Yeah, progressives: Figure it out!
I'm reading "Why the government built only 58 EV charging stations in three years/The EV fiasco should be a jolt to progressives’ senses" (WaPo)(free-access link). The article is by Marc J. Dunkelman, author of "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back."
I'm reading "Why the government built only 58 EV charging stations in three years/The EV fiasco should be a jolt to progressives’ senses" (WaPo)(free-access link). The article is by Marc J. Dunkelman, author of "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back."
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Why conservatives believe a small government is a better government…
“a jolt to their senses”? Progressives need their smug, thieving, Soviet asses kicked down the avenue for the remainder of this decade and then some.
Oh, give it a good, long rest. The reason they didn't build any EV charging stations is that it requires money to build EV charging stations, and they stole all the money.
I just saw a post on Instagram about some recent transport issues and a picture of Mayor Pete stating that she really missed that man.
This is the biggest impediment to progressive goals that progressives refuse to face—government has become a lumbering behemoth that spends vast amount of money to accomplish very nearly nothing.
My guess is not enough graft to go around.
The Wizard of Oz was about the then "progressive" takeover of the money supply via the Federal Reserve (Emerald City) and removing the dollar value from the price of gold (Yellow Brick Road).
To quote someone:
"The Federal Reserve today is more like the man behind the curtain than the great and powerful Oz. Progressives need to figure out how they will address the overcorrections of the past several decades and, in so doing, make government work again."
Does the article mention that Biden predicted this effort would "set the standard" and he funded it as a slap at Musk? (I won't gibe WaPo my email to access the "free" link.) Because way back at the start of Biden's single term there was no agreed upon industry standard for chargers and Biden wanted these built by Mayor Pete to put government weight behind the CCS standard. But so many car companies have since adopted the Tesla charging standard NACS, mostly because in CA and other EV-heavy markets most of the actual available chargers are Tesla ones, that the DOT build-out started adding NACS compatibility to its CCS stations.
It is now obvious that the Democrat approach is that there is nothing we can do about the deficit so let’s just spend away until Americano dies.
Trump has shown that if we save enough each year we can pay back the deficit for our children in 30 years of doing the right thing.
A 30 year mortgage to buy your future nap pines is a very common thing to do.
Happiness
Add this failure to Sec. Pete's growing list. At least over 60 people weren't killed in this screwup.
"Overcorrections". Haha.
Then they re-wrote the rules on EV subsidies to specifically exclude Tesla, and in order to remain competitive with his rivals receiving $10K per car for their cars, Musk was forced to stop rolling out his charging stations. So Biden not only wasted billions failing he actively stopped the rollout that was actually happening.
Same as spending billions on "rural high speed internet" a problem that Musk has already solved.
Progressives need to figure out how they will address the overcorrections of the past several decades and, in so doing, make government work again.
Which will be a very long time in coming because no living Progressive is ever going to admit that they failed due to institutional incompetence.
The first step is stop calling yourselves progressives.
"Yeah, progressives: Figure it out!"
They've got it figured out- billions of taxpayer dollars of graft for friends and family. And if a little of that sloshes out of the pot and inadvertently helps someone along the way, well- they'll take credit for that, too.
See: USAID
"'....reading "Why the government built only 58 EV charging stations in three years/The EV fiasco should be a jolt to progressives’ senses" ...
Did they forget to mention how much money went down that swirling drain in the course of their project? It wouldn't surprise me to see that this was glossed over.
Hah ! I was right - not a single mention of how much money was flushed for those 58 chargers. I wonder how many of them are actually functional?
Writing the stories that everybody wants, that's the Wa-Po-Po.
I came here to say that "progress" died when Disney closed down the "Carousel of Progress," but was surprised to find that the attraction is still going strong and has been updated five times since it debuted at the New York World's Fair. Unfortunately, they didn't or couldn't adapt the four-part structure (1900s-1920s-1940s-Today), so developments in the 50s through the end of the century aren't included. They should have included cassette recorders, Pong, Tetris, giant first-generation mobile phones and boxy early Apple computers. Jean Shepard and Mel Blanc provided voices for the last update.
