Author: Kim du Toit

Big Auto, Big Brother

Drive Time, Surveillance Society, Technology, Two-Minute Hate

Yesterday, I talked about wanting to own a pre-digital car — i.e. one that doesn’t fucking spy on your every move.

I often wonder what car or cars I’d get to replace the Tiguan, and what’s interesting is that I’m having precisely the same feelings that I have with guns and watches: nothing of recent manufacture at all — especially given that they’re all without exception loaded with electronic gizmos I don’t care for, or else gizmos that spy on you and/or could possibly be used to control your driving. In fact, the more I think about it, I’d probably have to go back to pre-1970s cars — fully resto-modded of course — to find a car that has not a single computer chip in its driving operation.

Here’s a business opportunity, because this is America.  (I don’t have the technical skills or capital to follow through on this but I’ll just throw it out there.)  Is it possible to turn your car into a mobile Faraday cage?  And would it be possible to turn the feature on and off?

I know, car companies and / or the godless insurance industry would probably use their lawyers and lobbyists to outlaw this, just as law enforcement tried to prevent speed-radar scanners, but it’s worth a shot.  With a switchable cage, the insurance companies couldn’t exactly deny you coverage or raise your rates if all the data showed was you doing trips to the supermarket once a week.

It’s time for us to fight back against this nonsense, and to borrow an expression:  rage against the machine — the machine, in this case, being Big Brother cars, the cunts who make them and sell your data, the even-bigger cunts who strip-mine your personal data, and and the last category of cunts who use your personal data against you.)

I feel a mega-rant coming on, but instead I’ll just go to the range.

And just to make you feel better, if my car was spying on me it could report said destination to… well, anyone who might be interested in such data.  Makes you think, dunnit?

…And Speaking Of Big Auto

Business, Drive Time, Management

From the fools who bet on EVs as being the Next Big Thing:  Volkswagen and Mercedes.

Yeah… screw you and your little Duracell cars, screw you for buying into the Big Manufactured Panic stemming from the Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© hucksters, and screw you for trying to force us into buying your shitty fad products by cutting back production of regular internal combustion-engined cars and trucks.

And while we’re on high-level fools in Big Auto, ladies and gentlemen, I give you:  Stellantis.  This is what you get, and deservedly so when you let finance people run an engineering business.  Let me count the ways:

  • Misreading your core customers
  • Forcing inferior and low-demand products onto the market
  • Reducing product offerings when your competition offers choice (and having those remaining products be simply me-too choices, which you’re always going to lose especially when your products are less reliable and more costly)
  • Making long-term decisions based on doomsday (and fallacious) predictions
  • Sacrificing long-term growth for short-term profits (see below)
  • Ignoring basic marketing principles, e.g. when faced with growing reserve stock levels, increasing prices rather than cutting them.

Stellantis has broken each and every one of those oh-so basic rules, and the people who will pay the price are their employees, who are going to be laid off as their workplaces end up being shuttered.  Now, of course, they’re scrambling… in the face of being sued by shareholders.

Sadly, the people who have made all these disastrous business decisions will be fine thanks to generous severance packages and bonuses.  (Tavares’s compensation last year was worth $40 million, for example.)

instead of facing the proper consequences of public flogging followed by hanging.

Which Way Did You Vote, Again?

Disaster, Politics

Which is probably the best way to view this inexcusable behavior in the storm-struck western Carolinas:

I should also say, when I flew here on Sunday, they actually stopped us from going in, the sheriff’s department. And it was because of a bunch of politics that they were claiming was the Speaker of the House of North Carolina that was preventing us from even going in and trying to kick us out, which I have clarified today with North Carolina politicians that reached out to me — good on them — and they were like, “That’s complete bullshit. Speaker of the House has nothing. He wants you guys there.”

But this is the kind of political BS that is happening here right now. Like, everyone’s trying to be in charge without taking any type of action. Nobody wants to coordinate with anybody. Everybody wants to pretend like they’re being a hero while these people are literally fucking dying in the mountains. And these people, like I’m saying, these people are on limited medication. They’re running out of oxygen, and there’s no one going to get them.

