It’s been reported that Joerg Kerner, Porsche’s chief of powertrain development, has been SWATTED by armed (German) government workers for suspected “cheating” on the government’s emissions tests.
Porsche, of course, is part of the Audi/VW conglomerate and offered TDI diesel engines in the Cayenne SUV. These, too, have been implicated in the “cheating.”
Kerner is being held in a cage, sans bail – having been deemed a “flight risk,” according to reports. Three other “suspects” are also being investigated.
Earlier this week German prosecutors searched around 10 premises in Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg as well.
You’d think someone had been harmed.
As every reader here already knows, this “cheating” business is a classic example of what lawyers call malum prohibitum – something which is prohibited by law. It differs in kind from malum in se – an act that is harmful regardless of the law.
“Cheating” a speed trap by using a radar detector is an example of malum prohibitum. It’s against the law. There is a statute. If you are caught, you will be punished. But there is no moral stigma – and if the statute didn’t exist, no one would feel guilty about using a radar detector (and most normal people don’t feel guilty even if there is a statute). The reason why is simple enough: The use of the radar detector doesn’t harm anyone else; it merely protects you from being harmed by an armed government worker looking to extract revenue on the basis of a statute.
VW’s “cheating” is the same thing, scaled up.
Actually, not quite – because the “cheating” involved regulations. A statute is at least a law, passed into law by lawmakers – who are at least vaguely accountable to the people who elected them. But a regulation is a mere bureaucratic fatwa. It is literally of a piece with the religious injunctions issued by Ayatollahs. No one elected them – and no one elected the regulators who wrote the emissions rigmarole, either.
Yet the rigmarole has the force of law. As is the case with the real thing, in countries where Sharia law is the law. And the Ayatollahs who issue those fatwas will not tolerate disobedience.
As here.
Kerner – and before him, VW’s Oliver Schmidt – have been given the Full Treatment even though their “crimes” have yet to produce any tangible evidence of harm to anyone except the affronted authority of the regulatory Ayatollahs.
Contrast what has happened to them with what has not happened to, for instance, George W. Bush – who pretty clearly “cheated” the country into an aggressive war (ongoing, years after the real evildoer retired to his Texas ranch) which resulted in very tangible harm to hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Mass murder – vs. “cheating” on a government test.
And that test – as has been explained here at length on prior occasions – involves angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin differences in exhaust emissions; levels so negligible as to be meaningless.
VW/Audi (and Porsche) are portrayed by an unknowing or complicit media as purveying to the public the equivalent of a 1969 Dodge Polara with an out-of-adjustment four barrel carburetor, two bad spark plugs and no catalytic converter.
But the “cheating” diesels were so got-damned clean no one noticed – much less smelled anything – until a busybody decided to run the cars through a gantlet of tests and – behold! – discovered a fractional difference in the exhaust product when the cars were not in “test loop” mode. VW’s crime was to embed software in the computer which made the cars compliant with the government’s ridiculously strict (a hair’s breadth away from “zero emissions”) standards while being tested, but emit fractionally higher amounts when out on the road.
This is not well-understood – which is why the government (the one here and the one in Germany) has been able to portray Schmidt and Kerner and others as malignant. Talk of “up to 40 times higher than permitted” emissions.
Yes, indeed.
“Up to” – but not necessarily actually. And “up to” “40 times” isn’t much when we’re not even talking whole numbers. The emissions at issue are fractions of a whole number, the difference between one regulatory “bin” and “tier” and the next up (or down) “bin” and “tier.”
VW/Audi/Porsche – the company and its people – are in the frying pan not for any harms they’ve caused; arguably, their “cheating” diesels did lots of tangible good – by saving their owners lots of money by using less fuel. The automaker and its people – talented, productive people such as Schmidt and Kerner, both of whom are brilliant engineers – are in the hot seat for having dared to affront Uncle and his useless eater regulatory minions.
The persecution of these men – and of the company they work for – over a trumped-up malum prohibitum is the very essence of malum in se.
. . .
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If the use of COBOL is the reason for all capitals, why aren’t the street and municipality names in capitals as well?
Because they were either pre-printed, or pre-programmed, since they were a constant.
