What's On The Menu

You can't order Kung Pao Chicken at an Italian Bistro!

I had a dream last night I was at a restaurant with some of my old friends.  It was an Italian bistro and they had the usual pasta dishes and the veal cutlets - good hearty food.  But one friend, who was younger, and believed "The customer is always right!" said, "I'll have Kung Pao Chicken, I'm in the mood for Chinese food!"

The waiter responded, "Ma'am, this is an Italian restaurant, we serve Italian food.  What we have to offer is on the menu in front of you.  What can I get for you?"

But she was having none of it.  "Kung Pao Chicken, like I said!  I'm the customer and I get to have exactly what I want!  No excuses!"

I woke up in a cold sweat and realized why I don't go out to dinner with old friends like that.   But it got me to thinking about the election and the complaints I read online (which are likely from Russian troll-bots) along the lines of "Is this the best we can do with Presidential candidates?  Maybe Biden or Trump should step aside and let someone else run!"

Andrew Yang, the ersatz billionaire (even moreso that Trump) has been beating this drum - Biden should "step aside" and let someone else run!  Yea, someone else!  Maybe Andrew Yang?  Talk about a self-serving argument!

The reality of politics is that you have a menu in front of you and you can only order off the menu.  There are no secret "off-menu" choices that the kitchen can make for you.  And while you can stamp your feet and hold your breath until you turn blue in the face, the kitchen can't make you Kung Pao chicken without the proper ingredients and expertise.

But this does not mean you don't have a choice or that your choices don't matter or that they are poor choices.

The media is having an orgasm over the "debate" as the media likes to generate controversy and drama because they make money this way.  I generally don't watch these "debates" as I am not an idiotic "undecided voter" who thinks "both sides are the same, so why bother?" and other attention-getting statements.  While both political parties are indebted to corporate sponsors and big-money donors (act shocked, and then grow up and grow a pair) they do have markedly different philosophies.

And bear in mind, we are not anointing a king, but electing an administration, which includes twenty-five cabinet members.  Not only that, there are appointments to various administrative agencies, from the Patent Office to the Post Office to the Pentagon - and yes, who is appointed and their philosophies makes a huge difference in how our government is run.

Then there are judicial appointments, which, as we saw during the Trump years, makes a huge, huge difference in how our lives work out.  People are upset at the Supreme Court, but fail to realize it was Trump and a Republican Congress that put the conservative majority there - a majority that is engaging in "judicial activism" in redefining the separation of powers itself.  According to the Supremes, unless Congress specifically authorizes a regulation in excruciating detail, the administration is powerless to interpret and enforce the laws.  This reduces the role of the Executive Branch to little more than an HR office.  Might as well toss the C.F.R. in the trash - promulgating regulations is so last-year!

So yes, it makes a difference who you choose, and you can only choose what is on the menu.  That is still one helluva choice and bear in mind in many parts of the world (e.g., China, Russia) you have no choices.  And one "choice" on the menu this year is to eliminate all future choices and let the waiter order for you, in perpetuity.  One bowl of gruel, coming right up!

But what about third-party candidates?  Why not have a system like in Europe?  Well, taking aside the problem our European friends are having right now, they have Parliamentary Democracies which are structurally different from ours.  Their system is designed to have a plurality of parties and as a result form coalitions of power - which often fall apart.  I am not saying one system is better or worse than the other, only that the odds of completely re-writing our Constitution to move to that system is about as likely as the EU moving toward our two-party system.

It just isn't going to happen.  It isn't on the menu.  So stop trying to order it and having a hissy-fit when they tell you it is not available. That isn't a practical solution to anything.  But yea, when I was younger, I thought I was a genius for pining for pie-in-the-sky ideas.  Then I grew up.

Third party candidates are spoilers, plain and simple. And in a way, they are like the obscure menu items that some restaurants offer on the back pages of the menu that no one in their right mind orders because the kitchen rarely makes it and as a result, it sucks.  It is akin, as I noted before, to my friend ordering an obscure pasta dish at a pier-side shrimp shack.  It not only sucked, it arrived after everyone else had finished eating.  Trying to "get what you want" often backfires.

Crazy Kennedy à la Brain Worm is a poor menu choice.

I mentioned earlier that "debates" are sort of pointless as most people make up their minds early on, based on their political views.  A die-hard MAGA fan isn't going to suddenly change their mind because Biden made a good argument.  Similarly, a pro-choice liberal Democrat isn't going to suddenly become a Trumper because "He didn't seem so bad" in the debates.

