The Curse of Creativity, Part 2
This time I compare myself to Albert Einstein and probably misspell some words while doing so...
In our last exciting episode of Things I Was Thinking About When I Was Supposed To Be Paying Attention To Something Else I talked about creativity and the people who possess it letting their mind wander and right now seems like a good time to talk about Albert Einstein being forgetful and not remembering his own address or phone number, probably because he was instead:
THINKING ABOUT HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKED.
Face it, we’ve got billions of people who can remember their address and phone number, but haven’t contributed jack shit to our understanding of the Cosmos (the Universe or the Cocktail) and a severe shortage of people coming up with Theories of Relativity so get off our backs and, yes, I just lumped me and my sophomoric cartoons in the same category as the Smartest Guy Who Ever Lived, but not without justification.
Einstein and I both fall under the general heading of “Daydreamers” and his Theory of Relativity mathematically predicted the existence of black holes and I used the news that at one point there were five planets visible in the night sky at the same time to produce a new and heretofore undiscovered way to call Donald Trump an asshole.
So don’t tell me Al and I don’t have a lot in common and wouldn’t find a lot to talk about if we sat next to each other at a ballgame.
Like…
Are Electric Vehicles the Answer?
Recently, I saw a TV commercial for an electric SUV and for some reason the family inside the vehicle were Vikings with cell phones and the music was Heart’s Barracuda and I recently read a Marketing Dive article on the commercial that said they wanted consumers to connect the electric SUV with our “inner Vikings” which might be a bad idea because if our “inner Vikings” ever get out we’d be pretty shitty neighbors and cause problems at PTA meetings.
Good song though…
But the part of the commercial that intrigued me was the Viking mom asking her SUV for directions and the disembodied ghost that now lives in our dashboards telling her to drive 327 miles north.
So the happy Viking family starts driving north into the mountains and then before it ends the commercial has a line that says that particular electronic SUV has a range of 600miles so if the Happy Vikings ever wanted to come back out of the mountains they’d run out of juice 54 miles short of home.
Which brings up…
Fun With Numbers
I’m not totally sold on the practicality of Electric Vehicles partially because a couple years ago I drove across Wyoming, Utah and Nevada and didn’t see a whole lot of charging stations (actually, I didn’t see a whole lot of anything, including people, animals and regular old gas stations) and according to this article from 2023, Wyoming has a total of 95 charging stations and traveling around Wyoming in an Electric Vehicle is difficult:
But according to this next article (written a month before that last article you didn’t read either) when compared to other states, Wyoming has the “second-most charging stations per EV” and I believe the statistical trick here is not having very many EVs:
A theory which is supported by this next article that shows EVs per 1,000 people in each state and in 2022 California had 27.55 EVs for every 1,000 people and Wyoming had 2.08:
https://insideevs.com/news/656711/us-plugin-car-registrations-per-capita/
So the main lesson here is not about the efficiency of EVs, it’s about people who start throwing around highly selective statistics and that definitely includes me and some of the Statcast numbers being thrown around during the MLB playoffs.
Just in case you’re still interested, hybrids make a lot more sense to me and if you’re thinking, “they might pollute less, but they still pollute” so do the coal-fired/dead-dinosaur-juice power plants that many EV charging stations get their electricity from.
So then I got interested in that subject and Googled “where do EV charging stations got their electricity from” and got offered a range of articles and turns out, if the article was produced by someone who was promoting EVs they’d talk about solar power being “the best known source of charging station energy” which isn’t exactly what I asked about.
“The best known source of Hall of Fame level NFL tight end Taylor Swift boyfriends” is the Kansas City Chiefs which still doesn’t mean there’s a lot of them available.
But if the article was produced by someone who wasn’t promoting EVs they had a tendency to admit charging station energy comes from the same power grid that is fucking up the planet.
The following article is from JustEnergy.com and says charging stations often get their power from the same coal and fossil fuel sources that EV drivers think they’re avoiding and it also says charging an EV battery fully can take eight hours, although Tesla claims you can get an additional 200 miles of range from a 15-minute charge at a “Supercharger station” and if you’ve ever driven across Wyoming, Utah and Nevada you’d know 200 miles is just enough to get you halfway to the next McDonald’s.
But before you get worked up about the disadvantages of EVs, Just Energy is a “retail energy provider specializing in electricity and natural gas commodities” so you should always consider your source and don’t trust those Google AI articles that summarize what’s already on the internet because they don’t quote sources and you might be getting your information about EVs from an oil company or a political cartoonist.
https://justenergy.com/blog/electric-vehicle-charging-stations/
And now here’s some more fun with numbers.
Do Millionaires Really Want To Be Taxed?
I can’t remember exactly when I first saw this story (like my co-worker Einstein, I’m forgetful) but a while back a United Press International article said, “nearly 270 millionaires and billionaires” urged the world leaders at the World Economic Forum to tax their wealth because income equality is getting out of hand and the consequences could be catastrophic and if don’t believe them, just ask Marie Antoinette.
Oh wait, you can’t ask Marie because a bunch of pissed-off French peasants cut off her head.
Which (I imagine) is just the kind of catastrophic consequences those nearly 270 millionaires and billionaires are trying to avoid and that sounds like a whole bunch of rich people willing to pay more taxes until you Google “how many millionaires are there in the world” and at least one source said the answer is 62.4 million.
So let’s round up and say it was exactly 270 millionaires and billionaires which means .0000043269 percent of the extremely wealthy are willing to pay more taxes while the other 99.9999956731 percent are probably saying:
“Hey, all you Rich Do-Gooders need to shut the fuck up.”
Those nearly 270 millionaires and billionaires are like the ass-kissing nerds who remind the teacher she forgot to assign homework for the weekend.
BTW: Those 62.4 millionaires are just 0.8 % of the world’s population and if you bump up the Rich People Standard to $5 million or more, that’s 0.1 % of the world’s population and the rest of us are just living in a world designed to make those extremely wealthy people happy which – like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity – explains a lot.
Today’s Lesson
Clearly, next time someone compares themselves to Einstein you shouldn’t be so quick to scoff (and I’m assuming you did scoff) because I think this essay shows Great Minds Think Alike (although nobody ever mentions that Mediocre Minds do the same thing) and I’ve got lots more random thoughts about the Jersey Shore, Monty Python, politically incorrect accents and our inconsistent outrage because you can imitate a Texan or Californian or Canadian, but not somebody from China or Puerto Rico so I think we have a lot to look forward to in The Curse of Creativity Part 3.
Info from actual scientists:
https://evtool.ucsusa.org/