Horse 3400 - The Badness Of The US Constitution - 15A, 16A, 17A

Amendment XV.

SECTION 1

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

- 

15A which was passed in the wake of the wake of the Southern War Of Rebellion And Aggression For The Explicit Right To Keep And Retain Slavery, was passed during a very small window when the United States started to consider all men as being equal (but not women). Even after spending gallons upon gallons upon gallons for blood which is the coin of the battlefield, the racist elements of society which never went away, still actually feared the power of the ballot box because whomever could control legislatures can change the rules and take away their privilege and advantage. They did not want that then; they do not want that now.

Even after the passage of 15A, racist cussjacks found other methods to disenfranchise people whom they hated, almost immediately. Since race, colour, and servitude was no longer on the cards, other measures such as Voter ID, or literacy tests, or arcane enrollment procedures, et cetera, could be used and still are today.

Herein lies one of the central problems with the way that the United States Constitution works. As it consistently refuses to assign rights to the people, or the states, or the congress, in the positive sense, it immediately undermines itself by including exceptions and get out clauses. This is utterly putrid in terms of how you design legislation.

For a nation which is supposedly "a nation of laws" as John Adams said, the conception and framing of what people think are rights, is incredibly bad. The right of citizens to do a thing (a right is the legal ability to do a thing, own a thing, or have an interest in a thing at law) which "shall not be denied or abridged" on account of X, Y, and Z, can and will be denied or abridged by self-interested and knavish cussjacks on other accounts including P, Q, and R.

The right to vote, which isn't explicitly granted in the positive sense here, is also not explicitly granted in the positive sense later on in other places like 19A either. Even here in 1870, right to vote could be denied on the grounds of sex (and was), or failure to pay a poll tax, or failure to have correct Voter ID, et cetera. Two of those reasons have been explicitly ruled out as grounds to deny the vote by other amendments; with the other currently being actively pursued as a means to disenfranchise people. Other means are being explored, as evidenced with rumours and inklings in the upcoming presidential election, where the means to disenfranchise people by ignoring the ballot box entirely is being explored.

If legislation was properly designed, the right to vote would simply be granted but it isn't; therefore 15A and what follows, is still bad.

SECTION 2

The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

- 

As with 13A, this section of 15A is functionally pointless. Remember, Article I, Section 8 already granted Congress the power to "make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper" to execute the powers contained within the Constitution; an amendment to the Constitution after being ratified by the states, is in fact contained within the Constitution.

Amendment XVI.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

- 

The note given is that Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution was modified by the 16A. Quite frankly I think that the whole existence of 16A is itself redundant as Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution already gave the Congress the "Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises". Income Tax is a tax. 

Actually to make the general sematic case, as Taxation is ultimately derived from the Latin "Taxo" which mean "I Pay", then of course the  "Power To lay and collect Taxes" is obvious; since taxation is just the process of destroying the dollars which have already been issued for the payment and provision of government provided goods and services in the first place.

The reason why 16A needed to be passed all, was because SCOTUS in Pollock v Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895) ruled that in principle federal income tax was not unconstitutional, but that income taxes on rents, dividends, and interest were direct taxes and thus had to be apportioned among the states on the basis of population; per Art 1, Section 9:

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

- Art 1, Section 9 (repealed with 16A)

I think that 16A is redundant because of Art 1, Sec 8. SCOTUS who stole for itself the power to say what the law is in Marbury v Madison (1803) saw this; then made a really really stupid ruling which took 14 years to work its way through Congress and then a further 4 years to rattle its way through the ratification process, to undo what really should have never been done in the first place.

If the mechanics of operation of the Constitution is so incredibly awful that it takes a whole generation at minimum to lance legislative cancer, then this is bad law. When you have things like the Equal Rights Amendment which has never made it through the ratification process still languishing in limbo, then what's the point? There is a symbiotic relationship between law and culture, wherein law shapes culture and culture shapes law; and where you have the Constitution itself being so monumentally stupid that it takes literally a generation to do even the most basic things like taxation administration, then it is little wonder that the country went to war with itself. So much of US Law depends on the opinions of SCOTUS; which right from the get go was and still is a set of political appointments which act as a weapon. That's awful.

Amendment XVII.

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

- 

17A finally got around to changing the Constitution so that the Senators from each State, were elected by the people thereof. What a novel idea.

At this point readers might be wondering why such a thing is even necessary because the very notion of representative democracy itself must my inference require the election of people sent to represent electorate/community/state/body politic at large. However this assumes that the thing in question is a representative democracy. The United States as envisaged, was not. 

The original text of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution before 17A read: "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof".

This means that until 1913 not only did the people not vote for the President (and they still do not because the Electors in the Electoral College do that) but also the people not vote for the Senators as well (who then went into the calculation of the numbers to decide the Electors in the Electoral College.

This harkens back to the fact that the United States was not only started because of agitations by rich land owners who owned other people as chattel goods to get common folk to fight a war for them, but that the second attempt at a Constitution for National Government was intended to be anti-democratic. In this respect, the United States' Senate was intended to be as anti-democratic as the British House of Lords; which to this day still is not elected but appointed on the basis of semi-open corrupt patronage. This is not exactly something unknown to where I live as the New South Wales Legislative Council (the upper house) did not have open elections until 1984. 

When you further consider that the various Judges of the Supreme Court Of The United States are appointed by the President "and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate" then until 1913 you had a nominally unelected body, making up the numbers to overlay a layer of abstraction from the electorate, to then appoint the judiciary. As designed, the system is a pus filled horrorshow and 17A only sets about correcting one aspect of it. 

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When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

- 

It makes sense that you should hold an election to replace someone who has either resigned, died, or been expelled. What doesn't really make sense is that the right to appoint, even on a temporary basis is handed to the various state legislatures. In practice this usually means appointment by the State Governor with the 'advice and consent' of the State Senate but it is still a poor practice. 17A Clause 2 is still the Constitution trying to retain the remnants of rule by diktat even though the world had moved on and direct election was already on the march. I of course say this with complete knowledge that where I live in NSW, we didn't even have elections of the Legislative Council (the Upper House) until 1978; which is very very classic tory in nature. 

One thing that 17A doesn't address because none of the United States Constitution ever wants to even look at this, is that owing to the almost religious belief that the states have a 'republican form of government' despite never actually defining what that is, it means that there are so very many provisions of law where the several states either remain responsible or have asserted responsibility for the various administrative functions of government. Consequently it is the states that conduct elections and it is the states who asset administrative control over them. 17A by operation merely confirms this principle and even when there are vacancies in the Senate, the states very much asset control and power over the elections of those Senators. 

Where I live in Australia, the Australian Electoral Commission conducts elections for our House and Senate with free and fierce independence; to the point that it is highly respected and is nobody's fool. The consequence of the operation of 17A in the United States is that just about every single election is run as if it was Amateur Hour at the local Service's Legion Club, and not only are they all conducted badly but they are likely open to corruption and public confidence in them is not great.

-

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

- 

While this grandfather clause sounds like it could in theory produce a case where someone would just hang around like a whiffy pongy spectre at a banquet, other provisions of the Constitution meant that in the worst possible scenario this would all become redundant within eight years. After such time, there would be no Senator who would still be there who was chosen before this was passed.

Horse 3399 - 2024 Bathurst 1000 Zs

The 2024 Bathurst 1000 has been won by Brodie Kostecki and Todd Hazelwood driving an Erebus Motorsport Camaro. This race was noteworthy for two things:

1 - this was the fastest running of the 1000km event; with the distance being covered in 5 hours, 58 minutes, 3 seconds; at an average speed of 167.62 km/h (104.15mph).

2 - this race had exactly 2 lead changes when Kostecki brought the Camaro into the pits on lap 27 and was passed by Will Brown, and the retook the lead on lap later when Will Brown brought his Camaro into the pits on lap 28. Basically apart from pit cycles, this was was decided on lap 1, and any and all intrigue evaporated from the race by about lap 3.

You could have literally had a nap on lap 3, for five hours, and then woken up to find the order unchanged and the almost six hour procession unaltered.

- Couldn't you go a Chiko Roll?

Well actually, yes you could. You could drive to the shops which are two hours away and come back and the running order would still be unchanged.

