My far too expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now.
I’m going to miss shopping at Target
Now that Target has announced a rollback of its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, I don’t know if I’ll ever step back inside.
I have always held that if someone wants to buy a plug-in electric vehicle, if he can afford one, he has every right to do so. Alas, Our Betters in the former Biden Administration — and I do so love referring to it as the former Biden Administration! — thought that no, it ought not to be a matter of personal choice or preference, but that people should eventually be required to buy a plug-in electric vehicle. Our American left are pro-choice on exactly one thing.
Trump ended the EV mandate. Here’s what it means for the auto industry.
The transition to electric vehicles is a years-long process that is already underway and faces fierce competition from abroad.
All of those electronic ‘convenience’ things in our lives, such as debit cards, just mean that businesses and the government have more ways to keep you under surveillance. From USA Today:
Authorities use Tesla data to track Cybertruck before bombing, raising privacy concerns
by Kathleen Wong | Thursday, January 2, 2024 | 8:58 PM EST | Updated: Friday, January 3, 2025 | 12:08 AM EST
Tesla vehicle telematics and records from a Cybertruck are providing key insights into the New Year’s Day explosion in Las Vegas – data that may not have been available decades ago but which raise troubling questions about how governments and companies track personal travel information. Continue reading
This site reported, back in June, how the ‘baristas’ at the OCF Coffee Shops in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia moved to unionize, and then owner Ori Feibush simply closed all of the shops he owned.
Now the Starbucks Workers United union has announced, on Bluesky, that they ain’t going to take anymore, that they’re going out on strike!
In the heyday of unionization, unions were representing workers who actually had some skills, workers who could not easily be replaced, because their skills were needed to do their jobs, and it took a long time to develop those skills. Perhaps, just perhaps, pulling a cup of coffee isn’t that difficult a skill to learn?
I’ve mentioned it before: rather than driving to a coffee shop, and paying $3.50 or $4.25 or whatever for a ‘barista’ to pull a cup of coffee for me, I can make it at home, in less than a minute, in my Keurig, for roughly 50¢. I’m saving money on the coffee, saving the environment a paper cup to be recycled or thrown in the trash, saving however much gasoline I would burn to get to such a coffee shop, and saving however many miles of additional wear-and-tear on my truck to get me there and back.
I am wryly amused.
During the COVID-19 panicdemic — no, that’s not a typographical error, but is spelled exactly the way I see it — employees who could work from home were told to do so. As it happened, my younger daughter, an IT/communications professional, worked from our farm. Fortunately, I had already installed an outdoor electric receptacle on the screened-in porch, and she did a lot of her work there.
A cup of raktajino — Klingon coffee — in a mug celebrating my status as a descendant of white, Christian, settler colonialists to start the morning.
And she was quite honest about the whole thing: she was just not as productive working at our home. With cats and dogs and chickens, with fine Kentucky spring and summer weather, there were simply too many distractions.
And it’s good for the employees as well . . . as long as they are not Jeffrey Toobin. A cup of coffee in the morning costs me 50¢, not $4.50 at Starbucks.
Logically, if most employees were as productive working from home as they are at the office, employers would love that. Having employees working at home means that employers could maintain smaller offices, have smaller parking lots, reduced janitorial services, reduced office ‘perks’ expenses, just a whole host of things. It only makes sense to require people who could work from home to come into the office if productivity is a real issue.
From The Wall Street Journal:
Meet the People Who Refused to Go Back to the Office and Lost Their Jobs
These people are coming to terms with the fact that they might never work from home again
by Callum Borchers | Wednesday, December 11, 2024 | 9:00 PM EST
If you’re reading this from your home office, it’s time to consider whether you’re prepared to lose your job over a return-to-office mandate. Continue reading
Does $3,000,000,000 for 93 postal delivery trucks sound like a lot?
One reason I prefer newspapers to other forms of the credentialed media is that newspapers can, and do, provide readers with some detailed, deeply investigative stories, something that television news just doesn’t do well. Fox News or CNN or MSNBC aren’t going to do the kind of deep digging that Washington Post reporter Jacob Bogage has done. According to the story, Mr Bogage has covered the United States Postal Service since 2020 and reviewed more than 20,000 pages of internal agency and company records for his latest story. Heck, I can’t even imagine CBS News retaining a reporter who specialized in the Post Office.
