Interweb Outbin

 

Goodbye to Comic Sans

Long term readers of this blog and website know full well of my love of the type font Comic Sans.  In execution, it is vaguely comic book-like. It stands out in chapter headings and as emphasis in the middle of a sentence. Weird Detective Mystery Adventures, our tribute role-playing game to all things pulp adventure, makes extensive use of the font. In small doses, it is fine.

It is, however, not real. No comic book has ever used Comic Sans nor anything like it. There have been several standards for comic book lettering—some of them actual fonts produced by old time strip spewing font machines—but Comic Sans was never one of them. Only certain greeting card companies made extensive use of it. As a font, it has a number of drawbacks.

Comic Sans scales poorly. The between line space is erratic, often dropping the distending letters of words with g, j, p, q and y. Worse, it is not resident on most browsers, translating into a mash up of itself and spacing regimes belonging to Times Roman or some other fuxtard fontard. I will miss Comic Sans, but I am giving her up. From now on we are in Ariel, the most readable and widespread font in the Microsoft English World. Because blogs are meaningless if they cannot be read.

I have also received notice from my webhosting site Yahoo that they no longer intend to support the web construction tool that they gave me. I will therefore not be able to update my current pages in their current format, but am free to import them into Fuxtard Press where I can marvel with delight as my art elements and text race off like jumping beans. Or I can redo the whole damn thing in something that I can fathom.

I have opted to leave things as they are until I have a chance to learn a new system, locate my previous text and dedicate several months to reconstruction. Given that I will be relaunching WDMA again, I do have an incentive to do this. Time is another question.

Between the time of the notification and now, Yahoo was offloaded from Verizon and bought by a private equity firm which also bought AOL. The new entity will be called Yahoo, but I am not sure what it will be doing. I may have more than one interweb issue on my hands.

In any case, the Wonderblog is now the thing, the outlet, the single most updated space in our place.

 

I Go Utterly Insane and Seemingly Need Meds Bad

I am not buying the fuel pipeline shutdown. I am not buying that it is hackers, Russian or otherwise. Moreover, I do not believe there is anything wrong with the pipeline, its controls or software. I think it has been shut off for the same reason OPEC shuts off Saudi Arabia or Iran. I think it’s a price rigging scheme, just as were the several rounds of suspicious refinery maintenance events which preceded it several summers ago.

Not long-ago oil was so worthless, so plentiful in supply

 that producers had to pay someone to offload it from their tankers. We are at peak production. There is a Global Plague on which has reduced demand to a fraction of normal. Gas should be a buck a gallon. Yet prices go up.

I call foul. I call BS on the whole thing.

 

I AM COOTIES

Let the record show that I have taken full advantage of my Western Privilege during this time of plague.  I live in a society which allows me to earn a living while sheltering in place. I can avoid contact with the world via ordering my every need to my doorstep. I have an abundance of personal preservation materials at my ready disposal should I need to venture out. As a member of several approved castes, I was allowed to obtain the best defense available to this malady and have availed myself of such. I am vaccinated, masked, and thriving. My only wants are for the contact with others my life afforded before. Even in this I have won out. At the start of this plague, I was on my own. Now I am aiding my loved ones, with them nearly every moment of the day. I am indeed a blessed person.

I am now a blessed person in quarantine. Mother’s Day brought contact with a person who has now tested positive for Covid. Just this day I and my housemates went to the drive-thru at our local Walgreens and had our tests proctored/self-administrated. I jammed a swab up my own nose and put the results in a disposable test tube, thus qualifying me for Level Zero as a Lab Tech. In several days, an actual Level One Lab Tech will get around to processing my tube, after which a qualified person will decide if I am diseased or not. Meanwhile, I play proto-zombie, staying away from folks lest I become a plague sprinkler.  

I have no symptoms. The person who tested positive isn’t so lucky. And this person is now marooned in another state. Just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water, Jaws returns. Not to make light of this nor paint the matter more dire than it actually is.

Insert profound point here. This isn’t over yet. As long as there is time on the play clock for this misadventure, anyone can still lose.

 

Flying Cars Now Have a Timeline for Adoption

In 2019, Boeing and Porsche announced they were teaming up to develop an electric flying car concept. Neither company has given any indication of when this might ‘take off’, but in 2018 research by Porsche suggested that the urban air mobility market could start to gain traction as soon as 2025.

By the way, the Wonderblog has now been joined by a Bloomberg email blast covering autotech, from which the above was culled. As with Wonderblog, the Bloomberg mailer will cover Flying Cars and Electric Cars as its focus. We at the Wonderblog welcome them. Come on in, the water is warm.

Sadly, Bloomberg has been finding out in short order what it took the Wonderblog nine years to discern—neither Electric Cars nor Flying Cars are making linear progress. Both fields are fits and starts, two steps forward, one step back with a skip to my loo and a few sidetracks thrown in.

On the heals of Elon Musk’s appearance on Saturday Night Live, one does have to reflect on what the man’s true accomplishment is. Has he made the electric car a commonplace item? Is he the Edison or Ford of the EV concept—a concept that predates the advent of gasoline. Thus far his works are expensive, rare, unprofitable, and prone to explosion accidents. That’s when he bothers with the EV at all and isn’t attempting a corporate takeover of outer space or drilling into the planet or distributing new fangled flamethrowers. (Just what the world needs. A new flamethrower.) He is the blesser of crypto currency, a thing decried by the maggots in Omaha and other slingers of fact-based finance. Should we just accept that he is beyond our mere mortal comprehension and bask in his awesome glow shadow or do we call a Trump a Trump.

The auto world has always had these Elon Musk types. They swoop in from other fields and pigeon distribute their wisdom. After a bloom phase, something like the Pontiac Fiero gets squat out into production, after which the auto industry gleans its own messages. The point of the Pontiac Fiero was to prove that Demming Quality Circles could vastly improve automotive design and assembly. While this turned out to be a boon to the production of auto parts, the One Thought Solves All approach Demming championed was of limited utility in design and assembly. (See the Pontiac Fiero.) The Fiero’s follow-up, an entire division of GM called Saturn did not fare much better. At the time GM ran out of money, the government made it give up on distractions like Pontiac and Saturn. Demming and his circles went by the waysides, with the industry gleaning simply that people would buy cars mostly made out of plastic. (An idea first broached by one Henry Ford the first.) Once most cars became mostly plastic, the all plastic Saturn marquee lost its luster. (1)

There are a lot of Auto History allusions to people like Musk. He’s not Ford. Ford was about affordable mobility. He’s not GM. GM was about market share. He’s not Chrysler. Chrysler was about value for the dollar. In the auto sector, those are the ideas which have won. That leaves the non-winners: Locomobile, Packard, Hudson, Peirce, Stutts and the like. I believe Musk is analogous to Cord (2), a peddler of advanced and expensive products, destined for mass sidelining at the first market downturn. Everything’s fun when its fashionable to be rich. Those times don’t last. Make something people need and can afford or your firm will be bitcoin bankrupt in the next market meltdown.

