Good Morning, and Happy Friday. I trust you all slept well, after a lovely day of Thanksgiving feasting and communion with family and friends.
The Dallas Cowboys laid a smackdown on The Washington Redskins yesterday (imagine submitting to the strictures of woke nomenklatura - wouldn’t be me!) and much like DaRon Bland broke the single season record for Pick and Sixes in the fourth quarter, I bring you some interceptions from the world of trucking, automated vehicle technology, and the ongoing embarassments of our ruling class, the worst of them all in human history. Pour yourself a coffee and let’s go!
First up, esteemed comrade and FreightWaves editorial director Rachel Premack brought us an amazing piece on Wednesday, where she shares her journey to a conference thrown by an organization with a very specific name; I’d never even heard of these guys until Rachel gave me a verbal teaser about them at F3 in Chattanooga a couple of weeks ago.
Behold, the National Association of Publicly-Funded Truck Driving Schools.
I learned that these schools have an important role in bringing up the next cohort of truck drivers. But it’s unclear where the leaders of America’s $875 billion trucking industry should direct resources. Should they focus their attention on bringing in new drivers — or rethink how those drivers are treated once they’re employed? And should they try to get as many people as possible into schools — or keep classes small?
There are public safety reasons for figuring out how to boost driver retention. A federal study from 2017 showed that less experienced drivers are more likely to cause a serious accident. A truck driver with less than three years of experience, for example, is 47% more likely to cause an accident than one with more than three years on the road, according to the analysis.
Bold emphasis mine.
The American Trucking Associations, a lobbyist organization that represents trucking employers, estimated last year there was an industry shortage of 78,000 drivers. Associations in other countries report similar labor shortages.
Few outside the ATA’s membership appear to agree. Research suggests trucking fleets — especially large truckload carriers — struggle to keep their trucks running because of turnover. Large truckload fleets, for example, saw an annual turnover rate of around 94% from 1995 to 2017. That would mean, say, a trucking company that employs 1,000 drivers would have to rehire 940 drivers over the course of a year.
Why fix turnover when you can keep hitting the corporate welfare crack pipe?
It appears from Rachel’s reporting that many of the people at this conference represented community colleges, who are already wards of the state in certain ways.
Most people would not view what training they provide as a component to a corporate welfare complex, but the distinction between community college CDL programs and that offered by the in-house schools of Mega-Carriers is irrelevant when the premise is the same - the trucking industry has a serious retention problem. Is it the role of the taxpayer to fund a merry-go-round for an entire industry that refuses to make any changes to how it does business? I don’t think so.
Rachel’s report from this conference is excellent and worth a read, in part for the glaring omissions from those whom she interviewed - it appears not a word was said to address the fact that truckers are surveilled out the wazoo, infantilized, forced to compete with indentured servants brought in from the third world, made to drive aerodynamic aesthetic abortions often equipped with automatic transmissions and other useless technology that serves no purpose other than de-skilling and emasculating the driver, and a litany of other insults too long to list here.
Keep reading this Substack and you will hear them all.
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Speaking of useless technology, Jalopnik relays to us something everyone outside the insular circle jerk of our Tech Overlords already understands - that very few are interested in their robotic junk.
The public’s trust in self-driving cars has declined for the second year in a row, according to a study conducted by J.D. Power and MIT. The growing distrust applies to self-driving cars in general, including autonomous vehicles used by ride-hailing services, as well as autonomous driving systems such as Tesla’s “Autopilot,” which belies its limited capabilities through a misleading name.
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The AV crashes and their frequency have risen to a level that’s prompted legislators and regulatory agencies to get involved. Again, lawmakers and federal agencies are reacting to the problems that self-driving cars now pose rather than preempting these, which is arguably a better approach.
The auto industry sped ahead of regulatory bodies in the U.S., hoping for the best as it deployed autonomous vehicles and investors followed suit. This seems optimistic at best and plain reckless at worst.
In a world where certain types of custom hot rods are only allowed on race tracks, and high capacity Road Trains are only ever seen in the Outback, maybe autonomous vehicles should likewise be kept far away from the motoring public - no one asked for the fucking things, and our streets and highways were not built for highly capitalized Tech-Bros to experiment with their fever dreams.
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And fever dreams they are - a report from the New York Times shows us that RoboTaxis built and operated by Cruise, the “self-driving” subsidiary of General Motors, are not self-driving at all.
From fellow Substacker Gary Marcus, a breakdown of the NYT story and the lies spun by Cruise -
This is quite a damning quote from the NYT article -
G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000, according to a person familiar with its operations.
Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.
Bold emphasis mine.
Speaking as a Luddite who is quite happy to recover that term and lean into it, hard, you really have to hand it to the TechBros. Not only do they believe that they can replace every Taxi Driver and Trucker out on our roads today, but they are doing it while employing an extra 50% more people and at anywhere from 5 to 7 times the cost per vehicle.
You would almost think they worked for the government.
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One wonders when the investment community behind Automated and Electric Vehicles is going to realize they have been hoodwinked, and that throwing dollars after dimes in the hope of someday recouping the investment is a chimera which has arrived far too early on our techno-development timeline.
No such delay exists with another component to this dystopia being forced down our gullets; the great Robert Bryce documents for us a rather telling investor exodus -
The energy transition isn’t. Despite years of unending hype, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal tax credits, and some $600 billion spent on wind and solar in the U.S. since 2004, investors are abandoning alternative energy in droves.
As the Wall Street Journal noted last week, “Rising financing costs and prices for equipment make it harder to develop clean-energy projects as industry investors increasingly weigh the risks of providing capital against the benefits of reducing carbon emissions.” The article continued, saying wind and solar companies are “finding it more difficult to secure financing than at any time in the past decade.” It also quoted David Foley, a senior managing director at Blackstone, who recently told attendees at an energy conference in New York that, “The irrational exuberance, all the excitement about clean energy is clearly getting squeezed out.”
