Good News / Bad News

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.

No Solo Effort

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.

Boycott NYFC?

Oooh, I like this idea:

Some Trump-supporting truckers are refusing to transport loads to and from New York City after the former president was fined $355 million and had his ability to run businesses in the state suspended in Friday’s civil fraud verdict.

And what should qualify for Quote Of The Day:

“I’ll tell you what, you fuck around and find out! We’re tired of you motherfucking leftists fucking with Trump,” the trucker said. “Leave Trump alone with the bullshit… you know you ain’t got shit on Trump, so cut the bullshit.”

Works for me and, I suspect, for more than a few million voters.

In the meantime, if I may coin a phrase:  Let New York Sink.

Straight Out Of The Marxist Playbook

Via Robert Shibley at Insty’s place:

One academic who has written about his approach is Professor Asao Inoue, who claims that individualism is an undesirable aspect of “whiteness.” In his courses, students are not graded down for failing to write in standard English. Instead, he has implemented a “labor based” grading system in which students are graded on the basis of the amount of effort they claim to have put in on an assignment.

Why is this out of the Marxist playbook?  Marxism postulates that what counts in production is not output, but input;  i.e. that the eight hours worked by an assembly-line worker is equivalent to the eight hours worked by the company owner.   (Also see:  women’s professional tennis prize money “parity” at Wimbledon.)

Of course, anyone with a brain knows this to be false, but in the (Marxist) scheme of “equity”, reality has to conform to the dialectic.  Or, to put it into quasi-academic language:

The Marxian process of change through the conflict of opposing forces, whereby a given contradiction is characterized by a primary and a secondary aspect, the secondary succumbing to the primary, which is then transformed into an aspect of a new contradiction. (American Heritage Dictionary)