Oh Noooooos, they had to leave more features out!

The automaker has already made the unusual move of eliminate two fuel-saving features from some of the vehicles – engine start/stop and cylinder deactivation – and will now remove wireless mobile device charging pads from a few SUV trims, GM Authority first reported.

Well now.

Let's talk about that -- start/stop and cylinder deactivation.

Both are sold as "economical."

They're not.

Further, there are zero successful implementations -- defined as "does not screw the vehicle's engine or result in expensive repairs down the road."

None.

Not even the Japanese have gotten it right -- Mazda has had problems with engines using it.  So has GM.  So has everyone else.

Why?

Because cylinder deactivation is akin to an intentional misfire and thus produces asymmetric internal loading within the engine.  It is done to try to shave a fraction of a mpg in the EPA drive cycle and thus get a bit better rating.

This may not bother you if you don't intend to keep the vehicle for more than 5 years or beyond when the warranty runs out (and you get to pay for the nice, expensive repairs) but if you do intend to keep it, well, that's a problem.

Never mind the nice 10 speed automatic transmissions that run about $10,000 to replace when they blow up.  And folks: All automatics eventually blow up.  They blow up because the fluid is in the friction material of the clutches and thus inevitably some of that gets into the fluid and no matter how good of a filter you have (which isn't real good, by the way) you get wear and the wear causes failure.  You can make it fail faster by not maintaining it, of course.  Contrast this with a stick that may require a clutch but the gearbox itself, if you know how to drive a manual, will go a million miles with nothing more than gear oil changes every 50,000 or thereabouts.

Now let's contrast.  My 2002 Suburban has a 5.3L engine in it -- the same displacement as the current model.  It has a 4L60E transmission; a 4-speed overdrive automatic with lockup torque converter.

I can buy a remanufactured gearbox for $2,000 and for about $1,000 in labor have it installed.  That's a third of the price of the modern model.  For another $500 I can have upgraded internal parts put in said gearbox which will improve its expected life even more.  The engine, in a crate, is less-expensive as well if and when I blow it up, but it's much less likely to blow up because it doesn't have that cylinder deactivation crap on it and the fuel injectors and required high pressure fuel pump aren't $1,000 each either.

Here's the thing -- if all that "stuff" resulted in a 3-4mpg advantage and did not increase maintenance and repair costs it might be worth it.  After all, going from 18mpg to 21mpg, well, over enough miles that's a fair bit of money, especially with gas in the $3/gal+ range.  Over 100,000 miles or so that would be good for about $2,300 in fuel which is not chump change.

But that's not the truth.  The EPA window sticker on the new truck -- current year model, mind you, according to GM -- is 15/19.  So in the real world all this crap saves you nothing and makes the truck wildly more-expensive to maintain.

Mine gets 14/18 in the real world all day long, statistically identical and, if I recall correctly, was rated right around there.  Fuelly, which I use to track it, confirms this.  Further, stick a trailer behind either one of them and at 70mph they'll both get 9mpg.  The reason for both is that aerodynamically both are approximately equivalent to a flat brick wall and there's nothing you can do about the laws of physics in that regard.  It simply requires "X" horsepower to move said brick wall through the air at Y mph.

Period.

Maybe I should send mine out to be repainted and then have Katzkin re-do the leather seating.....  Hell, I could re-engine and re-transmission the truck at the same time and spend less than 20% of the cost of a "new" one -- and it would be, for all intents and purposes at that point, both cosmetically and mechanically new.

And be more reliable.

It's time for a bit of 1776, I think -- except there are no more balls in this nation, maffs is racist and "muh weed" is better, right?

Note the red.  "Owner's Equivalent Rent" is 23.7% of the inflation index.  Yet the claim is that the price index for an owned house has advanced 2.3% over the last 12 months.

The actual increase in a median home price has increased 13.2% in the last 12 months.

Were that to be the recorded number instead of the abject fraud of OER 12 month reported inflation would be over 10% both in headline and core, since "food and energy exclusions" would make no real difference with nearly one quarter of the total being in residential housing.

This in turn would mean short-term interest rates should be running about 11% right now, with the ten year and mortgages being about 12% with the long bond at about 13-15%.

Yeah.

This is deliberate fraud, it is suborned and ordered by Congress which has done this for the explicit purpose of being able to continue to demand easy money policies from The Fed and spend that which they refuse to tax first and which they then get and causes real poverty in real people.

This is not a minor little detail or something that only hoses a few for the benefit of the many.  It in fact screws nearly everyone and if the American public had not been smoking bong hits in math class for the last 30 years and paid a bit of attention to any of this the entire federal and state government apparatus, along with all the sycophants in the media and "commerce" that feast on you, the people, would have been thrown into shark-infested waters long ago.

But muh legal weed dude, it's all good, maffs is racist and all that matters is the color of your skin -- never mind the intentional fraud and lies you racist pig.

You get -- and deserve -- what you tolerate.

I've been pointing this fraud out for over a decade right here in this column.

Enjoy your own destruction since it is, in fact, exactly what you demand.

Oh, and have another bong hit.

Uh huh.... inflation fears?

