Why do I despise Elon Musk?

Why do I despise Elon Musk? Let me count the ways:

Musk’s attitude towards laws is that laws are for the little people to follow, not for lords of the universe like him. He is quick to support law and order when it’s little people committing crimes, but he is Nixonian — “It isn’t a crime if a rich person does it.” For example, when the public health department of Alameda County ordered all businesses in the county to shut down for two weeks at the start of COVID to stop the spread of COVID, Musk refused to obey the state law giving her that power. And he has repeatedly manipulated Tesla etc. stock for his profit and then denying that he broke the law despite multiple SEC fines.

Musk runs the most racist car company in America, sued more times for racism in the past ten years than every other car company in America *combined*. Despite being a niche player with approximately 2.3% of the U.S. car market. And fish rot from the head, so that says something about Musk that makes him look… well, racist.

Musk also has little concern for the safety of his workers. Tesla has been fined by OSHA more than every other car company in America *combined*. The injury rate for Tesla’s factory in Fremont is greater than at any other auto factory in America. Again, the fish rots from the head. It’s part of his elitist attitude — “laws are for the little people, they should be glad to even have a job.”

Musk also is no friend of free speech. California has laws prohibiting retaliation against workers who speak out about illegal activities. Musk has repeatedly violated those laws by firing workers who complain publicly about working conditions or racism in his factory because free speech is for elitist scum like him, not for the peons. And when a reporter wrote about a botched introduction of a new Tesla model, Musk personally retaliated against that reporter by cancelling that reporter’s Tesla order. Because free speech is for rich people like him, not for the little people.

Basically, as far as I’m concerned Elon Musk is a grifter scam artist who managed to maneuver himself into control of several companies, take credit for their success, and use his showmanship skills to talk them up so that he can make a fortune from stock manipulation. He is the king of the pump and dump. He makes P.T. Barnum look like an amateur. There are many smart people who are responsible for Tesla becoming a successful niche manufacturer of luxury autombiles. Elon Musk’s total contribution to that success is scamming people into investing in Tesla back in the early days when it wasn’t clear that Tesla was ever going to make a profit. That’s an important contribution… but he didn’t “create” Tesla. Many, many people created Tesla, and Musk only provided one piece of the puzzle by scamming people into investing in Tesla when no sane person would have done so.

So anyhow. Tesla now has approximately 2.3% of the U.S. car market, so they’re still a niche player in the car market. Elon Musk did not somehow “fundamentally change the car market in America.” Claiming to have done so — and many other hyperbolic anti-factual claims of that sort — are another reason I despise Elon Musk.

I don’t despise Elon Musk because he’s rich. I don’t despise Elon Musk because his companies threaten established industry players. I despise Elon Musk because he is racist elitist scum. As established above.

That is all.

– Badtux the Scum-despising Penguin

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The #1 thing an electric utility needs to do is deliver electricity. PG&E can’t even do that.

So, PG&E cut off power to thousands of people because the wind started blowing.

The #1 thing an electric utility company is supposed to do is, well, provide electricity.

The fact that PG&E cannot do so when the wind is blowing is a damning condemnation of them as an electric utility company. PG&E needs to just die, already. Break it up and sell off the parts to someone competent. I don’t know of any other electric company, anywhere else in the nation, that has to shut off the power every time the wind blows hard. It’s time to force PG&E into Chapter 13 dissolution and forced sell-off, and end this fiasco, already.

Meanwhile, this little gem from the Wall Street Journal tells us why PG&E can’t provide power:

The failure last year of a century-old transmission line that sparked a wildfire, killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise wasn’t an aberration, the documents show. A year earlier, PG&E executives conceded to a state lawyer that the company needed to process many projects, all at once, to prevent system failures—a problem they said could be likened to a “pig in the python.”

Even before November’s deadly fire, the documents show, the company knew that 49 of the steel towers that carry the electrical line that failed needed to be replaced entirely.

In a 2017 internal presentation, the large San Francisco-based utility estimated that its transmission towers were an average of 68 years old. Their mean life expectancy was 65 years. The oldest steel towers were 108 years old.

Die, die, die, die, DIE, PG&E!

– Badtux the Irate Ratepayer Penguin

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The divine rights of kings

The Internet and all the hardware and servers on the Internet as well as the computer you’re using to read this were created by hundreds of thousands of ordinary middle class engineers and programmers and installers and technicians who wrote the code, designed the computers and routers, and built and installed the hardware all the way out to where you’re typing this. Yet virtually none of these people own any of their work. It almost all belongs to the super-wealthy, because of the divine rights of kings. Or something.

Generations from now, people will look back upon our current gilded age with the same revulsion that people today have when they look back upon the days when kings could behead people just on whim and lived lives of luxury while their people starved in rags.

