One Hundred Years From Today

Posted on 10/01/2024 by Grumpa Joe

One of my favorite things to consider is what the world will look like in a hundred years I would love to live long enough to see it for myself. Of course, I’m only a few years away from what a hundred-year picture will look like for me. If the next hundred years of change are like the past, the picture will be one none of us can recognize. What is more challenging to fathom is what it would look like if we went backward in time instead of forward. I won’t go there, but I will move forward.

Today, my solar panels are covered in snow, and it got me thinking about what will happen in the future when we have successfully electrified the country and a snowstorm stops us from getting electricity. I must have seen a magazine or something that prompted me to see the Indianapolis 500 car race, and I asked myself what that would look like when gasoline is no longer the energy source for cars.

Some things came to mind immediately:

1. The race starter will no longer be able to begin the race with “Gentlemen, start your engines.”

2. The race would be silent or maybe just whiny.

3. Pit stops may take eight hours to get a fresh charge.

4. There will not be any competition between automakers for the best engine.

5. Ford, Chevy, and Chrysler will be replaced by who knows what.

6. There will not be anymore fiery crashes.

7. There will not be any gears to shift to

8. No more spilled gas in the pits.

9. Battery explosions and fires will predominate.

10. Drivers may be replaced by AI Robotic driverless cars.

11. Races may be limited to: One lap, a few laps, or the most laps in the least amount of time

The entire car racing industry will evolve into something we won’t be able to envision. All forms of racing will be affected: Twenty-four hours of LeMans, Baja 500, Daytona 500, Nascar Series, Drag racing, you name it, and it will be different. Some forms of car racing will cease to exist, but man’s ingenuity will drive them to invent new ways to compete using electricity.

As I thought about one of the biggest impediments to electric cars, which is a source of charging stations for power, the name of Henry Ford came to mind. How did Ford overcome the impediment of not having gas stations and roads? He didn’t solve the problem; he only fostered it by selling more cars. Early drivers found gasoline in local drug stores. It was being sold as a spot remover. Then, it progressed to gasoline entrepreneurs who sold gasoline in bulk from tanks outside cities. Car owners filled buckets and cans to take home. From there, it progressed to the formation of gas stations and eventually evolved into the modern filling stations of today. Gasoline was already known as a fuel for internal combustion engines, and it was up to the car buyer to figure out how to get gas. They bought the car and then figured it out. This sounds like what we see today. People are buying electric cars and worrying about getting electricity as somebody else’s problem. As long as they can plug in at home, they are okay. Traveling long distances is still a problem, but slowly, it is evolving into an industry. Until charging stations become commonplace like gas stations are, we will keep using electric cars within 50 miles of home. It worked for Henry, and it will probably work for Elon too.

Filed under: Cars, economy, Hot Rods, Technology | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Commercial Suicide

Posted on 05/09/2023 by Grumpa Joe

The world has truly gone crazy. I have a very hard time believing that so many companies are being duped by governments around the planet. Their commitment to company suicide is admirable but assinine. It surprised me when I heard car company after car company climbing onto the bandwagon of switching to electric cars. Have they gone mad?

Actually, when Henry Ford began making cars, he had no idea where the gasoline would come from. There were no gas stations around the country to supply fuel to the suckers who jumped at the chance to buy a motorized wagon. In the movie Field of Dreams, there is a famous line “Build it and they will come.” I guess the entire world now operates on that philosophy. It is not a bad directive, but I would like to believe that there has to be a tiny bit more behind investing billions of dollars in a technology that is still years away from fruition. I give Elon Musk credit for sticking his neck out to build electric cars, but I don’t give GM, Ford, Chrysler, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and the many other car company’s any credit for rushing into this scheme built on the phenomenon of global warming being caused by humans. Yes, global warming can happen but it is far beyond our capabilities to make it so.

My intention with this post is to add to this fray of commercial suicide. I am proposing two of my designs for electric cars free to the world for use by humanity. Both are just as viable as the cars Musk and others are producing. In fact, these designs may be more reliable and cheaper to build than those in current production.

Design number one.

Cheby V110
Diverse Energy Powered Personal Transportation Appliance

Filed under: Cars, Cartoons, Humor, Sarcasm | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Bootleg Gasoline?

Posted on 28/08/2023 by Grumpa Joe

A good blogging friend posted a question to one of my recent posts. What will happen if we buy a sixty thousand dollar car and the government outlaws the same in favor of electrics? Well, for one thing, Uncle Sam would never be able to do such a thing without starting a civil war. That is something the liberals would be very unhappy about because they would be the unarmed bad guys that we, the armed conservatives, would be shooting at.

Americans would improvise to keep their cars running. It occurred to me that in January 1920, the government passed a federal law prohibiting the sale of drinkable alcohol. The law caused a lot of pain to the population, and ‘we the people’ began to improvise by bootlegging alcoholic beverages. The government was put into a sad state of affairs because the citizens didn’t pay taxes on any of the booze they drank, or produced. This era also spawned a huge gangster industry that has never been completely eliminated, much like the drug industry today.

Prohibition lasted for thirteen years before Uncle finally cried Uncle, and Congress repealed prohibition. If it takes that many years to prohibit electric cars, the roadside will be littered with millions of these cars abandoned without charge. I hope to live to see the day. Americans, being Americans, would sadly innovate and carry gasoline-powered generators to run their charge-less cars. No doubt, they would be using 100-proof vodka to run the generators.

Filed under: Cars, Conservative, Government, Sarcasm | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

A Highly Paid Pickpocket

Posted on 14/04/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Take a good look at this woman. She has her hands in your pocket, and is lifting your wallet and any loose change you may still have.

