Why The Young Hate Cars

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Well, maybe hate is too strong.teen driver lead

But they sure seem not to like them very much. As evidenced by the fact that a record-high percentage haven’t even got a driver’s license – and have no intention (according to what they tell researchers) of ever getting one.

How high?

Pushing 30 percent (and upticking each year) of present-day 19-year-olds.

As contrasted with almost no 19-year-olds back in the ’90s and before.

They are opting out.

Of the hassle.

Cars – and driving – are no longer a ticket to ride, for teenagers or otherwise. But especially for teenagers, who’ve been singled out for enhanced hassle – ostensibly because they are “inexperienced” and thus, apparently, to be be presumed dangerous (though this principle has yet to be applied in similar fashion to the experienced but aged). One wonders how they are to be expected to acquire experience when they are discouraged from becoming experienced.license pic 2

A driver’s license has become the two-legged analog of the tags punched into the ears of cattle to keep track of them. Us (that is, adults), too. And driving has become so controlled, so micromanaged that it’s not unlike having to get formal, explicit (and perhaps soon, written) consent before each “base” is covered when you’re making out, as demanded by some 190 proof feministas. 

In other words, not much fun.

Which is – typically – an issue for teenagers.

Teens are anxious above all to become adults, which entails being able to do as adults do. A driver’s license at 16 used to facilitate exactly that. Its possessor could drive anywhere, anytime – just like an adult. It was tangible, real-deal freedom. Not so now. Many states do not allow full-access driving privileges for years after a young person’s 16th birthday – in some cases, not until the age of 21. The license is highly conditional and extremely restrictive. Even more so than it is for the rest of us. The budding driver may not, for instance, drive with other teens in the car. Nor past a certain hour of the evening. In some states, teenaged drivers are required to have special plates affixed to their cars – which is an embarrassment. Not too far removed from requiring them to wear diapers – just in case.teen plate image

Would you want to go through the hassle – and expense – of getting a government permission slip to drive if such conditions were imposed on you?

There is also the vicious “zero tolerance” nonsense that imposes disparate punishment on teens because they are teens. A person over the age of 21 is considered sober – or at least, not legally “drunk” – in most states until their blood alcohol level is at or above a certain arbitrary threshold. But if you are a teen driver less-than-21 years of age and the faintest whiff (literally) of alcohol is detected, you are considered legally “drunk” and can expect to be taken to the equivalent of Orwell’s Room 101.

Perhaps someone will explain how it can be that a 17-year-old with a 0.01 BAC is more “impaired” (let alone “drunk”) than a 22-year-old with a .08 BAC?

Mind, as with all “drunk” driving cases, the state need not present any evidence of actually impaired (let alone “drunk”) driving. It is simply presumed one is “impaired” (and “drunk”) according to the state’s arbitrary BAC charts – which in the case of teens (and the youngest 20-somethings, too) encompasses any BAC whatsoever, no how minute. And it need not even be blood alcohol content. If a teen hangs out with some friends – one of whom is drinking and accidentally spills some beer on him – the mere presence (detected by smell) of that beer on the clothes of the not-drinking driver is sufficient provocation to seize his already limited license and cart him off to the clink.zero tolerance pic

So much for equal protection of the laws – another 18th century concept that’s been thrown in the woods, along with the fourth amendment’s curious idea about citizens who’ve given no specific cause for suspicion not being subject to unreasonable searches and seizures – a burden that the courts have decreed far too onerous for the efficient enforcement of the laws.

So, to recap:

* Teenagers are denied full driving privileges for years – for the duration of their teenaged years, in many instances. 

* Teenagers are subjected to public embarrassment via special license plates on their vehicles, the equivalent of being required to ride the short bus to school.

* Teenagers are treated unequally (more severely) by the law – subject to being punished for offenses that do not exist for (arbitrarily defined) “adult” drivers.  

Add to this the Wet Nurse “parental control” electronics being fitted to new cars such as real-time monitoring of where, when – and how fast – a teenager drives (these technologies soon to be applied to the over-21s, too). Limits on speed, limits on radio volume. “Geo-fencing” (no, really). The list is long – and growing. teen driver restrictions pic

It does not take an academic study to suss out the implications. Teens are doing the only thing left to them:

They are opting out.

Just as many people have decided it’s no longer worth the hassle to fly. At least at home, one’s crotch is still sacrosanct. You only have to take off your shoes if you feel like it. And if someone tries to rifle your pockets or belongings you may (for now) defend your pockets and belongings from such assault.

Each year, it seems, the circle grows a little smaller.

Obtaining a driver’s license – and one’s first car – was once upon a time (and not all that long ago) perhaps the number one priority of every soon-to-be 16-year-old. After, of course, the other thing. Which was very much enabled or at least made more potentially realizable if one had one’s own set of wheels and the freedom to jump in with another teen, hopefully of the opposite sex – and take that first bite of adult life.

That’s now denied in the interests of “Keeping kids safe” … by preventing them from ever becoming adults.

It is useful training for the world that awaits them.

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190 COMMENTS

  1. Great post. I agree 100% with you about the arbitrary laws facing teen drivers. I’m 17 and live in Tennessee which has a graduated license program. I got my license last year when I was 16. My restrictions were that I couldn’t have more than one friend in the car with me and I couldn’t be out before 6am and after 10pm. now I could update my license because I’m 17 and have anyone in the car with me and be out until 12 I believe. anyway I haven’t updated because to update it would be a massive waste of time to go back through the DMV. I will just wait until I’m 18 to update to a unrestricted license. until then I will drive like I’m 80 after midnight.

    • Say Graham

      Do remember when your mom or dad told you can have/do this or that after you did/didn’t do or have this or that? How about in your case grammar/high school when you got a passing grade after you met certain requirements? Could it be just maybe that those people/organizations in charge of or responsible for giving you that approval for or permission to whatever it may be, had good reason for withholding whatever it is/was that you and all the other not quite ready for prime time pre-adults felt entitled to. Trust what I’m telling you, there will come that day/days when you will say to yourself, why now or why me, even worse, I don’t/ didn’t deserve this/that. Please read, study and learn the difference between privilege and right(noun). Then think about all those restrictions placed on your ability to drive whenever, wherever and with whomever in your quick (not necessarily) witted mind you feel like. Now for your next lesson study the word adult, I recommend the use of Wikipedia. Upon study and complete understanding of and if you live that long you shall attain the state of adulthood. Congratulations, sorry to have been so cruel, my friend welcome to life. Take care and take your sweet time.

      • Why is that it is considered adult to accept a position of being a child of parental government? Why do those who accept their servitude proclaim their maturity and then accuse those who do not of being immature? It does not make sense. Maturity is not having one’s life being commanded by parents, even if such parents are elected by popularity contest or wear badges.

        Have you ever studied the right to travel Birdman? Evidently not because you believe driving is privilege. Driving being a government granted privilege happened because government took advantage of a new technology and decades of time to turn what had been a right for centuries into a privilege granted by the state. Even today “driving is a privilege” is simply a perception that exists because it is repeated over and over again. Much of the older structure is still in the law although perverted and diminished through time and changes. The incremental changes being driven by the perceptions. Now using a horse is a privilege and people are trying to turn bicycling into a privilege. Walking too. People say the slippery slope is a fallacy but I see it in action quite often.

        Teen driving restrictions come from the collective slowest ship in the convoy mentality. We go through our childhoods being held back by the slowest ships in the fleet. So what happens? We have people that are just as poorly skilled but they are older and we have more of them. People who would have advanced themselves become discouraged and then only do what is expected of them. People who just do what is expected of them do less as the expectations diminish.

        We enter adulthood and enter the corporate/government/military system as fungible human resources where upon we find again the same slowest ship in the fleet systems. Bonuses based not on individual achievement but complex and hidden collectivist calculations. Rules and limits again based on the slowest, dumbest, and least capable.

        We wonder why the nation is falling behind. Maybe because our progress is being dictated by the slowest among us.

        • Well said, Brent.
          Humans have rights, gunvermin have privileges “granted” to them by humans. Not the other way around.
          In a related note, the DoI says that gunvermin derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The ‘governed’ cannot consent to delegate authority that they do not have. E.g., theft, aka taxation. I cannot ‘consent’ to have the gunvermin rob (or kill) someone when I do not have that authority.

          • Phillip the Bruce
            I can see by the great command of the English language you hold, you
            might or should be of some great literary position in Life. I as do
            many of us and I’m sure I speak for a great many, If I were as smart
            (educated) as you seem to be, think it would be incumbent upon you to
            right all (some of) the wrong there is (seems to be) in life by
            getting involved, use your Drive to make change in life we could all
            enjoy.

