Tag: Stupid people

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.

Japs Bomb Pearl Harbor

Shootin' Time

…and in other “news”:

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell admitted that he was wrong to expect inflation would be transitory when it started to rise three years ago.

I wonder what clue he and the other asswipes at the Fed missed:  that government spending was increasing exponentially, that the Federal debt was spiraling upwards, or that the government was printing ever-more money to pay for government-created Covid-related expenses and social program giveaways instead of paying down the debt?

That’s some college degree you must have there, Chair Guy.  You fucking moron.

You’re “wrong”, and we’re being bent over the desk and raped by your mistake every time we go to the grocery store or try to pay down our credit card debt.

Overshooting

Eco-Crap

No, that’s not when you shoot off all your ammo at the range and have to drive home with an empty gun (yeah, we’ve all done it, nothing to be ashamed about).  What I’m talking about here is a series of predictive models which are not only wrong, but hopelessly wrong.

We all know (I think, except maybe for “climatologists”) that the way to test your model is to take all the history available except the most recent set, and feed that back data into your model to measure its prediction against the most recent data.  (Back when I used to do this stuff for a living, we used to call it “using history to predict yesterday”).

So here are the conclusions of a whole bunch of predictive models used to predict future temperature change / increase for a specific area:

Looks kinda alarming, doesn’t it?  (Okay. what’s alarming to me is the variation in predicted output between the models, but leave that alone for the moment.)

Now let’s drop the actual recorded data for the period and area into the graph, to see where it falls (same graph, plus actual):

Ummmm yes.  The only model which came even close to reality (Observations) was “INH-CMS-0”, and even that one overstated actual temperature increase by a factor of almost 40%.  Oops.

And by the way?  A change of 1.6 degrees over an average decade over four decades (80 40 years) is what we model builders used to call “noise” — i.e. insignificant.  Never mind a large area like the U.S. Corn Belt;  an increase of 1.6 degrees in air temperature is insignificant in your house.

Here’s the whole analysis, which is long and kinda involved, even for me.  The executive summary is what I’ve reproduced above.

And Robert Spencer gives us the summary of the executive summary, which is:

…or as we statisticians used to call it informally:

And John Hinderaker pointed out something else which should make everyone suspicious (it did me when I first looked at the chart):

Someone pointed out with respect to these data – I would credit him, but I can’t now find the reference – that if it were simply a matter of mathematical errors or inconsistencies, one would expect some models to err on the “hot side” and others on the “cold side” of actual observations. But that isn’t the case: all of the models run hot. That suggests that global warming alarmism is a political, not a scientific, movement.

Yup.  Let’s worry about something else;  this horse (Global Warming Climate Cooling Change©) is dead, and cannot be revived by MOAR HYSTERIA or STILL MOAR WHIPPING.

Straight Out Of The Marxist Playbook

Marxists, Seen On Campus

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)

Okay, Wait

Entertainment, Freaks & Loonies, Wokism

Here’s a headline which literally stopped me in my tracks — twice.  See if you can see where:

Actress cast as Richard III?  I thought casting men as women went out in the seventeenth century, but since when did casting women as men become a thing?  (As an aside, how will Dickless III play the seduction of Lady Anne in Act I Scene 2 without the audience breaking into uncontrollable laughter?)

And no, by all means play the hunchbacked king as a non-impaired man, which will make the “poisonous bunch-backed toad” line (among many other such insults in the play) completely meaningless.  Fucking hell;  why not just play Richard III as a frog, and have done with it?

Then again, this is Britishland, home of The Bard, where I once walked out of a dreadful performance of Macbeth (at the Barbican Theatre, by the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the halfway point.

So anything’s possible.  Expect to see a guest appearance by Willy Wonka or David Beckham in footballer kit during the final battle scene, where “Richard” utters the immortal line:

“A purse!  A purse!  My queendom for a purse!”