Green is Old

Wish I could post a picture.

https://iili.io/HiaszhX.jpg

Just bought this one last week through the Craig’s List. Spent it’s life in the high desert of CO and NM.

1979 F-150 4×4 – 300cid I6, New Process 435 top loader transmission with a “granny” 1st gear, New Process 207 gear drive, cast iron, transfer case, solid Dana front axle.

There’s some surface patina on the body and paint, the original paint was blue and a rattle can blue paint over top of it. The usual heat and sun damage on interior plastics, but the frame and underside looks like a two year old truck. It is in amazing shape.

That’s the new going to town rig for me.

The price you have to pay “go old” is a little distressing. I’ve been buying, selling, trading and driving old Ford trucks all my life. I could buy trucks like this all day long for $500 to $1000

Climate Change

Global Warming

Carbon Dioxide

Tragedy of the Commons

Die-Off

Useful Idiots

Useless Eaters

On and on and on and on, flip flop it never stops.

You better believe it, you no good ignorant swine.

If anything, some people’s brains are complete malignant neoplasms, nothing else.

The prime example is Joe Biden, Creutzfeld-Jakob candidate, pretty soon, all Joe will be able to do is grin and bear it.

That’s the way it goes moving west.

Nobody for President, it is too dangerous of a job.

You end up with shit for brains. Another drooling idiot, obviously.

ERIC PETERS EFFECT? Ford Raptor R brings V-8 back.

https://motorweek.org/road_tests/2023-ford-f-150-raptor-r-2/

“Well, the 2023 Ford F-150 Raptor R not only sets things right with a V8, but does it with a high-output supercharged powerplant packing 700-horsepower.”

be sure to watch the short clip to the end to see price, lol

‘Murkia, where F-150s have 700 horse power!

Past peak price?

The Biggest Car Market Crash Of Our Lifetime Car Prices Will Fall 50%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-RN7u9LmGs

Ok, let’s try some (possibly more representative) numbers.
California numbers, for example.
It happens that I live in California, but so do 39.24 million other Americans, out of 331.9 million U.S residents, or 12% of U.S. population, which makes it the most populated U.S. state. Texas is second at 29.5, Florida third at 21.8, and New York fourth at 19.8 million.

But first, the replacement cost for an IC engine. The video does not specify whether the replacement is a brand new, or a re-manufactured engine. Judging by the $10,000 price, I would guess brand new. I also surmise that a Ford (or any other make) dealer service department would refuse to install a re-manufactured engine (prove me wrong).

The *installed* cost for a NAPA remanufactured 300cid straight six in my ’89 F150 was ~$5,500 five years ago, of which, IIRC, ~$3,500 was the cost of the engine. I do not recall the independent repair shop’s labor rate at that time, but I guarantee it was less then the local Ford dealer’s shop rate.

So, we can, and should, discuss shop labor rates. According to the video, dealer shop rate in Alabama was (205)/(15) = $135/hr.
The Ford dealer in Norco, CA (Hemborg Ford) chargers $159/hr, last I checked. Independent shop will generally charge less, sometimes quite a bit less, because they want and need your business. But, for now, let’s compare apples to apples. So, dealer labor rates are evidently (159)/(135) = 1.18 the cost of Alabama prices. (20 hr)*($159/hr) = $3180.

Fuel costs to be discussed in a follow on post.

EV battery lifespans claimed in this article are pure speculation, not based on data. The range based on data is 1,000 to 1,500 recharges, and the batteries are NOT worthless after those recharges — just lower capacity.

1,000 to 1,500 recharges at 200 miles per charge is 200,000 to 300,000 miles. Owners of automobiles rarely drive over 200,000 miles (1% to 1.5%)

It IS green to keep an automobile as long as possible.

It is also green to buy a car or truck painted green.

Buying an EV is green ONLY if enough miles are driven to offset the 70% larger upfront carbon dioxide footprint from producing the batteries. And there is an additional carbon dioxide footprint for upgrading the electric grids to handle the increased electricity demands from lots of EVs.

