Remember Compact Fluorescent Bulbs?
Government and the expert class all but brought them to your house and forced you to change out incandescent bulbs at gunpoint. Government tried to jam them down with by force of law, notwithstanding their cost (to purchase, and to dispose of), and their many other drawbacks.
And then, just about the time the jamdown was complete, the free market came up with the LED bulb: cheaper, better light, easier to dispose of (and they last longer, so there’s less need to dispose of them) and they use even less energy.
Point, free market!
That same expert class is saying we need to switch to electric vehicles to “save the planet”.
Steven Hayward at Breitbart spells out how there’s no rational way to look at this as anything but returning the world to feudalism.
We’re already getting there, under “unusual” (for the moment) circumstances.
Of course, yet again, the free market may well have a better answer – more sustainable (especially if society kicks its unscientific superstition about nuclear power), more affordable, and capable of keeping the world, not just the top 10% of it, mobile. More on this in the future.
Watch to see how the would-be ruling class tries to gundeck hydrogen power.
Spoiler alert: the endgame of the “electric vehicle revolution” is NOT the same number of people driving around, except using EVs instead of gas-fueled cars. The endgame is sharply restricting or eliminating personal transportation for the middle and lower classes.
Hat tip to @TXOdysseus for pointing out in this thread that there aren’t enough vital minerals in the entire world to “replace” the internal combustion engine with batteries. It’s an empirically demonstrable fact. Those profiting from the “EV revolution” are well aware of it.
@mentions
And what of the Third World? If it’s physically impossible to build enough EVs to “replace” cars on a one-to-one basis, what happens to the places that need affordable internal combustion engines to develop industry? They’re being consigned to eternal pre-industrial poverty.@mentions
It’s outright imperialism, especially when you look at what actually happens to the countries where our “green” visionaries are happy to unleash rapacious Chinese corporations to rip Mother Earth to shreds. Global dreams of expanding a prosperous middle class will be shattered.
@mentions
The genuine demand for electric cars is very nearly zero, and always has been. If they were sold at realistic prices, without titanic subsidies forcibly extracted from taxpayers, there would be maybe a hundred of them in the entire world, driven by virtue-signaling idle rich.
@mentions
We have been forced to finance our compulsory transition away from reliable and affordable personal transportation. If this was any other industry, the Left would be screaming bloody murder at the cronyism, corruption, profiteering, and staggering environmental damage.
@mentions
The environmental promises of electric cars are a total sham as well. It takes a very long time for an EV to reach the same net “environmental footprint” as a modern automobile, especially if we’re not allowed to use nuclear power to charge them, and the cost/mile is staggering.
@mentions
The cost/mile factor is important, not only because the middle class will be impoverished by the compulsory adoption of EVs, but because environmental sensitivity is a luxury of prosperous societies. Raise the cost of everything for EVs and people will get dirtier in other ways.@mentions
Existing national power grids cannot come close to handling a 1-to-1 transition from autos to EVs. Again, the people doing this to us are very well aware of it. If we’re forced to sacrifice reliable power sources for expensive solar and wind junk, the shortage gets much worse.
@mentions
Everything that could come close to making these calculations work out for EVs is highly speculative technology, if not outright science fiction. We’ve got collectivist plans that dissolve into penciled-in question marks 5 and 10 years out. Maybe hydrogen fuel cells will pan out!
@mentions
So the plan is clearly to reduce the number of people with access to personal transportation, especially with enough range to give them control over careers and lifestyles. The lower classes will move around less. They’ll use public transport. More of them will cluster in cities.
@mentions
Not so for the elite, of course. THEY will have reliable transportation. They will be allowed to fly. Not a single member of the political or corporate upper crust will ever be obliged to plan their business or leisure around the lack of at-will long-range individual transport.
@mentions
There are quite a few states in the U.S. where it would be impossible for many residents to drive across state lines if they were forced to use EVs. It would take days of driving and recharging – assuming the titanic investment of building enough charging stations was made.@mentions
It’s already clear to most people in the lower and middle class that EVs are unaffordable. Sneering elitists snottily ordering hard-working family folks to throw down $60k plus staggering maintenance costs to replace their lovely $20k sedans should be causing an uprising.
@mentions
You should rise up not only because you’re being ordered to pay for those incredibly expensive, unreliable, shorter-range EVs – but because the toffs giving those orders KNOW YOU CAN’T DO IT. They’re the same people who accuse employers of exploitation over minimum wage jobs.
@mentions
If people supposedly can’t make a living at anything close to the minimum wage NOW, what happens when personal transportation costs 3x or 5x as much? They KNOW you can’t afford that. They know you’ll surrender freedom of movement after they make it unaffordable.