          • I will add that if you are a teenager, especially an irresponsible one, then your actual parents may see driving as a privilege that they have the right to restrict. But the gunvermin is NOT your mother (or father). It is not their decision, or should not be.

            • I’m sure I’m old enough to be your grandfather, and I hold a drivers license that you couldn’t qualify for in your wildest dreams. That not even being the point, I don’t know who raised you where you are in life, the only thing in this life that you can do without some type of qualification is illegal. You get a drivers license from the Secretary of State where you live, a government agency, if you qualify, just like any other license. You must qualify as a teenager that means you are a minor,the rules or laws may differ state to state. As a minor someone, an adult (parent) or some other governmental jurisdiction has control of or is responsible for you and/or what you do. As hard a concept as that is to understand that’s the way it is. With that understanding then surely you can see how it is a privilege not a right to obtain and hold a drivers license.

              • I’m pretty sure you are not old enough to be my grandfather. But that is neither here nor there.
                The State has arrogated to itself the authority to license (or not) driving, and numerous other things. That does not mean it is right, they have just claimed it and the sheeple have accepted it.

                • Not that it matters, but my grandfathers were born in 1894 and 1903. And both a lot smarter than you also.

              • That’s just the way things are. Do not question. Obey. Get permission. Do what is required of you by authority.

                Birdman, the commenting regulars and irregulars here at epautos stopped accepting that line of thinking long ago. Some of us never did some of us came to realize the folly of it. In either case trying to hammer us with this is pointless.

                I find those still in cage mentally seek to pull those of us who are out of the cage (back) into it. You can’t. Once the illusion is broken it can’t be re-established. There is nothing you can argue that can get me and I think anyone else here to bring the parental government back into our hearts. We may still get our licenses, permission slips, obey the arbitrary rules, fear ridicule, abuse, beatings, and even self edit ourselves but we will not love Big Brother. The system is a sham, a con. We know how it came to be, we know what it is for. That cannot be erased. You can fight off becoming aware but once you do become aware there is no going back.

                Wouldn’t it be nice to live a life of endless adolescence as the system has planned for us? Getting our permission slips to play within the rules and let our betters worry about the big issues of life. To return the matrix as it were? It’s just not in the cards. Some of us were never meant to be livestock or permanent children. Some of us were awakened accidentally. Some of us were abused by the system to the point were it broke its own illusion. In any case there is just no going back so your words about how we must do this and that jump through hoops because that’s the way it is and authority says so just won’t work. There’s no going back and arguing with us only means risking your own awakening.

              • Hi Birdman,

                In principle, every free man has the right to travel. The idea that we’re morally bound to ask for permission to travel is obnoxious.

                A license is effectively the state’s permission slip to travel. Hence, obnoxious.

                Now, if the roads were privately owned, the owners would have every moral right to lay down “terms and conditions” – including standards (if they so wished) of competence as demonstrated by having passed some sort of road test. And we’d bee free to accept the conditions – or not.

                But the roads are not privately owned. And we are effectively forced to use them (as well as to pay for them). This coercive aspect is hugely problematic from a moral standpoint as regards “terms and conditions” of use (e.g., that it is privilege to drive a car and one must accept the conditions imposed).

                It is analogous to the rules imposed on a slave. Massa say Kunta Kinte not allowed to walk off the property (or walk anywhere on the property without permissions).

                Fundamentally, the issue here is authority – and aggression.

                • Tor
                  You have no reason to fear me, I’m sorry if you might be a little intimidated. I do have the PhD of driving, so yah I’m retired now and I work for my state dot part time, I drove tractor-trailer and doubles cross country, for 12 years, drove all types of trucks , hauled every type of freight locally for 16 years, I’ve driven and instructed at two schools of high performance driving , I operate heavy equipment. The only thing I have not driven, except for the occasional ride down a never traveled road in the back woods, out of fear (of the other driver) and respect for me and my family are motorcycles. Even though I sound cocky I have no, nor do I want any authority over anyone or anything except myself, understand I’m not bragging, I can honestly tell you I’ve seen it all and been there done that where driving is concerned. With my experience and background I feel I have a unique insight into the subject of driving, a task not given the respect it deserves by most.

                  • “drove all types of trucks”. That always gets me. It sorta implies something no one I know of has done.

                    It ain’t happening, not even as long as I’ve driven.

                  • Hi Birdman,

                    Just an observation: You write that you neither have nor desire any authority over anyone. But you also say you are a part-time state worker.

                    With no intent to disparage – only to point out (because you may not have considered it) does the DOT merely ask and suggest? Or does it require? Where does the money that pays for the DOT come from?

                    This is arguably the sum and total of the problem. People – decent people – casually accepting violence provided they don’t actually commit the violence themselves.

                    My neighbors, for example, are wonderful people. I am confident they’d never come over here and shove a gun under my chin and demand money – for any reason. Yet these same people casually talk about the need to pay higher salaries to people employed by the local government schools (the wife being a school worker). How is this money obtained? Cue doublethink.

                    And so on.

                    The Libertarian position – at least, this Libertarian’s position – is that no one has the moral right to initiate force against anyone for any reason. Everyone has the absolute right to defend themselves against aggression – but not to strike the first blow (or even threaten to).

                    Thus, if people choose to have children and desire to educate them, then the responsibility – the obligation – is theirs alone. Others may choose to help if they wish to help. But forcing them to “help” is a contradiction in terms and morally despicable.

                • Hi Tor,

                  Yep.

                  Licenses are chicken and egg. To qualify for, say, a road racing or heavy truck (commercial) license, one must already have attained the necessary skill. The license is a kind of after-the-fact “yep, he can do that.” But he could already do that.

                  Learning – and acquiring additional skills – that’s great. Whether we’re talking reading more books or attending Bob Bondurant. But this granting of permissions (always conditional, often arbitrary) by the state – whether for driving or other things – is inherently dangerous, on multiple levels, as well as (arguably) a moral wrong.

                  Dangerous because it presumes the state is the infallible arbiter of competence. This is so obviously false further discussion ought not to be necessary.

                  Competent people are excluded – and punished – not for any lack of competence but merely because they lack the state’s permission to do “x”

                  Rest of rant here:

                  http://ericpetersautos.com/2015/06/10/state-permission-slips/

                  • eric, a catch-22 if there ever was one. At least now there are truck driving schools and you learn the basics on private property but the dicey stuff you get experience with AFTER you have a license.

                    Go to the DMV and they want to see your certificate. You say you already know how to drive a truck, don’t have one. That’s your admission of breaking the law if you haven’t had a license previously.

                    i’ll be damned, a call, a load, the patch isn’t totally dead. Gotta run. Peace…

          • Birdman, you’re the one arguing for the system of authority an perd permission here unless I’ve lost the ability to parse the english language.

            • I agree with all of you, it’s just that I’ve been there done that and my mantra is different now. I’m not saying if you can’t beat ‘Em join ‘Em, instead I say you can’t complain if you don’t vote and after that if you don’t like the results get involved and work for a change or changes. If everyone got together, I’m not suggesting revolution, but we (collectively) must start somewhere. Waddya’ think?

              • Why vote when the choices are limited to CFR A vs. CFR B? Remember 2004 when it was Skull & Bones A vs. Skull & Bones B? The lesser of 2 evils is still evil.

                • PtB
                  We can vote for who we want to if we get involved. I’m afraid that’s where going, if no body gets involved we become the sheep the followers……

                  • The same people who vote for the lessor of two evil, can have something to do with which evils or betters are on the ballot

                    • You truly are that innocent..?
                      Remember, the soviets had elections, too.

                      “Getting involved” is unlikely to change the outlook of elections, unless you assassinate the candidate. Even _I_ have problems with that.

                      We don’t get to petition to determine who gets on the ballot, or who has a prayer of winning. It’s a rigged game, and they get you both coming and going:
                      – Present skewed candidate options, to screw up the primary.
                      – Rig debates (the outcome is determined ahead of time. I don’t know how, exactly, but I also don’t know all the ways they rig a roulette wheel. I still can get a good idea of when it’s crooked.)
                      – The talking heads misrepresent what happened, what was said, and what was meant, and steer the sheep towards “the right outcome” (for the 1%er types, the plutocrats who really run things. E.G., “GE”)
                      – The dead rise to vote, among other voter frauds; and military (traditionally conservative) votes are lost, miscounted, destroyed. Just in case, mind….
                      – Machines have been found to be rigged. A vote for (R) becomes a vote for (D) when you hit the lever to finish it. And many machines don’t provide proof – so if you “fix” the electronic ones, there’s no output… (And even the ones that give output could be told to lie, depending on where the fraud originates.)
                      – Someone COUNTS the votes – they’re not necessarily counted honestly. (E.G., butterfly ballots in 2004. An indentation could be counted as a vote for Obama, but unless it was completely removed, the vote was discarded for Bush. Or vice versa, I don’t recall exactly – nor do I care when you get down to it, for the reason that they’re all panders – whores – for sale to and owned by the plutocracy.)

