That is, according to news™ coming out of Norway, the world leader in virtual-signalling, as gov't handouts for EV adoption (paid for by everybody) are reduced, reality comes knocking at the door
It's a trillion-dollar global scam, and that's something I've claimed in conversations ever since I learned Obama was pouring billions onto Musk to get him started.
There's not enough REMs, for starters. There's not enough production potential. A man from Chalmers Technical School in Gothenburg had a look at production logistics for batteries the other year: his conclusion was that if the global production capability when it comes to EV-batteries was turned up full and the batteries only sold to Sweden, it'd still take at bare minimum 20 years to replace all the private cars. Meaning "personbilar" only. No trucks, lorries, vans, 18-wheelers, et cetera. 10 000 000 cars needs replacing here. Plus charging capability. Plus electricity production. Plus a grid capable of handling millions of EVs being hooked up to chargers at the same time. Plus...
None of that exist, there's no budget to create the infrastructure, there's zero gain for the state to invest in it, and "the market" certainly won't invest tens or hundreds of billions in infrastructure (the fiction called "the market" never invests in infrastructure - anyone studying the history of post-WW2 liberal capitalism - aka neo-feudalism - learns that immediately).
Grift, scam, fraud is all it is. Tulips from Amsterdam, basically. And by inveigling the scam into politics, it makes it nigh-on impossible to stop.
A neighbour here, from the next village (just 20km, that means neighbour :) ) is a fan of EVs. Also, he is a local politician for the old Communist party, so he is pretty much obligated to love EVs and dislike Musk. He recently told me about his new one. Can't recall the model but I do remember the important bits: with a fully loaded cat, and a fully loaded trailer attached (850+850 kilos), he got almost 100km out of it. That's a new EV, a new model, top-of-the-line battery, with re-charging function using friction et cetera to "get back" some power when rolling down-hill. If I understood him correctly.
He seemed to me to have that earnest, almost pleading, tone that someone may have when they subconsciously realise that they made a poor decision they are now looking for moral support for, to make their fail hurt less.
On top of the cost of the EV, he also needs a heated garage with a real concrete floor; the costs do add up, no?
Meanwhile, our diesel pick-up truck can spend the night in an unheated tent in -30C and will start on the first try, without using starter gas, and can pull the same load an entire day on a full tank.
Or to put it as Hayek and Friedman might have: if it needs subsidies to be viable, it's not viable.
Indeed and coupled with the advent of AI… hence the mad rush to ‘depopulate’. We are the carbon they want to reduce. If it all seems like insanity it’s because it is. None of the numbers make any sense. We don’t have the rare earth minerals to fully transition. I’m not sure about the veracity of the peak oil claims but if I have learned anything from the past few years… it’s that ‘we’ are in the way of someone’s megalomaniacal vision… hence the slow cull.
Whether or not there's /a/ plan or oodles of intersecting plans or simply a consequence of "rational choice"-theory being the dominant episteme since the late 1980s/early 1990s, I can't say for sure. But:
The general trend throughout history is /from/ localised and autonomous /to/ centralised and top-down controlled.
Electricity is quite difficult to produce on your own, even before going into stuff like battery-banks, creating your personal grid, getting the right amp and wattage and so on. It is ideal for centralisation.
Bio-diesel on the other hand can be produced anywhere the raw materials can be found. Even a small farm could produce bio-diesel from waste, as well as Methane gas (aka "bio-gas") for private use. Add to that, that setting up a woodgas-powered generator isn't too difficult, and there's every realistic possibility for people in the country becoming independent on the central system.
Autonomous, even.
Which is intolerable under capitalism and communism alike. And is the reason there's virtually no real research going into systems of food. energy, education et cetera systems that would help people make themselves independent.
Add to that the current push, on-going across all categories of goods and services, to render everything into a 'service' or 'lease'.
