Adaptive Curmudgeon

I’m avoiding most political media.  Why?  Because it’s election season with a D in the office and Bullshit, when concentrated in unacceptably high levels, is bad for your health.

That’s why I deliberately scheduled something more pleasant (a proctology exam) during the time I could have been watching the Presidential debates on TV.  That said; I can’t help peeking at reports in the aftermath.  I expected Mitt to collapse in a black hole of boredom and The O to perform a soliloquy from Hamlet that moved Jim Lerher to tears.  Instead Mitt swung for the bleachers and Obama wiffed his turn at the plate.  Competence, when you least expect it, is a ray of sunshine.  I love surprises like that.

Unwilling to actually watch the show I still assumed Obama was mediocre and Mitt merely eeked out a minimally superior performance.  Apparently I was wrong.  I saw Joel’s link to Al Gore explaining what happened.  Go watch it.  (Read the rest of Ultimate Answer to Kings while you’re there.)  The esteemed high priest of environmentalism maintains the following:

• Obama “lost” the debates because he didn’t have time to acclimate to Denver’s altitude.

Oh.  Wow.  That’s not an excuse; it’s a cry for help.

There’s nothing quite so creepy as hearing “the dog ate my homework” excuses for the President.  I’m also not sure which is worse; Al Gore’s idea that Obama couldn’t hack the altitude or Al Gore’s corollary that he was so colossally ignorant of his own weaknesses that he didn’t plan ahead for  altitude.

I have personally flown in from sea level, stepped off a plane in Denver, and made a presentation within a couple of hours.  It does suck but if that’s your job then you do it!  If you’re feeling low or tired or hungover or jet lagged you still have to get up there and to your thing.  If your laptop was seized by the TSA, your Powerpoint was deleted by aliens, you’ve just been routed through six airports, you’ve eaten nothing but peanut dust all day, and you sat next to six sick children and a fat smelly jerk who farted all through the flight?  No excuses; keep soldiering on.  When you land in Denver you do what everyone in that situation does, pop a couple Advil, slam as much coffee as you can keep down, then get out there and rock out.  A knuckle dragging blogger can do it and I expect no less from the Commander in Chief.

I’d no more think of blaming the altitude for a bad showing in Denver than I’d think of giving Al Gore a lapdance.  Pros don’t make excuses.

A.C.

P.S.  None of this should make anyone think it’s in the bag for Mitt.  I like playing betting games but this one has me stumped. It’s either a squeaker for Obama or a landslide for Mitt.  Mitt will not win by a hair.  For him, it’s all or nothing.   Don’t let prognosticators fool you.  In this election nobody else knows the answer either.  It’s good to know our elections are still contested and not merely coronations.

As always, Tam at View From The Porch, nails it. Has there ever been a better paragraph than this:

When unemployment pays almost as much as the available jobs, work is disincentivized. Remember: If you want less of something, like tobacco or income, tax it. If you want more of something, like tobacco or unemployment, subsidize it. (And if you want proof that our government is crazy, roll those two sentences around in your head for awhile…)

Hat tip to The Whited Sepulchre for the initial story.

I read up on the 2012 Zero S ZF9 electric motorcycle (including a little blurb at Popular Mechanics and the companies web page).  Then I compared it to the Chevy Volt.  Finally I bumped into the less ready for prime time Lightning Motorcycle. (I’m not sure I consider this a “ready to buy today” vehicle so I’d take it with a grain of salt but I included it anyway because… it’s my damn blog.) I made this handy chart:

There you have it. For the money you’d flush on a Volt you can buy an electric motorcycle for a fun daily commute and have cash to spare for a new Honda Fit for when it rains. Or you can buy a quasi experimental racing machine that’ll go fast enough to detach your spleen. Given such wonderful choices, who would limp around in a (discontinued) sad sack Volt?

I’d like my readers to view two video ads for electric vehicles.  The first video is a 3:26 ad for a group of electric motorcycles  (on the market today).

The second video is about 30 seconds, produced by General Motors, and advertises a car they’ve stopped building.  I already examined it in The Car We Were Forced To Build.  My introductory sentence was as follows:

“Watch it and you’ll be embarrassed to be in the same room with that level of saccharine bullshit.”

Note the difference between the two ads!  What does the motorcycle ad have:

• Rock and roll
• Pretty girls
• Electric guitars
• High speed (though it’s not super fast)
• Wheelies, stoppies, driving in dirt

What do you learn from the motorcycle ad:

• It’s electric
• It charges everywhere
• It’s fun
• Girls and electric guitars and leather jackets and driving fast…It’s good to be alive!