The whole political debate thing goes back more than a century.  One of the most famous debates was the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.  Lincoln lost.  But the main issue - slavery - was eventually decided against Douglas' position.  I would not place too much weight on debates.

The Nixon-Kennedy debate of 1960 was another famous debate, this time televised. Perhaps the candidates back then were closer together in terms of political spectrum. Kennedy expanded the Vietnam War, as did Nixon, before the latter finally ended it when it was apparent it would never be won and it was draining the coffers of the Treasury. Supposedly, people who watched the debate on television thought Kennedy "won" while those who listened on radio thought Nixon the winner.  I suspect that rural voters with radios tended to vote Republican and city-dwellers with their newfangled tee-vee sets, tended Democratic.  Again, I doubt the debate changed many minds.

The Sarah Palin debate was interesting only in that it sealed the fate of the McCain campaign.  And I guess that is one reason why debates can be important. Elections in the US are close (despite the lopsided appearances of the Electoral College).  And those people who vote based on personality or "which candidate you'd like to have a beer with" or "which candidate eats his pizza with a fork" and other trivial bullshit, can sway an election one way or another.

Trump won because Hillary lost. Biden won, in 2020, the States that Trump beat Hillary in, in 2016 simply because he wasn't Hillary.  I am not taking a dig at the former First Lady, just recognizing that two decades of Hillary-hate on right-wing media seeped into American culture.  Particularly among blue-collar workers, admitted support for Hillary would be akin to announcing you were gay. Now Trump, that's a guy who grabs 'em by the pussy!

Hence why Democracy fails sometimes.

Obama, of course, famously "lost" his first debate (who decides who is the "winner" - the media?) and went on to rout Romney in the second and win re-election.  Maybe Biden is playing the long game here - setting exceptions low, so even a mediocre performance later on is seen as a "win."  It's a trap, Donnie, run!

Myself, picking a candidate is a very simple proposition.  I choose the candidate who is least likely to set up a death camp and have me exterminated.  I know, that is selfish, but that's just me.  And in the past, that seemed like a bit of a long-shot proposition, of course.  But this time around, we have a candidate who has promised to make himself dictator-for-life and extract revenge on his enemies and surrender the country to Russia.

I mean, gee, it is a tough choice!  After all, Biden is old.

Denial - A Powerful And Dangerous Emotion!

When tragedies occur, the first thing people do is deny they happened.

When the Titanic hit the iceberg, the first thing most people did was deny anything was wrong.  After all, it was the largest ship in the world and what could happen hitting some chunk of ice?  And when a steward said there was nothing to worry about, this validated their lack of concern.  Have another glass of champagne!  Thinking about a freezing death in the icy Atlantic certainly was not fun, right?

Others, seeing the danger, took action.  And if more people did the same, perhaps more passengers and crew could have been saved.  Myself, I would be trying to cook up some sort of raft made of deck chairs, life preservers, and whatever wood I could find (doors, bed frames, furniture).  Beats standing around denying it is happening!

What got me started about this was the tragic story of Christine Maggiore, who was diagnosed with HIV back in the 1990s.   She was seeking treatment when she ran into some hokum holistic "doctor" who claimed that AIDS was not caused by the HIV virus and the whole thing was a hoax or conspiracy.

She went on to found an AIDS-denial organization which actually convinced the President of South Africa of this nonsense - causing untold thousands to die needlessly.

And Ms. Maggiore?  Yea, she died, too - of AIDS, but not before her daughter did - who went untreated.

Why did she go down this horrific road?  Denial, plain and simple.  When people are confronted with horrific things, it is comforting to live in denial and pretend they are not happening.  If you had HIV back in the 1990's, it was largely a death sentence.  So to avoid confronting the horror, why not say it doesn't exist?  Problem was, before she died, treatments did become available - working treatments - that would have saved her life and that of her child.

We saw the same thing with school shootings.  The horror of grade-school children being blasted by some armed nut-job is too much to bear.  So isn't it comforting to pretend it didn't happen?  And while you are at it, go and mock those who insist on the truth - as Ms. Maggiore did with AIDS activists.  By shouting down the truth, you can live in a comfortable insulated igloo cooler of denial.  "I can't hear you! La! La! La!"

Or take anti-vaxxers.  Please.  The prospect of a pandemic killing millions of Americans (and millions more worldwide) was too grim to bear.  So people reached out to the life-ring of anti-vaxxer denialism.  CoVid didn't exist!  Or if it did, it was no worse than the flu.  I know I felt the latter - at first.  And if you want to stay in your denial comfort zone, then attack those who are telling you the truth!  The vaccines are the problem, not the solution!