Again, show ANY statute or code in any US or state code which makes reference to any human being conscripted as a corporation without consent or notification, merely by reason of the case of the letters used to print his name…… HAhahaha…just saying sounds absurd.
Any legal process must exist in citeable written form in order to have any validity…so where is it?
All these strawmen gurus going around for the last 30 years…but no one can cite it….. They just say “Hey look! Capital letters! That means you’re a corporation!” ……
Different parts of a piece of software are updated at different times for different reasons. (Y2K brought a lot of hurried changes to old applications.) The use of caps can also be used for emphasis, to catch the eye of the intended recipient.
As you observed, the use of all caps has been falling off as ancient applications are finally updated or replaced. I was a programmer back in the day and worked with quite a few computer systems and programs that lacked lower case characters. (Heck, I worked with punch cards and chain printers!) Many people today wearing watches and carrying phones that have more power and capacity than a huge multi-million dollar mainframe did decades ago cannot begin to fathom the restrictions that programmers used to live with. If you could save a few bits and a few CPU cycles by using all upper case characters (and two-digit years!) that was a very big deal back then.
As you correctly point out, there is no underlying law that magically turns a person into a corporation when his or her name is typed out in upper case by government, the electric company, the phone company, or your aunt Matilda for that matter. Absent such law the idea is utter and complete bilge.
Now that different styles and fonts are trivial to use, some “guru” will undoubtedly come out with wild theories stating that if your name is printed in Arial Bold Italic it means you have magically been turned into a Scotsman.
“Now that different styles and fonts are trivial to use, some “guru” will undoubtedly come out with wild theories stating that if your name is printed in Arial Bold Italic it means you have magically been turned into a Scotsman.”
HAAhahaha!!! -I think that would be Pinchpenny Sans Serif…. 😉
I noticed that the Post Office still uses all caps on their web forms and their own machine addressing diddlies….. Next, Bill is going to say that the street I live on is a corporation! 😉 (Leave it to the P.O. to always be about 30 years behind…)
And thanks for the eggsplanation, Jason. I knew the all caps nonsense was, of course, nonsense….but I did not previously know why some documents contained all caps – Never really even thought about it until I started hearing of some of these “strawmen” gurus and their disciples, as I don’t have much communication with Uncle (Unlike those guys, who seem to always be embroiled in legal issues, while they’re trying to school others on how to be free…)
Who knows what horrors will be unleashed upon us if your name is printed out in that font! Beware! Don’t let this happen to you!
https://youtu.be/qxDJMn-534Y?t=1m35s
BTW, another reason that upper case can be used is for convenience is sorting. The folding of lower case into upper can be done internally of course, but it may also be displayed or printed out that way depending on specifications or the whim of the programmer.
Jason
The first computer I ever had anything to do with was an IBM 1440. I was a communications technology (two-way radio) student at a votech and I was waiting for two of my fellow students to catch up with me so our teacher, Bart Whitehouse, WA0HWP, could take us through the microwave module together.
One day a geek wandered in and asked if anyone would be interested in helping them fix the IBM 1440. I looked at Bart and he told me that he would send someone for me when it was time. Before I could troubleshoot the 1440, I had to learn IBM’s rather peculiar method of schematicizing. After I’d mastered that, I was able to isolate the problem to a handful of same-sized circuit boards. I wound up removing individual active components, plastic transistors, and testing them with an ohmmeter. I quickly found one that had become a diode and bought a replacement at RadioShack for 37 cents. The machine sprang to life immediately, and I was buried in mass adulation from almost everyone in the computer lab. I went on to become the only Fortran V programmer in the school to receive a certificate of proficiently, which was filled in on an old Underwood typewriter. It is still in my credential binder.
It isn’t a law, it is a corporate law regulation, which has probably been long since replaced by subsequent regulations. It was based on the 1933 bankruptcy of the United States government corporate entity.
If you have worked with early computer systems then you know that the use of upper case was quite common. For what it’s worth, I started with the IBM 360 and later transitioned to DEC systems, working in software development for many years. I worked both on system-level software and applications, utilizing quite a few programming languages. I did not work on mainframe hardware. (I left the field a long time ago.)