Compare it to the Chevy Volt ad:

• No pretty girls
• No rock and roll
• The car (almost) never moves under it’s own power.
• The fastest the Volt moves is as a chassis on an assembly line that is actually slower than a couple of town dogs.

The juxtaposition of the two is why I can’t stop beating the living &^%$#$ out of Obama’s expensive green jobs horseshit unicorn-mobile.  But, and this is a ray of hope, the motorcycle actually looks kinda’ cool.  Remember, I’m not anti-electric car.  I’m anti-shitty overpriced crapfest that attempts to deny market forces (and fails miserably).  Also, all vehicle ads should show the vehicle being fun…this is how God intended it.  Every time a car shopper viewed the GM/Chevy Volt they dried their tears and purchased a Honda Civic.  Show me a vehicle ad that makes me want to weep and I’ll show you a government that shouldn’t be selling cars!

I had come to believe that the Chevy Volt were like unicorns.  Everyone can describe them (and some people weep at their beauty) but they don’t exist.  (Maybe they’re vampires?  They control the minds of the weak, suck the blood out of their victims, and are nearly impossible to kill?)

Yesterday I saw one.  I saw an actual real life Chevy Volt being driven on an actual road by (presumably) a human being.  I didn’t expect much but an electric car (of any kind) is kinda’ cool so I expected a little “wow factor”.

Instead it was just a shabby generic shitbox limping along the right turn lane.  It was quiet I guess.  It looked like the “V” part of the “Volt” placard had peeled back.  Other than that it was utterly unremarkable.

I guess I expect a $40,000 car to be at least as interesting as a Volvo.  This was more like something you’d drive if you couldn’t afford a Civic.  Oh well.

Also the guy driving it looked royally pissed off.  I can’t say why.  It’s not necessarily the car’s fault.  (Maybe someone dumped a piranha in his lap?)

At any rate let it be known that in the fall of the year 2012 I saw a living example of the shovel ready green technology of 2008.  There, I said it.  Having honestly admitted that they do exist on actual public roads I’m going to go back to hatin’ them.

The problem with being paranoid is you might be right and therefore not paranoid at all.  This really takes the fun out of things.

Case in point, “fiat currency”.  In a sane world you’d just have “money”.  Money makes sense.  Why?  Because hauling around a bushel of soybeans to trade for a case of PopTarts would suck.  I’m happy with the idea of a medium of exchange.  Unfortunately I’m not so happy with the concept of “fiat currency”.  “Fiat currency” is the technical term for little slips of paper (or numbers in accounts) that have no value whatsoever other than a governmental blessing.  The only reason I can use cash to buy cookies or cocaine is because the Government says “these slips of paper are totally awesome and nothing like that ream of paper you just bought at Office Max”.  There’s one other part of that belief.  If the people (en masse) start thinking currency is just paper… it’s game over.

Fiat currency is an impolite phrase.  Nobody likes it.  It’s something you’ll never hear uttered by most Americans.  It also sounds silly right up to the point when it doesn’t.  Like now.  The debt is $15,981,575,234,553.39 and during bailouts in the last few years “totally awesome pieces of paper” have been created in such number that the Government couldn’t even physically print them.  Not that they didn’t feel like it.  It’s simply not possible.  Even if you get a discount on cheap photocopy paper and have oh I don’t know… big bunch of factories that make money there is too much imaginary money to print it.  When dollars are wished into being so fast that physically representing them on paper is impossible I get nervous.  This makes me sound paranoid when I get together with the family for Thanksgiving.  It’s tough being a Curmudgeon.

…

Even as I write this I realize that at least one other tinfoil hat wearing American will see the flaw in the above paragraph.  You see I referred to the U.S. Mint as the Government’s big bunch of factories that make money.  Other people who think too much about fiat currency  (and therefore at least sound paranoid) will surely note that mint only makes coins…which are only good if you want to buy a soda at a vending machine.  All the paper money is represented by Federal Reserve Notes.  They’re made by the Federal Reserve.  Who cares right?

Well there’s this part about the Federal Reserve being somewhat independent of the U.S. Government.  Don’t trust me.  Here’s what Wikipedia says :

“…the Federal Reserve is independent within government in that ‘its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government.'”