If one is a follower of science, rather than wild guess climate predictions of doom, one would want to green the planet with more vegetation, resulting from more CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s the only green that counts.

I like the Red-Blue analogy. I think that after 1988 everything was standardized from blue =dums to red = returds. Prior to 1980, they alternated between red meaning challenger and blue meaning the incumbent. Some claim that it lasted between 76 and 2004. I believe after 2000, the current “thing” became the standard. I liked the old way. It wasn’t easy to pigenhole and identify people’s affiliations. My stupid commie brother tells me I’m a commie because I supported “red” people like Trump. Beam me up.

What is electricity? We behave like wires are like pipes, pushing electrons around, or that the electrons move back and forth. This is good enough for a concrete understanding, but the reality is it is just an “energy field.” The wire is just a tool to direct the field in the direction we want.

https://youtu.be/oI_X2cMHNe0

Generators and batteries create the field, but so does the wire, and the load. Loads, like lights and motors (and computers) transduce the field into something like motion or photons. Along the way resistors, inductors and switches manipulate the field.

That’s it. That’s what all this stuff is about. The theory guys love electricity because once the infrastructure is there, nothing moves. No pipelines to leak, no tankers to get stuck in a canal, no international incidents (or very few since most grids don’t depend too much on foreign generating stations -Germany and the Northeast US being notable exceptions). Just an electric field.

Ephemeral and nearly virtual. Power companies essentially sell nothing, deliver nothing. If they unplug the generator the field collapses and no more power, but otherwise nothing changes. Everything is still there, just that it doesn’t do anything and there’s no residue of the product.

One of the reasons why software is such a VC darling is because it doesn’t exist. It’s just pure thought, and when removed from the machine it is nothing. When you buy Windows or iOS you’re buying nothing.

Which business would you rather be in? The one that needs to ship product all over the place, or the one that ships nothing anywhere? Thirty years as an amateur investor has taught me the company that has no shipping costs is going to be more profitable than the one that does.

“There is nothing “efficient” about a three-ton half-ton truck that requires a ton of batteries in order to be able to go less than half as far as a non-electric half-ton truck can go on a full tank of gas. It is the apotheosis of inefficiency to increase the weight of a vehicle by a ton – and for that reason be obliged to burn through the additional energy required to move all of that weight.”

Exactly. Simple physics is going to end the EV – but probably not before the guv’ment wastes many more of your dollars and is eventually forced to give up.

Seeing how much they are wasting in Ukraine to fight a losing war against Mother Russia, these parasital pricks might never give up. The Biden thing is going to cross all the red lines, and keep doubling down until the nukes are lit off. Maybe, unless cooler heads remove this lunatic from office.

I will tell you how this might end, the clue is the headline pic of
James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog: a mule pulling a jalopy. They are going to fuck things up so bad we are going to be shoved back into 1850 whether we like it or not. Kunstler asks, how are we allowing this one (Biden) family to fuck things up this bad. Cocaine in the White house, bribes from Gina, catastrophic wars, debts through the ceiling.

Seriously folks, the Biden thing keeps doubling down on his Ukrainium war fantasy/insanity. Cluster bombs for a huge cluster fuck. Slaughter like we haven’t seen since WW1. And for what? Did the Amerikan people ever vote or approve of this war? I thought we lived in a Democracy. What are we to gain when Ukraine, just a few years ago, was part of mother russia?

I work hard for my money, which is why I value my Geo Metro. The little crappy Geo Metro is king of fuel efficiency, which means I am not funding Rex Tillerson’s next humongous supersized yacht. Exxon-Mobil is the world’s biggest corporation because it is good at getting what we want – oil. And oil is made into gasoline, and I want a lightweight car, not some electric 6,000 lb beast, but a light and fuel efficient, max mpgs, easy to work on, low cost replacement parts.

I mean, I never have to worry about an bank breaking part on my little cheap ICE car, but if I have one of those electrics, or even a hybrid, I would worry about the main battery going out, and when I detected it fading, that would make me nervous and I would sell the car first, to a sucker, a bag holder, like a dealer on a trade in.

