Also (no pic,unfortunately):
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Pic Of The Day
Tag: Stupid people
Caveat
Here’s a little nugget from the Trump Tariff Front:
General Motors (GM) announced plans to invest $4 billion in three new U.S. assembly plants, including the production lines for the Chevrolet Blazer and Chevrolet Equinox, which the company currently builds in Mexico.
Yay and all that. Another reaction:
The United Auto Workers (UAW) praised GM’s decision, calling it a validation of the effectiveness of global auto tariffs.
Yeah, fine, whatever. Let’s just hope that you union assholes don’t jump on this opportunity to make unreasonable wage demands, which is what drove GM to move the plants to Mexico in the first place.
I’m not at all confident that this won’t happen, but as I am not and never will be a target customer of General Motors*, I personally will not be affected, especially as the newly-replanted assembly plants will be building Chevrolet Equinox, Chevrolet Bolt EV, Chevrolet Blazer, Cadillac Lyriq and Vistiq EVs and the Cadillac XT5. (Lyriq? Vistiq? WTF kind of names are those?)
I see that GM, with its customary foresight, has slated its EV models for some of the new plants, despite customer demand for said excrescences falling through the floor.
Pathetic.
The only GM car I’d ever consider buying is the Caddy CT4 Blackwing, except that while its engine is admittedly excellent, the CT4 looks like a primitive 1978-era CAD drawing:
In earlier times, we would have described that thing as “uglier than a bucketful of burst assholes”.
As for all GM’s other models: pass, with extreme prejudice.
And Here’s Why
Earlier this week I talked about how Yurpeen tourist places were rethinking their welcome wagon policies.
Well, here’s one place that’s doing that and I think, based on the evidence, we can all see their point:
In a desperate attempt to crack down on alcohol-fueled debauchery, enraged [Albufeira] City Hall officials on Friday approved huge new penalties of up to £3,375 for holidaymakers flouting a strict new good behavior code — with fines for everything from urinating in the street to getting naked.
The rules will kick in within weeks, in time for the summer season, aiming to curb anti-social behavior.
And locals hope they will turn the tide, with nakedness, vomiting in the street or having sex in public all now coming at a price.
Here’s what really sucks about this. I know Albufeira — I’ve been there before, and I thought it might be the prettiest little village on the whole of the Algarve coast — but that was eons ago. Clearly, things have changed, and not for the better.
And the problem is that regardless of how badly the tourists (mainly Brits, duh) might behave, the pubs and restaurants are obviously making a killing so they’re not going to do anything to stop the Louts & Sluts Brigade from trashing their town.
Sadly, it’s always the local folks who end up with a town where the streets flow with vomit, blood and semen while the publicans shrug and pocket the cash.
And then everyone will be shocked — shocked! — when the locals start posting signs that read “Muerte A Los Turistas”, “Ingleses Regressam A Casa” or “A Bas Les Rozbiffs” (depending on whether it’s Spain, Portugal or France, for instance).
What’s really needed in Albufeira is for the Porro rozzers to go all Chicago P.D. circa 1968 with these drunken assholes (men and women):
…and let them know that what might be fine in Merseyside, Manchester or Millwall is non grata when visiting Albufeira.
The problem is that the Euros in general have gone to great lengths to pussify their various police forces, so that very logical avenue will denied them — but it is, at the end of the day, the only language that these oafs understand. Until that time, then, nothing will change, and fines aren’t going to do diddly.
Speed Bump #4,657
Via Reader Sean F., another gem:
Everyone likes to tell us that if we adopt very strict gun control laws, no one who isn’t supposed to have firearms can get them. It’s so naive it’s almost adorable, or it would be if it wasn’t our rights they were idiotically talking about trampling on.
Instead, it’s very troubling because their nativity is likely to get someone killed.
This is known as “killing the message with illiteracy”.
FYI: the words are “naïve” and “naïveté”. We English writers don’t often use verbal modifications such as the acute accent (é), and the diacritic / umlaut (ï) hardly ever. But the latter should be written when the compound vowels need to be expressed individually, e.g. “nah-eev” instead of “nave”. As I recall, I learned this back in 1965, in sixth grade from our English teacher, Mr. John Ball (MA, Oxon),.
Wrong Target
As anyone interested in trends would know, there’s been a surge in a specific type of city-center crime recently, one which involves a scrote whizzing past his victim, snatching their phone from their hand en passant. This has made London, amongst others, a place where one should not walk the streets while catching up with an old friend on the phone, or even just calling home to make sure that the kids have not set fire to the house while one has been busy at the gym.
