Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Tesla Hits The Wall of Reality of Question Number 4

The autoblogreen headline reads Tesla shares in freefall, now below IPO price.  Within the story we read these “expert” analyses of Tesla Motors.

...According to Josef Schuster, the Chicago-based founder of IPOX Capital Management LLC, “The company is a great concept with relatively weak fundamentals. Markets are weak and in a weak market right now this is hurting the company even more.”

Financial expert Michael Holland explains, “They brought this thing into a market that was not rewarding hype,... The stock did get its pop, and now it’s plagued by the reality of the marketplace. The reality of the marketplace is that people aren’t paying for dreams and visions.” (bold by ed.)

The reality of question number 4, which I noted in a post titled Reality for Tesla “True Believers.”

But question number four, “And do they offer the kind of basic, bottom-line transportation value needed to attract mainstream buyers in a tough market?”, is the most important question, and with a starting price of around 60K, running up to 130K, I think the answer to the question is a emphatic “No.”

As I have previously noted in regards to Tesla, Obviously, A Hand Out is in Order, otherwise Tesla Roadster to Go the Way of the Segway.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/07 at 02:16 PM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

False Sense of Entitlement Blues

There is a story in the business section of The New York Times with a headline which reads American Dream Is Elusive for New Generation, which in reading makes makes me want to either scream, or weep.  The story begins this way.

After breakfast, his parents left for their jobs, and Scott Nicholson, alone in the house in this comfortable suburb west of Boston, went to his laptop in the living room. He had placed it on a small table that his mother had used for a vase of flowers until her unemployed son found himself reluctantly stuck at home.

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter — four or five a week, week after week.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Poor young Mr. Nicholson, diligently hunting for a job, in the cushy comfort of his parent’s home, upon being offered a job, and an opportunity for self-reliance, turns it down.  And why did young Mr. Nicholson turn down the job

Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder…

“The conversation I’m going to have with my parents now that I’ve turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job,” he said.

That is not reasoning, my friends, that is an outright spurning of an opportunity for self-reliance due to a false sense of entitlement inculcated through the American education system, which has caused young Mr. Nicholson to worry more about what he is going to tell Mommy and Daddy, rather than how he can pay his own way.

But to what, does The New York Times attribute young Mr. Nicholson’s inability to get a job?.

The Great Depression damaged the self-confidence of the young, and that is beginning to happen now, according to pollsters, sociologists and economists.

While it cannot be disputed that the current state of the economy is affecting young college graduates’ ability to find employment, let’s not blame it on damaged self-confidence, but rather false self-confidence instilled in America’s culture of unearned entitlement, which is supported by these statements describing young Mr. Nicholson’s world view.

“Going it alone,” “earning enough to be self-supporting” — these are awkward concepts for Scott Nicholson and his friends.

The story continues, lamenting this, that, and the other thing, including other individuals’ successes in the past, but providing no real substance as to why young Mr. Nicholson should be so special as to refuse to stand on his own two feet and take any job, other than maybe that he is “handsome as a Marine officer in a recruiting poster.”

The denouement to the NYT piece are these two paragraphs, and they are the main reason for my not knowing whether to scream, or weep, upon reading this story.

So he struggles to get a foothold in the civilian work force. His brother in Boston lost his roommate, and early last month Scott moved into the empty bedroom, with his parents paying Scott’s share of the $2,000-a-month rent until the lease expires on Aug. 31.

And if Scott does not have a job by then? “I’ll do something temporary; I won’t go back home,” Scott said. “I’ll be a bartender or get work through a temp agency. I hope I don’t find myself in that position.”

The attitude displayed by young Mr. Nicholson, in those words, perfectly illustrate why American society is failing.  A good portion of American individuals believe they are entitled to a free ride and will not get off their asses until they have milked the system, whether it be Mommy and Daddy, or the State, until the milk runs dry.

I’ve got the false sense of entitlement blues.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/07 at 11:17 AM
(5) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

The Rise of the Animal Class

Reynolds links to a Jammie Wearing Fool post titled ‘This Type of Conduct is Not Supposed to Happen in Civil Society’.

That post title was taken from an utterance of Alton Police Chief David Hayes, as reported in a news story titled Mob shoots fireworks at police, firefighters, wherein we read this.

