Wednesday ORT: Its-a-Luigi, Abu-Dhabi-Doo, Barra-Double-Fails, My Car Thing Still Works

All subscribers welcome

“i’m scared of the way my heart gets sore / from wondering if you’re mine.”

Good afternoon, you filthy animals. First things first, with an SV1000 update: the seller lowered the price to $1500, citing that it idles badly if you jiggle the (hard to get, and a bitch to swap out) spark plug wire, and someone bought it immediately.

someone

Anyway...

“The deadliest killer in America right now is named Mario Spaghetti, what a time to be alive”

Let’s get the bad news out of the way: the alleged killer of the UHC lizard appears to have no relation to soulful flugelhorn player Chuck Mangione, whose lovely album Feels So Good is on regular vinyl rotation here at the farm. On the other hand, the uncannily accurate sexual-orientation-radar of my most Unabomber-esque friends remains unbeaten. “Soyface gay,” one of them remarked regarding the infamous “hostel mask pull-down” photo, presumably between deadlift sets and/or vigorous servicing of his borderline-personality executive girlfriend.

So. Why’d he do it? This kid was junior-lizard status himself; remarkable academic record, reasonable career-in-progress, handsome in the kind of unthreatening, vaguely submissive way the girlbosses like now. His family owns an assisted-living facility. Did he really have a bad back surgery? Was his mother really overcome by chronic pain after a botched procedure? Did he fall under the spell of some charismatic anti-corporate blue-haired chick or watch-cap-wearing dude?

This is what we know: he wasn’t exactly smart about his public profile after the fact. He still had all his assassination equipment with him while ordering at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. Wasn’t there, like, a deep river or something between NYC and there? Or did he always want to get caught, consciously or sub-? John Updike once wrote that “No deed is so private that it does not require applause,” or something to that effect. Surely he wants everyone to know why he did it. In his shoes, I sure as hell would.

Had the election gone differently, we’d no doubt be hearing a lot about his 3D-printed weaponry. The truth of the matter is that not even the most draconian methods, including the currently popular “send everything you make to to the government for review” will make it impossible to print guns from home equipment, but that wouldn’t have stopped a Blue-led Congress from “doing something”. Thank God for small favors; even if your life plans don’t involve 3-D printing assassination equipment, perhaps you don’t want everything you make being reviewed by an incompetent “AI”, a Third World Mechanical Turk, or the GS-11 equivalent of a Reddit jannie.

What surprises me is all the hand-wringing going on about “OMG THIS GUY MURDERED A CEO AND PEOPLE ARE CHEERING IT”. Of course they are cheering it. Like it or not, when you “earn” ten million dollars a year it puts you outside the realm of normal human sympathy. When you do it working for a healthcare company that ranks #1 in claims denial… you might as well put out a LinkedIn post asking people to spit on their hands and hoist the black flag. Or were the “elites” really stupid/insular enough to think they could rig the entire American game in their favor while still retaining the loving admiration of the opiod-addicted, poverty-ridden, opportunity-deprived heartland?

Speaking of outrageously stupid CEOs

History will no doubt record that Mary Barra was the worst possible leader that The Our Democracy could possibly have chosen for General Motors. It’s not just that she’s worse than, say, Mullally or Sergio or Piech. Or even that she’s less competent that the second-tier caretakers like Roger Smith or George Romney. This emptily-grinning, wide-beamed fool has a demonstrated and public record of being worse at making decisions than: thrown darts, flipped coins, doing nothing, doing the precise George Costanza opposite of what she wanted to do… you name it.

Here’s the latest: After investing more than TEN BILLION DOLLARS!! into the Cruise robotaxi operation, which was an obvious joke not only to computer-science people but also to regular scientists, regular people, and possibly domestic pets, GM will once again walk away with nothing but a bruised ego and another ribbon of shame for its corporate uniform. I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. It was never going to work. Never. You needed to be a genuine idiot to think it would. Mary Barra is a genuine idiot, so no wonder. The only shocking thing is that there was no line item in the accounting for “magic beans”.

But wait, there’s more.

Readers with memories longer than that of the Ellen Degenerate fish from “Finding Nemo” may perhaps recall that GM took a fair amount of its bailout cash and spent it buffing up the China operation instead of preserving domestic jobs. This choice, which at the time I called “tantamount to treason against the American people”, also turns out to have been bad business. Now Barra’s Buffoons have to take a FIVE BILLION DOLLAR charge against SAIC-GM, the “joint venture” where the Chinese government bricks and Mark Reuss swallows.

