WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Programmed DNA nanorobots to shrink cancer tumors by cutting off their blood supply.
Archive for 2023
November 13, 2023
IT ISN’T MUCH OF A DISGUISE: JP Sears Takes Message to Kids in New Children’s Book, Calls Disney the Devil ‘In Disguise.’
FASTER, PLEASE: SpaceX hopes for second Starship flight test next week.
WE’LL SEE: Elon Musk started a price war that Tesla can’t win.
Under increasing pressure from new competition, Tesla spent the past year slashing the average price of its models by roughly 25%. The Model 3 fell from $48,000 to $44,380. The luxury Model S, meanwhile, plunged from a high of $130,000 to $96,380. The cars, as they say, have been priced to move.
It’s an unusual business strategy, to put it mildly. “I can’t think of another point in the history of automotive when a brand that wasn’t going out of business cut prices 20% a year,” Mark Schirmer, the director of communications at the research firm Cox Automotive, told me. Tesla is hoping that lower prices will drive up sales and slow the advance of the company’s rivals — maybe even scare some of them out of the market altogether.
But that’s not what’s happening. Lower prices are not translating into higher sales. The number of cars Tesla delivered to customers in the third quarter actually declined. Revenue is dropping, and the company’s once fat profit margins are getting squeezed — down to 17.9% in the third quarter, compared with 25.1% a year ago.
Even at a reduced 17.9%, Tesla’s profit margins are still quite fat in an industry that averages about 7.5%. Tesla would have to cut prices much deeper just to reduce profits to the industry average.
This is just sloppy reporting from Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who left that key fact out of her story.
Lower profits won’t make shareholders happy but that’s no reason for scaremongering.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Newsom Assures Homeless They Can Resume Pooping On Sidewalks Once His Boss Leaves.
HE WON’T LEAVE UNTIL AND UNLESS THE CABAL THAT INSTALLED HIM TELLS HIM TO: So Many Democrats So Want to See Slow Joe Gone. “If Biden is salvageable, the Democrat-Media Complex will do what it can to push him across the finish line in just one more race.”
SAMIZDATA QUOTE OF THE DAY; Ideological Insanity Edition:
“There is an ironically neocolonial feel to the cultural elites’ absolution of Hamas. It is their indoctrination into the politics of identity that leads them to view Israel as the culpable adult in this relationship and the Palestinians as blameless children. Critical-race-theory narratives about white privilege and brown victimhood have led to a situation where not only are whites demonised as powerful and destructive but also non-white people are patronised to an obscene degree as non-powerful and pathetic. This hollow, pat explanation for every political event has now been cut-and-pasted on to the Middle East (despite the fact that Israel is not a ‘white’ country). The end result? Both Israelis and Palestinians are denuded of their humanity, the former damned as the conscious authors of all ills, the latter reduced to the moral infants of world affairs, whom ‘nobody should blame’ even ‘for the things we do’, in Hamad’s words. The anti-Israel elites take a far more racially paternalistic view of Palestinians than Israel does.”
– The relentlessly quotable Brendan O’Neill, at Spiked.
Related: The Media’s Savior Complex Is Warping Hamas/Israel Coverage. “When you add it all up — the Ramirez cartoon, the slowness to report on Kessler’s death and the general unwillingness to be specific about the circumstances of his demise, and the U.S. press’s rush to report Palestinian falsehoods, including that Israel had leveled a hospital in Gaza, not to mention repeating unverifiable ‘Gaza Health Ministry’ (a.k.a. Hamas) casualty numbers — one gets the distinct impression that American newsrooms have their finger on the scale for Palestinians. Whether it’s for sinister reasons or out of a misguided understanding of their own role, they’re not serving the public interest.”
READER FAVORITE: Sunbeam Royal Posh Champagne Heated Blanket. #CommissionEarned
TODAY’S HIGHER EDUCATION: WARD CHURCHILL NATION. The Lack Of Clarity And Courage In Higher Education On Hamas And Israel.
The day after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill penned an essay in which he referred to the victims of the attack as “little Eichmanns.” Churchill believed that the attacks were a “natural and inevitable” response to longstanding American foreign policy. As reported in The Guardian, he intended “to make the case that even those with innocent roles in a system bear collective responsibility for perpetuating it.” The essay initially went unnoticed but resurfaced in 2005, setting off a firestorm.
Churchill’s claim was offensive and absurd. As a public university employee, his speech was protected under the First Amendment. But outside of a tiny number of progressive voices in higher education, his claim was met with overwhelming critique. Most people recognized its patent moral failure.
One might have thought that last month’s Hamas terrorist attack on Israel would have registered similarly to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Instead, far more voices from progressive corners of higher education mirrored the tone and substance of Churchill’s essay, and fewer institutional leaders forthrightly denounced those voices.
Higher education has become a toxic industry.
THIS WAS TRUE IN 2020, TOO, AND YET: Nate Silver: Democrats are taking a huge risk either way. But they shouldn’t try to get away with a Rose Garden campaign.
In 2020, Biden was incapable of a normal campaign. The press knew it and covered it up. I expect them to do their best to do it again.
Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
WHEN TRUTH IS A CRIME:
UK Home Secretary Braverman was just fired over her comments about the pro-Palestine protests.
She was the only political leader who openly called out the failures of multiculturalism.