                      You can’t TRULY believe that the election would be permitted to decide more than who rules the plantation?
                      I mean, if it were fair in any sense, the parties would be limited in their fundraising – and third party candidates would NOT be barred from (or arrested for trying to attend) debates. Nor would they be denied matching federal funds that the Big Two take for granted.

                      On second thought, maybe assassinations aren’t a bad idea – but how many assassins does it take to turn on a lightbulb?
                      You expend one each time he’s used, after all. And it still won’t affect the unelected bureaucrats (judges, police, public works workers, DMV, IRS, dogcatcher, etc.)

                      So not much to be gained that way.
                      Better to stay distant and breathe slow… And eliminate from range.

                      Sure, you only get different shit in office, but at least it wouldn’t be the bought-and-paid for shit. E.G., imagine Biden had taken over as POTUS. Would we have Obamacare? Good or bad is irrelevant, would we have it? Would the media have been able to make Biden believable? (arguably, the media could portray him as as stupid as Dan Quayle, if not moreso.)

                      The game’s rigged. Voting won’t change a thing, and that’s the point. And blaming the “people who don’t vote” (Are clued into the game, or don’t give a rat’s ass) is meaningless, given that the dead vote, and there are over 100% of eligible voters casting votes in precincts, and 100% of the vote goes to ANY candidate….

                      The only language they’ll listen to is force of arms, and that requires numbers – which, I honestly think, we’ll never really have.
                      Just too many people who don’t care. They’d be content to work in Auschwitz, and watch others die – PROVIDED they are last in the ovens. Family doesn’t even matter…. (Look up Frankl’s “Man’s search for meaning.” He details the camps, and the worst guards – were other inmates, who enforced the rules. They were the most vicious, and the most minimally different. Q.V. Logotherapy.)

                      If I can choose between a sandwich of Doberman shit, or Husky shit – why choose? I don’t want to eat a shit sandwich.
                      I’ll use a rock to beat the plutocrat about the head, and steal his ham and cheese on rye. And I’ll lose not one wink of sleep over the “morality” of it.
                      That would accord the evil SOB too much honor…
                      E.G., Bill and Melinda Gates, busy peddling toxic vaccines (KNOWN toxic, mind, no accident) to foreign countries.
                      It’s not the wealth that’s abhorrent; it’s the ego and pride and evil, willful, abuse of others.
                      Same with Soros, for example. Biden. Obama. Bush. Clinton. Etc.

                      I didn’t give them authority over me; it was forced upon me, making the contract void on its face. It’s Don Carleone, making the offer you cannot refuse. Either your signature or your brains will be on that contract…

                      I’ll refer to Patton’s definition of patriotism: “Patriotism isn’t dying for your country. It’s making the other poor SOB die for his.”

                      See, if I can’t FORCE others to leave me alone, I do not own myself; all contracts are created under duress, and I have no say in my life. No control over my life – I’m answering other people’s commands.

                      That’s de facto slavery…

                      (For what it’s worth, I tried the “get involved” route first. Writing to people, telling them my views, explaining why I held those views, and what would benefit society the most. I was generally told I didn’t matter. So, while I still make the token protest of voting against the Big Two, I don’t have any faith in the system that’s meant to produce this sort of result. GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Just need to take out the trash….)

                    • Jean – I like your plantation comment. We are not voting for the plantation owner, just for the overseer, who was often also a slave.
                      As for having something to do w/”which evils or better are on the ballot,” I have supported Ron Paul, but the game is rigged. The GOoPers bent, twisted and flat out broke their own rules to be sure he didn’t even have a voice at the convention, let alone get the nomination.

              • Withdraw. If people don’t play any more it goes away. This is why government is so determined to keep people playing.

        • Omg…….I understand all of what everyone is saying, believe me I agree with you. Been there don’t that, nobody is/was a greater dissident than me. I’m not preaching if you can’t beat ’em join ’em. Not at all call me old fashioned (not old) its been my experience that he who complains does nothing to further the cause. It’s like politics, if you don’t vote you can’t complain and then if you don’t like it do something (constructive) about it. I’m not suggesting a revolution

          • “I’m not preaching if you can’t beat ’em join ’em.” But yet you work for the state DOT – sounds like joining to me.

            • Yep, and nothing I despise more than a DOT dick. I got 14 citations Friday the 13th, one for no DOT numbers on the door…..and they couldn’t have been larger and fit on the door. He went over the tractor and trailer for a couple hours and it was all bullshit. He said the tractor had old worn out brakes, terrible, as he said. Funny, only 4 months earlier I had gone to the Pete house and loaded a pickup bed full of brake parts including new drums and everything else including S cams. Everything about brakes on that tractor was new. He red tagged both the tractor and trailer(no problems on the trailer, worn brakes but in spec), the sign of a true asshole. It goes on and on but suffice it to say he cost a load of expensive rock I had to dump to be able to jack up both tractor and trailer. The only two things that stuck was a diesel leak and a non-working headlamp. DOT, Dump on Truckers, rob them blind. My 14 count fine was 4 feet long and total bullshit. And since I’m grandfathered in on DOTphysicals he tried to catch me for running too many hours. It was 9 am and I had just got in the tractor about 45 minutes earlier. I could write a book on the a-holes and what they do to collect revenue via DOT. That certainly wasn’t the first round I’d had with one either.

          • If you voted you can’t complain. If you voted for power then you can’t complain what power does. When you vote for the D or the R you are saying use government power to make everyone else live the way I want them to live. It bites people in the ass, they complain, then they do it again.

          • Hi Birdman,

            Regarding “if you don’t vote you can’t complain”:

            This presumes a meaningful (and free) choice.

            Those of us who do not believe it’s morally right for any person/group of people to violently impose their will on any other person/group of people have no real (meaningful) choice. We are presented with the option of different forms of violence, imposed in different ways.

            But that isn’t a choice. And by going long with it, we become complicit in that which we purport to oppose.

            And we’re not free to be left alone, even if we don’t participate.

            It’s worth thinking about.

  2. Eric, GREAT post and many GREAT comments.
    I believe many points made were pointing to the real reason. But if I had to name the number one reason, and if someone else made this reason already please forgive the repeat I didn’t read ALL comments:) Oh.. anyway #1 is the internet! Kids think their friends live in cyberspace and only sometimes in real space.

    When I was a kid I remember the burning desire to drive(freedom & friends), hell I owned a 1973 Opal GT before I could drive! These Nanny State rules would not have slowed me down!

    Being poor made me a mechanic and cars were simpler so I could learn, built my first motor on my mothers kitchen floor. I derived great satisfaction and pride in being able to repair anything! Now kids get the pride by hacking an online game.

    Even a 10year old used car is beyond the capability of the average teen now, beyond very basic stuff. But then cars are in general much more reliable then in my youth.

  3. Another late thought about the whole issue of teens learning to drive is that if some people have their way, the whole question might be moot soon enough anyway.

    A respected investment advisor, Ric Edelman, has said on his radio show that children under 5 years old today might never actually drive, because he expects self-driving cars to be the norm by the time these children reach 16+. However, he has also said in his books and on his show—hugely optimistically—that he suspects human lifespans are about to increase dramatically, with 120+ becoming the average instead of 75–80. I think that’s wrong for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here. I suspect he’s just as wrong about self-driving cars, but it might be because 10–15 years won’t be enough time. However…

    Tesla’s Elon Musk said in an interview in March that he believes driving will eventually be outlawed in favor of computer-driven vehicles: “It’s too dangerous. You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.” He later clarified his remarks to say that he himself hopes driving never is banned, but warned that the public might one day demand it if human drivers become a liability.

    Car and Driver discussed Musk’s remarks in the context of all the distracted drivers we see who text and talk on cell phones while driving. (A disproportionate number of those getting into accidents driving while texting do seem to be teens and young adults.) Distracted drivers will be one of the main causes of such legislation once more self-driving cars are available.

    The obvious alternative is tougher licensing standards for the whole population as in Europe. Causing an accident there is akin to professional negligence because of the stringent training and rules for all drivers. But that gets right back into the issue of the present graduated licensing and restrictions for teen drivers now imposed in many US states, and how that will put off many from starting to drive in the first place. It’s the rock and hard place problem…

    • I recommend people read Mark Rask’s book “American Autobahn”. It goes through numerous details of how things got the way they are. Now from what I learned there plus my own insights, distracted driving is the result of legal driving being boring, driving being a chore for most people, and teaching people the other guy has to look out for you. These are the key reasons we have what we have IMO. It’s pretty clear the 55mph NMSL was invented by people who never drove themselves. It’s sleep inducing. It creates a craving for distraction. Why are people doing everything but driving? Because driving was made into some horrid boring task by people who turn life itself into drudgery for others.

