the economically untenable.
Which is what EVs are.”
I have no problem with governments, making broad and sweeping changes to regulations and subsidies, to encourage people to take up vehicles that do not use finite greenhouse causing fossil fuels.
And again, where is your data to backup the your argument that it’s economically untenable?
And don’t give me no short-sighted answer, I’m referring to decades into the future, and my children’s environment that they will grow up in.
And while on the subject, I’m sure you will come back and tell me that, like our former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott… “Climate change is crap!”
And your example of the Nissan is short-sighted and simplistic.
The reason is, as technology improves in coming decades, recharging times will be shorter, and distance covered, will be greater.
The Lithium used in battery cells require a great deal of mining and processing to be useful for battery packs and it’s not available everywhere either.
How much environmental damage is being done to mine the lithium and rare earth elements used to make the magnets for the motors?
Will it mean that America will continue to wage war elsewhere on the planet to steal the wealth from other nations just so Americans can virtue signal the rest of the planet?
I have to giggle, but I find it amusing that people such as yourself, like the throw around the term virtue signalling, because when you say it so often, it shows you really have no understanding of what it means, when directed at people such as myself…
I’ve just been accused of using the term Alt-right, and the moderator of this site, thinks to question me, then allows alt-right talking points such as “virtue signalling” to go and challenged…
Which just confirms my suspicions regarding the bias of this moderator…
However, but back to the discussion, into the future, renewable fuel powered cars may not need lithium batteries, and may develop a whole new technology.
And with regards to US hegemony, I think that will continue, even when the lithium runs out, along with the fossil fuels.
I’m sure the US government, will still maintain strong political and economic control over the world, well into the decades to come, well after the fossil fuels have been depleted.
I’m sure the resource war of the second half of this century, will be around food and water security.
Decades ago the same kind of dire predictions were being made for “the year 2000.” (The book “The Limits to Growth” by the Club of Rome is a good example, and there were certainly others.) It was nonsense then and it is nonsense now.
According to those prognosticators we should have run out of oil and other important resources decades ago. It hasn’t happened. In fact reserves have increased. We will not run short of fossil fuels for centuries.
Your predictions are just as unlikely to come to fruition as those the Club of Rome made 50 years ago. (One of the few advantages to being old is having already lived through this crap and seen what a crock it is.)
There is not a reason in the world to force the use of electric vehicles. If and when their development reaches a point where they are actually superior to ICE vehicles at a comparable price the market will make a natural transition – as it did in the early 20th century when electric cars were rejected in favor of gasoline powered models.
Oh, and you can take your “alt-right” nonsense and shove it up your ass. (Eric is too much of a gentlemen to put it that way. I’m not.) It’s just a lame attempt at guilt by association.
“There is not a reason in the world to force the use of electric vehicles.”
Who said anything about forcing people?
I don’t think the US government is forcing people to do anything.
And i’m just in favour of gentle persuasion, and incentives… not outright coercion.
Even though I’m in favour of vehicles with alternative fuel sources, if the government demanded I use them, I would rebel too, just out of principle.
And as for the rest of your diatribe, well, it just goes to prove my other point, that people such as yourself view and express the world through your limbic system, rather than your prefrontal cortex.
Peter, you write:
“Who said anything about forcing people… I don’t think the US government is forcing people to do anything.”
Either you’re ignorant – or you’re being (again) disingenuous. EVs exist – as other than curiosities – only because of massive government subsidies and mandates, which are forcibly imposed.
That’s what a mandate is, you know.
The government is not “asking” car companies to manufacture EVs; it is ordering them to. The government is not “asking” us to “help” fund EVs; it is forcing us to pay taxes to subsidize them.
Nothing the government does is “gentle.”
I literally almost just threw up.
Government is force. It uses all form of coercion in the form of taxes , mandates, rules and regulations and enforces it all with armed government workers.
Wibble wobble # 3
Maybe you better check the dictionary version of forcibly… not one American is forced to buy an electric vehicle that is regulated by the government.
And your little rant about you being forced to pay taxes, in order to pay for something that you don’t agree with, is just an example of your own disingenuous claptrap.
I’m sure you have no complaints, if your taxes are forcibly used on projects and government institutions that you agree with…
In short, you are driven by simplistic ideology, and you provide no facts to backup your emotional claptrap.
Have you got it now Eric?
***”not one American is forced to buy an electric vehicle “***
No, but just as bad, if not worse: We are all forced to pay to subsidize their manufacture; to subsidize their purchase by those who choose to drive; are forced to see ICE cars so crippled by mandated ‘safety’ equipment, and a plethora of delicate electronic systems, turbo-chargers, and tiny engines in order to eek out the last .001% of an MPG and a .001% reduction in emissions that we can no longer purchase and drive what we want, because it is no longer viable or legal for the manufacturers to make such…..
And you don’t call that force???
You don’t call it force when someone MUST pay for a car equipped with airbags which may seriously injure or kill them; or high-back seats and thick pillars which obscure visibility, thus requiring even more mandates- i.e. back-up cameras and collision avoidance schemes????
Clover,
No on is forced to buy an EV – yet. But they are forced to pay for them. It is a distinction without a difference. It is like being forced to pay for someone else’s apartment. The fact that you don’t use the apartment doesn’t obviate that you’ve been forced to pay for it – indeed, it makes it even more obnoxious. As with EVs. People like me – who don’t want an EV or drive an EV – are forced to subsidize their manufacture.
In re the rest: You’ve clearly not taken taken time to read about – or are unable to grok – the Libertarian point of view, which opposes all forcible taking of other people’s property for any reason whatsoever.
Do you understand what “alt right” means? Or do you just hurl that lightning bolt at anyone who disagrees with you, hoping the imputation of fascist/Nazi will silence them?
PH …”And your little rant about you being forced to pay taxes, in order to pay for something that you don’t agree with, is just an example of your own disingenuous claptrap.
I’m sure you have no complaints, if your taxes are forcibly used on projects and government institutions that you agree with…
In short, you are driven by simplistic ideology, and you provide no facts to backup your emotional claptrap.”
LOL. Why do I see a dog barking at a mirror as I read this?
Eric, I don’t see one so I will ask, do you have a ‘Hall of Shame’ section for these types of ‘special’ clovers?
If not you should set one up. You could number them so that when the same garbage is regurgitated by a new clover, we could just send them to read previous responses to their stupidity?
Hi CF,
I like this idea of a Clover Hall of Fame! Let me see what’s doable…
That great Australian intellect shining through. Why can’t you be more like great down-under thinkers like David C. Stove ?
Australia is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me. So I can clearly not choose the electric vehicle in front of you.
Oh! I just found this little quip here, how droll! Funny how some children’s movies have some of the best talents and lines, eh? Inconceivable!.
” Who said anything about forcing people?
I don’t think the US government is forcing people to do anything.”
You’re absolutely correct! The government would never force anything upon us. Just like it would never force us to pay taxes; or to buy health insurance; or to let people feel up our rectum if we want to fly for “our security”; or to have airbags in our cars for “safety”; or to have car insurance if we want to drive; or to purchase E10 (gas with 10% ethanol) for “cleaner air”; or…
But yeah, you’re right. “Big Brother” is just looking out for us. Let’s all celebrate this “good deed” by sacrificing everything that we own (including our bodies) to “him”.
“However, but back to the discussion, into the future, renewable fuel powered cars may not need lithium batteries, and may develop a whole new technology.”
Lot of things MAY happen in the future. If they do, people should be (on their own) able to choose the objectively better product.
Till then, the points made about the production of Lithium ion batteries and rare earth magnets causing tremendous pollution is a valid one, and a huge demerit of this so-called “clean” technology.
Indeed, a lot of things may happen.
But I think it’s safe to say, that lithium batteries in the near future will become obsolete, and in the decades the come, there will be newer, more efficient renewable energy sources…
“Lithium-ion batteries could be obsolete if inventor has his way.”
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/batteries-john-goodenough
“…production of Lithium ion batteries and rare earth magnets causing tremendous pollution is a valid one…”
Without any broad-based data to support that statement, it will just remain your opinion.
Yep, lithium batteries almost certainly will become obsolete…..
So, since we’re dealing in speculation now anyway: What if the infrastructure of nationwide gas station/parking lot/curbside chargers which will have to be built to accommodate all of the current EVs, is not compatible with the new technology?
Current EV technology has not even stabilized, let alone matured so the idea of building an infrastructure for it is laughable- and I don’t even think politicians are crazy enough to do it.
And regardless, what is the purpose of all this anyway- to replace that which exists and works- and which is relatively cheap and efficient, and for which a universal infrastructure already exists- with something that is none of those things?
“And regardless, what is the purpose of all this anyway- to replace that which exists and works- and which is relatively cheap and efficient, and for which a universal infrastructure already exists- with something that is none of those things?”
We will all the have grandchildren one day, and they will have grandchildren, and what will they think of your statement then?
Peter,
You’ve guzzled the “climate change” Kool Aid. Rather than continue slurping it up, I urge you to take the time to read a bit more about the subject.
**”We will all the have grandchildren one day, and they will have grandchildren, and what will they think of your statement then?”***
I guess they’d think “Grandpa actually had a brain; and didn’t fall for the latest political subterfuge peddled by the media of his day”.
So please explain to me, how it is that trading energy consumption which is directly used at the point of consumption, for energy which is centrally generated and then distributed, will have any benefits to future generations- unless of course, you consider having electrical generators (or worse yet, nukular power plants) dotting the landscape is somehow a benefit.
Oh…that’s right…we’ll just trade what we now have for this bumblefuck nonsense which offers no benefits (but does offer a lot of detriments) just to keep us occupied until that mystical magical technology of the future materializes……
Sell you descendants into police state of total control and surveillance (worse than what we already have), and say that you did it for their benefit…. Yeah…makes perfect sense! Mmmmmm! That Kool-aid is good!
Hi Peter,
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design”. – F.A. Hayek
“The plans differ; the planners are all alike…” – Frederic Bastiat
Eschatological hysteria has been around as long as man has sought meaning outside of himself, but remained remained mainly religious in nature until Thomas Malthus wrapped it in a pseudo-scientific package. Since Malthus, the “scientific” doomsayers have insisted that their concerns are founded in scientific truth, not religious fanaticism, they are wrong. Paul Ehrlich, one of the worlds most prolific and highly compensated doomsayers is perhaps best understood as the Bill Kristol of the left; wrong on everything, but still influential. Ehrlich, outside of his own specific area of expertise, has a perfect track record of false prognostications. To a genuine scientist, such a record would cause at least some self reflection, to a religious fanatic, it would not.
CAGW alarmism is the latest in a long line of “end of the world” hysteria masquerading as science. Many assertions of the CAGW alarmists are profoundly anti-scientific. The term “climate change” is manipulative and dishonest. First coined by the loathsome Frank Luntz to be used by Republicans to distract from the message of the CAGW alarmists, it was quickly adopted by that same crowd to distract from the embarrassing fact that the observational record stubbornly failed to conform to the alarmist predictions. The correct term is catastrophic, anthropogenic, global warming (CAGW). After all, if it’s neither catastrophic nor anthropogenic, then the rationale for an Elite power grab is undermined. Using the term “climate change” renders the claims of the alarmists non-falsifiable. I assume you understand why that is anti-scientific.
Consensus is not science and, even if the consensus claims were true (they are not), emphasizing this, at the expense of actual debate, indicates a weakness in the scientific case. If you are interested in how profoundly wrong “consensus” science can be, research plate tectonics.
Which brings us to, “the science is settled, the time for debate is over” assertions common to the alarmists. Such claims are inherently anti-scientific and those making them should be treated with scorn by the scientific community. But, it is the skeptics, asking valid scientific questions that are dismissed and ridiculed. Again, such a basic inversion of scientific integrity can only be understood through the lens of religious fanaticism.
Finally, the use of the term “denier” is dishonest and morally reprehensible. It’s purpose is to link skeptics to holocaust deniers and, thereby, shut off any debate. No person, acting as a scientist could, in good faith, use such a term. In addition, outside of a few cranks and politicians who could be described as “deniers”, such a creature does not exist.
Do you know what the skeptics supposedly “deny”? Hint, it’s not what is claimed.
Do they “deny” the science of the “greenhouse effect”, demonstrated by John Tyndall in the latter half of the nineteenth century? – No.
Do they deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas? – No.
Do they deny that CO2 concentration has increased from Tyndall’s time to now? – No.
Do they deny that this increase is likely due, in large part, to human activity? – No.
Do they deny that average global temperature has increased since Tyndall’s time? – No.
So, what exactly do they “deny”?
First, they question the likely impact of CO2 on climate sensitivity.
Second, they question the certainty of the temperature record.
In the first case, Tyndall established that, everything else equal, a doubling of CO2 would lead to about a 1 degree celsius rise in average temperature. Every credible scientist understands that, if this is all that happens, we have nothing to worry about, as every new CO2 molecule has an exponentially diminishing effect on “warming”. The catastrophic claims rest on the assertion that positive feedback mechanisms will elevate the harmless 1C per doubling to 2.5C or more. This assertion is theoretically implausible and unsupported by observational data. The skeptics are correct in questioning this assertion.
The official temperature record has been adjusted many times recently, always cooling the past and warming the present. Absent these adjustments, the hottest years on record occurred in the 1930’s, not the 2010’s. Note, I am not claiming that these adjustments are necessarily fraudulent. I am sure that there are many valid reasons to adjust the record in light of new data, analysis, etc… However, the entirely one sided nature of the adjustments indicates the strong possibility of confirmation bias; and the frequency of the adjustments necessarily renders the claims of certainty invalid. Again, the skeptics are correct to question this.
I’ll tackle policy proposals in another post.
BTW, are you related to Rolf?
Cheers,
Jeremy
Well, tie me kangaroo down, mate! Another great post by Jeremy!
Jeremy, the adjustments are fraudulent. The global warmists never did a test to see if there was any systematic error.
The temperature record is a very large data set. Error correction is usually not required with a large data set where it is used to arrive at single value, in this case the change in average temperature. Simply put the errors cancel each other out.
There are tests that can be done to see if correction is required. Tony Heller did some tests for particular corrections. In each case no correction was required. Either there isn’t the error the experts claim or it self cancels.
Now even if we grant the experts their corrections it should be one and done. But it’s not. They are always changing their adjustments. This indicates either fraud, incompetence, or a data set that is far too problematic to draw any conclusions from.
Their actions ultimately give it away. There’s no reason to take any action on their findings. If they are honest they are incompetent or the data is crap and we don’t know what error will be discovered tomorrow. If they aren’t honest it’s all a fraud.
My wording was poor. The experts apparently never did any tests to see if there was an systematic error that needed correction.
There could be systematic error on the individual station level but in the entirety of the record for that station or all the stations it may not need correction and correction could introduce a bias.
Hi Brent,
I don’t disagree with you. My point was that it does not require an allegation of fraud to show that the temperature claims, and the stated certainty about them, are illegitimate. The simple fact that the record has been adjusted so often renders the 95% confidence level claimed by the IPCC absurd. The fact that the record is always adjusted to conform to a preexisting theory indicates fraud or confirmation bias.
I have spoken to many people, with surprising success, about this issue. What I have found is that, if I begin with an allegation of fraud, I lose them immediately. If I start by showing that the claims don’t hold up to scientific scrutiny, I get many to listen and have changed minds.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Hey Nunz,
Hah, I shouldn’t be surprised that you caught the reference. I wonder of Peter will.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Jeremy, Must be a good 30 years since my last encounter with that ‘un….. Ya don’t forget a name like Rolf! 😉
Peter,
Show me an EV with real ownership costs (not subsidized) comparable to a current $15,000 IC sedan, that can travel at least 400 miles (as any current $15k IC compact economy car can) and which can be fully “refueled” (i.e., recharged) in 5 minutes or less and you’ll then have an EV that is competitive with a a current $15k economy car.
For it to be superior – as a car, spare me the virtue signaling – the EV would have to cost significantly less to own (purchase price plus cost to drive over time) and still go at least as far as the IC car and be capable of being fully recharged in 5 minutes or less.
Do you know of such a car?
I await your reply.
deafening silence…
crickets…
Hmmm…. Does Dick…err…I mean Peter own an EV? If not, I wonder why not?