In terms of sheer number of laps led, this is only second to the Brock/Richards demolition of all and sundry in the 1979 running of the event when they were fastest on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Claimed Pole, Led Every Lap, Won the race, and when Brock claimed the lap record on the last lap. In this respect, Kostecki's winding out of the lead to no more than about 30 seconds, and not even claiming the fastest lap, looks incomplete as that honour went to Broc Feeney.

What did this six hour procession prove? Quite literally nothing that we already didn't know. Camaros finishing 1-2-3 merely further demonstrates that the advantage that the Camaro has over the Mustang remains baked in; and the processional nature of the race also further serve to demonstrate that the cars themselves by virtue of being faster and more competent than every iteration of top-flight touring car racing in Australia which had come before, are ironically worse.

The Supercars are basically a bespoke GT3-Minus category, which are reasonably heavy compared to a GT3 car, have a completely adequate and competent aero package, and a bound box of rules which is so tight that any advantage which exists is permanent. Results like we saw at the 2024 Bathurst 1000 are frequent, common, and worst of all, boring as all get out. If you had tuned into the race expecting to see an intriguing battle, then you wasted six hours. There wasn't one. What's worst of all is that thanks to the sunk-cost fallacy, we are stuck with this for the foreseeable future.

What the Supercars category demonstrates on a mind-numbly boring repeated basis is that although you can invent a category of motor racing which is fast, it doesn't work a jot for producing anything interesting to watch. Yes, Brodie Kostecki and Todd Hazelwood drove their Camaro the fastest, but even they knew that provided they could maintain any kind of gap over the car in front, they would win. Ho hum. Yawn. Crick. Roll over.

Motor Racing generally reached the point where being aero dependent was already known to be a killer of intrigue by about 1985. Aerodynamics as applied to a racing car is a fluid dynamics question; specifically about how you make the air flow around all of the parts and pieces and about how you generate downforce which is mostly a suck-pull force underneath either the wings or the car body itself. That's all fine and good until you put lots of cars into a line and you then invent the phenomenon of "dirty air".

A wing works best in still and undisturbed air. When you put many cars in a line, whilst it is true that the one in the front punches a hole in the air which the others then all follow through, the turbulence which trails off in three dimensions is not amenable to the wings and things of the cars which follow. This is exactly like the wake and the waves which follow after a ferry as it bluntly and rudely crashes across the harbour and creates an unpleasant ride for all of the wee ickle sailboats who then get chucked about in the waves of the wave. If you then multiply that in three dimensions, then that is what is happening to the cars which follow.

This then creates the dilemma that a car immediately following at close quarters, no longer has the aerodynamic grip of the car in front; so the driver will back off some distance to regain the aerodynamic grip that they want. By definition, a car which is following at an increased distance is not racing closely with the car in front. If you then multiply that by two dozen, then what you get is what we saw in the 2024 Bathurst 1000; with 24 cars nominally following each other at about 5 second intervals all day long. In fact, the interval between the Kostecki/Hazlewood Camaro and the Feeney/Whincup Camaro, hovered between about 7 and 15 seconds for most of the day.

What is awful is that we should expect this again and again and again, and we get it again and again and again. The organisers of the category have fallen for the fallacy hook, line, and sinker, that fast cars always equal good racing. They do not. Time and time again, we prove that the funnest racing to watch, is with the most rubbishy of cars. We have Hyundai Excel racing which is frantic. We have TCR which is cut an thrust racing at close quarters. Formula Ford with practically no aero is about slicing cars through the air and maximising drivers skill. Supercars racing is now purely about dialling in an advantage and nothing else.

The category could be fixed by throwing away the cars en-masse and actually re-inventing the rubbishy cars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when three-box sedans ruled the roads. They were designed to put families in, to get groceries, and occasionally do big road trips which included dirt roads. They were not designed from the outset to go motor racing. A rubbishy three-box sedan thing with practically no aero whatsoever and maybe enough horsepower to yell down a Valhalla war-hell-ride, is what the public actually would like to see, because the fastest cars in this category ever wasn't really the funnest of things to watch. It was okay but boringly forgettable. 

Horse 3398 - Australia's Part In Bombing Beirut

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZO8-XXf0ek

Lebanese officials say 22 people have been killed and 117 others injured in Israeli airstrikes on central Beirut yesterday evening.

There was no warning issued before the strikes which hit residential buildings in two densely packed neighbourhoods in Bachoura - a small Shia area in the capital.

This is the third time Israel has launched air strikes on the city outside of the suburb of Dahieh, where it has struck repeatedly.

Media outlets, quoting security sources, suggest the apparent target, Wafiq Safa, survived. Safa is a high-ranking Hezbollah official and close ally of Hezbollah's former long-term leader Hassan Nasrallah. 

Neither the Israeli military nor Hezbollah's media office have commented.

- BBC News, 11th Oct 2024/

Well I will.

Hamas, Hezbollah, the IDF, and Benjamin Netanyahu are all evil and I hate all of you. The quicker that all of these things are dismantled, that Netanyahu is exiled to the Marshall Islands, and the quicker that the endless cycle of death comes to an end, the better.

I will comment. My country has blood on its hands. We helped supply the bombs.

In a week which saw the Israeli Defence Force lobbing rockets and bombs at both Gaza and Lebanon, and which saw Sky News Australia's Sharri Markson meet with the co-morbid Psychopath and Sociopath In Chief, PM Benjamin Netanyahu (this man has no remorse for his actions, no empathy for the people that he has stated that he thinks are vermin, frequently displayed criminal tendencies, and whose moral compass was burnt to a crisp so long ago that he consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others), we have to come to the conclusion that not only is every single word coming out of both sides of parliament in Australia unreliable, but we are joyfully complicit in war crimes. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/11/us-made-munition-used-in-israeli-strike-on-central-beirut-shrapnel-shows

A US-made munition was used in a strike on central Beirut that killed 22 people and wounded 117, according to an analysis of shrapnel found by the Guardian at the scene of the attack.

The strike on Thursday night hit an apartment complex in the densely populated neighbourhood of Basta, levelling the apartment building and destroying cars and the interiors of nearby residences.

...

The Guardian found remnants of a US-manufactured joint direct attack munition (Jdam) in the rubble of the collapsed apartment building on Friday afternoon. Jdams are guidance kits built by the US aerospace company Boeing that attach to large “dumb bombs” ranging up to 2,000lbs (900kg), converting them into GPS-guided bombs.

The weapons remnant was verified by the crisis, conflict and arms division of Human Rights Watch and a former US military bomb technician.

“The bolt pattern, its position and the shape of the of the remnant are consistent with the tail fin of a US-made, Jdam, guidance kit for Mk80 series air-dropped munitions,” said Richard Weir, a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch’s crisis, conflict and arms division, after viewing a photograph of the fragment. The Mk80 series encompasses three classes of bomb, the smallest of which is 500lbs and the largest is 2,000lbs.

- The Guardian, 11th Oct 2024

The whole Mark 80 class of dumb bombs (yes, even the IDF's propaganda which says that they were using smart bombs was a total lie), has been in use since 1946; and started to see active service in the Korean War. The current Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAMs) are  also relatively dumb bombs; which the IDF has been deploying on civilians who have been defending themselves with tents and thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and Prayers are nominally useless against JDAMs, which is handy for the IDF as they continue to pummel the every loving cuss out of ordinary people until the streets flow with so much blood that Benny gets to have a chuckle.

Meanwhile, if you do even the most basic of perfunctory research, you find that Australia has played its part in the ongoing genocide of civilians like the pathetic little lap-dog that we are.

https://www.flightglobal.com/defence/australias-ferra-to-continue-jdam-er-wing-kit-production-work-on-powered-jdam/155505.article

Boeing and Australia’s Ferra Engineering have signed a memorandum of understanding related to further Australian production of Joint Direct Attack Munition Extended Range (JDAM ER) wing kits, and will explore applications for a powered version of JDAM.

The MoU will see Ferra continue to produce the JDAM ER wing kit, with the partnership to be extended through 2028, says Boeing.

- Flight Global, 24th Oct 2023

Boeing are famously going through something of a reputational poo-brown patch; with doors and engines falling off their planes in mid-flight, and their Starliner space capsule program having so many missteps that it even failed at being a ferry service to the space station this year. Nevertheless, Boeing are still about to mysteriously get their people killing programs working like a well oiler meat grinder.

