Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Aptera goodbye.

How could anybody possibly fuck this up?



This is why "the private sector" sucks.




For profit.  Return on investment.  Shareholder value.  All that shit.  That is why companies are run by people who delay production on something like the Aptera  because you can't roll down the window and get a burger.  As if anybody who was waiting for the Aptera  cared.  Another magic carpet ride diddled into history by gucci-crackeng "executives."  "Former employees" bust up what is left and become urban legend just for grins.  Do you see something really fucked up here?  Millions of people will buy what is in that picture, and these suits can't deliver?  Well duh.  First of all, they had to understand what is in that picture.  Among many other things, there is 100 mpg.

That is energy.  You can see it in the picture unless one is flat stupid or blind-sided by some clown-head ideology... a picture taken by the mind using petroleum and its theoretical price.  It is light and personal and "reasonably priced."  Duh.  They saw a fucking car.  No bullshit energy density calculations for them.  Return on investment in the finest gucci-cracking scale tradition.  Pay me first.  How much?  Never enough.  See how it works?  Look at the Aptera design right now  before the big one.  How much do you think it would have cost to pop out a million of those smeggers every four years?  That's Prius scale. Divide by ten.   This is not energy density or rocket science.

So there goes your  hyperspace tadpole for now.  Wingless flight, eh?  How bad do we need to be in tube space?  As a slipcraft, this type of vehicle is best suited to slipspace.  You could do this with a variety of electric motors (or not) and have one that rolls for 4 to 7 grand right now or one that actually flies for ten times a much... as  much as the suits were going to charge for the Aptera before it ever started production.  Yep.  You heard right.  "Actually flies."  All electric.  I figured it out, and I am just an anonymous dumfuk in krakkerland.  Meanwhile, the Aptera suits could not sell this thing.  How could this happen to carbon-based life?

This is why the private sector sucks.  Just like your private parts, their function is essential but limited compared to, say... your brain.  This is why we mourn the passing of Mickey's monk,  key is you avoided talking  like you knew what private parts do.  Slips like the lips and brain live in a separate universe.  That kind of know thinking will have us walking or crawling in slipspace when we could be rolling, riding, floating or flying.  Plum stupid unless you got a horse.  So listen up, pilgrim.  Put your slipcraft together for whatever you can spare.  Then dip in to what you can not spare if you have to.  The private sector sucks because you are going to need you're slipcraft.

Those who want one that flies simply send  100 mpg euro to me, anonymous dumfuk, Indiana and give us about a year.  They will not bust us for terrorism as we are too busy putting slipcraft together for crypto  thugs.  Meantime otherwise normal people make their own slipcraft.  Otherwise we hole up.  Everybody is used to this by now.  The Aptera story is a perfect fractal of what is going on in the private sector  universe.  Everybody else read the Slipcraft Manifesto years ago on a bubble-gum wrapper.  We do not need suits draining billions and fucking up dreams clipping million dollar high school econ haircuts.  Get them the fuck out of the private sector.

Get them the fuck out of the pubic specter and prudence potts the pan inspector and every other sphincter we all encounter in passing.  Who the fuck did not want an Aptera?  Bet you could make one for less than ten grand.  This is a bet we are all going to take one way or another whether we like it or not.  Imagination is the limitation, and design compromise  the big surprise.  This is not energy dense physicists or rocket scientists.  This is process managers fucking up the process.  What does that say to any reasonable  person?  They got your wingless flight for ye right here.  Like you did not know that was goombah for "fuck you."  Like you never been downtown.

Fuck them.  We make our own wingless flight. 

-30-

16 comments:

  1. wow thats a nifty doo dad.
    and yeah i would love one..
    your'e right, so would many many others.
    and they canned it?
    oh thats braindead.

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  2. boomerangcomesbackMarch 1, 2012 at 4:42 AM

    Frankly, I like your nasty "tone-of-voice" and disgust aimed at idiots who are clueless, though surrounded by clues, diagrams, connected dots, and such.

    The trike concept looks cool, but 4 wheels make me feel better about stability, cornering, and getting T-Boned by an idiot suit in a hurry to his stupid "job".

    Otherwise, the craft is sleek and sweet. Looks a little short on stowage space, but maybe it can pull a boxy U-Haul trailer? {grin}

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  3. We have all had this experience. A great idea... then the "munny" people come in and fuck it up. In this case, they kept changing the design parameters so it could "sell" to the "mainstream.:

    The Aptera began legally as a motorcycle. The suits tried to morph it into a family sedan. Originally it was a 2-place vehicle that could get you down the road warm and dry at highway speeds for pennies a mile.