— Badtux the Democratic Socialist Penguin

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More on why centrally planned economies don’t work — and why our current capitalism doesn’t work either

Centrally planned economies in the information age don’t work for the same reason that we don’t write computer programs that detect bombs in luggage — the problem set is so huge that there is no set of heuristics that can cover all the permutations. Instead we set up a system that learns, and some rules to let it know when it’s working right, and then train it in the real world. In the industrial age the Soviets could compete, albeit with significant inefficiencies that I’ll discuss separately if you’re interested. Once we moved into the computer age, economies became too complex to centrally plan. Training them with tokens, a.k.a. money, really is the only way that works with modern economies.

Unfortunately the set of rules has been hijacked by rich jackasses who care only about themselves and not about the health of the economy as a whole. Or as Michael Roberts says, “a rentier economy is a dying economy”. But people continue to think that the set of rules that currently exist, “natural law” rules that are actually “survival of the richest” rules, are the only ones that can exist. Our nation grew its economy best back when the government imposed a set of rules that redistributed money back to the people who actually created wealth (i.e., the workers who actually built Buicks and Chevrolets) rather than allow it to concentrate in the hands of a few rich people, because that allowed the tokens to be used to train the economy to generate wealth that benefited the common folk. Obviously now that money has become magic talismans and “market economies” have congealed rule sets that have become religious in nature rather than practical, we end up with what we observe — an economy that benefits only the few, not the many.

Rich people continue to whine that changing the rules is “Communism”. No, it’s not. They are pushing a religion that contains a rule set designed to enrich the rich, rather than upon the concepts of money and markets as a whole. I am quite capitalist, capitalism is the only proven way of actually encouraging the creation of wealth. What I’m against are rules that benefit only owners of capital, not the workers who generate capital. We’ve had rules that benefited both owners and workers before, and it worked out well for this nation. Saying that this was “Communism” is saying that the entire USA of the 1950’s was Communist — which is patently absurd in every way possible.

– Badtux the Economics Penguin

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I missed the 200th anniversary of the birth of the most important thinker of the 19th century

By which I mean, Karl Marx.

May 5th was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.

Hard-core Marxists are fond of saying “true Marxism has never been tried.” Well, there’s a reason for that. It’s because true Marxism is unworkable. That was the biggest reason why Communism arose — as it became clear that real people just don’t behave in ways that make Marxism workable, the creators of the Communist Revolution in Russia decided that what was needed was a dictatorship of the proletariat to train the people, over the generations, to behave in the ways needed for Marxism to work. In the end that dictatorship became a self-propagating mechanism that completely forgot about why it was created in the first place. After all, what dictator really wants to relinquish power?

Still, none of that changes the fact that Karl Marx correctly diagnosed the problems of the capitalist system of his era, a capitalist system that monopolized the output of workers at gunpoint into the hands of leeches who would be bankrupt if not for the output they stole from workers at gunpoint, a capitalist system that viewed workers as disposable, safety nets as dangerous weakness, and old people should just die, already, as useless eaters. His policy prescriptions for dealing with those problems were unworkable and eventually distorted into something horrific (the Communist system that killed tens of millions of people worldwide, maybe even hundreds of millions, over the roughly hundred years that it was extant), but his observations were correct — and are becoming true again. Alas.

– Badtux the History Penguin

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Vinod Khosla the Vile and his quest to illegally take access rights from California’s citizens

The guiding law regarding ownership of beaches in California is the California Constitution,, which prohibits ownership of beaches and tidelands (defined as either the high water mark or the start of vegetation, depending upon which is higher). In other words, you can’t own a beach in California, regardless of what Vinod the Vile insists.

The guiding law regarding access to beaches is the California Coastal Act of 1976. This Act was intended to protect access to the coast by maintaining, at a minimum, the amount of access that was available in 1976. The Coastal Act created a new kind of property, access rights, which are created either by use in 1976 or by signing over access rights afterwards. Access rights are similar to the concept of a right-of-way, where an entity has the right to pass through a property on a specified corridor in order to perform some public good such as, say, provide and maintain electrical lines. In the case of coastal access rights, the entity in question is the general public of the State of California, and the public good provided is the beach.

Access rights can be total, conditional, or none, based on what the situation was in 1976. The Coastal Commission was required to inventory and document by the end of 1981 access to all of the beaches of California. Once inventoried, landowners had to maintain the level of access that was provided at that point. If they provided no access, they could continue providing no access or they could voluntarily sell a right-of-way to the State if they so desired. If they provided conditional access, they had to continue providing conditional access under the exact same terms as when the Act was passed, and were required to get a permit if they wanted to change the amount of access they provided in any way. And if they provided full access… well, same deal. They had to continue doing so, and again, would have to get a permit if they wanted to change the amount of access they provided in any way.