Right? Wrong.

The list goes on and on.  Trumpism is a major form of denialism.  Trump famously said he could shoot someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue and get away with it.  And over the years, he has done one horrific thing after another and yet his simps refuse to see it.  They retreat into denial - latching on to far-right news outlets that tell them that anything bad Trump did never happened or if it did, it was part of some conspiracy to get him.

Denial is a powerful and dangerous emotion.  There is a lot of sunk cost fallacy involved.  If you engage in denial early on ("The Titanic isn't sinking!") it gets harder and harder as time goes by to change your mind ("Get in a lifeboat! Now!").  You have to admit you were wrong and that is hard for most of us - perhaps all of us - to do.

So people double-down on conspiracy theories, alternate facts, and fake news.  They long ago forgot what the point was, other than to "own the libs!" whatever that means.  I don't think they even know, anymore.

And since people attach such personal feelings to denial, it is hard to convince them otherwise.  In fact, a head-on approach often backfires, as the person you are confronting will say you are just an alarmist and that your attempts to convince them otherwise are evidence that they are correct and you are wrong. "But I was just down in the orlop deck and it was knee-deep in water!" you say. "But of course!" they counter, "The orlop deck is below the waterline.  They were probably just washing the floors and you misunderstood the situation!  Don't you think the Captain would say something if we were sinking?" (The old appeal-to-authority gag).

You can't convince them of anything so don't try.  Your trying to convince them otherwise only serves to push them into a corner.  They feel they are being personally attacked and will lash out and entrench their denial even further.  Just do your own thing and hope they come around eventually.  When they come to the truth by themselves, they don't feel they are "wrong" just changing their mind. And of course, it pays to lead by example - they see you getting in the lifeboat and they might start to wonder.

But confronting denial is pointless - like trying to deprogram a cult member (which is, in fact, the same exact thing - a cult member denies they are in a cult until the Kool-Aid comes out). The harder you try, the more they cling to it.  After all, the cult leader told them you would try to convince them to leave the cult!  And here you are, making the very arguments the cult leader said you would make.  You are doing more harm that good by trying to convince them to leave.

I felt sad reading about Ms. Maggiore and her child.  I had never heard of her or her organization.  Apparently the "Foo-Fighers" were big promoters of her organization and AIDS-deniers themselves.  They quietly took down their postings when it became clear they were an embarrassment to the band. Quite frankly, I cannot name a single one of their songs and I doubt I missed much from that brain trust!

But that is probably another good reason celebrities should keep their political views to themselves.  No profit in alienating a portion of you fan base!

Red Lobster Redux

Red Lobster is in trouble - again.  This time, by design.

I wrote about Red Lobster a decade ago, shortly before Darden group spun it off to private investors.  If you read (or watch) the history of many of these restaurant chains, you realize they are bought, sold, and spun-off many times in their history, before sputtering out over time - which they all seem to do.

Joe Chef comes up with a restaurant idea, "Joe's Burger Shack" and pours his life's blood into it.  It makes a little money and he expands it into a three-restaurant chain.  He is doing OK and a large corporate owner of several chains, "GoodFoodCo," buys him out for a few million dollars, which is good for him, as he had no capital to expand further, and he was running out of energy and would have gone bankrupt eventually if he kept trying to "go it alone."

GoodFoodCo quickly expands the chain to 25 States and three overseas locations, both by franchising and through company-owned "stores".  Before long, it has restaurants in every state - hundreds nationwide - and has expanded into 25 foreign countrues.  You can go to a Joe's Burger Shack in Beijing or Tel Aviv.  They are everywhere.  They even selll Joe's signature burger sauce at Walmart!

Over time, the novelty of smashed burgers dies off and the franchisees get antsy.  GoodFoodCo cuts back on advertising and raises the prices of supplies - which captive franchisees must buy from GoodFoodCo.  As franchisees go bust (including some that are chains themselves!) GoodFoodCo buys them back - for cheap.  Once they own a majority of the "stores" the advertising budget suddenly increases (magically!) and GoodFoodCo shows a healthy profit.

Then, for whatever reason, GoodFoodCo spins off Joe's Burger Shack to Rayleon, Inc., a manufacturer of nuclear missiles or whatever, who wants to "diversify" their portfolio away from the defense industry.  I guess they think they can apply their business practices to the restaurant world.  The results are predictable, and the new menu items ("Joe's Atomic Burger!") flop.  More franchisees go bust and company-owned stores close, one after another.  The abandoned hulks of Joe's Burger Shacks dot the landscape.  Even the original location has closed!