 

Not to be so US-centric. The above referenced Porsche isn’t really Porsche, it’s VW. VW sells cars to humans. Porsche is sort of Buick where it comes from and Audi is… over-engineered Eurotrash crap meant to separate the unwary of disposable income. (3) Not to disabuse Bloomberg of hopeful tidings, but a report from 2018 projecting the demand for flying cars in 2025 is probably the only product of this partnership. They are already one plane behind Terrafugia at the same stage. Not a hopeful sign.

(1)  The Quality Circles also suggested that people didn’t like the car buying experience at all. In an effort to make it less onerous, the dealerships were ordered to not allow haggling and to ban their salespeople from deploying any of the time-tested tactics. Carmax has since adopted a similar strategy. The new Carvana chain aims to make trips to see your used car prior to purchase a thing of the past. In Saturn’s case, sales took a plunge and never recovered. And if you venture into your local Carmax, you will find creeping vestiges of the soft sale approach being enacted.

(2)  Cord’s makes were Duesenberg, Auburn and Cord. Duesenbergs were priced at the half a mansion level. Auburns priced at the same level as the average supercar. The for the masses Cord, a mini-Duesenberg, came in at the mere Mercedes price point. Of the three marquees, only Auburn was an actual production luxury car. Cord’s primary gift to the venture is that he figured out how to sell the Auburns. Oddly only the Cords and Duesenbergs are well remembered, although almost no one ever owned one.

(3)  Audi is a hold-over from that time when every European make needed to badge an unreliable performance car to compete with Jaguar. The thrill of owning a fine car which does not function still has a mysterious hold over the gentry.   

 

 

Man Dreams and Science Provides

 

Greetings Blog Readers and Other Confused Lost Souls.

Amazing news has crossed our desk in regards to three topics this blog claims to cover. As usual, we are about two months behind the curve. It’s our obvious hope that you have been living in a cave,  unwilling to formulate an opinion until you have heard from us. That’s our target demographic. Our topics for this post are Flying Cars, Brain Damaged Fascists and New Dubious Methods Wall Street Has Devised To Make Your Money Melt Away. That makes our target demographic leftist hermits with a thing for tech. That explains our readership statistics in a nutshell.

My arm is currently swelling with a toxin I voluntarily allowed the infusion of. Said gunk is supposed to spare my skanky self from the plague we have been experiencing lo these many months. If it seems like a year ago that we were all consigned to lives of remote existence, it is only because it was. I and everyone who has had this shot may count ourselves amongst the world’s elite. Hopefully there will be more of us elitists in the coming days. The way mass production works is that things wedge in. As of this moment, the availability of the gift is limited to people near first-world distribution points on a scattershot basis. I was administered my dose in a Walgreens rather distant from my house while another person received a dose from the Walgreens close to my house even though he resides far away. In a week or two this stuff will be everywhere and the only people not receiving it will be those inclined to decline it regardless of availability. In the meantime, the willing play musical Walgreens. I know of a family of three who got theirs administered in three different places. Such is the randomness of the slating.

We are profoundly lucky. More than half a million of my countrymen did not make it to this point. And the body count still has a way to go. It may take some time to get things normal again. Without Trump in charge, it will take less time. As hope dawns, so does my desire to talk about something else.

Man dreams and science provides. This has been the story of the modern world. It has only occasionally been interrupted by outbreaks of calamity and need. If it wasn’t for WWII, we would have had television and photo offset printing as real industries ten years earlier than when they appeared. It’s a minor casualty, but who knows what this plague has delayed and by how long. I fear a wave of mass automation in the restaurant industry may be in the offing. People are starting to talk about life after this, to throw their nets widely. Our pal the Flying Car has made two recent sightings. To remind people what a Flying Car is, we will reaffirm our criteria in short form:

Definition of a Flying Car

In order to qualify as a 'Flying Car' a vehicle must encompass the following three concepts. 

1. Vehicle must be able to take off and land without a runway or dedicated external support facility of any kind.

2. Vehicle must be capable of conventional garaging.

3. The operation of a Flying Car may be no more complex than that of other conventional consumer commuter vehicles.

Hil-Gle has decided to take the lead in defining the flying car, mostly because no one else will. Even the manufacturers seem a little iffy on the concept. We use the term manufacturer with some hesitation. It’s not that no one has ever built one, but rather that they have been hand-crafted pieces even when offered for sale to the masses. There have been two makes and models of vehicles sold as flying cars thus far. Total production for both has been under 100 and there are no currently available examples for sale new. Not in decades. If any are still intact, they exist as curiosities exhibited at museums and air shows. In short, they did not do well. They did not revolutionize personal transportation. They were not breakthroughs to be emulated. They were just bad planes. Which brings us to the Terrafugia Transition.

We first reported on the Terrafugia April 21, 2012. Nine years later the same plane has changed names from the Terrafugia to the Terrafugia Transition, signifying that there is another model on its way out and that Terrafugia would now be the marquee (or make) of the aircraft and the un-trademark-able Transition would be the badge (or model). Other progress included:

Kevin Colburn, general manager of Terrafugia, said the company was “excited” to obtain the FAA certificate. He added that the group improved the Transition’s quality system, completed the critical design aspects, and built the vehicle. Terrafugia also delivered 150 technical documents to pass the FAA audit. “This is a major accomplishment that builds momentum in executing our mission to deliver the world’s first practical flying car,” he said.

The Transition, in airplane mode, will now be for sale for pilots and flight schools, but the driving side of its persona won’t be completed for another year. Colburn said the goal was to have the complete version legal in both the sky and on the roads in 2022.

That was in January. In February the company fired 100 or so of its workers (almost everyone) and said it was relocating operations to China. Its website never functioned that well and is currently in a state of dysfunction. So, don’t hold your breath. From what I can see they produced all of two actual Transition planes and had plans for a radical redesign, which they hoped to fund by selling you a copy of the plane they decided needed to be radically redesigned.

One wonders what they were doing for nine years. I fear the story covers all of our Flying Cars, Brain Damaged Fascists and New Dubious Methods Wall Street Has Devised To Make Your Money Melt Away topics in one elephant shaped car like thing scoop. Before I break bad on this cluster of MIT dreamers, a little time should be spent lauding the progress they did make.

The Terrafugia “Only Model We Actually Made” Transition is much more of an innovation than other flying cars have been. It didn’t use aviation fuel. You could get away with mere racing gas or high test. The difference in kerosene-like explosive properties is the one between merely having an insurance rider on your home and making whatever dwelling is adjacent to the plane’s garage uninsurable. There are lots of reasons planes are kept at airports and one of them is the properties of their fuel.

Second, its entirely possible to put the plane in a garage without dismantling it or leaving some important system lying back at the airport. The previously most successful Flying Car left its wings at the airport. And the Transition does transition from plane to car without undo overt mechanical manipulation. While the wings and tail don’t flower out and retract back, what configuring it does require is no worse than the set up of your standard sail catamaran. Thirty to ninety minutes of monkeying with the thing and you’re set to go.