So what is Australia's part in this? Why not just ask Boeing?

https://www.boeing.com.au/news/2023/boeing-ferra-expand-precision-aerial-munition-partnership

BRISBANE, Oct 25, 2023—Boeing [NYSE: BA] and Australia industry partner Ferra Engineering signed a Memorandum of Understanding to continue production of Joint Direct Attack Munition Extended Range (JDAM ER) wing kits. The agreement also includes the intent to explore applications for Powered JDAM(opens in a new tab) — a long-range, low-cost and mass-producible JDAM derivative capable of travelling upwards of 300 nautical miles.

Brisbane-based Ferra is Boeing’s global supplier of the 500-pound JDAM ER wing kits. Under the memorandum, the partnership will be extended through 2028. The partnership aligns with the Australian Defence Force’s commitment to enhance sovereign weapons capability under the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) Enterprise and aligns with the AUKUS security partnership goal of advancing  trilateral defence capabilities.

- Boeing, 25th Oct 2023

I wonder what Ferra think of all of this:

https://ferra-group.com/capabilities/logistics-sustainment/

Ferra understands the need to provide higher value products and solutions to our customers. As part of our advanced manufacturing process, our role in the product life cycle doesn’t finish once the production product has left our organization.

Ferra has the capability to manage inventory and logistics on behalf of our customer. This has been delivered in a commercial and military environment.  

- Ferra Engineering, retrieved 12th Oct 2024

Now bear in mind that the identified shrapnel in Beirut is a piece of the Boeing JDAM; which means that as Ferra Engineering is Boeing's global supplier of the JDAM ER 500lb wing kit, that it had to have been made right here in Australia.

Isn't it funny. When Joe Hockey yelled at the auto-industry and told them to go away, they all did. Making cars in Australia is simply too hard. However, making parts and pieces to kill brown people? Well Australia is all for that because apparently it aligns with the AUKUS security partnership goal of advancing trilateral defence capabilities and enhancing sovereign weapons capability. Remember under the terms of AUKUS, we're not allowed to service our own F-35 aircraft but Israel is allowed to home-brew their own. Also under the terms of AUKUS, as the pathetic little lap-dog that we are, when Big Brother America wants to bomb the cuss out of brown people, we don't question it but comply like an evil evil little sycophant except that as a nation we're actually too stupid to even seek any kind of advantage. 

This is where your tax dollars are going. While America possibly is on the verge of lurching to the right as Donald Trump has repeatedly declared to deport people on day one, and as Israel actively pursues Benny from Cheltenham's personal goal of turning many thousands of people into chunky marinara because he must find joy in the suffering an deaths of people, what do we say? Nothing. Australia yet again has no foreign policy.

Horse 3397 - No. The Car Pipe Is Not "The Future"

In a piece in Uncy Rupe's doyenne newspaper yesterday (which I'm not going to link to because I'd rather not even give his firm the ad revenue) there was a breathless piece praising Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe under the streets of Paradise (not Las Vegas) and asking if such a thing could be implemented in Australia. Could is one thing because clearly with enough money, the billionaires of the world can buy whatever crazy bonkers jacknuts thing they want. A better question is should such a thing be implemented in Australia? As with any piece of journalism which is supposed to drive clickbait and ragebait, Betteridge's Law Of Headlines applies and the answer is "no".

Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe constantly gets praised by tech bros turned fanbois, who seem to not know the difference between AM which is Actual Machinery and FM which is Funky Magic. Funky Magic proposals are often seen as "the future" and there are countless FM solutions which faded away and have been blown away with the dust of the future's past. Meanwhile, the most boring and oldest pieces of technology which are AM and not FM, just seem to constantly and boringly work.

Yet again I find myself asking the question, why is it that public transport systems which carry millions of people are seen as bad because they are socialist and communist, whereas billionaires seemingly have a predilection to invent impractical and worse gadgetbahns that are always worse at the job?

Trains just work. Having a train with a designated corridor of operation, which runs to a timetable, stopping at distinct and discrete stations, is a thing which was nominally invented in a metropolitan setting with the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground in 1863. Some of the stations which are still on the Metropolitan Line are now more than 160 years old; which says that trains running in an underground pipe have been proven again and again and again; whereas Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe do the same job but magnitudes of degrees worse.

Just because you apply the magic word 'autonomous' to something, does not magically make it better. Autonomous Vehicles are fine, but Automatic Vehicles where the level of computing needed is nil, are better. Just like Colin Chapman's aphorism that if you wanted to build a better Formula One car just simply add lightness, when it comes to building the most reliable and scalable public transport system, adding simplicity is best. In practice it is possible to run Automatic Trains running almost to saturation, with no computers whatsoever. We know this because the first completely automatic and driverless lines on the Paris Metro, used cam wheels and relay boxes, to control the movement and door opening/closing systems. Automatic Train Operation on the Paris Metro, is proven technology which has been around for 70 years.

Having said that, there is a difference between Automatic Train Operation (ATO)  which is what things like the Paris Metro and Sydney Metro uses and Autonomous Vehicle Operation which is what Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe are supposed to use (and don't but we'll get to that later). Autonomous Vehicles generally have a big powerful computer which collects data about where it is and where everything around it is, in the environment. Autonomous Vehicles generally have things like cameras and RADAR and LIDAR, which then gets fed to the computer, which hopefully has had a sufficiently good enough machine learning regime that instead of a human meatbag being the wheel, the computer is the one to decide to drive the vehicle into a lake or into the side of an ambulance full of children with leukæmia. 

ATO needs only limited electronic/mechanical inputs because everything in theory is in a very controlled environment. While there are signals on the Metro, the driverless trains do not actually look at them and do not need to. The Metro trains do not need any kind of machine learning because there is nothing to learn. The Metro trains do not need AI because they do not need to be intelligent. The Metro trains do not need to worry about errant children with leukaemia accidentally falling onto the tracks because if the system is designed properly, there is no way to fall through platform-side glass walls. With ATO, all that is needed is physical electric contact, to move the trains forward and to have a series of switches and ludicrously simple software which makes the trains stop and start, and the doors open and close at the appropriate places. Actually in theory (and in practice starting on the Paris Metro in 1952) ATO doesn't even need computers to be able to operate because the whole system can be operated on a purely electromechanical basis; in the same way that a toaster works.

Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe, even inside a rather limited environment, still need thousands upon thousands of machine learning AI hours to be able to operate in their car pipes. Heaven forbid that they get turned loose onto the streets above because we are still at the stage where that same AI will take its thousands upon thousands of machine learning before rationally and autonomously deciding to accelerate into an ice cream stand with thirty children with leukæmia (why are there so many children with leukæmia in these scenarios?).

I do not know if Elmo wants to admit this but mainline railways, with no automation and a meatbag in the driver's seat, and with a few train protection measures such as signals and dead-man braking systems both inside and outside the cab, still do a better job both in terms of frequency and capacity, than his cars in the car pipe. Elmo's Boring Company which has somehow managed to convince the city of Paradise (not actually Las Vegas) to allow him to put his car pipes under the city, has built the tunnels but even the simplest of tracked vehicles such as a bespoke tram or train, would do a better job than his blobby Teslas. At best any given Tesla on the system as it stands can hold seven people; where as a small van sized tram could very likely hold twenty. A Tesla after all is a car, which is excellent for moving a small group of people around like a family but utterly rubbish at moving anything more than about ten people. 

The even more dumb thing about Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe, is that the pipes are hideously small and can only really be used for small cars. The pipes and the stations can not even really be retrofitted like the Glasgow Subway was; which runs really wee trains in really wee pipes. It would have made more sense to build a pipe to carry trams, because let's be honest, ten trams could easily replace the entirety of Elmo Mash's car pipe system.

However, at that point we start talking about buses and trams and those things very much start to look like proper public transport; which Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe are not. There are 70 Tesla Model Ys in Elmo Mash's car pipes; which means that at absolute maximum, the number of people that can be transported at once is 490. Any four car set on the Sydney Trains Network can do that by itself.

