Free Republic

Was [Hitler] equating Jews with Communists?

Hitler hated Jews (thereby attracting antisemites - and antisemitism was pretty mainstream in Germany, and FTM was far from unknown in America) and was competing directly with the Communists for the support of those who hated/feared (actual) liberalism.

Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under 'communism' and 'fascism'. As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939,

'the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.’

No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.

What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as 'the general welfare'. There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.
____________— F A Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (May, 1945 Reader’s Digest Condensed Version)

If you read The Road to Serfdom (Reader’s Digest Condensed Version here), you will see that FA Hayek used the term “liberal” to denote people who today would be called “conservatives” in America. That is because Hayek, an Austrian, learned English in America before the meaning of “liberal” was essentially inverted, according to Safire's New Political Dictionary, in the 1920s. And the meaning of “liberal” was not changed in Britain, where Hayek wrote Serfdom during WWII.

Well, Bernie, the reason oil prices went up is perfectly simple:            

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

The minute Biden “read the riot act” to all the oil companies, telling them that oil was going to become a non factor in the economy, the result was directly and exactly “a conspiracy against the public, and a contrivance to raise prices.” Far from demanding that they compete at arm’s link to satisfy society’s need/desire for energy, as any liberal antimonopolist would do. Biden’s dictum constituted permission and encouragement for the oil companies to cease competing. So they did, reducing their expenditures on producing more oil and reducing the supply - forcing up the price of oil precisely as a cartel would do.

In the past year I have been listening to “reason,” as Bernie would have it, to the extent that I now can relate to Elon Musk’s prediction that - a critical tipping point having been passed due in no small part to abusive Biden action - battery electric vehicles have become seriously competitive with gasoline-fueled vehicles. I have bought what for me is a serious chunk of Tesla stock as a result. But - recall the “Osborne Effect” - it is at present a good time to hold off on buying a new car, if you can.

The problem is precisely that BEVs (read almost exclusively Teslas) have been coming down in price and can be expected to continue to do so in the future. Which means that used Tesla prices face serious price competition from new Teslas. So if you’re considering a new car, sharpen your pencil to see if you should prefer a new Tesla - but altho I wouldn’t expect a Tesla’s performance to degrade I would expect declining resale value. So try not to buy - any car - unless you can be happy holding on to it for the longish term.

Bitcoin^{The dollar} is not a business which produces anything. Bitcoin^{The dollar} has value because people buy into it, but there isn’t any underlying business operation with bitcoin^{the dollar}.

missing from that laundry list is the fact that the transmission of electricity is not at all 100% efficient.

And at the end of the day, that electricity probably came from the burning of a "fossil" fuel. And if it did somehow come from wind or solar - those are not at all 100% efficient, nor anything nearly reliable.

I’m not married to the idea that we must stop burning oil, natural gas, and coal yesterday. Even Elon Musk doesn't think that.

When we’re talking about solar and wind power, “efficiency” is a flawed concept. We’d like to turn vast amounts of solar energy into electric power available when and where we want it. Viewed from that overall perspective, our “efficiency” of converting solar energy into electric power is basically zero because we have hardly any of the earth covered with solar panels. ‘Way more solar panels would be valuable, but no one is putting them on my roof, or yours, for free.

The question isn’t “efficiency,” it’s bang for the buck. The learning curve and economies of scale are changing the bang for the buck equation in favor of solar and batteries. And in favor of “more than enough” solar panels, allowing the use of fewer stationary batteries. And less or even no fossil fuel consumption.

Efficiency becomes crucial at “the tip of the spear,” - ie, where the rubber hits the road. There, efficiency plays into lower requirements everywhere up the supply chain.

electricity is “100% available” energy

Although much more than an ICE, electric motors are not 100 percent efficient. Chargers are not 100 percent efficient. Batteries do not take up the charge, nor discharge at 100 percent efficiency. Nor is the entire drivetrain 100 percent efficient.

All true, in the real world. In an ideal, lab bench, world, I make no doubt that conversion of electrical energy to mechanical work could (e.g., using superconductors in the motor) be done with awfully close to 100% efficiency. And I did use scare quotes around the expression “100%” available.

But I must quibble about “drive train” efficiency - in that no transmission is required for the EV. One less (mechanically complex) part of the drive train . . .

Tesla actually offers insurance to owners of its cars in some states.

To me, the issue of safe transportation is ultimately an issue for regulation by civil tort law. It seems to me that when Tesla concludes that its “FSD” software, unsupervised by humans, is safer than the preponderance of human drivers, Tesla should make a push in one or a very few low-population states to get “licenses” for unsupervised computerized driving with Tesla insuring the concomitant risks.

And when that results in a tort, and the cry is raised to ban “cars without drivers,” that opposition would logically be answered by pointing to any accidents unambiguously caused by human error, and asking for proof that FSD would not have prevented it. It being unanswerable either way.

That appears to be the solution to highway carnage in the long run. This approach would lead to casualties, but we are already suffering casualties now.

On Gutfeld, Tyrus made the point that if all whites are erased from history, none of the evils of history will be attributable to whites.

Prayer of agreement bump.

Prayerful bump.