The Act doesn’t require the Coastal Commission to grant a permit. Indeed, the Coastal Commission can deny a permit if a) it would reduce access to the beach, and b) there is no documented ecological or environmental reason or documented public safety reason for reducing access to the beach. The Act calls for maximizing access to the beach, thus is crafted such as to deny permits that would reduce access unless there is an ecological or documented public safety reason for denying access to the beach. (A bunch of unexploded artillery shells due to use as a USMC artillery firing range prior to the passage of the Act would qualify as a public safety reason, for example). The Coastal Commission cannot, however, require a landowner to provide more access than was provided in 1976 without compensating them for that access. That’s the law — the Coastal Commission cannot simply take access rights away from landowners and grant them to the general public, they can only maintain existing access rights and must buy any additional access rights that the public wants.

So anyhow, this is the law in California — it basically freezes access at 1976 levels, and requires the State to pay if it wants to require a landowner to provide more access than at 1976, and basically prohibits a landowner from taking away access that existed in 1976. In 1976, Martins Beach was open to the public. They could walk down the Martins Beach Road from the pavement for free, or they could pay a gate-keeper a small sum of money to drive down Martins Beach Road and park at a parking lot near the beach. When Vinod Khosla bought the land surrounding Martins Beach in 2008, he was warned that he had to maintain this access at the same level as 1976. He did so for two years, then decided he didn’t want to view any of the little people anymore, and locked the gate and put armed guards to keep people out — despite the requirements of the Coastal Act.

So here we are in 2018. The California Legislature passed a law in 2014 reiterating that Martins Beach is public property and that the access rights grandfathered in 1976 continues to exist. The California Court of Appeals affirmed that law, and the California Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal because the law is pretty much cut and dried. Khosla continues to try to prevent access but is handicapped in that because the local Sheriff says he won’t respond to trespassing calls because the surfers who jump the gate and go down to the beach to surf have a legal right to do so. Khosla could probably hire beefy security guards to attack surfers, but the surfers aren’t exactly shrinking violets and the security guards would have to assault the surfers in order to prevent them from continuing down the right of way granted by the 1976 Act, at which point the surfers would defend themselves and beat the crap out of the security guards. Needless to say, security companies are not falling over themselves to have their security guards beat up and charged with assault on a public right-of-way.

So what’s a billionaire oligarch to do when all the courts in the state of California refuse to be bought by his billions? Well… Vinod the Vile knows what to do: Take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. He figures that the Supreme Court got bought by the election of 2016, so he can get his way there.

Will it work? We’ll see. On the other hand, the current status quo, where Vinod can’t call the sheriff to get people thrown out for trespassing and security companies are reluctant to get involved for fear of being charged with assault or having their guards beat up, means that whatever the U.S. Supreme Court decides will be mostly irrelevant. Vinod the Vile will continue to have to watch the “little people” use “his” beach — and will continue to be able to do nothing at all about it.

– Badtux the Beach Penguin
Note: My personal experience with Vinod the Vile dates back to fourteen years ago, when he was the lead investor in our startup and decided to use the company as his personal playtoy to prove out some bizarre theories of his. I left in disgust after three years and the company folded shortly afterwards after he managed to asset-strip it for his own benefit, managing to get four times more money out of it than he invested in the first place by stealing the money from the other investors with bogus loans and other means. Don’t ever, EVER go to work for a company whose lead investor is Vinod the Vile, and don’t *ever* approach him for investment. He will rape you, clear and simple. That’s what he *does*.

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Reading the directions

I haven’t said anything about the “tax cut” plan that the Republicans passed at 1AM on a Friday evening, crayon scrawls from lobbyists on the sides and backs of pages included. The one that hikes taxes on teachers while cutting taxes for owners of private jets. Yeah, that one, the one that sociopathic lizard people wrote to cut taxes on The Richies and hike taxes on The Poors because, well, I guess they figure their base is so propagandized that they will continue to support the Republicans regardless. But that’s mostly because I don’t know all the nasty details yet. Nobody does. That crayon-scrawled atrocity has not been formally typed up and sent to a conference committee yet.

What I do know is that if I were looking for a place to invest, guillotine makers would be my first choice. Why our oligarchs think they’re immune to the same forces that have lead to necks being stretched or sliced in the past eludes me. Americans are a vindictive violent people. About the only thing that has kept them from rebelling in the past is the notion that we have free and fair elections so change can be done at the ballot box rather than via tar and feather, and given all the voter suppression going on right now, I don’t know how much longer that complacency will last.

Yeah, time to read the directions.

– Badtux the Directions-reading Penguin

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The new gilded age has our feudal overlords fearing a serf uprising

Wesa just be slaves on da massa’s plantation, dependent upon them for the very food we eat, which is provided by giant corporate entities owned by our feudal overlords. But there’s always the worry of slave uprisings. Especially in those places where that nasty “democracy” stuff has taken hold.

