Tag: Stupid people

Alternatives

Corporate Wokism, Drive Time

Everyone’s always talking about concepts like “plant-based” or “knowledge-based” (A.I.) nowadays.

How about “reality-based”?  Here’s one company who thought they had it all worked out, until reality stepped up and said, “Nazzo fast, Guido” (actually, “Noch langsamer, Fritz” ):

Mercedes-Benz has backtracked on their plan to transition to selling only electric vehicles after 2030, with company officials saying that “market conditions” have not allowed that to happen.

Ah, those pesky “market conditions”, wherein customers tell their supplier companies to take a hike after said corporations make unbelievably stupid decisions (Bud Lite, coff coff).

The background:

The company said it would commit $47 billion to electrifying its fleet, with CEO and board chair Ola Källenius saying, “We are convinced, we can do it with strong profitability, and we believe that focus on electrical is the right way to build a successful future and to enhance the value of Mercedes Benz.”

In other words:  we’ve bought into the whole Green New Deal, hook, line and sinker, and we’ll just force customers to adapt to the New World Order by giving them no option to do otherwise.

And then came Q4 ’23 results.  Oh, and a few other things which might have made potential (and existing) customers reevaluate their options:

The business model change comes after multiple highly-publicized instances of Mercedes-Benz electric vehicles catching on fire and causing massive damage.

Yeah.  Imagine that.

My question is quite simple:  other car companies have also declared their intention to be all-electric by x date (e.g. Jaguar, Volvo).  Does anyone think they’re going to have a change of heart too?

Or will they just do the Lemming Thing and plunge off the reality-based cliff, secure in their own virtuousness?

Mollycoddling

Snowflakes

I don’t know where this word came from, but it sure as hell describes this situation:

A book serialised on Mail+ at the weekend, called Bad Therapy, suggests that ‘touchy feeling parenting and therapy’ had effectively damaged Generation Z, those born from 1997 to 2012, who are now in the 20s and teens.

The rush to ‘diagnose and accommodate, not punish or reward’ has led to ‘the loneliest, most anxious, depressed and fearful generation on record’.

The modern emphasis on protecting and safeguarding has led us to our current predicament, where even the wrong use of pronouns makes some people ‘feel unsafe’.

This may sound harsh, but this generation snowflake really does need to get a grip. Their future mental wellbeing depends on it.

Never mind “mental wellbeing”;  their entire future requires that Generation Snowflake needs to grow balls (figuratively speaking, of course), develop a thicker skin and stop thinking that the world depends on their mental wellbeing.

I would humbly suggest that the reintroduction of corporal punishment in schools would be a good first step, but no doubt some will disagree with me — which is part of the problem, right there.

Prime Example

Snowflakes

Following on from the above post, here’s a classic example of mollycoddling:

Why Anya Taylor-Joy’s corset photo is so dangerous to impressionable young girls

On Sunday, to celebrate the premiere of her film Dune: Part Two in New York, the 27-year-old posted a shot of herself wearing the undergarments needed to pull off the dramatic Maison Margiela haute couture gown she wore on the red carpet – namely a corset straight out of the Victorian era, that was cinched so tightly it will have eating disorder counsellors clearing their diaries for the foreseeable.

Here’s the offending pic:

But here’s the silly part:

One [commenter] accuses the actress of ‘normalising starvation’; they tell her plainly that ‘this is not a healthy look for women at all’; and another has written a desperate plea: ‘You are going to kill people with this sort of beauty promotion. Please delete. Please.’

I find it hard to comprehend why Anya would have posted this picture – or at least not taken it down once her followers had made her aware of the potential damage it could be doing.

And sadly the only thing I could come up with was the need for publicity – the need to garner more attention around her red-carpet appearance for Dune.

As a grown-up actress, looked up to by so many young women, she needs to recognise that supposedly fashionable Instagram shots like this can turn into tomorrow’s anorexia inspiration.

Frankly, if “impressionable young girls” feel the need to starve themselves to death after seeing that pic, they need to be expunged from the gene pool anyway.  But here’s another pic of the offender:

Next thing, we’re going to be calling for the abolition of pics such as this because “shots like this can turn into tomorrow’s rape inspiration” among impressionable teenage boys or Third World immigrants [some overlap].

Here’s a suggestion for people calling for this kind of action:

Fuck off.  Just Fuck. Right. Off.

We don’t need to be “protected” from this stuff;  we need to realize — as about 90% of all sentient beings realize — this this is fantasy.  The corset was a movie costume, not a “how to dress” guide.  That some morons will take it the wrong way is unfortunate, but not problematic for anyone other than their own stupid selves.

I’m reminded of the Popes who ordered that Michelangelo’s priceless artworks be defaced by having fig leaves painted over the depicted women’s pudenda.  Same people, same thought process.

What the hell:  why not inspire some lustful thoughts, or maybe an insatiable urge to go and shop at Victoria’s Secret…

No Solo Effort

Architecture, Politics

Here’s one which set my teeth on edge:

MSNBC host Joy Reid lamented that black Americans have not received sufficient reparations for “literally, physically” building this country.

Ignoring for the moment all the Chinese workers who built the railroads and the (largely) White guys who built the skyscrapers… wait, skyscrapers?

You see, without the eeevil Whitey and his supremacist designs and engineering and stuff, we’d have ended up with, shall we say more modest structures:

Oh, I know:  this silly woman was talking about political “reparations” (I just couldn’t resist the opportunity for a cheap shot, shoot me).  Here’s the full excerpt, then:

MSNBC host Joy Reid lamented that black Americans have not received sufficient reparations for “literally, physically” building this country, believing that former President Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure is the best they will get.