I don’t believe he grasps the concept that “consumerism and sustainable growth” will exhaust the natural resources he believes are “renewable”, long befor his grandchildren have the opportunity to be good little consumers themselves. If he does, then he sure doesn’t give a shit how they will have to live, or force others to live, so he and his progeny can enjoy the benefits of other people’s labor. Hi9s type will often accuse you and I of being “shortsighted” when it is his own self interests that are the core of the matter. In other words, he’s just another Pepe Bocca hypocrite.
GTC, I was thinking ‘Pepe’ too- but Pepe Le Pew…. 😀
Wibble wobble # 5.
“Do you know of such a car?
I await your reply.”
As I’ve repeatedly said, and if you have been reading, you will see that I have expressed my thoughts regarding the limitations of the technology as it stands in 2019, but if you care to read on you will see that like all technology, I believe it will vastly improve over the next several decades.
Have you got it now Eric?
***”I have expressed my thoughts regarding the limitations of the technology as it stands in 2019, but if you care to read on you will see that like all technology, I believe it will vastly improve over the next several decades.”*****
But Peter, you are defending the enforcement of that which bow is (i.e. something which is terribly flawed, being promoted and mandated to replace that which works well, and with which people are perfectly happy) on the mere hope that what you desire will come to pass at some time in the futrure?
And even if that were a realistic hope, it is still WRONG to impose it by force on others, whether that force takes the form of subsidies; or regulating ICE cars to the point where they become undesirable and or economically unviable; or by destroying the infrastructure for ICE cars, or reducing their production by covert regulation- i,e, carbon credit schemes and the like (Which may be covert to people such as yourself- but are as plain as day to those who have not consumed the Kool-aid)
On both counts, you lose.
Ignoring the immorality of force and coercion (as most authoritarians always do), just as a practical matter: What happens if this infrastructure for EVs is put in place, and all of this money is purloined for their promotion, in the hopes that the technology will improve and make them more viable in the future…and then it runs out that some other technology, such as hydrogen cells, in-fact make the breakthrough and become viable? Or some other technology is invented that has not even been considered yet? Or it is realized that EV technology has reached it’s limits, and in reality, there is nothing better with which to replace ICE cars?
I guess it really doesn’t matter anyway, since the whole point of getting rid of ICE vehicles is to restrict autonomous private travel….
And I guess there is no hope of people such as yourself ever coming to the realization of that, or caring, because you advocate and defend force(ultimately violence), so why should it matter to you then what agenda is being pushed, as long as an ostensible reason is offered for it? “Save the earth”; “Save the grandkids”; “Prevent crime/terrorism”; “Reduce car accidents”…take your pick.
Clover,
You tout assertions about hypotheticals and projections as though these were facts – while ignoring the actual facts.
The facts are that EVs are far too expensive to be economically competitive with IC cars, they take at least 5-6 times as long to recover a partial charge than it takes to fully fuel an IC car, are range gimped and that range is markedly affected by heat/cold and use of accessories… all facts, indisputable.
Your hypothetical cost-competitive/recharges as quickly as an IC car is purely speculative. It may happen – but it has not actually happened. And there is no direct/indisputable evidence that it will happen.
Cost going down is not enough; the cost must be less – else it does not make any sense.
The range must be comparable to an equivalent IC car, regardless of heat/cold and use of accessories – else it is diminishment of mobility and so undesirable.
The time to recover a charge must be about the same as the time it takes to refuel an IC car – else it is a time-waster and a tremendous inconvenience.
The Great Green Arkleseizure is the creator of the universe, as claimed by adherents of the faith on planet Viltvodle VI. The Jatravartids of this faith believe that the Universe was sneezed out of the Great Green Arkleseizure’s nose. I, myself, am waiting for the return of Zarquon, which will happen at the end of the universe, so, I might have a bit of a wait. Perhaps, in the meantime, we should spend our time squeezing wine from granite, and defying other laws of nature as well. If all of this inane activity is to no avail, it does not matter, as long as I get my Bordeaux, yes?
…such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess’s undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy. Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sorts of parties.
Peter,
“Virtue signaling” is used to describe people – invariably affluent – who signal their (supposed) virtue (in this case, belief in the “climate change” religion) by driving around in EVs subsidized by other people’s money.
It has nothing to do with “alt right” – a term invented by the political left to disparage anyone who disagrees with leftist shibboleths as a kind of crypto fascist, if not Nazi.
Which is despicable nonsense.
I challenge you to find any statement of mine that even inclines toward the support of any form of coercive collectivism, which is the core philosophical premise of the political left and the political right.
If you’re honest with yourself (and to be fair, you may not have realized it) you are in principle closer to “alt right” than I … because it is you who advocate for coercive collectivist “solutions” to problems you believe exist – and which you insist on forcing others to accept exist.
There is little meaningful difference between the left and the right; they both agree on coercive collectivism and merely bicker over what shall be done to whom by who.
Per Lenin – the godfather of the “alt left.”
Libertarians repudiate the use of coercion – for any reason except in response to coercion (i.e., in self defense),
As soon as I read “Alt Right” in Peter’s first post on here, I didn’t take him seriously- as he clearly had never read any other articles or comments here, if he thinks that we are in favor of any political ideology other than that of individual liberty/self-ownership/being left alone; and his pigeon-holing any of us into any brand of authoritarian-collectivism, be it right or left, leads me to believe that he just associates any given position on a given topic with any particular group which may advocate that position- rather than seeing that our positions are based on reality and personal understanding; and the only ‘right’ or ‘left’ here is that we all believe in the RIGHT to be LEFT alone!
Since I am opposed to:
Wars
Nukular power
Welfare
Socialized medicine
Police
Democracy
Socialism
Communism
Taxes
Licenses
State involvement in marriage/family
Anti-discrimination laws
I wonder where Peter would place me on his political scale? [Uh-oh! I think smoke is coming out of his head!)
Ooo! Oooo! Or better yet, imagine the meltdown Peter would have if he encountered a black person- such as Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams, who shares our beliefs?!
ROTFLMAO picturing it!
Peter: “This can not be!!!!!!”
Indeed! These guys would probably make his head explode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8UqbASjQCo
That and the, wait for it… “Think of the (grand)children!” that the control freaks always tearfully trot out if nothing else works.
They pulled that crap 40-50 years ago too, and the children and grandchildren are doing just fine. The only real problem with them is that so many have been immersed in this nonsense for so long that their brains have been washed into unthinking acceptance and compliance.
Wibble wobble # 6.
Really, that requires no reply, because it’s just an incoherent rant, using all the typical alt-right talking points.
In short, limbic system driven emotion, and no facts
Tried to insert image…
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/7d/d6/b4/7dd6b4ccfb8ed04bff5e8efe1605f544–kettle-pots.jpg
Clover,
You continue to characterize me as a fascist/Nazi – without an iota of evidence to support the claim, which would include arguing in favor of coercive authoritarian government, racialism and so on.
I’m on the verge of banning you because I tire of responding to non sequiturs and ad hominem attacks unsupported by facts.
“I have no problem with governments, making broad and sweeping changes to regulations and subsidies, to encourage people to take up vehicles that do not use finite greenhouse causing fossil fuels.”
In plain English, you want to use government guns in order to force your will onto everyone who does not share your views. In other words, you are a violent predator who is in need of treatment and education. By the way, EV’s will always be much more expensive than an ICE because it costs a lot more to store electricity than it does to generate it. It’s basic physics that most people, such as yourself, do not understand. Comparing i-phones or computer technology to battery technology is absurd because chip technology is 99% intellectual and one percent material while battery technology is 99% raw materials. I support the right of self-defense so that people can defend themselves from violent predators. My guess is that you support gun control because the main purpose of gun control is to protect the most violent predators, the law makers and their enforcement goons.
Well-said, Rick!
And don’t ya just love it? What Peter is essentially saying, is that he supports government’s ability to decide what is best for all, and then enforce impose those decisions on all, by any means necessary.
Funny, he doesn’t seem to notice how throughout history, such scenarios have only resulted in genocide and decline- and have NEVER accomplished anything good (even if one were to be so evil so as to believe that if such did somehow result in positive effects that those means could be justified0- which of course, they could not be.)
Any time a power structure is erected to control the masses- ostensibly always for “their own good”, no good comes of it- and you would think by now, having seen all the modern examples, that no one would fall for such idiocy- but yet they persist, and rush head-long into the abyss, gleefully trading their most valuable resource- personal liberty- for some promised utopia which never materializes…but which instead results in the very opposite of what was hoped for.
The fact that they would do so in regard to EVs is even more disturbing, as it clearly illustrates their cluelessness. What they are essentially proposing, is a forced solution to a problem which doesn’t even exist; and if it did exist, their solution would be no solution, because all it is doing is relocating the generation of power from that of the end user to a centralized location- which not only fails to accomplish the stated goal of “reducing emissions and reducing dependency on fossil fuels”, but would, when accomplished on a mass scale, most likely exacerbate those conditions.
But they clearly haven’t given this an inkling of thought. They just parrot what they hear; what they’ve been told. They haven’t even heard both sides of the argument; much less assessed the situation on their own. If they’ve done any “research”, it is likely only the reading of studies and prophecies of government-funded prophets in white coats, who are all paid to be on the same page (Just like the nutrition studies of the past 40 years- which are now just finally being outed for the junk science they were).
Funny- these types always care so much about “the people” and “the planet” that they are willing to destroy both by aiding the causes of the worst monsters and tyrants, who don’t give a damn about either.
Peter,
Were you aware that the U.S. is on the verge of becoming the world’s greatest producer of oil and a net exporter? The whole “peak oil” con has fallen asunder.
Yet for decades, the same people who are now pushing the “climate change” shibboleth ululated about the imminent scarcity of oil. Turns out they were very badly mistaken. And the abundance of oil obviates any need for “alternatives” – especially those which are much more costly and far less convenient.
I understand you believe in “climate change” – the hysteria, that is. Over a measured 1 percent increase in average temperatures that may or may not be the result of man’s activities – and in apocalyptic worst-case scenarios confected by cynical, power-hungry politicians who (mark this) do not impose energy austerity on themselves.
The argument that “…as technology improves in coming decades, recharging times will be shorter, and distance covered, will be greater” has been rattling around for decades.
I might walk on the surface of the sun one day, too.
But how about today?
Eric, what you find when closely examining the “climate change/global warming” movement is a tissue of lies. Of course environmentalists have been some of the worst liars to come down the pike in the last 50 years, purveying hysterical tales of impending doom which of course never materialize – so they keep moving the goalposts. Instead of “by the 1980s… by the 1990s… by the year 2000” the latest mantra is “we only have 12 years.” To quote the phrase used by scientist Reid Bryson (father of modern climate science) in describing man-made global warming, “It’s a bunch of hooey.”
What you find on close examination of the climate change religion is that it is primarily based on cherry-picked and falsified data fed into faulty computer simulations. In a manner like corrupt prosecutors burying exculpatory evidence, original data is conveniently “lost”, contrary data is discarded. Studies are commissioned that are designed and funded specifically with the goal of “proving” man-made climate change. Make no mistake about it, this is a religion, one that demands its followers make whatever sacrifices the priesthood requires in order to appease their angry god – and also demands that “unbelievers” (or “deniers” as the True Believers like to call them) must be brought to heel.
An example of this: The “climategate” emails from about 10 years ago revealed how a group of “scientists” (more like political hacks) cooked the books to make it appear as though the last century was warming at a dangerous rate. They further plotted to retcon history, looking to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period from the history books, and utilized Wikipedia to attempt a wholesale rewriting of history. They even wanted to have printed history books changed. This is the kind of mindset we are dealing with.
Additionally, when examined closely we find there is no “scientific consensus.” The so-called consensus is fabricated, and scientific dissent is ruthlessly suppressed.
Then we have the climate hucksters themselves making the most damning statements imaginable about their true agenda, such as:
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” – Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
“Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection… The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.” Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair IPCC Working Group III
There’s plenty more, but you get the idea. The bottom line is that the fraud is being purveyed by people who want to use “saving the planet” as an excuse to expedite the wholesale theft of individual liberty and property. Governments salivate at the prospect while useful idiots in the peanut gallery actually believe they are going to take control of the earth’s climate by driving electric cars.
One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is applicable to the endless predictions of doom trotted out by the True Believers:
“In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has
shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore … in the
Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million
three hundred thousand miles long … seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. … There is something fascinating about science. One gets such
wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
fact.”
Awesome post, Jason! I really enjoyed reading that.
Yeah, I remember back in the late 80’s, reading books on sundry and various subjects, and somehow, they’d always get around to quoting some prediction of immanent environmental catastrophe- and that unless such and such was done by the year 2000 (like eliminating private cars) we’d all be freezing to death/sweltering to death/living in a toxic wasteland/starving, by the year 2020.
So, next year, it looks like life as we know it will be radically different! I can just see it- all of those greenies saying “See? Told ya!!”.
And I still remember all of the “We must conserve electricity at all costs” BS from as far back as the late 70’s. See? Now I know why they wanted to conserve it: So they could use it for all of these electric cars!!! (Now things have changed, somehow; Now EVERYTHING must be electric! If you’re not using electricity every minute of every day, something must be wrong with you! 😉 )
Wibble wobble # 7.
“Were you aware that the U.S. is on the verge of becoming the world’s greatest producer of oil and a net exporter?”
On the “verge?”
Not even close, from what I read on ZeroHedge, all those Shale oil companies are up to their eyeballs in debt, and will collapse before you become oil independent.
Most of those Shale oil companies, if not all, only make profit when WTI is above 75 / $80 a barrel.
And with the impending crash of the global economy, the price of oil will go down even further from it’s current low price.
“The argument that “…as technology improves in coming decades, recharging times will be shorter, and distance covered, will be greater” has been rattling around for decades.”
Yes, I remember my grandfather telling me when he bought his first electric current in the 1960’s, and he was complaining that the battery took up most of the room in the boot, and it took all night to charge, and he only drove for 30 minutes…
????????
*Car… oops, autocorrect, I meant to say car of the nineteen sixties.
Clover (I use the honorific because you’ve earned it) –
Debt is an entirely separate matter – irrelevant to the fact that, indeed, the U.S. is on the verge of being the world’s largest producer of oil and a net exporter. Oil supplies are vastly more than touted – and we are in now way “running out.” It’s a fatuous argument because the facts make it obviously fatuous.
And if oil prices go down even more, then gas becomes even cheaper – and EVs even less appealing.
Eric, The Dipshit (I use the honorific because it’s earned it) – when squittering about oil supply is obviously unaware that
”
There’s no shortage of oil in the world right now, with global supplies hitting a record last summer. ”
From
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ap-explains-venezuelan-oil-embargo-could-mean-us-225134103.html
And is ignorant about what the Global Warming scam is about: here are the real goals in the criminals own words
http://www.investors.com/po…
“At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
and
http://www.cfact.org/2017/0…
“Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s fourth summary report released in 2007 candidly expressed the priority. Speaking in 2010, he advised, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.””
Hey Cadillac: Have you ever heard of Sears?
Next up: Cadillacs sold at your nearest Ace Hardware.
Actually that’s not a bad idea.
Computers took off when they stopped being sold at specialty computer stores
and started being sold at department stores.
An EV cadillac may not need a dealer but rather would sell well
without dealer prep and overhead.
Hi Pat,
Cadillac EVs – like all EVs – will only “sell” so long as others are forced to “help” finance their manufacture and purchase.
Heh, your user name (Alger Hiss).
There will be a real slew of Ch. 11 filings in the next two years. GM, GE, Sears, JCP, Macy’s and all the rest of the crap brands. Popcorn and marshmallows ready!
Dealerships utterly detest the BEVs. They only have tires and brakes to really service. I bought a used offlease 2015 Spark EV with ccs charging. It can charge 0-100% soc in about 20-25 minutes, 10-80 is more like 10 minutes. It has a 19kwh battery, not much larger than a current Zero motorcycle. It’s range is about 70 miles mixed in summer, less due to defroster use in winter. BEVs can’t work in their ideal environment for efficiency, which is urban, unless government helps. They are presently a toy of affluent suburbanites that wish to virtue signal. They can be very low cost to operate in some usage patterns, but require a lost art here of being able to accept LESS. Those who do are likely masochists at heart. I like to experiment with edgy things, and BEVs seem to be accessible right now due to low resale value, reusability of parts such as batteries. Also, they are truly international cars, the onboard chargers are all the same, the only difference is the connector is either J1772 or mennekes, for either, purely electrical mapping adapters are available, no transforms needed.