Finally, they were working on making it a little more user friendly to actually fly. How is a bit of a mystery, but according to the now defunct website, you only needed a Sport Pilot’s license to operate the Transition. I don’t know where this falls in the spectrum of single engine prop certifications, however they were making a big deal out of it.

(Up With People People May Now Stop Reading. I am about to crack on them mightily.) Part of the problem with the Terrafugia was in how the vehicle appeared and what the manufacturer omitted in his pitch. What the prospective buyer saw when the plane was in the air was a two-seater with no cargo room and a 400 mile range. They highlight the 100 MPH airspeed, which is zippy indeed for a car but sort of Datsun 210 for a plane. Specifically, it’s sort of Piper Cub-like—a Piper Cub being a low-end two-seater single prop plane which retails for far less than the probable million all in that Terrafugia seemed destined for. (Last list price was $400k. It started at $140k.) True, the Piper Cub doesn’t come equipped with a parachute built into its frame as the Transition does, but it probably also doesn’t drop like a freaking stone when its motor shuts off. This doesn’t say anything horrible about the Transition. I’m sure the Piper Cub would drop like a stone too if its undercarriage were appended to a Mazda 6. The question was: what advantage did the Transition net over and above owning a comparable Cessna and a comparable car. At maybe three times the price.

Wait. Transition was said to have many luxury appointments. Only a leather interior is specified but it possibly also had a killer sound system. So there’s bling factor to consider—bling factor offset by a product which greatly resembles a Piper Cub being eaten by a Datsun 210. Not the thing of visions of George Jetson dancing in your head.

Finally, they made two. Two actual planes. Of a model they decided to entirely redesign between the production of Plane One and Plane Two. And they had 100 employees. To make two planes in nine years. Had I been given the parts and a salary, I could have made more than two planes in nine years. And I have problems screwing together IKEA furniture.

The Terrafugia people led a miserable existence by MIT engineering grad standards. Much of their time was spent pushing the plane from one tradeshow to the next. They had a two-fold task. Gin up free publicity and attempt to gain funding. In this, they were largely successful. But even P.T. Barnum can’t tour the same act for nearly a decade without the novelty wearing thin. They never got to the point where they could actually sell one to someone with money to buy one. Announcements about dates to make appointments to potentially buy a Transition came and went four times. And from what I can read, the FAA and other authorities granted them every exemption possible largely out of pity for the nearly decade old start-up. Money flowed into the thing in several batches, called tranches, each successive one having more onerous strings attached. The first investors are burning mad money and are willing to take a flyer on anything. Everyone after that is in the loan for a piece of the company game. Then you get to the final tranche, the people who know you are out of money and credit. They offer to bail you out at essentially the cost of all other investors. Heads, they get an outsized chunk of the venture, Tails they get all of it. Enter the Chinese.

In this case the Chinese are here in their guise as Volvo. It seems the Chinese bought Volvo through one of their special not really private enterprise funds and used Volvo to bail out Terrafugia. The idea is to net the R&D value of Terrafugia for a fraction of its cash pay in. You pony up enough for them to keep the lights on and then you wait. Either you wind up owning 49% of it as a going firm or you get all of it. In either case, it’s secrets are yours. It’s not a bad way to spirit off technology and the practice is neither new nor illegal. GM and GE and any number of amalgamations do it all the time. (It’s how GE bought and saved Xerox.) That said, GM is not a mass murdering totalitarian criminal enterprise out to rule the world.

If there is a bright side to this, I think the Chinese got rooked. This is not to say that the Terrafugia people are scam artist. I see no evidence of that. Rather they are what they seem to be: the kind of guys who build two planes and then scrap the idea for something better and hope the cash will keep coming. Sadly, even communists have a creeping belief in money at least as a capacitor of a nation’s potential energy, as a store of the worker’s efforts. There’s somebody in a rice paddy somewhere making all of this crap possible. The cold hard math of Terrafugia had to bubble up, even to designated techno privateers: 100 employees + 9 years = 2 planes. It took them two years, but the Chinese did finally pull the plug. If they were smart, they would cut their losses and just leave the two damn planes behind. I doubt they’re even worth the cost of transportation.

(One of the planes had to be retired last year because it was no longer safe to fly. This means that the Red Airforce netted one plane and a parts plane with parts that may not entirely be compatible. The two existent Transitions are not identical models. One is a proof of concept and the other is the model for production.)

Did the Red Airforce gain a flying car? No. It does not meet our criteria. If it functions, Terrafugia is an overly rugged bush plane with shallow range. That defeats the purpose. The Chinese have no need for a roadable aircraft, which is what the Transition is. If the Chinese want to take off and land on their own roadways, there’s certainly no technical reason they need a special plane to do so. I fear that the Terrafugia has transitioned in custody from MIT Grads playing Aviation Moguls to Commie Apparatchiks playing Spies. Our next entrant shows far more promise in becoming something akin to a flying car.

Billed as the “world’s first flying electric racing car,” the Mk3 is a full-sized, remotely operated eVTOL that’s reportedly capable of reaching speeds of up to 75 mph (120 km/h). It takes design cues from the classic F1 machines and features a svelte carbon-fiber frame and fuselage that’s light as a feather. In fact, the racer tips the scales at just 200 pounds (100KG) unmanned.

I want to avoid using the words FLYING COFFIN here. Mk3 is a roto drone, like the ones that are making aerial photography commonplace even in student film projects. It’s scaled up to roughly coffin size so that a prospective nitwit can sit in it. But that person is no more a pilot—or racer—than the monkeys on the Gemini rocket tests. These upscaled pizza delivery drones are ladled with programs which keep them from running into each other, keep them from violating God’s Laws of physics and keep them in relative formation. Any race involving such machines has all the real autonomy of marching band practice or slot car racing. It’s largely a spectacle and not a competition.

That aside, I think this is where the flying car concept is headed. No authority in its right mind is going to allow me to take my eleven minutes worth of flight time electric man zipper wherever I want. Doing such would place me in your powerlines and trees faster than it took me to unbox the thing. And that’s assuming constantly level flight magically happens and I immediately get the feel for the up/down, right/left and thrust controls. No matter how affordable you make the vehicle, you cannot graft fundamental concepts of three-dimensional movement into a critter that walks. Pilot is a graduated and stratified certification for a reason. In order for the Flying Car to work on any real level it needs some aggressive baby buggy bumpers.

