Conservatives reach max absurdity; begin road to reality as Fox News debunks itself

I sometimes think that if a liberal or Obama suggested that everyone kiss their babies at night that Fox News and the right-wing would start a smear campaign against babies (like they did to teachers).

Hell, you can even smear firefighters if you play by their playbook. Watch:

"Firefighters are completely and utterly overpaid. First, they only work three days a week. Where can I sign up for four-day weekends? I mean, come on! Secondly, they don't always go out on calls. So they spend their days polishing brass and taking up too many parking spaces at Ralph's stocking their fridges. Many firefighters make additional money off the multiple houses they own because they have so much surplus cash and time. In reality, we should just return to the "volunteer" firefighters like the old days and save all taxes we waste on their unions, retirements and overstuffed salaries."

See how easy that was? Of course I didn't believe a word of what I just wrote. But in the span of one minute I completely slammed and tarnished an honorable profession. Imagine if I actually had a real soap box in which to wreak havoc... like Fox News.

How can having one guest on debunk an entire news network?

Second having that guest on debunks the two posters above since they've declared Fox News a propaganda channel that would never feature a contrary or dissenting view.

Hope you two enjoy the irony.

Are you two for fucking real?

I wish I wasn't. I really do.

When you guys decided that teachers were fair game in your efforts to destroy a union, I realized that you guys would stoop to any level to make political gains.

You know I'm a teacher in a union, right?

Seriously... why are there so many teachers here? SDW, Nick and I are all teachers.

By "you guys" I mean the entire Republican/GOP/FOX apparatus. The parade of talking heads and television personalities and politicians mocking and ridiculing teachers was one of the most disgusting political acts of theater I'd seen in a long time.

Delete

I'm pretty sensitive to that stuff as you might imagine. I really don't know what you're talking about. Sean Hannity seems pretty anti-public education to me, but I don't recall hearing about him or others really going after teachers. Do you mean the Wisconsin showdown?

Maybe you guys just have a lot of time on your hands... [ducks and runs for cover]

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BR, you either continue to misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent the [general] conservative position on electric cars.

Very few conservatives, actually none that I know of, have any serious problem with the idea of electric car technology. Especially if it does take the U.S. off oil. The main problem is in using the state apparatus, with truckloads of taxpayers' money, to force inferior products onto the market.

Why are they inferior? I'm sure you'll ask?
What makes me so sure the Volt isn't going to be the best electric car on the planet?

Think of the car you drive today. Almost every new vehicle today has power windows and locks. When these were introduced to the market, they were premium luxury features. However, as time went on and the tech got cheaper, power windows became a virtually standard feature for cars.

That's where most people stop in thinking about business processes. It's where liberals get the idea that if you throw enough money at a product, you can create solutions for everyone.

However, what's often overlooked is the quality side of the process. When high end clients were paying $50,000 for a car with power everything, those features had better work. High end customers can be demanding, and reputations can be cemented by a single bad product.

So this market process has an inherent discipline to it with regards to quality. Apple takes this to previously unheard of (and sometimes ridiculous) levels, but the fact is that knowing your competitors can put you out of business tomorrow with a new or better marketed product can focus an organization greatly.

When government steps in and starts skewing the market with subsidies and tax rebates and starts picking winners and losers, the best parts of capitalism get thrown out. And when a company starts pitching its 'next generation' as the key to its turnaround to access government funding, you can be assured it's being designed to fit a need - but not for customers.

American capitalism would have worked just fine in getting the American auto sector back up and running. It would have likely meant that Chrysler would have been carved up between GM and Ford, but I still believe that would have been better than selling the popular Jeep and Minivan franchises to the Italians.

In short, nobody dismisses the Volt because it's an electric car. But plenty of people will dismiss it because it seems to be plagued with bureaucratic design history and goals and hardly a product put out by people who are truly passionate about what they are designing and why. (For that, look to Tesla.) Steve Jobs taught us better than that, both about business turnarounds and passionate design.

And personally, I think a lot of people realize that the battery tech runs on rare earth minerals and has the potential to be just as environmentally damaging as the oil we're condemning today.

I'll admit I have plenty of free time. But then again, I have designed my life that way deliberately.

I'm a bit lost as to what he is talking about as well. Republicans do indeed go after unions but that is in part because the Democratic party reaps in large amounts of union money and since unions a largely government based nowadays, you can see the self-reinforcing circle there.


Absolutely!


It isn't just that they are inferior, it is also that many of them make no economic sense in that they cost much more than they save in gasoline throughout the life of the vehicle and that the energy footprint in creating them is much larger than it would be for similar cars, but that energy isn't considered in their energy economy. Finally though it isn't hard to make conventional cars that get the same or better gas mileage but they have been driven out of existence by government regulation. As an example many of the Democrats who hype $40,000 electric cars and declare we should be like Europe have regulated the diesel engines used in so many of the smaller and most fuel efficient cars in Europe out of use in the U.S. Many of the cars from Europe cannot be directly imported into the U.S. because of our odd bumper requirements, the strictest diesel requirements in the world, and many safety demands that add considerable weight to the car.

Thus government is both the problem and solution and problem again. The only solution to them being the problem is subsidizing the solutions that somehow manage to check all their ridiculous requirements yet cost double what the market alone could produce.


The main issue with the Volt is just that it was lied about as a start. GM as a company was in massive trouble, largely due to bad contract with union members. We were told that the contracts didn't need to be looked into because the Volt would save the company. The Volt was supposed to be a pure electric car that would plug in, quick charge and have a range of 150 miles while being price competitive with regular cars. In short GM didn't need to alter their bad contracts or consider different options because they were going to innovate their way out of all their prior problems.

So the Volt arrived and of course it hasn't saved the company. It wasn't a pure electric car with some amazingly new battery technology that would somehow create massive numbers of incredible new jobs while preserving all the old jobs. Instead it was a conventional hybrid. On price it wasn't at all competitive and needed massive subsidies. That means not only did it not save the company, the company went into bankruptcy where Obama gave it over to crony capitalism.

The problem here is that we see this has been the same solution for much of the economy under Obama. We don't have to hate solar power, electric cars or anything else. However if promises are made and when the actual product arrives, it costs three times the other solutions, however the government will continue borrowing money and subsidizing it so it is only double the cost of other solutions and then all the companies that made the hyper-expensive item still go bankrupt anyway, that is just not smart. When the conventional solutions are also DEMONIZED and still manage to deliver without all the manipulation and problems, that is just odd and weird.

I noted this thinking in the thread on medical coverage with BRussell. Our government spends as much of our GDP on medical care as most other countries do yet they provide almost universal coverage. In our instance we basically get charged double as the cost shifting increasingly covers the ever more expensive and inefficient government solutions. We see this with education as well. No one HATES medical care, education or energy efficiency. We hate bad solutions engineered by government that check boxes instead of providing cost competitive answers.