General Motors Has a Very Bad Week Thanks to Shawn Fain of the UAW and the California DMV.

General Motors Has a Very Bad Week Thanks to Shawn Fain of the UAW and the California DMV.

I’ve been delighted at the way the week is going for General Motors.

First, the California DMV has been taking their stupid “self-driving taxis” off the roads because they ran over a woman, dragged her 20 feet, and then GM tried to hide the video they had from the California DMV. This on top of driving into wet cement, slamming into a fire truck, obstructing ambulances while people die waiting for it, and other incidents.

The truth is that self-driving vehicles have never been safe. It’s just that California is such a bubble economy susceptible to bribery and corruption, that it desperately wants it to succeed. So maybe they’ll be back on the roads causing more trouble soon.

Convoy, an autonomous truck company, went under and fired 500 people this past week. Good. The goal of autonomous trucks is to put millions of truck drivers out of work. Better the hundreds writing software than the millions driving the trucks.

Then Shawn Fain, the President of the UAW, announced that they reached a contract with Ford Motor Company that gave in to all of the union’s demands, which means that Ford’s plants will be up and running and GM can either agree to the same deal or deal with the idling of all their plants while Ford dealers are full of inventory.

General Motors is a truly disgusting company. Everything from the “Don’t call the cars a rolling casket.” E-Mails, over the defective ignition switches, to Dex-Cool problems (coolant gunk screwing up cars), to trying to use every contract negotiation to starve and eventually kill the UAW (with non-union battery jobs and permatemps that barely make any money on the factory floors).

The Obama Administration let GM go bankrupt and keep the same fools in management and C-Suite that got them into trouble the last time, then once the US Treasury offloaded the shares, they killed their hybrid and compliance cars, which didn’t have the huge profit margins of gas guzzling trucks and SUVs, and went right back to doing what they were doing.

Shawn Fain stood up to all of the car companies, and he’s the reason why these battery plants that Biden is dumping billions of taxpayer dollars into won’t be non-union.

Joe Biden decided to lead from behind and show up on the picket line when it was obvious that he couldn’t just declare the strike illegal and send them back with nothing, like he did with the rail workers.

(Who is going to tell the President to beat it? But he does have a lot of nerve trying to pretend to be pro-labor after the rail worker incident.)

I would like to buy a new Buick next time, but it does very much depend on a lot of things, from where interest rates happen to be to what this deal with the UAW looks like.

My ex lost the Kia he got from me in the break-up back in May. He hadn’t even finished paying on it.

He said that “some crackhead”, I’m just quoting him, busted out the window, ripped the steering cover off, and hotwired it.

At the rate the piece of shit was falling apart on him it probably wouldn’t have made it to 100,000 miles.

Right after I bought it, the air conditioner failed and had to be warranty repaired.

He said before “the crackhead” made off with it, it was not starting when he went to turn the key, sometimes, until he turned it like five or six times.

I said, “Fired right up for the crackhead though, like the scene out of The Terminator.”

Quality has gone way down, prices have gone way up.

I remember when you bought most any car they made and you got a lot of car for $20,000 and it would run for 30 years or 500,000 miles.

Needless to say, that’s long gone.

They all use such bad parts and so much computerized shit now, you’re lucky if it lasts as long as the payments.

In 2020, I personally witnessed two Kias explode in the span of a week.

My uncle just bought a new one. Good luck with that, I guess. He should have asked the family and I could have told him all about Kia.

Gavin’s GULAG. California Passed Bill to Make it Easier to Mistreat the Mentally Ill.

Gavin’s GULAG. California Passed Bill to Make it Easier to Mistreat the Mentally Ill.

California has passed a new “mental hygiene” law which will enable it to deem more people mentally ill, and then force them into “treatment”, including toxic and dangerous pharmaceuticals.

Like most laws, this basically doesn’t force the State to do anything, it just puts people at risk of having the law selectively enforced against them.

The United States already has a long history of abusing mental health laws and trampling over people’s constitutional rights.

If you want to bypass due process, you just accuse them of being mentally ill and then have all sorts of “secret court” proceedings where they have no right to personally attend, speak on their own behalf, or even have a lawyer represent them.