      • BrentP, you nailed it. Back when I ran an Escort and then a Passport, I was up on it, steely-eyed, looking for everything as far as you could see. I had no accidents at any speed.

        1980 found me looking for another no-good trucking job. Really, there are some good ones but I’d just come from a big freight hauler with few tractors assigned to the same person and most of the fleet was just worn out, so much so that my 3rd trip the dispatcher gave me in a tractor with broken spring pockets on the low side and a turbo that didn’t function and had left me sucking air far from home already(they didn’t give you a fuel card cause they had the mileage figured and gave you “plenty of fuel”, that is, if your turbo worked. When the dispatcher handed me that rig again I said “Say, you have my address don’t you?’ and without a pause he said “yep, want me to send your last paycheck?”. I was an old hand then, too old to put up with bullshit like that.

        But I had a really hot El Camino that I’d had an engine built to wail on all day long, 8 quarts of oil, a cooler, a beefed up transmission with an extra cooler and extra fluid capacity.

        A friend of mine had what was then a new cutting edge business, building communication systems with fiber optic cable. He’s complaining one day about how long it took to get equipment out Houston to someplace like Kansas or Co.

        I got this wild and crazy idea that with my new Escort I could run fast enough to beat the freight companies and the airlines both. I put the proposition to him I’d get his equipment to a location faster than putting it on a plane, and then offloading to some freight company to deliver.

        So we sorta had a bet. I was able to pick up freight in Houston, run it to Kansas and beat the other way by a long shot. He paid me like he would have paid the air freight people and I made good money. A common speed for me then was 120 or if people wanted to stay with me, faster than that.

        Even tired, bored didn’t enter into it nor did sleepiness. Houston to Denver really isn’t far enough at that speed to go to sleep. It was a good job for a while before the bankers got involved. And that’s another story.

        P.S. I had a custom tarp on that EC and even if things had it humped up, there’d be a place right in front of the endgate that the tarp was pushed down by air making it a great spoiler. It kept that rear end planted and make the cab very quiet. I’d love to do it again.

        • PtB, Those were great days. I’d love to make that Elco go again. Monte Carlo interior with the swivel buckets, SS and trailer towing package. Mechanically, nothing was the same as other Elco’s. I still have it and all new chrome and an SS grille my cousin who runs a big SW GM parts store got for me in Canada. I would love to have the ’74 Laguna front end.

          Cruising the plains one day and met a Laguna model. I told a friend with me, Get your gun, we got a front end to get. He was laughing and said “that looks just like my Z, I’ve never seen one”. That was the Elco they should have made every year. If I hadn’t been busy I would have run that guy down and tried to buy it. It looked great.

  4. Everybody here discussing the reasons for teens not wanting to drive or get involved with cars has made an excellent point. Here are some more thoughts:

    Some states, such as North Carolina, now require a teen to present proof of insurance to be able to get a driver’s license in the first place. In other words, “floating” without being insured is not possible in those states. When I first started driving in Virginia in the 1970s, my parents did not have to worry about adding me to their policy right away.

    The infantilization of teens and young adults is real. Note the new mantra that young people’s brains aren’t “fully formed” until their mid–20s, so they must not be held fully accountable for violent crimes, hurting others in accidents, or general bad behavior. This has been the reason, for example, for eliminating the death penalty for younger offenders. The same principle applies to driving. If the kid shouldn’t be held accountable, then he/she probably shouldn’t be driving, goes the logic.

    Also, there is striking evidence that today’s youth are generally much less mature for their age than were those their age, say, 30 or 40 years ago. Citing this, some prominent people such as conservative parenting guru John Rosemond have long called for raising the driving age to 18. He has said that today’s 16–year-olds have about the same level of maturity as did a typical 12–year-old in the 1970s, and he seems to have a good point. Of course, this means that a 16–year-old with the mentality of a 12–year-old probably shouldn’t be behind the wheel—so again goes the logic. Not saying I necessarily agree, but a lot of others do, and that’s the issue.

    The aggregate, constant cost of cars, fuel, insurance, maintenance, repairs, etc., plays a role. Student loans, other debt, and low income do as well. But cars have long been an appliance, even for Mom and Dad. As much as I like cars, mine is used as an appliance too. I don’t have space nor money to spare for a “tinker” (hobby) car, and I’m in my 50s without gobs of debt. Imagine what a 22–year-old’s situation might be by comparison.

    Parents’ willingness to chauffeur Junior and Missy wherever they want to go plays another role; from where do you think the soccer mom stereotype comes? Why learn to drive if Mom will take you everywhere anyway and you can watch DVDs or play video games during the ride?

    Those electronic devices are another factor, combined with the demise of shop and other practical classes and training in schools. We have a generation of kids who know nothing about how things work and don’t know how to fix anything. They have no practical skills. They haven’t learned anything really useful before becoming adults, and employers are complaining about this as well. So kids learn nothing about cars in the first place, even if they have access to a relatively affordable vehicle. But they sure know how to text and play Grand Theft Auto V.

    I work for Mazda at a low level and speak only for myself. One of the training staff at work, who visits to train dealer techs, mentioned that his now grown children were not allowed video games and the like at all when they were growing up, and he said they are in their 20s and have the maturity and knowledge about the real world that youth used to have. And, he noted, they drive and like cars. That’s a pretty revealing anecdote. Perhaps it’s the key.

    • got my license at 14, started driving a truck for my uncles that year. I wasn’t particularly mature compared to others my age. I did own cattle and hogs, financed them at the bank and did every damned thing that was required to maintain them from plowing, planting, harvesting, doing the vet work that everybody did for themselves back then. It wasn’t a sometimes job, it was every day, every single day. There was no letting them go without water or feed for more than a couple days(not me, I built self-feeders and mine never went without) and never, ever without water. I hauled hay for myself and hauled it for pay. My neighbor my age had a pickup and we hauled trash for the town, not just when we wanted but when it was needed. Midnight in a blizzard might find me trying to deliver pigs and keep them warm or hauling water and feed to a cow that is down from calving. My dad used to drop me off at the farm in the morning with an old galvanized Igloo water cooler and an axe so I could chop post oaks for fence posts and my grand-dad would come out early afternoon with lunch and we’d eat and have the watermelon I’d put in the water trough early that morning. Then we’d build fence till 6 or so and go in and have supper and then we’d work the garden at the houses and do the yards and maybe whip up a batch of ice cream and sit outside and look at the constellations and talk till ten, go in and clean up and watch Johnny for an hour or so and hit the hay to get ready to do it all over again. I wouldn’t trade my life for the easy life of a senator’s son.

      In cotton harvest season I helped my uncles hauling burrs, cottonseed, and baled cotton at the gin. I worked nights often and hauled two or three loads of baled cotton 30 miles away to the compress where they’d leave me a machine to unload my semi. Schools had different hours in the fall so the kids could get out right after lunch and help with the harvest.

      I was also a straight A student and competed in UIL music competitions with the band and solo.

      My daddy wouldn’t spend a cent on pickup upkeep unless it required tools I didn’t have. I even got disgusted and pulled every inch of wire out of my 55 Chevy pickup and rewired the whole thing. It was nice to have lights on both ends and a heater fan, the extent of options it had. Another uncle was a tractor mechanic and he’d tell me how to replace pinion and axle seals and do a brake job which I’d do in the back yard. We gardened at home and the farm every season and put up food for the winter.

      There were no convenience stores, maybe a fast burger joint that served real food. I worked at the grocery store(bofem)when I could and was friends with the owners. We played hard too. We’d spend the night fishing at the tank and have huge stringers of fish and frogs to clean and freeze. But life was good, no, it was great. We were turned loose with pickps when we were 12 or before and guns too. We’d stay out all night killing rabbits cause the genius ranchers all bought into the theory of cyanide guns(I could buy as a kid at the drugstore) that killed off the coyotes and other predators leaving nothing but rabbits. And the local hardware store sold us any gun we could afford and made bulk ammo deals with us. MY best friend and I were run off our own place by a older guy trespassing. We went back to the house and told his day. He grabbed the old 30-40 Krag and said “You boys get in the pickup” and we did and that situation was cured pronto.

      And after all that we made enough money to buy clothes and toys…..like guns and cars and alcohol. We were living proof a country boy can survive.