    It got contorted into how the investors could pull out... say 30% ROI... in a year. You do not do things like this for a ROI. You do it to change a paradigm. The Wright brothers would be considered insane today.

    They could have franchised their bicycle shop. Instead they pursued a moonbeam idea that achieved moderate success, never paid off and ended up consuming their lives. And humans began to fly.

    Everybody wants to be Henry Ford. Nobody wants to be Wilbur Wright. Everybody wants to own a van Gogh. Nobody wants to be a Van Gogh. Finally somebody somewhere pulls off a good idea. Everything changes.

    Few get lots of munny to pull off a good idea. Even fewer pull off a good idea to get lots of munny. In the corporate world you have to pretend you are there to do both, and that is where polarization usually begins.

    This is a fractal of all the people who support "private enterprise" without knowing what it actually is. As soon as you let the munny people run everything, the idea gets compromised.

    We had the Horatio Alger meme pumped into our heads for over 100 years. It existed in less identifiable form 100 years before that. The private realm of private enterprise is anonymity... not ownership.

    Few are willing to pay that price.

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  4. You could charge this off some solar panels prolly.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQgTne7TAGY&feature=related

    For how long did we use the spinning bike wheel as gyro, and not put one to use full time?

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  5. In the Freemason filosophy, we will see these renewed relics soon enough. Affordable? That's a different story. The financial frakking for fiat hasn't completed it's fossil finish.

    The formula for fiat folio depends on the possession of the fossils and not the use of them. There is no "What happened to the electric car" that doesn't follow the fractal of Orson. "We will sell no Welles before their time"

    Factorial recombinomics dictates this transition once the patents, Letters of Marque have been shifted sufficiently to the privateers and their overlords, the shift will happen and the reality of factorial evolution will remain consistent in Occu-Pi.

    Your grandkids won't be sitting in and smoking pot but instead they will scoring a lid of petrol and burning a two-stroke in the woods. Treasury agents or carbon cops will be busy following those footprints.

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  6. Can't we do better than tiny tin cans on wheels? Smart cars are dumb because they are totally impractical. There's barely room for a human let alone groceries !

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  7. That's the idea, No groceries, no girlfriend, no petting, no dog, no life.

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  8. JG, your comment proves a point (to me anyway) that what Waldo is saying is wrong. I think he was saying these minimalist ideas have been unfairly suppressed, but most of us know the American preference in vehicles, supersized powerwagons. The US had big oil reserves and was immeasurably wealthier in assets than Germany all during the engineered Great Depression. Cars continued to get bigger and heavier all through this engineered period for WWII. The US had the cheap easy to reach oil, ahead of anywhere else, and the manufacturing base to produce a big culture leveraged off transportation and mechanization. Once debt finance established itself in the consumerist fifties, America was able to ramp up its interstates and trucking to peak in its relative wealth around its peak oil production years, in the early seventies. This was the peak of the muscle car era and when dad could still support the whole family with a nine to five, and businesses tenured employees.

    If it ever goes to fuel shortages, say ten years from now, gas lines would definitely favor small light vehicles in the market., or ones we could propel off solar panels with possible future battery improvements, or hybrids, or small turbo diesels which is the affordable solution in Asia and Europe already.
    I think the market will decide in the future as it has in the past what people prefer in vehicles. They will choose to live as large and as fast as possible, until it is impossible. Preferences for SUVs will shift when they can't afford the fill at the pump.. If gas and diesel costs alot more than people are used to paying, they will begin to buy subcompacts and more scooters. The difference between that and these futuristic mono cars is not very much as they are all limited compared to what we are used to. This would take it to a third world standard, but one that is in Asia considered very fortunate and an improvement.

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  9. as a grateful recovering marketing dork... eye wood say this project was about as fuckup-proof as it gets... BUT they had a window of about one or two years. AND experience shows that clueless suits are primarily interested in scooping off cash for themselves by toadying up to the "investors" perceived (or manufactured) greed.

    the original concept was not "mainstream" (at the TIME) and was never intended to be. the design compromise (there is always one) in electric vehicles (today) is dictated by some fairly simple physics. the suits rarely understand engineers... or marketing either. which makes you wonder how they got where they are- because the "private sector" sucks.

    the "private sector" (as we currently frame it) sucks the life out of enterprise "Marketing" set the Prius design back at least a decade... and that's with relatively unhampered engineers and bosses who had at least a ghost of a clue... with world-class manufacturing capability, Look how quickly things get "socialized" when there is a war... the worst "enterprise" ever.