The Postal Service’s electric mail trucks are way behind schedule
Defense contractor Oshkosh had only delivered 93 trucks by November — compared to 3,000 originally expected by now. The delays put Biden’s climate goals at risk.
by Jacob Bogage | Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST
A multibillion-dollar program to buy electric vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service is far behind its original schedule, plagued by manufacturing mishaps and supplier infighting that threaten a cornerstone of outgoing President Joe Biden’s fight against climate change. Continue reading
Jim McGovern is the United States Representative from the Second Congressional District in Massachusetts. After being in the House of Representatives since 1997 — that’s 14 terms! — he tweeted:
I’m on the floor talking about how we need to cut grocery prices, lower people’s mortgage and rent costs, and make it easier for folks to get ahead.
The Distinguished Gentleman from Massachusetts was whining that people’s grocery bills are too high, and that mortgages and rents are too high, and need to be brought down. And yes, those are issues on which former and future President Donald Trump, and the majority of Republican congressional candidates ran, but the point is obvious: those costs skyrocketed right after President Joe Biden took office, taking office with Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress, though the GOP won a bare majority in the 2022 elections, the Republicans winning largely on the high inflation during Mr Biden’s first two years, inflation which drove those grocery and housing prices so high.
Why, it’s almost as though the Democrats’ policies didn’t work.
“Affordable housing” has been the Democrats’ theme of late, but that raises an obvious point: what is “affordable housing” like in cities run by the Democrats? From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
The death of Jah’Nae Campbell underscores the lax oversight of Philadelphia’s low-income rental housing | Editorial
As repeated complaints went unheeded, the 12-year-old’s family blames substandard living conditions inside their West Philly affordable housing complex for her death.
It is entirely possible that I have been, believe it or not, too charitable to our friends on the left. In my recent article, Will Bunch uses his Freedom of Speech and of the Press to tell us that he hates Freedom of Speech and of the Press, I mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch for his tirade against MSNBC’s (supposed) journalists, Joe and Mike Scarborough for having gone to Mar-a-Lago and meeting with former and future President Donald Trump. Mr Bunch told his readers about the brave “journalists left who do plan, in a moment of increased risk, to keep asking the tough questions in this muddled new era,” but trashes two (purported) journalists who have gone to cover a story about the next President of the United States as somehow “supplicants,” showing fealty and making obeisance to him. Uhhh, you can’t “keep asking the tough questions” to Mr Trump if you are unwilling to talk to him in the first place.
I would have thought that a journolist, oops, sorry, journalist like Mr Bunch would appreciate freedom of the press and the willingness of journalists to go into hostile territory, to get their stories, to report the news, even from people who didn’t like or respect them. Continue reading
My good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, has an article this Friday morning on the Biden Administration prosecuting a major ‘carbon offset’ sales company for fraud:
C-Quest Capital LLC Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Newcombe, who stepped down as CEO in February, was indicted Wednesday in New York on wire fraud and commodities fraud charges. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the most serious charges.
C-Quest develops emission-reduction projects to earn carbon credits that can then be sold to companies or other entities that wish to offset their own emissions. Newcombe, a onetime Goldman Sachs Group Inc. managing director and World Bank official, founded C-Quest in 2008.
You can read the rest on Mr Teach’s fine site.
But this one speaks to me, due to my experience. It was 2003, and carbon offset salesmen came and made a presentation to the concrete company at which I worked. Ready-mixed concrete producers use pozzolans, materials which are not cementitious alone but when mixed with Portland cement during the production of concrete utilize the excess calcium hydroxide liberated to become cementitious. We use them because they are less expensive than cement. The two most frequently used are flyash, which is harvested from the ignition byproducts of burning coal in power plants, and ground granulated blast furnace slag, the material left over from the smelting of iron ore.
The manufacture of Portland cement is a major carbon dioxide (CO2) emitter, so by the partial substitution of flyash, ready-mix companies reduce their carbon footprint. The salesmen told us that we could gain carbon credits every time we used flyash instead of cement, and that we could sell those carbon credits to other companies, to make it look like they were doing something to help fight global warming climate change, but, since it wouldn’t have changed how we did business since we were already using flyash — other than requiring some bookkeeping — it wouldn’t have reduced CO2 emissions at all! It was simply a way to take money, taking it from one CO2 emitter and giving it to a company which emitted less CO2; virtue signaling for the first, without having to actually spend significantly more money to reduce their emissions, and extra money for us, for doing what was already in our own economic interest.
Is anyone really surprised that fraud would be involved? When it comes to global warming climate change, the scammers and fraudsters will always be buzzing around.