Not happy with involuntary committal laws, the authoritarians did this with Second Amendment rights in recent years too while the allegedly “conservative” Supreme Court sat there and allowed yet another anti-Constitutional process play out.

There is, for sure, a lesser standard of justice in America for not just the mentally ill, but for anyone even accused of it by the State, and I would just like to go on record as thanking the Democrats for proving they’re even worse, again.

It wasn’t that long ago, that California (again), was at the Supreme Court trying to enforce a law making it a felony to bring homeless Americans into the State (they lost), and they’ve been in court constantly trying to make homelessness a crime, and the cities like San Francisco are the biggest disgrace in America on that issue.

As for whether the government should be allowed to “step in” when a person has refused “medicine”, no. Not only no, Hell no.

California is a cesspit. I think most of us are ready for it to fall into the ocean.

Matthew Garrett Says San Francisco People “Get it.” With the City in Court Attacking Homeless Americans. Also Blasts US Constitution.

Matthew Garrett, Says San Francisco People “Get it.” With the City in Court Attacking Homeless Americans. Also Blasts US Constitution.

Matthew Garrett told me the other day on TechRights IRC that it’s unfortunate that American citizens can’t be arrested for talking about things he doesn’t agree with.

He also keeps saying that there shouldn’t be a right to own guns.

Well, in both cases we have the right to speech and the right to own guns.

Not only is it reflected in some form in every State constitution, including STATE OF ILL (Illinois. Not our best State.), but they are Amendments I and II of the United States Constitution.

As a United States Citizen by Naturalization (Immigration), Mr. Garrett raised his right hand and swore an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the United States Constitution from “all enemies, foreign and domestic”, and that he made these promises “without mental reservation or purpose of evasion”.

Clearly, he said the words or he wouldn’t be granted US citizenship, but now he turns around and openly attacks the very bedrock of our nation’s highest law? The Bill of Rights!

In Europe, where he’s from, there are varying levels of democracy. When I say varying levels, I mean there is an elected government in most places, but nothing that says definitively what that government can’t do.

Many of their countries have no codified Constitution, many of them still have their monarchy like King Charles waving around his $400 million (USD) stolen African diamond in his scepter while waving at football games and sharing potato recipes (worth every penny), and almost none of these “old and mature democracies” have a guarantee of Freedom of Speech, much less the Right to Bear Arms.

The Founders of the United States were better men than you’ll find floating around this place today, and they had just left an oppressive system in Europe that still, to this day, has national religions, and criminal punishments for Free Speech.

In the United Kingdom, where Roy Schestowitz is from, not only can you be arrested for not being polite (and people wonder why they’re polite….), but you’re not allowed to have guns.

The government did this for a reason. When a government is going broke and wants to repeal your safety net and take away your living standard at whatever rate it chooses…..right in front of them lately (Roy was telling me how some grocery items have doubled in price practically overnight….It’s a bigger disaster than the supermarkets in the US.), the last thing the politicians want is to have to look over their shoulders while they’re doing it.

Even in the US, States with more gun control than others are seeing a steeper erosion in their living standard for the bottom 20%.

The politicians don’t pass this to protect you.

They pass it and then they say they’re cutting pensions again or no more food stamps or come back to the unemployment office when your hours at Walmart are literally cut in half and THEN you might get $5 a week.

I talked to Roy last night and mentioned that STATE OF ILL makes their unemployment offices hard to find.

They’re always out in the middle of nowhere, where there’s no public transit, two counties over, and 20 left in the State for 13 million people.

They never put any signs out making it obvious you’ve come to the right building.

It’s like that scene in the movie Men in Black where they’re hiding in a thing that says it’s part of the turnpike authority or something.

They want to hide from the public not only to make sure nobody wanders in, but to make it hard to live if you lose your job because you can’t figure out how to get there or afford the costs of going.

It seems that’s the same thing they do in the UK. The government is obligated by law to provide a stipend, maybe, but they’ll make you work for it to wear you down.

The United States gets a bad rap for “gun violence”, but truth be told, Europe isn’t exactly all that safe. There are travel advisories about handing over your wallet in Paris (no guns) to avoid getting stabbed on the train from the airport after you JUST GOT THERE.