Ha! There aren’t enough known lithium deposits on the planet, to supply that market for new EVs and every other battery for power tools, lawn mowers, etc. let alone provide the replacement batteries for those EVs.
“Steven Hayward at Breitbart “
You mean John Hayward
For those who think this is “flying cars” type of nonsense start paying attention; all the technology necessary to permanently, geographically, lock in place the middle and lower class citizens already exists. Remember the IoT is not your friend. All it takes to bring it online is the political will. If you thought the Holodomor was terrifying wait until this becomes real.
How is this feudalism? Can I get a definition here? This word seems to be the go-to for “everything I don’t like” for the right like fascism is for the left.
jdm
in feudalism the lower(serfs) &lower-middle class(artisans) belong to the land and can only move about outside their assigned fief with the permission of the vassal or lord of that fief OR as an outlaw.
What Mitch is describing is a broad brush method of geofencing where eventually every movement of the lower classes is tracked and monitored.
For instance I can rebuild, in my garage, 3 1980’s era 350 v8s found in junk yards, and bought for cash. When complete I can put them in the back of my 2007 F-150 and paying cash for gas drive from Mpls to LA in about 28 hours and sell them for cash with very little trace of my passage in the hundreds of tracking databases. If I take the battery out of my phone no one knows what route I take. Most of all it will be more cost effective than if I were to ship common carrier. If I load those same 3 engines in the back of a 2023 F-150 Lightning I will be lucky to make it to the Nebraska border before I will have to pull over to spend 4-6 hours recharging (this requires credit card), then if I’m lucky I will almost make it across Nebraska before I need to recharge again and so on, in short it will take 3 days to reach LA. While I’m making the trip it will be easy to calculate my route ahead of time because I’m wedded to the charger technology and my truck has GPS/WiFi that will be pinging all the way across country. I won’t break even on the costs an I will have lost a week of my time – better just to ship common carrier. This is what a soft geo-fence looks like.
A hard geo-fence would be when you bring online a Social Credit System, then your 2023 F-150 Lightning will be told that because you lack the social credit (i.e. carbon credits, etc) it cannot travel outside of a 100 mile radius from your home – so you drive west on I-94 and suddenly you slow down to 20mph and your truck informs you that you have to turn around. Think what a boon this will be; the elites and the upper middle class will no longer have to build walls around their Gated Communities.
This is what the new serfdom will look like.
Don’t you worry peasants, elite experts already have a narrative. Ever heard of V2G? Nevermind the obvious conundrum of creating energy out of nothing, they are pushing it through a generally reliable energy blogs of previously stellar repute. I will have to write a scathing email to the purveyor to see if he has any interest in stopping destruction of his reputation.
jdm, ask me what it is like live in a society to have restricted means of transportation. It is not academic, it is empirical. And yes, it is a rhetorical invitation, you know the answer already.
Thanks for the explanations, guys.
It doesn’t even need to be a 2023 F150 Lightning. I have a friend who can start his 2014 Volvo S60 from his cell phone (factory feature, not aftermarket). If it can be started remotely, it can be disabled remotely.
Bill C
exactly!
And it is altogether believable that environmentalists will decide that people who merit owning a vehicle (instead of depending on mass transit or Johnny-Cabs) must nonetheless adhere to a weekly allotment of 260 miles(enough for commute to work and to get groceries) after which your car won’t start until next Monday. If that becomes your reality you’re a serf.
Why would this all be feudalistic? Because it ties us to permission to move around.
Think of the gun-carry licenses, which are broken out by state into “shall issue” and “may issue.”
Now think of your driver’s license in those same terms. With a severe shortage of (acceptable to our government) vehicles, we’re going to revert to “may issue” drivers licenses.
In fact, we might even see “may issue” trip permits.
Guess who gets to decide if our travel desires are acceptable?
Maybe not off topic — Musk said that he will begin reporting (on Twitter) the story of the Hunter Biden censorship decision at 5 PM today EST (now he says delayed by 40 minutes for further verification, which I think means legal review).
Should be interesting. I am guessing we will get chain of events but not names so Musk & twitter can avoid lawsuits.
This post is entirely correct about the reasoning behind banning fossil fuel cars. Gasoline is portable in a way that a battery charge is not.
But do not forget that these people, our societal elites, are idiots. They value the 3 C’s — contingency, compromise, and consensus, over the truth. The idea is that by using contingency, compromise, and consensus among the elite you have created a road map to power. These people don’t think like aristocrats, they think like middle managers.