There was no government bankruptcy in 1933 and the United States government is not a corporate entity. If you disagree, please provide a pointer to the incorporation papers and the bankruptcy proceedings. Please also provide us a copy of this “corporate law regulation” that magically makes a person a corporation if his/her name is spelled in all caps, as well as a copy of the underlying statute. Don’t bother with the usual handwaving, smoke, and mirrors of the “gurus” – let’s see some actual proof of these wild theories.
The IBM 360 has always been considered to be a mainframe computer because it was a mainframe computer.
http://www.rvbeypublications.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/webjamestraficant.pdf
Congressman James Traficant went to prison because he was a whistleblower who exposed what the mainstream media hid, even though it was reported in the Federal Register.
Bill, Bill, Bill….
Larry Becraft Debunks The Fake Traficant Speech:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lawmen/bTXXKs_Hmi8
Did he also debunk the prison term that he served, or was that simply ignored?
Bill, please elaborate on how Traficant’s convictions on bribery, racketeering and tax evasion have anything to do with what you are talking about. (Ditto his refusal, when he was a sheriff, to execute foreclosure evictions, just because he felt sorry for the debtors…).
Yes, I know full well that the 360 was a mainframe computer. If nothing else I could certainly see the amount of space that it took up at the time. 🙂
You are evading the questions. As Nunzio pointed out, Traficant’s claims have been thoroughly debunked and he was convicted for a number of unrelated criminal activities.
So I will ask again:
Where are the incorporation papers for the U.S. Government? (For that matter, what entity supposedly incorporated it?)
Where are the court proceedings for the supposed 1933 bankruptcy of the federal government?
Where is the “corporate law regulation” that transforms and individual into a corporation if his or her name is spelled in upper case characters?
It is very simple. All you need to do in order to clearly support your position is to produce this handful of documents.
Nunzio,
You share a couple characteristics with all other naysayers about capital letters, the lack of interest in actually finding black letter law, and the use of the premise as a basis for ad hominem attacks.
Billy Noy, asking you to provide proof for a theory in which you believe, is not an ad-hominem attack….it is merely the requesting that you substantiate something which you purport to be fact.
Black-leeter law? How can it be black-letter law, when no one ever heard of it prior to these “strawmen” gurus coming on the scene a few decades ago, and you yourself even claiming that it came about in 1933?
In order for a process or semantic to confer a different status upon a human being, such process would have to be spelled-out and codified, and thus available to be refered to and cited; for if it it is not, it can neither be enforced nor defended against, so therefore doesn’t exist- and so far, neither you, nor anyone has been able to cite such a process, other than coming from the mind of those who promote such theories.
And such nonsense is very dangerous, because it deprives those who practice it of formulating a sound legal defense, since they are off on a wild goose chase which holds no water, since it has no merit in law- while ignoring the very laws which they are being charged with, be they Constitutional or not- for those laws ARE in existence, and are enforced by judges, until and if they are invalidated by the Supreme[ly stupid] Court.
Uh…that shoulda been “Billy Boy”….
The Constitution has increasingly provided most wild goose chases for those too ignorant and/or lazy to do due diligence.
So what we have here is engineers teaching the car to pass the test. Just like teachers do in American schools.
RB,
Computers don’t learn, they are programmed. Teachers indoctrinate. Learners learn by themselves.
Computers can be programmed to learn. But you missed my point anyway.
The trick is finding programmers that know how to program.
What the psychopathic regulators are pissed off about is not that these guys violated some arcane regulation, but that they are actually engineering automobiles that can pass their ridiculous tests. The regulations are written in an effort to make the internal combustion engine extinct, yet these guys keep making ICE cars that can pass ever more onerous regulations. How dare they! Lock them up!
The Boeing 707 /kc135 When first built in the late 1950s was designed with a water tank for injection into the diesel burning (jp4)jet engines to increase thrust (power) for takeoff. Equating political unaccountable Gods’ war crimes to the evils of minute air pollution is masterful work. Keep writing Eric.
Thanks, Bert!
It baffles me that so many people are “outraged” over this VW/Audi/Porsche thing while at the same time are indifferent to demonstrable mayhem which can be laid at the feet of the psychopaths who rule us.