“During an interview aired on Wednesday’s edition of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm responded to a question on whether there is a plan to address energy prices that have started to tick up by stating that “the better choice is to move to electrify transportation, because it is so much cheaper for you” and “moving to clean is moving to energy security and moving to affordability.”

I almost fell off my chair. I just Googled Biden’s electrification of transportation plan and learned that he is pouring money into electric charging station infrastructure. Will it be enough? Probably not for a very long time. His desire is to have 500,000 charging stations in place by 2030. The latest stat I found on the number of gas stations in the United States is 115,400. At first the number of charging stations sounds like it will be plenty, but I don’t think so. Most of the 115,400 stations provide up to twelve or more fueling points. It takes me about five minutes to fill my tank while a fast charge will take about 45 minutes. That means the electric charging depot will require nine times as many charging points to equal the fill capacity of a regular fueling station. My arithmetic tells me that the number of charging points is only half of what will be required. Another fact of life is that the current grid that supplies us with our spark is not capable of simultaneously charging more than about five cars per city block before it crashes.

At the same time Biden is planning to increase regulation of gasoline to make it more expensive and harder to get. Remember a few weeks ago when I stated that the current car shortage is a government conspiracy to force us into electric cars. Along with that, the pandemic taught us that we don’t need to drive. Anyway, I have veered from my point which is to state that this lady who has her hands in our pockets is a moron. She actually believes she can convince us that going electric overnight will be cheaper for us.

What Ms Granholm has left out of the discussion is where the electricity needed to spark those 500,000 charging stations will come from. Maybe she has a plan to install a huge windmill on the roof of every fossil fuel and atomic power plant across the country to give us a charge. While we hire the Dutch to design and build those windmills for us we will have to rely on something else. Maybe it will be hydro-electric, but wait, didn’t Lake Meade nearly run out of water this last year? Where will we build new hydro-electric plants. Niagara Falls already has a power plant. Actually, a better idea will be to buy all the old bicycles that the Chinese are no longer using, and we can use them to move around. Not only would that be clean green energy, but we would all lose weight and be healthier. Think of all the reduced health care costs that would accrue. Surplus doctors and nurses would need to be directed to keeping the millions of illegal aliens that have descended upon the USA healthy. The downside of healthy immigrants is that they will be buying up all the beautifully efficient gas powered cars that we had to give up for the electrics.

The bottom line is that we need more power pants

Jennifer Granholm’s stupid answer was completely political talking points. She did it so robotically, and kept repeating the exact same line so many times that I wondered if maybe she is a government robot with limited artificial intelligence.

Here is my tip to Joe Biden, “we are not stupid.”

Filed under: Conservative, economy, Government, Sarcasm | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

All I Want For Christmas

Posted on 25/12/2022 by Grumpa Joe

is a nice easy to remember password that works for every site I visit, and for all the internet places I go to everyday. One would think this is an easy request, but it seems to be damn near impossible to achieve. Among the worst password requesters are Google, and Apple. Both companies demand using passwords, and that they be changed often. In the process they drive users nuts. Probably even worse than Apple is Norton password manager which requires it’s own password to enter before you can access your passwords.

Being memory challenged makes this particularly difficult to navigate. Just try reading the instructions offered by Google. They might as well be in Egyptian hieroglyphics as far as I am concerned. I am an Apple person, but if a simpler system becomes available I’ll dump everything Apple in favor of simplicity. I have an Apple user-id, but it seems that Apple can not recognize that id in any of it’s many discrete applications like iCloud, Apple Store, iTunes, iPhotos, iMovies, etc. Compound that with devices like iMac, iPad, iPhone, iWatch, and many more. I would think a simple droplet of blood applied to a device would solve the problem. I may go anemic or worse yet die because of a lack of blood, but it might be easier to use the devices.

Last week my internet service took a crap, and stopped working. In order to get it up and running I decided to reset the system by shutting everything down. I went too far, and shut off my iMac as well. That was a tragic error on my part. The most tragic was trying to re-enter my own computer after a shut down. It has been three years since the machine has been shut off, and that time gap caused me to forget the Apple id, and password for the machine. It took a full four hours of watching, and listening to Youtube videos made by two different guys from India who spoke a mile a minute with a strong Hindi accent, and tons of trial and error efforts using their recovery steps to finally get into this Mac which sits on my desk unused by anyone but myself. Success was finally achieved and unlike the woman who gives birth and forgets the pain immediately upon seeing her child my pain continues. Now, for whatever reason, in the great wisdom of Apple the Mac acts just like my iPhone. If it is unattended for a few seconds it requires, you guessed it, a password to enter again. I am positive that this useless feature can be turned off, but I may not live long enough to learn where the switch is. I will sleep easier now that I am protected from my wife getting into my computer when I’m away.

Man typing on the keyboard trying to log into his computer forgot password

In trying to understand why all this is necessary, I vision the workplace where every colleague takes over your keyboard when you turn your back, or go to the john. I would sooner booby trap that individual and spray him with indigo blue ink than have to reenter the password every time.

Throughout all this I keep hearing about how smart artificial intelligence has become, but in my opinion this problem is beyond the capabilities of AI. Maybe in another hundred years after electric cars rule the planet, and the air is thick with the smoke of hydrocarbon fueled electric power stations, AI will be smart enough to solve the password problem. However, there is no incentive for Apple, Google, Norton, and the others to solve it because they are making too much money selling updates to newer machines that need more passwords. Like I said above, I’ll reward the company who solves the pw problem permanently with my cash. In the meantime, I’ll keep asking Santa for a solution. His elves suffer from the same malady and may be able to make the miracle happen.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, Satire | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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