Wednesday ORT: Lightning Struck, Gov. Casey, POSH Deals, MAiD In Canada, The #1 Corvette

All subscribers welcome

it’s a great time for THEM, mind you

We will start tonight’s ORT with a Commercial Message: I believe that the paperback and Kindle versions of Cat Tales will be available within the next 24 hours. I am scrapping tooth and nail with Amazon to try to make the Christmas shipping deadline. The companion website is already up and running. The paperback will be on Amazon at $19.99 for a large-format 6x9, 151-page edition. The Kindle is $9.99. All subscribers will be notified via email the minute they are available for purchase.

I’ll be printing a limited (heh) number of hardbacks at well, signing them as you like, and mailing them to readers along with the limited edition SNOBES cutout sticker. I’m still working that part out, and they won’t be ready by Christmas, but I’m hoping to have them to readers for $30 shipped.

I’m pleased to announce that Cat Tales has a beautiful front and back cover design by the incomparable Matt Tierney — but if Amazon allows it, and I think they will, I will also be printing a hyper limited number of paperback books with some variant of this cover on the back, just for fun. There will be one per Trackday Club member, and they will ship in the summer. Keep an eye out:

Still probably better than Vivek

Remember the TV show Succession? Remember how the most deeply pathetic person in it was Conor Roy, the neglected first son of a rich father who fell in love with a hooker then decided to spend $200 million on getting 0.7% of the vote during an otherwise hotly contested federal election?

Well, we have another nepo baby who has failed at everything but politics, and his name is… Casey Putsch.

He’s just another regular patriot like you and me, zooming around in an everyman’s Robinson R44, which at $800,000 or thereabouts is basically like owning a 2004 Camry!

Is Casey serious about his anti-H1B, America First approach? It’s impossible to tell, but my experience with him has been so overwhelmingly negative, anytime I see or hear a statement from him I get a strong vibe of “That man never drank a Duff in his life!”

Some of the comments on Twitter are heartbreakingly enthusiastic, and it’s easy to see why. The current choice in the Ohio governor’s race is between:

Amy Acton, the crazy COVID lady from 2020 whose fearlessly expressed desire to turn Ohio into a massive FEMA prison camp was far more frightening than any risk that the coronavirus itself might possibly have posed to the state as a whole; and

Vivek Ramaswamy, about whom the less said the bettter. His fortune appears to be largely derived from fast-and-loose hyping of low-promise medications with disappointing clinical trials. He had his own mother perform a suspicious clinical trial of a drug that did exactly nothing — except fuel an IPO.

You have to admire Casey’s reptile brilliance here. Facing the worst two candidates in Ohio governor’s race history, he is likely to do better than Conor Roy. As for me, I’m probably going to do something I haven’t done since 1992, and that is: knock on doors for the Democratic candidate. I think Amy Acton is a dime-store Khmer Rouger in a polyester pantsuit — but she’s still better than Ramaswamy, who presumably would immediately misuse his position Roivant-style to loot the state for the benefit of “his people”, whomever “his people” turn out to be.

The electric slide… over to range extenders

Ford announced that it will take an $8.5 billion charge as it cancels the vast bulk of its current and future EVs. This means killing the Lightning, the sales numbers of which were only impressive to Aston Martin dealers, and canceling the from-scratch successor EV that was supposed to be developed and built in Tennessee. They’ll spend another $6B to wind down the SK On deal.

The production capacity used for the Lightning will go towards building trucks that people actually want to buy and own. Supposedly the next “Lightning” will be an “EREV”, meaning “a copy of the Ramcharger”. The actual Ramcharger has been delayed once again, to 2026. Prediction: Stellantis is waiting for the midterms to see if they have to waste any production capacity on showroom paperweights like the Ramcharger. Advice: Ford shouldn’t be in a huge hurry to get in that business.

There’s something genuinely impressive at the speed at which a mild form of sanity can return to a small part of the auto business. That doesn’t mean there aren’t hard times ahead, and especially for this guy:

The retail was probably fifty grand each; the actual value of them is, what, half that?

It’s just a Starbucks Submariner. How much could it cost? Sixteen grand?

Something to remember about the famed Bloomberg Terminal: it’s fundamentally a terminal, which means that it will eventually evolve a buy/sell marketplace similar to those on USENET back in the day. I believe that “POSH” has been around for approximately twenty years, although I might be a few years conservative. It has been a very long time since I worked a job that put me even in the vague vicinity of a Bloomberg terminal.

The following screenshot has been going around for a few days — and what interests me is that there really aren’t any deals to be had. The watch prices are near the bottom, but not at the bottom, of Chrono24 dealer listings. Which means they’re considerably above what people are getting paid by dealers, and somewhat above what people expect for private transactions. The Birkin might be a deal, depending on color. The Have A Seat Labubu is a deal.

