A friend got a rental of a Tesla over the holidays. It’s undoubtedly the industry standard for EVs and a complete blast to drive. The problem: It’s not a practical car at all. He was driving in the cold, and the car was nearly drained after two hours. Searching for a charge was no easy task. The first one didn’t work. The second one stated that it would be charged in 10 hours, which he didn’t have. The third one charged in one hour but that was a full hour wasted.
His conclusion: This is indeed a glorified golf cart designed to keep you at home and under the thumb of the manufacturer. And this is just a test. The repairs are worse. Keep in mind that this is the best the industry has to offer. The other manufacturers of these things make products not nearly as highly rated, which is why so many of them are sitting on lots unsold and why orders for the machines are plummeting.
It seems like the EV craze has peaked already. Growth in gas cars is now far higher than electrics, flipping a trend from 12 months ago. Finally, consumers are figuring it out. This is a good second car, provided you’re driving in your own town, you have a hook-up at home and can charge it overnight, and you don’t suddenly have to go out of town. It’s a toy, sometimes a fun one, but not a real car. For that, you need gas.
The idea that this car is going to transition the United States to “clean energy” is absurd. If every car were electric, the grid would crash and rationing would be the norm. And maybe that’s the whole point. You drive only with permission. Nothing about your transportation is within your control. Authorities will decide everything for you. It’s a perfect strategy for creating a society of dependents.
Fortunately, consumers aren’t playing along. We still live with the remnants of a capitalist system whereby manufacturers have to make profits. So that’s a serious problem for the whole industry. It could very well collapse in 2024.
Sure, Tesla will still be around making luxury cars and trucks for well-to-do urbanites, and bless them for it. But it isn’t for everyone. It isn’t even for anyone who has a long way to go. Even now, the only substantial pockets of broad ownership (above 20 percent) are California and D.C. The heartland knows better and so do people in very cold latitudes.
As long as we’re on the topic of fails, consider fake meat. Remember how it was going to replace real meat? Well, take a look at the grocery stores today. This is another product that has peaked. The stock for Beyond Meat was $196 in 2019. It has fallen and fallen. Today it’s a bargain at $8.72, with no one being particularly interested. It looks like this one isn’t long for this world either, which makes you wonder why muckety-mucks are still pushing this nonsense on us. Consumers aren’t having it anymore.
The same goes for COVID-19 vaccines, for which your tax dollars paid. The companies have stock sales and patents and a seeming public demand. Except for one thing: They don’t work. They’re also highly dangerous. This is an incredible disaster for both Moderna and Pfizer. The Pfizer stock is down to $28 from $59 in two years. Moderna has fallen to $100 from $384 in the same timeframe. They’re both sitting on massive stockpiles of these vaccines, with almost no remaining public demand for their endless boosters. They also face lawsuits with claims that the companies wildly exaggerated the benefit. In any case, they were never necessary for the vast majority of people and certainly not for children. They paid off the Food and Drug Administration to give them permission to even sell products that would never have been approved under normal conditions.
Once again, we have the remnants of capitalism to thank for this. Government tried to force everyone to get the vaccine. They succeeded among some segments of the population for a time. They also enlisted Hollywood stars and every manner of “influencer” (I hate that term) to browbeat people into getting them. Whole cities (New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Boston) were even shut to the unvaccinated. At the very least, the companies and cooperating government officials should apologize for this disaster.
And so long as we’re engaged in this fit of schadenfreude, consider Mark Zuckerberg’s alternative to X (Twitter) called Threads. It came out earlier this year to great fanfare. Here’s a social media service that’s thoroughly censored! As if that’s some kind of marketing pitch. It was always ridiculous. It started with 4 million users, mostly by drafting the users of Instagram. Today it’s down to 1 million, but even they’re hardly active at all.
For my part, when I saw how Instagram was being abused, I immediately deleted my account and a thousand images with it. What a relief! As it turns out, I hated that thing anyway. Good riddance!
Threads was a disaster for this company, adding to the other disaster of Mr. Zuckerberg’s Metaverse itself, which is completely empty and boring. It turns out that Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t a good businessman at all. Maybe the movie “The Social Network” was correct that he merely stole the whole idea of Facebook itself. He never really had business acumen. And speaking of Facebook, good grief, what happened to this thing? There’s essentially no reach on the platform.
Facebook has turned into nothing more than an advertising platform that markets your data. It’s really only useful for its marketplace. Otherwise, what’s the point of this thing anymore? It’s a wonder that its stock price hasn’t been hit, not just yet.
Another piece of toast this year has been online learning. Frankly, people are sick of it. Classrooms should be real. The fakery of remote classes is obvious to one and all.
Even DEI has hit the skids! Wisconsin just dialed back all funding and froze the programs.
Are you noticing a pattern here? Markets in the real world are rejecting the “Great Reset.” Whether eating bugs, driving EVs, munching fake meat, or living in the metaverse with censorship, none of it’s working. We can only hope that this trend continues in 2024 and that it bankrupts the companies that threw themselves into the whole racket. Let’s hope the consumer marketplace can render its final judgment before all of this jazz becomes mandatory, which is the real goal.
In the meantime, let’s be grateful for every amount of capitalism we have remaining, because markets mean consumer choice. And when given the choice, we know now that consumers don’t like Klaus Schwab’s plans for our lives, no matter how much Bill Gates endorses them.