And:

Howard pointed out that some of his colleagues are funding their rescue missions out of their own pockets. At the same time, Air Force helicopters are grounded and personnel aren’t working because they’re awaiting Title 10 orders that aren’t coming from above.

“There’s military helicopters all over here sitting on the ground, and they can’t do nothing,” he vented. “Even my JSOC boys in Fayetteville, they can’t get orders if they’re not here. It is just the most disgusting thing, and they’re killing these people. And I don’t know why they’re doing it.”

Howard said that he doesn’t “know what kind of conspiracy” is behind this bureaucratic nightmare. In my more cynical moments, I can’t help but wonder if Gov. Roy Cooper (D-N.C.) and the Biden-Harris administration are willing to let Republican voters in a reliably red part of the state fend for themselves — and die. I don’t want to believe that, but it’s hard to shake that gut feeling.”

I know, I know:  it’s usually easier to ascribe bad outcomes to inefficiency than to a malevolent conspiracy.  But I just can’t shake off the memorable words of former SecState James Baker III, “Fuck ’em.  They’re not gonna vote for us, anyway.”

Dust Settled

Technology

Okay, all that connectivity bullshit seems to have cleared up.  I won’t go into detail, but the past two days have been somewhat nerve-wracking because I kind of like keeping this here back porch of mine going, and because without an Internet connection in my house, I was going to have to go to places like Sta*buck$ or my apartment complex’s front office to use their free wi-fi.  And the rent had to be paid,yesterday — and there was no guarantee that I would be able to do it online.  (Not that I care that much;  my bank has a branch literally in the next block — actual walking distance, no kidding — so at worst I could get a cashier’s check cut in about five minutes.)

Also, my plagues & poxes episode finally seems to have cleared up — although New Wife is now showing some worrying symptoms of same — but at least I’m no longer hacking up bits of lung or whatever.

The downtime meant I had no time to assemble the Monday Funnies or News Roundup for their respective days, but that’s not important in the grand scheme of things, what with so many others putting out the same type of content anyway.  And to be quite frank, both involve quite a lot of work to put together (“curate”? I hate that fucking word), so I might just make the Roundup a weekly thing.

Anyway, normal service will now be resumed.

Assuming, of course, that in the general mood of whatthefuck that I described last week, that there’s anything I feel like ranting about or even giggling at.

In Pursuit Of A Dream

Deep Thoughts

I was watching some Eeewwchoob show about the evils of the lottery and how it’s just a disguised tax on stupid people and the poor and yadda yadda yadda.

One of the statements was that if you were to win a lottery with an advertised value of, say, $100 million, if you chose to take the lump sum payout instead of the annual payout, you’d end up with only $26 million, after taxes and so on.  ($100 minus the “lump sum penalty minus income tax.)

“Only” $26 million.  (Here’s where the “opportunity cost” canard, so beloved of finance people and con artists, comes into play.)  In other words, you’d be “losing” $74 million dollars because It’s All A Big Ripoff, Man.  Except of course that you wouldn’t be losing anything, but gaining many millions that you never had before.

And I don’t want to hear the old hackneyed saying about whether you buy a lottery ticket or not, you still have about the same chance of winning — which would be true if nobody had ever, ever won a lottery prize.  But as the newspapers are full of stories about how X won a lottery and then went broke after only a few years boo hoo, we have to assume that at least some people hit the jackpot.  So while the odds against are cripplingly high, they are not impossible.

So I play the lottery every week.  I only drop a few bucks at a time, because my feeling is that a $2 ticket is the cheapest dream you can get, and in any event I don’t live close to a casino where the odds are better but the payout is pathetic.  And if you know how the stock market can be and is being manipulated by huge institutions and giant index funds like Blackrock and Vanguard, you’d forget trying that form of legalized gambling too.

