Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Smacked Upside the Head by an Idea I Should Have Seen Earlier
In another conversation on one of my posts, someone asked why governments keep pushing people toward electric vehicles. And it dawned on me what a huge reason must be. Because the Government controls the electric grid almost everywhere.
Utility companies that are private, or publicly-held, still have extensive government regulation. If the government controls the fuel supply of your vehicle, they essentially control your movements. They also see how much you use, and can shut down your supply at any time, if it suits their purpose. California drivers of electric cars can look forward to days and days of no power, ostensibly to reduce the fire danger from high-voltage power lines. Even with batteries, they always “leak”, so you can’t rely on extra battery power when your power is cut off.
Another thought I just had. Can you imagine a police vehicle chasing a fugitive in an electric car? All they’d have to do to catch the guy would be to wait until his car ran out of juice, which I’m guessing would be pretty fast at high speeds. Good radio communications between police in various areas would be able to easily track and apprehend a fleeing suspect in his Leaf.
The government has no control of the gasoline you put in your gas-powered car, and supplies are plentiful everywhere, giving you nearly unlimited freedom of movement. My gasoline-powered car is my Liberty, and I will never let it go.
Published in General
Good thing you don’t live in California.
What about the police in their Leaf? Or Chevy Bolt? Or Electric Mustang? Or maybe Tesla?
But I suppose the police stations would have GASOLINE OR DIESEL FUELED GENERATORS, to keep THEIR electric vehicles charged.
I know a person who went on a missions trip to a communist country. The people in the local church saved up small amounts of diesel fuel in their homes for months so that there would be enough of the government-rationed fuel to allow the missionary access over a broad area. This person spent a night in a child’s room where the fuel had been stored. Though the fuel was no longer there, the room still smelled strongly of diesel. If all the cars had been electric, movement could have been very restricted. You are quite correct, @rushbabe49
Oh, and I made a similar point a while back in the Conservative Migration group: If Biden et al cause inflation etc that increases interest rates while also causing a housing crash that means home-owners lose the value of the homes they own, that makes it basically impossible for people to relocate from a blue area to a red area.
“Haven’t taken the covid jab, Comrade? Well, then no juice for you!”
Good comments all – but my own Liberty spends an inordinate amount of time in the shop.
Not mine. I have a Toyota Tacoma. It spends almost no time in the shop.
I think you’re thinking to locally, too temporally. My impression is that those controlling the future of travel have a conformist, homogeneous view of future humanity, and manufacturing. In the future, communication will be electronic, manufacturing will be robotic, and transportation should be electric. Sort of like the 60s view that in the future everyone will be wearing formfitting silver jump suits (and no one will be fat).
Also I heard a lecture by I think Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and he said that with all-electric self-driving cars people will be glad to cede control of driving to their cars, and eventually will become afraid of driving their cars (what with the millimeter proximity of fast self-driving cars to other cars), and ultimately will always being driven everywhere, and will be happy about it.
Further more, electrification and digitizing everything would make beneficial control of the world’s economy, manufacturing and population much more easily centralized and potentially subject to AI.
And with Elon Musk’s marvelous brain chips in everyone, playing soft circumstance-oriented Muzak into everyone 24 hours a day, and giving information and directives in a soft harmonious manner, like a digital conscience (coincidentally wirelessly supplied by Musk’s ubiquitous Starlink) electronic everything and everyone could be under immediate digital control. What a wonderful new world this could be.
Come to think of it, if 7.5 billion people could be so easily controlled, housed, fed, and entertained, what good would they be? One wonders why they would want to keep all of them around at all. Perhaps they would want to reduce the world’s population to 0.5 billion.
This would all be “conspiracy theory” but it’s been published by its promoters, including by Schwab himself, for years now.
A lot of people in California are off the grid already.
Now if I owned this home, we would have a wind powered generator that would sit inside the area where some people have attic fans. As it is windy at least four days a week in the afternoon.