I'll give you a brief example: setting aside 'classic' services, such as hairdressers or plumbers (to cite but two examples), repairing any kind of modern power-tool is nigh-impossible due to the inclusion of microchips. They've surely made said tools lighter and less clumsy, but it's also literally impossible to fix them once broken (which is also why, if you approach a retailer, staff will quickly exchange said broken tool for a new one without thinking about it, provided you're within the warranty). The same applies for virtually everything that runs on both electricity (e.g., power drills) or fossil fuels (e.g., cars), with perhaps the exception of chainsaws, petrol lawnmowers, and the like, which are 'just' a small combustion engines that actually can be easily maintained or fixed.
The same is even more true for anything 'digital', such as TVs, 'smart' phones and tables, or computers whose app stores permit you 'buying™' stuff, such as other apps, TV shows, and movies, but you never take physical possession of these essentially zeros and ones. Are these goods in the established sense of items that one can take physical property of? (The same, by the way, applies to most what passes for 'money' or currency, which is similarly mostly digital and, in case we're talking fiat money/cash, can be declared 'invalid' by gov't or central bank decree at a moment's notice.)
All of the above reinforces the trends both of you mention, in particular the absence of anything that permits autonomy/relative independence, which is, let's face it, only partially possible if you live on a small farmstead and can get by a few days or weeks without many essential problems (other than the abject inconvenience of using an outhouse in case of a blackout); that kind of scenario is utterly inconceivable if you live in a high-rise or condo in a city.
There's kinda no way out, either way, but one way of life is, in my view, clearly preferable to the other.
A way can be made, long-run time-scale, to let cities shrink. If we look at Scandinavia specifically, there's no real (monetary reasons aren't real per se) reason not to set up an incentive-structure so that instead of two-three major cities, and a dozen or so mid-level ones, we instead have thousands of smaller burghs: say 10 000 - 20 000 inhabitants in each, and each burgh ca 20-30 km apart.
Such a system would be much more resilient in every way. And it doesn't need to be forced in some WEF-esque way either: just set up tax incentives in such ways it becomes more profitable to move out and grow to that size, but not larger.
The overall tax-grab for the state would stay withing 90% of today's but it would be collected in different places along the economy's food chain, from today.
But the spontaneous trend is centralisation, has been since the days of S.P.Q.R. at least, for reasons of simplicity for the bureaucrats in charge.
"...which is also why, if you approach a retailer, staff will quickly exchange said broken tool for a new one without thinking about it, provided you're within the warranty..."
This can be mitigated: instead of VATs every step in the purchasing chain, create the tax so that it is based on the utility of the thing. It's an old 1960s enviro-idea, on how to entice capitalist economy to create good stuff, instead of vendor trash with built-in degradation and fail-points.
Also, the current situation creates incentive for the customer to break whatever he's bought before warranty runs out, in such a way he gets a new "free" gadget under warranty.
You know, cities will shrink inevitably for two main reasons: first, historically, 'the countryside' has always filled nearby cities with new inhabitants. As it stands, mainly due to massive, sustained domestic migration from the rural areas to the biggest cities, there's literally not that much of a rural population left that could migrate to cities.
Second, and way more dangerous than the former, is the fact that demographers and actuaries know this quite well (because births vs. deaths are not very 'elastic' in terms of push/pull factors), and their data underwrites the long-term planning decisions for infrastructure upgrades/maintenance. Just look at the massive grift called 'utility fees' (or nettleie): the grid was built by state-owned companies for a specific purpose, then it was privatised, and now it's used to fleece consumers--the smaller the number of consumers, the higher the fees per capita (rural areas). These notionally privatised™--but really subsidised in a myriad ways and hence public-private hybrids (in the mould that you allude to under the conditions of post-1945 'liberalism™')--who often cannot change their utility provider (I'm one of those so affected: there's a power station but no competition). Over time, once population levels drop below a certain level, investments begin to lag and break down eventually.
No amount of top-down planning or the like will work as not all locations can sustain these 20-30K inhabitants in the same way, to say nothing about material constraints building new infrastructure.