But Members of Congress here have been shot at in notable incidents in the past decade, Republicans and Democrats alike. Truth is that nobody in this country likes the government and what’s going on in Washington especially.

This is inevitable when you’re dealing with a national government that represents a lot of States that really don’t have much in common with each other.

In the UK, they can just repeal your benefits, they can repeal your social security, they can foist whatever they want, and you have eggs to throw at their King, maybe, if you’re lucky.

Moving on, Mr. Garrett once said in Twitter that people in San Francisco “Get it.”. He said he liked living in San Francisco because they “Get it.”.

They’re infamous for being cruel to the homeless.

In Indiana, where I’m from, there are homeless shelters. There are programs to find them work and get them back on their feet in as little time as possible. It’s almost unheard of to see someone living under newspapers and eating out of trash, and whacking off in public and talking to buildings due to untreated mental illness.

If you come to Illinois or California, where the Democrats have total control of the government, it’s wall to wall public masturbators living under newspapers and talking to buildings.

In fact, just the other day when I was taking out the trash, I ran into one of them at my dumpster. He was talking to the dumpster and whacking off in front of it. I called the police, but they never showed up.

Lucky for the homeless, who have been so badly treated by “liberal” states and the few American cities with self-avowed Communists on the Board, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle haven’t had much luck in court.

How do you get Communists on the Board and your rent is 2-6 times the national average?

Didn’t the actual Communists at least build buildings for people to live in instead of enacting zoning codes to make sure no affordable housing goes in and then issuing people tickets for parking in their own driveway?

We see how the people of San Francisco feel about the homeless, like the artsy fartsy guy with the artsy fartsy art gallery that turned a (presumably) artsy fartsy hose on one of them because he was sick of looking at her.

San Francisco. Where homeless people “get it”. The hose.

The Ninth Circuit Ruling is controlling in those states. It’s the largest appeals circuit in America. They made a ruling, the Thomas Ruling, that basically says “If the State isn’t doing enough to shelter the homeless, it can’t pretend that they willingly chose to sleep in a public place, and therefore cannot criminalize it.”

Who is challenging this ruling to the Republicans that Trump put on the Supreme Court? Not Indiana. Not Florida. Not Tennessee.

Why certainly it’s Texas, right? No.

It’s San Francisco. Where people “get it”. The hose.

I would be embarrassed and ashamed if I showed up in a country, asked them for the privilege of being a Citizen, and then one of my first official acts as such was to show my ass (figuratively) and mock their Constitution, which I had just sworn to uphold.

But it seems that some people have no appreciation of irony, good manners, or even the sense to keep it to themselves if they apparently made misrepresentations under oath.

Nothing says “Balls” like “I came to your country to ask for Citizenship and then now I’ll be an Internet Asshole that takes a shit on your founding ideals.”

The United States can’t do much about people who blast the Freedom of Speech because they have the right to Freedom of Speech here.

And yes, that is the same Freedom of Speech that allowed the Nazis to march in Skokie, but 40+ years later the Nazis are not well liked and don’t have a single member in the State or local governments in Illinois, even though they won their court case and were able to march in Skokie.

Letting them march is the lesser evil. It reminds people that they’re there and they need to be vigilant to make sure they don’t come to power.

Of course there are repercussions in the United States for being a Nazi, even though there is no law against it. If you openly admit it, you’re going to have a very hard time professionally. Nobody is going to elect you to anything.

In Germany, where there’s no strong freedom of speech, they outlawed Nazi symbols, and parties, and ideologies, outlawed it, and there are Nazis in their legislature that just don’t wear swastikas and call themselves that. So big difference. They’re in the legislature introducing bills and voting on things, where they can actually do a lot of harm, as long as they don’t use symbols.

This is my opinion of Matt, but I can’t figure out what else to call it when you say you support the Constitution and then go down the line saying that foundational pieces of it shouldn’t exist.

If you didn’t agree to live under it, then I don’t believe for a minute that you should have filed an N-400.

Fake meat stocks in the toilet and layoffs at Impossible and Beyond.