And more from that amazing innovating genius Elon Musk….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs
Musk and alexandria ocasio-cortez are proof that Americans are mentally retarded parasitic children.
Musk is from South Africa.
Africa. That would explain the ‘African engineering’ and the constant lying…..
Here is a good explanation of battery tech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RbwOhM6PUk
The guy is a tax-taker goof, but knows science.
I see 2 year old off-lease Smart EVs for sale for $8000.
Now THAT would be a viable toy since you can’t even get a new golf cart for that amount.
$20,000 for used Cadillac ELRs…pffffft.
While painting a bigger picture in this article, it looks like Mr. Armstrong is with you on the imminent demise of the internal combustion engine:
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/the-clash-between-normal-people-the-global-warming-crowd-green-extremist-overlords/
GM has long proved that “management by consensus” is a sure formula for disaster, though to he fair to GM the other domestic automakers have all had their grim and often bizarre failures. The weird Edsel of the Fifties was perhaps Ford’s most notable example, perhaps followed by AMC with the Pacer (Half a car for price of one!), and more recently the DeLorean and the Bricklin, both of which utterly disappeared altogether a few months after introduction.
I am salivating at the mouth to see Jan 19/Q1 sales reports for the big 3 on trucks. The 2019 Silverado is an abomination and I have only seen 5 (3 Chevy/2 GMC) here in metro Houston since September 2018. I saw 3 new 19 Rams with paper tags on my commute this morning and lost track of the total 2019 Rams I’ve seen in Houston since then. Tick tock Marry
In my area, ya look for used trucks on Craigslist…..all ya see are late-model Chevy’s for sale.
Unfortunately Mr Peters is wrong about so many details in this article that it definitely in the fake news category. First of all, it was well documented that after former Cadillac head Johan de Nysschen was fired in April 2018, they moved back to Detroit in September of 2018. Second, if he would have done the most amateur search of Google, he would have seen that Porsche, Audi, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Bentley and even Ferrari all have future electronic vehicles coming. Not to mention the fact that Tesla has sold over 200,000 cars itself. It’s called keeping up with the Joneses. If anything, they are late to the party as always.
This isn’t the first time I, being a novice, have been able to call out the lack of journalistic integrity Mr Peters has.
Patrick,
Yes, the other companies you mention are also building EVs – but not because of market demand. Because of mandates. They, too, are rushing over the cliff. You seem to have missed the point.
On the NY thing: I merely pointed out that Cadillac moved its HQ to NYC. Which is perfectly true. That the decision was questioned and changed a few months ago doesn’t alter the point – which you missed, again – that Cadillac moved to perhaps the most car-irrelevant place in America.
On Tesla: They have given away those cars, each at a net loss (or would-be loss, absent the subsidies) which is another point you missed.
Eric,
Toyota says the new solid state lithium batteries will be in their cars by 2025. This is an effective new technology with much faster charge times and 500 miles on a charge. it’s a huge advance over the current lithium batteries. Will GM get it right? I doubt it but they won’t fail because of the batteries.
Hi Bernie,
Yeah – but how fast, exactly? And how much? If it’s not as fast as refueling – five minutes or less, to “full” – and costs more than fuel… why bother with it?
This is the question – which no one seems to want to discuss, let alone answer. Are EVs functionally or economically superior to IC cars? If they are not, why would anyone want one – other than for the novelty factor?
Meanwhile….we’re all still waiting for all of those $35K model 3’s that were promised 4 years ago. Oh, what’s that? No one’s gonna get ’em now? [Well, I wasn’t waiting…I wouldn’t have one!]
It’s always some glorious future made possible by a new technology that’s just around the corner…..
Just like we were going to be living in colonies on the Moon by the year 2000 and flying around in hover cars…. How’s that working out?
I love how people keep falling for the same crap, over and over again. Until reality hits….the promised technology either quietly disappears or is greatly delayed; or if brought to fruition, is wracked with impracticalities and problems……
Pie-in-the-sky- to make ya trade what works well and efficiently….for some promised utopia which doesn’t work at all…much lkess, efficiently.
Elon Musk is a genius of a con-man…Or are people just really stupid? How do people so stupid get money for an imaginary $35K model 3 electric toy? Only in America!
Hi Cambo,
People have been lied to. The MSM has presented a fantasy – not reality – while at the same time, tub-thumping that EVs are “inevitable” and The Future…
People are so obsessed with high technology; state-of-the-art this & that; anything with a computer/electronic interface/blinking lights, that it no longer matters if that technology actually works or not; or if it actually offers a benefit or efficiency over an older, simpler way.
100 years ago, the NYC subway was unstoppable and reliable- regardless of the weather or anything else; as was the LIRR (commuter railroad) with manual signals and steam engines…..
Subway cars from 55 years ago are still in service, while much newer ones have been retired…because the old ones still work and are economically viable to maintain and reprair.
Today? (and for a couple of decades now) that system is a mess- The have updated everything over these last few decades, to be computerized; state-of-the-art trains; computerized signals; even the promise of one line that can be operated without a motorman or conductor (Put hundreds of millions of dollars into retrofitting the old line- but it never seems to materialize- and if it ever becomes functional, it’ll take 100 years before the cost is amortized!)
You get on a NYC train today, and it’s absolute chaos- constant detours and reroutes and breakdowns. On the LIRR, where steam trains used to get through blizzards with no problem- the service comes to a halt if leaves fall on the tracks, or it rains moderately (seriously!)….
And YET, you mention to the average NYer that we’d be better off with the technology of 75 years ago…and they stare blankly and then say “Yeah, but we should have modern equipment so that it doesn’t seem like we’re in the Dark Ages”….
Yeah…it doesn’t matter that despite a massive amount of taxpayer wealth pays for all of this crap, and that it takes longer to get where you’re going today (if you get there at all) than it did 75 years ago….and that it’s giotten to the point where half of NYers don’t bother going anywhere on the weekend that requires a trip on the subway, because it’s become so arduous….all that matters is that “we” have nice shiny trains with blinking lights and computers….
Ditto with cars and everything else. Function no longer matters…..
In my basement is a Sear stand up freezer from 1968 (its older then me actually, I’m a 1973 model). My mom bought it used in the early 1980’s from some friend who was moving from a house into a condo and didn’t have room for it. It still looked brand new even though it was already 15 years old. I became it’s third owner sometime in the late 1990’s and it’s still going strong (it doesn’t look new anymore though). It’s never leaked freon, and has never been recharged. (if it does start to leak, its toast because that freon is no longer available).
I doubt that I would have saved money over the years by having a more energy efficient model because I would have had to replace the whole thing twice by now since they don’t last long anymore. It’s more green by lasting a half century instead of being replaced every decade by an machine that may only be 3% more “efficient” than the last. (an existing working item is always more green than any new item). It’s outlasted a washing machine from 2001 and dishwasher from 2004 (both pieces of garbage that never were right even when new).
You got that right, Rich!
My neighbor had a 1968 freezer also (She moved, but I believe that the people now in the house still have it)- Big ol’ chest freezer- I don’t know what brand- but it’s never given them a day’s trouble.
Contrast that with a new one I bought in ’03 when I butchered a steer….. Crapped out in 6 years- and I’m talking the compressor- not a capacitor or something small. Woulda cost almost as much to buy a new compressor as I paid for the freezer!
Yeah…so it used $2 a month in electricity vs. the ’68s $4 or $5 (and mione was a lot smaller than the 68!)…big whoop. Now I guess it’s really “saving me money”, ’cause it ain’t costing me anything to run…since it doesn’t anymore.
Musk has just announced a layoff of 3000 employees/ 7% of workforce due to financial difficulties.
Looks like Uncle better step up to the plate and mandate EVs for everyone.
Did you see his 1950s sci-fi rocket?
It fell over BTW.
If it’s not a con he’s not a genius.
He should become a televangelist.
https://stories.avvo.com/nakedlaw/bizarre/6-outrageously-wealthy-preachers-under-federal-investigation.html
I wish people could understand physical matters like Specific Energy and how dangerous it is to have a 100kw bomb underneath you.
Batteries really don’t blow up. Lithium cells when either shorted or over charged/ discharged will first expand/Puff up and then flame.
I’ve seen this happen numerous times with people flying electric R/C planes.
Done it myself.
In the case of EVs it creates a cascade effect. No stopping it.
I don’t think Patrick was missing these points, I think Patrick is just steeped in conformation bias.
“Yes, the other companies you mention are also building EVs – but not because of market demand. Because of mandates. ”
A mandate is a market… You may not like it, but when the “Gubmint” makes every house get an indoor toilet, that’s a market… When the ‘Damn Gubmint” makes houses
get Smoke Detectors it’s a market. A lot of money has been made on GFI outlets, and
fire extinguishers and seatbelts….
Pat,
A mandate creates an artificial market – and that is a perversion of the concept of a market. Such perversions existed in the Soviet Union. Do you advocate such here?
A market – properly speaking – involves the free exchange of goods and services; each party obtains a net value, that defined by their willingness to participate in the exchange. If they are not willing – and the exchange is force – the idea of “value” becomes as risible as being a “customer” of the IRS.
The “market” you describe” is merely wealth transfer – based on coercion. There is no value in forcing the manufacture of things which cannot be sold absent a requirement they be bought. What you defend is fundamentally akin to rolling the printing presses to manufacturer more money (paper currency)… something is created, but value is lost.
China is a mandate, it’s a car market with 20 Million unit sales/year and
the Chinese have mandated 100% EV Sales in 5 years.
So, GM is chasing that.
Hi Pat,
Yes, it’s a mandate – but it is not a “market” anymore than I “contribute” to Social Security. Words (definitions) matter – because they are the articulation of concepts. And forcing people to build – and buy – something is the antithesis of a market. To speak of what goes on in China as a “market” is to endow it with a legitimacy it does not possess.
Exactly, Eric. It’s like Obamacare: Government forcing people to buy something they don’t want/need/would be cheaper on the free market….while dictating to the providers of said product the specifications of their product- as opposed to letting a free market determine what may be offered and at what price.
EVs and their promotion/subsidization are the transportation version of Obamacare!
While you bask in the full fury of Ayn Rand, GM is looking at
selling 20 Million units of EVs a year in China, or more importantly
not getting locked out of the China market.
You are welcome to rant all you want. Please, type away in righteous fury. Meanwhile real adults working in business are trying to move product.
By the way… Mr “Purity of Market”. I hope you walk everywhere,
requesting permission from private landowners to pass and avoiding public roads and sidewalks… Oh what? You like publically funded roads? What about the market for roads? Why aren’t you driving only
on privately owned roads? After all, that is supporting private enterprise
and ending your addiction to socialism
Pat,
Rand has nothing to do with this.
You keep missing the point. GM is exploiting mandated demand in an authoritarian country – and using American taxpayer dollars to finance it. Why should Americans be forced to finance GM’s “growth” in China?
Is this laudable?
Characterizing yourself as a “real adult” for not objecting to this – and by implication, those who do object as infantile – is typical of people who don’t mind (as the saying goes) breaking eggs to make omelettes. The eggs being other people’s resources and even lives.
Do you remember 2008, Pat? When GM went belly up – and begged the government to steal money from the American people to prop it up – in order to save American jobs? What happened to that, Pat? You will say that GM repaid the loan, which is true. But beside the point. And then there is the fundamental point about EVs being fundamentally not viable – unless they are heavily subsidized and their manufacturer mandated and alternatives effectively outlawed via regulatory fiat. You seem to believe – as many EV touters do – that everyone (including the Chinese) can somehow afford to buy $30,000-plus electric cars, which is risible. You are talking about a near-doubling of the cost of the current typical IC economy car (tripling it in China, where you can buy a new economy car for about $9,000 U.S).
How do “real adults” square this math? Or do you – like so many EV people – simply assume everyone’s a six-figure tech worker and so ought to have no trouble absorbing a 50 percent (or more) increase in the cost of a car?
I once admired GM. It used to make cars for the market – in response to buyer demand. It owned – legitimately, because without coercion – 50 percent of the North American market. Today, the entire enterprise has less market share than Chevrolet division had in 1970. Interesting, isn’t it?
GM came to love Big Brother – and Big Sister, too. It stopped focusing on its customers and began to hump the leg of the government. Today, it is an adjunct of the government, or might as well be. It cares more about mulcting people via mandates – and genuflecting before politically correct shibboleths such as “diversity” – than it does about designing and building cars for the market. Which explains its diminishing market share – and its increasing reliance on mandates and subsidies, to force people to buy its products, whether directly or indirectly.
As far as your comments in re the roads: See my article on the subject. Roads are actually very Libertarian – in principle at least. They can be (and have been) built without coercion and funded via non-coercive user fees, paid as you go.
You’ll notice – perhaps – I have not called you names, but rather presented facts and made arguments based on them.
It is what “real adults” ought to do.
“GM is exploiting mandated demand in an authoritarian country – and using American taxpayer dollars to finance it. ”
Yes and American-Standard is exploiting mandated demand in every County in the US by selling toilets.
Modern US Building code since the 50’s has mandated an indoor operable flush toilet in every dwelling unit in the US.
Are you going to go on a rant about American-Standard humping the leg of Government?
” You seem to believe – as many EV touters do – that everyone (including the Chinese) can somehow afford to buy $30,000-plus electric cars, which is risible. You are talking about a near-doubling of the cost of the current typical IC economy car (tripling it in China, where you can buy a new economy car for about $9,000 U.S).”
http://www.impactlab.net/2019/01/20/chinese-company-unveils-worlds-cheapest-electric-car-for-under-9000/
and GWM is rolling out a $9K EV for the China Market. I would suggest you spend more time
on Planet Reality and less time in some fabian debating society where every EV costs $140K and goes 20 miles and takes three days to charge.
It’s rather amusing watching people like you ranting about reality…
Long diatribes about China and Mandates. Get a clue. China is a communist country. It’s a great big communist country. You know that dreaded socialism? Oh and China is now the second largest
global economy. Bigger then Japan… Oh? Right. Bigger then Germany..
While you are ranting about Mandates, China is building the worlds largest electric bus fleets, High speed rail and EV Car charging networks. But you ranting about Mandates, and oh that awful GM loan in 2008. That’s so 2008… Meanwhile GM has been dealing with 10 years of reality.
Yes GM lost market share. GM has lost market share to companies like VW and BMW. Oh BMW is doing a full electric strategy? You are whining about the Horse and Buggy and while the players are changing technology.
What makes a better business case? Being the best Gas car manufacturer in China in 5 years or being the 2nd best electric car manufacturer in China in 5 years?
make your argument. You are so smart… I want to hear that.
Clover,
The point is that mandating (forcing) people to buy or subsidize anything is morally wrong on the face of it.
Unless you take the position that you have the right to threaten to harm other people in order to provide you a material benefit, or to benefit something you consider “good.” In which case, you’re a thug. One without the courage to do the stealing and coercing on your own, of course. Rather, a poltroon who hides behind the ballot box and hugs the pants leg of proxies (politicians and bureaucrats) who do the wet work you’re afraid to do yourself.
There is demand for toilets, Clover. Real, authentic demand. Thus, a market. A Toilet Mandate is not necessary nor ever has been.
There is almost no real demand for EVs; just forced production and subsidization. That GM is exploiting this does not detract from the vileness of it. GM has become a make-work operation and shakedown racket, all at the same time.
The $9k EV you linked to? One, it is a concept car – not an actual – car. One that can be bought, I mean. Two, if it ever turns out to be actual and delivers on its promises, then it would be superior to current IC econo-compacts and not require subsidies or mandates. How about we eliminate them, in that case?
Your entire argument is premised on an obvious absurdity: If EVs are so very good (let alone superior) mandates and subsidies would not be necessary. And yet, they are vital – without them, the “market” for EVs would all but disappear. You know it as well as I know it.
EVs are not new; they have been around for more than 100 years. They remain inferior to IC cars, if the measures are cost/convenience/practicality. Which is why they cannot compete on the merits.
That is the bottom line reality, Clover.
China is building infrastructure, yes. Absolutely – on the backs of people who exist to serve the state and its new crony capitalist adjunct.
You desire the same here. I do not. I prefer free exchange and non-coercion.
“There is demand for toilets, Clover. Real, authentic demand. ”
No there isn’t. For most of the history of this country, we didn’t have indoor flush toilets, sewer systems or water treatment plants.
