DINK Implications

What do you think about the word DINK?  When I grew up it was a criticism that something was a bit too small for the task at hand.  When I was on a ski trip with my then fiancée Susan to announce our engagement, it was what a kid behind me said about the skis I was using.  As life progressed, it now means Double Income No Kids.  And this article describing the attitudes toward raising children in China speaks volumes about our current situation.

The article points out that many young couples are not having kids or are having fewer than at times in the past. They cite the costs of everything as their primary reason.  That, on the surface, seems to be a rational answer, especially given the costs of education these days.  I can speak from experience sending several kids through private preparatory schools and college.  If I did not have a good paying engineering career I wouldn’t have been able to do this.

But, perhaps we are not looking at the deeper reasoning.  Go ahead and talk to your children or those of child bearing age about this question, and compare their thoughts with your own.  You will probably see the same thing I did when I look at this.

  1. They no longer see family legacy or even family name legacy as important.  I remember so clearly how a sole surviving son was not to be sent to the front lines of a military situation … because it could wipe out the family legacy.
  2. The Royals in England use the term heir and a spare recognizing lineage to the Crown as an imperative.  Recent events bring that thought process into focus.
  3. The move away from an agrarian economy … it is no longer essential to have a large family to provide for each other.
  4. They don’t believe they will live to retirement.

That last one surprised you, didn’t it?  How can that be?  Check it out and listen carefully.  They believe the world is coming to an end as we know it and they are afraid. They have chosen to “live, eat and be merry because …” you guessed it … the end is near.  That is what the global focus on climate change has wrought!  They have no hope.

Most of us worked our whole lives to give our children and their children a better life.  We passed on that goal from our parents and grandparents.

Go ahead and check this out please.  You will not hear that attitude widely expressed.  Sure, there are notable exceptions, but they are just that … exceptions.

We can point to an almost countless list of reasons why today’s younger generation are so different, but I think it is primarily because they have DINK aspirations.  Their views of life and their places in it are just too small to be relevant.  They have been told that others are to blame.  They have not been told that it is their job to rise to the task.  The tasks now are to be dumbed down and spoon fed so they don’t have to break a sweat.

We can find blame everywhere if that is where you want to let this argument rest: social media, online gaming, plus an obsession with digital substitutes for true friendship.

Assigning blame may make us feel a bit better, but it is not going to change anything.

Insanity is …

The EV Kool-Aid

I grew up enjoying Kool-Aid during the heat of the summer … it was a refreshing, cheap, and just plain fun to make.  My entrepreneurial streak saw the opportunity to sell glasses of it to passerby pedestrians.  I think we all have an image of that glass jug with moisture on the outside and a smiley face as shown here.  What fun .. and for those who are trying to cut calories, you can even get it sugar free.  What is so wrong with all this?

Well, let’s start with those artificial sweeteners.  Do you remember the original one: saccharin?  It was banned due to fears that it caused cancer which was later discredited, but more importantly it is known to have no nutrient value … it may not be bad for you, but it is certainly not good for you.  Drink water, and please avoid bottled water.  If you want, use a filter but be aware that many of them will take the beneficial fluoride out of it.  Let’s come back to that after we take a deeper dive on what Kool Aid now means.

As Wikipedia indicates, “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is an expression used to refer to a person who believes in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards. The phrase typically carries a negative connotation. It can also be used ironically or humorously to refer to accepting an idea or changing a preference due to popularity, peer pressure, or persuasion. In recent years, it has evolved further to mean extreme dedication to a cause or purpose, so extreme that one would “drink the Kool-Aid” and die for the cause.

While use of the phrase dates back to 1968 with the nonfiction book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, it is strongly associated with the events in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978, in which over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement died. The movement’s leader, Jim Jones, called a mass meeting at the Jonestown pavilion after the murder of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan and others in nearby Port Kaituma. Jones proposed “revolutionary suicide” by way of ingesting a powdered drink mix made from Flavor Aid (later misidentified as Kool-Aid) that was lethally laced with cyanide and other drugs.

We are witnessing an age of artificial sweeteners on EVs … which are not helpful in a sustainable business model.  Don’t we remember when then President Obama sweetened the opportunities for smart grid implementations.  Sure, it resulted in a “pull forward” demand for these ideas but that simply resulted in a boom bust cycle.  Everyone was drunk with enthusiasm when those incentives appeared, but no one (except me) pointed out that there was going to be a disaster in the years that followed.  They had bought forward the customers who were on the fence about smart grid investments … and how could they turn down the sweeteners?

We need to cool our jets on ideas like “banning the internal combustion engine” and start teaching people how to think differently about the driving experience.  We should not be sweetening the perspective of jackrabbit performance and long range.  Where are the thoughts we learned helped like reducing speed limits which we did during the energy crises of the late 1970s.

It might be a bit harsh to compare the EV hype with Jonestown, but the parallels are clear.

We are going to kill off most of the emerging EV companies with artificial sweeteners.

The Running it up the Flag Pole Deception

As Wikipedia indicates, let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes is a catchphrase that became popular in the US in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  It means “to present an idea tentatively and see whether it receives a favorable reaction.” It originally meant what it said, but it is now considered a cliché. It is sometimes used seriously, but more often it is used humorously, with the intention that it be recognized as both hackneyed and outdated. A non-joking equivalent would be “to send up a trial balloon.”  If it gains the desired reaction, perhaps it might become a reality, but any observant person today will recognize that it is a deception.

