With the news of Electric cars spontaneously combusting outside of the confines of an internal combustion engine, sometimes repeatedly after being exposed to salt water these questions immediately came to my mind:
Exactly how much salt water does it take to cause this to happen. Do they have to be flooded, soaked briefly or is an angry ex with a bucket of salt water enough to spell fiery doom for an electric battery?
If you are an insurance company what kind of rates are you demanding to cover a car with a history of spontaneous combustion. If you are a bank approached to finance such a loan, what kind of coverage are you demanding to protect your investment?
What is going to happen with communities that went all in on electric school buses. If you are a parent, are you going to feel safe with your kids on such a bus, and how long will it be before we see the first electric school bus go up in flames with a bunch of kids in it? How fast will the virtue signaling city counselors who ordered them run for the hills?
I submit and suggest until there are answers to these questions it might not be a very good idea for the US government to subsidize these vehicles and it is likely an even worse idea for anyone to consider spending tens of thousands of dollars on one them.
Do something more useful with your money, buy a Pinball machine. It’s more likely to appreciate and less likely to go up in flames.
Imagine if instead of serving as the governor of Illinois, Democrat J.B. Pritzker is an Uber driver. And Pritzker’s car is loaded with problems. The check engine, oil pressure, ABS, and TPMS warning lights are on.
What would be Pritzker’s fix?
Uber J.B. would simply ignore the problems by having his car professionally detailed, so his vehicle looks good, then he’d place electrical tape over the locations on the dashboard where each warning light is flashing.
Pritzker governs America’s sixth most populous state the same way–by ignoring the metaphorical warning lights facing the Land of Lincoln. Here at Da Tech Guy for years I’ve been railing Illinois’ big three problems–which are intertwined–and they are a massively underfunded public pension system, widespread government corruption, and declining population.
Now there is a fourth one, rampant theft and violent crime. Illinois’ largest city, Chicago, is still suffering from the highest murder rates since the 1990s. Carjackings are skyrocketing–in 2013 there were 344 reporting carjackings, last year the total was 1,674. Because so many shoplifting incidents aren’t reported, I don’t trust any theft figures. But the anecdotal evidence is alarming–shoplifting is soaring.
For years, liberals have, often blaming “corporate greed,” decried the many food deserts in big cities–and rural areas too. A food desert, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is an area without a nearby supermarket selling inexpensive groceries. Chicago, after some pushback from left-wing alderman because it is non-union, didn’t see its first Walmart open until 2006. Eventually there were eight Walmarts in Chicago, but shortly after the election of a far-left Democrat, Brandon Johnson, as mayor, Walmart announced it was closing four of those big box stores. In the press release explaining the reason for the shuttering of those Chicago stores, Walmart revealed “that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago – these stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years.”
Also last week, multiple media outlets reported that Home Depot, Target, and yes, Walmart, have decried the drastic rise of “shrink,” that is, shoplifting, at its stores. Walmart’s CEO, John Furner, pointed his finger in the right direction about “shrink.”
“It’ll take communities stepping up and enforcing the law to be able to – to bring this issue under control,” Furner said.
While local law enforcement is not the responsibility of Illinois’ governor, Pritzker has never condemned Kim Foxx, the Soros-funded so-called prosecutor in Cook County. Her social worker approach to law enforcement–which Brandon Johnson also favors–is partly responsible for Chicago’s crime wave.
As for Pritzker, thru his ridiculously misnamed SAFE-T Act, the abolishment of cash bail–little or no bail is the current de facto practice of Foxx–will take effect statewide in less than a month.
Here’s my fix for the food desert problem: Hire more cops, have them arrest shoplifters and the criminals who fence their swag, prosecute them in a fair trial, and imprison them if found guilty for a few years. Such a surefire strategy will not only to protect the public and retailers, but it will serve as a deterrent to people considering a life of crime.
Simple and easy.