Just to enforce how incredibly bad Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe are, the London Underground with its electric trains in 1890, had a mechanical metal board which would pop up on the side of the tracks after a train had passed. The accompanying signal went red; which indicated that not only was the driver to stop the train but that there was a train inside the block section ahead. On the underside of the train was a glass bulb; which if it hit the metal board would smash, thus creating a leak in the vacuum breaking system and stop the train. Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe are still not actually smart enough to have any kind of automatic system which stops them in the event that there is a blockage ahead. The stopping of all the cars in the car pipe is still dependent on the AI making a rational decision to stop. The big difference between AI and a meatbag in the driver's seat is that AI does not have the fear of being fired and losing their job if they mess up. AI does not of itself care about accidentally turning those errant children with leukæmia into something resembling chunky salsa.

The super fun bonkers thing about Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe, is that they're not even Autonomous. Companies like Uber and Lyft dream of Autonomous Vehicles because that means that they'd be able to get rid of the meatbags which are otherwise called drivers, who demand horrid things like wages because they need to eat. In what surely was an amazing act of hubris, in 2016 Lyft announced that they would actually have Autonomous Vehicles by 2020 and that they expected that 80% of all vehicles on the road would be Autonomous by 2025. Well, here we are less than 12 weeks away from that data and the number of Autonomous Vehicles that Lyft actually owns, is nil.

I get it. People like the shiny thing. People's eyes glaze over with wonderment and actual dumbfounderdundament when they think about the possibilities of the future. I also think that the future is always designed by people who are to dream big and bonkers. But why is it though, that in dreaming big and bonkers that people with clearly more money than actual sense, just invent variations on gadgetbahns which never worked  in the past, which don't really work in the future, and which end up lasting exactly as long as the company which supplied the original bespoke cars/pods/viehwagens last. Long after people like Charles Yerkes in London, or John Bradfield in Sydney, have long since been dead and buried, the train systems which they helped to forge are still left behind and work amazingly boringly. Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe will probably go the way of the of the Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit System in Virginia; where pod things travel around on limited tracks, long after the original company which invented the system went bankrupt. Elmo Mash's car pipes will continue to exist long after he has numptied his way into whatever bonkers hatstand future he imagines has been blown away with the dust of the future's past. Meanwhile, things like the Sydney Metro will just continue to work properly.

Horse 3396 - Soichiro Honda: My New Favourite CEO

As a 2017 edition of Wheels magazine proclaimed, the reason for the then rise of the SUV displacing everything else, was primarily because of one key reason - all y'all are fat¹. Between the average age of a new car buyer rising well beyond 50 and the increase in size of the average person from 59kg in 1960 to 76kg in 2017, people are simply fatter and not necessarily taller; so they want something easier to get n and out of.

Since 2017, the pandemic has been and gone, and the car makers have decided to stand on the throats of the car buying public, as they  prefer to sell 2x $30K cars rather than 3x $20K cars. Why go to any effort at all to sell cheaper cars, when your more expensive cars can have maybe a buck and a half worth of improvements to bring in five bucks extra in revenue. 

The story of businesses doing squat all to comply with changes in technology and/or regulations, is not a new story at all. Indeed when Alfred P Sloan cam up with the idea of the 'Model Year' in the late 1930s, it was purely to create anxiety in the consumer so that they would buy new cars more often to keep up with fashion. In consequence, by the 1950s when cars looked more and more garish, the actual improvements under the sheet metal was glacial. Most cars in the United States still had not even adopted what we would consider basic technology and building methods such as unibody construction, front wheel drive, and disc brakes; all of which were standard on the Citroen Light 15 in 1936. Twenty years later, the build quality of the famed 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, was objectively rubbish; even by standards of the 1930s.

So when the California Smog Acts of 1967 and the Oil Crisis of 1973 came along, it should surprise exactly nobody that the big automakers in the United States responded as they always had done; by doing squat all. When federal emissions standards came along with the invention of the Environmental Protection Agency, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, were all happily producing outdated dinosaurs; when smaller cars from Europe and Japan, including from those car makers own overseas catalogues, made the Big Three look like foolish fools. 

Perhaps the most symbolic demonstration of the United States' general malaise and particularly the Japanese' car makers ability to actually build something of quality, was the first generation Honda Civic. It along with the KE10 Toyota Corolla, further made the Big Three look like a bunch of jackasses and when a mid-level manager at General Motors during a press conference, was asked by a member of the press as to why the Honda Civic could meet fuel efficiency and emissions standards, when the 1973 Chevrolet Impala could not, he responded with thinly veiled racism. 

Racism, corporate hubris, and sheer stubborn stupidity are hardly the stuff of legend, but this is where the groundwork to our tale begins. At this press conference in which the man in the grey GM suit tried to brush off the 'yellow peril' as being unimportant, the manager at General Motors explained while that the CVCC² technology which Honda were employing on the Civic worked perfectly well on their "toys", it could not possibly work on a proper car like the Chevrolet Impala.

"Well, I have looked at this design, and while it might work on some little toy motorcycle engine, I see no potential for it on one of our GM car engines, he said. Yep, another serving of the same old sh…stuff: haw haw haw, get a real car, haw haw haw."

- Richard Gerstenberg, GM manager

The 1973 Chevrolet Impala had a wheelbase of 121 inches, and had a choice of engines from the 250cid Inline-6, and a 350cid, 400cid, and 454cid V8. This is not a small car by any stretch of the imagination. I used to own a W116 Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL 6.9, and that car which at the time was the most expensive car in the world was still small than the Impala and the V8 up front was only 418cid. 

Enter Soichiro Honda himself. Soichiro Honda was an engineer. Soichiro Honda was a cavalier. Soichiro Honda was an abject mad-man; who even made his way down to the factory floor, just to ride the motorbikes and drive the cars that his company was producing because as he saw it, if they weren't good enough for him, then they weren't good enough for the general public and he wanted repeat custom. 

In what has to be about most brilliant "go cuss yourself" moment in automotive history, Soichiro Honda found out about the General Motors' press conference in which his cars were being disparaged and he was mad; really mad.

He was so mad that he jumped on an ordinary economy flight to the United States, specifically to buy a bog-standard 1973 Chevrolet Impala with a V8 off of a showroom floor. He then had the car air-freighted back to Japan (because he could) and then immediately ordered his own engineers to do nothing to the car except built a set of bespoke CVCC heads for the car; of the same style and ilk fitted to the Honda Civic. He then had the same car air-freighted back to the United States, where he then delivered it to the Environmental Protection Agency in Ann Arbor; where having done nothing to the car but change the heads, it easily passed fuel efficiency and emissions standards. Not only did the car pass the EPA's standards, it did so without having to have a catalytic converter to it. 

"I have made my point. I am done."

- Soichiro Honda

This where most retellings of the story end because every great story has an Act One beginning, an Act Two complication, an Act Three struggle, and an Act Four denouement and triumph. Job done. I am not happy with any of this because there are so many things left up in the air.

This car which purely existed for the sole purpose of being a spite car, and which made arguably one of the most pertinent points in the 1970s, was one of the single most important cars of the period; and we have no idea what happened to it. As far as Honda goes, Soichiro himself probably thought nothing of it because he had no use for the car being proving his point. The people at General Motors had no use for the car beyond being embarrassed by it. They certainly would not want to keep it and Honda absolutely would not give them intellectual property. The EPA had no use for the car because why would they? So where is it? Nobody knows. 

As for CVCC technology itself - it no longer serves any real purpose. The advent of fuel injection, firstly mechanical and then electronic, completely obliterates the need for dual chamber valves in the intake manifold and direct injection means that the manifold itself changed all over again. General Motors never really learned anything; and just continued making increasingly rubbish engines until Vauxhall/Opel invented the Family 1 and 2, and they bought out Saab to steal direct injection proper. Honda continued to make all kinds of lovely high tech stuff; learning things from Moto GP and Formula One. So all of this means that the 1973 Chevrolet Impala with the Honda CVCC heads, is now just an appendix to automotive history and nobody knows where it went.

¹ no really, this is a thing: https://www.drive.com.au/news/plump-my-ride-designing-cars-for-fat-people/

²  Honda and CVCC - https://global.honda/en/heritage/episodes/1972introducingthecvcc.html

Horse 3395 - Cosplay Coal Miner Matt Canavan And The FIAT 500e

Cosplay Coal Miner Matt Canavan in what I assume is a regular fifteen minutes of hate against wokeness, political correctness, and what Rita Panahi would call "loony lefties losing it", came on 2GB this morning in a rousing display of triumphalism at the thought that FIAT was suspending the production of the 500e because of lefty loonie wokery or some such. To be honest, I have no idea what the jinkies that the anti-woke MAGA knuckle draggers on the right are talking about half of the time; because they've equally been carried off in a wave of nonsense to fight culture wars that I do not care about.