For most of the world there aren’t indoor flush toilets. (Africa, South America, Mexico, Indonesia, India,) Billions of people live without flush toilets.
You also betray that you have never worked outdoors in any hard job. Construction sites, mining, Agriculture, road construction these are all work sites without flush toilets. If there was a real natural organic demand, mines would have flush toilets…
They don’t have them because the workers can’t demand them and the employers don’t want to pay for them.
You would know this but, i guess you have never done any hardcore physical activity in your life.
“The $9k EV you linked to? One, it is a concept car – not an actual – car. One that can be bought, I mean. ”
You also betray you know nothing about car manufacturing. All cars start as concept cars. They show them off, if the press and customers like them, well, then they try and sell them.
Oh, and if in 5 years Electric cars are at 100% of the chinese market and GM is selling in that market and decides to start exporting from China EVs to the US, what are you going to say? Are you going to say “Eric Peters screwed the pooch here?”
Are you going to say “Wow, um, I guess I missed this technology evolution?”
“I prefer free exchange and non-coercion.” Okay. Stop taking my tax money to build roads in your hick county. Refund 100% of the federal gas tax and let your chunk of hickville pay for it’s own roads
and it’s own bridges….
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704913304575370950363737746
“”When [counties] had lots of money, they paved a lot of the roads and tried to make life easier for the people who lived out here,” said Stutsman County Highway Superintendant Mike Zimmerman, sifting the dusty black rubble through his fingers. “Now, it’s catching up to them.”
There you go.. Move to Stutsman ND. You can freely associate on wether you want a paved road..
although you really do belong in Yemen. No Government there.
Clover,
The fact that flush toilets aren’t everywhere (as at constructions sites and mines) doesn’t mean there’s no market demand for them. They may not make sense at a temporary work site. Hence portable toilets. But it’s neither here nor there.
As others have already pointed out, toilets were invented – and offered for sale on the market successfully – long before any building codes mandating their installation in new home construction. No mandate is necessary for toilets to be a successful (not subsidized) product on the free market.
Facts.
EVs exist as other than high-dollar curiosities only because of mandates and subsidies.
Fact.
Whether I have or have not done “hard core physical work” bears on exactly nothing, Clover – at least as regards the topic under discussion.
But for the record, I’ve been a roofer and unloaded UPS trucks, both plenty active.
And if you want to compare dick length or bench press max, I’m down for that, too.
On concept cars: They are for show, Clover – and may or may not be built and what ends up actually being offered for sale is often very different from what is shown at a car show.
If you knew anything about the car business. You’d know this. So either you know little about the car business, or you posted that example – the “$9k EV” – for deliberately misleading reasons.
Finally: You write that I live in “hickville.”
Note that it’s you – not I – hurling racial/ethnic slurs.
Here you go, Clover… just for you!
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2019/01/26/what-cadillac-should-have-done-and-still-could/
I’m so sick of this virulent scum [exemplified by Patb] whose lack of intelligence and morality makes them worse than the plantation slave-owners (whom they would no doubt feign disgust for), because they unabashedly advocate and foster slavery for all of humanity (At least the plantation slavers only enslaved a few people).
First off Pat, building codes (such as mandate terlits) which dictate how others choose to live, or how they order what is supposed to be their property, only exist because authoritarian scum such as yourself have erected a humongous infrastructure of organized crime which we call ‘government’ to so force people to comply with your will; or what YOU feel ‘is best’.
Having grown up in a place where one has to pay $750 (!!!!) to the local elected cartel just for permission to have a waterheater installed in their own home [That is how the cartel works- They make mandates which not only require you to buy products and services, and live in a certain manner- but then they charge you for permission to even do what they mandate; while taxing you to live in your own home, so you can pay their salary…) I moved, as soon as I was able, to a place where there are no building codes, so I can do what I want on my own property, and not have to ask anyone for permission to do as I please with what is mine (and such places are becoming very rare- almost non-existent here in the US).
And guess what? I CHOOSE to have a terlit. In fact, I have 2 of them. No one has to force me to buy those terlits; no one has to force others to partially pay for them; no one is forced to subsidize their manufacture.
This country was full of terlits long before any places other than Boston and NY had building codes. Now, unfortunately, all this country is full of -much like yourself- is SHIT!
Hey, but if it makes you feel any better, this state did persecute some Amish a few counties over, for not having indoor plumbing in their private, non-tax-funded school! (You would have loved it! You could have brought a lawn chair and a pennant, and rooted for the state!).
There’s literally no difference between you and a Mafia hit-man, except that you justify the crimes of which you approve because you think that iof they are committed by certain men who somehow have the moral right to do something to others which you do not have the right to do, that it makes it legit.
Thanks for the back-up, Nunz!
Hiya Nunz!
The key difference between people like us (Libertarians, anarchysts) and people like Pat (socialists, corporatists) is not that we have wildly differing ideas as regards what’s desirable, how people ought to interact but that people like Pat insist on forcing their views on others while we are content to leave people like Pat free to practice socialism… among themselves (like-minded people) provided they leave us out of their schemes.
Exactly, Eric. That is the simple truth of the matter.
Regardless of what we may prefer, or think to be right or correct or judicious, we want nothing other than the most basic right that all humans should have -both for ourselves and all others- and that is simply the right to be left alone to order our lives as we see fit; and to allow all others- whether we agree with their decisions and actions or not, to be free to do the same.
*They* on the other hand, advocate the use of violence, murder, coercion and theft to force others to do what *they* see as being ‘the proper thing’- or to force them to do what some consensus thinks is right and proper; or to manipulate certain groups to force them to provide some benefit to another group (who *they* also control)- thus *they* are inherently violent, larcenous manipulators.
It may not occur to some slower types that that is what it boils down to, at first (Although it is pretty obvious- I mean, most of us figure it out when we’re kids: Don’t pay your taxes, and what happens? Some men with guns come and take you away, and take your stuff) – but at least by the time they’re in their teens, they should see this, unless they’re mentally retarded or something.
I mean, it was easy enough to see when I was a kid in the 70’s- when the tyranny was much lighter and gentler than today; back then, the adults would tell you “Be thankfull you don’t live in the USSR where the police can break down your door in the middle of the night for virtually any little thing”.
Well, today, that tyranny is much more in their face. Little children being handcuffed, tazed and tackled for minor school misbehaviors; SWAT teams destroying people’s lives and houses- not of violent hostage-taking criminals- but just the average person; Parents getting arrested for merely letting their kids play outside; “safety” roadblocks and ‘checkpoints’- East German style; Every aspect of our lives controlled and surveilled and taxed; with a swift boot to the ass for the least little transgression. Zealots of particular political ideologies openly advocating genocide, violence and death for those on the other side (Whole they claim to be ‘tolerant’ )…..
All that, and yet they get huffy and defensive when we point out that they are the purveyors and enablers and slavery, tyranny, violence and death- all the while decrying (and rightfully so) the slave-owner of 200 years ago for doing no more to a few niggers….
Yet they want to do the same to everyone, on a worldwide basis- and think that that is no crime.
They’ll decry Hitler (But rarely Stalin, for some reason… :o), and yet advocate for the erection of the very same power structure that enabled such men- because “their brand of tyranny is better or more humane” or something, than Hitler’s or Stalin’s…
Damn fools!
This most basic of issues separates the innocent from the evil. Once one sees that the political system in which they participate, and which they uphold and advocate, is nothing more than a way of ‘legally’ manipulating sentient human beings via the use of threats, coercion, violence, murder and theft; and still continue to support that philosophy and legitimize it, for what ever reason, they have accepted those crimes as being ‘moral’ and legit, as long as they are used to bring about the results that *they* desire- which, they rationalize “are best”- therefore somehow justifying the use of what ever force may be necessary to impose them upon any who would resist them.
And then they wonder why all these centuries of such; all the money expended; all the technology, has not somehow brought about the utopia- their own personal version of which they’re always trying to shove down everyone else’s throat.
But that’s all that politics amounts to: Using force to manipulate and control others. Right, left, socialist, communist, constitutionalist, conservative, neocon…whatever- anything but Libertarianism/Anarchy/Voluntaryism is nothing more than just arguing about which particular details one wants to force upon everyone else.
Why don’t you move to Somalia? You would be much happier.
It is interesting, Clover, that you constantly resort to threats and insults… because of course you can’t deploy facts (or morality) to defend your positions.
Why should those of us who simply wish to be left in peace and not forced to finance your next EV (as well as your current one) be forced to leave or cede the country to you? We aren’t trying to force you to do (or pay for) anything.
You, on the other hand….
And Somalia? It is afflicted by exactly what you advocate – murderous violence rather than peaceful coexistence.
Somalia? If I wanted to live amongst violent thieving niggers who shit in the street, I would have stayed in NYC. [Maybe they need building codes to force them to purchase terlits!]
Nice reply though, when you have no actual valid points to rebut what we say…..
Building codes exist not only ostensibly to promote public s-a-a-a-a-a-f-t-e-e-e-e, but also to put in features than hopefully will forestall fires, or at least human injury or death thanks to them, or building collapse (earthquake, a real concern here in CA), more to protect the INSURANCE industry from payouts. Beyond what any “code” requires, a builder can build a dwelling like Fort Knox, provided he can sell it at a profit.
It’s all too apparent that one does not need a sufficient IQ to gain the top of the corporate ladder. Only a willingness to step over bodies on the way up.
I first becam awar of GM’s management lunacy when it allowed the bean counters to design or redesign the newest entry into the small car market back in the 70s with the Vega. A literal POS if ever there was one. My older brother bought one…he was a rotary wing mechanic (and pilot) in the Army and was taking auto mechanics at a local community college so he knew a thing or two about maintenance.
Unfortunately the Vega did not. Within 24K it needed a drink of 10W every 40 miles. Within two years every body panel had rusted through. I believe he got a new engine and replaced body panels courtesy GM.
As for me I’ll stick with vans. My first being a 67 Chevy with 283 window van with Positrac…..useless on Northern Michigan roads though. I wish I still had that little beast. With the 283 and being as light as it was, it would get up and go.
My parents had a Vega. Car did leak and burn oil. The oil slick on the driveway was there after the car was long gone. It did make it 8 years and 92K if I recall. The guy who bought it fixed it up and flipped it. So it probably did go on for a while longer.
It’s design was sound. It’s execution was horrific. The only poor design choice was the aluminum block without sleeves. If manufactured properly it was fine. However at GM quality levels at Vega volumes it often was not. Rust protection was probably cut for cost.
A Vega made with today’s materials and coatings with one of the modern small engines in 200+ hp range would probably be a fun car. Small, RWD, MT, simple, light weight. No airbags.
GM did make a sorta high performance Vega, don’t remember what it was called.
It wasn’t a Lockheed Vega.
Siriusly folks…….
Now I remember it was the Cosworth Vega.
Pelosi has been planning for this for over a decade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAqPMJFaEdY
The Vega name was dropped in ’74 and for 1975 the car was Re-Badged as the Monza, 2+2, and Spyder, equipped with cast iron 2.5L 4-cylinders or an optional 262 small block V-8. Pontiac also sold it as the Astre, Buick as the Skyhawk, and Olds as the Starfire. I had a ’75 Nova Custom with that 262, and it was an excellent motor. (until they turned it into the 305 in mid-’76, complete with crappy head castings that cracked, and piss-poor timing gears and camshafts)
In fact, Pontiac also dropped the Aster name and rebadged it as the first Sunbird, in 1977 or ’78. The whole line was canned in favor of the Chevette/T1000 Platform in ’79, I believe. The Sunbird name came back when Pontiac got tired of the first year J2000 name for their rebadged Cavalier, lol!
Actually the Vega continued until 1977. Sometime, in 1976 or 1977, the Vega got a NEW engine, the 151 CID four-banger with a more conventional IRON BLOCK, IRON HEADS, and OHV layout, much akin to the similar but not-the-same 153 CID Four-Banger used in the Chevy II (early NOVA) back in ’62, it was an option which came ONLY with a three-on-the-tree or a Powerglide automatic. This new engine which actually endured for about 25 years (and I think is still sold in industrial and marine applications) as the “Iron Duke”, to counter the awful reputation the GM 2300 OHC four got (deservedly).
The Chevy Monza was a sportier car, based on the Vega chassis but with different sheet metal and trim. It actually looked quite good for its time but many were already shying away from the 4 cylinder models. Chevy also offered a ‘staid’ version of their small-block V8, a 262 CID, two-barrel which ‘produced’, to use the term mockingly, a measly 110 horsepower. To further add insult to injury, to change the rear spark plugs, one had to unbolt the engine mounts and jack up the engine about two inches! I shit you not…
And yes, the other GM divisions sold their badge-engineered versions of this relatively good-looking vehicle which was still a mechanic’s and car owner’s nightmare.
Wow, I never knew that they used the Iron Duke in the Vega! Talk about opposite extremes! Then U guess the bodies just rusted away, but if ya could throw a saddle on the engine, ya’d be fine!
I was gonna mention the Monza spark plug thing…but I kinda figgered that it had lost it’s impact these days when people are used to such absurdities- like pick-ups that ya have to take the cab off of to change the turbo or a head….and cars where ya have to pull the engine to do change the oil pan or gasket…..
The Monza was actually designed for GM’s Wankel rotary engine. (I have an old Popular Science magazine featuring that on the cover.) Obviously those plans fell through when the General cancelled their rotary project and the Monza was sold with conventional engines.
The AMC Pacer (LOL) was designed for the Wanker[sic] rotary engine too.
The car companies did all of that bumblefuckery on their own, and then quickly abandoned it when they saw that it wasn’t a good idear [Well, except for Mazda…].
Imagine if those endeavors had been backed by subsidies and regulations? We’d probably be driving the abortions that they abandoned!
I worked for a dealer 1974/1975. They had a mechanic that did nothing but warranty rebuilds on Vegas. There was a waiting list.
The Monza was a different car. The V8 version was pretty dang peppy as I recall from driving the new unsold ones back and forth from the storage lot.
consequence, I’ve wondered how many Vegas might have been sold had they stuck a small block V8 in a model. It was designed for one so some added body stiffening and heavier front end parts and they’d had a fast car.
I liked the looks of them and thought long and hard about doing the swap.
A guy up the road from me made the complete kit but I can’t call his name. A friend had one of the Cosworth jobs and it was pretty fast plus had a better transmission.
Well, they actually managed to sell quite a few Vegas before people realized that the engines were crap: hence, the full-time mechanic (this in just one small/mid size city) rebuilding all those engines on warranty!
Hi Eric – I haven’t followed your blog on a regular basis but enjoy reading it every time I do.
This story seems to have similarities to what happened at Opel. I worked for Opel for more than ten years and it always struck me that the genuine obstacle to success was leadership – which began in Detroit but found yes-men to run Opel with the same lack of principles.
Perhaps you’d like to put out a piece on GM’s leadership at Opel (loss making for almost two decades) and the contrast with the recent take-over by PSA Groupe and the swift return to profitability?
I’d appreciate it, perhaps others might also.
Hi Aaron,
Stick around, my man! Because we’ve got to stick together to get through what’s coming… !
Money is just too hard to come by these days to waste it on anything GM makes.
…And by the way, Cadillac does not even know how to produce Luxury. The last retarded MBA babblers that ran that place in NYC thought they could fool smart wealthy customers into buying their “Chevrolets with a $15K Cadillac badge” with…here’s where it gets really stupid…Con-Man Advertising!
I was at an auto show several years ago and sat in both a CTS and a Lexus ES. The Caddy had lots of exposed metal visible in the interior (window frames, mostly). And the plastics used were of low quality. Yet they were asking slightly *more* money than the Lexus. And Lexus has the famous 5-star dealer treatment, while Cadillac does not.
A company that seems to “get” American luxury these days is Lincoln. I recently sat in both a Continental and a Navigator, and they were fantastic. They’re very well designed, and really show off the firm’s return to restrained elegance. The only thing that I didn’t care for (and it’s so trivial it’s not really worth mentioning) were the grocery bag clips in the rear that had a bit of excess “flash” around the edges from the molding process. 5 minutes with a nail file would have fixed it.
Agree with Lincoln ‘getting’ luxury. They look very nice, with fantastic interiors. In fact, even the new Explorer/Expedition (same platform) look really good both inside and out, and both Lincoln and Ford seem to have the powertrain strategy sorted for these cars and the F Series trucks. Including hybrid I see.