It would be a largely auto pilot affair. The thing flies from its central charging station to that little granite pad you have on your lawn and waits. You kiss your wife, kiss your mistress, kiss the kids and then go out to the lawn where its majestic gull-wing doors lift at your chipper approach. After you plop your butt down and switch the station from Classical to Smooth Jazz, you hit the button for your destination. The gull wing doors fold down, sealing you in. The smell of honeydew melon fills the cabin, disguising the aerosol sedative which has just been administered. It heads up and then off to an imaginary preset avenue at a preset altitude and then whisks you into a line of other flying cars, all at preset spacing. You arrive shortly at Hedge Fund Control, your flying car circling with other flying cars as the flying car on the roof pad is unloaded. Eventually it is your turn to disembark. Once you are out of decapitation range, your craft seals and wings off on its mission to be recharged and fumigated. At about 5:15, after all of the presidents and directors have left but before the comptroller, you take the reverse flight home. It’s so commonplace you don’t think about it, you overstuffed pampered parasite.

I am not at all discounting the occasional rich guy who sat through 1000 hours of flight training being allowed to fly his flying car into my trees and powerlines. That happens with planes now. (Just last week I spotted a guy in one of those go-carts with wings buzzing over my house.) I fear the irresponsible rich will always be with us. And it is with only limited sadness that I consign the flying car to a fate as low end helicopter service for an emerging caste of low end helicopter slightly more responsible rich people. Before then I am sure we will see the flying car in use with the police or paramedics. So you may get to fly in one eventually, if you are supremely unfortunate. What I am sure of is that the first group of MIT grads who comes up with a model and a systematic approach to the flying car will have his or her (his) choice of SPACs to mate with.

What the heck is a SPAC? It’s a “Special Purpose Acquisition Company.” They are publicly-listed companies, but otherwise have no operations. They’re not making anything, selling anything or earning anything. They’re just a blank check. You might call a SPAC a host. They exist solely to find a mate—in this case, a private company, one with actual operations, that will reverse-merge with the blank check SPAC and, together, will flower into a publicly listed stock.

I want to be generous here. The generosity of my government and its capitalistic system has provided me with a shot that will keep me from dying in this plague. For that I am profoundly grateful. Nor is it the place for someone with a mind and perspective as profoundly small and narrow as mine to question the mechanisms by which my utopia has been delivered. It should be said that General Motors was not much more than a SPAC when it started. All you got for your GM stock originally was Flying Bill’s promise that he would buy companies in the automotive business and he would keep buying them until he ran out of people to buy his stock. And he wasn’t the only one. United Motors ran the exact same scheme. Together GM and United* founded two of the Big Three automakers. And they all lived happily ever after until they went broke 80 years later.

That said, GM and United at least gave you an idea of what they were buying. All the SPAC people have are condor logos and theme songs. The dream is that you are getting in on the floor of the NEXT BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY. No one says the word CONGLOMERATION or cites the NEXT ITT or the NEXT ENRON, because those are not great examples and would screw up the whole swooping condor with music animation. Nor is the slogan GIVE US MONEY TO BUY SOMETHING seem all that superlative in all of its accuracy. Not even when appended to a prefixed tag line along the lines of WE’RE REALLY SMART.

If I were a betting man, I would bet that the world of SPAC has many circles all surrounding just a few key players—many SPACs being offered by just a few parties with most SPACs eventually sharing the same salesmen and guides. And that many SPACs will one day merge with other SPACs just to keep the lights on. As opposed to Flying Cars, you will find your SPAC filled with the dregs of the always bloated commercial real estate world floating in a thick broth of HELOC** and secondary mobile home mortgages. Plus dead shopping malls redeveloped into dead office towers redeveloped into condos redeveloped into section eight housing, SPAC by bloody SPAC.  If it is any consolation, you will be providing a damn fine living to a very few undeserving and untalented white men. Who will have to go back to the OTC market where they belong once the SPAC thing has played its dismal self out.  Or are you unable to think that way?

The study’s lead author, Leor Zmigrod, told the Guardian that the variance was likely due to the black-and-white nature of how these individuals saw the world, making elaborate thought processes that much more difficult to execute. “Individuals or brains that struggle to process and plan complex action sequences may be more drawn to extreme ideologies, or authoritarian ideologies that simplify the world,” she said.

At HIL-GLE we hold these truths to be self-evident: People who promise you nothing deliver exactly that. While investing in ETFs and stocks and number 15 at Churchill Downs can all be dubious surrenders of your autonomy, it beats throwing money at beggars. Yeah, they’ll buy something. People willing to accept condor logos and parades as substitutions for complex explanations are the life’s blood of everything evil and wrong in the world.

(*) United went on to become Maxwell which went on to become Chrysler. It should be said that none of the other companies involved in the automotive sector were stock market animals. And I am not sure that the stock market was much of a boon to the industry at all.

(**) HELOC: Home equity line of credit or construction lines of credit loans.

Auto American

Sometime back this blog reported that electric cars would soon be replacing conventional models in sales popularity. Gas stations would close shop. Older cars would evaporate, simply on the basis of comparative cost of opertation. A humming, pollution-free land of wonder was just around the corner.

Insert crow into mouth. Chew. Actually what’s been happening is that cars themselves are disappearing in favor of the even less economical Carry All. What the hell is a Carry All? It’s the blanket term for an enclosed bed truck, which covers the SUV, minivan and Nissan Cube. That’s what people are buying. Terms such as ‘SUV’ or ‘Durango’ or ‘Jeep’ or ‘Suburban’ are just descriptors of trim level, and not very accurate at that. We’re all buying little freaking trucks. It was Hudson which introduced the step-down slide in and sit car over 50 years ago. Today we have gone back to step up vehicles. And none of them are electric.

But wait! There are electric cars.  There’s the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla and…. There are also red headed left handers, too. And electric cars are about as common.  If one is generous, a claim could be made that electric cars are replaying the adoption rate of the cell phone. No one had one. Doctors, lawyers and bigwigs had them. Then… wait a decade… everyone has one. Even by that scheme the electric car is well past due. I fear that it is time for me to admit defeat.

Allow me to wax moronic explaining my odious predictive failure.  The cell phone analogy is entirely wrong. Cell phones did not replace anything. They were an entirely new idea. They replaced the pay phone—the phone no one owns—and perhaps the pager. But it’s not so much an evolution of the phone as it is a grafted extension of the phone system. At its core the cell phone is a hybrid of the walkie talkie and the telephone. It’s a walkie talkie that calls into the phone system. By contrast, the telephone is something that is wired to your house or wired to a wall and then transmits via wire to other wired receivers. Adopting the cell phone did not require someone to come into your home and yank all the wires out of your walls and then issue you a new receiver with all new parts. Instead, they just hung enough antennas and then made the anchors (the cell phones) cheaper and cheaper. And today the only communication system wired into your house is the internet, usually concurrent with Cable Television. Yes, today no one uses the telephone, now called a land line. But this isn’t because it’s been yanked out. Cars are different.