Rayleon then spins-off the remains of Joe's Burger Shack to Kraven, Krakhed & Klegal ("KKK"), a group of "private equity" investors, who load up the chain with massive amounts of debt and come up with a "turnaround" plan for the chain.  KKK then sells off the land that the Burger Shacks are located on, to another company, LandCo, that the principals of KKK own a large part of.  The Burger Shack chain then pays an exorbitant rent to LandCo.  They do the same with the "intellectual property" of Joe's Burger Shack.  Joe, now retired in Florida, is chagrined to discover his likeness has been sold off - he gets a cease-and-desist letter from the law firm of  Dewey, Screwem, & Howe, after he tries to open a restaurant in Ft. Lauderdale, using his smiling face as a logo.

Of course, none of this is sustainable.  The principals of KKK are making money through their land leases and intellectual property royalties.  They are also raking in huge salaries they get for "managing" this demolition-derby.

Where they go from there depends on the market and timing.  Generally, it is a good idea to pump up the numbers (and hype them with a "roadshow" as well as online) and then do an IPO.  This allows the principals of KKK to sell their interest in Burger Shack (or "BS" as the kids call it) to "retail investors" on Reddit, who believe, beyond all logical reasoning, that this "meme stonk" is going places.

The dumpster is indeed a place.  But thanks to the Internet, you can keep these geeky incels buying the junk stock forever - convincing them that a dying restaurant chain will suddenly turn around and make billions overnight.  Float rumors of a Burger Shack Meme Coin and watch them wet themselves with excitement.  When it all goes horribly wrong, simply blame Joe Biden and the Democrats for their pesky SEC regulations -  that's what ended the party - right?

Now, I am not saying this is what happened to Redneck Lobster, but the word on the street is that what is driving the chain towards bankruptcy isn't "endless shrimp" or anything like that, but the fact they cannot service their debts. It is Sears all over again, with the death spiral of lack of foot traffic compounded by cost-cutting to try to break even - which leads to a loss of foot traffic.

I remember visiting a Sears in Ithaca, New York and feeling like I was in an abandoned bus station.  Stained ceiling tiles were falling to the floor and whole empty sections of the store were cordoned-off with Police tape (crime scene?).  I did buy a weed-wacker, one of five available (open box) for what I presume was below cost.  It was a sad sight.

But you can make money this way - in a "bust out."  Like the movie The Producers (and Broadway musical, which then became a movie again), you can make more money from a flop than from a hit.   When the musical fails, no one demands forensic accounting as to where the money all went (and thus discover that the musical was "oversold" by 1000%).  It is only when you make a profit that people demand an accounting!  Mel Brooks is to blame for modern Corporate practices, it seems.

So we are seeing the final death throes of Red Lobster.  Or not.  They may sell the tattered remains to some other operator, or the remnants will emerge from bankruptcy court, only to be bought out by another "private equity" firm, who will close stores, revamp the menu, show three quarters of increasing profits, and then do an IPO.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

E-Bikes? Cool New Toy? Illegal Motorcycles? E-Assist For The Elderly? Spawn of Satan Himself? (You Decide)

E-Bikes are here to stay,  This gives me mixed feelings.

We like to ride our "beach cruiser" bikes on the 20+ miles of bucolic bike paths here on our island.  When we first moved here, I rode a lot - making cheesy videos along the way.  But as I get older, I find myself riding less and less.  Perhaps we need to ride more.

In the last 10 years or so, we've seen the rise of the e-bike, from primitive early models to bicycles-with-e-assist, to full-blown roadworthy motorcycles or at least mopeds, with DOT-spec lighting and brakes and whatnot.

I had mixed feelings about them.  They can go fast, and on a bucolic winding bike path, a mini-motorcycle going 25 MPH or more doesn't mix well with children on sidewalk bikes or elderly pedestrians walking their dogs.  On the other hand, so many of our friends gave up on bicycling as they got older, as they no longer had the muscle mass they had in their 40s or 50s.  Past age 50, you body gives up and slowly starts dying.  You can delay the process, but not avoid it entirely.

A friend of ours had two spanking new e-bikes with zero miles on them.  They bought them, but due to balance issues, decided instead to go with three-wheelers (also popular with our age group).  So he says, "I'll let you have 'em - cheap!"