I can quote more authoritative sources than Wikipedia but if you’ve read this far you already knew it.  I don’t see why my savings should be denominated in slips of paper that can be invented (it’s not even necessary to print it) by people who answer to darned near nobody and can tell the President and both houses of congress to kiss their ass.  It’s as if you renamed “Big Donny’s Pizza” into “Federal Pizza” and started making imaginary pizzas…and I had to eat them.

Of course none of this is new.  We haven’t been on the gold standard for years and the Fed has invented money out of thin air since then.  This is why stuff that you’d buy for $1 in 1913 costs about $23 now.  (You can have fun with inflation… I just picked that as a random example.)  There’s no law that says you’ve got to print money until dollars are worth less every year for decades on end.  It just seems to be how things go.  I suppose the ability to “invent” money is as hard to resist as the power of Sauron.

Why mention all this?  Because I wanted to list a few things that:

• Are true.
• Don’t sound true (even though they are).
• Sound really paranoid when you discuss it (even though they are true).
• Freak me out.

There’s something else that is true and yet sounds nutty. The Federal Reserve, which is quasi-independent of the Government and can hand me a pinecone and tell me it’s a $50 dollar bill if they wish… have their own police force.  They are called Federal Reserve Law Enforcement Officers.  They’re a relatively new thing; they were created following September 11, 2001.  They have cool badges and guns and all the groovy stuff you’d expect.

You’ve got to be kidding me. A police force that doesn’t answer to the president or anyone else and employed by a system that can invent it’s own money.  Am I the only one that thinks this is a bad idea?  Also why should a bank to have it’s own police force rather than using something like Federal Marshals?  What’s next?  Should WalMart have it’s own Air Force?

So far nothing has become of it.  Still I think it’s a bad thing.  Does it make me hopelessly paranoid?

Also if you already knew about this… do you freak people out at Thanksgiving?  Just askin’.

I carefully evaluate technology before embracing it.  Wiser men than myself have warned that it’s better to think things over a bit before swigging a New Coke, using a fancy derivative in your investment portfolio, or buying the first Betamax on the block.

This isn’t to say I’m anti-technology.  Technology is great stuff that keeps us from hunkering in caves and dying at 35.  I wouldn’t want to live in a world without automatic drip coffee makers, antibiotics, telescopic rifle scopes, or word processors.  But I am definitely technology suspicious.  You have to identify when technology is shit served up on a platter of false hope.  For example; mustard gas, the Chevy Volt, non-dairy creamer, the AMC Gremlin, Hot Pockets, and (unforgivably) “Nader alarms”.

This brings me to pad computers and especially the iPad.  As a first strike against it, the iPad comes from the spawn of Satan; Steve Jobs.  (He’s not dead you know… he’s a disembodied nerd/spirit running Apple from the “cloud”.  Always ready to deflower any fool who can summon him with incantations and a black turtleneck. ) Like Mephistopheles’ deal with hell, Apple’s iPad seems like a fools bargain which “frees” you from the ability to control your own machine.  Plus you can only keep the iNinjas at bay if you keep Apple’s presence in your home to a minimum.

In fact I’ve so far pigeonholed iPads as the most useless idea this side of an internet enabled refrigerator.  (Unlike the Kindle which has battered my reluctance down and taken over half my library.)  iPads seem to be a computers which are incapable of… well… computing.  Nobody composes literature (even bad poetry) on one.  Nobody uses one to do their taxes, tune a fuel injection system, or calculate ballistic coefficients.  It’s a dumb terminal for the “cloud” that happens to play angry birds and look cool.  Thus I’ve associated iPads with irrelevant teenage bimbos maintaining Facebook personas.

Today I got a different view.  I was in the local grain elevator.  I love grain elevators.  They’re the most classic of timeless American institutions; a combination of free enterprise, important services to society that are masked in obsolescence, and total obscurity.  Plus they sometimes explode.

The grinders are huge American metal devices which are twice my age and have more mass than a Buick.  (I’m talking about Buicks made back when the door alone felt like battleship armor.)  The floors are wood and well worn.  The ramps are gravel and large enough that you can drive your tractor (or farm-semi) inside.  The siding is equal parts faded sheet metal and dry rotted planks.  The lighting is old incandescent bulbs (suck it Al Gore!) encased in protective glass containers that look surprisingly like Mason Jars.

It is also a haven of capitalism.  Prices are listed on a blackboard.  They change daily.  In fact the blackboard looks suspiciously like what I’d expect a bookie would have in 1950.