Gasoline is the miracle liquid, because it is stable at room temp and has beaucoup BTUs, can be stored in a very inexpensive container that is not pressurized, or minus 400 Farenheit. The solution to our problem is not heavy electric, nor a hybrid, but super efficient ICE cars. But in Amerika, we want power and big trucks so our controllers are going to force us to change the way they want, not the way we should go based on natural forces based on economics, not ideology.

By mandating EVs, they are making the nation a fail. EV’s are a money loser, and they only work when we have so much extra money, living in a military empire, that we can just waste money as a national pastime. We have so much extra money Biden can send $200 billion to Ukraine without Congressional approval. That is some largesse on a biblical scale.

The problem with gasoline engines is that they are only 25% thermally efficient. So what we really need is a work cycle that is 50 or 80% efficient. Some experimental diesels are supposedly 50% efficient, that is turning the potential BTU’s in the fuel into torque.

‘Red has always been historically associated with a particular political philosophy. It is interesting that, electorally, a decision was quietly taken to change red to blue.’ — eric

Like many clumsy examples of American insularity, this flat-footed inversion of long-accepted color symbolism was brought to us by the Lügenpresse:

‘In 2000, both the New York Times and USA Today published their first color-coded, county-by-county maps detailing the showdown between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Both papers used red for the Republican Bush, blue for the Democrat Gore.

‘Why?

“I just decided red begins with ‘r;’ Republican begins with ‘r.’ It was a more natural association,” said Archie Tse, senior graphics editor for the Times. “There wasn’t much discussion about it.”

https://tinyurl.com/y66zw27w

OMG, what an idiot. What a blithering know-nothing. The Chinese-American Tse never heard of chicoms being called ‘reds’? Yet this uninformed simp remains the graphics director of the Slimes.

Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the French I took

— Sam Cooke / Herb Alpert / Lou Adler, Wonderful World

I do remember the electorial map being blue/republicams & red/democrat. The reason for the reversal was internationally, red has alwas been associated with nazism/communism and that color hit too close to home with the democrat party. So their party spokespeople in the media flipped it around. History revision in action for you!

In Oregon, if you drive a vehicle that’s 20 years old or younger, you have to take it to a local DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality) station for an inspection every 2 years when you renew registration. Before cars got OBD ports, an employee at the station would stick something in the car’s exhaust pipe to check emissions. Now, they simply stick a device connected to their computer to your vehicle’s OBD port. My late 1990s truck has passed the inspection each time I’ve had to take it in to be “smog tested”, but I once had a neighbor whose late ’90s Ford Taurus failed the test because of some computer part.

Speaking of DEQ, an unelected bureaucrat at the state office decreed last year that sales of new gas vehicles in Oregon will be BANNED by 2035 ala California, meaning that someone who wants to buy a new vehicle in the state will only have the option of buying a very expensive EV. Will these bureaucrats also seek to ban sales of OLD gas vehicles, or perhaps BAN private ownership of vehicles altogether ala calls from those psychopaths at the WEF?

The landfill economy, hard at work being uneconomic and unecological, to save us from the “climate crisis”?
$36000 plus installation to replace a BATTERY? And where does the dead battery go? Into the landfill.
Far more ecological to make things that last a long time. A very long time. Which we had reached in car engineering about three decades ago. And now, it’s gone. To “save” the planet.
A far more dangerous thing to the environment and the economy is the psychopathic ramblings of those who desire to satisfy their psychopathy at all cost. Also known as the state.

If it was just about the environment they would just make it a requirement that if you bought a new car you would be required to drive it for the next ten years before buying a new one. Unconstitutional? Probably, but what isn’t now?

Would going all EV help? Probably not since China builds two new coal fired power plants a week and most western countries lack the generating capacity, grid infrastructure et al to actually do this. But our leaders insist this will happen and it will! Of course this will end up looking like that scene in the movie “Downfall” where Hitler is ordering his generals to move troops around who were already dead or captured. Perhaps by 2035 Eric will be reviewing gm’s new Pedicab and Stelantis’s new bicycles.