The latest evidence of that squeeze came last Friday when Siemens Gamesa (Siemens Energy AG) announced it was canceling plans to build a $280 million wind turbine plant in Portsmouth, Virginia. That project was supposed to create 300 of those “green” jobs we’ve heard so much about.
These charts demonstrate the waning enthusiasm for alt-energy, particularly when compared with the performance of two prominent hydrocarbon companies and the S&P 500 Index. They show year-to-date performance.
Have a read of the whole thing, and adjust your investment portfolios accordingly.
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Here’s an older link from earlier this year; recently sent to me by friend of this Substack and real life mensch Big Dog Sib -
At The End of The EV Rainbow, You'll Probably Be Riding a Bus
Resource constraints will demand that our EV future doesn’t just look like a hushed, tailpipe-free version of our internal combustion present day. Globally, about 75 million cars and 65 million motorcycles are built and sold every year. It would not be feasible to shift even 10% of this volume to EVs. Yet many countries are steadfast in their plans to suspend anything but EV production and purchase in the next decade, long before any meaningful increases in lithium production or charging capacity can be realized. Think of the EV regulations as the proverbial immovable force and EV production capacity as the immovable object. What’s gonna give?
Take a recent article in Wired as a clue about whether the promise of EVs is one that can be kept. Titled “Dear Electric Vehicle Owners: You Don’t Need That Giant Battery,” it ridicules the naivete of people who think their new EVs can offer the same range and capability as their old gas-powered cars. It suggests replacing one new F-150 Lightning with three or four low-range Nissan Leafs. Almost nobody wants what the Nissan Leaf has to offer, something demonstrated across a decade’s worth of underwhelming sales and consumer lawsuits. But hey, nobody wanted to wear a sweater when Jimmy Carter told us to, either.
For more than a decade now, the EV hypesters in the media have sold us a future in which EVs are better than internal-combustion cars. Quieter! Faster! Smoother! More luxurious and feature-filled! Turns out it was a massive bait-and-switch operation. High-function vehicles such as the Tesla Model S, F-150 Lightning, and GMC Hummer EV were used to ridicule concerns about EV ownership. But that’s not what you’ll be allowed to have in the long run — because you don’t “need” range, power, size, or capability that matches or exceeds that of traditional cars.
In fact, you might not even get to own one of these low-range, low-feature EVs yourself. The Wired article suggests that “there’s much more that Americans could do to get more out of each EV battery, like sharing cars ... choosing a smaller battery is less of a big deal than swapping a truck for a car, or giving up car ownership entirely in favor of a bus or ebike — options that would get us to a decarbonized future much faster.” Expect this “EV as a service” idea to be wildly popular with both the U.S. government, which every year does less to hide its absolute terror of citizen mobility, and the major corporations, which want you to pay a monthly fee for everything from streaming video to the right to have your refrigerator make ice cubes.
To all of those BoomerCons who still believe we have a free market and that the Commies haven’t already won, please have a think on what ‘subscription’ services are going to mean in the real world, especially when the same authorities who punish us daily via your local “DMV Experience”, amongst others, get to decide, in conjunction with their corporate brethren, what you ‘need.’
The author of this piece, Jack Baruth, publishes here at Substack as well. I recommend subscribing to Avoidable Contact Forever, based purely on his Bio alone -
I've been fired and blacklisted by the major auto manufacturers and their paid toadies in media. Read the stories they wish I wouldn't tell. Plus observations on culture, tech, systems and processes.
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Regular readers of this Substack will know that I am a huge, huge fan of the philosopher, mechanic, and author Matthew B Crawford, who writes the Archedelia Substack, and has been a guest on my podcast -
Crawford recently gave an interview to Freddie Sayers at UnHerd about the imposition of Autonomous Vehicles onto society, and what UnHerd referred to as the wider ‘War on Motorists’.
It is really worth your time to watch, and to consider Crawford’s thoughts, distilled as they are into a 33 minute interview, and capped off with this exchange -
”To bring it back to the car, we started off talking about all these political rebellions which seem connected to motorist groups. Maybe this is one such moment, where there is actually a political fight that is worth engaging in. Maybe those people should defend their right to drive whatever car they want.”
”Hell yeah.”
”Maybe rebellion is not burning down anything, it’s more like a line where you say ‘I’m going to keep my car and I’m going to drive it.’”
”Yeah, sign me up … We hereby inaugurate the Freedom to Drive Movement.”
As we say on the C.B. - Put that hammer down!
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Those watching the news yesterday may have heard about some troubles in Ireland, a country from which hails one of my grandfathers.
Much of these new troubles stem from our ruling class and their attempt to turn humanity into a beige, globalized mush, a mutt species whom they wish to Lord over, smashing any semblance of local democratic accountability along the way.
To those people, I say, keep Ireland for the Irish, thanks.
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In other news, this Substack recently breeched 1200 subscribers, no doubt to being listed as a ‘Substack Featured Publication’ earlier this week. That means some of you ended up here by clicking a button, perhaps not giving a whole lot of thought to anything other than the name; I really hope you enjoy the content and that the suggestion was not in vain - it would be nice if you stuck around.
Today’s list of links should give you some indication of the type of content to expect; if what I write and podcast on is not your bag, that’s fine, and I thank you for at least giving me a ‘drive-by’ inspection. If nothing else, if you have any truckers or fans of driving in your circle of friends and family, or, you know, those who respect basic human liberties and freedoms once afforded us in a modern society, please send this their way; I’m sure they will appreciate it.
Thanks for stopping in, and enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections, and Hate Mail, are always welcomed and encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com