Stephen Green takes a long-overdue look at the inevitability of electric cars and such, and comes up with this priceless observation:
We need to talk about the word “inevitability” because when it comes to electric vehicles, I do not think it means what supporters think it means.
And then the killer:
Inevitability, you see, is when government spends money we don’t have and passes laws that won’t work to bribe or force people into buying cars they don’t want.
Like Karl Marx’s sense of inevitability — the inevitable fall of capitalism and the inevitable advent of its replacement — such things which go against human nature always need assistance from the firm foot of government to be applied with a heavy hand.
If the above is slightly incomprehensible to you, you need to read Stephen’s whole piece.
The free market is never replaced. Even in the Soviet Union, Cuba and other enclaves of socialism, there was still free enterprise in the form of the black market.
JQ
Elon Musk causes severe cognitive dissonance. I don’t know whether to love him for [a] buying Twitter and pissing off the sinister (old Latinate word for left) [b] putting payload into space at I kid you not one tenth what NASA charges [c] Starlink just fucking amazing. Or I could hate him for [d] Tesla, need I explain [e] SolarCity [f] stock price manipulation [g] various other nefarious schemes we haven’t heard about. Yet.
Cybertruck is very very very wow which is was Jobs’ guiding principle. The device must delight the user. I can think of ten good reasons not to buy a Cybertruck (if I had the money haha) same as I could think of ten good reasons not to buy a Porsche 992 (my black sheep uncle written off and forgotten by the family left me a hundred million in his will when he died in Lagos). Not all EVs catch fire on a daily basis in fact many owners keep them garaged in the same building where they reside.
You don’t want to have such an open mind that when you sit on the throne your brains drop in the bowl, but check out Brian McManus’s YouTube channel Real Engineering for the other side of the story. I’m a big Elvis fan though turns out he was not a sterling character. If you live long enough one day you may own an EV whether from choice or compulsion and likely you will say, this POS isn’t such a POS after all.
Or it WILL be a POS, and I head off to a tall building in D.C. with a Mauser, a lunch pail and a hip flask.
Karma would be if the burning car in the pic belongs to Jennifer Granholm (Econazi – Sec Energy), and the locality fines the owner for littering, illegal parking, air pollution and a hazmat cleanup.
Now you know I be lovin me some Kim du Toit…but you got me at this mixed metaphor…
“need assistance from the firm foot of government to be applied with a heavy hand.”
I’m hoping that self-driving cars become a reality sooner than the need to switch to electric cars. If I can have a car that arrives at my front door within 5 minutes to take me where I need to go then I won’t care if it’s electric or petrol. Not my problem.