      And now kids of 25 can’t survive without a big gulp or lighted tennis shoes and get treated like children just like in school.

      And while we were hard as a rock and could run 10 miles across pastures now kids need somebody to pick them up and give them a ride to school. I’m through with my old curmudgeon rant now.

      • Eight you certainly know the difference between working for yourself and working a job. I think it’s true of most of us here that working for yourself really is good work but a job just sucks the energy out of ya. But now work is a job, there just isn’t so much work for yourself for kids to experience. I think that’s a big part of what allows for the schools to do as they are designed to do. I think the child labor laws were designed to help create this sort of permanent childhood along with the state. In normal circles I think the problem with child labor was being forced by their parents to work. IMO voluntarily kids should be able to earn money whenever they choose doing what they choose.

        If I knew what I knew now I would have started a business at age 12 repairing appliances. Instead I started working at a union grocery store when it was legal for me to work.

      • In HS in Kansas, you could get a restricted license at 14 for to and from school and “farm errands for your parents.” Many parents would ‘fudge’ the age so the kids could get an unrestricted license w/o waiting to turn 16. Then when they did actually turn 16, they had to go get it amended so they wouldn’t have to go register for the draft.
        Ain’t the gunvermin grand?

        • PtB, now I hear on the radio constantly ads telling how the feds have all these great jobs, one I wasn’t even aware had anything to do with govt. and my not have, may have just been the insurance criminals at play, and at the end they say ‘Oh, too bad you can’t qualify, you haven’t registered with the Selective Service’ and they single out men for this onus, no mention of women getting docked for any reason. It’s some sordid shit I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

          BrentP, I’m not a very good employee. I have to watch what I say around everybody in the company or have to rephrase it and say it again and get dirty looks. I don’t do very well when working for people who know less about what I’m supposed to be doing than I do. Of course one of my bosses just chucks his ignorance out there for everyone when he says “I don’t got a clue”. Sheesh, me neither.

          • 8 – remember when Eddie Chiles used to say “If you haven’t got an oil well, get one”?
            Try telling your boss, “If you haven’t got a clue, then get one.”

            • PtB, not having a clue is something I can live with. Many questions could be asked of me I don’t have a good answer for but I don’t express it as ‘I don’t got a clue’.

              I like the kid and like his values but his skills with language, both spoken and written, really get to me. He’s handed me communications of a very technical nature from a major company and asked me to interpret it. I had already done the really technical part that nobody understood but me, including the engineers who found a method of tank building and had us build it and I was the only person who had personal experience with a major part of the project. Probably 3 companies ran a background check on me to see why I wasn’t running the show on this. No doubt they found it.

  5. We’ve come to treat the bees the way we treat ourselves.

    The market has spoken. These $600 plastic “flow” hives are the bee’s future, much as our increasingly limited and controlled plastic environment is our future.

    Raising a relatively free and sovereign bee, would mean only a small additional marginal effort. Doing so pays for itself in the longterm. Living as relatively free and sovereign people, would also be only a small additional marginal effort. Doing so will payoff in the longterm.

    3 Reasons to go against the Flow Hive

    Who’s to Blame for the Honeybee Holocaust? Maryam Henein. Author of the 3 reasons article.

    In the end, actions will be what matters. Words can serve to guide our actions, but for them to really matter, action of some sort eventually needs to be taken.

    In the case of bees, isn’t it possible that emerging plastic hives, and existing commercial hives could be adapted to increase bees’ freedom and sovereignty?

    The Deeper Message of the Flow Hive
    https://naturalbeekeepingtrust.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/the-deeper-message-of-the-flow-hive/

    By extension, isn’t libertarianism possibly a straight-forward marginal pursuit to mitigate problems, and increase desired outcomes that benefit the many, and adversely affect only the powerful few?

    In the longterm we will win, so long as we align our goals with reality. Those in power are fighting a losing battle to defy nature, the time is coming when a change becomes inevitable.

    All we need do is shape the emerging change to our advantage. All we have to do is refuse to be victims of abuse, and decline to be seduced by the lure of gaining power and doling out abuse in the future over those who’ve previously abused us.

  6. The young are indifferent to cars. For those young who do buy cars, the vast majority conclude a $20,000 car still gets them there in the same amount of time; it’s cheaper to operate; it still keeps them dry; it handles well; and it holds its value well as a used car.

    The attitude that cars are a mere appliance is the most common. Cars these days have zero status and are generally considered a burden whose cost should be minimized, not a status symbol worth burning one’s hard-earned money on.

    The Dubious Future of the American Car Business—in 14 Charts

    From a GM presentation, here’s a brisk guide to today’s auto industry and how it’s in danger of leaving behind the poor and the young

    • Tor, I lived in a small town on the Tx. plains last year for a few months. I noticed the number of older houses from the 60’s and 70’s housing boom were negligible. That town may have the highest number of blinged out pickups percapita I’ve seen but for the most part, only the landed gentry seemed to really be doing well and their houses aren’t in town. But people must have a dwelling and besides an old part of town where the small houses of the 40’s and 50’s still exist, the town was fairly much trailer houses. From single to double and triple wide and rarely did you see a garage or even a carport. A common thread though was multiple new pickups(for the most part)at each house.

      A great deal of that would account for Hispanics but more and more I see it with every group no matter ethnicity or race. I see the truth of the situation as people being forced into fewer homes with more inhabitants and more people with the auto being their main possession. The auto industry is about the only thing that makes the economy look like it’s NOT dying and your article supports this in a back-handed way. The only other part of the economy which shows any growth is simply the number changers on WS doing their bait and switch technique for banking and investments and using hedge funds to create false profits as far as the GDP is concerned.

      A lot of people have caught on since the crash of ’08 there is no magic bullet. Most don’t really have any way of saving money. Just when a family thinks it might be on the cusp of having a bit of nest egg inflation slaps them back down again.

      This country hasn’t hit bottom yet but it will and many of those who thought they had a great deal of savings and net worth are going to be disappointed.

      Once the rest of us are unable to support subsidized crops those people with two or three half million dollar strippers, that many or more half million dollar tractors and thousands of acres of land will be surprised to find the banks sucking it all up again for pennies on the dollar. I don’t need any of that stuff as do very few people and don’t need the land if there isn’t a reason to grow anything(subsidy falls off or stops) and land is fairly worthless unless it makes money.

      Things will get ugly when the ‘had it alls’ become the used to haves and the have nots have not a damn thing nor anything to lose.

      We’ll have to see if the bankers can sell worthless expensive equipment to 3rd world countries who rarely even see a tractor.

      I was in Mexico in ’04 during the mandarin and banana harvest and I suppose, a never ending coffee harvest. For most of the country, the rain comes to the mountains and that’s where the farms are. I saw a lot of rubber heels and burro’s but very little mechanized harvesting equipment. From laborers bringing crops off the mountains to distribution centers and loading it on trucks, there was very little machinery involved.

      We may get to see how this plays out sooner than later.

      • Cue Alfred E. Neumann – to the tune of “Ol’ Man River.”
        I don’t plant cotton, I don’t plant ‘taters
        But I gits paid by the legislators
        For plantin’ nothin’. I don’t plant nothin’ at all.

        • As you might recall before the big hacking last year, Alfred E was my avatar.

          I gleaned much from Alfred back when cartoons were replete with truths and editorialists were replete, as always, with bullshit.

          • Cartoons have always been good sources of insight, if you knew to look.
            Most of “Rocky & Bullwinkle” goes right over the head if you are not attentive.
            Too bad Gary Larson retired.

            • I still laugh over an exchange the dynamic duo had. Walking through a mid-east desert and Bullwinkle stubs his toe on something. He digs it up and it’s a model size ship studded with gemstones. After a brief exchange he and Rocky get into an argument over who’s to speak the next line. It went something like “Gee, this must be the Ruby Yacht of Omar Kayyahm”. They were both mortified. We always wondered how many laughed without knowing why and how many just got a buzz cut without knowing it. I suspect the latter was the lion’s share of it. I do miss adult cartoons and not just Fritz the Cat….and those were good too.

              • Yes, that was a good one. At the time I had no idea what the Rubaiyat actually was, but I had heard of it and so knew this was a wordplay.

                • You were probably a Crum fan too. I saw the first Fritz the Cat in Austin at the UT sub since TTU was a Baptist bastion even though it was a state university.

      • When I lived in Useless, back in 79-81, there was 1 neighborhood where the houses were derogetorally referred to a ‘stick’ houses. Maybe it’s changed a bit since then, but at that time, and in that area, a house that did not have a least partial brick veneer was “Cheap.” I think a lot of them had become rentals. You would drive by and almost watch the paint chip off – 1/2 already gone. But there would be a Caddy or a Lincoln in the driveway. This was before the PU became the uber status symbol.