I didn't want to take advantage of a friend, but he insisted on the price and we went to look at them.  Mark always had the idea in the back of his mind that someday, maybe at age 70, an e-bike might be the ticket to continued mobility.  And that makes sense - we see a lot of older folks riding e-bikes, keeping up with their children and grandchildren on conventional bikes.  If not for the e-bike, grandma would have stayed home.

On the other hand, is this another sign of the end times - where we rely more and more on electronic assists to the point where we become fat blobs with no muscle strength?  It is a disturbing thought, as so much of research and technology today is directed at artificial means of enhancing our strength, from muscle assists to entire suits of electronic servos that do everything for you.  Good news for the paralyzed or those with muscular dystrophy.  But eventually these things trickle down to the fit and able, much as the electric shopping carts at Walmart have become fat-mobiles.

The above video is an excerpt from the Pixar movie Wall-E.  In a not-so-distant future, the planet becomes overwhelmed by consumer product trash from the wholesale club, that humans leave for a perpetual space cruise.  Hoverchairs are provided - according to an archived advertisement - as a way for "granny" to join the fun.  But as years go by, everyone ends up in a hoverchair, so obese as to be unable to even walk or get up, if they fall down.  The "Otto-Pilot" a form of AI, merely wants to keep the humans anesthetized and wallowing in a sea of consumerism - perpetually.

People end up spending all their lives in the hoverchair, drinking their meals from "big gulp" cups and staring into virtual screens, wondering what new amusement might distract them for yet another day.  It was all-too-frighteningly-real sixteen years ago.  Since then, this behavior has become normalized.  We wallow in fast-food and sit and watch My 600-lb life and think nothing of 250-lb children or 350-lb teens.  And "screen time"?  It has taken over our lives.

Although maybe this too, shall pass.  I find myself turning away from the false friend that is the phone.  So much of the "content" to day is click-bait and AI-generated.  A recent posting purports to show "rare pink dolphins" which according to Snopes.com actually exist, although they are albino dolphins with a very light pink hue.  The posting - which was quickly taken down - showed shocking pink dolphins which looked like a bad photoshop job.  Clearly AI content. And text content? Almost all AI these days.

The only ones "reading", liking, and commenting on these AI posts are other AI-bots.  You guys go ahead and have an AI-party with each other.  We humans are not really intrigued.  That is the weird thing about AI is that it is really boring and maybe that is one way to spot AI content - the boredom factor.

But getting back to e-bikes, I was hesitant to buy them as I wasn't really in the market even if the price was such a bargain.  I felt like I was one step closer to the hoverchair.  And quite frankly, our regular bikes have been gathering dust as of late.  No point in even keeping them, now.

What's next?  e-Kayaks? We used to call those motorboats.  And yea, they do exist, too!

Pretty soon, I'll be just a brain-in-a-beaker!

EV Market Crashing or Booming? Or Neither? (Bureau of Specious Statistics Strikes Again!)

EV sales are down - or up - depending on how you look at it.

I saw this chart online and it was accompanied by text proclaiming that Tesla sales are "cratering."  Even if we assume the data is correct (and nothing on the Internet is ever a lie or just AI-generated crap!) the "meme" overstates the case quit a bit.

The first thing to notice is that they are comparing sales from the first quarter of 2024 with the first quarter of 2023.  This is a common gag in the auto-journalist business as they argue that car sales are seasonal (which they can be) and thus comparing the same quarter to that of the year prior is valid.  However, this technique doesn't take into account other things, such as the overall economy slowing down (or speeding up) - factors out of the control of any one company.

Funny thing, too, as "Auto Journalists" (which are now auto-mated, apparently) are all-too-willing to compare, say, the fourth quarter of 2023 with the third, if it makes Tesla look bad - or good - depending on what they set out to prove in the first place.

The second thing to notice is that while Tesla sales may be "cratering" they still sell (in America) more EVs than all other makers combined.  If that's a "crater" it's one helluva nice one.  They are still Number 1 in the EV market, by a wide margin.

The third thing is that Ford sold over a half-million vehicles in Q1 2024, and that is just one company.  The EV market is still a tiny slice of the overall car and truck market in the US.  Teslas seem to be "everwhere" only because, like VW Beetles in the early 1960s, they were so noticeable compared to the rest of the vehicle population.  I  was passed by a "Cybertruck" on the causeway the other day (he was doing 50 in a 25 zone and cut me off - Tesla drivers are the new BMW drivers!) and the only reason I remember it was that I was temporarily blinded by the sheer ugliness of the damn thing.  If it had been a Ford or Chevy or Ram, I would have forgotten about it in five minutes.