Fake meat stocks in the toilet and layoffs at Impossible and Beyond.

Fake meat was one of the most overhyped investments in the past few years, and reality has set in.

The stock price for Beyond Meat Inc. sank from $109.95 per share to $14 in just the past year, and the situation at Impossible Foods isn’t much better.

After losing 86.5% of its share price, Beyond Meat also made the news when their COO, Doug Ramsey, bit another man on the nose during an altercation outside of a football game recently.

“Creepy Uncle Bill” Gates is heavily invested in both companies and was perplexed at the market rejection of both products. He took to his bribed/friendly media a while back to say that states were passing laws that prevented them from calling these products “beef” (because they’re not beef, and calling it beef is a form of fraud). So now, they have to call it “Plant Based Ground” on the package.

He said that they sort of want to “force us to call it lab garbage”, which is basically what the stuff is.

Plants are healthy. Beyond and Impossible are not.

To make it taste better, they salt the crap out of it and do things to give it an unhealthy lipid profile, to the point where, from a health standpoint, you’re better off eating beef. Which obviously tastes like beef. Even if they made the fake stuff taste like beef, it would still be an unnatural highly processed junk food.

The companies generally tend to charge about $9 per pound for “Plant Based Ground” lab garbage, whereas beef costs half that, for the decent stuff.

Bill has some big problems.

He invested heavily in these things, even though he admits that he doesn’t eat them himself. Of course not. Why would he? He’s so concerned about climate change that he has 9 private jets and it’s usually just him flying on them, and his house is 50 times bigger than the space he needs, especially now that his wife Melinda divorced him due to being embarrassed by his association with Jeffery Epstein.

Joe Biden’s mismanagement of the economy has cost a lot of people a lot of money. Even the billionaires in America haven’t been spared. They’ve lost $400 billion since Biden was sworn in. But they’ll still be fine.

Bill is good at diversifying and slithering around and getting government bailouts. He managed to secure a lot of Department of Energy money for a very dangerous type of nuclear reactor which won’t even have a prototype generating any power for 15 more years, assuming it ever gets built at all, but that (taxpayer) money is gone now.

Fake beef is dead, dead, dead, though. Between January and October alone, Impossible and Beyond have laid off a combined ~115 employees with ~100 or so in the last three months alone (source: various articles you can easily search for, or scroll through layoff tracker), and with no new investor stupid enough to throw money at this after watching their business plans fall apart, more layoffs are inevitable.

The story about the COO of Beyond being arrested for biting a guy on the nose is actually pretty tame if you pay attention to the circus of freaks and weirdos in orbit around Microsoft and Gates personally.

They banked on McDonalds launching the “McPlant” “burger”, but the trial run failed miserably even in leftist bastions like San Francisco, and they decided to scrub the entire project.

Now they’re launching a “Beyond Steak” at Taco Bell. Most people who go to Taco Bell are “high af”, as the cool kids call it these days, and usually at 3 AM, and they’re not going to order a Beyond Steak taco.

This whole thing was always highly speculative.

From the get go, vegans and vegetarians complained that they weren’t going to order any of it from a fast food restaurant that grilled it on the same grill they just had actual meat on, and meat eaters aren’t going to order fake burger unless it was a one off thing to amuse themselves out of curiosity.

I ordered an Impossible Whopper (with cheese) once to see how they tasted. I thought it was fairly close, but a real Whopper with cheese tastes better and doesn’t come at a cost premium.

Political conservatives certainly aren’t going to be the customer for this stuff. They see “switching” as degrading their masculinity and propping up “liberals in San Francisco” and “Bill Gates”.

The only thing most people seem to agree on is that once you know more about Bill Gates than his “reading list” puff pieces, the more you dislike him.

The US economy is in serious trouble, and the media (to protect Democrats mainly) won’t admit it, especially with the election coming up. They already know the results will be a Democrat wipeout, but they’re hoping to contain the damage by blaming people being laid off for their own layoffs, faking unemployment numbers, saying that we don’t even know if we’re in a recession or bickering about what the textbook definition of hyperinflation is when most Americans agree things are really really bad at the stores.