Yeah I know, the jokes write themselves.  “Eight?  You mean twelve“  and “If Obama was the best deal Blacks could get for themselves, y’all are in deep shit”, etc.

I would never have believed it, but I’m getting sicker of the race bullshit in the U.S. than I was of the race bullshit back in the old Racist Republic.

See, what people like Joy Reid need to do is to go and live in somewhere like South Africa forever for a couple of years, just to see how that “political reparations” thing is likely to work out.

Stupid bitch.

Bowing To The Inevitable

Drive Time, Eco-Crap

I had a quick chuckle at this one:

Instead of essentially requiring automakers to rapidly ramp up sales of electric vehicles over the next few years, the administration would give car manufacturers more time, with a sharp increase in sales not required until after 2030, these people said. They asked to remain anonymous because the regulation has not been finalized. The administration plans to publish the final rule by early spring.

The change comes as President Biden faces intense crosswinds as he runs for re-election while trying to confront climate change. He is aiming to cut carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles, which make up the largest single source of greenhouse gases emitted by the United States.

At the same time, Mr. Biden needs cooperation from the auto industry and political support from the unionized auto workers who backed him in 2020 but now worry that an abrupt transition to electric vehicles would cost jobs.

Yeah, not to mention the impossibility of getting a huge number of Americans to give up their beloved and reliable cars, trucks and SUVs for impractical and unreliable Duracell runarounds.

The decision was taken mainly because consumer demand for EVs has been lower than expected, and various major car manufacturers announced disappointing results in their recent annual reports.

“Lower than expected”, and shrinking as people who aren’t interested in virtue-signaling decide that, well, fuckem.

There are, of course, a variety of reasons for the drastic underperformance of EVs, but perhaps the greatest issue is that they are still working out as more expensive than traditional gas-powered cars. There is also an increasing body of evidence that they are not so environmentally friendly as their proponents would like us to think.

Not to mention that there are only a tiny number of charging points across the vast expanse of the U.S.A., and not much chance of their number growing at a rate which would make everyone’s life easier.

But we all know that,  Here’s the part which made me really chuckle:

It is not all doom and gloom for the EV industry, though, as Elon Musk’s Tesla continues to go from strength to strength. Yet Musk’s recent embrace of the anti-Biden agenda has unfortunately made him persona non grata within the White House. Given the petty and vindictive nature of the Democratic establishment, don’t be surprised if Tesla’s famously generous government subsidies soon vanish into thin air.

Yeah, just wait till prospective buyers of EVs discover that the true price of a sub-compact Tesla is really north of $100,000.  The “thin air” will also contain buyer demand.

Cute Name

Economics

The Daily Mail refers to them as “Rolex rippers” —  a cutesy name for thugs who attack and rob people in the streets for their watches:

A spate of luxury watch muggings in London is putting wealthy owners off flaunting their wrist candy — and may be contributing to collapsing demand for high-end timepieces.

The value of secondhand watches, as tracked by the Bloomberg Subdial Watch Index, is down more than 40 per cent since its peak in April 2022.

Major UK retailer Watches of Switzerland has seen its share price drop by 53 per cent this year after announcing it expects revenue to be 10 per cent lower than forecast, while Richemont, owner of Cartier, has said half year sales are down by 17 per cent.

Typical Mail ignorance used as panic creation.  The “spate of robberies” cannot affect more than a tiny percentage of luxury watch owners, and while London certainly has a large share of sales of these overpriced geegaws, it’s not enough to account for the dip in Richemont’s sales.

Aside:  For those who aren’t aware of the Richemont empire, it includes luxury brands like Montblanc pens, Cartier, IWC, Dunhill and Purdey (!!!).  It’s controlled by a South African one-time tobacco tycoon, Johann Rupert, who founded Richemont as a way to get out of the tobacco business.

What the downturn in Richemont sales would appear to mean is that the demand for luxury items is dipping due to economic concerns (not street thuggery) — except that when it comes to individual wealth, sales are trendy within the various divisions within the luxury market.  Such divisions include real estate, cars, precious metals, clothing, yachts, watches and so on.  And of course, while “fashion” plays a lot in this market, the real motivator for such spending is driven by investment.

Note, by the way, that Richemont doesn’t own Ferrari or Aston Martin (yet), and if Sotheby’s recent auction of “desirable” cars is anything to go by, a larger chunk of disposable income has been channeled in that direction — one 1956 Mercedes 300 SC can buy a couple dozen  Vacheron Constantin watches, for example.  (I’m also told by sources within the collectible car market that sales are softening there too, but the sales of luxury yachts are still firm, even growing.)

We won’t even talk about real estate prices in the South of France or similar “must-have” destinations like the Gulf states.

Against serious high-ticket items like yachts and resorts in the Greek islands, for instance, Montblanc pens and Rolex watches are pretty small potatoes.  That said, however, I certainly wouldn’t risk wearing a luxury watch in London nowadays — although the discreet Patek Philippe is certainly not as noticeable as the chunky Rolexes and Breitlings.

The real story here is not the ups and downs of economic trends or the spending of rich people, but the ever-increasing rise in street thuggery (and not just in London), which law enforcement agencies seem unwilling to address let alone reduce because racism.

I also note that the luxury real estate market in Manhattan seems to be softening, and I’m pretty sure that it’s getting more difficult to sell those $50 million+ condos in an area where increased street thuggery makes London look like a kiddies’ playground.

Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail  talks hysterically about the thuggery (because hysteria is their stock-in-trade), but not a great deal about lenient prosecutors and police inaction.  That discussion seems to be more acceptable to conservative outlets like Breitbart News.