I don't know if Coalboy Canavan likes electric cars because they need coal-fired power stations, or hates them because they don't use petrol. I also don't know whether Cosplay Copper Miner Matt Canavan likes electric cars because they need copper as provided by his opinion provider BHP, or hates them because they use copper from Rio Tinto. I have no way to guess his opinions because depending on whom is paying the bills, he undergoes a Sailor Moon type magical transformation sequence to become whatever his opinion providers demand.

However, the matter of FIAT suspending production of the Fiat 500e has nothing to do with wokery, political correctness, or whatever nutcase invention that these people have come up with. FIAT is a business. Given that the Agnelli family by themselves are probably worth more than the GDP of Australia, I very much doubt that they honestly give a thought to whatever wokery that Cosplay Canavan can come up with.

The real reason, for a business making business decisions is far more transparent. A business making business decisions is because the business of business is business.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stellantis-halt-production-electric-fiat-500-longer-due-poor-demand-2024-10-01/

MILAN, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Stellantis' (STLAM.MI), opens new tab chief Carlos Tavares will address an Italian parliamentary committee next week on the prospects for the carmaker's production in Italy, the company said on Tuesday, after it warned about poor demand for electric vehicles.

The hearing will take place on Oct. 11, Stellantis said in a statement, after announcing it had extended the suspension of production of its Fiat 500 electric city car until Nov. 1 due to weak orders.

- Reuters, 1st Oct 2024

The reason why FIAT are suspending production of the 500e is ludicrously simple; namely that they can't shift them fast enough and in their rush to extract profits out of the public, they've misjudged what the public can actually pay.

Here’s the basic problem.

https://www.fiat.it/car-configurator/#/

The FIAT 500e costs €29,950, or A$48,824.

Holy cash registers, Batman!

Someone needs to be sat in a chair and have the pointing finger of judgement wagged in from of them. FIAT expects people to pay nearly thirty cussing thousand euros for this? Really? Are they ignorant? Are they oblivious to the real world? Are they mad? Rub my nose in the dirt and call me 'stinky' but even Blind Freddy can see that charging thirty large for this, is madder than Mad Jack McMad who won the 2024 Mister Madman Competition.

This is almost the textbook example of doing market research and then completely ignoring everything that the market research told you. This is yet another example like the Edsel, or the Merkur Sierra, or the Cadillac Cimmaron, where the product itself wasn't and isn't inherently bad but the marketing/sales department have driven headlong into a wall. This is simple economics in action and is repeated elsewhere in the industry.

Suppose that you have the Whizzo chocolate bar on sale in the supermarket. The Whizzo chocolate bar sells for $2. The marketing department tells you that for only a few mils per bar, you can add nuts. You resell you Whizzo Nut chocolate bar for $3, on the basis that you only need to sell two-thirds as many because 3 x $2 = $6 and 2 x $3 = $6. Multiplication is commutative, yeah? You still expect $6 in revenue but have spent less in making the product to get it. The problem is that even with an item which costs $2, people are very much price sensitive and aren't going to just turn around and buy your improved product because of a minor change in benefit to them. 

If you then scale this up by a factor of ten-thousand, then selling two-thirds as many big products should scale up? 3 x €20,000 = €60,000 and 2 x €30,000 = €60,000 because Multiplication is commutative, yeah? The maths is perfect; so what's the problem? The problem is that €10,000 is a hell of a problem for the market to absorb. The people whom you hope to sell your improved product to, have not magically had an increase in buying power and are highly unlikely to even be able to buy your thing in the first place. It should be said that €30,000 is not exactly the kind of coin that any cool and funky teenager even has any more. This is not the 1960s, this is not the 1970s, this is not the 1980s.

Just like most of the OECD, wages have generally been on the slide in real terms since about 1980 at the latest. This is mostly because of that strange window in the latter half of the twentieth century where due to two bouts of unpleasantness, the destruction of physical capital was so severe and so massive that for about thirty years, wages growth exceeded the rate of return on capital. What we have seem, and especially after the pandemic, is that not only has capital reasserted itself but we have now reached the point in most countries in the OCED where more than half of all the rewards of GDP are paid as passive incomes to people who have not worked for them. What this means is that the imagined customers who would have maybe bought a FIAT 500 are now convinced that they can double their money by putting it back in their pocket, and the imagined customers who are teenagers or people in their twenties now no longer exist.

FIAT upon having realised that they now have a real life fizzer, aren't going to very well fund a sunk cost fallacy, are they? Consequently, their suspension of production is because of the most open of all business reasons, weak orders.

Now here's what I don't understand. Is this Cosplay Coal Miner Matt Canavan having a triumphant clarion cry because it fits that part of his magical transformation sequence, or this Cosplay Copper Miner Matt Canavan having a whinge because it fits that part of his magical transformation sequence?

Perhaps in a dose of double irony, the ad break which immediately followed had an advert from none other than BHP with their "a-woohoo, a-woohoo, a new generation³" jingle; extolling the virtues of copper mining. This is even more confusing than Cosplay Coal/Copper Miner Matt Canavan's triumph/whinge because I don't know who the advert is for. I'm not going to go out and buy a megaton of copper now. Having said that, if the chocolate bar company wants to sell me a Whizzo for $1, I'll have three of them.

Horse 3394 - Do Electric Sheep Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

The 1968 novel by Philip K Dick, "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" is not, as the movies "Blade Runner" and "Blade Runner: 2049" would suggest, primarily concerned with the hunting down of a fugitive android. Rather, the novel seems to be more concerned with asking the philosophical question about what kind of emotions a machine can have, given that they are merely designed to follow their programming instructions. 

The two tests which are used to see whether or not someone is an android are a physical bone test (because androids are built inventions which do not have the random impurities in bone structure that humans do), and a specific empathy test to see whether or not the person in question is capable of feeling empathy for the theoretical person in the test. That's all fine and good but there is a massive plot hole which is papered over in that in theory the test would never be able to tell the difference between an android and a sociopath, and the fact that if the androids whom they are doing the testing on have already escaped from Mars to Earth because they fear their own destruction, then they have already exhibited emotion. Okay, there is a whole entire other argument to be had about whether or not fear and anger are genuine emotions or reactions to things but considering that they are things to be felt, I tend to think that they are emotions. 

Not that this is a particularly novel idea in literature, as this kind of question is played with again and again. From "Frankenstein", to "I, Robot", to "2001: A Space Odyssey" and even into modern cinema with the aforementioned "Blade Runner" and even "Millennium Man"; so this is well trod ground. It should be of no surprise then, that on a very recent re-watching of the 1991 anime "Kyatto Ninden Teyandee" or in English the Samurai Pizza Cats, that I come up against this question again. Thanks to this most dubious of dubs and the many decisions that were made in writing the English gag dub, I have this persistent question; especially about Lucille. 

Edoropolis/Little Tokyo is set in a semi-future-past-present-eka-Edo Period. The world is populated by, as described by the show itself, animaloids. From here, the internal continuity exists only as far as the current gag calls for, and so very much of the time there is a Thirty Xanatos Pileup of discontinuities and dialogue disasters and triumphs. As far as the internal logic of the show is concerned, we honestly don't know if the characters are animals with armor, mecha-enhanced animals, androids with animal components, or just out and out robots. Who knows? Nobody knows. Not even the writers know. They don't even care.

On top of this, the internal logic about how species work, is also nonsensical. Unlike say Bluey, where the primary person template is a dog and only a dog, in Samurai Pizza Cats, everyone is everything; so don't think too hard about it. Here's where it gets weird. It is canon that the different kinds of animals can have children; the most visible example of this is that Emperor Fred who is a panda and Empress Frieda who is a rabbit, have a daughter who is also a rabbit. Also, when Francine who is a cat tries to go on a date with her beau, he turns out to be a terrifying horse looking man thing. Knowing all of this, I still have this persistent question about Lucille.