A few months ago I listened to a podcast with unorthodox environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg. Lomberg explained to the interviewer exactly how the CO2 reduction mania of the elites would cause much more suffering than it would reduce, especially when compared to other measures that might reduce environmental damage. When the host asked Lomberg, why, then, so many of our elite institutions were focused on CO2 reduction rather than on, say, on providing fresh, clean water to poor villages, Lomberg said that it was easy to build a coalition among the elite to reduce CO2 because they all found personal economic value in that. Providing a fresh water source for a poor village, not so much.
The great battle is always between power and truth. In God power and truth are the same thing. Among human beings this is not the case. Power and truth are not always opposed, but they are not the same thing. It is perversion to believe that the truth is a thing created by human beings and not a thing recognized by human beings.
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the lesko brandon administration is not the only government attempting to destroy its own citizenry to establish a powerful elite and powerless people
in may the freely elected and much beloved president of beleagured ukraine banned opposition political parties and independent television leaving only the official party and official media
this week and only 40 billion dollars of relief aid later the crappy underdog proposes to ban russian orthodox religion because duh russia
also probably slavery
and trump
but mostly russia
we should reward him with another few billion dollars
we can pay for it with interest on student loans
wait . . .
I am going to save the troll some time and trouble here, as regards Elon Musk revealing the treasonous complicity between twitter and the gummint. He will say:
1. It’s old news
2. Hunter is the victim
3. Matt Taibbi sold out to do PR for the richest man in the world (talking points memo went out, MANY leftards are using “PR” in their tweets. Cultish mind control, herd mentality, echo chamber.)
4. Accuse twitter and Musk of white supremacy antisemitism.
These are today’s talking points for the leftist cult. Election interference much?
kinlaw, Musk chose Taibi as his messenger because Taibi is leftist trash in an attempt to deflect criticism from the reprobates.
It’s a fool’s errand, that is already failing. He’s trying to talk sense into a crowd of mentally ill vermin whose only goal in life is to find new debaucheries to explore.
Since the big news this weekend was Musk exposing Twitter’s malfeasance re: the NY Post’s Hunter Biden laptop, I thought I would let y’all in on what “Emery” said about the story as recently as May 27, 2021:
When the WSJ and the NYT, two large reputable newspapers with differing political slants, report that there is nothing to a story, there is nothing to that story.
http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=78060#comment-218748
And, Emery being Emery, that comment was mostly cut-n-pasted from a comment he made on the eve of the 2020 election, October 31, 2020.
https://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=75725#comment-209107
One day, perhaps, MBerg will realize that “Emery” is not an honest player. The moniker is used by multiple “seminar callers” to poison the comment section of SITD with anti-conservative talking points, regardless of the topic of the post.
This is hilarious. The New Feudalists ARE those espousing for the “free market.” They’ve enacted hereditary rule of companies and vast fortunes by ensuring estate taxes are something they can avoid. They call structures which make barriers to entry so high “capitalism” and “free trade” when it’s nothing of the sort. They bury small companies (or buy them up) with their overwhelming wealth.
Mitch, I know you know this, I showed you it. The GOP gets far more from the uber-rich than does the Democratic Party. 2:1 in the Romney/Obama election according to their own filings, including PAC filings, so don’t try to obfuscate on that point. I showed you those filings. So, either the rich are stupid as hell and giving money to Dems who vote to raise their taxes, or they are smart and give it to the GOP who repeatedly voted to reduce taxes on the rich, big companies and especially to ease policies on off-shoring and out-sourcing.
What a joke.
Say Peevee?
The reprobate propaganda machine called, and said you should stfu, and turn yourself in to the nearest processing center, to get your chip updated.
They sounded pretty upset, ngl. Lots of vermin noise; squeaking and gnawing in the background.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/15/election-2020-democrats-crush-republicans-in-fundraising.html
In the real where Paddyboy does NOT live, eco-mad French MP’s ban domestic flights for the plebes — private plane flights by the wealthy & their friends will continue.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/france-bans-short-flights-if-theres-a-train-tlblkbdxg?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI54fSwabg-wIVBojICh2BmwFUEAAYASAAEgKM2PD_BwE
Musk’s release of the twitter files has unhinged the leftist degenerates, reprobates…and for the 80IQ “I stand with Ukraine” crowd:
Drumpf says the Constitution should be suspended, to allow a new vote. Really, he posted that.