Illinois’ mainstream media needs to get on board and accurately report on food deserts. In a New York Times-length study by the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago’s NPR affiliate from earlier this month, only one sentence mentioned the real problem, albeit gently. “Grocery operators have pointed to crime and homelessness as reasons they’ve needed to invest more in security, driving up costs,” they reported, “according to Amanda Lai, a Chicago director of food industry practice for the consulting firm McMillan Doolittle.”
Yep, one sentence.
Meanwhile, with the warning lights flashing, J.B. Pritzker continues to drive Illinois into the ground, while pissing away $20 million to fight food deserts. In the short term there is no hope for a repeal of the SAFE-T Act, but that’s part of the cure that Illinois needs.
As Ronald Reagan said, “Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”
Glenn Reynolds notes the shock of some that passing a law concerning homeless camps and actually enforcing it has caused camps to vanish. This is a disaster for some NGO’s in the sense that they get a lot of government and state money to solve a problem that can be solved by just enforcing the law.
There is no incentive to solve a problem that is both a profit center for you and allows you to claim virtue.
Speaking of profit centers there is a 2nd post at Insty today on a man who will be teaching about the Budlight fiasco at business school. It’s is certainly a subject worth scholarship but it that had a line that likely floated under the radar to most people that I found absolutely hilarious:
He emphasized that beer is essentially the same product, and what sets it apart is the power of its brand
I would submit and suggest this is pretty much true. I suspect a lot of brand loyalty in beer is all about habit. Break that habit and you break that brand.
And Speaking of Breaking the habit as of Today Tweetdeck is no longer a free service when I tried to access it today I was redirected to a screen offering me a blue subscription check for $80 a year.
The real point is Twitter’s value basically comes from addicting people to multiple streams of data and giving folks who want to reach a maximum size audience (advertisers etc) access to that stream. This move gives an incentive for people to walk away from the stream and once people are broken of the addiction your done.
While Elon Musk should of course make the best possible business decision for his product I submit and suggest this is rather foolish. Tweetdeck makes twitter useful because it allows you to view multiple streams in the same window. Without it twitter involves too many tabs and simply isn’t worth my time. I might keep a tab with my DM page available and I might answer embedded tweets I see elsewhere but if you want to get me to see something by putting it on twitter odds are starting today I’ll miss it
On a totally different note I was shocked to see that season 4 of the chosen was going to include the razing of Lazarus from the dead.
Given that this is the last big miracle before the entry into Jerusalem I figured we would see it till at least season 5, particularly since we are going to get the beheading of John the Baptist this season which comes much earlier.
That suggests that either season 7 is going to be all passion and resurrection, with season six all Jerusalem
(Don’t be surprised with the number of characters there is plenty of material for this to be the case) and Season five everything else OR that Dallas plans on moving up the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ and having a large chunk of season seven covering a big chunk of acts.
Either way it will be interesting to see how he handles it.
Finally we have regularly been getting short weeks at work. Last week was 30 hours, the week before 32 and the week before 30 which is a great incentive to burn vacation days for people and unpaid time off has been offered which can be tempting on a really beautiful summers day.
Yesterday on the drive in all of us in the car agreed that we would be lucky to end up with four hours although one of us was optimistic enough to suggest me might manage 6.
Much to my shock and everyone else’s as well there seemed there was plenty of work in my department and by moving some people to it during the day ( and letting a few go home early who wanted to ) all of us who stayed managed to our delight a full 8 hours of work which guarantees us at least a 32 hour week.
That’s how bad the Biden economy is, it’s so bad that getting a full days work in the middle of a work week on a day you’re scheduled to work a full day is a pleasant surprise worthy of note
4th Doctor:Sit down. Sit down. What did you call those robots? Leela: Creepy mechanical men. 4th Doctor:Yes. You know, people never really lose that feeling of unease with robots. The more of them there are, the greater the unease and of course the greater the dependence. It’s a vicious circle. People can neither live with them nor exist without them. Leela:So what happens if the strangler is a robot? 4th Doctor:Oh, I should think it’s the end of this civilisation.