Yep eric, “hypocrite” comes to mind. Or simply ignorant dumbasses is probably more accurate. The unthinking masses of sheeple whose main concern upon arising every day is to get that fix of sickeningly sweet soft drink and watch the idiot box. Please do keep pointing this out.
I was literally shouted down by shrub buttlickers when he and that cabal of devils who call themselves “neocons” illegally took this country into war against a country who hadn’t harmed us. What it really boiled down to, and this point is almost never spoken of, is Saddam Hussein had convinced neighboring oil producers to begin selling oil via the gold Dinar instead of the fiat FRN. That’s the reason he had to die and Iraq had to be demolished.
Gotta love it, 8. They say in their 9/11 Commission Report that the Saudi’s did 9/11 [LOL]….so what do they do? Bomb Iraq, and sell billions of dollars in weapons to Saudi A-rabia!
That’s the kind of contradiction which should be proof positive to anyone what BS this all is….yet no one questions it……
Nun, they whisked the Israeli’s away who were dancing in the street, knowing full well what had happened. They took that away from the FBI who, for once in their entire sorry existence, knew what was going on. Hell, they even tried to warn shrubco and were turned away.
3000 people is a small price to pay for huge profits that seem to have no end in sight.
A year and a half ago or so the govt. announced it was taking Lockheed in as a “partner”. It don’t get any better for stockholders than that.
And the entire Bin Laden crew was whisked away from the FBI on the day no planes were allowed to fly. I recall seeing pics of the inside of their homes. They didn’t bother to take shit, just haul ass…..and somehow nobody in this country except a few people seemed to notice….and when the MSM was told to not repeat a word of it….well…..they didn’t.
Like MiB said, every damned one of them should be lined up and killed…..only I’d torture them first and it would be all of them including the little hispanic shit nephew who’s trying to become a pol in Tx. and doing a bad job of it.
If I had my way, anyone with the Bush name, regardless of if they were any kin, would be paranoid for awhile. Purge!!!
‘Zactly, 8.
So far, this has to be the biggest scandal in US history. They are actively milking this one (and will continue to) far longer than Pearl Harbor.
This shit’ll never end- they’ll just do repeat performances every now and then, to keep freshening their power and to foment “patriotism”- Why not? It always works so well.
And they avoid mentioning that those jihadists dancing in the streets were Zionists in Israel.
Eric, just more proof of how effective modern brainwashing is.
Think about it: The majority of people hate whomever they’re told to hate by the “newsmedia”. The news depicts something or someone, or even an idea as being bad- be it a country, or white people, or a business or capitalism itself….and practically overnight the masses are parroting what they’ve been told. No fact checking; no thought. What ever is being propagated is seen as “legit” because it is on TV, so any resistance is immediately dropped, and emotionalism takes over. The viewer becomes a “believer”, and from then, on, no amount of logic nor facts will convert them to reality, because such things have little effect upon emotion.
It’s a fiendishly clever system they’ve erected. And how often do you see those who partake of it’s “services” ever refuting the things they preach?
And on top of that, they not only tell the faithful believers what the problems are….but they always propose the same answer as the solution: More regulation/more government.
He who controls the media, controls the world.
Nunzio,
Their brainwashing wouldn’t be as effective if its subjects hadn’t been prepared over a dozen years to accept it. All they had to do is prevent critical thinking skills from taking root as they usually do among non-brain damaged human beings.
He who ignores the media will inherit what is left after the second American revolution.
Exactly Bill. But it’s gone way beyond just the skools. It’s to the point where the basic tenets of indoctrination are passed down from generation to generation. The parents are as deluded as the kids, because they went through the same skools. “Heed the scientists! Pay homage to the ‘experts’! The policeman is your friend! Everybody does it, so it’s O-K! ….”.
But even if there is a revolution- or if America just crashes under her own dysfunction, or the other tyrannies have enough of us, what rushes in to fill the vacuum left by America, will likely be no better….and will probably become even worse, as such has been the unrelenting pattern of human history.
It always has to get bad enough for the majority to recognize how bad it has gotten before a revolution, which is a return to the beginning point, can occur.