The sad part? Ford won’t bring them to Australia. We have vast spaces of land (mostly arid, but still a lot with agriculture and huge amounts of gravel roads in our wheatbelts) where their size would be welcome. Since we lost domestic manufacturing of Falcon, Ute and Territory, we did get the Mustang, but the rest of the US Ford SUV/Truck range (and Lincoln!) would be Very Nice Things to have indeed.
For my 2 Aussie cents, I’d prefer the Lincoln over a Range Rover – nevermind that Landcruiser owns the bush and outback.
Don’t you get some great Toyota trucks that aren’t available in the US?
– I do recall seeing them when ISIS was debuted with their 100 plus convoy crossing Iraq during the early years of Barry the Kenyan and thinking that the CIA could at least buy American.
Agreed…Lincoln has finally figured Luxury with their latest models.
For a good laugh…Sit in a Chevy Impala and then in a Cadillac CT6.
The last Freakish MBA Goofballs that ran Cadillac (Johan de Nysschen and Melody Lee) thought showing deranged hipster monkey-children in ugly and rundown intercity environments was going to sell Cadillacs. How do you get more stupid than that? Seriously.
Hi Cambo,
I don’t think they’re stupid in the conventional sense (lacking intelligence). Rather, I think they are highly paid Babbits and poltroons, who have an almost instinctive – and reflexive – ability to understand and conform to whatever the current PC orthodoxy is. Few in corporate America dare express the slightest hesitation about “diversity,” or the inevitability of EVs – because Climate Change.
Indeed, rabid enthusiasm for these things is how one rises and becomes rich.
Eric, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the highly-edumacated and or those who are content to operate within the corporate/gov’t agency environs, is that they believe what they’ve been taught; what they are told.
No reading between the lines; no comparing of actual results with stated objectives; no speculating as to ulterior motives. Everything is black and white to them.
Academia can be used to promote the search for truth and acquisition of knowledge…or it can be used to indoctrinate and peddle BS. It has obviously been used for the latter for quite some time.
One of my cousins was VP of a big advertising agency in NY. I had only met the guy maybe two or three times in my life- and most of those being when I was a kid. Thought he was pretty sharp and had a good handle on things.
Recently re-established contact with him; even perused the book on management which he wrote. Holy crap! The guy, now in his late 60’s, has the simplicity of a child! He just believes everything at the most superficial level- without question (He even bought a hybrid)…virtually ANYTHING spewed by the media/academia/government is lapped-up without question or scrutiny; and to top it all off, the guy’s personal life is a living hell- I live 100x better than he does! He has virtually nothing to show for his decades of corporate servitude…I doubt he’s even worth more than I am financially at this point….
And so for my black friend, who has four degrees.
And so my [other] friend’s Ph. D. neighbor.
So for my cousin’s boss [president of the ad agency, whom I met years ago].
These people are like freaking CHILDREN! By fully investing in the modern edumacational system, they’ve become the simplistic tools (or should I say ‘fools’?) of the state- eager to do what Uncle and his disseminated rantings decree is judicious and proper. They are incapable of independent thought.
I am not using hyperbole here; I an being dead serious.
My millionaire friend on the other hand, who bought a Mack dump truck right out of high-school, he has more knowledge/understanding; a better life; and much more money than any of the above-mentioned poindexters…..
So…it is NO surprise to me as to why so many of these corporations are making absurd decisions and or dropping like flies.
“Eric, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the highly-edumacated and or those who are content to operate within the corporate/gov’t agency environs, is that they believe what they’ve been taught; what they are told”
Precisely…They can memorize but they can’t think rationally.
These are the same indoctrinated robots that used highlight pens at University…a tell tail of unthinking indoctrination. The constant squeak of highlighters across paper was maddening in study halls…To the scientists and engineers who were trying to figure physical reality.
Morning, Cambo (and Nunz!) –
Carlin – a liberal, but a cynical and smart one – explained in earthy language what is wanted: Obedient workers. The entire government (Prussian) school model is based on the idea. It is the deliberate enemy of the classic liberal idea of teaching critical thinking. It is disjointed, subjective; rote memorization. Training, as one trains a dog. So he’ll obey commands.
Mark Reuss, like all corporations in our Fascist system, has a government gun to his head…What else do you expect him to say if he wants to preserve his career and even his physical life. What would Mussolini and Stalin do? White men are the new Jews in Nazi Germany.
Resistance is Futile. You will be subjugated in the NWO thousand-year-Reich Borg Collective, or you will die.
Hi Cambo,
I wonder about that – often. This idea that a guy like Reuss “has no choice.” He is (or should be) a very rich guy. Surely, he has enough money to live on – very comfortably – for the rest of his life. Why not speak your mind, be a man? If he got fired, so what? He’s in his 60s, he’s rich… he no longer needs the money. Or ought not to. He could strike a blow, at little real cost to himself.
It’s guys like me – who are not very rich, who do need the money – who face a much harder choice.
Too many people always live on the edge of their income. Doesn’t matter what it is. They spend it all and borrow more against future income. That’s why the rental economy doesn’t bother most people these days. They are used to living on that edge anyway.
It’s only those of us who live with less that can actually have the option to speak.
Eric, I think the acquisition of money becomes an end in itself to many of these people.
Look at Warren Buffet- one of the richest men in the world- worth BILLIONS. He lives in a modest home and lives on about $100K a year. He could spend a million dollars a day, and still never be able to spend all of his money in his lifetime.
So what is the point of him doing anything to actively maintain and increase wealth?
He’ll die, and all of that wealth be given away and or left to others, and be scavenged by Uncle.
I live on next to nothing…and I’m perfectly content. Not that there’s anything wrong with either extreme, or anything in between- but I just don’t “get” what the point is, to collecting wealth- whether one lives lavishly (which is a very hollow pursuit) or modestly, like Buffet. Why bother?
I guess he realizes global socialism/fascism is the future and wants to succeed in the system…Even if he has to make a fool of himself by basically saying “the total failure Cadillac ELR is the future”.
The collapse of the USA is shocking. How can Americans sleep now?
What should Americans do? What will happen? How do you prepare? How do you resist tyranny?
We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. Americans are running out of options. The elites have taken control of the government, media, and the corporations. The 1% will not stop until everyone is enslaved or dead.
The US, like China, is a police state where no one has rights and anyone can be tortured, arrested, killed, or have their property stolen by the state at any time. Most people prefer to ignore it and pretend everything is fine, though.
Americans are too lazy and scared to protest, but even if 10 million Americans protested in Washington, our overlords would use water cannons, tear gas, torture, guns, and prisons to crush it.
Americans could use guerrilla warfare and snipers to attack the government and elites, but the government could use the guns, fighter jets, helicopters, drones, aircraft carriers, tanks, and nuclear bombs that the American taxpayers paid for against the rebels. Americans, like the Soviets, could just give up, drop out, pretend to work, stop paying taxes, and start disobeying the law and the whole rigged system could collapse.
Another option to escape tyranny as conditions worsen is for Americans to just lay low, become stateless and nameless, and wander the world as nomads.
Part of the reason Americans are not resisting now is that they are defeated, degraded, divided, and distracted. Why go out and risk getting arrested and killed fighting tyranny when they have weed, beer, food stamps, A/C, and TV? Young people don’t care about freedom because they think living in a police state is normal and old people don’t care because they will be dead soon. Only middle-aged people who know what freedom was like and might be still alive for another 30-40 years seem to care.
The USA has crossed the line, but knowing when the revolution starts is difficult because the growth of the police state has been gradual.
Until the government closes churches or burns books, or you get beaten by the police or your friend is shot by the FBI, Americans may not really believe that they live in a police state.
The ruling class and the media have studied history well and have slowly chipped away freedom over the past 50 years. The media plays Americans like a fiddle. The elites can manipulate Americans to give up their freedom easily.
All the government needs to do to get Americans to give up their guns is to use a real or staged shooting and non-stop 24/7 news coverage about the dangers of guns and play slanted stories about the success of gun laws in Australia or Japan to get Americans to register their guns this year and then use another shooting next year to convince Americans to accept gun confiscation and microchip implants.
If the elites want to make Americans give up their freedom then they take the worst case and use endless stories maximizing the dangers of a tragedy and minimizing and ignoring the arguments for liberty.
If the 1% wants all men to register as sex offenders, the media will use a horrifying story about a white man who raped and killed a 7 year old girl.
The ruling class can print any amount of money to fund high salaries or give benefits to pay cops and soldiers to arrest or fire on Americans. The elites can lower standards so that low IQ people, felons, illegal immigrants, and tattooed people can join the military or become police officers. The 1% can use the UN to round up Americans if they can’t recruit enough cops and soldiers.
The media may soon use stories about mandatory Ebola quarantines or a Russian invasion to brainwash Americans to go to government concentration camps willingly.
The water and electricity still works and government checks are still good now, but when the US Ponzi economy crashes, riots break out, food runs out, and a civil war and WWIII starts, Americans will wish that they had planned and prepared better.
Americans need to be like the founding fathers now and do everything they can to fight for freedom. Nothing is more important than freedom. Everyone is born for a reason.
The US economy will collapse and Americans will go to the concentration camps, the question is when?
Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
Aside from submitting like the bulk of the sheeple, the only real choices are to leave or to fly under the radar to the extent possible. You’re not going to win a direct confrontation.
I know a number of people who have left for places that, while they may not exactly be Galt’s Gulch, have governments that lack the virtually infinite resources of the Federal Mafia for imposing tyranny and persecuting refuseniks.
Exactly, Jason.
The level of tyranny we now have here, can only be achieved by:
a)Gradualism; The mass brainwashing and cultural retraining of the majority over the course of several generations- which requires lots of time; abundant resources; and a huge build-up of government infrastructure in order to take advantage of and maintain the results…
or:
b)Violent overthrow of a society; which generally doesn’t work as well, as it makes it very apparent to it’s victims that there is an enemy, and who exactly he is; and also requires a great amount of resources.
Most small third-world countries (or even larger ones) simply don’t have the resources or infrastructure, even if they were to have the desire.
And what tyrannies such places do impose, are thus very limited, and don’t affect one’s day-to-day life- even in many of the communist countries (Not that I’d recommend them, of course!). You can have more freedom on the streets of Cuba than here in the US. You can live freer in Laos than here….. (Yeah, there are unnecessary hardships and economic prohibitions imposed…but day-to-day life is actually far freer than it currently is here.)
What do you expect? Give a determined gang of terrorist psychopaths, that call themselves “Government”, a Central Bank money counterfeit racket and then wonder why they end up owning everything and everyone.
They will always win.
USA citizens were “free”only when they’ve killed at” free” the Red-Skins and Buffalo , but they never have been free.
The slavery of the Big Capital and -ism has made them the perfect slave ever imagined.
The rest is the fairy-tales for the imbecile peoples.
Hi Alexandru,
Americans were more free – and recently, too. Their property and persons were more respected than in most other countries; not perfectly by any means – but, more so than in Europe and elsewhere. In everyday life, they were less pestered, harassed and controlled than most people.
All of that is gone now, of course…and America is less free than most other places and the average American is more pestered, harassed and controlled than people are in Russia or China.
If I could stand the cold weather and could speak a little Russian, I’d be moving over there. Or somewhere else in Eastern Europe. Apparently, Eastern European people still like their freedom. Unlike Americans. I became even more thoroughly disgusted with Americans in the long 18 year aftermath of 911. In the early days of the TSA, I remember bitching about having to take off my shoes and some NY bimbo told me that it was good for safety and we would be able to prevent more attacks. What bullshit. If you look at any measure, of quality, you don’t inspect every article. You take a random sample. The stupid bitch was endorsing her own enslavement. I am thorougly disgusted with Americans in general. And Europeans and Canadians. as a whole.
Ditto and amen, Swamp… the whole TSA Submission Training thing was a bellwhether. I never would have believed Americans – most of them, anyhow – would accept such degradation and obvious conditioning.
I grew up in the days when TV and movies were still fighting WW2. Whether it was accurate or not, I remember the horrible scenes of Nazi civilian checkpoints.
The TSA is like living in one of those old movies about the Nazis! How can ANYONE not be appalled?
BTW, the worst I’ve seen is the basement tunnel TSA at LAX if your not a “preferred” traveler and get to go through the line upstairs.
And to think that some Murcans actually feel sorry for these thieving sex assailants, bringing them pizza and gift certificates to restaurants.
Jebus K. Rist! I can’t believe Americans have become so dumbed down and so enslaved.
I say, let the fat bastards starve. They could stand to loose twenty or thirty.
P/S/ Taxpayers will be paying for those slimy pricks for the rest of their lives however long that is…….collecting their free medical ie: insulin, heart meds and chemo.
Russian women are a knockout and they’re nothing like the American females who only seek to entrap you and then steal everything you have through a bogus divorce.
Russian, Ukrainian others seem to have it all over the west for beautiful women.
Those Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the west behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Georgia’s always on my,my.my, mind.
You might be surprised at how difficult it is to leave,
Short of having a few bill, American swill is not welcome in most countries worth living in.
Amen to that, Eric!
Someone told me once about their relative from Eastern Europe (I forget which country) who came to visit them in NY c. 1950.
While walking down the street together, the relative sees a cop, and expresses concern and fear. The host says “Relax! This is America; no need to be afraid of the cops”. By the time the relative was ready to return to Europe, he thought America was the greatest place on earth.
Today? LOL! I doubt the pigs in any European country are feared even a tenth as much as the bastards here are! I’ve heard of many Europeans who wont even come here, because they know it’s so bad.
The yellow jacket protests (completely uncovered by USA media) give some hope
Yes. A little. I hope they can outs Marcon. Otherwise, they failed.
The French slaves are getting a tad uppity…doesn’t mean they don’t want their slavery…Just a little less. They are bratty children who view their Political Masters as mommy-and-daddy that will steal for them and give them stuff for free. They’re French…Like Democrats only worse.
Morning, Cambo –
Yes, agreed. The Yellow Vests are realizing that the Free Lunch is a fraud. I suspect they still desire the Free Lunch – the protests merely reflect their anger at having to pay for it.
‘Zactly, Cambo.
I don’t know much about the specifics concerning the Yeller Vests….but considering the rampant socialism that has been extant in Frogland for many decades now (And on a level to where they interfere with your personal and family life even more so than here!) it is highly unlikely that somehow a substantial group would just now appear at this late who would suddenly be seeking liberty.
I assume it’s more akin to the “Occupy” movement or Tea Party, here.
Same BS. Tea Party: “Medicare and Social Security for Americans only!”. Occupy movement: “Take from the rich and give it to us!”.
It’s not liberty for all that they care about- It’s just getting “their share of the [elicit] pie”.
Take away their guns, or their ability to parent their children as they see fit; no problem. But they’ll riot over the outcome of a soccer game.
If Emanuel Maroon stood up and said “We’re just going to loot [what remains of] the rich, and no one else has to pay any taxes”, the Yeller Vesters would pack up and go home. It’s likely not liberty they’re after…but just a better slice of how the pie gets redistributed.
They’re nasty, bratty, parasitic children who demand everyone else live for them…All of them trying to live at the expense of everyone else, aka, Democracy. They’re French…That won’t change until the 3rd world migrants start taking over.
America now ranks 45th in press freedom. In fact it also ranks 20th for overall freedom.
And now they are coming for your DNA.
Where you drive is being recorded.
What you buy is recorded.
Your cellphone conversations are recorded.
What books and magazines you buy and read are being noted.
If you live within 100 miles of an international border(Canada/Mexico) you live in a Constitution free zone.
The TSA………………
This is all being done for your safety.
Meanwhile an ex Marine(female) is strip searched inside a jail with a previous record for unwarranted strip searches.
“If voting really mattered, they wouldn’t let us do it.” Mark Twain.
America is just one step away from totalitarian government. All it takes is another false flag and the deal is done.
Elections are dog and pony shows and voting is a hoax. It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes that counts. So who did your voting vote for?
“Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson.
And Jefferson was the man whose contempt for the constitution was made plain by the Louisiana Purchase.