Thus why our massas be doing their best to subvert or eliminate democracy via, e.g., laws that restrict voting rights, un-auditable electronic machines that can be easily rigged, threats of violence if the “wrong” people show up to vote, etc. Because if democracy would outlaw feudalism, then obviously it is democracy that is the problem, not feudalism. Right?

– Badtux the “Serfin’ USA” Penguin

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So there’s a shortage of electricians and plumbers, you say?

Apparently so. Leading to calls for more training for trades and less emphasis on a college diploma.

But look: that shortage is on purpose. The plumbers and electricians unions got a lot of licensing laws passed that basically says the union gets to limit how many plumbers and electricians there are by deciding how many apprentices they’ll take on, you need an apprenticeship to get licensed. And the plumbers and electricians don’t want competition. So you go out to job sites and you see one master plumber getting paid $200,000+/year supervising a dozen Mexican illegals getting paid $50/day under the table, and none of those illegals qualify for licensing because none of them are citizens.

All the training in the world isn’t going to help if the experience requirement for getting a license remains the law in most states and master electricians and plumbers refuse to hire Americans eligible for licensing as apprentices.

– Badtux the Trades Penguin

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Why is the South so cotton-pickin’ poor?

I already pointed out that the unique labor demands of growing and picking cotton led to slavery being extremely profitable in the pre-Civil War South, to the point where slavery would have never died out naturally until the advent of herbicides and mechanical cotton picker machines in the 1950’s. I mentioned how slavery was continued somewhat in the sharecropping system that arose after the war, and the system of segregation that insured that blacks had little choice but to work in the fields or starve since they were blocked from most other jobs by the segregation regime. I also mentioned that my grandmother and grandfather on my mother’s side, both poor whites, were sharecroppers when they married, living in a one-room tar-paper shack with no indoor plumbing or electricity (the toilet was an outhouse) and working like dogs to grow and pick cotton, and how one of my mother’s least-favorite memories was picking cotton as a child.

So back to my question: Why are there so many uneducated poor white trash people in the South?

Well, it’s for the same reason that the South embraced segregation so heavily: by keeping most white people poor and uneducated, it meant that the Southern aristocracy could obtain cheap labor for their fields.

In short, Southern poverty was a deliberate decision of the Southern aristocrats who lost the military phase of the Civil War but won the peace afterwards. They deliberately organized their society so that schools beyond K-8 were too expensive for poor people. They deliberately kept industries that might have employed large numbers of poor whites in high paying jobs out of their states. It wasn’t until the mechanization of cotton production that desegregation could happen in the South, nobody dared push it before then because the South *would* have risen up again. It wasn’t until the surplus poor white population was no longer needed for cotton that industries like textiles and the auto industry were allowed to come to the South to employ the surplus poor white population, and the taxes to build good schools were never passed even then because educated people were a threat to the aristocracy.

The end result of that third world society — a sea of poverty and a small set of aristocrats on top — was that these states were poor. The aristocrats didn’t care. They could have had more money if they’d allowed the peasants to become prosperous and educated, but they cared more about being on top than about absolute wealth. It’s no surprise that in the 1960’s and 1970’s, as the power of the old Civil War descended aristocrats collapsed, the affluence of the South grew immensely. Even into the 1980’s, it seemed that the South was going to rejoin the rest of the United States.

Then progress stopped. Because a new aristocracy arose. An aristocracy that, like the old one, also was more interested in maintaining their power than in absolute wealth, though in many cases, like the Koch brothers of Oklahoma, they do have immense absolute wealth. And maintaining their power is easier with an uneducated populace. Thus the constant attempts to prohibit accurate teaching of biological science in Southern schools (modern biology simply cannot be explained without the theory of evolution), the prohibiting of teaching critical thinking skills in most Southern schools, and so forth. By keeping the poors stupid, ignorant, and superstitious, the poors don’t look up at their aristocrats and start measuring the aristocrats’ necks for nooses. By keeping the poors fixated on guns, gays, god, and godless Liberals, the poors don’t notice that the aristocrats have been fucking them up every goddamn orifice for the past two hundred forty fucking years.

All in all, it’s a nice scam. But it *has* required that they shut down prosperity again, which they’ve done via de-industrialization, replacing high-paying factory jobs with low-paying service jobs. Yet the rubes still haven’t caught on: their poverty isn’t accidental. It’s planned.

And the motherfuckers who planned it are getting away with it. Again. Because turns out that not only are the majority of Southerners ignorant, they’re also stupid, lacking the common sense to realize that it’s no accident that the Northeast and the West Coast are affluent and prosperous while they are mired in poverty…

So it goes. As it was, it is again, yessiree. When you have an entire class of people that benefits from keeping the majority poor and ignorant, only an idiot would blame liberals for that. But idiots are one thing not in short supply.

– Badtux the Economics Penguin

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