We’d also have a full solar array on the roof, as it is sunny 300 days a year.
Sure they would be times we wouldn’t have access to those two methods of generating energy, but it would be beyond the government’s power to stop it on days when it was going on.
As far as police chases, law enforcement can put down the nail strips across the roads and there are also gizmos where by using an EMP they can zap your car and knock the power off.
Of course in my county we only have a total of two county sheriff’s patrol cars out and about after 6Pm, so there are a lot of things I assume a person could get away with. (And this is one huge county.)
I’m blowing that part.
Yes. And remember, electric cars will not only be self-driving, but they can be shut down and even remotely driven, so once all cars have been mandatorily replaced with new all-electronic vehicles, there won’t be any need for nail strips.
At the time I was averse to Japanese and Korean vehicles, preferring American brands, little thinking about foreign content. Anyway, pondering a (used) replacement. And I take it you’re suggesting the Tacoma. Gas? Diesel?
Or maybe electric if I can charge it without recourse to the electric utility. (An acquaintance near here has a mini-micro water turbine but sometimes the wet weather creek isn’t so wet.) I’ve had some slight experience (dated) with windmills and photovoltaics and even a tiny amount with H2 – hopefully they are much improved.
Uh, nope, nohow, no way. What will they do with all the people in South America and Africa? That future works for advanced nations, but not for the rest of the world.
To me the thing about going off the electric grid is that for evenings and nights, you need batteries to store the power. Batteries have short lives compared to wind turbines, and this is the limiting factor. (But candles can be made out of ash and animal fat.)
But candles produce CO2, so you’re not allowed to have candles. Nor allowed to make them, without a special EPA license that nobody can get.
A body might go off the grid, but its still necessary.
My 2008 Acura RDX has, in its 13 years, spent about three days in the garage. It never breaks down, is very comfortable to drive, even long distances, and gets OK gas mileage. Drawback? It uses premium gas. Honda products last a very long time. Hubby’s 2005 Acura TL has over 240,000 miles and does quite well.
But they’d never know I had candles. Unless they looked at my window at night from outer space. Dang.
By the way, without candles how would I ecologically cook my meal (worms)?
Please remember that every human being produces CO2 all day, every day. Let’s see…will the government start to ration breathing? You will be allowed only a limited number of breaths per hour before having to pay for your pollution of the environment.
I’m not really suggesting anything. My gas powered Tacoma has about a quarter of a million miles on it and the only problem is squeaky brakes.
If gasoline cars are going away, you should upgrade/replace both of them while you can.
Get something with minimal bells and whistles that can cause problems, perhaps including becoming undriveable if certain “safety systems” fail and won’t allow the engine to run or be driveable.
Look for something that doesn’t have any kind of electric-powered or -assisted steering. That seems to be getting more and more common too, for one reason it seems to be one thing they can “tweak” to improve gas mileage by not having a regular power-steering pump. But the larger concern might be the ability of someone – perhaps the government, perhaps not – to hack in and control the electric steering from elsewhere.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a vehicle without power steering in at least 30 years. I want manual shift back, too.
And crank-up windows. I saw an old truck that was so old it has a vice grip rusted to the shaft handle where the handle had come off, and it rolled up the window just fine.
Vise grips have substituted for lots of things.
Yeah. Duct tape, coat hangers, crazy glue and vice grips should go in every emergency kit.
Silicon caulk. It holds the world together.
I’m not saying to avoid power steering, I’m saying to avoid ELECTRIC power steering.
Indeed, if regular power steering fails, there’s still a mechanical connection that can be used to steer, it just takes more strength. If ELECTRIC steering fails – or gets taken over by someone else – you got NOTHING.
Are you saying fly by wire is a mistake?
Maybe not always, but if it’s hackable and/or becoming obsolete and no longer supported, then yes.
In this case, it means, if you want to get a personal you-drive-it car that you can still use in maybe 20 years, don’t get something with electric steering.