Like the bag of potato chips that used to be 15 ounces, but is now 7.5 ounces at the same price. Most things have gotten that way. Rent, your whole grocery bill, the cost to keep the lights on and the car gassed up.

That’s another problem for fake meat. It’s an expensive novelty, and you’ll have a hard time selling it in this economy.

The lying media is irritating people and there will be political consequences very shortly because nobody believes the bullshit and the Billshit that the media is peddling about these things anymore.

To go along with hideous levels of inflation, Walmart gives “Walmart+” to employees instead of a cost of living adjustment.

-/r/Walmart post about DoorDash contracting to deliver Walmart+ orders.

To go along with hideous levels of inflation, Walmart gives “Walmart+” to employees instead of a cost of living adjustment.

The employees at the local Walmart all had to attend a meeting today where it was stated that all Walmart employees get “free” Walmart+, which basically is free delivery of any size order to your house and 5 cents off per gallon of gasoline at Walmart or Murphy gas stations.

I guess it’s not nothing, but Walmart says that the Internal Revenue Code causes the “fair market value” of the Walmart+ subscription to be reported as taxable income.

So congratulations. Instead of a raise you got another way to spend money at Walmart, and you owe the government another $15-20 when you file your taxes next year.

Normally, it’s hard to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I doubt they’d be doing this unless they figured it benefited them more than you.

We’re already so tethered to Walmart at this point, it’s hard to shop anywhere else. Between the discount card (which works on some groceries, but not most) and the 5% back on my Capital One Walmart card for doing online orders, there’s hardly a point to shopping my groceries myself anymore, so I use the store pickup already.

The upside of having Walmart+ is marginal. I already know from Online Grocery Pickup employees talking about it that DoorDash drivers hate Walmart+ (verifiable through this article too) and they complain that they have to put groceries back that they’ve already picked and cancel the customer’s order all the time. Walmart probably pays more to have that happen than if they kicked a few more bucks to the drivers.

Walmart for their part says that a tip after some guy got $4 from them to deliver tons of groceries and a 50 pound bag of dog food up three flights of stairs is “optional”.

I just don’t see myself using it often unless I’m laid up in bed with the flu and absolutely cannot go out and pickup my own groceries, have an order for pickup that does not meet the $35 free pickup minimum and would normally be charged a $5.99 convenience fee (I’m there every day anyway, so this DOES happen), or an at Murphy filling up my gas tank and want to use the 5 cents a gallon off (in addition to my credit card, where gas always has 5% back).

The upside for an ethical person with Walmart+ is low. Ethics dictates a sizeable tip. Most Walmart customers are terrible people who don’t tip well, like the folks who already complain that their food arrived cold from restaurants with DoorDash. So the only ethical thing is tip or don’t use it.

With gas prices through the roof lately, I can’t imagine that Walmart+ isn’t on its last leg already.

If nobody wanted to make $4-5 taking a grocery order when gas cost $3 a gallon, who wants to do it with gas at $4.30 a gallon?

The whole thing is obviously in a death spiral because some manager at Walmart bought into this gig economy bullshit instead of paying a professional delivery driver in a Walmart truck to make the rounds (like Amazon Prime does).

And when we say “gig”, it’s a nice way of saying “slave”. People who work inside the store, for Walmart, make at least $17 an hour without having to drive all over the city not getting tips. They also don’t have to pay the employer share of social taxes at the end of the year.

The “app economy” has created a permanent underclass that cannot afford childcare (leading to Walmart warning that it won’t release orders to people with young children in the car) and do not make the legal minimum wage (which is $15 an hour in my state).

I’ve complained about these apps before, and how it’s dangerous for these “gig workers” from DoorDash to have their kids in the car.

Very recently, in the city I live in, a guy got into a running car and pointed a loaded handgun at a 16 year old in the back seat. A week before that, a guy stole a running vehicle and then ditched it a few miles later with some toddlers in it.

And you know how these app companies are. “We’re just a facilitator! You can’t sue us!”.

This is what comes out of San Francisco, folks. The most illiberal non-progressive system imaginable.

A return to plantations working slaves for subsistence living standards.