Anyway, "progress" was already dead when Rachel Maddow put on a hard hat and went to Hoover Dam to complain that we weren't building anything anymore. A big reason why progress died was progressives, who used worries about non-existent species to kill big projects. Don't mistake progressivism for progress. Another reason there is no progress is this massive debt we are carrying around. Maybe we should join the Belt and Road initiative and get China to pay for what we need.
Seriously, if you were intent on defrauding the government in order to get rich, why would you be anything other than a Democrat? You get cover for your theft from the most prestigious broad sheets to the cable networks.
"Overhead" is the word they are looking for. Government mandated overhead grows until the entire budget is consumed.
I'd prefer to make government small again. Like Article I, section 8 small.
The initial appropriation was just "seed" money. It was spent to form some committees. The committees needed staff. Everyone had to be trained. Then there were conferences to attend to see what other committees were proposing.
Everything had to be run by the UN. More travel was required to visit member countries to assess their needs and special circumstances. A greal deal more money was needed to support news media efforts to "get the word out". $20 million network anchors don't come cheap.
And then therre's the grant money needed to fund supporting "research" in academia.
There's more. A lot more. You can't expect Charging Stations to just spring up like weeds, all over the country.
Designing the stations and siting them and guaranteeing no harm to any creature or tribe that ever took a crap within miles of the site must be accounted for. Realizing, however, that mistakes will be made, reserves must be set aside for attorney fees, court costs and the inevitable "settlements".
Given the complexities of this undertaking, it's quite amazing that SO MANY stations are ALREADY up and running! More money is needed if we're serious about meeting our modest goals.
This sounds like a typical slow-moving government grant or contract.
- People on Capitol Hill come up with a super complex set of ideological goals and rules for giving away money, and these requirements can be dozens or hundreds of pages.
- They hand the rules off to agencies to find organizations to do the work. The agencies spend 6-12 months getting through 1,000 legal hoops to give money away. This includes listing irrelevant requirements. With Biden, see ensuring "black and brown female participation," setting aside funds for minority-owned businesses, requiring that preliminary research be conducted at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), etc.
- The agencies receive hundreds of bids/requests for money, and spend another 3 to 6 months rating and reviewing the bids. Those good on irrelevant factors (e.g., DEI/woke goals) get pushed to the top of the lists.
- The government starts giving away money, but some winners are bad per their ideological focus, while others are good but start slowly per the 1,000 hoops required.
Progressive need to admit that Joe Biden was a disaster - FOR EVERYONE. He is a crook. Stop lying and deluding yourselves.
He is above the law. Biden's cabinet picks were also a disaster.
progressives refuse to do this. Refuse.
And what if the government had built all those EV charging stations they funded? Did anyone in the Biden administration think about increasing power generation and making the existing electric grid more robust and reliable so as to support the additional power demand a half million new charging stations would put on the existing electricity delivery systems?
Meanwhile this morning I read about a school district in Maine which replaced a number of their old diesel school buses with EV buses (BTW, both the manufacture of the buses and their purchase was subsidized by the federal government under the Biden administration). Due to cold air temperatures the buses lost power, could not be restarted, and had to be abandoned on the side of the road. Good luck to people in Maine and upper Minnesota and places like that who put their faith in EVs. Come the dark months you’ll find that you chose … poorly.
Think about the Manhattan Project, started in 1942, which produced workable nuclear fission bombs of two different designs (uranium and plutonium) that were used in 1945. That project was no doubt hindered by its lack of DEI (diversity, after all, being our strength, we're told) and "environmental justice" requirements to benefit the local Pueblo tribes. So, amazing what they got done, right?
Elon's chargers work. A point which will be lost on WaPo readers.