Cars are car part containers. No matter what brand or model, your car is 90% alike to all other cars. For any car system, there are all of maybe three variations. The spark plugs in your 1978 Delta 88 are identical to the ones in your 2017 Honda Civic. Ditto the nuts and bolts and glass and radio and pads and shocks and catalytic converter. What variation there is can be attributed to size constraints. The gear box of your F-150 is a bit different than the one in your Smart For Two. The greatest differences are in the body--a vast idiosyncratic package for your collection of largely non-unique components--and in the transmission, the mechanical force system, which needs to be custom configured specifically or you will go flopping down the road as opposed to rolling.  It’s a tailored suit and a fancy set of shoes thrown over very similar interior bits.

There are two approaches to building an electric car. Approach One (Techno Salvage): invent only the systems that you need to, specifically the engine and the fuel container. The engine is a bunch of electric stuff and can be distributed. You’re not carrying fuel anymore. You just have to make room for batteries. Approach Two (Rainbow Gold): Reinvent everything. Build the car around the constraints of the electrical drive system.  Both approaches suck equally. Two factors have limited the electric car’s development thus far. First, electric cars, no matter how they are configured, are not 90 % alike to other cars. Many electric cars are not 90% alike to other electric cars. They are more different than other manufactured items. If plumbing were at a similar stage of standardization, only the rich would crap indoors. Second, and most importantly…

Elon Musk is an idiot.

He’s an idiot who can land a spent rocket engine back on its mooring.  He’s an idiot who can plausibly dig a hole to China. He’s an idiot who can successfully design and market a home use flamethrower. (I had the idea first. Really.) He can will a lot of things into being. Without a doubt he is one of the most successful dreamers in the world today. The auto industry is a pile of manure and does not deserve Elon Musk. And the sooner he figures that out the better all humanity is going to be.

When it comes to the electric car, Musk’s Tesla is clearly the pick of the litter.  Of the three electric car start-ups from a decade ago, his is the only one to have produced a car that functions. Second place goes to the group who produced a car that did not function. Third place is from a group which did not produce a car. So Musk is Peggy Flemming in an Olympics in which the two other contestants did not skate.

Musk has followed the accepted historic pattern. Entice investors. Don’t use your own money. Start with a bling car to stir up interest. Once the bling thing is generally perfected, strip it down to a mass production archetype and then scale up manufacturing of the affordable model. Everyone from Columbia to Henry Ford did it this way. Ford’s first car wasn’t the Model T, it was the Cadillac. Once that car was perfected, Ford used what he learned and made the Model T. (Very long story short.) GM’s founding makes were Buick and Cadillac and then they scaled down to Chevrolet and Pontiac and other plebian makes. Although following in their footsteps so far, Musk has missed two steps which will inevitably be his automotive undoing.

Historical Missed Step One: R&D is something you buy. It is not something you do. Innovation is a thing that happens in someone’s garage in the middle of the night. Or it takes place in a university. It cannot be willed into being through spread sheets and benchmarks and project management. It is a creative process with a high failure rate. You hand the successful innovators dump trucks worth of cash. The failures you don’t have to pay.

This goes to the basics of knowing what business you are in. At some point Musk decided that he was a battery manufacturer. This is like owning a monopoly on helium when your aim is to find a use for balloons. Auto manufacturers are in the business of screwing together auto parts and putting such under a nice canopy. They are not in the business of inventing auto parts. Traditionally most auto innovations came from either other basic industries (inevitably exploiting university research) or from auto racing. (Traditionally most innovations come from someone employed in R&D at another auto firm who has been working on a side project on his own in his own garage. He comes to you with an innovation that he could not get green lighted at his employer and is now handing off to you the ready to go perfected product for one large lump sum.) In short, the time to go into the electric car business is AFTER the battery technology is perfected, not before.

Musk has also decided to reinvent the way cars are sold. That part of the process is actually NOT BROKEN. The whole make cars, ship them to dealers, dealers hit up banks and send you money cycle works. Dealers will also fix your cars and sell your parts. It keeps you in coin and makes life happy for customers. Musk’s system of build them and set them in a lot and then take pot luck ties up a lot of cash. And his custom of using salaried auto hikers to do the customer’s tax and regs and physically drive the car to the buyer’s home has efficiencies only a pizza delivery service can appreciate. How does one buy a Tesla in the first place? As opposed to having dealerships, which would lend some visibility to his product, Musk puts the burden of making the purchase and arranging financing on the customer. With predictable results. *

Musk’s answer to the cash flow issue is to float bonds and then scramble to pay for them. And to seemingly blow weed prior to investor conference calls. Not that the process of business itself is all that high and exalted, but if you fail at it, you fail.

Musk isn’t the con man Tucker was. His car works and can be produced. It’s everything else he’s screwed up, much to the detriment of the electric car field.  Failures such as this are common, since…

Historical Missed Step Two: The Auto Industry is a Mausoleum for Money. Major Auto Manufacturers are Vulture Capitalist Creations. What do Ransom Olds, Henry Ford, David Buick and Walter Chrysler have in common? They were all kicked out of firms that they founded. Not necessarily the firms they are known for, but they were all booted at one time or another. None of the existing Big Three American auto makers is the result of a successful start-up. All of them are cobbled together remains of failed or amalgamated firms. General Motors is an amalgamation of several HUNDRED former manufacturers. Chrysler is what remains of Maxwell, which itself was culled from the wreckage of United Motors, an entity spawned from the failed Bicycle Trust monopoly. Jeep is what is left of Overland, a failed parts client of GM. Jeep was obtained through merger with American Motors, an amalgamation of Nash and Hudson. Hyundai was a program to provide reliable cars to shipyard workers. It was only after merging with KIA that Hyundia obtained drive system technology needed to sustain themselves as an actual exporter. The list of firms which are lumbering husks of other firms runs on and on, with no sunshine seen for start-ups.

It could be argued that Ford is a successful start-up. Ford took a payoff from the original Henry Ford Motor Company (which became Cadillac and then General Motors), took his staff and their experience and went to start a new firm.  That firm, Detroit Automobile Company, failed within a year. The firm we now know as Ford is itself a recapitalization. (“Recapitalization” is a big word for screwing the original investors and making off with the assets.) Like all auto companies, Ford diversified (in one instance funding Dodge) and amalgamated (taking over Lincoln Motors). Ford and Musk are both visionaries of a type, although Ford’s vision had less to do with emergent technology than it did guidance to a specific price point, expanding the reach of the car to the average citizen. Like Musk, Ford had his run-ins with Wall Street and government naysayers. At one point the government threatened to turn over control of Ford to Nash Motors. Musk has gotten into as much trouble as he is likely to—which is to say that Tesla is irrelevant and not worth the government’s lead to shoot. In the end,  Ford was not quite a vulture, but was vulture enough to muddle through. And in the end, I think Tesla is what a vulture eats.

I do still believe that the electric car will be a big thing. Just not anytime soon. And it won’t be coming from Elon Musk, who will be long gone to his orbital habitat to blow weed to his heart’s content by the time we get an electric car under $20,000.00. Musk’s flame out has undoubtedly discouraged others from jumping into the electric car fray. But the global auto industry has other issues.