My best guess is that this will happen one way or the other, with existing places being repurposed for smaller populations (which, once more, favours existing settlements).
It's a trillion-dollar global scam, and that's something I've claimed in conversations ever since I learned Obama was pouring billions onto Musk to get him started.
There's not enough REMs, for starters. There's not enough production potential. A man from Chalmers Technical School in Gothenburg had a look at production logistics for batteries the other year: his conclusion was that if the global production capability when it comes to EV-batteries was turned up full and the batteries only sold to Sweden, it'd still take at bare minimum 20 years to replace all the private cars. Meaning "personbilar" only. No trucks, lorries, vans, 18-wheelers, et cetera. 10 000 000 cars needs replacing here. Plus charging capability. Plus electricity production. Plus a grid capable of handling millions of EVs being hooked up to chargers at the same time. Plus...
None of that exist, there's no budget to create the infrastructure, there's zero gain for the state to invest in it, and "the market" certainly won't invest tens or hundreds of billions in infrastructure (the fiction called "the market" never invests in infrastructure - anyone studying the history of post-WW2 liberal capitalism - aka neo-feudalism - learns that immediately).
Grift, scam, fraud is all it is. Tulips from Amsterdam, basically. And by inveigling the scam into politics, it makes it nigh-on impossible to stop.
A neighbour here, from the next village (just 20km, that means neighbour :) ) is a fan of EVs. Also, he is a local politician for the old Communist party, so he is pretty much obligated to love EVs and dislike Musk. He recently told me about his new one. Can't recall the model but I do remember the important bits: with a fully loaded cat, and a fully loaded trailer attached (850+850 kilos), he got almost 100km out of it. That's a new EV, a new model, top-of-the-line battery, with re-charging function using friction et cetera to "get back" some power when rolling down-hill. If I understood him correctly.
He seemed to me to have that earnest, almost pleading, tone that someone may have when they subconsciously realise that they made a poor decision they are now looking for moral support for, to make their fail hurt less.
On top of the cost of the EV, he also needs a heated garage with a real concrete floor; the costs do add up, no?
Meanwhile, our diesel pick-up truck can spend the night in an unheated tent in -30C and will start on the first try, without using starter gas, and can pull the same load an entire day on a full tank.
Or to put it as Hayek and Friedman might have: if it needs subsidies to be viable, it's not viable.
Indeed and coupled with the advent of AI… hence the mad rush to ‘depopulate’. We are the carbon they want to reduce. If it all seems like insanity it’s because it is. None of the numbers make any sense. We don’t have the rare earth minerals to fully transition. I’m not sure about the veracity of the peak oil claims but if I have learned anything from the past few years… it’s that ‘we’ are in the way of someone’s megalomaniacal vision… hence the slow cull.
Whether or not there's /a/ plan or oodles of intersecting plans or simply a consequence of "rational choice"-theory being the dominant episteme since the late 1980s/early 1990s, I can't say for sure. But:
The general trend throughout history is /from/ localised and autonomous /to/ centralised and top-down controlled.
Electricity is quite difficult to produce on your own, even before going into stuff like battery-banks, creating your personal grid, getting the right amp and wattage and so on. It is ideal for centralisation.
Bio-diesel on the other hand can be produced anywhere the raw materials can be found. Even a small farm could produce bio-diesel from waste, as well as Methane gas (aka "bio-gas") for private use. Add to that, that setting up a woodgas-powered generator isn't too difficult, and there's every realistic possibility for people in the country becoming independent on the central system.
Autonomous, even.
Which is intolerable under capitalism and communism alike. And is the reason there's virtually no real research going into systems of food. energy, education et cetera systems that would help people make themselves independent.
Add to that the current push, on-going across all categories of goods and services, to render everything into a 'service' or 'lease'.