@Robert Marshall: My main take-away from the (dramatized) film Oppenheimer (2023), was that the short-timeline Manhattan project succeeded by taking in the best scientists despite having oddball, square-peg personalties and marginal willingness to follow the rules. This weirdness included Oppenheimer himself; and the dirty bureaucrats play dirty in the film too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_(film)
I've been renovating and building residential property here in Austin since 2004, for my sins, as the saying goes. Since 2018, the last seven houses I built I put EV charger circuits into the garages, 50Amp three phase, adding to my house costs. Blanked the circuit off at the garage wall, for the buyer to use on their own EV charger of whatever type after installing the correct outlet type plug, which I offered to do as part of the sale. I put that feature in the sales info for the houses. Just this year, the last house I built finally has someone using that feature. And it cost me $1025 to install the outlet and upgrade the circuit to current building code, which the City of Austin (spit!) changed last year, just after I completed this house.
So I can build chargers slightly slower than the federal government, but at significantly lower cost. Any takers? I could use a half billion or so!
And my EV chargers come with a house built around them that I'll throw in for free! Buy a charger, get a free house!
"Any takers? I could use a half billion or so!"
Are you a black lesbian? If not, that might be a problem.
The Manhattan project was extremely diverse, and inclusive, in terms of ethnicity, religion, politics, country of origin, heck, even sexual misbehavior and probably sexual orientation. Maybe not that equitable, in that it was a meritocracy without quotas for overcoming any -isms. Race wasn't much of an issue because the Chinese and Japanese and Indian physicists, some of whom worked to produce their own nuclear bombs in the 40s and later, were busy in their home countries, and Africa didn't have a robust physics education infrastructure producing genius physicists at the time.
Complaining that the Manhattan project wasn't diverse is like saying a Boston creme pie doesn't have much asparagus in it. It wasn't a diversity project, it was a "do this to stop bad people killing millions of other people" event, and thank goodness it was treated as such.
For much less than a half billion, I could be a very convincing black lesbian.
The sad thing is that he doesn't seem to realize that Progressives are doing exactly what they were designed to do. Gum up the works. Destroy productivity by creating duplicate positions with similar job descriptions, but different titles. Keep adding, always keep adding to the Federal employment level. Create jobs that create more jobs, even if they're the same jobs.
And if, for any reason, the job is not going as you want, stop working. Don't quit the job. Just stop working while there.
What does he expect they'll learn? They're literally doing what they've been designed to do.
How many Federal employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
1- to hold the ladder.
1- to screw in the lightbulb
2,500,000- to request forms to be filled out, approve or deny them, require additional photos, data, and specs, then pass on their approval to the next 15 departments for their requirements.
The charging station project was as ill-conceived as Biden's Gaza pier.
"Diversity" in the early years of the 20th century pretty much did mean "men from all over Europe" which the Manhattan project definitely had. We now have a Manhattan Project National Historic Park spread out over New Mexico, Tennessee and Washington State. They've brought the women at Los Alamos and the African-Americans in the project (mostly on college campuses and not at Los Alamos) into more prominence.
""Why the government built only 58 EV charging stations in three years/The EV fiasco should be a jolt to progressives’ senses"
As should have been the California high-speed rail project, the homeless fight, the Great Society failure, the incompetent education establishment (including the Department of Education), etc.
All these should be wakeup calls -- except if you're in on the grift. DOGE is now confirming the entire left-wing establishment was in on the grift, including its media.
A new gas station opened nearby last month. It took about a month to construct. It has about a dozen fueling stations. No federal funding was involved.
Why should the federal government be funding the construction of EV charging stations? That’s the first question that should be answered.
Turns out, "the party of government" ain't that good at governing?
Add to this example the reported $40 billion they got to implement broadband Internet access in rural areas. After turning down Starlink because Musk Man Bad, they had years go by without a single home benefitting from the program. How much of that money, if any, is left over after all of the graft and inefficiency?