There is a 40% global production overcapacity in the auto industry. Sounds ominous. Many cryptic and dire things can be plausibly extrapolated from just this factoid. In fact, the industry as a whole ponders this daily. It’s the auto industry’s version of Zen meditation.

What does this factoid boil down to? Remember I told you that modern auto companies are mostly vulture capitalist creations. (There is another factor that I will explain later.) Each firm has inherited a lot of stuff, generally for pennies on the dollar of their actual value. And they are not using 40% of it.  If they actually needed this stuff, it would cost them a fortune to buy it. So they are sitting on it, even though they don’t need it. And they make payments to maintain it. If this sounds silly, then you obviously do not own a storage locker. The auto industry rents lots of storage lockers, figuratively speaking, crammed to the gills with stuff which is highly valuable only to the auto industry.  No one wants to give up their horde. The way the game has been played thus far is to acquire additional hordes when a competitor goes out of business.

Sort of. That game has actually been over for a little while. It can only be played within national borders. The game is over here in America, since there are only two players left. GM and Ford cannot amalgamate. They can only eat foreign car companies, but that capacity is limited by the other factor that I hinted at. Bluntly, many car companies are Government Sponsored Enterprises. Germany has two major car companies, BMW and VW. VW is essentially a jobs program. If Hyundai isn’t an actual bodily appendage of the South Korean government, it certainly qualifies as a condom. Fiat is the crown jewels of Italy, having amalgamated all of its civilian and sports car lines. Japan’s many auto makers are situated somewhat similar to those in the US circa 1950, but their government’s cradle to grave welfare state is not factored into their export’s prices. They are effectively jobs programs also. It’s the same story everywhere. The upswing of this is that the market is littered with irrational actors.

I’m not saying that this is bad. And it’s not unique to the auto industry. It just means that they are not glass eyed utilitarians. They are beholding to labor unions and social factors and humanity in general. Many are the civilian putz-facing ends of national military industrial complexes. Again, this does not make them bad, but it does make their behavior a tad unpredictable. The good news, from an electric car perspective, is that zero emissions is an agreed on goal. The bad news is, electric cars are not the highest priority. There are three priorities ahead of it, one of which is a distraction and one of which is a chimera.

Distraction: Waiting for Godot. China has a billion potential auto buyers. The minute, the second, the microsecond, China swings those doors open all global production overcapacity evaporates. Or at least mine does as I carve out my unfair share of this virgin and prosperous market. Heh heh heh. Wrong, round eye! Wrong, rising sun bastard! Wrong, fish and chips, frog eating, kraut eating eurosimpleton! The Glorious People’s Republic which is rising to consume all the Earth will make its own damn cars. China’s people are not your customers. They are China’s customers. Mother Mao Funny Money stays home. If there is one thing that we can take away from decades’ worth of economic engagement with the People’s Republic of Chinese Earth it’s is that they are a giant leech black hole squatting on the face of global capitalism. If allowed to, the Chinese may sell us cars—replicas of western cars, really—but they will largely drive their own cars—also replicas of western cars, really. The Chinese may eventually even have electric cars, provided we make the batteries easy enough for them to copy. So Godot is a no go.

Chimera: Sometime some time ago all of the great IT minds migrated away from dull science fiction science to the heady Wall Street fairyland of the Hedge Fund. There they toiled away, night and day, on computers which would make NASA blush, plugging in predictive programs which would guide the already well to do in becoming even more so. The behavior being predicted was binary in nature, buy or sell. And after many decades of continual development involving some of the best paid mathematicians and theoretical programming architects on Earth, the net cumulative result of these efforts HAVE ZERO EFFICACY.  Given this, what makes anyone think that we can program a car to drive itself?  

Wait! We have autonomous drones which fly and shoot missiles and kill people. No, we do not. The drones that kill people are radio controlled. They have human operators. We do have autonomous munitions, which react well to sensors and can read maps to hit stationary targets. In theory, we could have flying killer robots any day now, but that’s not the benchmark that we are attempting to have parity with. Both flying and killing are comparatively easy. A flying killer robot does not have to stop behind the school bus which is halted at the railroad tracks even though no train is coming.

Wait! Computer models are getting better all the time. We now predict the weather with near flawless accuracy. While this may be true, I remind you of the collective failures at predicting the stock market. The weather follow’s God’s rules—and God is pretty consistent. Driving is the weather, plus human psychology, plus physics in random ratios changing by the second. It’s easy enough for a 16 year old to be passably good at, but beyond the capacity of a machine which adds in groupings of two no matter how kryptonian its sensor array may be nor majestic its branch routines.

Wait! There already ARE self-driving cars! What are you blathering about? Long answer short: they’re not safe.  The only way to make them workable is to designate “auto-pilot” only lanes. If we go down that route, we might as well just have an effective mass transportation system and dispense with cars altogether.

Look, I’m probably going to have to hang up another ‘I was wrong’ sign here. But I cannot help but feel that we are all being sold a load of crud. The first delusion is that the self-driving cars are for us consumers--that we will all be entitled to flop down in our buggies one day muttering “home, James” and be mystically whisked off while we enjoy nappy time. As fun as that sounds, we are not the market. Nor are they attempting to put the Ubers under. It’s the truck drivers that they are out to un-employ. Mark my words, once it becomes obvious that robo-trucks are a hazard to the highways, the trucking firms are going to demand “auto-pilot only” lanes. (And they will ask that the robot delivery trucks be allowed to operate at night in urban areas.) This is all a not very high tech scheme to avoid paying rednecks as well as claim ownership of the public way. I say we nip this in the bud. If you want to send freight across the country largely unattended there’s a thing called the choo-choo. But if you are using the roads that were made for us, for our enjoyment, for our personal transportation, and are sending corporate farm hog sludge from Amarillo to Providence, then we demand that you hire a redneck to guide it. **

A factoid frequently pitched by the computer car people goes “Did you know that the average car is only in operation 2 % of the time?” As if the entire auto thing wasn’t massively wasteful in and of itself. The pitch then goes on to postulate “Imagine a world where an operating car could simply be summoned to your door as needed? When not in use the car moves to places where it is likely to be summoned. In such a future, no one would need personal cars at all.” Imagine a world where your wife summons an automated car at 3:00 AM only to find the podmobile’s faux leather bucket seats encrusted in vomit. Imagine a world where your wife has done her grocery shopping and decides to leave such in the podmobile until someone gets home to hike them in. Wait! She can’t! Imagine a world where at a high volume time of day your wife has to share a podmobile with someone who smells. Or because of the communal nature of podmobiles, she is not allowed to stow stuff for future use, rearrange her face, fart, sing off key or do any of the other personal Zen things the dickless are so fond of. We can’t get women to use mass transportation as it is. By what fit of Imagineering is this going to work? Until you can reprogram women, this is a non-starter.

