Author: Kim du Toit

Good News / Bad News

Business, Eco-Crap, Watermelons

Good news for us wot loves those internal combustion engines in our cars, bad news for EVs and their watermelon supporters:

Rivian Lays Off 10% Of Workforce As Lucid Production Underwhelms

EV startup stocks Rivian (RIVN) and Lucid (LCID) sank Thursday after both companies reported fourth-quarter earnings and revenue late Wednesday, and announced they are not ramping up production in 2024.

Rivian reported Wednesday a loss of $1.36 per share in Q4 with sales doubling to $1.31 billion. Wall Street expected a loss of $1.35 and revenue totaling $1.28 billion. Looking to 2024, Rivian said it expects production of 57,000 vehicles, remaining flat compared with 2023.

The company also announced that it predicts vehicle deliveries in Q1 2024 to be about 10%-15% lower than in Q4 2023 and that it is laying off 10% of its salaried workers.

Along with Rivian, Lucid reported Wednesday a Q4 loss of 29 cents per share with revenue falling 39% to $157 million. Analysts predicted a loss of 30 cents and sales hitting $180 million. Lucid produced 8,428 vehicles in 2023 and delivered 6,001.

For 2024, the company forecasts producing 9,000 vehicles, well below Wall Street’s expectations of more than 14,000.

Yeah, nobody wants to buy them now (even at subsidy-lowered prices), and still fewer will buy them when said subsidies disappear and the costs of these boutique vehicles assume a trajectory opposite to Rivian/Lucid’s share prices.

And the children will laugh and play, in the playgrounds to which they were driven in their mommies’ gasoline-powered SUVs:

And the oil rigs will pump again, their oil being carried along the completed XL pipeline, filling up cars will no longer require a letter of credit from the banks, natural gas will flow into people’s houses in greater amounts and at lowered prices, windmills and solar panel farms will rust away and fall over, and nuclear power generators will become a feature of every town in the land.

And the watermelon socialists who supported the whole Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© pack of lies will dangle limply from lamp poles in many streets, those that did escape the Air Pinochet helicopter flights, said choppers fueled with the cheaper avgas and therefore able to fly many missions…

Hey, a man can dream, can’t he?  So mote it be.

Interesting Purchase

Business

Well now, lookee here:

Today, Walmart and VIZIO announced they have entered into an agreement for Walmart to acquire VIZIO for $11.50 per share in cash, equating to a fully diluted equity value of approximately $2.3 billion.

Why would Walmart buy a TV manufacturer?  As RedState’s Brad Slager notes (with my emphasis):

Walmart currently stands as the largest retailer for Vizio products, but this buyout has less to do with the retail side of things. The store chain is eyeing its expansion opportunity through Vizio’s smart TV platform. The intention is for Walmart to step up and become more of a direct competitor with Roku, Amazon, and YouTube in the direct-marketing arena, intending to leverage Vizio’s OS through its built-in television apps.

Hey, the more the merrier (paraphrasing Milton Friedman, talking about free-market capitalism).

Just as long as Walmart doesn’t pee in the soup and prevent Vizio owners from choosing between the various vendors like Roku et al. by locking them out of Vizio sets.  That would be a Bad Thing.

I can’t see why they’d do that,because this would just mean that consumers just wouldn’t buy Vizio TVs — I certainly wouldn’t under those circumstances — but as we often see, giant corporations are as prone to fucking up as any other business.

Cancerous Society

Immigration, Muzzies

My French is slipping… what’s their word for “expulsion”, again?

49% of French Muslims want Catholics to convert to Islam, and that 36% percent want churches to be transformed into mosques.

France is a country where more than 70% of prison inmates are Muslim.

There are also more than two hundred rapes every day in France, most perpetrated by Muslim men who entered France illegally.

7% of illegal immigrants ordered to leave France are ever actually deported.

25% of French Muslims said that the word “France” is a word they reject.

If  a quarter of French Muslims reject the entire concept of “France”, wouldn’t it be prudent for the host body to reject them?  Or, to put it more bluntly, at what point, one wonders, do the French say “Assez!”  and start mass deportations?

At the least, I’d suggest improving amending French law to include castration as a penalty for rape, but no doubt the French, famously permissive when it comes to l’amour, would have a problem with that.

Oh yeah, the French for “expulsion” is expulsion.  I knew that.

Good Example

The Gun Thing

It’s not often I’m jealous of Scandis — I mean, frigid weather most of the time, socialist governments, high taxes:  let’s be honest, this is not a place to be sought out by expatriate Americans.  (Okay, the women are pretty hot, but you can only have so much sex before… uhhhh where was I again?)

No, that’s not the Swedish Bikini Team — in fact, they aren’t even Swedes, but Finns (Miss Finland finalists 2011).

But there is one reason to be jealous of the Finns, apart from the above:

Finland has announced it will open 300 shooting ranges in a bid to encourage citizens to take a greater interest in national defence.

Under the Finnish constitution, every male aged between 18 and 60 must complete national army service but the government hopes that civilians will keep their weapons skills after the period of conscription with the new range proposals.

Jukka Kopra, the Finnish politician, said: “The present government aims to increase the number of shooting ranges in Finland from roughly 600-700 up to 1,000.

“This is because of our defence model, which benefits from people having and developing their shooting skills on their own.”

Note:  not State-controlled/supervised shooting, but individual practice.

And a thousand ranges, in a country that has about 50 square miles of habitable area?  [hyperbole alert]  That works out to about one range every 100 yards, or a Sako behind every flake of snow.

Plus, they’re practicing to shoot Russians, which makes me really jealous.

Or, as the meme goes:

Tiukat ryhmät, toverit!

Range time, Kim?  I think so, in solidarity with our Finnish friends.