George Orwell ws right…. sixty years ago. His crazy stoner smokepipe dreams have become reality. So much so that few realise it, and if they were told about it they’d laugh it off. Nah, dat ain’t happnin heah……
Same with the Communist Manifesto. America has been practicing all 10 planks of it for some time now- some of them for 100 years now….but mention it to most- even show them in black and white, and what do they do? They can’t deny it, so they rationalize/justify it.
“Ya gotta have education, dummy!” [Ah yes, and we all know, apart from communal government-mandated compulsory edumacation which is paid for from “each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, there could never exist any education…. 😉 ]
And “Ya gotta have heavy progressive taxation….WHO’D BUILD THE ROADS?” [That latter phrase seems to be the one thing they ALL learn in the aforementioned government schools!]
And “The government HAS to regulate private bidness! Do you think that we the dweebs who elect the ‘rulers of the [gag]free world are capable of cooperating and working things out in a voluntary free-market, as had been done from Adam to Karl Marx?!”.
We have never had a shortage of education.
The shortage has been among those intelligent and well-enough educated to repeat the process.
We’ve never had a shortage of indoctrination. Education does not proceed from unionized employees whose salaries and facilities are paid for by extorted funds, where a handful of tyrants whom you nor your kid have ever met decree what is and may not be taught.
My education did not begin until I managed to extricate myself from such facilities the day I turned 16.
My education began when my mother and sister started reading to me, and carried on from basic literacy, after I could read to them.
You are correct Bill. Same here. In fact, the skools undid a lot of what I had learned at home. “Re-education” at age 5….
I was too stubborn for them to do that to me. I entered first grade reading at a third grade level with an early junior high vocabulary. I knew the Latin words for all the naughty parts before I knew the street names for them, as a result of having read my mother’s nursing textbooks.
George Orwell was never a “crazy stoner smokepipe dream(er).”
Everything that Orwell missed, Huxley covered.
People in general are outraged over whatever the media tells them to be outraged about.
I see it over and over again. People don’t have the energy or time to think so they take emotional short cuts and the media and ruling class take full advantage.
They’d have more time and energy if they would stop vegging in front of screens.
As those large companies have thrown their lot in with the nwo, they can’t take any steps to defend their own people. And the Porsche bloke is not an evildoer. Rather it is the ibc and the governments who are the evildoers who are exceeding their limited authorities and harming great numbers of people. No clover or snowflake will ever understand that, as they do not know what liberty is.
Eric,
Your understanding of legal Latin leaves me hoping you were never an attorney:-)
More information, please! Eric uses the terms as I understand them; if that’s wrong, please spell out with specifics.
Eric, excellent column.
Thanks, JdL!
Bill tends toward the pedantic at times…
Bill’s statement above, seems totally ludicrous, coming from someone who believes that having one’s name spelled in all capital letters somehow renders that person a corporation!
Things are even worse when all someone has to do is mention a commonly held fallacy for everyone to become convinced that they believe it. I was matching your fallacy with fallacy.
Nice try, Bill! 😉
You haven’t provided a believable defense. of your premise.
Now you’re turning the tables. You were the one who was supposed to provide a valid citation for a legal theory which you referred to as if it were real.
What legal theory was that?
The one about seeing your name in all caps meaning that you’ve morphed into a corporation.
When you see your name in CAPS it is a sign that a legacy piece of software designed decades ago is still in use. Back in the day, machine resources were very limited and very, very expensive. Character sets frequently lacked lower case.
There is a lot of old COBOL code still being used by government, banks, insurance companies, etc. that only supports UPPER CASE characters.
‘Zactly, Jason. Which also ‘splains why seeing all caps was more common in the recent past, and is becoming less common now….but of course, that still doesn’t stop the “strawmen” hucksters from preaching their nonsense.
Afternoon, Nunz!
We’re all slightly Weird here – but in general agreement on the important stuff – so I don’t let the small stuff bother me.
Agreed, Eric!
I like Bill. It wouldn’t be the same without him. Sometimes ya just gotta fight fire with fire though…especially when he puts the matches in your hand! 😉 (If I didn’t like him, I’d either ignore him, or be merciless in my badgering!).
We ALL have differences of opinion. It’s fun to explore ones with Bill….he can come up with some good and unique thoughts- or at least quotable verbiage.