I’ve never understood this connectivity obsession anyway, especially as one shouldn’t talk on the phone in the street (for any reason) because believe it or not, passers-by are not really interested in your choice of wine for tonight’s dinner party.
But back to the phone robbers. Britishland is applying the boot with a heavy hand in response to this epidemic:
E-scooters and e-bikes driven by brazen phone snatchers are to be destroyed by police within hours of being seized amid a crackdown on London’s mobile theft epidemic.
Previously officers had to warn offenders before taking away and crushing a bike, scooter or any other vehicle driven in an anti-social manner or if it was used to facilitate a theft.
But now, new powers will mean police won’t have to wait two weeks before throwing them away and will be able to do so in a two-day time frame.
Now far be it for me to rail against the crushing of these electric pestilences, which have been involved in so many pedestrian collisions because their riders are reckless assholes, not to mention the above assholes of the larcenous kind.
But it seems to me that the wrong part of this equation is being punished. I’m no expert on the topic, but I have to feel that crushing a thief’s e-bike is rather pointless, in that said thieves having been thus dispossessed will simply steal a fresh bike with which to continue their little reindeer games.
Surely, for all sorts of reasons, it should be the thieves getting fed into the crusher’s jaws rather than their conveyances? Much more likely to slow this modern kind of theft, I think.
But no doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this, as would my followup suggestion that said crushing of scrotes be made a PPV TV event.
Fooling The Gullible
As a longtime marketing guy, I’m still fascinated by how easy it is to hoodwink people by making them think that a higher price equates to better quality.
The genius move, however, is to build on another perception of quality, e.g. “German engineering” or “French luxury” as a support for that higher price.
The “German engineering” ethos has been leveraged countless times, most notably with Mercedes cars — although in this case, it was a reputation very well earned, back in the 1960s and -70s. (In the recent past: not so much, as anyone who’s driven a Merc of said vintage will tell you.) As gunnies, we all know of the Heckler & Koch example, which has enabled this bunch of WWII-era retreads to make oodles of cash out of their not-especially noteworthy handguns and cheekbone-crushing G3/PTR-91 automatic rifles.
It’s why I always roll my eyes at the extreme HK fanbois, because I’m positive that most of their fanaticism stems from a need to justify their paying a premium price for what is really a pretty ordinary product.
As for “French luxury”, here’s one example of the trope: Grey Goose vodka, which is a case history for the ages. (Watch it; it’s 10 minutes of your time well spent.)
I happen to know quite a bit about vodka manufacturing, as it happens, having worked with the South African retail arm of Gilbey’s. As I’ve recounted on these pages before, part of my education occurred when the Gilbey’s guys took me on a tour of their production facility, where an engineer taught me how to make cheap liquor: take a clear distilled spirit (from any source: potatoes, sugar cane, barley, wheat, apples, all mixed together, whatever) and pass it through a series of charcoal filters to make vodka, or add a few drops of diesel fuel(!) to make gin, and so on.
The genius of marketing, in the Grey Goose example, was not the manufacture of the vodka or the quality of its raw material, therefore — French wheat is no different from any other wheat — but utilizing the aura of French luxury brands (Louis Vuitton, Chanel etc.) to imply that GG was an exceptional product, made all the more so by creating an artificial bottleneck on supply, and most telling of all, selling the product at a premium price to the International Status-Hungry Parvenu Set. Good grief: $30 per bottle for vodka? When it first came out, I tried it at a hotel bar somewhere — I think it was at Claridges in London, while on a business trip — and while I’m no expert on vodka, I have drunk a woeful amount of the foul stuff. I could discern little difference between Grey Goose, Stolichnaya and Smirnoff. (The bartender obliged me by setting up a blind taste test of the three brands — the mark of a good bartender, by the way.) I identified Smirnoff immediately (see above for reasons), but GG and Stoli? No chance. And Stolichnaya, by the way, is a product that trades on the Russian ethos for vodka quality, go figure.
But what all the above illustrates is how easy it can be to dupe people into buying expensive products as part of an aspirational desire to be part of a specific set — most notably, what used to be described as the “jet set” (now, the private jet set), which contains elements of society such as professional footballers, pop stars, supermodels, Russian oligarchs, Hollywood actors, software billionaires and other such scum.
And never has the old adage been so verified that a fool and his money are soon parted.