Americans' inflation fears reached a fever pitch in June, rising to the highest level since June 2013 as the price of consumer goods continued to surge, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey published Monday.

The median expectation is that the inflation rate will be up 4.8% one year from now, a new high for the gauge, and up 3.6% three years from now, the highest level since August 2013, according to the New York Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Expectations. 

People always understate inflation -- and their expectations always are less than reality.

How's the price of food doing for this last year?  Gasoline?

Food and energy aren't important, right?  How about health care?

But... remember, Americans also support the government spending more and more money.

Money they don't have, and thus don't tax first.

What causes inflation?

Spending money you don't have.

So why is it, may I ask, that "expectations" as so high?

Maybe you ought to get up and have a look in the mirror; after all, you let the infestation of both state and federal governments go on with all their "unemployment" benefits and literal trillions of spending that was not funded by taxes.

Yeah, I know, there was a pandemic.

That's nice.

Did it require us to put a gun in our economy's mouth and blow its brains out?

No.

You did that, not a virus -- both with Trump and now Biden.

Congratulations.

The usual wave arms and do nothing game is back on in DC.

The economy is booming under President Biden’s leadership. The economy has gained more than three million jobs since the President took office—the most jobs created in the first five months of any presidency in modern history. Today, the President is building on this economic momentum by signing an Executive Order to promote competition in the American economy, which will lower prices for families, increase wages for workers, and promote innovation and even faster economic growth.

Uh huh.

More than 100 years ago Congress got tired of the monopolist games in various industries and passed a series of laws, with the first being The Sherman Act.  When firms danced around the edges (gee, you think that sort of thing is new?) it was rapidly followed by Clayton and Robinson-Patman.  You can find them in 15 USC Chapter 1 and, I remind you once again (for the 100th time, more or less, over the last 13 or so years of this column) Sherman and Clayton are not civil penalties either: They contain federal felony, 10-years in the slam-slam penalties for each person involved.  There is no corporate shield behind which one can hide in that regard.

Biden hasn't given a wet crap about any of this during his time in federal office -- not as a Senator, not as VP and now, with this order, not as President either.  Nor did Trump.  Nor did Obama.  Nor has anyone else for a very long time.

Since this is long-standing law it does not require Congress to do a single thing nor can Congress stop its enforcement without passing a new law of some sort.  It simply requires an Administration with a pair of nuts between its legs that is willing to start jailing people.

Let's go through a few of the items in this list.

• Non-competes.  These are roundly abused by larger corporate entities.  Putting a stop to it, if it happens, is a good thing.  Don't think for a second that this is limited to highly-skilled jobs; an infamous case involved Jimmy John's sub shop demanding all employees sign one.  NY came after them for it but note that Obama's "Just-Us" department and Eric PlaceHolder did not.  So much for giving a crap about the "little guy" eh?
  
  
• "Calls on the leading antitrust agencies, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to enforce the antitrust laws vigorously...."  Oh really?  You mean like nearly every single medical practitioner in the United States which illegally colludes with insurance companies to fix prices?  Let me know when you start leading hospital and corporate medical officers out of their offices in handcuffs and straight into prison.  May I remind you that there are not just one but two Supreme Court decisions (Royal Drug and Maricopa County), both now more than 30 years old, confirming that anti-trust law does indeed apply to these firms and that the oft-cited claim of immunity by way of McCarran-Ferguson was explicitly turned away by the Supreme Court in both cases?
  
  
• "Americans pay more than 2.5 times as much for the same prescription drugs as peer countries, and sometimes much more."  15 USC Chapter 1 explicitly covers international trade: "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal."  So stop with the bull**** you rat bastard piece of crap and simply frog-march every pharma firm executive straight into the dock; their pricing schemes which force Americans to pay for the development of drugs that every other nation then uses without paying said cost is a 10-year Hi, Bubba is now your roommate federal felony.  I'm tired of the damned lies Joe: Handcuffs and indictments now *******.  No more bull****.

There is much more but until Biden and The Ho stop lying through arm-waving and start frog-marching I'm not impressed and until you make them cut the crap they won't.

Want actual solutions?  They're right here.

Note the date on that article.

It's over folks.

You've seen it with Fauci.

You've seen it with the CDC in sworn testimony that was clear bull****, either maliciously-so or due to incompetence.

Now you're seeing it in the cadre of teachers the administration is promoting.

The Biden administration announced a plan to extend tuition breaks to future teachers and do away with GPA requirements for grant recipients to increase access for students of color.

You couldn't possibly do a more-stupid thing than remove the requirement to actually succeed in college from the granting of privilege to those who want to teach our children.

The plan also aims to increase access to the program by removing the grade point average requirement ....

Ah, so you no longer have to be able to learn, say much less teach, to become a teacher.

We wonder why our nation's public schools, especially those in underserved areas that this program targets, are incapable of making change for a $20 in their head or even on a piece of paper -- or composing a basic business letter using proper English?

Joe Biden not only is perfectly ok with that he's expanding the number of incompetent people teaching your children, on purpose.

To minority parents in underserved areas: Why do you let this ******* infest the White House when he is directly screwing your kids?