If no one was pedantic, there would be no modern fundamentals, like an understood difference between a democracy and a republic.
Why are none of the engineering societies sticking up and defending the engineers? They take money from engineers for this reason and yet fail to do nothing. Which means the societies are under the control of the IBC. Maybe all the auto engineers ought to just leave the profession. That might get some attention, esp. if they do so simultaneously.
Truth be known, as long as the automaker, or any given industry, is the primary employment source for taxpayers, government generally give that industry tacit approval to do whatever it wishes. But when said industry no longer provides a sizable tax base, or (more importantly) campaign funds, they become revenue targets themselves. The coprporate lawyers gave the govrt the ammution, and the weapons, to use again st the general populace, but seem to forget that there are teeth at both end of that rabid dog, and it bites indiscriminately when it fails to be sufficiently fed. The final answer will ultimately be to put down the beast, as no one seems to have the will to pull its teeth, primarily because they want to use those same teeth to their own ends!
Bravo! Well stated gtc.
I guess the government has to vilify the citizenry and the free market, so that they can justify their own existence and truly violent and harmful crimes as a means of “protecting us” from the “monsters” they’ve invented, whose “crimes” are neither violent nor harmful to anyone…and thus not even crimes.
The sad thing is, that the peons eat this stuff up. The average person actually believes that VW did something bad, and is “deserving” of what our oppressors are doing to them.
it might be a good time to recall the dictionary meaning of the word “FASCISM”. It is, quite simply, “government control of private means of production”.
In the case of VW, we have a private means of production, the car manufacturer, being hamstrung, dictated to, demanded of, and now imprisoned, by government attempting, against any laws in [lace, to CONTROL that automaker as to what they “may” produce and sell.
On WHAT Constitutional basis do FedGov (through EPA, another unlawfully constituted entity) purport to CONTROL what Volkswagen, Audi, Ford, Honea, or any other automaker or designer MAY produce or sell or design? None, that’s what.
What would you expect given that VW was created by Hitler, a fascist?
They all play the game because it is more profitable than fighting it.
Over at Ars Technika (Apple’s autocorrection seems more apt) There was a story about the DOE’s relaxation of coal and nuclear power plant regulation that was blown way out of proportion because Trump is Evil. There was a comment about how the natural gas supply in the northeast was maxed out during the last cold spell and that some of the turbine generation plants had to have fuel oil on hand to keep the lights on. There were other comments about the need for more gas pipelines. I replied that first it was next to impossible to build new pipelines in this country and that what if there were a leak, and posted a link to a story about the giant methane leak in northern California a few years ago. And compared a gas leak to the fear of the Keystone pipeline around the same time, for reasons of leaks and death from below the surface.
Of course I was down voted and piled on for being a stupid idiot comparing methane gas leaks to oil leaks. I was going to mention the VW NOX scandal but just didn’t feel like taking on the entire foolish crowd. But it seems to me that oil spills have a major advantage in that they are held down by gravity. If methane is a greenhouse pollutant where was all the outrage? It was just a local story or at least known about in energy circles. No protestors with signs in front of bulldozers or attacking the CEO.
I guess if the TV cameras can’t see the pollution (or the protestors aren’t telegenic) it doesn’t exist.
The DAPL pipeline passes about 300 yards from my acreage and delivers about 500,000 barrels of North Dakota crude per day. If I asked someone to point out where it is they would have no clue, except for the placards on the side of the roads where it passes under them. Crops are grown in the fields about the line and the landscape looks exactly the same as it did before they laid the pipe 2 years ago. They laid the pipe parallel to a high pressure natural gas line that has been there since the ’60s without any leaks.
On the other hand one county over they allowed a large wind farm to be built with hundreds of turbines that can be seen 20-30 miles away, and at night it is a sea of annoying blinking red lights. Massive amounts of concrete were poured into the ground for the base of each turbine, very large above ground sub-stations were erected and massive above ground transmission lines are needed to transmit the electricity from the very large footprint ( I estimate about 100 square miles) of the wind farm.
If it were up to me there would be more pipelines, and instead of heavily government subsidized wind farms we would be building clean natural gas fired power plants since we have a glut of natural gas.