Trump has long since reached his sell-by date.
as usual there is a grain of truth in what paddyboy says but he builds a mountain of lies from that single grain
there is a faction of the republican party that represents wall street big business international corporations whose sole interest is making money
there is a faction of the republic party that represents main street small business family businesses whose interests include a healthy economy but also include a healthy society in which to raise their families
the two factions battle for money and to nominate candidates who will address their interests which explains why we get unsatisfactory hybrids like mccain or romney trying to please everybody and appealing to nobody and why the party grandees sabotage grassroots republicans like the TEA Party and MAGA movement.
in contrast democrats dont care about making money they care about controlling people and forcing society to change toward their ideal which nobody wants which is why they cannot abide free speech or debate they are the ones trying to force everyone into serfdom owning nothing eating bugs and liking it
The ignorance, idiocy of the leftist-marxist-dem thinking electricity comes from the wall socket is pathetically naive. There is NOT enough MEGAWATTAGE produced by wind and solar you despicable fools and NEVER will unless we carpet the entire country with these inefficient, poisonous things. There is no free ‘energy lunch’ and all sources have cost-benefits. All of them. The best bang for buck is fossil and nuke. Nuke could solve it all, but the leftist prig dolts don’t want that either. You disgust me DEMOCRATS.
“there is a faction of the republican party that represents wall street big business international corporations whose sole interest is making money”
The tribe splits its assets for the strategic win.
Soon er or later, we’ll all see the truth. Probably too late.
The most common type of government in the West, since the earliest days of history, has not been rule by tyrant, or rule by an absolute monarch. It has been rule by an oligarchy, meaning rule by a numerically small group of people over the majority. Aristocracy is, after all, a variation of oligarchy. There is actually something organic and natural about this because it reflects the reality of the pareto principal. Oligarchy might be the state of human political organization that will tend to develop, which would explain its perniciousness.
Ancient Rome, Medieval England, and the USSR were all oligarchies. Any particular oligarchy lacks stability, but when it is overthrown, it is almost always replaced by another oligarchy. This is actually what Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Fourwith his book-within-a-book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (Emmanuel Goldstein, Ed.).
So, if you do not want to live in an oligarchy, you must constantly work to defeat it,and your efforts to defeat oligarchy will constantly be challenged. The first line of defense is “equality under the law.” In oligarchies members of a the oligarchy enjoy superior legal rights than non-members of the oligarchy.
So ask yourself who promotes the idea of “protected classes,” and who champions the idea that the justice system may exersize discretion when enforcing the laws passed by the people.
Back to the topic of lightbulbs, I was using CFLs where I could even before the 2007 that effectively banned incandescents, and what I quickly learned was that CFLs didn’t give the advertised life in any configuration but bare bulb 40/60W equivalent. Somebody in reliability really skipped some tests, or hid their results, to put it mildly. I also learned that when a bulb said “60W equivalent”, the lumens number was closer to that for 40W, and it was a God-send when they finally figured out how to do “bright white” and “daylight” bulbs that removed that sickly yellow color.
What I’ve also learned is that while incandescents work at extremely low temperatures, it’s dicey for CFLs and LEDs. And so my remaining incandescents are mostly on outdoor light fixtures.
Long and short of it; politicians who don’t understand engineering and temperature ranges are an extremely poor choice for deciding what kind of technologies the public ought to use. For that matter, as I’ve watched publications like those of the IEEE, ASQ, and TBP, I’m getting a lot more cynical about the ability of most engineers to do so, as I’m seeing more and more evidence of politics driving engineering decisions.
Another thing that comes to mind regarding CFLs was the hubbub about mercury in them, and how we had to spend a bunch of extra time and energy disposing of them properly (still do, as I’ve got about a dozen still in my home). Well, I looked it up, and the toxic dose is….a little bit more than you’ve got in a typical bulb, which was about 4mg.
So if you broke it and licked out all the mercury, you could have some trouble, I guess, but by and large, unless you were smashing them for fun, you were not going to be mad as a hatter. But that little detail escaped our “betters” in government.
I’m getting a lot more cynical about the ability of most engineers to do so, as I’m seeing more and more evidence of politics driving engineering decisions.
I am observing and hearing about the creep of politics, esp. the “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” brand of politics taking over the sciences, from medicine to archaeology.
I do not believe that I am being overly dramatic when I compare the current moment with Germany in the 1930s. One day your bank is a normal, German bank, with a German flag flying from a staff outside its doors. Then one day you see that there is a swastika flag flying along side it. Soon after you see that all the bank’s management are wearing swastika armbands.
It is sometimes said that there is really no difference between Left & Right totalitarianism. This is not true, there several consistent differences. One of them is that communists take over a government by revolution. They destroy existing institutions and rebuild them on marxist principles. Fascist take over existing institutions and corrupt them until they are, finally, unrecognizable.