Here she is in a recent speech explaining how mass migration, multiculturalism, & lack of… pic.twitter.com/Tinkrb0Vy8
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 13, 2023
Related:
80 Years After Hitler Failed, Nazis Finally Seize London https://t.co/VIXdoOlayc pic.twitter.com/Lrlanq5XcT
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 12, 2023
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The IRS released its 2024 tax brackets. Here’s how to see yours. “The tax agency on Thursday said it’s adjusting the tax brackets upwards by 5.4%, relying on a formula based on the consumer price index, which tracks the costs of a basket of goods and services typically bought by consumers. The 2024 limits come after the IRS last year expanded its tax brackets by a historically large 7%, reflecting last year’s high inflation.”
Since the IRS isn’t nearly keeping up with actual inflation, this amounts to a stealth tax hike.
I-10 DOWNTOWN IS OUT OF ACTION “INDEFINITELY”: What — Or Who — Caused That Devastating Freeway Fire in Los Angeles?
WHOSE TRUCK IS IT, ANYWAY? Tesla will sue you for $50,000 if you try to resell your Cybertruck in the first year.
Tesla added a section titled “For Cybertruck Only” to its Motor Vehicle Order Agreement, which laid out the new rules.
“You agree that you will not sell or otherwise attempt to sell the Vehicle within the first year following your Vehicle’s delivery date,” it says.
“Tesla may seek injunctive relief to prevent the transfer of title of the Vehicle or demand liquidated damages from you in the amount of $50,000 or the value received as consideration for the sale or transfer, whichever is greater. Tesla may also refuse to sell you any future vehicles,” it says.
But if a customer has a good reason to sell their Cybertruck, Tesla may agree to buy it back at the original price minus “$0.25/mile driven, reasonable wear and tear, and the cost to repair the Vehicle to Tesla’s Used Vehicle Cosmetic and Mechanical Standards.”
If Tesla does not want to purchase the vehicle, the company may then agree to let the customer sell it to someone else.
Plus: “Elon Musk said in an earnings call earlier this year that it would take a year to 18 months before the EV truck can become a significant cash-flow contributor, adding that he hoped production of the Cybertruck would reach a quarter of a million annually by 2025.”
That’s ambitious. The Ford F-150 is the bestselling vehicle of any kind in the US and Ford sold about 653,000 last year.
GREAT MOMENTS IN MORAL NARCISSISM: Soccer star Megan Rapinoe says her injury in championship game proves there is no God.
As far as soccer star Megan Rapinoe is concerned, her Achilles injury in the final game of her storied career comes as evidence that there is no God.
Rapinoe, 38, was forced to leave the National Women’s Soccer League championship game Saturday after injuring her right leg, saying afterward she was “pretty sure” that she tore her Achilles tendon. Her team, the Seattle-based OL Reign, lost 2-1 to the NY/NJ Gotham.
“I thought about it a little bit. I mean, I’m not a religious person or anything, and if there was a God, like, this is proof that there isn’t,” she said at the press conference following the game. “This is f—-ed up.”
The non-contact injury came about three minutes into what was billed as the last game of her illustrious athletic career, which may explain the gallows humor.
Whatever her thoughts on religion or the lack thereof, Rapinoe does have some thoughts on religious choices: Megan Rapinoe, Whose Fiancée Is Israeli, Raises Money For Gaza After Hamas Terrorist Attack.
Why is she helping to raise money for Gaza while saying nothing in support of Israel, which is the country her Jewish fiancée holds citizenship in?
It also can’t be ignored that BLM, which Rapinoe loves, has a history of very anti-Semitic messages. It endorsed BDS and called Israel an apartheid state, the co-founder called for the end of Israel and the organization has stood with Palestinians AFTER Hamas, which enjoys support in Gaza, murdered innocent civilians.
There’s no way around it. She’s silent on the horrors in Israel while supporting Gaza and BLM all while married to an Israeli citizen with Jewish heritage. Make that make sense.
As Mark Steyn has written, “our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.”
SO MUCH ANTISEMITISM AT MIT: Report: Jewish, Israeli students at MIT ‘blockaded’ from attending classes.
JESSE WATTERS PRIMETIME: Using the “perfect rhetorical fortress” to get out of a DUI.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: How Is THIS for irony? ‘Planned Parenthood Won’t Say Gay.’
Planned Parenthood won't say gay. pic.twitter.com/dGTr0X6OwA
— Sidewalk Steve (@Sidewalk_Steve) November 12, 2023
“Last we checked, a person with a penis is a biological man. So if two biological men are engaged in a sexual relationship with one another, that would accurately be described as a homosexual relationship. In other words, it’s just two average gay men. So why won’t Planned Parenthood just say it? It’s not like being gay is a shameful thing these days…They don’t dare offend the Transgender Mafia. Gotta tread very carefully with those folks.”
GO WOKE, GO BROKE: Disney’s New Woke Captain America Movie on the Verge of Crashing and Burning. “An anonymous 4chan user who claims to have been at a Los Angeles test screening—I won’t link to the post because I cannot verify the claim—says that the film is much more political than the Marvel series ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,’ from which the film continues. He claims the plot revolves around politics, the president, and an election. And who goes to a Marvel Studios movie for that? The user also claims the president in the film is a Trump proxy and the story devolves into a January 6 metaphor.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Rubio introduces legislation to ban federal tax dollars from funding anti-Semitic campuses.
I’d rather just ban federal tax dollars from funding higher education in general.
All those federal dollars have helped to produce a toxic industry.