Oh just wait until the market collapses and they’re left to rot.
http://www.techhui.com/photo/dead-wind-farm
They’re replacing blades and other stuff on lots of farms here that are a couple decades old. Without subsidy though, it would be different story since some companies have been known to pay $8/mwh for someone to take their production during the wee hours when demand is lowest.
You’re right about the glut of natgas. If GM had priced their trucks competitively with gasoline they’d be making big inroads for CNG. $10K per unit average price over gas engines just doesn’t make sense. Some of the oil support companies, mainly pipeline companies and actual oil companies have had some of those trucks.
I suspect they’re getting a better deal than what I priced for one. Of course if you can simply siphon off gas for them and show the loss somehow then it’s “free” fuel I guess…or at least less costly. And if pickups still lasted like the ones of the early 90’s then you might make up some money since gas engines tend to last a long time. There’s just too much cost for the new unit to ever make up for it.
A few years ago there was a new steel foundry built near Hamilton, Tx. using natgas. It’s a new way to get the high temps needed from a natgas furnace. It was built by one of the Nordic countries for ship building steel.
I have a ’68 model JD 4020 with a propane engine I guess will outlive me.
The pipelines are just as subsidized as the wind generators, fields of solar cells, ethanol manufacturing, and Teslas.
Would you prefer a field of crashed airplanes to the “sea of annoying blinking red lights?”
Tractor trailers are cheaper and less polluting than any of it, operating without subsidies.
since airplanes are not supposd to fly less than five hundred feet off the deck most places, there still won’t be any seas of crashed airplanes even if the windmills didn’t have the red blinkers.
You have never heard of IFR?
Long, long before there were any “windmills” there were radio towers, which have always been required to have warning lighting if they were above a certain height, which is subject to their location.
The Tesla continues to take lives due to its shitty programming priorities, and yet no one is even indited, much less prosecuted. Lick the govt. anus and you acquire immunity, plain and simple.
Bankers cheat on government regulations all the time. This cheating does real harm to countless numbers of people. Not one goes to jail.
Meanwhile an engineer cheats ever so slightly…… even if he has to keep his job that has a salary that is a tiny fraction of what his equivalent in the finance world makes.
And they wonder why they can’t get kids in the west to go into engineering. They never seem to have a problem finding kids who will go into finance. Maybe it’s that a whole risk reward thing.
So true about the banking cartel. They actually stole peoples money. Don’t even get into the police abuse. What ever happened to respondeat superior. I bet corporate wanted these guys to pass the test at all cost. I know what it’s like in manufacturing. Where they say get objectives A,B,C done no matter what and then in the next message we need to lower our operating cost and here’s your new budget which is less than last years.
The reason people don’t want to be engineers when they grow up might have more to do with perceiving what Scott Adams said in one of his Dilbert books:
“The risk-reward calculation for engineers goes like this:
Risk – Public humiliation and the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
Reward – A certificate of appreciation in a cheap plastic frame.”
Maybe engineers should be paid millions of dollars for their work, if society is going to hold them to legal liability standards every bit a strict as the doctors who DO make that kind of money.
Soldiers do far more heinous things for trinkets on their chests.
Creative engineers should be paid millions.
If I made the same money for my employers in a financial field I would have probably racked up seven figures of bonuses by now for it. What did I get as an engineer? I got to keep my job well hell in one instance, where I made a company the most money thanks to high volume, I was downsized.
They tend to earn more when they pay themselves.
But VeeWee’s engineers did NOT cheat. Uncle Stupid said “when the thing is plugged in to the test computer, we need to see THIS resulting set of data”. So the obedient servants at VW made a machine to give them those numbers. WHEN PLUGGED IN.
This whole unbelievable travesty of justice could have been easily prevented if the rulemakers nad written the rules well. Had the rules said “under these conditioins the engine must produce test results within these stated parameters, THEN they’d have a solid case. I was REALLY disappointed when VW”s engineer drew a prison sentence. A man like that does NOT belong rotting away in the GreyBar Hotel. VolksWage sold their best men down the river. Sad….. criminal, even.
He should have decapitated a couple of people instead- then he, like OJ Simpson, could be a free man!