What appears to be in it for the car companies is a belief that these roving automatic car fleets will need to be replaced on a consistently short-cycle basis. As it stands, the average current car is lasting in excess of a decade. Not surprisingly concurrent with this phenomena, car payments are now extending well past their traditional three year horizon. I don’t know how great these cars are, but few people are prone to give up on something they are still making payments on. And once you’re through paying on something for five to seven years, most folks are content to drive it into the ground. Beyond stockpiles of crud, this is where the rest of the 40% overcapacity is coming from. People are just holding onto cars longer.

Lost in this is Ford’s original idea of making cars affordable. Given the constant median wage in the United States, an affordable car would be from $12,000 to 16,000. If you look around, you will find that there are few if any new cars at that price. There are a number of reasons for this all of which boil down to (A) the car manufacturer needs to make $2000 per unit just to send you a box and (B) the retailer needs to make $1000 just to sell you a box. You can also add in about $5000 worth of mandated crud on each car. That’s $8,000 out the door to give you about a ton of nothing. Any further things, such as a door handle, are going to cost you more. The next big auto innovation, whatever it might be, will address this issue, but for the moment the entire industry is stuck.

Right now selling you a hybrid or electric vehicle is a dicey proposition. Both have systems which may not last the life of the payments. Both require replenishments costing thousands of dollars at the five to seven year mark. This is not a design for a happy customer.

Which brings us to the electric car’s final impediment, the last auto industry distraction. In order to stay in business the auto makers have to sell cars people want to buy. Largely these are the aforementioned Carry Alls in their various plumage. The industry makes good money on these things even though they are entirely a technological and environmental dead end.  It’s good money now, but it is just treading water. The industry as a whole is going to have to pick a future and then go there.

*Tesla’s claim is that they are manufacturing vehicles which they have already sold. In short, everything off of their assembly line already has a buyer.

**The Interstates were not really made “for us” although interconnecting roads were. Prior to the rise of the automobile, the roads in America did not connect. It was the auto industry, and us the consumers, who pushed to put through connecting and improved roads. The interstate system, which is where a lot of the freight travels, was dreamed up by Eisenhower as a military necessity. Like the internet, it just happens to have civilian applications. It was felt that the interstates would encourage intra-American tourism, mostly via car. They were NEVER intended as freightways and the trucks should not have been allowed on them. We have railroads.

Note: Our Grand Opening for the WDMA site had been delayed a bit. We hope to have the front page redesign done relatively soon.

The Flying Car Invented! Again!

The hit of the New York Auto Show is a vehicle which claims to be the world's first Flying Car. It's now received more airplay than any other model at the show. Although pitching them at the Auto Show is a new twist, there is otherwise very little new about either this vehicle or the concept of the Flying Car itself.

In fact, the Flying Car may be one of the most frequently "invented" concepts out there. I have reported on them here before. Every two years, like clockwork, someone invents another one. And each one makes the pitch that such and such is a breakthrough or that it has never been done before. To me, it seems to have been done to death.

Since it's such a seemingly booming (if non existent) field, perhaps the time has come to provide potential manufacturers with an acceptable definition of a Flying Car. That way they would know one when they build one. Unlike the current and previous vendors, I think the average person has a fairly good handle on the concept of what a Flying Car should be. As a service to those people willing to build and/or throw millions of dollars into the development of such, I have come up with a necessary and sufficient...

Definition of a Flying Car

In order to qualify as a 'Flying Car' a vehicle must encompass the following three concepts. 

1. Vehicle must be able to take off and land without a runway or dedicated external support facility of any kind. This almost subsumes the VTOL (vertical take off and landing) function, but could be stripped down to cover any vehicle which does not require an airport or specifically conditioned area from which to take off or land from. Optimally, a Flying Car should be able to take off from traffic and, if need be, land back in traffic without creating undo complications. It is also acceptable if the flying car never has to deal with traffic at all and has its own generally available transit system.

2. Vehicle must be capable of conventional garaging. It must park like a car: in your garage, in your driveway, on the street, at the store and at any other place where conventional consumer commuter vehicles can be found. This means no aviation gas. This means that it can't be the size of a plane,  or a tank or a truck. Ideally, it should be car-shaped or car-sized, at least on the ground. Also ideally,it cannot require  some pit stop  transition phase. If you have to halt it, get out and change the vehicle from a car to a plane or a plane back into a car, it's no more a flying car than a pop up camper is a house.

3. The operation of a Flying Car may be no more complex than that of other conventional consumer commuter vehicles. It can be different than driving a car, however it cannot require training far in excess of what it takes to operate any other common vehicle type. Baked into this idea is that a potential operator not need to possess any specific talent in order to qualify for training to operate the vehicle --and that the training period not exceed that required for other conventional consumer vehicles. No rocket science, no CDL. no professional time suck certification of any kind.   If it requires a pilot's licence to operate, it's a plane and not a car.

Have we actually invented a Flying Car?

No. Since 1937 or so, we have quite copiously failed to invent a Flying Car. Pictured above is the Aerocar, to date the only mass produced vehicle touted as a Flying Car. There was a vehicle very similar to it which appeared in 1937, but the venture quickly failed. Aerocar and its competitor Airphibian are the only two Flying Cars to have made it to the production phase. Introduced in 1948, the Aerocar remained available through 1962. (Production ended in the late 1950s.) The similar Fulton Airphibian was available, in various models, from 1950 to 1956. Neither were actually Flying Cars, but rather driveable aircraft. In short, you can drive them to an airport, take off from the airport, land at an airport and then drive them to your destination. The Aerocar owes its relative success to its economy of acquisition and savings gained through off airport storage. For a plane, it was fairly cheap. And you could use it as a car or store it at your house when it's not being an airplane. The Fulton Airphibian was slightly better as an airplane, but required storing parts of it at the airport. Neither were all that good as cars. The current Terrafugia is more of the same. No one is going to take their 3 wheeled Terrafugia on a supermarket run. Like previous Flying Cars, the Terrafugia is going to be driven to and from the airport-when it's through being shuttled around to car shows.

If it ever makes it into production at all, that is. The majority of the Flying Cars that have been touted thus far never make it much past the prototype and promote phases. Those that aren't driving airplanes are like the device above--a small, dangerous flying thing. The one before the Sky Car here looked like a flying saucer--and there have been a spate of such designs since the 1950s. Unless portable power output develops by leaps and bounds, designs such as this have limited utility. Advances in the un-winged aircraft belong more to the military sector than to the area of commuter vehicles.

Which is not to say that the quest for a Flying Car has few advancements. The Helicopter and, to a lesser extent, the auto-giro, both started as attempts to create a Flying Car. Both efforts fell short, but did advance the field of aviation to some degree.

Unless George Jetson was hiding some mad skills, the actual advent of the Flying Car is a long way off, if not impossible. Today a car that flies is a plane--and quite rightly so. Some pilots may be nitwits, but at least they have put in some effort. I certainly don't want just anyone out there flying around and potentially giving me a roof job. So the concept may be utterly stupid on its face.