Now, the savvy among you will likely respond that time is money for these folks, and that it makes more sense to spend $15,450 on an easy purchase of a “Starbucks” Submariner from a fellow terminal user than it would to spend a couple of days finding a private seller at $12k. I’m less sanguine about the Rolex OP 41 at $9200. You can buy that watch all day for $10,000 brand new from an authorized dealer.

The watch-collecting hobby likes to use POSH volume, rather than pricing, as a measure of market health. The more watches people see for sale at a given time, the more nervous it makes them. In theory, a small group of coordinated people could probably create a couple of market adjustments… maybe if you could get twenty people to list the same model of watch on the same week, you could create a cascade of falling values. If I had terminal access, I could keep you all posted on this — but, alas, I’m just an unemployed writer!

Cheaper not to keep her

Christine Gauthier was in the regular force field artillery for 10 years before a training accident in 1989 resulted in injuries to her knees, hips, neck and back. She is now in a wheelchair…

Was that all her documentation with the VA during those 24 years, asked an MP.

Gauthier scoffed. “This is just the last four years,” she said, prompting gasps from MPs.

Then she added, “With respect to MAID I have a letter in my file because I had to face that as well.”

She described the letter as saying, “If it’s too difficult for you to continue living, Madam, we can offer you medical assistance in dying.”

More than one in twenty deaths in Canada can be attributed to “MAiD”, or “Medical Assistance in Dying”. And the percentage of those where the lucky recipient was not facing an otherwise terminal medical situation continues to rise.

This situation came to international attention this week when radio host Glenn Beck offered to pay the transport bills for a young woman who has been approved for MAiD in Canada because… there’s no surgeon in her province who could do the surgery she really needs.

Her condition, NPHPT, is generally curable via surgery but intolerable without it. Canada can’t provide her the surgery. In fact, they can’t even get her in to see an endocrinologist, something that is usually a 90-day hassle at most for Americans. The lifesaving surgery is available in the States, but Canada has a different solution for her: free death.

This is an otherwise healthy young woman who was in no way deranged or depressed before her condition got the better of her. In theory, she could go on to be a mother, a grandmother, a highly productive member of society.

This is the same country that just allocated $894.5 million to pay stopgap medical coverage for immigrants until said immigrants qualified for permanent healthcare in Canada, a grueling 90-day wait during which presumably you don’t get offered free euthanasia. Meanwhile, the mysteriously-funded NGOs are screaming at Canada’s mild plans to reduce absolutely destitute migrants from 41% to 36%.

If you look at human beings as interchangeable economic units, this makes a sort of rough sense. For the cost of saving this young woman’s life, Canada could probably pay the bills of several young male immigrants, who could then go work in the lithium mines in the rare moments when they’re not busy engaging in brutal sectarian disputes that originated in their home country around the time of Marcus Aurelius.

Killing veterans is also a good idea; have you seen how sick some of them get?

I don’t want to be one of those people who continually bleats THIS IS EVIL! but, yeah: this is evil.

Bloomington Gold, here we come!

automatic transmission, wonky body: what’s changed?

At this point, the car had now been stored at the Oklahoma restoration shop for 20 years, and the shop owner hadn’t spoken with the 1953 Corvette’s owner in 15-18 years. Corey says the shop owner said he wasn’t even sure if the guy was still alive today. Corey asks if he can reach out to the car’s owner and called the guy up one day. Corey reminds him of the 1953 Corvette at Lloyd Miller’s shop in Tulsa, and offered to help the car’s owner to complete the restoration. At the mention of Lloyd’s name, the ’53s owner asks, “is Lloyd still alive?” to which Corey replied, “Lloyd was wondering if you were still alive.”

The very first production Corvette in history, and the third-ever car to be built with Corvette intent, appears to have been discovered in plain sight. The linked article is worth reading if you’re into this sort of thing.

In the video released by Corey, he presents information about those early cars, and says that VIN 001 was given an internal Chevy engineering number of 3950 and VIN 002 was named 3951. After requesting documents on those 39XX engineering cars from the Heritage Center, Corey found that VIN 001 was shown to another group of engineers about a week after its completion and from that, a list of 22 line items to improve various aspects of the car was generated.

Many of the fixes from those 22 line items appear on this vehicle. It’s a fascinating look into the process of how cars were built then: you just knocked out a couple cars then made whatever changes you could sort out. Talk about rapid prototyping!

I’m tickled pink that the car has been sourced and is in the process of being documented. I am slightly terrified that someone will decide to “restore” it, which in this case would basically mean “build an all-new 1953 Corvette on whatever you can salvage of the frame.” Over-restoring is a serious issue in the collector community, and this car appears ripe for such a molestation.

Clearly the car should go to the NCM, not to “Bloomington Gold”. It’s slightly daunting to think, however, that most of the people involved with this car thought their counterparts might be dead. Will Millennials have any interest in keeping and preserving 1953 Corvettes? Sure, this one has a solid claim to a more or less permanent place somewhere, but what about the nontrivial number of other Fifties Corvettes out there? What is their eventual fate — and why do I think it looks something like a Chinese washer/dryer combo?