    Does that mean "making money" is better... or that it should even be counted as "enterprise," a project or undertaking that is especially difficult, complicated, or risky? The suits usually get in the way. We have all seen them do it... maybe even done it ourselves when we were wearing suits. Suits are jammies stylized to resemble real clothing of the last century.

    Puts it in perspective. Fashion diminishes under difficulty, complexity and risk. That is when form follows function. We have been living the last century in a world turned upside-down, a theme-park mock-up of our great grandmothers' daydream, the one that died before we were born. Easy money follows simple and safe.

    We have followed that calf-path all the way into grandma's cartoon... and even grandma knew the coach turned back into a pumpkin. If we understood basic design elements we would not buy fake fireplaces with concrete logs. We would not be trying to make plastic on the side of our houses look like wood. We would not be wearing jammies to work.

    In the world outside "professional sports," coach was always a pumpkin,

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  10. The best the "private sector" could do was the Sparrow: http://www.corbinsparrow.com/id16.html

    how dum is that?

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  11. Waldo, I'm 100% for efficient vehicles but the problem is, we need them, not only to get from point A to B but to haul things.....like children for instance! AND as PD pointed out, spouse's g/fs, pets so on and so forth. It's all good and great to say you want a smart car if you live alone(no spouse, no kids, no pets) but what about those that don't?

    So after all these years and all these brilliant minds working on it, the only thing they can come up with is singular spaced vehicle? REALLY?

    PD and I are on the same page on this one for sure.

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  12. Hi Mary....small vehicles? sure. I'm not advocating huge gas guzzling hummers at all..I hate those dinosaurs. I've been driving my honda civic for 4 years. Can't they at least design something like it for a family of 4 to travel safely and comfortably in and energy efficient?

    Come on now, you know they can. Why don't they? Why do they keep showing us these one person, no room for anything else, death trap vehicles?

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  13. You gotta make some design compromises, JG... and physics is physics. To haul shit, you got weight and space. The easiest path to energy efficiency has been (so far) to eliminate as much weight and space as possible.

    The next is range and speed. Do you need to go 70 mph. for 4-5 hours at a clip? Then it's all about map-eating... and to me-- that's what a vehicle is for... as opposed to carrying. Otherwise, the most energy-efficient carrying vehicle on earth is a shopping cart.

    Carrying and map-eating with the same energy-efficient vehicle... and ya gotta go a long way to beat a horse. Or today's car. For energy-efficiency, the best vehicle manufactured so far has been the bicycle, a really low (human) powered contraption that takes little space.

    Map-eating is severely compromised. Then there are aircraft... and boats... and I have messed around with both. Again... speed and capacity... physics. Bicycle as opposed to shopping cart. Now a quick-attach bicycle trailer going to the local food source makes sense.

    But nobody's going to develop it in a world of cars and strip-malls.

    Maybe this is another thought to ponder in the "role of government" bag.

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  14. You're talking about a Prius. 40-50 mpg... $20-30k. Had mine for 7 years... still waiting for the next generation- of anything- that will get 100 mpg. You can modify a Prius to do that with an additional $10k LiPo batt pack.

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  15. whoops. better belay that "role of government" shit for now... since we DO NOT HAVE ONE. Otherwise, here comes the "socialist" bailout of GM: http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/03/03/gm-halts-chevy-volt-production-zerohedge-exposes-accounting-fraud-90102/

    The suits at GM were vandals long before any of this "socialist" muck hit public discourse. They already killed the electric car once. Before that, they managed to murder mass transit. With "government" complicity... like there is ANY DIFFERENCE AT ALL. Oh no... it's not "capitalism." it's "the government." Like there is any difference... aw fuggit.

    "Capitalism" is now a euphemism for "looting." Maybe that's not linguistically accurate, but it's like sorting out "true" christians... or conservatives... or Murricans. Sifting gnat shit out of the pepper.

    How can you deny an electric car? http://youtu.be/jAv6M1Bai0c

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  16. ...and if you need any more convincing about how dipwad "the market" is... check this out: http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/29/electric-car-list-2/

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