I can add nothing to the intelligent comments above.
Now let's do California high speed rail!
Let's take a look at the DIE requirements for the project. In a quick read, I did not see that Dunkelman dealt with that.
Why conservatives believe a small government is a better government
Yes, one and done. All these lectures about the complexities of government funding are really just justification to make government as small as possible…
The system worked as planned: Very little was accomplished, but politicians, cronies and apparatchiks got a lot of taxpayer money.
Construction started on March 17, 1930, and the building opened thirteen and a half months afterward on May 1, 1931. The Empire State Building. How far would you get today in that time span?
"How far would you get today in that time span?"
You'd probably be lucky to have gotten a reply to your request for a blank building permit form to fill out.
Steven Wilson said...
“Construction started on March 17, 1930, and the building opened thirteen and a half months afterward on May 1, 1931. The Empire State Building. How far would you get today in that time span?”
The Brent Spence bridge carries both I-75 and I-71 across the Ohio river. The bridge carries about triple the amount of traffic it was designed for.
About a quarter century ago, a new bridge was promised. Lots of studies have been done. No construction work has started yet.
The linked article was a well- written apologia for government projects: Why they are designed not to work. In the end, it is pointless to note all the rules and “safeguards” that prevent getting things done. Preventing action is the very reason government bureaucracy exists. If you want to get something built, you must go outside the bureaucracy. Everyone knows this. Building EV chargers was never the goal! The goal was to allow politicians to pat themselves on the back, as if spending billions were actually the same thing as building chargers.
If they wanted chargers built, they could have given Elon Musk a couple billion dollars and told him where to build them, and they would have been built. That was NEVER the goal!
Progressives killed progress. Killing progress, stopping construction projects, and banning stuff -- that's the whole progressive tool kit. There's nothing else in the bag except a sugar-free mint with fuzz stuck all over it.
How to make things work again? Well, we could start by gassing progressives, but that might be too extreme. Far nicer would be to dethrone them. If a progressive is found in a position of power, give him ten minutes to clear out his desk, then it's the street.
I thought I successfully posted a comment but I'm not finding it, so... here:
Does this writer know what a "Wizard of Oz moment" is? Hint: there IS NO Oz the Great and Powerful. The little man behind the curtain is pretending to be Oz the Great and Powerful. A "Wizard of Oz moment" is when Toto pulls the curtain aside, reveals the faker guy, and everyone realizes that the whole thing is a sham.
So. Sloppy analogy or Kinsey gaffe?
"Progressives need to figure out how they will address the overcorrections of the past several decades and, in so doing, make government work again."
They could start by not insisting government be in charge of every little decision that people make in their lives, but everybody knows they'll never go for that.
Since 2018, the last seven houses I built I put EV charger circuits into the garages, 50Amp three phase, adding to my house costs. Blanked the circuit off at the garage wall, for the buyer to use on their own EV charger of whatever type after installing the correct outlet type plug, which I offered to do as part of the sale. I put that feature in the sales info for the houses. Just this year, the last house I built finally has someone using that feature. And it cost me $1025 Those chargers would be Level 2, good for overnight charging, but not what's needed on the road for long distance travel, and not what the government had in mind.
Progressivism has nothing to do with progress.
Progressive is only to be used in reference to the fulmination of cancers. Be it the micro body or macro body variety.
3 phase in a house? I don't think so. That requires a 3 phase transformer at the pole.
If EV charging stations were necessary the market place would have provided them.
I thought EV chargers required ordinary 240V single-phase alternating current like an electric clothes dryer. Pretty sure that's what my builder installed in my new home. I'll never get a pure electric vehicle, but I would buy a plug-in hybrid if a good one presents itself.
I wasn't aware that 3-phase service from the curb into the home was even a thing. Isn't the whole point of 3-phase transmission to economize on the materials required for long-distance transmission via the innately higher conductor utilization?
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