Apart from being the object of Speedy's and Guido's affection (for reasons that seem mostly nonsensical to me), Lucille doesn't seem to exhibit any kind of sensible emotion. Not even when her brother is kidnapped does she seem to perturbed. Admittedly this is because she is trying to maintain a level of stoicism but she doesn't seem to concerned that he is kidnapped. Lucille's emotions both in the Japanese and English dubs range from apathy to ambivalence when all about her friends are being blown up in explosions. I do not know if this is a lack of empathy or sociopathy or just played for comedic effect. However, she is frequently upset; which always results with a trap door opening in the top of her head and a spray of missiles in a crazy Itano Circus fashion, but again that is usually because something bad has happened to her and not necessarily because she feels bad for anyone else.

So here is my persistent question about Lucille. Lucille is a sheep. Is she a mecha-enhanced animal? Is she an android with animal components? Is Lucille actually a full robot? Is Lucille an electric sheep? Is she actually the textbook case study of whether or not androids dream of electric sheep? Is Lucille an android, in which case she might dream of electric sheep? Is Lucille an android but a sociopath, in which case she would not dream of electric sheep? Is Lucille an electric sheep but a sociopath, in which case she would not dream of electric sheep? Is Lucille an electric sheep and she dreams of androids? Are Speedy and Guido androids, and do they dream of Lucille who is an electric sheep? Is Lucille both an android and a sociopath but a narcissist; in which case does Lucille dream about herself; who is an electric sheep?

I know that works like "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" are supposed to make us ponder about things like sentience and the ethics of killing machines if they actually gain self-awareness but I do not think that we will even get close to such things in my lifetime. That question seems to be a bit useless for that reason. However, the internal logic of the question itself, does in fact give you the answer.

An 'android' is a humanoid robot. When machines switch off, they are not on. Robots do not dream. As an 'android' is a subset of robots, androids do not dream. Period. If androids do not dream, then they do not dream about electric sheep, or in fact anything else for that matter. Dreaming is the domain of a thing which does not switch off, lest it dies. The question of "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" follows Betteridge's Law Of Headlines which states that: any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.

With a small amount of manipulation, we can turn Betteridge's Law Of Headlines into a paradox by asking: Is Betteridge's Law Of Headlines True? Paradoxes are fun but my persistent question about Lucille, "Do Electric Sheep Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?", is so utterly mind bending that it makes my head want to explode.

Who knows? Nobody knows. Not even the writers know. They don't even care.

Horse 3393 - Why Sydney Lost The AFL Grand Final

 I have been asked to write a piece on why the Sydney Swans lost the AFL Grand Final in 2024. The person who asked me to do this (who asked to remain anonymous), couldn't work out in the heat of the moment why a team which went 17 and 6 during the regular season, should biff it so badly and lose by ten goals in the big dance on that one day in September. Seemingly there is no sensible description as to why a team which won the minor premiership, should splutter so badly when it mattered. On paper, this should have been a relatively easy victory for Sydney but football matches are not won on paper but rather, in a place with thirty-six players, green grass, and a football.

Probably the best way to view this match is to look at the relative formations of the two sides. Sydney nominally played a 6-6-6 formation, with 6 players the back, 6 in the middle, and 6 up front. Brisbane on the other hand, tended to play 8-5-5, with 8 behind, and 5 in the middle and up front. This makes some kind of sense in a big match like the Grand Final as a defensive outlook is generally how a scoreline like this eventuates. 120 is not an overly large winning scoreline but 60 is a scoreline which demonstrates either failure to convert possession into points or what happened here, failure to gain meaningful possession. Suffice to say, this match was more or less won in the first half.

The opening ten minutes were dour. No major score happened at all until Will Hayward opened the account for Sydney, then another goal by Tom Papley drew the lead out further; before Kai Lohmann scored two goals for Brisbane; wherein they took the lead and never ever relinquished it. It was the second quarter where Brisbane really put the boot on the throat of Sydney and chocked them into submission, and a comparison of the scores at the end of the first and second quarter bears this out.

Q1: Syd 3.1.19 - Bri 4.3.27

Q2: Syd 4.3.27 - Bri 11.7.73

One goal either way at the end of the First Quarter is not even remotely interesting. However, 7 unreplied goals in a quarter is the kind of thing which breaks a team's spirit and where the half-time break can not come fast enough. This is the kind of scoreline where you go into the dressing sheds wishing for lighting so that the game is cancelled. 46 points is also bigger than the largest margin that any side has come back from in the entire history of the Grand Final; so unless God himself is handing out miracles (which is unlikely as he doesn't even give the Saints any), then you may as well start tying maroon ribbons to the handles of the Premiership Cup there and then. The postcode of the address to mail the pennant to, already begins with a 4.

So what went wrong that Sydney should score but 1 goal to Brisbane's 7 in a quarter? Mostly formation.

I do not care if you are playing Australian Rules, or Association Football, or Cricket, or Field Hockey, et cetera, or any sport which takes place on a very big field, games are very much determined by how well you manage both personnel and space. This does not apply to basketball where the field is small, or netball where the positions are tightly bound in defined bound boxes, or Rugby League or Rugby Union where the scope of space management is very tightly limited by the shape of active play. Australian Rules Football which is played on a massive field and with a very very loose ruleset surrounding what is offside, is such that to the untrained eye it appears that players are free to go where they please; and it is this where Brisbane absolutely excelled where Sydney did not.

Remember at the beginning of this how I suggested that Brisbane tended to play 8-5-5, with 8 behind. That meant that in addition to the nominal 6 players that a team would logically play if they were playing with a balanced set up, that Brisbane had two extra players in their own fifty, most of the time. This meant that Sydney when they did push forward, tended to find contests for the ball where they were outmanned. Having 30% extra manpower to win possession in your own half, meant that even though Brisbane sacrificed players in the midfield and up front, they could win possession more easily when Sydney did foray forward.

This meant that Sydney had a choice. Should they commit players forward to meet the markups where they were outmanned, or should they make use of the extra player in the midfield and up front when Brisbane did push forward? This choice, is one which tactically gets more desperate when a side goes behind on points because of the dilemma that in order to score points, you need people up front to be able to win the ball in a useful position to be able to do so. When Sydney did decide to commit players forward, this created space and loose men in the midfield for Brisbane, who after winning the ball across the half-back line, played the ball forward through very limited corridors up the ground. 

The third quarter of the match which had the score blow out to 73 points, was simply more of the same. Again this was not about Brisbane trying to win the football up front, but choking out any and all opportunity for Sydney to score anything. In that third quarter, Sydney scored just 1.1.7; which in any match of footy is corpsing. Granted that they were allowed to breathe a little bit in the fourth quarter and they scored four goals, but had they done that then the scores would have both ended up at about 16 goals and change; which is both at about 100.

This match was not won because Brisbane were an amazing attacking side who kicked out and handpassed everywhere. Neither was this match about Brisbane restricting Sydney's repeatedly proven ability to play wide which they do at home very well. This match was won by Zorko, Answerth, Lester, Wilmot, Payne, Fletcher and Dunkley, all led by Harris Andrews who stood at the back directing traffic and trying to make sure that nothing got past him without written permission. 

Sydney's top goal scorer for 2024, Joel Amartey, got nothing in the final. Sydney's second top goal scorer for 2024,  Logan McDonald Sydney's third goal scorer for 2024, Tom Papley, got one goal in the final, right at the beginning and never really even saw the ball ever again. 

This is the point on which the match hinged. Brisbane winning a contest in their own fifty, then never allowing Sydney forward. That's where the match was won. You can not score if you don't have the ball. You can not win the ball if you're outgunned and outmanned, outnumbered and outplanned, in every contest. As Sydney were committed forward, there was consistently little organised defence out back because you can not be in two places at once.

Horse 3392 - The Badness Of The US Constitution - 13A, 14A

Amendment XIII.

SECTION 1

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

-

The fact that 13A was passed in 1865 and only after the country had been torn in two by the Southern War Of Rebellion And Aggression For The Explicit Right To Keep And Retain Slavery, because let's not pretend that this monumental bout of cussedness was anything other than that, actually points all the way back to the creation of the United States itself and the several states' refusal to accept that Somerset v Stewart (1772) might apply in the then colonies. 

Somerset v Stewart challenged the very idea that slavery should exist in England and when the states refused to accept this as a thing, the government under Lord North tried to bring them to heel with punitive taxation measures. The fact that the states refused to accept punishment and negotiate on the matter of why the taxation was imposed in the first place, says that the people who wanted to keep And retain slavery had so much of an economic advantage to do it that they were literally willing to go to war to defend it; which they duly did. The fact that they convinced other people to fight for them, on the notions of "freedom", set in play the petards by which four score and seven years later, these United States would be hoisted.