I'll give you a brief example: setting aside 'classic' services, such as hairdressers or plumbers (to cite but two examples), repairing any kind of modern power-tool is nigh-impossible due to the inclusion of microchips. They've surely made said tools lighter and less clumsy, but it's also literally impossible to fix them once broken (which is also why, if you approach a retailer, staff will quickly exchange said broken tool for a new one without thinking about it, provided you're within the warranty). The same applies for virtually everything that runs on both electricity (e.g., power drills) or fossil fuels (e.g., cars), with perhaps the exception of chainsaws, petrol lawnmowers, and the like, which are 'just' a small combustion engines that actually can be easily maintained or fixed.
The same is even more true for anything 'digital', such as TVs, 'smart' phones and tables, or computers whose app stores permit you 'buying™' stuff, such as other apps, TV shows, and movies, but you never take physical possession of these essentially zeros and ones. Are these goods in the established sense of items that one can take physical property of? (The same, by the way, applies to most what passes for 'money' or currency, which is similarly mostly digital and, in case we're talking fiat money/cash, can be declared 'invalid' by gov't or central bank decree at a moment's notice.)
All of the above reinforces the trends both of you mention, in particular the absence of anything that permits autonomy/relative independence, which is, let's face it, only partially possible if you live on a small farmstead and can get by a few days or weeks without many essential problems (other than the abject inconvenience of using an outhouse in case of a blackout); that kind of scenario is utterly inconceivable if you live in a high-rise or condo in a city.
There's kinda no way out, either way, but one way of life is, in my view, clearly preferable to the other.
A way can be made, long-run time-scale, to let cities shrink. If we look at Scandinavia specifically, there's no real (monetary reasons aren't real per se) reason not to set up an incentive-structure so that instead of two-three major cities, and a dozen or so mid-level ones, we instead have thousands of smaller burghs: say 10 000 - 20 000 inhabitants in each, and each burgh ca 20-30 km apart.
Such a system would be much more resilient in every way. And it doesn't need to be forced in some WEF-esque way either: just set up tax incentives in such ways it becomes more profitable to move out and grow to that size, but not larger.
The overall tax-grab for the state would stay withing 90% of today's but it would be collected in different places along the economy's food chain, from today.
But the spontaneous trend is centralisation, has been since the days of S.P.Q.R. at least, for reasons of simplicity for the bureaucrats in charge.
"...which is also why, if you approach a retailer, staff will quickly exchange said broken tool for a new one without thinking about it, provided you're within the warranty..."
This can be mitigated: instead of VATs every step in the purchasing chain, create the tax so that it is based on the utility of the thing. It's an old 1960s enviro-idea, on how to entice capitalist economy to create good stuff, instead of vendor trash with built-in degradation and fail-points.
Also, the current situation creates incentive for the customer to break whatever he's bought before warranty runs out, in such a way he gets a new "free" gadget under warranty.
You know, cities will shrink inevitably for two main reasons: first, historically, 'the countryside' has always filled nearby cities with new inhabitants. As it stands, mainly due to massive, sustained domestic migration from the rural areas to the biggest cities, there's literally not that much of a rural population left that could migrate to cities.
Second, and way more dangerous than the former, is the fact that demographers and actuaries know this quite well (because births vs. deaths are not very 'elastic' in terms of push/pull factors), and their data underwrites the long-term planning decisions for infrastructure upgrades/maintenance. Just look at the massive grift called 'utility fees' (or nettleie): the grid was built by state-owned companies for a specific purpose, then it was privatised, and now it's used to fleece consumers--the smaller the number of consumers, the higher the fees per capita (rural areas). These notionally privatised™--but really subsidised in a myriad ways and hence public-private hybrids (in the mould that you allude to under the conditions of post-1945 'liberalism™')--who often cannot change their utility provider (I'm one of those so affected: there's a power station but no competition). Over time, once population levels drop below a certain level, investments begin to lag and break down eventually.
No amount of top-down planning or the like will work as not all locations can sustain these 20-30K inhabitants in the same way, to say nothing about material constraints building new infrastructure.
My best guess is that this will happen one way or the other, with existing places being repurposed for smaller populations (which, once more, favours existing settlements).