Why, can you believe that the Chinese government would use a joint venture to absorb the bulk of (what little) GM knows about making cars, only to shell-game the thing into failure once the sheep had been appropriately shorn? Who could have predicted that giving Red China a 51% stake in “your” business could lead to failure? Furthermore, who could have guessed that the CCCP government wouldn’t have any interest in giving a lifeline to a bunch of corrupt scumbags who all-too-clearly were licking their chops at a future where they could be Big Wigs In Little China using the American taxpayer’s money?

Why does Mary Barra still have a job? Why does Mark Reuss still have a job? Why is there anyone at General Motors above VP level who has yet to receive a complimentary meeting with George Clooney and Anna Kendrick?

“Mary, everyone who has gone on to change the world has sat right where you are sitting now.”

Gosh, what could General Motors have done with FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS? Here’s my offhand list, the entirety of which could have fit into that black hole with room to spare:

• A vaguely competitive Silverado that doesn’t eat transmissions and engines, because it turns out people like buying half-ton trucks more than they like taking robotaxis;

• A full TNGA-style platform for a wide variety of new-generation cars and crossovers that would be competitive on a global scale;

• A 2026 Camaro;

• Enough cash to pay off the dealers and close Buick before things get really embarrassing.

Can we all agree now that Buick can close up shop? It was really only kept alive so the Chinese didn’t have to think too hard about how their choice of prestige-brand GM cars had zero interest back in the USDM. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy driving a LaCrosse Avenir around, but I’m a downwardly-mobile 53-year-old man who lives in a nonexistent zip code. Not stirring stuff from a demographic perspective.

Fire Barra. Fire Reuss. Fire everyone who isn’t an engineer or useful person. Force a merger with Ford — hell, the two companies already engineer transmissions together because apparently that’s too hard for just one Fortune 500 company to do. Call it “American Leyland”, I don’t care. Just stop the bleeding, the idiocy, the subpar products, the frankly evil obsession with China, the blue dashboard lights. All of it.

Let.

It.

GO.

The greatest season in recent memory comes to a close

Man, I already miss the 2024 F1 season. Congratulations to Sergio Perez on being out-qualified by his junior teammate and, incidentally, handing McLaren their first championship since people still knew how to do the Macarena. Random thoughts:

• Did George let Lewis have that final pass? If so, why?

• What happened to Oscar after the break? He went from being on equal terms with Lando to being an also-ran. Which Oscar will we get in 2025?

• I have often been scandalously accused by the ACF readership of being something between a booster and a simp for Yuki Tsunoda — but come on, the man has earned the second Red Bull seat. He couldn’t do any worse than Perez!

• After the race, Verstappen expressed his distaste for the stewards’ actions, but also indicated that he would personally apologize to Oscar for the contact. This, as they say, becometh a man.

• The emotion in Leclerc’s voice about winning the Constructors’ Championship… lovely to hear. He’s going to take Lewis apart one piece at a time next year. Bet on it.

• Other than wrapping up both championships at Abu Dhabi, I can’t think of how this season could have been much more dramatic and/or interesting, given the current players and the current rule set.

I guess it’s time for all of us to take a break while Netflix gets their season ready. I wonder how kind they will be to Perez.

My Car Thang still works, and I don’t know why

in honor of dan pina, former nasa series director and, until today, a completely unappreciated pussy

In July of 2022 I became a late adopter of the Spotify “Car Thing”. The idea of it, I think, was pretty sound: basically a voice-command adapter for the Spotify app that allowed you to see what was playing, change the volume directly, and do a few other neat things. A lot of people use Spotify primarily in their vehicles, and this allows you to do that without having to look at your phone.

Two days ago, Spotify turned them all off. Except, apparently, mine, which works as of this writing. I’ve been told that I can get a refund for it, as long as I apply by the end of January.

The Car Thing was panned by all the tech blogs and Refinery29-esque lifestyles-for-whores sites, but I thought it was an excellent example of a product that does just one basic task in eminently satisfactory fashion. The price was low, the function was more than acceptable, and it allowed me to interact with my music the way I wanted to. It also answered the “what the hell are we listening to?” question for anyone unlucky enough to be seated in my Accord when, for example, I’ve decided to listen to Weather Report’s Night Passage three times in a row.

Just as importantly, the Car Thing was a key component in my decision to keep using Spotify rather than pay for Qobuz, which is an objectively superior streaming service. I’ll miss my Car Thing. When it stops working. Which it has yet to do. Maybe it’s just a matter of never updating Spotify, or my phone. I could live with that.

How odd, to feel sentimental and/or nostalgic about a piece of “e-waste” that was probably conceived and birthed by some of the worst non-technical managers to ever live on the Left Coast. Oh well.

Hey Spotify… play “Three Views Of A Secret”.