Let's make no bones about this. The cost of 13A was blood. The cost of 13A was utterly pointless because it should have been addressed before the invention of the United States as a nation. The fact that this took two wars and 93 years, is evil.

Had the United States accepted the ruling of Somerset v Stewart in 1772 then no punitive taxation measures would have ever been passed or needed, the Revolutionary War would have probably never kicked off and certainly the  Southern War Of Rebellion And Aggression For The Explicit Right To Keep And Retain Slavery would have never happened.

However contained within 13A is still a clause which quite frankly is pretty horrid. Given that the United States fostered and nurtured a culture of really evil racial hatred which still persists in some quarters, the clause "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" strikes me as being deliberately nasty.

Having already proven that racial hatred was rampant, how could anyone ever actually guarantee that the courts of law which were and are presided over by equally racist judges, be free and fair? If the whole process which leads to a party "having been duly convicted" is itself coloured with a poisonous tint, then an unjust judge could and would duly convict on petty grounds to subject someone whom they hate, to slavery all over again.

In fact 13A only addressed a specific issue (albeit a very very important one) but did nothing to shape the culture. There was a period of about five years in which there was some semblance of equality but that soon dissolved as soon as those with money and power were able to shape the system to their own ends all over again.

13A did not address issues of equality.

13A did not address issues of equity.

13A did not address issues of decency.

For everything 13A is, the one thing which it is not, is just.

13A immediately sparked off the era of "Jim Crow"; which in many circumstances was not an iota any better. Sure, 13A removed slavery outright as a thing but it never attempted to address any issues surrounding segregation, discrimination, or unfair and unconscionable contracts, the existence of things like company stores, or a whole host of issues that grew up and festered in the culture because the initial scar of slavery was never lanced properly in 1774.

13A never corrected the lie that although America said that it held certain truths to be self-evident, life, liberty, and happiness, it immediately set about to explicitly and deliberately deny those same rights to people who it deemed not actually to be created equal.

SECTION 2

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

- 

I have no idea why this needs to exist. If Article I, Section 8 already granted Congress the power to "make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper" to execute the powers contained within the Constitution, then by default 13A Section 2 should have already been included? 

I know that the United States really hates the idea of handing plenary powers to government but deliberately hamstringing it to the point where it doesn't even function well is a bad thing. Yes, there are people who defend that design but by default governance does not merely disappear but crystallises to unelected and unelectable private powers; thus making a mockery of the opening words of the Constitution: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union... No. You do not.

Amendment XIV.

SECTION 1

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

-

One of the curious consequences of that opening line of 14A is that literally anyone born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. This creates the situation of so-called 'anchor babies' where desperate people will enter the United States (legally or illegally) and have their baby on United States' soil. As citizenship is conferred on the basis of land and not parentage, then that child is a citizen of the United States.

There are of course a lot of asterisks all the way down here; which include the problem of whether or not a first nations person born on a reservation is actually a United States citizen, or whether or not someone who lives in an unincorporated territory where not all of the Constitution applies (thanks to SCOTUS's 1917 Insular Cases) is actually a United States citizen, or even the "sad coconut" case where someone both on an unorganised but incorporated territory like Palmyra Atoll is absolutely a United States citizen. Does the US Constitution apply even when nobody lives there? Yes, it does. It turns out that even the void is not an invitation to anarchy.

But it is the second part of this which is really scary. 

"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;"

By implication, the States can enforce any law which does abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States and which does deprive people of life, liberty, and property, by due process of law. It turns out that the States can actually ignore any rights which people think and believe to be inherent, by merely passing legislation to do so. 

Of course, this was in fact always the case. A right is a legal instrument which allows someone to do a thing, or own a thing, or have an interest in a thing. What 14A does is bounce back a lot of power to the States; who in the five years after 1868, which was immediately after the War of Southern Aggression, began to strip away the rights which slaves and black people had won for a brief period of time; all with the endorsement of 14A because legislatures always pass law by due process of law.

As for "the equal protection of the laws", if the law offers no protection at all but to everyone equally, then this maliciously satisfies the conditions of 14A. 

SECTION 2

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, [being twenty-one years of age,]* and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

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Note 1 - the Members of the House of Representatives is apportioned based upon the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State; except when the right to vote is denied to them. Note that women for the purposes of 14A S2 simply do not exist. Also note that there is a difference between someone being explicitly denied the vote by law, and being denied the vote by law because the state has made it difficult to do so (such as by means of reducing the number of polling places, or making those polling places really hard to get to, or by having machines which simply do not work, et cetera). It might be in the State's interest to have people counted in the "whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State" because then they'd get more Representatives but at the same time, it might be in the State's interest to have people unable to exercise their franchise because the self-interested people with power are a bunch of racist knaves.

Note 2 -  The right to vote at any election can be abridged for “participation in rebellion, or other crime”. Yet again this assumes that the justice system itself if reasonable and just, and not made up of a bunch of racist knaves. The actual operation of this secrtion meant that States who were formally in the North could and did deny the vote to people who had fought for the Confederacy; likewise that States who were formally in the South could and did deny the vote to people who had fought for the Union. 

SECTION 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

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14A which was passed in 1868 was originally supposed to deny people who had previously taken up arms against the United States for the Confederacy from holding public office, both elected and unelected. That seems sensible enough. Why would you want your former enemies engaged in the apparatus of government. 

It does however pose an interesting question. With regards January 6th 2021 when President Donald Trump stood at the end of The Mall and incited people to violence, to engage in insurrection and with the confessed intent to kill various members of the House and Senate, then that should have automatically disqualified him to run again for President under this section. Several States declared that Trump was ineligible to run for President and had him struck off their ballot papers.

Trump then took the case to the Supreme Court, in the case of Trump v Anderson (2024); wherein SCOTUS ruled that 14A S3 was the exclusive domain of the Federal Government and that the States, even though they were correct in applying the law, were not the ones to do so, so their decisions were struck off as invalid. What the cussing cuss is this cuss? If SCOTUS refuses to apply the law because it was deliberately stacked with partisan appointments, then yet again we prove that functionally even engaging in insurrection or rebellion against the United States and/or given aid or comfort its enemies therein, is basically pointless. 14A S3 is utterly pointless and useless if the court is made of scum.

Horse 3391 - Tim Tams Are Cheaper When They Go Jetsetting

The idea that market forces will naturally make prices cheaper is often touted by eejits who hate any and all existence of government because it imposes some kind of barrier to their imagined liberty, including when all available evidence shows that market forces do not of themselves naturally make prices cheaper. 

The general idea of the market in economics is a theoretical concept, which looks at prices and volumes that buyers which to buy some particular good/service at, and the prices and volumes that seller which to buy some particular good/service at; then describes the relationship between them. Of itself, the market is only truly concerned with prices and volumes: that is, the price and amount that a contract is concluded at by the buyer and seller. 

It is important to note that of itself, the mechanism of the market is a perfectly amoral beast. It cares not an iota or a jot about the moral goodness or fitness of the good being sold, as evidenced by the fact that markets exist for hard drugs, weapons and firearms, and even the going rate for contract killings; nor does it care an iota or a jot about the moral goodness or fitness of the players involved in the buying or selling of goods, as evidenced by the fact that things like slavery and sex trafficking, both are bought and sold by nefarious cusslords.

It should also be noted here that the market of itself, does not care an iota or a jot about the relative power that the various parties have within the market, as evidenced by the fact that the United States' healthcare market profits amazingly by selling essential drugs and treatments to really vulnerable and desperate people because they can get away with it. If anyone wants to point to the moral goodness and fitness of the United States' healthcare market as being the shining example of how markets work, then you must conclude that they are either an idiot or a cusssmith. 

Setting all of this up by way of background, I note that the supermarket duopoly of Colesworth, as two of the ten largest companies on the ASX by market capitalisation, have both decided to rip the wallets of the general public for fun and superprofits; for not other reason than because they can get away with it. Admittedly this isn't quite the moral quandry as hard drugs, firearms, slavery and sex trafficking, but the amount of price gouging going on has been enough to warrant at least raised eyebrows from the Federal Government:

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/woolworths-coles-sued-by-accc-for-misleading-price-drop-claims-20240923-p5kcnj.html

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has accused Coles and Woolworths of adding to inflation and higher interest rates after the competition watchdog alleged the supermarket giants manipulated prices on hundreds of everyday staples to boost their bottom lines.