“Part of the reason Americans are not resisting”….is because they are so brainwashed that they don’t even realize that there is a problem; they think THIS is freedom! Regardless of their political ideology, they gleefully sign up to do Uncle’s dirty-work; to kill and be killed for politicians and bankers. They vie to be selected to a position in some government agency or para-military organization like the police, BATF, DEA, DHS, TSA, etc. They’ll gladly vote their neighbors ‘guilty’ of the most petty non-crimes, if Uncle invents some law criminalizing a given behavior….
How many Germans resisted Hitler, or would have even if they could’ve?
How many Russians resisted Stalin or Lenin?
They say that the pen is mightier than the sword. Today, governments have figured out that the pen (propaganda) in conjunction with the sword, is the mightiest combination. Simply create a population who will not resist, because they have been relieved of intellect and morality….and eliminate the few who do show any signs of resistance.
And there is no stopping it at this point. One can only remove oneself from the arena, physically, and sit back and watch the slow collapse of such a system under it’s own weight- and that does not happen overnight; and as it happens, those who run it become more and more desperate to regain the power which they see slipping away from them, and thuis become more and more violent/tyrannical in their rule.
And thanks to modern technology, it is becoming virtually impossible to even fly under the radar as we once could here.
Keeping them distracted with sports and TV.
And religion.
Yeah well, lok at the results of the Viet Nam war and look at the results of America’s war in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere to realize technology is meaningless in the face of a determined people.
Yeah…those people are so free now….
And that was just after an invasion/temporary occupation by a foreign power….imagine if they had to live with constant surveillance; propaganda; and control of their every daily action, for several generations……
Imagine if 98% of their fellow countrymen didn’t recognize who the enemy was, and aided and abetted and cooperated with him- like Americans do.
Americans didn’t do anything 50 years ago, when they might’ve had a chance. They don’t do anything today. They’re not gonna do anything tomorrow.
Try finding one household that doesn’t have at least one member or close relative who wields arms for Uncle- and thus are given the utmost boot-licking by those households for “their service”, and woe is you if you even speak a word amiss against “the troops” or the pigs; or ABCDEFG…..
The government could disband tomorrow, and we’d still be left with nearly 300 million citizens who would gladly fill the void and carry on business as usual.
We are not fighting a mere army…. We are fighting a society and a belief system; a belief system which worships at the altar of government. A determined, UNITED, HOMOGENOUS people could in fact resist- like the Moozlims have for so long- but look at what is going on around us: Cultural revolution and dilution, so that no two people agree on anything; there are no common values nor beliefs anymore. We live in a true melting pot like never before of DISSIMILAR people and cultures- and why? Because such is WEAK, even in the largest numbers; and possesses no unity nor commonality, so there can be no resistance. If any fighting is done, it is one group against another- while the enemy rushes in to offer “help” for the problem he created- and is then held up as a beneficial “hero”.
A foreign invasion of a country in which even 2 or 3 groups of disjointed people can come together to repel the enemy is a completely different scenario.
Americans will NEVER give up their guns. The average gunowner, 80 million strong in America, has 6 guns and some percentage of them would shoot anyone who came to take them. What percentage is anyone’s guess, but even a rate of 3% would outnumber the number of police and soldiers available for door-to-door gun confiscation. Any confiscation program would probably end after a couple of weeks of bloodshed. My estimates are very conservative.
Hi Nathan,
I pray you are right; I strongly suspect you’re wrong. Very few people will actively resist. Passively yes – as by not turning in outlawed guns. But what good is a gun you can’t carry with you anymore out of fear of being arrested for “felony possession of an illegal weapon”? What good is a gun you have to hide in a crawl space or bury in the yard?
How many people will openly keep their guns in defiance of “the law” – and fight to prevent their being taken away?
Look at how cowed most people are over mere opinions they’re socially shamed into at least pretending to not have (or to agree with). To mispronounce the name of Martin Luther King is a job-losing offense and career suicide. It will likely soon be a crime.
Such people will not fight.
Exactly Eric!
Americans have already largely given up their guns. Many large cities, they’re already totally gone as far as the average person is concerned. (15 million people in the NYC metro area….and pretty much only the gov’t goons and the criminals have guns; same with DC; Boston, etc.)
And I highly question the gun ownership stats. The truth is, the people who own guns, tend to own a bunch- like here, where the average household contains at least 6. Those 60 million people who voted for Hitlery…they can’t tell me any of them own a gun, for they gladly vote for gun-grabbers; and the 60 million who voted Repugnantcan…a large number of them also vote for gun-grabbers- even if their gun-grabbers are a little less blatant and more gradual than the blue variety- so right there, the people who voted, account for the better part of all the adults in the US….and a good two-thirds of ’em have no problem with gun-grabbers.
And of the minority who are left- thjose who actually own guns- most are as you described, in places where the guns must be kept locked away and or unloaded; and of course, the size and type of gun any of us can buy “legally” is now greatly limited, and is no match to the military-grade weaponry our money has supplied the AGWs with.
The vast majority of places, the average person can not even have ready access to a gun in their home; much less on the street/in public places.
That battle has already been lost.
My neighbor actually spoke the very words to me: “If they ever come for my guns, I’ll bury them!”
Yeah….so what good are guns if they can not be used to protect one from the very tyranny that would force one to give up those guns?! “I still have my guns! But of course, they’re 4′ under dirt….but I have ’em! Hoo-ha!”
We see in this the very picture of how American resistance will go.
They’ve taken the fruit of our lavor.
They’ve taken our property.
They’ve taken our ability to travel freely.
They’ve taken our right to free association.
They’ve taken our free speech.
They’ve taken our families.
They’ve taken our liberty….
But ya know, when they take what’s left of the 2nd Amendment…THEN we’ll stand up and do something! -say the armchair quarterbacks.
“No, wait! We’ve still got foooootbaaaaaaalllll! Give ’em the guns and maybe they’ll leave fooootbaaaalllll alone!”
Believe this or not, agree or not. This is THE TRUTH.
The MAIN difference between America and the socialist countries- The United States of America was founded as an experiment in whether or not a country can be governed by its own people. Americans were self-reliant, rugged individualists not wanting or needing a boss, a nanny, or a parent in the form of a government. Our rights were given to us by our Creator, not by any government, governmental agency, King, Queen, legislature, judge, or court. These tenets were written into our Constitution for all to read and see. The job of the government is to protect the citizens from foreign invasions, fraud, attack, and theft by criminals, and NOT to “protect” them from themselves. The government is not there to provide anyone with an income, health insurance, or free telephones. The government is not there to spy on its citizens or to regulate what they eat, drink, what medicines they treat themselves with, or what they may legally buy from another citizen or from a store. The government is not there to regulate free speech, or to determine who you will or won’t associate with.
Over the past one hundred and five years, all of this has been overturned by unConstitutional laws, agency regulations, and court orders. The Bill of Rights has been eviscerated, with the exception of the Amendment barring the quartering of soldiers in the homes of citizens.
In short, our country has been taken over by a new government class. In 2010, the people elected a Republican House of Representatives to reverse the direction of the country. This did not help. The House DID NOT use to power of the purse to change any policies. So in 2014, voters elected a Republican Senate. Again, the Republicans did nothing to reverse the country’s direction. The velocity of the move to the left was terrifying to the average American (not on either coast). Obama had been purging the military of tens of thousands of officers at a time- the ones who were not with him.
In 2015, some of those ousted from the military were planning a coup. Many of them knew, however, that a coup would never be accepted even by those who agreed with their motives. A few of their leaders went to Trump and told him of their plan, and asked him to run for President. He thought it over and agreed.
Many Christians believe that Trump was chosen by Almighty God to turn our country around, and that he could NOT have refused- he is like a modern-day King David, chosen to lead his country. You might say he is on a mission from God.
Like I said, believe this or not, or agree with it or not. I am posting this so you understand why many feel the way they do about Trump. I know that Donald Trump is not a perfect man, but neither was King David.
Wibble wobble # 8.
What has guns got to do with electric vehicles?
I don’t see you admonishing Nathan Hail… quite the opposite, you joined in with an even longer reply.
Peter,
“The fire that broke out in December 2014 in a new Tesla Model S was apparently caused by a gun fired inside the car. As electrek reports, John Schneider from Pennsylvania received on December 31st, 2014 his new Model S from Tesla. At the drive home smoke and flames started to emit from the back seats of the car. Schneider stopped and exited the car, and could only watch the car being consumed by the fire.”
That answer your question?
Tuan, wouldn’t it be ironic if Fred Schneider bought a Tesla, and it burst into flames from bad singing while being driven to The Love Shack?! 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Schneider
I’m hoping the gestinja get Teslas for patrol.
https://youtu.be/IMn_fbDpUTk
No… of course not.
It’s patently obvious… isn’t it?
Nuff-nuffs everywhere here.
Peter,
Observe that your comments are mostly non sequiturs and other such (e.g., posting quotes from old philosophers). Meanwhile, the replies to yours have been thoughtful and factual; logical arguments with supporting evidence.
You make our case for us.
“Patently Obvious”? As opposed to what, not legally protected obtrusiveness? This “Pepe” cracker is lacking all originality, although, I must say, I’m not familiar with “wibble wobble”, or is that some retarded version of “Weebles”? Well, it’s always entertaining to see this type hang themselves with the proverbial “rope” they try to snare everyone else with, lol!
Peter,
What are you babbling about?
“What has guns got to do with electric vehicles?”
Plenty. Government guns, armed government goons, force people to subsidize EV’s just like they force people to pay taxes and obey mountains of rules, regulations, mandates, etc. Those who refuse to be robbed by the elite will be thrown into cages and leagally murdered if they resist. The scum, like yourself, enjoy all this violence and coercion which is why they advocate and authorize it to be used against peaceful human beings who have never harmed anyone and just want to be left alone in peace. . The scum love to force their will onto others and they love to punish those who refuse to lick their boots. Like rapists, they prefer force over peaceful persuasion. Like rapists, they don’t allow their victims to say no.
Since the mericans have accepted being fondled, Xrayed, and beaten by the thugs at TSA, who have now extended their domain into all areas of society, they are not going to stand up and fight armed goons from the system they depend on to survive. Most of them are too fat, slow and unintelligent to resist. To resist requires fortitude, knowledge, and knowing your enemy.
Every time I read about the mass move to electrification, I keep going back to your article about CNG, Eric.
It makes anyone promoting this electric boondoggle look like a lemming or a fool.
I’m of the opinion that Cadillac needs to stop chasing the German Big 3 and move even further upmarket, to go after Bentley and the like but at a lower price. If you look to the past… Cadillac never chased the Germans. They were a cut above everything except the swankiest of S-classes in size, luxury, and prestige. There were no “cheap” or “small” Cadillacs just as today there are no “cheap” or “small” Bentleys or Rolls-Royces. Start thinking like they do, you know, booze fridges and fine crystal in the back seats, carpeting nicer than most people’s houses, actual names for their, that sort of thing, and nothing smaller than full-size. Cadillac is bling, and needs to own it.
It can’t be a coincidence that Cadillac’s first attempt to chase the Germans – the Cimarron – was also their first major failure other than that diesel. It also can’t be a coincidence that their current best seller, the Escalade, is the only Cadillac that has an actual name, or the “street presence” a Cadillac should have.
You want a performance Cadillac? Go back and dust off the Cien concept, there’s your performance Cadillac, bold and brash and ready to chew up an Aventador. The driving dynamics of the V-series aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but they lack the historical context of M or AMG and so come off as blatant me-tooing.
I have thought this too about Caddy. Go upmarket, stop trying to be German (or Japanese for that matter). It has made the “also ran” for decades now. Be unabashedly American again too. Big engines (nothing less then a V8), luxury ride (not “sporty”) out of the world, in your face styling. And yes, Bling, and fewer cheap parts shared with GMC and Chevy.
Ironically the Escalade is the only vehicle that really seems to have the Caddy feel of old. Big, brash, brutish, in your face, no apologies for being what it is. People seem to be willing to pay $100k+ for them. Give them a reason to do so across the whole line and more!
The more greenies hate it the better!
It gives Buick a reason to exist too, if it has some room to be.
It would be an interesting experiment. Take an Escalade frame and run it through a semi-custom coachworks, turning it into a hand-built masterpiece. Imagine a two seater roadster with all the power and wheelbase of an SUV. Not to mention the AWD, LS engine and variable suspension. Or RWD sedan with stretch option for a town car.
Too bad all the skilled labor capable of building such things is doing their own thing in California…
If luxury brands discontinued the small and medium entry-level cars, what would the Starbuck-drinking posers drive?!?
Hi Handler,
I agree with the original poster, who suggested that there are too many small (and “me too”) luxury cars. I’ll go further: Far too many “sporty” cars. In fact, every car (just about) is trying much too hard to be “sporty.” If Cadillac were my fief, I’d return it to being what it once was: Maker of big, flashy (but impressive) luxury vehicles. Forget this “sporty” idiocy – and also the me-tooing of BMW, et al.
Eric, we all know why GM rebadged a Tahoe and tacked on at least another $6K and did it too long.
I find it hard to believe they didn’t know they were running Cadillac into the ground .
The $4.5B in profit for the 1st quarter last year still wasn’t enough even with the huge profits being made under another name in China.
I may stick a 4.0 L Cummins in the El Camino and drive it till one of us gives up.
I totally agree, but luxury brands have made more money by “democratizing” (whoring out their name) to attract the wannabes. Brands that have adopted that strategy are no longer special. A Mercedes-Benz is almost as common as a Ford or Chevy.
I always liked the idea of Ford reviving the very short-lived Continental Division. The Mark II is still the classiest American luxury car ever produced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEJ7qH7Ym14
“They are a Potemkin Village on wheels, ”
And one buys them here:
Potamkin Cadillac: https://www.potamkincadillac.com/
LOLOLOLIOLOL!!!!! I remember the commercials from years ago in NY- at one time, I think they had a cluster[phuk] of dealerships on Staten Island, called “Potamkin Village“!!
How is Crapillac still even around? How can one make garbage for decades, which costs a LOT, yet offers no value; doesn’t last; and depreciates faster than a piece of dog crap on a Vegas sidewalk in July; and doesn’t even carry status value anymore- and still trudge on as if it were a viable business?
We are truly living in Bizarro World!
Where ever Crapillac is getting it’s money from, it’s clearly not the customers…so if they’ve managed to continue to exist this long without a viable competitive product, how will switching to yet another non-viable expensive POS product that no one wants hurt them? 😀
Hi Nunz!
I liked Cadillacs when they were still Cadillacs…the last being the Sedan deVille, which they made until the early ’90s, if memory serves. It was not a BMW clone. It was an American luxury car – and no one makes them anymore… including Cadillac.
Ditto, Eric! I loved the old DeVilles- even had one. Great cars until they started putting the HT4100 pile-O-crap motors in ’em. They were REAL Cadillac, when the name Cadillac still meant something; and the cars were distinctive and unique.
There was no mistaking a Caddy of that era for any other cookie-cutter car!
They’ve been telling us for the last 40 years that Americans don’t want cars like that…but last time I checked, you and I were still Americans, and we want cars like that! What I don’t want are these stubby, look-a-like little cellphones-on-wheels and electric abominations which they seem to think that we do want!
I had an aunt and uncle who only drove Caddys. He was an exec for Canteen and always drove the biggest Caddy you could find. Big ones like the DeVilles. Don’t remember if he ever owned one of those chrome monstrosities like the 59/60 EL.
My 2 cents: Cadillac went too upmarket. It’s fine to compete performance wise with BMW et al but in the luxury world brand is important. Few these days find as much cache in owing a caddie as they do a BMW, etc. Caddie worked because it was cheaper but still nice/good. Buick took that niche. Also, that monthly subscription thing: Wasn’t that like $1800/month Who thought that would ever make money? What a waste of corporate resources.
When EVs collapse, GM will introduce a solar/wind powered auto with a backup alternative fueled Briggs & Stratton powered by BS and wishful thinking. Uncle is doing his best to make us all walk and not drive trying not to get his hands dirty in doing so.
I really believe GM knows something we don’t on what’s coming via regulation. We all know here that E-cars won’t/don’t work, and GM’s first E-car, after it announces all the closures, is an expensive one so they can make more $, to hopefully save their ass.
Major mistakes have been made, Alpha chassis is too small for life (ATS/CTS/Camaro), Notice how the Camaro sales tanked after it went to Alpha? It is an amazing chassis, just to small.
Most will blame ‘sedans aren’t selling’ bullcrap, but all sedans got too small.