And I’m not saying the following is true in my case, not at all.  But something has occurred to me, as I’ve watched the economic news get worse and worse (thank you FJB) and the outlook becomes gloomier and gloomier, with prices skyrocketing and incomes remaining stagnant or even decreasing, with more and more hints that Social Security will end at some point, etc. etc.

I can’t help wondering that if all that shit really does hit the fan:  how many truly desperate people will not just turn to crime, but might take (in Tammy Keel’s immortal words) a sack lunch and a Mauser to the roof of a tall building, in the ultimate expression of nihilistic fatalism and despair.

And I wonder too how many people right now are being held back from doing so by having just the faint hope of that little lottery ticket in their pocket.

That Collecting Thing

Guy Stuff, Toys

Other than guns and maybe knives, I don’t know that I’ve ever been much of a “collector” of anything.  Oh sure, I’ve thought of collecting stuff before — watches, for example, if I were ever in a position to afford such a collection — but perhaps it’s a factor of growing older that the desire to own stuff of any one particular kind is no longer as attractive to me as it once was.

A good example is that of the aforementioned watches.  I’ve long had a list of watches I’d like to own, simply because I love the workmanship and craft involved in the creation of such creatures.  Then my list began to shrink, and a few criteria started to assert themselves:  no battery-powered — or “quartz” — movements, and even automatic movements began to lose their desirability because, frankly, they keep shitty time, almost regardless of their cost.  So:  manual-wind watches.  And then when I acquired my plain-Jane Tissot as a gift (thankee thankee, you-know-who):


…my earlier desire for other watches just evaporated.  (I have a couple others which I wear, very occasionally, for specific occasions, but this Tissot works wonderfully well for me, 99% of the time.)

Shocking as it may be to some, this “shrinkage” has started to manifest itself in my most long-time passion, guns.  (You may administer smelling salts at any point, now.)

Seriously.  I have a few guns that I judge as essential for self-, home- and social defense needs, and a very few sentimental favorites — the Browning High Wall 1885 in .45-70, the Winchester 94 in .30-30 and of course the Mauser K98 in 8x57mm, to name but some, and then the plinking equipment (which don’t count because, of course, .22 guns are household appliances and not guns, as I’ve stated ad nauseam  in the past).

Unlike many of my acquaintance, I have absolutely no interest — none whatsoever — of chasing after the latest whizzbang offering from SIG or Canik or whoever, so forget newly-manufactured guns, in toto.

But as I cast my eyes upon the contents of Ye Olde Gunne Sayfe on occasion, I sometimes wonder whether I should perhaps just get rid of a few outliers not because of financial reasons*, but simply because I cannot see myself shooting them ever again.  And having reached that realization, what point is ownership?

In one of my occasional Lottery Dreams (see the post above), I often wonder what car or cars I’d get to replace the Tiguan, and what’s interesting is that I’m having precisely the same feelings that I have with guns and watches:  nothing of recent manufacture at all — especially given that they’re all without exception loaded with electronic gizmos I don’t care for, or else gizmos that spy on you and/or could possibly be used to control your driving.  In fact, the more I think about it, I’d probably have to go back to pre-1970s cars — fully resto-modded of course — to find a car that has not a single computer chip in its driving operation.  And yes I know, modern cars are so much more efficient and economical than their forebears, but frankly, I’m prepared to put up with all the hassles involved with a stick shift and carburetors, for example, just as I’m prepared to have to manually wind my wristwatch every day or work the bolt of my rifle.  (If push came to shove, I could even go with a wheelgun, much as I love me my 1911s, as any fule kno.)

Hell, I’ve even tossed out the kitchen knife block in favor of just two or three basic knives hanging on the magnetic strip on the side of the fridge.  (I haven’t reached this stage with my other knives, however:  I’m sentimentally attached to pretty much all of them for one reason or another, but I don’t know if I’m ever going to buy another one.)

It’s an interesting thing, this change that is coming over me:  the desire to cut back, to simplify, to accept less in favor of plenty.

Anyone else out there feeling this way?

*Loyal Readers may recall that I had to hock all of them a while back, but I am pleased to report that the status quo has since been restored.