  7. Your comment is what I have experienced and very true. I would add that the mechanical crafts, all crafts, all of humanity has also been stifled by severe abuses with patents, copyrights, registrations, licensings, permittings, fees, inspections, tax IDs, they approve and deny on and on and on. I’ve seen people invent really good things and then drop them when asked to jump through the hoop that is afire and hanging from a nail on a brick wall.

    I have a friend who would like to get a food product “approved” but you have to pay a $480 filing fee (in 2015) just to submit it in Utah. If it has any errors or is not accepted for any reason that money is history.

  8. As the proud owner of 8 Millennial children, I see this a little different Eric. While the younger generation today do not treasure cars as much as we did growing up, I am not so sure that the fact that cars gave us freedom/cars are now another source of control, tracking, and headache is the entire reason. Sure, it may play a part, but I do not think it is a huge part.
    I think the main reasons kids are not interested in cars as much anymore is technological in several aspects. when we grew up around ’68 Chevelles, and ’72 Gran Torinos etc. cars were very simple. Mechanically speaking, they were not much more complex than a lawn mower. They were very easy to work on, and quite easy to customize. Now, cars are highly complex, and not easy to work on at all. further, it is very difficult to customize them unless you know what you are doing.
    The mechanical crafts are also no longer respected. When we grew up, being a shade tree mechanic was respected. Now, I think it’s toatally different. Kids today respect game developers and people who can write code a lot more than people who can spin a wrench. I see this reflected among small business owners I have met. Many folk talk about “good jobs” leaving the country for Mexico and China, and that there no good jobs out there. But if you talk to a mechanic, or an electrician, or a plumber, or a locksmith, they will tell you it is impossible to find good help these days. Meanwhile, programmer jobs have disappeared in a glut of too many applicants for too little work. It’s a cultural shift. People don’t want to work with their hands anymore, and they no longer respect people who do work with their hands.
    And if you’re not good with your hands, and it is difficult to modify them anyway, why would you be interested in cars for anything other than getting from A to B in comfort?
    Next, when we were growing up, we didn’t have the communications that kids did today. We never asked on the phone “where are you?” because the phone was bolted to the wall… Now, you can chat with your friends wherever you want whenever you want, and you don’t have to drive over there to see them. If you don’t have to drive, why be interested in cars?
    I think that the day of the shade tree mechanic, who hops up an old Barracuda in the back yard are gone for good, Eric.

    • Hi Paul,

      All your points are solid; I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written. Indeed, I’ve ranted before about the complexity/cost issues. But your point observation about the cultural shift is spot on. The “car culture” is not what it was. And people do seem to be less hands-on/mechanically minded than they once were.

      I began to notice the graying of the hobby about 20 years ago. Now it’s the rule rather than the exception – or seems to to – that people “into” cars are middle aged and older people, for the most part.

      Very sad.

      • I agree with both of you on all counts, and I would add that this cultural shift is part of a bigger plan to create a more easily managed society that is less mobile and less self-sufficient; a plan put in place by those who would love to see us all crammed into tightly packed cities where cars are even less practical and costly to maintain (parking hassles, more tickets, more accidents, etc.)

        To make sure this becomes a reality, the education system has been heavily skewed away from anything “hands on” that requires creative and critical thinking, to a “touchy-feely” system of PC gobbledygook. Add in the complexity of modern cars and all of the other factors you mentioned, and it’s no wonder young people aren’t “into” cars anymore.

      • I look under the hood of a new car and what do I see. That’s sure a nice piece of carbon fiber or exotic plastic. I bet if I could figure out how to remove it, I might find a battery, might even be able to see a starter or a starter wire. No problem with reservoirs though, there’s a couple of little plastic hickeys with tops on them and a symbol of some sort. Now if I can just figure which is the windshield washer and which is the coolant. I generally have to do the nose test.

        Look under one. I bet it will float and probably even keep the engine running. Well, that’s something……sorta like the old VW’s except they were pushers and these are pullers. Run off into the pond and send everybody to the back and I’ll stay into the throttle. Those big ‘un tires oughta work pretty good in the water. And if you make it across you start to think “trolling motor”. I always wanted an Amphicar.

        • I don’t know why people hate engine covers so much. It’s today’s optional valve covers and dress up air cleaner.

        • This is a deliberate strategy of planned obsolescence to create a throw-away culture and get repeat business. If your car or electronic device cannot be repaired easily and cheaply, you are forced to buy a new replacement. Many mobile phones cannot even be opened for battery replacement by their owners – you have to take them to the store and pay a fortune for the new battery, which makes most people buy a new phone instead.

    • Financialization. When people talk/write about the engineer shortage I tend to go into rant mode. This society stop valuing the entire pyramid of working with ones hands somewhere after the moon landings. The society started valuing finance. It also decimated the technical education of making stuff and fixing stuff. Finance is what is rewarded so that’s what we get. Engineers to machinists and so on just aren’t valued any longer. Pay is good compared to being the conditioned product of public schools working in fast food and such but it’s no where near where it should be given the value created. Lost ground to inflation since the 1960s or even before. But finance… lots of money there. Because well they actually get paid based on what their schemes yield. But the people who make stuff, forget getting something even close to what your creativity yields.

      Go into finance young man, forget about making stuff.

  9. Unless somebody is involved in commercial activity, such as driving a taxi, limo, or a semi for Target or McDonald’s, they are not required to obtain a driver license. They are allowed to exercise their God-given right to travel, as opposed to getting permission to “drive” from a gang of criminals calling themselves “government.”

    • Big M, you are right on target with your assessment of the requirements for driving licenses, seems to me. In a nation created by free, natural and independent sovereign human beings who had every reason to be suspicious of potentially tyrannical government, it is our birthright to be in a position of control over that now overtly tyrannical “government” and We, the People do not need driving licenses.

      So, how do We, the People assert our control over this oppressive gang of thugs called “government”? The Founders left us with two very important and useful tools which, if put into practice again, would reverse the now over 100-year trend toward totalitarianism. Those tools are 1) Trial by jury (meaning a jury of peers hears a case then determines guilt or innocence without the interference or even the participation of a “judge”) and 2) an independent and extra-governmental Common Law Grand Jury. While the first may be an unfamiliar and debatable concept, the second is embedded in our own united States Constitution (common law is referenced in the Seventh Amendment, grand jury in the Fifth) and was, apparently, very well known by our Forefathers as a reliable and effective counter to the tyranny that unfailingly results from corrupt government. You may find some enlightenment by googling “Hagan Smith common law grand jury”. Please get educated, do some thinking and join us in our efforts to restore true Liberty through the reestablishment of an Independent People’s Grand Jury under Common Law in every county in every State of the united States.

  10. Good essay today Eric. It seems to have stimulated a number of wide ranging thoughts.
    As to today’s teens and cars, part of this trend is the feminization and infantilization of young people from early teens to mid 20s. Nearly all are taught in schools where 90% of the teachers are women (aside from coaches). Teens are coddled and swaddled until their 30s by helicopter parents. Encouraged to live at home until married, like house poor Europeans. None of this normal in the 50s or 60s, when young males would be shunned if still living at home after age 18.
    Of course the Nanny State has burdened young drivers with special restrictions and expensive mandatory insurance. In more rural places, driving is still needed very early. In cities and towns, many young adults drive parent’s cars or bum rides, ride bikes, walk, buses, etc. I couldn’t afford my own car until a senior in college but got my learner’s driving permit at 15.
    And would any teen prior to this century want to drive a Mini Cooper or Yugo like small box like the ones popular with the Millennials? Even the painted up “hippie vans” were more macho. The first Japanese auto company to produce a $15K Hello Kitty car in blue and pink will sell millions. Are they putting estrogen in public school water fountains now?
    Teens and especially young men suffer from Immortality Syndrome, as in “I’m never going to die” no matter how stupid and dangerous they are. So keeping some of these off roads is a good thing for the rest of us. But driving is the best expression of individual ability to act independently and make ones own decisions. Being transit dependent is stunting intellectual growth.
    The Chinese get it, the Europeans don’t. Which is why the Chinese are rabid capitalists w/o apology and most Europeans meekly line up for their two month vacations, no work “jobs” and other handouts, like subsidized housing. All complete with trams, buses, trains and shared bikes paid for by the State. Everyone can go just where Big Sister wants them to be.
    China is rapidly building highways and roads and cars, trucks and motorcycles. There, it is not cool to be a Millennial wimp living at home and taking the bus (not that most still have to do so due to the costs.)
    On the bright side, in the US most young people are far more libertarian than their parents, if only due to the Internet and common sense. So driving isn’t everything. The shaky broke-bank economy may be at fault, that and obscenely expensive education that creates huge debts.
    My Depression era raised parents made it clear I was out of the house at 18 or paid rent to live in their basement. Those circumstances no longer exist, and let’s face it, many if not most Boomers are politically stupid and have little to no confidence in their children’s ability to take personal responsibility.
    At the very least, we should encourage Boomer grandparents to give their grandkids cars when possible. Some then will get the hint and leave the parental nest. Or at least learn to live halfway free.