Plopped in the middle of all this decrepit and aged Americana was a decrepit and aged farmer.  He looked less well dressed (and less modern) than these folks:

As always, thank you for your support.

But far more intelligent than these folks:

I’m Larry. This is Darryl and my other brother Darryl.

He was parked on an old truck seat with his feet on a coil of bailing wire.  He was ignoring me.  (I was the only customer he’d had in hours.)  I expected lousy service.  All real grain mills pride themselves on poor service to rival the most obtuse pierced wonder at Starbucks.  It’s a rural hazing procedure.  Plus old people don’t move fast and who the hell hurries for cattle feed anyway and the damn kids these days and the price of diesel is caused by those jerks in Washington and the new seed is shit and…  Yes, moving slow and complaining is a form of art when done well.

Sadly, he was staring at the glowing phosphorescence of a *$%#@@$ iPad!

Oh no!  They’d gotten to him.

Then I peeked over his shoulder and saw that he was carefully reviewing grain prices and a weather map.  He had a string of numbers in a piece of paper and he was staring at the weather map as if willing it to predict the future.  (For those of you who don’t know…the futures market at this level is practically gambling.  Despite what you hear during testimony about Federal subsidies, farmers sometimes take huge risks in anticipation of huge gains.  He was pondering what I presume was a high risk / high reward bet.  Amusingly he was looking at weather stats from another state.  Probably wondering if their weather had hosed them enough for him to hold out on his local harvest.)

Data heavy high-risk calculations by an overall clad, red state, elevator operator, in nowheresville?  On an iPad.  This was not Angry Birds!

I have backed off my earlier assumption that all things that go though an iPad are fluff.  Now I see them as 99% fluff and 1% real decision-making power.  Cool.

For a while I made a hobby out of bashing the Chevy Volt.  Was I shooting fish in a barrel?  Yes; if by “shooting” you mean “detonate with a nuclear bomb” and by “barrel” you mean “area of ideologically driven blinders” and by “fish” you mean “unsupportable assumptions”.  Was it pointless?  Yes!  (Since when does it do any good to point out the emperor is wearing no clothes?) Do I care?  No.  Volt bashing made me happy so what other reason did I need?

Eventually (in March 2012) I decided I’d beaten the dry earth where a horse once stood for too long.  Every person on earth had either figured out the Volt was an expensive bust or they were unteachable.  (Also I had baby chicks to raise; a far more important task than watching politics.)

Here’s a list of various rants I spewed forth about the lamentable wheeled horseshit produced by planned economy misfits in my country.  The list might be incomplete and it’s definitely out of order.  I work for free so you get the quality you’d expect.  Here goes:

• The Car We Were Forced To Build (Note: I didn’t remember this link until a few days after this post went live)
• Volt Learning Curve; Reality With A Sledgehammer
• Volt Revolt
• I Just Plain Love Hammering The Chevy Volt
• The Chevy Volt Is Still Shovel Ready: Jobs Money Quote
• The Chevy Volt Is Still Shovel Ready: The Great Leap Forward
• The Chevy Volt Is Still Shovel Ready
• Smart Car Follows The Chevy Volt Down The Rathole
• The Chevy Volt’s Slogan: FAIL Of The Century
• The Chevy Volt (As Expected) Continues To Bleed Money (A dead horse, sufficiently beaten, is dead. A green jobs government subsidy, never dies.)
• High MPG Does NOT Mean Gutless Shitbox: Part II (Here is an identical priced alternative to the Volt with high MPG and…unlike the Volt…balls!)

What interests me is the media is slowly getting with the program.  I called off Volt bashing in March and but the Washington Post has looked past Obamas halo to write about it in September.  Well done gentlemen.  I refer to GM’s vaunted Volt is on the road to nowhere fast:

“No matter how you slice it, the American taxpayer has gotten precious little for the administration’s investment in battery-powered vehicles, in terms of permanent jobs or lower carbon dioxide emissions. There is no market, or not much of one, for vehicles that are less convenient and cost thousands of dollars more than similar-sized gas-powered alternatives — but do not save enough fuel to compensate. The basic theory of the Obama push for electric vehicles — if you build them, customers will come — was a myth. And an expensive one, at that.”

A final note to folks who haven’t hear my Volt screeds.  I have no problem with electric cars (in fact I’m pissed what passes for one because I had such high hopes).  I do, however, have a problem with shitty cars.  I also have an uncontrollable urge to take a meat cleaver to the perversities of a command economy especially when they take root in my country.