We have little to fear currently. Not only have we not invented the Flying Car, we're not close. And I don't care what the next group of rich boys are selling. A Flying Car is a car that flies. Accept no substitution.

Bad Ideas: Four Favorites

There is no inexorable evolutionary march that replaces our bad, old ideas with smart, new ones…. Like crab grass and kudzu, misguided notions are frustratingly resilient, hard to stamp out no matter how much trouble they have caused in the past and no matter how many scholarly studies have undermined their basic claims. (Steven M Walt, Where Do Bad Ideas Come From? Foreign Policy Jan/Feb 2011)

One of the reasons bad ideas seem to linger is that they occasionally work. Some bad ideas are just bad and only seemed to have worked in the past. Other bad ideas once had their day in the sun but have since been outmoded. Other bad ideas are bad simply because they have been done to death. Let us examine four particularly bad ideas which show no sign of going away soon.

1. The Stunt Issue
Magazines are in a bad way of late, so Hil-Gle is basically supportive of any survival tactic that might be tried, More or less. The Stunt Issue, however, has had its day. Our definition of a Stunt Issue is when a magazine suddenly departs from its core niche, generally to explore the niche of another. We are not talking about Cosmo doing a SEX issue or Playboy announcing its Playmate of the Year. That’s hawking your niche. Rather it’s Sports Illustrated doing a swimsuit issue or the news magazines sprouting college guides.

It is the news magazines, all three of them, which have been particularly prone to suddenly jumping from flora to fauna. None of them really does it as well as England’s Economist. Every single issue is a stunt issue of some kind, and in the classic way. As with a newspaper’s special sections, the intention is to reach a whole new crowd of advertisers. It is fine as far as it goes. On top of the usual weighty Economist fare you also get a bonus feature on a focus of some sort, which is usually just as hoity- toity. (And helping one become hoity-toity is the true purpose of The Economist. I speak as a dedicated reader.) Unfortunately our American newsmags do not have any such recourse. They just simply bolt the field whenever there’s a slow news week.

Long time readers will recall our recounting of Newsweek’s grab for pulp fiction fame, which failed to save the magazine primarily due to poor execution. Since Newsweek was transformed into the print blog of the Daily Beast last year and US News has ceased publication altogether, Time has been left alone as the sole news magazine in general distribution. They are now the print monopoly, with a 100% hold on a desirable advertising demographic. This should put them in an entirely golden position, freeing Time to bulk up foreign staffs and launch in depth investigations—two moves which would guarantee a flow of unique material into their pages. With the cuts at newspapers it would be an easy—and obvious—void to fill.



Well, skip that. Like Newsweek, when the news gets slow, Time too reaches for the pulp. This latest one was announced on last Friday’s Morning Joe. As it should happen, this MSNBC program had as one of its regular guests the former editor of Newsweek. Imagine what was going through his head as the editor of Time flopped down this chunk of Science Fiction puffery. Was he trying to rub the poor Newsweek editor’s nose in it?

The cover really isn’t much. Time’s too-cute-to-be-understood title for this is ‘2045 the Singularity’. The basic upswing of this overly imaginative piece is that by the year 2045 man will have merged his senses and bodily functions with those of machines. Time breathlessly claims that through this confluence, people will never again ‘die’. Given that 2045 is about the expiration date for yours truly, I was indeed intrigued.

Yeah, well forget it. Turns out there may well be a simulated me wandering about the Matrix doing pulp magazine history or whatever it is I do, but I will still be quite literally worm food dead. How incredibly underwhelming.



On top of that, they really didn’t sell it all that well. In keeping with our service to all news magazines who attempt to ply pulp fiction water, we have remade their cover as an example. Next time don’t overthink it. If you want to say THE MATRIX is real, do it. Look, all futurism is lies. All you need to do is do it straight and try to be amusing. Singularity? A ‘singularity’ is what happens at the center of a black hole. Any sci fi fan can tell you that.

2. Running For President
You have to wonder what’s going through their minds, sometimes. What normal person would want to be President of the United States—or even a politician in this day and age? Not any, actually. Not in the longest of time.

Given that all potential candidates are a little off to begin with, defining motives involves abnormal parsing. It is only with the ones who know they can’t win that we can even venture rational guesses on. Pat Buchanan ran essentially to increase his stock as a commentator. Pat Robertson ran to increase his standing as a religious leader. Jesse Jackson ran to deflect an investigation into his organization. Sarah Palin may very well run because she might actually win the Republican nomination. But why the hell is Donald Trump running?

Is there something wrong in Trump Land? Or is he seeking to increase his next network deal? It’s one of the two.

But if he tried, could he at least win the Republican nomination. Palin/Trump 2014?

I know we are a little out, but Hil-Gle will go on record predicting a second term for Obama.

3. Playing Hardball With Labor
Despite the paucity of organized labor in the general employment pool, the last few big attempts to break a union have backfired. As I recall, the management orchestrated UPS strike backfired fairly hideously. One wonders what makes the NFL think it can win a lock out with its players? The history of strikes in sports certainly can’t give them much confidence. True, they won the last strike, but that was 20 plus years ago. Since then Baseball nearly crippled itself with a labor action. It still hasn’t come back. The NHL strike didn’t really solve any of that league’s problems. Couple this with the competing United Football League waiting in the wings and the NFL’s actions may have the makings of a modern self-inflicted business disaster. (Bet you didn’t know there was a United Football League. If the NFL blows it, you certainly will.)

4. The Flying Car
Every time I want to wax poetic about how the electric car is the salvation to all of our energy problems, I am reminded of three things: (1) I have yet to even see ONE electric car on the road; (2) electric cars have been manufactured continuously for over 100 years and the concept has yet to catch on; and (3) the Flying Car, the other often predicted next big thing.



About every three years or so there’s another big Flying Car story. It might be the most invented thing in the world. Both the autogiro and the helicopter started off as being flying cars. As opposed to that, they both became “Something Else That Flies But You Still Can’t Park It In Your Garage.” Pictured is the Flying Car in its post WWII iteration. I think they made five of them.

Our cover comic book is from A.A. Wynn’s Ace line of magazines, which seems to have been done by Harry “A” Chesler’s shop. The Four Favorites, who weren’t really a team and seldom ever met each other in their stories, often got into far more harrowing situations on their covers than they ever did in their stories. (This was a problem Superman also had periodically.) It was sometimes unclear which four characters constituted the Favorites. As a group, they didn’t have much in the way of variety. None of them had secret identities or even day jobs. Magno and Lash Lightning had essentially the same powers, as did Captain Courageous and the Unknown Soldier. Captain Courageous and the Unknown Soldier weren’t even people, but rather spirit beings who showed up whenever trouble was brewing—great for the in and outs of four page adventures, but not much when it came to character development. Making it look like you have several appealing ideas when you only have to half thought out ones may be the oldest bad idea of them all.

Next: I am hoping to clean up the website a bit over this next long weekend. If my research comes back, the next blog post will be on a prominent pulp era celebrity.