I was intrigued by their new CT6, what a car. But then GM does their normal packaging crap and you have to buy it their way or else. So I actually went to buy one, and in order to get the bigger engine, you have to go way up-trim. Why? And then they are AWD-only, sunroof-only, etc…… Really? Why? I said, OK so order one for me. Can’t. My dealer friend just shook his head in disgust.
And why I bought my first FCA ever, a 300 and I could order it my way and I have been really enjoying it.
Most sedans are getting bigger. The Civic, Corolla moved up to midsize and the accord, camry are now full size. The Fit and Yaris replaced the original civic and tercel/corolla’s compact sizing.
Maybe that explains a lot for GM. Everyone else is getting bigger and they keep getting smaller. I would assume that most of us would prefer bigger.
Yeah. I bought a Camry Hybrid in 2007 and drove it for 11 years. Great car.
Just traded it in on a ’18 Honda Accord Hybrid. Another great car. Leather interior, lots of goodies, 47 mpg, 600 mile range. Interestingly, now a full-size car. Fits in my garage with about three inches front and rear to spare. And cost less than half of an otherwise similar EV costs.
Most Americans are getting bigger. Especially red staters..
https://www.menshealth.com/health/a23130077/states-with-highest-obesity-rates/
Clover,
More digs at people based on who they are and where they live. The contempt you’ve got for rural white Americans is quite something – given the outrage you feign over “racism.”
I go after people’s ideas. Such as the dishonest and vicious ones you espouse.
I’m getting to hate city people. They think that they can go out to the country on weekends and just run all over people’s private property.
Hi No One,
Me too. Pat is an exemplar. The guy (or gal) radiates contempt for us “rednecks” and “hicks”… who only ask to be left in peace, which is something people like Pat can’t seem to abide.
Boy dont ya know it?
Why would the cucks-on-wheels at GM and Ford be dumping BILLIONS into self driving software and ALL EV vehicles? They aren’t stupid, they have share holders and bond ratings to keep up. Any FOOOOL can see EV’s ARE NOT SELLING and no one wants them. But again, what does GM and FORD know that we don’t? Isn’t it obvious, just look at the play book of Uncle Scam and his Fascist henchmen of the past to get a clue. It’s coming, and it wont be pretty…
Brazos, I would tend to agree with ya, except for one thing: The infrastructure for EVs and self-driving cars is virtually non-existant; and even if there were plans and money to start building it tomorrow, it would still be a decade or more away; and the technology for it isn’t even fully established/settled yet, etc.
It would require a massive undertaking, nationwide, on a scale never before attempted.
So where does that leave us?
Either:
A)The car companies ARE stupid (And ya have to admit, most major corps have been doing mainly stupid things for quite some time now- even shooting their own geese that lay golden eggs)
or:
B)Since there will be no EV/self-driving infrastructure for quite some time (if ever), and since viable used cars will die off before long due to attrition, and the car companies having gone bust from their foolish endeavors with EVs and self-driving cars won’t equipped or around to make new ICE vehicles…it will mean an end to personal autonomous transportation for the masses.
(Actually, A or B will result in the same thing)
Those are the choices. This is likely the covert war on private vehicles- period. Not to be replaced with EVs and self-driving turds; as those things are just the excuse to justify the abandonment of the ICE model. No replacement will be forthcoming…other than buses, bikes and sneakers- ’cause there is no infrastructure for these pie-in-the-sky Jetson-mobiles…and no one is even talking about creating one…… (You’d think that that alone would strike most people as funny- but it doesn’t. -ZSee “A” above…)
Good point Nunzio, very possibly true. Metro areas are a disaster to drive anymore, so maybe they just want to be able to drive much easier themselves.
But what about rural areas?
What I mean, Chris, is that there’s no infrastructure as far as generating all of the electricity that would be needed to charge all of the EVs if they were to become ubiquitous; the charging networks (Chargers essentially where every gas station is now; some way to charge cars overnight for city-dwellers who park on the street, etc.); The facilities to deal with all of the batteries on a mass basis; the sensors needed to keep self-driving vehicles on the not-so-well-defined roads/allow to recognize all traffic control devices/ etc…….
Yeah, they might be able to implement some of it in limited areas in densely populated cities….but even that would require huge effort, time and money… And as people like myself who live in the sticks- good luck with that!
This stuff is a pipe-dream. The few self-driving cars on the roads now, and they have a rather high crash rate; and from what I’ve seen, a lot of EV owners are starting to get a glimpse of reality, and not liking it so much.
And with all of this crap being so high-tech, imagine if they DID build that infrastructure!- Imagine what it would look like ten years down the road. Imagine a cellphone or a computer from 10 years ago, what it looks like now! [The computer I’m typing this on is 12 years old…but I’m a weirdo!]
“What I mean, Chris, is that there’s no infrastructure as far as generating all of the electricity that would be needed to charge all of the EVs if they were to become ubiquitous; the charging networks (Chargers essentially where every gas station is now; some way to charge cars overnight for city-dwellers who park on the street, etc.); ”
Actually, there is lots of infrastructure. We call it Electricity…
The numbers work out to about 30% of current production.
Given the grid is sized for peak load, it’s really not a big deal
Given demand destruction, the Utilities need EVs to be
a big future market.
So the utilities see this as a big future market because they will get massacred otherwise.
Nunz,
It only takes 1 politician to get a New Deal infrastructure plan rolling… First they take tax money from us to build some crap, then they pass laws so the crap from Barra and Co. can sell us crap back.
See here in Texas for example, gov wasting time on how to enslave the driver: https://abc13.com/technology/new-task-force-will-promote-self-driving-cars-in-texas-/5102433/
It is coming…
Yeah, Brazos, this BS could (and well might be) set in motion…..but think of the time it will take- especially with politicians doing it! Chargers would have to be motre ubiquitous than gas stations currently are- especially in big cities where people don’t have the luxury of taking up space for four hours, waiting for the three cars ahead of them to recharge; and where they don’t have a driveway or garage at home.
We’d need probably ten times the number of generating facilities as we now have…..
Facilities for maintaining/disposing of/recycling all of those big batteries.
Not to mention every single street and intersection retrodfitted to safely handle self-driving cars (Which is what it will take to make such a thing a reality).
Even if money were no object; even if they started construction on all of it tomorrow….
And before it was halfway built, the technology would change, and it would be obsolete- or would forever shackle the vehicles to limited parameters, ’cause even to make a simple change would involve so much….
But I don’t doubt that it’s coming- in the sense that it will be started to give the appearance that it is a thing- whereas in reality, as I said before, I believe it rather just a covert way of letting the old ICE infrastructure crumble…and then coming along and saying “Oooppss! This new stuff ain’t working out…and now we have no way to replace it; guess all you peons can no longer travel freely in private cars! SUCKERS!!!”.
I mean, if it were sincerely about EVs and self-driving cars (regardless of the reasons), no one would be so foolish as to build an infrastructure for a technology that is not even stable and proven yet- much less mature. But yet we can’t deny that it’s being pushed. Why? Because it is designed to fail. That’s the whole point of it.
“The infrastructure for EVs and self-driving cars is virtually non-existant;”
Maybe where you live, but, in developed America, we have something called Electricity. Houses have that new fangled stuff, including Electric Light Bulbs.
So, when I bought a Chevy Volt, I bought it in February, which was far too cold to deal with trenching, so I ran an extension cord from the plug on the back of the house to the parking spot and used to charge that way. I know lots of Volt owners who just ran an extension cord down to the curb and plug in.
It’s a 50 foot problem in civilized society…
Now, if somehow we could run internet out to your end of cowpatch, I somehow
suspect we can find an electric outlet too.
Hi Pat,
“What I mean, Chris, is that there’s no infrastructure as far as generating all of the electricity that would be needed to charge all of the EVs if they were to become ubiquitous.” – Nunzio
“It’s a 50 foot problem in civilized society…” – Pat b
As long as EV’s remain a very small percentage of operating vehicles, then charging is a 50 ft problem. However, Nunzio is concerned about whether EV’s become ubiquitous. In this scenario his statement, “The infrastructure for EVs and self-driving cars is virtually non-existent”, is valid. This statement should not be controversial. The infrastructure, as it currently exists, cannot meet the demands of a significant move toward EV’s. This is not a “50 foot problem”. Why be disingenuous?
Jeremy
Morning, Jeremy!
I’ve test driven numerous plug-in hybrids. It adds a layer of inconvenience where none existed before. Imagine: It is pouring rain – or very cold (and very dark) and you’ve just rolled up to your house. Instead of just getting out and getting in to the warm house and out of the weather, you have to grab the charger “nozzle” from wherever you left it, run the cord to the car and plug it in. In the morning, you don’t just get in and drive away. First you have to unplug, then stow the cord.
It’s not a big deal – but it is another layer of hassle. Who wants more hassle?
The EV people will respond by pointing out that they don’t have to go to gas stations, which is true. But most of us go to a gas station maybe once or twice each week – at our convenience – and spend perhaps 5 minutes there. After which, we no longer have to think about much less plan for refueling, whereas for the EV driver recharging is a daily hassle that one has to make time for and plan for.
It amazes me that this fact doesn’t arouse more open derision for the EV given our “right now” and fast-paced society.
“It’s not a big deal – but it is another layer of hassle. Who wants more hassle?”
I think you hit it, it’s not a big deal.
I find it worth the $1/day in Electrons I burn to be far cheaper then the $40/Week in gas I was burning with the Camry.
Given I drive the volt I occasionally have to get gas, and it’s funny. The smell of the gas fumes is much more noticable to me, then it was when I was getting gas 2-3/week.
Clover,
The issue is forcing others to fund your preference in a car. You continue to talk around this fundamental objection – because it’s inarguable and unanswerable.
Your Volt was conveyed to you by GM at a loss and even so, it still cost about as much as an entry-level compact luxury-sport sedan such as an Audi A3.
These things can’t make a case for themselves on economics; the buy in cost obviates any fuel savings. On practical grounds, they are objectively inferior as well.
Which is why they have to be mandated and subsidized to exist…
Ever notice that the people who want to tax the productive the most are the biggest tax dodgers and gloat about it. Here’s pat gloating about how cheap it is for him to use the public roadways because he isn’t paying any of the fuel related taxes that go to their upkeep.
Morning Eric,
Yep, as the infrastructure currently exists, the only condition where an EV would be practical and convenient is if one lives in a house with an attached garage and never pushes the range during a round trip. But, they’re touted as great “city” cars, which is absurd. My buddy in Chicago often has to park three blocks from his apartment. Even if Pat’s fantasy of curbside chargers materializes, there is not enough curbside parking available to make this work.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Curb side chargers are an absurdity in residential Chicago.
1) The electric and other on-the-pole utilities are in the alleys.
2) the curbside becomes packed with snow.
3) The “dibs tradition”. Imagine someone calling dibs on the spot with the working and accessible charger. Imagine the fights over the chargers that have been dug out.
4) The City of Chicago is broke.
5) A lot chicago infrastructure is very old. Even if several chargers are put in per block there would need to be a central brain to manage the available juice to each one.
Hi Brent,
“Curb side chargers are an absurdity in residential Chicago.”
Of course, does dishonesty or cognitive dissonance best explain those who think otherwise?
Cheers,
Jeremy
Not to mention that the dopey EVs can’t charge when it’s below freezing- which I’d imagine in Chicago, Minnipopolis, Buffalo, etc. would be quite often, especially at night…..
…
I can’t interpret Hick… If that’s what he meant, he should have said it, in American…
That’s it, Clover – you’re done here.
I won’t put up with a despicable, hypocritical racist who has the effrontery to accuse others of that.
The gall is almost as halting as the cognitive dissonance.
You practically wet your pants over parenthetical comments about black slavery… but then go on and on about “hicks” and “rednecks,” even after I pointed out the disgusting hypocrisy of your comments.
Enough.
Poor Pat; can’t understand the word “ubiquitous”…..
Thanks, Jeremy! But hey, no sense confusing someone like Pat with mere facts!
No doubt that Pat is being driven solely by visions of rainbows and unicorns, which will somehow magically materialize in ‘the future’ for the benefit of such dreamers who don’t mind the limitations and control imposed on them for the sake of “saving the world”[by relocating their emissions to remote places, where us hicks and rednecks live], if they are just diligent enough to stomp us hard enough and make us pay for this “glorious” future that is “just around the corner”……
Oh, what was I thinking, Pat?!
I forgotteded that those millions of people living in apartments in NYC and L.A. and Miami who park on the street or in a parking lot, can just dig a trench and run an extension cord!
And the lots and park & rides where they park while at work…well, I’m sure they can just install a charger at every parking space. Yeah, just get a solar fence charger and a spool of 16 gauge wire, that should do it!
And just build a few new generator….that should do ‘er. I mean, it’s not as if we’re always being told to conserve ‘lectricity as if we’re already near capacity or anything. Not like they ever have brown-outs in those cities or ask people to turn down their A/Cs or heat lest everything gto blam-O! Silly me!
And I guess they installed a reliable way for every ‘autonomous’ car to recognize all traffic signals and signs, and road edges on all types of roads; and a way to make them functional in snow and ice, etc.- Hmmm…must’ve done it last night while I was sleeping……
Damn, Pat, are you mentally retarded, or just ignorant?
Nunz, street parking and the electric car: This is where the real agenda becomes obvious. The new urbanists attack every aspect of parking in the cities. They want street parking eliminated. They want private lots and garages eliminated. They fight new developments that include parking for residential or commercial purposes. They often cause projects to be canceled over parking. But if there must be cars they’ll favor electric cars over the others “for the environment”. Then of course there are other groups pushing electrics politically.
But wait electric cars require not only parking, they require special parking with electric power. So put it together. What’s the over all policy? No private passenger automobiles at all. None. You won’t even be allowed your own off street private property place to park it let alone charge it.
Pat, in street parking how do run the cord without crossing above or below the sidewalk? In most places crossing the sidewalk above it is certainly not legal and below it probably isn’t either.
Then even on your own property the busy bodies in government forbid it because that doesn’t mean code. And if you live in a place with a home owners association or a condo or something like that it will certainly be prohibited to just run an extension cord.
If you didn’t get caught or it wasn’t prohibited where you live, lucky you.
Well in London, the city is installing Kerb side.
In our city, the local utility is installing 2500 EV chargers
curb side. See, and I don’t expect you to understand this, but
in cities, the power company has these things called “Utility Poles”. They run electricity on them. These poles run along the sides of roads and streets, so about half the streets in a city are already fairly convenient for installing charging points, or doing a little bit of engineering work to install them.
as for “Home Owners Associations”, I find them far more annoying then any city government I’ve ever dealt with.
City govt tends to confine itself to Health/Safety. HOAs start
off with ‘aesthetics’. Being told what color I can paint the door
or if I can park a truck in the back is quite annoying.
However, most ‘Libertarians’ love HOAs because it’s all “Contract Law”…
Clover,
Half of your arguments consist of belittling people rather than dealing directly with the objections or points they’ve made. Brent’s an engineer – and most of the people here are educated, technically sophisticated people, as is evident from their articulate, reasoned and fact-based posts.
But you call them “hicks” and “rednecks” – which amounts to the same thing as stupid nigger.
At any rate: A car takes up “x” physical space; each EV takes at least 30-45 minutes to recover a partial charge. Therefore, each spot is taken up for that amount of time. What happens to all the circling/charge dwindling EVs that can’t find an open spot in time?
And who pays for all this new infrastructure?
Gas stations have efficient throughput. A station on perhaps a 1/4 acre lot can refuel hundreds of IC cars to full in an hour. Each car is in – and out – in 5 minutes or less. And most cars only need to refuel once a week – not every day.
We return to the central fact – the one you continue to avoid addressing:
EVs are a make-work project; absent mandates and subsidies, they would virtually disappear – because they are inferior on economic and practical criteria to IC cars.
They can tout tremendous performance and “sophistication” – but so can an IC Corvette or 911. Such toys are fine for those who want them and pay full price for them. But it’s obscene to force ordinary people to finance luxury-performance cars that happen to be EVs for the indulgence of the virtue signaling affluent.
Who’s paying for curb side chargers? Your neighbors. Every solution is about you passing on cost to other people while avoiding taxes yourself.
Utility poles? You steal electricity from the poles like in some 3rd world country? Because I wasn’t discussing having someone else pay for infrastructure to charge your vehicle I was discussing your nonsense about running an extension cord to vehicle.