- Sydney Morning Herald, 23rd Sep 2024

Speaking as someone who has been conditioned most of my life to think that the idea of something being "on special" is an intrinsic lie because as someone who is inside a shop at a particular place and time, there really is no other contract on offer for that good at that time, I have always gone shopping with the expectation that the price listed is the price listed, and that as a customer I can either choose to accept or reject that particular contract at that time. There are no forward rate contracts. There are no grandfathered price contracts. Nevertheless, when it comes to buying things I am very much painfully aware of the weight of the money in my pocket; to the point that I pinch pennies so hard that they squeal. 

Consider this:

This is the price of a packet of Tim Tams at Woolworths in Prospect.

This is the price of that sane packet of Tim Tams at Tesco in Inverness .

At the current market rates, Au $6.00 = Au $6.00. Also the current market rates, GBP £2.50 = Au $4.86.

There are some things which are so incredibly baffling, that the great Sherlock Holmes thought that this was too much and decided to take up apiary, that Jane Marple thought that this was all too much and decided to take a mental health trip to Bertram's Hotel, and that Farmer Giles Brown had a case of their airs with excitement because he could see and identify the massive pile of male bovine excrement here. 

Now I don't to wish to embarrass a poor operative at Woolworths because I know that this whole issue has to do with forces and motives way beyond this person's control but when I emailed Woolworths to get an explanation of what was going on, I received this glorious piece of marketing puffery:

Please understand that our prices have been changed because of increased distribution costs. We hope that you continue to enjoy the savings at your local Woolworths.

- email from Woolworths, 24th Sep 2024

I love this.

Firstly, this takes no responsibility for their own choices in price setting and instead shifts the blame onto an unnamed third party. 

Secondly, this poor operative at Woolworths knows that I am clearly a nutbag who is a bad faith actor who has asked a question knowing full well that both they and I are chained to system like thespians in a morality play who are both doomed to play the parts given to us.

Thirdly, we both know that Michael Bliss has been hauled into an Uber against his will. This takes the Mickey Bliss. We have all bene taken for a ride. There is no way in Hades, Mordor, Valhalla, Sheol, Abaddon, or any other of the clubs in the Nefarious Football League (NFL) that the excuse of "increased distribution costs" makes any sense at all.

Even if we were to assume that's true, the total distance from the factory that makes Tim Tams, to the Woolworths distribution centre in Minchinbury, to Woolworths in Prospect is less than 16.5km. The total distance from the factory that makes Tim Tams, to Tesco in Inverness, is just a mere 16,797km. It is brazenly illogical to blame "increased distribution costs" when the retail price that same good landed at a place literally a thousand times the distance, is 19% cheaper.

You can not blame distribution costs, or wages which are roughly similar, or taxation because the retail price in Inverness which includes 20% VAT is still less than the retail price in Prospect which includes 10% GST. No. This is possibly the classic example of where market forces are in action, where the mechanism of the market is a perfectly amoral beast and cares not an iota or a jot about the the moral goodness or fitness of the players involved in the buying or selling of goods. This has to be about the purest example that exists where price gouging occurs purely for no other reason than because they can get away with it.

So the next time that someone wants to tell you that market forces will naturally make prices cheaper, you should laugh in their face and they should accept it because this is clearly a comedy routine and they are a clown. They are not a very good clown and unlikely to get a gig in the Melbourne Comedy Festival, but at least they tried.

Horse 3390 - The Badness Of The US Constitution - 11A, 12A

Amendment XI.

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

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The thing to note about the Amendments to the United States Constitution is that without exception, they are all tacked on after the fact, to modify or clarify something inside the document, or to give spring to some new concept hitherto unrecognised within the document. In principle this either says that the original document was bad and/or the kosmos changed and/and/or the people affected by it finally had the clout to be able to effect the change.

11A is quite frankly strange and bizarre in most legal frameworks. 11A limits the scope and power of SCOTUS to decide cases which cross over state lines and where there might be a dispute, as well as cases which cross over national borders where there might be a dispute.

My reason for why I think that this is strange and bizarre, stems mainly from the United States's strange and bizarre legal conception of what republicanism is. In the United States of America, the United States is a person in its own right as corporation sole and that makes sense. The several States are persons in their own right as corporations sole and that also makes sense. But the fact that the United States is limited to not being able to rule on disputes which cross state borders because they want to keep the personhood of those several states not only distinct but jointly equal in status with that of the nation, leads to weirdness.

Once upon a time in English Law, there were local benches, then benches in Hundreds, the benches in Baronies and Counties, and finally upwards to the Supreme Court and the King Himself. So allergic is the United States to organised hierarchy and the insane fear that someone might actually get the power to do anything, that restraints such as 11A are imposed as a check to that imagined power. That's fine as a concept but in practice what this means is that an already clunky judiciary becomes even more clunky and instead of having national cases which might be able to impose a uniform ruling, the Federal Government and SCOTUS is legally unable and in fact barred from making any kind of ruling at all.

Suppose there was a wage case being argued by a combination of workers in the State of Jefferson and the head office of XYZ Co. was in the State of Kalmia. 11A means that this must be decided in one of those states. If XYZ Co. then has various manufactories in the States of Lincoln, MacKenzie and Norton, then a suit making a wage case must be launched in each of the several States of Jefferson, Kalmia, Lincoln, MacKenzie and Norton and SCOTUS and the lesser Circuit Courts are barred from deciding a national wage case. In my country, a national wage case would be decided by a Federal Industrial Relations Tribunal of some sort, or maybe even by the High Court itself. That is legally impossible in the United States due to 11A.

11A might have been sensible in 1795 when companies were small, but the rise of factories and the joint-stock corporation, and then the multi-national joint-stock corporation, makes a complete mockery of what 11A was intended to do. 11A as a handbrake on the imagined power of the United States' Federal Government, by design restricts its power to act; including when that power to act could have been really useful. 11A inadvertently could be a reason why the United States is one of the few countries in the OECD with no real Labour Party to speak of. Actual governance in many cases such as labour relations, education, the franchise, is either left to the several States or ceded to private concerns. The only people who really win out of this, are the killers, thieves, and lawyers, who can either exact and extort outrages across state lines, or who stand to make profits from suits which cross state lines and/or national borders. 

Amendment XII.

The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;-the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.

But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. [And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.] The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice President, shall be the Vice President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

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12A is a ramshackling mess. 

The Electoral College which was a stupid answer to a bad question, was in fact such a bad answer that it had to be changed pretty well much immediately. 

The new form of government invented for the United States of America, is almost exclusively the design of Alexander Hamilton. I have no doubt that he meant well in considering how the mechanics of the House of Representatives and the Senate should operate and they're mostly a copy of the Houses of Commons and Lords in London, but when it came to the appointment of the President it is really obvious that Hamilton never thought beyond the tenure of George Washington and wanted to install him as King.

Hamilton's answer to appointing the President was so incredibly rubbish, that as soon as Washington got tired and stepped away, the next election in 1800 was an omnishambles. John Adams who had previously been Vice President and who described that office as the most insignificant office ever devised by man, won the election but the idiocy of Hamilton's design meant that the person with the next number of votes in the Electoral College became Vice President. The position fell to Thomas Jefferson; who it must be said absolutely hated Adams with the same kind of passion that Hamas and Likud have for each other. Of course Jefferson agitated for the system to be changed because he knew that he would probably (and subsequently did) assume the office of the President and did not want his Number Two to cling to his shoes like a number two. 

12A stipulates that there are in fact two elections, and that at least one of the people who the electors vote for shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; which is presumably to stop a state for voting for their favourite son. In practice the "ticket" of a President and their nomination for the Vice President, means that the functional requirements of 12A are always met. So-called "Presidential Elections" are not strictly the case in that they are in fact "Presidential AND Vice Presidential Elections". On certificate day when the Electoral College certificates are opened and read and counted, there is not one election but two. Thus the ticket of Apple/Banana versus Morris/Norris are actually stapled elections. At time of writing, the two sets of tickets for the big parties are Trump/Vance and Harris/Walz.