    • Good post Muggles. The young men these days do seem more feminized on average, with their heightened sensitivity to negative feedback and “micro-aggressions”, whatever that means. Women on the other hand have forgotten to be ladies, using language that would make a sailor blush, and holding the men in their life by the b*lls. Or maybe I am just growing old.

    • I still say EVERYTHING in this entire country changed rapidly after NAFTA. At a nearby town there was an industrial park with various sorts of manufacturing. After NAFTA, the only jobs there were disassembly of equipment and hauling it to Mexico. You’d see cotton gins, spinning mills, feed mixing equipment and anything made in this country headed that way. Even things like wallboard manufacturing went out of the US. Trade barriers for 3rd world countries were abolished and no trade barriers for US goods were abolished in other countries creating this $17T deficit although that’s only the current year number, not the historical accumulation.

      So what are young people to do? Now the #1 job market in the US is the medical industry. It’s simply not the same world.

      The green card crowd is accustomed to living 20 in a house and the rest of the people are rapidly becoming used to multiple generations in the same dwelling. It took 100 years for a country to go from multiple generations in a household as the norm to single people all having their own dwelling and a single law to reverse that accomplishment and send us careening back to 2nd and 3rd world status.

      With 10% of the population having 90% of the money, we’ll continue to regress and get poorer with govt. of some sort being the main employer(it already is) and the poor paying an inordinate amount of tax and paying more for everything they buy.

      The Salon article robbed from Alternet was dead on. Any good accountant can figure this out and have.

      So many poisons in our food system are creating huge amounts of young with crippling diseases of one sort or another. I could go on but it should be easy to see.

      How can something as expensive as a car be very high on the list when you have no job or no job worth having?

      Right now the car industry is almost the entirety of banking and GDP of hard goods but it’s not going to last. Nothing but a newfound poverty is going to last in this country.

      Rant over.

  11. The young hate your values and your principles. They don’t see you as part of the solution. They’ve experienced you as a major part of their problem. They want you out of the way, along with all the other evil crap that we all agree are our obstacles to our respective visions of a freer world.

    Most of the best and brightest on the internet are AnComs, not AnCaps. We know all to well and are largely in agreement as to the inferiority of the AnComs.

    But there’s a problem with AnCaps. They assert their superiority over AnComs by fiat, or with incomplete arguments. If they were being rational and scientific about it, they’d concede there is some non-zero chance that AnComs are right and AnCaps are wrong. They don’t do this. They “know” they are right. And AnComs are “wrong.”

    I think this can be resolved by breaking unproven linkages in events. Why not acknowledge the French Revolution brought a great deal of freedom to the world to a lot of people. It freed generations from the shackles of hereditary castes, and got the masses out from under the thumb of the church and the older generation in general.

    Much of the Russian Revolution was of great benefit to the slavic peoples. The masses of them were still in slave status. And the power of their church was unbearable. It was due to their inexperience and naivete that they were unable to reap the benefits, while simultaneously guarding against the costs, which became quite massive over time.

    From a consumer perspective. Both the French & Russian revolutions were experienced as a great good. Why should they care what effects their freedom had on the rest of the world. There’s no provable connection between one and the other. If the Industrial Revolution and the American Revolution were both so great a thing. They should be able to adapt and thrive despite the French and Russian Revolutions.
    – – –

    AnCaps believe that a person’s value is utilitarian based on what they can contribute, while AnComs believe it is innate and everyone has value simply because they are human, and that all people bleed the same color. AnComs see the unseen that AnCaps discount as insignificant.

    AnComs are oblivious to the rights of creators and owners of property. They are blind to the unseen of ownership and individual creative effort. They create systems that quickly breakdown because they imagine people will work against their own best interests. They begin from an idea of unlimited freedom, but the quickly devolve into unlimited compulsion, because their systems just don’t work in the real world the way they imagine.

    AnCaps have no problem with private tyrannies (work places) because of the theory that if conditions are too bad the workers can go somewhere else… but they must earn their inalienable right to life and liberty by the sweat of their brow.

    AnCaps respond that competition is irrelevant here because conditions will be the same everywhere. Workers will get the minimum pay and the maximum productivity expectations that the market will bear. No one *chooses* to work in a sweatshop! They do it out of necessity. The coercion is not direct, but it is intrinsic to the system.

    The AnCaps claim ownership and control of all resources in the world beyond all reason. How can it be noble and reasonable, to deny access to water and tillable land and hunting and fishing grounds unless you “buy” it from them.

    Where they make improvements to things, one can argue that is their property. But when a tiny minority claims to own everything within sight, and even things far far away, you have to question that and validate the claims. AnCaps system is actually even more fantastical than the AnComs.

    AnCaps create a world where everyone starves unless they are catered to, because somehow they’ve come to “own” every last atom of the world. AnCaps are beyond the ridiculousness of the AnComs. By a very great margin.

    I don’t favor either one entirely. They’re like the Alphas and Betas in Brave New World. I am divergent and factionless, I have elements of each, and also characteristics beyond either of them. I won’t agree that AnCaps aren’t true anarchists. I would take one any day over a Republicrat. And over an authoritarian AnCom. But I don’t agree it’s been proven that AnComs are wrong or evil. And I do think the errors and evils of AnCaps are greatly in need of investigation and correction.

    I think there’s some kind of hybrid solution available. Which should satisfice both schools and also shore up each other’s systemic weaknesses in order to advocate a hopefully bulletproof system.

    Look at the software market as model. Free/Open Source software is developed completely voluntarily by devoted communities, without coercion (systemic or direct) or expectation of profit, and made freely available for everyone on the planet to download and use for no cost. We are talking about some of the most solid software out there that provides 95% of the backbone of the internet. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP to name a few.

    It’s crucial to recognize free/open source software is largely derivative of for profit software. There’s been a taking here, and the right thing to do is to acknowledge this debt and affirm it as real and ongoing concern.

    Open Source ends ups being the best of the best. But a real danger is, creators will cease to create, if they aren’t given their due for their efforts.

    So far, Open Source hasn’t crashed the commercial software market and in some ways bolsters it by providing more choices AND forcing commercial companies to stay on top of their game and not only out compete other vendors but also give people a reason to spend money for something they could get for free.

    To my mind, property owners and AnCaps are on shaky ground enforcing their claims, because they don’t provide any workable alternative. If your system includes a majority of the people suffering and starving unless they submit to your whims, you’re going to learn that quantity has a quality all it’s own.

    Some open source products even have dual licensing models, where you can get the “community version” for free but can also buy a commercial license for value added extras such as additional functionality and professional support.

    This model is easily extended into the offline world where all of the basic goods and services needed to support human life on this planet to a reasonably comfortable degree could be provided freely by a community option, yet entrepreneurs would still be left with enough of the fruits of their labors to compete and sell value added extras that many people would want above and beyond basic living.

    The smart thing to do, is for AnCaps to determine a level of bloodsucking they can tolerate, and then move forward from there. Eventually new ways of commerce and keeping of account can be initiated so those whose value is “given” to the masses, get back what is their due.

    This way everyone benefits to some degree. Yes AnComs get something for nothing or nearly nothing in the short term. In the long term, AnCaps still end up far superior to those of lesser ability and willingness to make an effort.

    Even if it makes philosophical sense to say those who produce nothing deserve nothing. This never works in reality. Eventually those with nothing will take something from anyone and everyone without prejudice.

    A wise farmer puts out some feed for his animals. And doesn’t prevent wild animals from feeding themselves according to their wild protocols. Worse case, the farmer has to make provisions for those nearby in the wild as well.

    To leave any animal too hungry, and with no options to feed themsevles, is to invite disaster on all of his labor and all of his hardwon capital. It’s suicidal and contrary to his best interests. Where is the moral victory, to be eaten by wild animals, all the while thinking: “I’m better than they.” I’ve won a great philosophical battle. There can be no sense in that.

    • There is a certain level of bloodsucking that can be tolerated. Should it be tolerated? I can’t speak to that, but the points you make certainly should bring some pause. But we are well, WELL past the amount of bloodsucking that can be tolerated any longer.

      I think the tent should be as big as possible and the more people in it with a mostly similar view the better.