In most cases, it is being used to buy some time … to appear innovative and helpful, while trying to decide whether you are really for it or against it.  The reason I am blogging about this is because the latest buzz over future EVs has pushed way beyond anything realistic … it is all hype and positioning.  Judge for yourself.  Watch the new Audi ideas for the EV of the future:

Don’t get me wrong … I love this car idea and can’t wait till the time it becomes available … but … and this is a big but, I have an 8 year old Tesla Model S that has self-driving features, but they are still far from truly operational.  I was picking up one of our clients at the airport in it and commented that sometime in the future I might be able to just send my car to pick her up.  That would be a very cool feature.

Yes, there are cities now experimenting with autonomous taxis, and I believe that is a smart idea for “short hops” kind of like an electric bus we see at airports that just makes a repeated loop.  On one level, these small steps toward autonomy make perfect business sense.  But it is a huge leap to fully autonomous vehicles.  I like the idea of 18 wheelers transporting goods between warehouses, and especially within shipping ports.  These are all in play right now, and I don’t find them misleading.

What I object to is the corporate grandstanding to out-position their competitors.  Aspirational ideas are wonderful, but these promises of future vehicles are flat out misleading.

Do you remember when Tesla introduced the new roadster and started taking orders?  That was back in 2017.  There still is NO sure date when those orders will be filled.  Was Elon just running this idea up the flag pole?  No, not at all.  He will produce this car … if he can stay out of jail due to all his shenanigans.  I still love my Model S and plan to keep it until it dies … which according to the latest battery life estimates will make it past my lifetime.

What bothers me the most is knowing the reality of all this.  Very few of these new EV concepts will ever see the light of day.  Most of the startups will fail … there are too many trying to get market share of a relatively small market.  Most people don’t really want an EV as their primary transportation and most people can’t afford an EV to just run around town.  Yes, there are a lot of people with a lot of money … take a look at the housing boom and property values along the coast.  But MOST of these people will not put up with the realities of having an EV as their only car to drive at these locations.  And, they certainly will not try to drive to that location and put up with the charge time.

I salute Elon for his innovation and vision.  He needs to check his eyeglass prescription.

 

Primrose Paths

It is funny how phrases from my youth are resurfacing now to help me see just how wrong everything is these days.  It is hard not to shake your head and make comments like Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise: “Beam me up Scotty … there is no sign of intelligent life!”

Shakespeare used the phrase “primrose path” several times because his audience would have been very familiar with that analog, drummed into them during most Sunday sermons of that day.  Jesus is quoted as saying that if you want to go to heaven, you must take the steep, narrow, thorny uphill climb.

The preacher would declare the road to hell is wide, pleasant and easy, and downhill all the way. The central idea comes to us from the Gospel of Matthew 7:13.  “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go there.”

Shakespeare seems to have liked that idea very much since he uses it several times and creates the metaphor of a flowery road to bring it into focus. He does that three times in his plays and two of them become a primrose path or way. On the surface, the primrose path is simply a flowery path or road. In the plays, it’s a metaphor with a reference to the road to hell.

It is fascinating to me to see so many parallels today indicating we are so willing to avoid the narrow paths that lead to a better world.  I know it is politically incorrect to question whether we should be doing things in the first place, but we need to.  We seem way too prone to pick the “shiny penny” idea that on the surface seems to be “the easy way out of our dilemma.”  The full consideration of all paths is just not politically expedient in today’s soundbite culture.

Most recently, I saw a fabulous documentary on Netflix about milk production called The Milk System which divulged the myths we have all come to believe about milk being an essential part of our diet both here and around the world.  If you watch it, you will be quite angry at how we have been led down that primrose path by people who have a profit motive as opposed to doing the right thing for their fellow man.

Cowspiracy covers the environmental damage associated with the diary and beef industry. I encourage you to watch both movies and listen carefully to the interviews with milk producers and scientists around the world.  They all expose that we should not be raising cows for milk production in the first place.

So, given we are going down the primrose path of milk production, we now see billions of dollars going to figure out ways to eliminate the cows.  Take a look at this article from The Washington Post.  The right path is to simply produce calcium supplements and eliminate the idea of milk in our diets!

Size Matters 2.0

A recent blog about the fact that size matters points out the scale issues being called for as the world moves to reduce carbon emissions.  That is clearly one dimension to the problem.  But, there is a more pressing question right now.  Read this article to understand the background for this blog. 

Why in this country at least are we considering such large EVs on the roads along so many and much smaller vehicles?  Have we forgotten the most fundamental law of physics that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.  This is the central issue when playing pool or billiards.  We all have seen those swinging balls where the number of balls that react is exactly the same as the number you swing.

The latest version of the Hummer EV weighs in at about 9,000 pounds.  It is only a matter of time before it hits the typical car weighing about one third of that.  It is going to send that smaller car flying!

Why, in this age of environmental sensitivities are we offering ideas that are simply wrong headed?  Oh … I forgot, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  If you are Hummer, the answer is an all-electric Hummer.  We are willing to ban all internal combustion engines (ICEs), but we are not willing to ban cars that have no place on the road?

Your reaction to this will certainly avoid some middle ground position.  After all, we are not really willing to have a full debate here.  Free market types will simply say that this involves the freedom of choice, and I agree.  Then why are we reducing the freedom of choice with the ICE?  Another position might be that we should tax “overweight” EVs to reflect their societal costs.  Then why aren’t we willing to tax the future sale of ICEs and let customers decide?

You can’t have it both ways.  We are either going to let a free market work, or we are going to attempt to control markets with regulations.

There is no question that size matters.  To me, the biggest question we are trusting others to answer is the size of government.  That is at the root of all of this mess.