That’s Graphite, not Graphene

Not that you’ve ever seen any graphite in the absence of graphene . . .

Wow.

Great article, very fine post.

[Elon Musk] works hard, he is wealthy(very), and intelligent, has visions of possibilities for the future and he works hard (yes I repeat myself).. so yes, in a way, elon is above the law, due to the other laws of action he practices day to day.

Jordan Peterson described Musk as perhaps one in a thousand in creativity, and one in a thousand in conscientiousness, making his combination of those traits one in a million. And on reflection, upped that to as much as one in a billion.

I don’t LIKE all that he says, believes or implicates... but he due to wealth, action, effort and some vital inspiration... IS above the law. In that aspect, so is Donald Trump... above the law.

When Musk bought Twitter and turned it into “X,” it was probably a braver act than he even realized, considering the corruption he was going up against. It is widespread corruption in high places which thinks to be above the law, not Elon Musk or even Donald Trump.

According to Scott Adams (who says he was a bank’s loan officer before he was told that because of his not being black or female he was never going to be promoted) describes the charge against Trump that he inflated the value of the collateral he offered for his loan as being presumptively true and utterly irrelevant. In the sense that no bank ever takes a loan applicant’s word for the value of offered loan collateral. Ever. Exaggeration of offered collateral’s value is nominally illegal but absolutely routine. And the bank that Trump “defrauded” testified but only during the sentencing hearing (wonder why they didn’t get the chance during the prosecution phase) that the bank would like more of Trump’s business. Some criminal, some crime!

“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.”

I don’t think Elon Musk fits that mold perfectly.

“I’d give anything to go back to a time before the internet existed. It was better.”

I think things were much the same only we were unaware. The internet and independent journalism have shed much light on the truth about the world. Growing up you had to believe Cronkite or Huntley/Brinkley. They were both propaganda. While there is much to despise about the Internet, it has exposed the dark underbelly that needs to be exposed.

The irony of using an internet web site to communicate with strangers about the internet has to be noted . . .

I think it was below 2.5 seconds! I want to say 2.3 seconds.

Way wrong - I guess it was 2.6 sec. Slow.

Having watched today’s cybertruck event, I have the following comments:

• Elon insisted that the vehicle is a practical, useful truck. He showed it out-pulling a serious standard pickup.

• OTOH he showed video of the “Beast” version of the vehicle out-accelerating a Porche. He even asserted that it could out-accellerate a Porche while towing another Porche. And as he discussed the vehicle, Musk very easily fell into referring to it as a “car.” I forget the exact zero-to-sixty time he gave, but I think it was below 2.5 seconds! I want to say 2.3 seconds.

The Beast model will set you back $100K. But if you were thinking about a Porche . . .

A commentator asserted that a businessman who bought one for business purposes could deduct the whole price in the year he bought it. How many businessmen could actually turn down a deal like that! Musk himself is on record, months ago, that a cybertruck would be his own personal drive - wonder why? 😊

I for one took a second - and third - look at $TSLA because of the way Musk handled “Twitter," as it then was.

There is no gainsaying that Tesla, under Musk’s tutelage, has argued for, and adjusted its business practice to exploit, policies which - while (at least marginally) reduced environmental impact - have been engines of inflation (see, the “Inflation Reduction” Act). I like that not at all. But the existence of such policies, and their past consequences, is water under the bridge.

Where we now sit, the technology of rechargeable battery effectiveness and of production efficiency has been substantially advanced. The learning curve, if plotted on a linear scale, looks sort of ill-defined. But if plotted on a log scale against the log of the total quantity of any particular good which has ever been produced, fits very well to a straight line. This is Wright’s Law, first published in 1937 by an aircraft production engineer (not related to Orville and Wilbur). If you predict that the quantity produced will increase at a geometric rate, your Wright’s Law prediction turns into a Moore’s Law prediction. And we all know how exciting that can be.

All prejudice caused by past low cost and modest utility of rechargeable batteries notwithstanding, the system of storing electric energy and converting that energy to driveshaft torque via electric motor(s) was - sooner or, realistically, later - going to become competitive with our beloved internal combustion engines. But, accelerated by expensive Democrat policy, the quantity produced has grown so much that the cost and effectiveness of BEVs is now reasonable, and can be expected to soon become more than reasonable.

Recognizing this, I have devoted what is (I hope) discretionary investment in TSLA. TSLA is not for the faint hearted, because its market price is volatile and jumping in and out of it looks to me like sheer gambling. If you aren’t ready to hold thru thick and thin, don’t buy in the first place.

😊

I have an electric remote control golf trolley. It originally came with a 26 lbs led acid battery.

I was able to swap that out for a Lithium-ion weighing 6 lbs and swapped that out for one that weighs 3 lbs. I do not notice a change in performance.

I’m not familiar with the term "remote golf trolley.” Is that a kind of electrical caddy, so that you walk the course but don’t carry your bag of clubs?

I tried golf back (way back) in my early 20’s, but I was terrible at it and gave it up pretty quickly.

What percentage of the gross weight of the trolley did the 26-pound lead acid battery constitute? That would suggest how much difference a 3-pound lithium ion battery would make to the acceleration/hill climbing ability of the trolley. Probably less percentage effect on top speed.