Doctor Who: The Robots of Death 1977
I’m a great believer in the idea that there is no point in buying a movie if you don’t watch it regularly.
So when I started buying movies on Amazon Prime I got into three different rotations on watching them
Watching them in order that I bought them
Watching them in order that they were released
Watching then in the order of the year that the movie takes place in (for the LOTR movies I consider it pre-history)
I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, it was a great time killer during the COVID lockdowns but it got a tad interesting a year or so back because I bought the TV series The Time Tunnel so I keep having to jump back into that series when they jump into a particular year comes up.
Yesterday I finally go to the 20th century and went to put on the 1938 version of Dawn Patrol staring Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone which I bought back in 2019.
So imagine my surprise when instead of the propeller that opened the credits of the 1938 Errol Flynn movie I suddenly saw an opening announcing the 1930 version of the movie staring Richard Barthelmess in the role Errol Flynn would replace him in, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the role that David Niven would grab and Neil Hamilton who would gain worldwide fame as Commissioner Gordon in the 1960’s batman TV series in the role Basil Rathbone would take over 8 years later.
Now I had never seen the 1930 version so I began watching it but found myself a tad put out by the idea that I had bought one movie and had another one switched on me without my knowledge or permission.
I tried to search for the 1938 version on Amazon and found it was no longer offered as a streaming movie in the US (but it was still offered in England) which does me no good of course. I suspected that for some reason Amazon lost the rights to the Errol Flynn version and substituted the other.
And while all of the flight scenes (except the closeups) and all of the scenes of the Germans and 2nd unit stuff were actually identical I wanted the movie I purchased so I contacted Amazon and had them call me back.
This was quickly escalated beyond the basic guy and the advance tech I got had me look up my initial order from 2019. The screen shot looked like this:
You’ll note that while the description shows the cast of the movie I ordered the photo is from the one I didn’t but when I clicked on Order details: it got well interesting
As I had suspected they lost the streaming rights to the 1938 version and substituted the Howard Hawks 1930 one. That this was done is was bad enough but not only did they substitute the 1930 version of this movie in my movie library but they edited my invoice after the fact to say that the 1930 version of the movie was what I ordered.
That really pissed me off.
Well the guy did the best he could. He refunded the price of the picture and left the 1930 one in my library with the assurance that if the 1938 version became available to Amazon Prime for streaming again it would restored to my library automatically, but there is no way this should have been done without notification and even if I had been noticed the editing of my existing invoice to indicate a purchase I never made is beyond the pale.
Now in fairness the act of substituting the 1930 version might have been (and likely was) some kind of global edit in their system so they might not have realized it would have edited the invoices of old purchases, but they SHOULD have known.
There are three lessons to this story
When you “buy” a movie or TV show from Amazon prime make sure you know you’re not “buying” a movie in the same way as a DVD, you’re buying a license for unlimited streaming of the movie for as long as Amazon has the rights to it, nothing more. Make sure you know this before you buy.
When you have a digital order or any order from amazon for that matter look up the invoice and when it says “Print it for your records” do so the very day you made the purchase because you can not trust that the records in the Amazon system stored digitally will be the same as the day you bought.
If you actually want to be sure that you will own a movie that you want BUY A HARD COPY
For myself Trust is gone I have made my last streaming purchase from Amazon, it will be BluRay or DVD’s or VHS tapes (I have my old Dawn Patrol copy around here somewhere) for me and when it comes to any other purchases from Amazon you can be damn well sure I’ll print out a physical copy of the order the moment I make it.
I can’t think of a greater incentive to go to your local department store and buy your goods in person.
Closing thought: Given what we’ve seen from other digital services like Youtube I think rules 1 & 2 should concerning Amazon should always apply across the digital world, particularly if you’re a conservative as I would not trust any of these services to refrain from creating a false digital trail for their own ends.
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