And BTW, what happens when the utility poles run perpendicular to the road and through the back yards and alleys? That’s how it’s done in much of the chicago area.
One can avoid HOAs because it is private. However the control freaks and busybodies that go into government and those who demand their choices be subsidized will go into government from which there is only escaping to the next government where the cycle will repeat.
Even worse; in NYC (and many other places) the utilities are underground!
I love how Pat thinks that Libertarians ‘love HOAs’!
What Libertarian would ever buy into an HOA? The only positive thing we can say about them, is that it is an individual’s right to cede his autonomy and delegate his own decisions to others if he so chooses- just like when one joins a commune or some other form of voluntary communism/collectivism- if that is how they want to live, who cares? As long as they can not force me to do the same, like they can through politics.
HOAs come in different flavors. Most of them give the few of them a bad name.
So “the city” is installing some curbside chargers….which means YET ANOTHER freaking subsidy for EV owners- just as if the city were to erect gas pumps at convenient locations. (Good going, cock-sucking Muslim mayor and fascist scumbag council members of London!).
Imagine the cost, for the wiring; connection to the infrastructure; meters to accept payment, etc.
And I’m sure London is much like NYC- where, when you find a parking spot, you don’t easily give it up. The idea of finding a spot….with a charger, no less; and then vacating it an hour later, and having to go through the process of looking for another [non-charging] spot, would not only be a time-consuming hassle- but totally unthinkable.
2500 chargers might be adequate for one large condo tower on the outskirts of NYC with huge parking lots with thousands of spaces. It wouldn’t even make a dent in some of the complexes like Co-op City in The Bronx- let alone for on-street parking pretty much anywhere in the 5 Boroughs. They’d need hUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS if everyone were driving EVs….and then before long, like everything else in NY, at least half of them would be broken and not repaired for years.
Not to mention the electric transmission infrastructure upgrade that would be required to bring all of this extra power to the city and then to the point of charging (remember, these things would be in use all of the time) and the new generating facilities that would be needed.
Where is all of this stuff coming from, and who is paying for it?
Hmmm….either they haven’t thought this stuff through very well…or else, it is purposely designed to fail- which jibes perfectly with their agenda to eliminate private cars of all varieties…..
I wouldn’t mind an EV that ran off of a zero point device of some sort. Perhaps like the Tesla’s (the man) car of lore.
Cadillac failed at beating at BMW at its own game so now they’re going for Tesla. How clever!
Is there anybody in those glass siloes that can think logically and reasonably?
Yes. Those who can never be promoted.
Caddy axed the CTS or CT6 and the ATS. That’s all I need to know. They are horrible. So is GM.
They’re called Government Motors for a reason now
Hi Zane,
Yup. Barra is pleading with Uncle to make the $7,500 EV tax subsidy permanent. In other words, she wants Uncle to force you and me to help subsidize the “sale” of every new GM EV.
I’ll give Barra her desired $7,500 per EV subsidy on one condition. That condition is that for each one a government elected office holder has the salary of his office permanently cut by $7,500 per year. That way the taxpayer has on going returns.
I’m not into luxury cars, but if I were, I’d want a big engine with balls, not some cucktastic hybrid
Well, might as well get a genuine V while they’re still around
Zane, check out the Charger/Challenger/300 triplets with the V8. I was pleasantly surprised how good they are. You can get a decent one for $40K +/-. I love the V’s too, but add $20K min.
If you want amazing, anti up a little for the 6.4L, still can be had for low $40’s and you get a posi.
Get them while you can, they are most likely going away in the next 1-2 years.
I’m actually looking at a Ram Rebel as we speak, non eTorque V8.
Love Hemi’s, don’t mind the mileage as I want power and sound and while the one my dealers getting has a sunroof, overall it’s what I’m looking (again, regular 345, towing, 33 gallon fuel tank, Navi since I need it for work)
Down the line, gonna order myself a manual Scat Pack TA (don’t need the hellcat and love the looks).
While the new guys gonna ruin them, it’ll take time and I’m sure I can place an order before it’s too late
Agree 100% Zane. Will be getting a Ram soon to replace my Sierra 6.2. Sad for GM that their 6.2 has so much potential, yet they handcuff it to squeeze every last mpg out of it, and yet rams smaller 5.7 runs so much better (to me). Non-e-torque for me too, no roof, etc… I don’t know what FCA’s going to do with the Challenger/Charger/300, as they are still selling pretty well (160K/yr total?).
BUT, cafe has gotta be putting a squeeze on these to keep going. I too will be getting the last year avail., even if my current 300 is not ready to go. Probably the Charger Scat Pack for the 6.4 and posi. even though I prefer the looks of the 300.
Best of luck with the new truck.
I’m pissed about the things GM has done in the last decade but their trucks are designed to work. You’ve always had half ton trucks from them that had more horsepower than the heavier models. It’s so you can keep it nailed continuously even in the heat. The last time I drove the 5500 Dodge I had to back out of it on a regular basis (I wasn’t exceeding the speed limit) so it could cool down dragging a 30′ dual tandem gooseneck with maybe 5 or 6 thousand pounds of load.
Overheating was the thing that always pissed me off about Ford trucks.
If I didn’t work a truck I’d damn sure drive something else. I like the idea of something I’ve never been able to buy, a helicopter, like the big red job my neighbors use to round up cattle.
Now you could drive just about any car made on an assembly line for the price of a new light truck. If not for the insurance costs, I could buy and operate a used class 8 tractor instead. These are crazy times.
“Overheating was the thing that always pissed me off about Ford trucks.”
My experience also, especially with the renowned 300 I-6.
If a GM pickup overheats then it’s really low on water, or something else wrong like a blown head gasket.
I dunno about you guys….. Been driving Ford trucks since the late 80’s, and never had one overheat; never had one shoot a spark plug……
But the price ya pay, is poor MPGs- but it’s worth it- especially considering what those little toy Jap trucks get…..
Well, my neighbor has a 4×4 T100 and it gets worse mileage than my K1500 while it hauls half as much.
Exactly, No One. What’s the point of having a truck that can’t do as much work, if it uses as much or more gas than a more capable truck? The idea was supposed to be that one would buy the lesser trucks if they didn’t need the capabilities of a stouter one, in order to get better mileage. Without the better mileage, what is the point of the lesser truck?
I think that, had Cadillac kept on the path it had started in the 1990s when they brought out nice cars with advanced engines (hello Northstar V8!), they could have made it. I liked a lot of what they were selling, but I could not and cannot afford to buy their products. That said, I think that they WERE on the right path and strayed off it…
My cousin has been in corporate at GM for the last 27 years. The way he looks at the current leadership is no one cares. They are all there to make a buck at the expense of the future of GM and the jobs of everyone else. Many of the corporate employees who are invested were let go at the end of 2018. They just slapped the loyalty out of the senior employees. The CEO has no investment in GM. If GM sinks she will go find another high level management job. Cadillac is over priced and under delivering. Their interiors are notoriously low rent for their price point, reliability for Cadillac is trash as well. Look at what Lincoln is doing. They are revitalizing their luxury suv’s and cars and starting to out sell Cadillac.
I saw a YouTube video last week about GM being in bed with the Chinese government having 11 co-owned plants there and setting up the Chinese to own vast amounts in the US.
Wish I had the link. It’s an eye opener and scary as hell.
After them laying off 15,000 workers last year and moving the four plants to Mexico their name is rapidly becoming a very nasty taste to Americans.
And doing so after turning a $4.5B profit in the first quarter is adding insult to injury.
Yep thats true. The reason why they back pedaled on ending the Cadillac CT6 is that it will continue to be made in China and they want to sell it here in the US. Sad part is some ignorant GM fan boys still only buy silverados and think it’s an american company. I tried to tell them camry’s, accords, all trucks are actually made in the us. They think about it and say well corporate is still in the US. What good does a corporate address do if international profit stays outside the us, cars are made outside the us, all they want is your cash.
Hi Mooeing,
Yes, indeed.
Also, models like the Escalade and Yukon and the GM trucks they are based on will be rendered extinct or close to it by the very fuel efficiency/”greenhouse gas” fatwas that Barra is leg-humping like a horny cur. Given that these are the only vehicles GM actually makes money on, once they’re gone so is GM.
When GM goes down, I’ll buy us a round!
Hi Zane,
Amen! I’d like to have a pig roast, actually… something I’ve had on my To Do list for a few years now.
Eric, here’s an easy way to catch a pig when the time comes:
https://i0.wp.com/iowainformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/copsdonuttrap.png?fit=1021%2C755
Mooeing, only the big 3 make light trucks that can do gooseneck duty, a must in my part of the country.
A friend’s wife bought a new Tacoma crew cab 5.7 L a couple years ago. I was bitching about the mileage of my Z71. I know there’s a problem but don’t know what. I get 15.5 at 75 to 80 mph pulling a hard quartering wind. The damned thing gets 14 doing 60 to 65, maddening. He replied that Toyota had always done a steady 13 mpg since day one.
I just want to find another 92, 93 Turbo Diesel Chevy that got over 18 with factory skinnies and 16 plus with 265 75 16 load range E tires. I’ll be satisfied for another, especially since it’s a much better pickup than a new one. More inside room, nicer seats, better HVAC, closer to the ground, better handling, heavier frame and more durable…..and no fuckin air bags.
Hi Eight!
I m working up a rant on the ’19 F-150… which is now available with the Raptor’s 450 hp V6 s well as a diesel…
I think GM has too many/the wrong brands. Where Buick is now is where Caddie should be. Should’ve axed Buick and kept Pontiac as the youth/performance brand. Cadillac as Mercedes competition would never work. Look at Toyota and Nissan. They only have 1 luxury brand, not 2.
What’s the point of Buick?? Never got past the old people’s stigma and they don’t make anything that I’d ever consider
Pontiac should be revived after they get rid of the Government whore. Don’t offer the same cars you could get from Chebby, revive the solstice, revive the firebird/TA while fixing some of the Camaros flaws, bring back the Fiero, make it something kids actually wanna look at!
GMC is iconic, but redundant. Don’t see why you need two truck companies, should decide whether they want Chebby or wanna stick with Gay Man’s Cruiser
Of course, nothing’s gonna change, so let’s start writing the obituary
Buick: The luxury of a Caddy and the utility of a Chevy, at a price somewhere in between. My last great beast was my ’86 Buick Estate Wagon which gladly accommodated a 77 Old 403 small block and was a well built work horse in addition to being a well appointed highway cruiser. That is the Buick I miss having!
Yeah, the ’79 Regal I had when I was in my 20’s was one of my most favorite cars ever! And those old early to mid 70’s Electras/225’s were some of the best cars ever.
Too bad GM (and most companiesw these days) weren’t more concerned about making good products that people actually want to buy, and less concerned about “image” and “lifestyle” marketing; they could save a lot of money by just having one brand, and making a complete range of vehicles…instead of making 12 of the exact same vehicle under 6 different brand names, with the only difference between them being trim and little piddling trivialities.
I would say that where Cadillac is now is where Buick should be, not the other way around. Cadillac – ultra-luxury, the way it once was. Make the phrase “it’s the Cadillac of _______” relevant again. Buick – German fighter, but at a lower price. If GMC is to keep existing, then Buick should have no trucks at all. Also, with names like GSX and Grand National in their past, they’d be better suited to take over the V lineup. GMC – Buick with trucks. Pontiac – run rings around a BMW, for half the price. Possible gimmicks include becoming the last refuge of the true, pressure-actuated-wastegate sports turbo. Chevrolet – all things to everyone, from basic cars to trucks to muscle cars.
Novelty has replaced functionality. Political view and virtue signaling has replace engineering. The experience have replaced wealth accumulation.
That’s because the SJWs have converged GM. The same thing happens at ANY entity the SJWs infiltrate…
I’m banned from posting on Automotive News through Disqus because I repeated too many things I’ve read here there. Will Cadillac and Buick see the end of the decade ? Will it eventually come to forced purchases at gun point to keep $GM from going bankrupt or defaulting. Stay tuned citizen!
Hi Brazoz,
AN doesn’t like me, either. I think because I ridiculed one of their contributors, who wrote an article decrying the Hellcat.
Keith Crain? Lol. He’s been a jerk for as long as I can remember. Back in the early 1990s, they were touting the benefits of ITS systems. In the mid 1990s, they talked about the future where you could unlock a car with your driver’s license. I cancelled my subscription in 1997 or so.
brazos, you thinking they might pass something like “ObamaCar” where you have to buy a new vehicle at least every five years or pay a tax penalty ?
Not too far fetched. Let’s call it a “Sustainability Tax”. Cars that don’t meet the standards will be taxed based on their non-compliance with new regs. Own a 2010 model? That’s $500/year Sustax. 2000 model? $1500/yr Sustax. Pre OBD2? $2500/yr.
We have to save the planet, you know…
Notice how the SJW’s, especially the female version, call for outlandish bs and get their parents to pay? I see an eventual backlash in their future.
While I don’t subscribe to the Republican or Democratic party, I’ve been virtually forced to vote for Some Republicans in the last election. I fear we’ll all be voting with the “Green Tip” party in the near future.
I don’t look forward to bringing out the old “Red Raider” mantra of “Guns Up”.
A sustainability tax is not at all too far fetched, infact its already here in Europe, particularly in London where our dear mayor has a new tax on diesel cars pre 2015 (Euro6). In April it will only cover central london but will expand to most of greater London in a couple years. A 24 hour charge for driving into the covered area. More charges coming up for different cities…. seems like going back to the mid evil citadel towns where only the rich can get in as only they can afford to pay the charges….
Morning, Nasir!
I agree – and dread this. Because I am certain the idea is under consideration. It would be the most effective way to deal with the “problem” of millions of cars that aren’t automated or even GPs’d. These will take a generation to attrite out of general circulation, and there would still be a very large number left and available for those who do not wish to “opt in” to the new regime of automated/electrified/ride-sharing “mobility.”
Taxing them in this manner is much more subtle than an outright ban. It leaves open the possibility of legal possession, just makes it economically untenable for 99 percent of the population.
This has already been done with automatic rifles. It is technically legal to own one. If you can afford to pay Uncle several thousand dollars for the privilege.
Eric, I had an automatic rifle and handgun. The rifle was a blast for burning ammo. It would have been great with a 3 shot burst mode.
I was a Big Mac fan in the early 80s, a Mac 11. It was a room sweeper although you needed to sweep rapidly since it would empty a 32 round mag in 2 seconds.
Every time I watch a movie and someone is spraying and praying with something like the Mac I wonder how many people realize the gun just keeps spraying and spraying is an impossibility.
Well, it’s fiction they say. Yes, it certainly is.
I got a great laugh from David Letterman back when he first started the Late Show and would have short skits. You could see a granny in a rocker sitting in a darkened room right before the door burst in and several bad guys swarmed in only to be cut down. Then the light comes on and it’s David holding a Mac and he says “It’s easy to nap with a Mac in your lap” as you see the Mac he’s holding. Maybe I should look for that on YouTube.
The japanese make it very difficult to keep a car more then 5 years as a stimulus
to the auto industry. They require an annual inspection and every year it gets tougher.
Clover,
Authoritarians are very fond of evasive euphemisms. So, “stimulus” – to describe the forcing off the road of perfectly sound cars only a few years old in order to force people to waste money on new ones.
This is a “stimulus” in the same way that a sadistic kid “stimulates” ants to move quickly using a magnifying glass and the sun’s rays.
I often wonder what is wrong with the wiring of people such as yourself – who are so glib and casual about shoving guns in people’s faces to regiment their lives and steal their property.
You’d be startled – and angry – if some random thug came to your house and demanded money to fund whatever… or else. But it’s ok (to you) when exactly the same thing is done to some other victim, provided it is done officially. Via a vote, or an extortion letter on “official” letterhead, via the mail.
As if, somehow, an action that most sane people consider immoral and even evil (theft) when performed by an individual on a freelance basis somehow becomes moral and acceptable when it is done by “official” individuals with titles and special costumes, who have empowered themselves to do it legally and rendered their victims legally defenseless to the assault.
I eagerly await your explanation of “reality.”
You will never get an honest explanation because the truth is that clovers enjoy using government violence against all those who dare to think for themselves, all those who do not obey or conform. They love to punish dissidents. They enjoy sending swat goons to kick down the doors of peaceful families, ransacking their homes, and terrorizing their families.