First responders from the Alton Fire Department and five officers from the Alton Police Department were attacked by a crowd of several hundred people in the Oakwood Housing Complex who shot large bottle rockets at them. The incidents occurred late Sunday and early Monday in the 700 and 800 blocks of Oakwood…

The confrontations began at 10:20 p.m. and within the 40 minutes it took to resolve the first incident, police were attacked three times. It started when a firetruck was dispatched to extinguish a Dumpster fire in the 700 block of Oakwood and was immediately attacked by the crowd shooting and throwing fireworks at them.

Jammie Wearing Fool states that the mob exhibited “subhuman savagery,” but I unfortunately must point out that this event is only an exceptionally minor subhuman act of stupidity incident, compared to what may be coming in America’s future.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/07 at 08:56 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Thou Shalt Not Steal

Thou shalt not steal.  What is it, about those four simple words, that is so difficult to understand?  Stealing, is immoral, plain and simple, and yet all manner of justifications and obfuscations are daily presented so as to instill in “the people” a confusion in regards to the fact that stealing is immoral, such that the admonition “Thou shalt not steal” is become “Thou shalt not steal, except…”

Wendy McElroy posts an excerpt of a F.A. Harper essay on the subject of stealing, which provides an “intutitive morality” test on stealing.  The post is titled To Steal or Not To Steal.  Can you pass the test?

From Harper’s essay, posted at Wendy’ site.

Herein lies the principal moral and economic danger facing us in these critical times: Many of us, albeit with good intentions but in a hurry to do good because of the urgency of the occasion, have become victims of moral schizophrenia. While we are good and righteous persons in our individual conduct in our home community and in our basic moral code, we have become thieves and coveters in the collective activities of the Welfare State in which we participate and which many of us extol.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/07 at 08:14 AM
(2) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Loss of Principal, Gain of Principle - It’s A Mystery

Wal-Mart Stores has spent a year and more than a million dollars in legal fees battling a $7,000 fine that federal safety officials assessed after shoppers trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death at a store on Long Island on the day after Thanksgiving in 2008.

The mystery, federal officials say, is why Wal-Mart is fighting so hard against such a modest fine.

And why is Wal-Mart’s battling of this fine a “mystery” to federal officials?  Because of this.

But in fighting the federal fine, Wal-Mart is arguing that the government is improperly trying to define “crowd trampling” as an occupational hazard that retailers must take action to prevent.

It would be a “mystery” to federal officials when a business or individual stands up for principles rather than mere principal.

I say good for Wal-Mart, and I hope they continue to bury the federal government in their own bureaucratic legal paperwork jungle.

Wal-Mart Fighting $7,000 Fine in Trampling Case

Via dispatches from TJICstan.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/07 at 07:38 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Censoring God

GodBlock

GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions. When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.

Via Blazing Cat Fur, who upon noting this specialized web filter asks But does it work against Airport Hare Krishnas?

On a related note, we have the following from a post at Counting Cats in Zanzibar titled Cultural Incommensurability.

How many books have you in your home? How many have you read in your life? Now try and imagine there was just one book and you are brought up, from an early age, to believe this is the word of God. Well, in places like Afghanistan that is frequently the case. Imagine also that your education consisted of memorising by rote that one book and you were beaten if you recitation was a bit out? Imagine further that that book is something you can’t actually read. You can recite it but that’s not the same thing. Not only can you not read at all but also that book is in a foreign and ancient tongue and you depend on the local holy man to tell you what it means. Now some of these holy men are scholars of that book but out in the boonies quite a few of them are as illiterate as you.

Books of course have power and the more of them you read, the more broad-based and subtle that power becomes (that is not to say it must of necessity weaken the faith of a religious person - I have met a lot of pious people who are staggeringly well-read). The situation amongst much of rural Afghanistan is like Medieval Europe. Yes, there were great Biblical scholars but many parish priests were hardly theologians. The Bible and those who could understand it - or gave the impression they could - were treated with awe. The mighty Cathedrals that still inspire awe in us, in a culture that can send probes to Saturn, must have stunned the medieval peasantry. Then something changed but the authorities who wielded the power of The Book weren’t happy and as we all know the reformation hardly happened without much weeping, wailing and the rending of garments.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/07 at 07:13 AM
(3) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages