Yeah, Nazzo Fast, Guido

Stephen Green takes a long-overdue look at the inevitability of electric cars and such, and comes up with this priceless observation:

We need to talk about the word “inevitability” because when it comes to electric vehicles, I do not think it means what supporters think it means.

And then the killer:

Inevitability, you see, is when government spends money we don’t have and passes laws that won’t work to bribe or force people into buying cars they don’t want.

Like Karl Marx’s sense of inevitability — the inevitable fall of capitalism and the inevitable advent of its replacement — such things which go against human nature always need assistance from the firm foot of government to be applied with a heavy hand.

If the above is slightly incomprehensible to you, you need to read Stephen’s whole piece.

No Consequences

As I never tire of telling people here (and other places), Marxism is one of those strange belief systems that holds that as long as the intentions are praiseworthy, the consequences are irrelevant.  Take this latest episode in the People’s Soviet of Kaliforniaaahhh:

In their seemingly never-ending quest to make lives for Californians miserable, the state legislature passed a bill that Governor Newsom signed into law mandating a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers by April of 2024.  

…and why not?  Don’t we want people to be able to earn a “living” wage in California?  (Okay, Califuckingfornia is expensive to live in because of their insane one-party government and its onerous laws, rules and regulations, but we can discuss all that some other time.)

Well, sure.  Except that business owners, already driven up against the wall by said laws and regulations, have decided that enough is enough, and they need to rein in costs — in this case, salary costs.

So:

PacPizza LLC, operating as Pizza Hut, said in a federal WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) Act notice filed with California’s Employment Development Department that the company has made a business decision to eliminate first-party delivery services and, as a result, the elimination of all delivery driver positions. Similarly, Southern California Pizza Co. has also announced layoffs, impacting about 841 drivers across the state.

Thus, Californians too lazy to fetch their own pizzas will now have to rely on expensive “third-party” delivery services (e.g. UberEats etc.) to deliver their deep-dish delicacies.

Oh, wait;  didn’t California recently pass legislation that made Uber service essentially too costly for people not on a corporate expense account?  Why yes, yes they did:

The California Legislature passed a law in 2019 that changed the rules of who is an employee and who is an independent contractor. It’s an important distinction for companies because employees are covered by a broad range of labor laws that guarantee them certain benefits while independent contractors are not.

While the law applied to lots of industries, it had the biggest impact on app-based ride hailing and delivery companies. Their business relies on contracting with people to use their own cars to give people rides and make deliveries. Under the 2019 law, companies would have to treat those drivers as employees and provide certain benefits that would greatly increase the businesses’ expenses.

But hey, that was too much even for the serfs and helots a.k.a. ordinary Californians, who later passed Proposition 22 in a ballot measure, in essence telling the legislature to fuck off and leave Uber and their drivers alone.  Of course, that was no good, so the CalGov tried to get the Prop 22 overturned in the courts (standard Commie reaction when the peasants revolt, if they can’t be stuffed into gulags or shot in killing pits).

Then in early 2023:

App-based ride hailing and delivery companies like Uber and Lyft can continue to treat their California drivers as independent contractors, a state appeals court ruled Monday, allowing the tech giants to bypass other state laws requiring worker protections and benefits.

The ruling mostly upholds a voter-approved law, called Proposition 22, that said drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft are independent contractors and are not entitled to benefits like paid sick leave and unemployment insurance. A lower court ruling in 2021 had said Proposition 22 was illegal, but Monday’s ruling reversed that decision.

Everyone following the story of the film so far?   (There may be a test.)

Anyway, now that the Cali Politburo has decreed that workers have to be paid a lot more than their services are worth, and employers have responded by applying one of the basic capitalist principles (when wages get too high, reduce the workforce), expect the Politburo to pass some equally-stupid new law, say that companies which sell fast food have to employ drivers.

You heard it here first.

Frankly, I look forward to the day when Californians have to fetch their own fucking pizzas, driving cars at $7/gallon fuel costs or EVs which catch fire and turn them and their pizzas into extra-crispy meals for buzzards.

Me, I say:  Let California sink.

Top 3 For The Chop

Here’s the background to the question below:

Argentina just elected a new president, Javier Milei, and his first act upon being sworn in? He signed an executive order reducing their government departments from 21 down to NINE.

As Twitchy points out, we have only(!) fifteen FedGov departments (but innumerable sub-departments).

My question to my Readers:

You can eliminate three Cabinet-level federal government departments (to start off with) and all their sub-departments.  Which three would you eliminate first?

Mine:  Environment (an agency, not a department in the strictest sense of the word), Education (in toto) and Homeland Security (all their sub-departments to be reallocated to their original departments, e.g. Secret Service to Justice, Coast Guard to Defense, etc.).


I don’t know how it works in Argentina, but here in Murka, federal government departments exist at Cabinet level at the President’s pleasure — Richard Nixon, for instance, elevated the EPA’s chairman to Cabinet level by executive order — but departments can only truly be eliminated by Congress defunding them.  Nevertheless, play the game.

Avoiding The Stink

Pigs stink!  News at 11.

Here’s one that made me chuckle:

A farmer has been paid almost £1.5million of public money to stop rearing pigs to allow 5,000 new homes to be built.

The deal is part of a move to reduce the amount of harmful nutrients flowing into waterways in Norfolk and to get house-building moving again, in what is the first deal of its kind.

The pig farm is on either side of the A47 bypass south of Norwich. By closing it down, the reduction in pollution means that officials will be able to grant permission for 5,000 homes elsewhere in the county.

Never mind the reduction in pollution;  just having a pig farm within a mile of a new housing development would render the houses either unsellable, or else priced so low as to be unprofitable to build.

Farms are noisome things, to be sure, and it’s not just pig farms either.  Fully a third of Mr. Free Market’s country estate is almost unusable (well, for my citified nostrils anyway) because of a neighboring cattle farm.  And speaking of city slickers:

Well said.

We Know Better

…saith Gummint, when it comes to just about every human product or endeavor.  Here’s a fresh dose of silliness, from a doctor (another group of busybodies):

Banning junk food won’t stop people eating it, just look at how Prohibition failed! But we DO need new regulations to tackle our poor diet

Oh we do, do we?  So banning won’t work, but the softly-softly approach by regulation will achieve the same ends (cf. gun control Over Here, another catalog of failures).  Let me continue:

How do you feel about being told what to do, particularly when it comes to decisions around your health? I want to reach for my 1911.

Most of us, I suspect, think we should be left to make our own decisions (and our own mistakes). Except for doctors, government busybodies and other foul control freaks

But I also think most of us would accept that there are areas where the government should step in and regulate”errrr no.  Maybe 5% of all human activity might need government oversight, and I’ll entertain arguments from anyone who thinks that 5% is too much.

Anyway, after dealing with the low-hanging fruit (leaded gasoline and cigarettes), Our Good Doctor gets after food.

There’s no way you can ban people from eating junk food — not only is it everywhere but you also have to ensure there are affordable alternatives. — No, “you” don’t.  People would prefer to eat Twinkies instead of carrot sticks or oatmeal bars.  Leave the Twinkies alone.

But there are lots of things that could be done to nudge our behaviour, many of which Boris Johnson planned to introduce before he fell from power. — and not a moment too soon.

These include the end of BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) sales on foods high in fat and sugar — their main purpose, after all, is to make you eat more junk food. You rarely see BOGOF (US: BOGO) offers on fresh veg or fish.errrr that’s because fresh veg and fish are perishables, hello.

Other plans included a ban on adverts for junk food and sweets aimed at children, online and before 9pm on TV. These measures are popular — a YouGov poll found a ban on junk food adverts before 9pm is supported by 62 per cent and opposed by just 17 per cent — but almost all the anti-obesity strategies Boris loudly promoted have been kicked into the long grass.because they’re unpopular, stupid and bossy.  Kinda like Boris.  By the way, the same percentage (62%) applies to people who want to reinstate the death penalty in the U.K.  No?

With one in five children now overweight or obese when they get to primary school, and the number of obese adults projected to soon outnumber those of a healthy weight within the next five years, there is a desperate need for action. Yes, ban smoking in the young but we also need to be thinking about diet. — If we’re serious about reducing the number of fat people, why not just shoot them all in the street?  This would be the most efficient (and, by the way, the least costly) option.

And we just know that Gummint is all about efficiency — except in their own dealings, of course.

Let’s rather just shoot them.  On the whole, I’d be happier living among fat people than having Government busybodies peering into my shopping basket.

Not to mention:

 

Anyone else starting to feel peckish?

Do Something To Stop The Bastardy

A little while back I talked about how some refugee family (actual refugees) had fled Germany to homeschool their kids, because the German public school system is like our own, only worse, and they being Christian, thought they could find refuge Over Here and school their children according to their own beliefs and not in the godlessness of the public school system (as prescribed by German law).

So now they’re facing deportation because Gummint.

It’s bad enough that the German government was fucking them over — the State fucking people over has a long and storied tradition Over There — but now our Gummint is fucking them over despite the family not having broken a single U.S. law.

I urge you all to follow this link and sign the HSDLA petitionPlease.

And pass the link on to everyone you know who might support this family.  Every bit helps.