So, we are talking about a tiny market share here when talking about EVs. Yet the incel simping neckbeard stans have bid up the price of the Tesla "meme stonk" to the point where it's "market cap" is greater than companies making five times more vehicles and greater profits.  But as we know, "market cap" only reflects what the chumps paid for the last share sold, and doesn't reflect the real value of the company - or indeed, anything.

Tesla is due for a reckoning in its share price and place in the auto world.  The cars have not been updated for many years and newer designs from mainstream automakers look and feel more modern.  Tesla's latest creation, the "cybertruck" is the butt of jokes - and has been compared (unfavorably) to the Pontiac Aztec, which in its defense, had a hatchback tent that actually worked and sold for a few hundred dollars, as compared to a few thousand.

Musk's "pay package" has basically gutted Tesla like a fish - taking away billions of dollars in capital that could have been used to fund new R&D but instead is being set ablaze on the dumpster fire that is Twitter.

But that's just the sideshow.  EV sales were destined to tank after a while, once the "early adopters" who were willing to pay top-dollar for a Tesla already bought one.  To make EVs work, in a real-life sense, you need a charging station near your home or in your home or at your place of work.  While the charging network has expanded considerably, the average middle-class or lower-middle-class person living in an apartment doesn't have access to a charging station or, in many cases, even a guaranteed parking space.

People have noted before that the idea of home solar and home charging stations (once the backbone idea behind Tesla, with its acquisition of Solar City) only works for people who own their own home, plan on staying there for quite a while, and have disposable income to spend on these things.  A friend of mine (recently deceased) put a set of leased solar panels on his house.  He also cooked up his own diesel fuel in his back yard.  He was a tinkerer and hobbyist and could afford these things.

He sold the house long before he died and the word is, the new owner wasn't too keen on the solar panels.  Something went awry with the system (most likely the inverter circuitry) and the quoted cost to repair is was far, far more than the benefit of charging back into the grid, particularly now that Georgia Power only pays wholesale rates to home solar users, for surplus electricity.  I wonder if this is an isolated incident or a trend.  Already, home solar installs have fallen off a cliff due to higher interest rates and decreased rates for buying back excess power.

Could the same happen to EV sales?  Overall, as the chart above shows, EV sales are up (except for Tesla).  There are reports that some EV owners (as many as 46%?) trade-in their EVs - for one reason or another - for an IC-engine car.  Hertz dumped 20,000 EVs - mostly Teslas - in favor of IC engine cars.  For the rental market, you want a mid-level Camry which any idiot can drive without a half-hour of training.  Hertz's sale of 20,000 Teslas may explain the dip in Tesla sales.

No matter how you slice it, though, the EV is a product of left-wing thinking.  You can't be a global-warming denier and sell EVs.  You can't decry government subsidies on your social media site and then rake them in with your EV factory.  It makes no sense at all to be right-wing and the largest maker of EVs in the world (at least for a time).  Could that explain why Musk is apparently trying to destroy his own company?  He is like a teenage alt-right follower tearing down his Bernie Sanders poster from his bedroom wall, only to replace it with a MAGA sign.  Go far enough left, you end up right.

All that being said, the chart above hardly shows a "cratering" in Tesla sales. It could, however, be a foreshadowing of things to come, both for Tesla and the EV market as a whole,

My take?  The car market in the USA circa 1910 was dominated by super-expensive automobiles for the very wealthy. The "Three P's" - Peerless, Packard, and Pierce-Arrow were the epitome of automobile luxury and technology. Then came the Model T, Chevrolet, and then the model A - inexpensive cars not designed to last a lifetime, but a few scant years. Only Packard survived the depression and even then, just barely,  By the end of the 1950's, it was gone as well.  The lifespan of many a company is measured only in a scant few decades - and pioneers are often kicked under the bus.

I suspect there will be a shakeout in the EV business in short order.  In order to expand to a greater market, EVs need to not only meet gas engine cars in price, but beat them.  If government mandates for fuel economy and emissions are to be met, the mainstream automakers will have to sell a lot of EVs, and that means expanding the market beyond the stans and simps.  When an EV costs less than a IC engine car, the middle-class will be more likely to buy them.

And there is no reason why an EV can't cost less  - just take away stupid screen shit that no one wants or needs, or blindingly fast 0-60 times that just waste range.  When you get down to it, an EV is not more complicated than an IC-engine car, it is simpler.

It should be cheaper, too!