Electric Vehicles

Spoken like a true entrepreneur. Steve Jobs would be proud.

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BTW…I saw one of those Cybertrucks out in the wild, up in the Woodlands, this past weekend. It’s far more horrifying in person than in a picture. Even a moving picture.

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We saw one in the wild a few weeks ago. It was black, either painted or wrapped. I guess its owner didn’t like all the fingerprints.

The one I saw looked like a sheet pan I’ve had in the kitchen for the last 20 years.

I was being facetious (obviously…I hope), but the issue isn’t Shell individually, it’s that it operates in a controlled market where supply is artificially restricted to maintain the price of the raw material. It’s anti-competitive, and we just let them continue to fleece the customer and post record profits.

Fun Fact: Apple is being sued by the DOJ for being a monopoly for having too much of a market share for high-end phones. Not all phones, just the high end ones. The luxury ones that are not a necessity.

Meanwhile, oil companies engage in price fixing on something that almost everybody needs to use almost every single day and…crickets.

Any control of supply isn’t being done by public companies.

I will assume that is also being facetious.

Ray, you’ve gone full Towlie. Never go full Towlie.

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That was my experience as well.

So ugly I wondered if what I saw was a modified version.

Nope. It was truly that fugly.

Anyone that honestly likes that thing is a Musky fanboy to the extent that Swifties would say is too worshipful.

She didn’t want work for a corporation…or buy products…or sell products…or engage in the production of products. You know…as a career. She didn’t want to do that.

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Likely the same one I saw the other day. At least I’d like to think there’s only one in Austin. Truly grotesque.

It makes sense that it looks uglier in person, because the publicity media will, of course, have been staged so as to be as flattering as possible to this overpriced dumpster on wheels.

There are several. I know there is one I’ve seen more than a few times around Far West and MOPAC, and at least one somewhere in SW Austin.

Do we really want it cheaper, encouraging people to burn more of it? I certainly don’t ascribe any altruistic motives to oil companies, but if their pricing activities accelerate the search for alternatives, that’s ok with me.

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Towlie is Lloyd Dobler??

The one I saw was leaving the Home Depot up near Lakeline. It’s bed was probably packed with boxes of fasteners of various types.

She’s a kickboxer…have you heard of kickboxing…sport of the future.

Rivets. Lots and lots of rivets.

Absolutely. A big part of the problem - which is not unique to the oil industry - is that we allow the profits to be privatized but not the effects. The damage the product does to the environment is well known and has been for decades, but we just accept that and make people themselves bear the cost of living with pollution and the effects of climate change while Shell et al bank billions in profits over a three-month span.

Same with the meat industry that pollutes our waterways with animal effluent and - yes - exacerbates climate change with billions upon billions of cow farts every day (methane is about 28x worse of a greenhouse gas than CO2). Then there is the loss of CO2-gobbling forest land to clear cutting for space to farm livestock and grow the vast quantities of feed they require. And, lastly, the oceans of water they drink.

None of that is priced into the cost of a burger. The profits are reaped by the food industry and the cost of the damage wrought is born by taxpayers.

If the true “soup to nuts” cost of raising a quarterpounder was included in what the consumer was charged, they would be served only at Michelin-starred restaurants.

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That’s probably 3 at least, then.

I have a friend of a friend who has worked for Tesla for quite a while. He’s been a Tesla fanboy as long as I’ve known him.

Last time I saw him we were talking about the CyberTruck and he was clearly doing everything he could to change the subject, which is the rarest of rares with the Tesla stans.

Made me laugh.