      I always enjoy your posts Tor.

      • Thanks PreacherRye. LIke most here, you seem a hardworking, kindhearted, empath, who’s quite bewildered by the unfathomable increase in power of the sociopaths recently. And even more surprising, the growing cultural tsunami of apaths that don’t seem to have a problem with it.

        Someday, I’d like to stop engineering this crazy train of mine. And quit tearing up the tracks in Eric’s back forty. In better future circumstances, I’d love to chew the fat about my Honda, and other steel chariots of fire. Or reminisce about the more interesting vehicles worthy of mention in years gone by I still fondly remember. But for now… this is war… it’s time to get back off the rails again…

        I guess what I’m proposing, and please feel free to join in and suggest something better, is we acquire the outer shell and the appearance of an apath. All the while, preserving our true empathic inner selves, and only revealing our true nature to the select few in our lives who’ve proven themselves as worthy of our trust.

        In order for any of this to work, we will have to be seem convincingly mired in apathy, and fully conditioned to handing over the expected tribute to the sociopath with no resistance or hint of aversion in doing so.

        It’s guerrilla psychology, not calling a spade a spade. Not just being ourselves unfiltered. Not showing any preference to anyone when out in public and in today’s toxic mix of sadists, statists, oblivious morons, and badge-polishers of all sorts.

        It doesn’t feel good. But, maybe just play dumb, and act real cool with everything, no matter what heinous thing occurs, and resolve to work to mitigate and rectify things later, when no one is observing you, and you can safely do so in secret.

        There’s no reason to show your hand to everyone. Let others think what they will, just agree with their assessment and don’t correct them. Over time, your actions will speak for themselves, and you’ll be far better off surviving as an alpha male in the arena of action and value provision.

        Trying to be an alpha male these days in the arena of rhetoric, or the arena of reputation, is a sucker’s game that leads to relentless challenge, impoverishment, and eventually madness. Or sometimes, even worse.

        • Maybe enough alpha males and alpha females would make a difference. Right now we have a bill, the TPP, that’s secret. What sort of shit is that? It’s tyranny, plain and simple. While not a big Rand fan, he’s at least involved right now in a filibuster to stop the re-authorization of the Patriot Act.
          So now the justice dept. says what can be said and what can’t, literally. Where in our Constitution did they get that power?

          Get unpopular, it won’t be any worse. I’m living proof. It may piss them off and scare them but that’s what they need, the badged crowd and their supporters anyway.

          I was commanded to open my safe but I suddenly hadn’t a clue to the combination. Consternation and then threats. So I tell them “hey, there’s a big acetylene torch sitting right close by, use that on it…….but let me and mine get on down the driveway a ways before you do that. I can’t remember if that cannister in there is one or ten pounds of black powder”. I didn’t bother to mention the cases of ammo inside. I just requested to be at least 1/4 mile away when those brave shitty pantsed guys opened ‘er up. They said that was a booby trap and I said only if you’re a booby. Ah, I just love the sound of that pop top in Bang a Gong, always makes me feel like I have company.

          • Even if you believe in all those old papers, TJ said in the DoI that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. And since no one can consent to something secret, then anything secret is unjust. QED.

          • The TPP will be the first devastating blow. The other secret one being negotiated right now is the TTIP that will come on its heels and be even worse.
            – – –

            “The TPP is the forerunner to the equally secret US-EU pact TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), for which President Obama initiated US-EU negotiations in January 2013. Together, the TPP and TTIP will cover more than 60 per cent of global GDP.”

            Full Press Release

            Leaked text of the TPP agreement

            Once you go to wikileaks, there’s many other links that cover other parts of the agreement.

            – You down with Tee Pee Pee, yeah you gnome Eee…

            Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Clover… errr… I mean Epsilon… Ford

            “We’re not too stupid, and we’re not to bright. To be a Gamma is to be just right.
            The cathedral of Our Ford, first level, blue beam.”

    • Dear Tor,

      You wrote,

      Where they make improvements to things, one can argue that is their property. But when a tiny minority claims to own everything within sight, and even things far far away, you have to question that and validate the claims. AnCaps system is actually even more fantastical than the AnComs.

      If that were true, it would of course be intolerable.

      But is it?

      I don’t know of any ancap theorists who argue that one can arbitrarily lay claim to unlimited land merely because one “saw it first”.

      If anything, it’s the statist imperialists who do that.

      • Mighty convoluted since in the first place the state took money from people living there and then sold it back to only certain people again as “private” land. In my view the size of the Ponderosa was the result of might making right and having the gummint back it up. I don’t know if that land there was ever sold or simply taken. But Pa and the boys were mighty possessive.

      • I’d like to roll back the clock to the industrial revolution for a moment. The miracle is seen. Think of all that was lost as the mentally unseen.

        Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times, and all his earlier movies are excellent indictments of the absurdities we’ve all become accustomed to enduring without question or notice.

        Capitalists rightly point out the alleviation of scarcity this provided everyone. But they seem blind to the abuse of power that resulted from this “economic miracle.” The machine like horror of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is another great portrayal of much of what’s wrong.

        The flawed “capitalist-ish’ system ‘we have ‘ has an enormous power over minute details of our life. Recently we told China to delete all their pirated material from their websites. Somehow they largely accomplished this, because you dare not mess with Leviathan when he demands something.

        I don’t agree that we must “take the good and take the bad and there we have the facts of life” I want what’s good about capitalism. And I want to understand why Marxism and Socialism have has all the successes they have.

        There must be some validity to their complaints. I believe that independently of their horrible and laughable economics and centrally planned people’s plantations

        If “capitalishism” we’re a reasonable system, which it clearly is not, there would be access to water. You would be able to find shelter. Choose your own clothing and so far. Somewhere.

        Maybe not in cities of millions of people. But certainly in cities of half a million or less. How can it be, that people aren’t allowed to park there car somewhere. Plop down their suitcases, and make a life for themselves wherever they choose.

        How is it that all the land is cordoned off by the government. This government wouldn’t get away with what it does, if not for the complicity and enabling of the capital-ish-sts. I’m not buying the scapegoat model that we remove the government, and all will be well. How exactly is this even remotely possible.

        It is ridiculous to claim otherwise, that Western Society is a brutal authoritarian society as seen in Brave New World when you think about it. The industrialists didn’t end up giving anybody a free lunch in the long run. They became the engine of the greatest and most far-reaching tyranny the world has ever known.

        The indigenous Asians here in the Americas were put to death for merely speaking in their own language. To take one example.

        Last I knew, this is decades ago, the indigenous people of ROC were still intact on the island and somewhat left to themselves. Maybe this is no longer the case, and you’re on the authoritarian monolithic bandwagon as well?

        To say this is acceptable, that primitives and natives are unpersons because they adhere to collectivist economic regimes, and find sophisticated concepts of property incomprehensible, does not change the bloody authoritarian savagery that was visited upon them.

        A savage tyranny that exists to this moment. Worldwide, nearly a billion live in free form favelas. Not in the good old people’s economic paradies of Amerika. Favelas are ungood and forbidden economic crimes.

        I’m arguing against all the sides. Think of my argument as the one of John the Savage in Huxley’s Brave New World.

        I do welcome your input, and will further meditate on what you have written, and what PreacherRye has written. As well as all the great things that I’ve seen here before.
        – – –

        Look how easily the slur “chinese slaves” rolls off everyone’s keyboard. Why not look at your own enslavement before concerning yourself with others.

        Americans move every 5 years. They wake up at ungodly hours to alarm clocks and scurry to their work like rats in a Deadly Gauntlet Maze every day. We’re every bit as mutatedly specialized as are the North Koreans, I would assert.

        We are the crippled obese sendentary mutants of any Brave New World adaptation. Just watch the BBC version for yourself, and you will recognize the “Merikans” right away.

        We read books. We watch footage. We enjoy music and art about the Alphas and the Betas of our society. We deceive ourselves into thinking we’re Alphas and Betas too.

        But the cold reality of the American Capitalishstic system, is for the most part, we’re all Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. We’re eugenically altered freaks of capitalist-ish production systems. And we’re getting worse and more zombified over time.

        Bred and engineered, biologically and environmentally to serve a Despotic Nihilistic Machine of Consumption that’s badly in need of maintenance and retooling before it seizes up and things get even worse.

        Some of us are going to have to play Charlie Chaplan and jump right into the gears with some big wrenches, and adjust the gears enough, that once again, we have the option to live on a human scale.

        If you like fast food fast lifestyle plastic fantastic living, that’s your right. It’s not anyone’s right to force all 7.1 billion people to get on more and more treadmills spinning at more and more RPMs for more and more useless trinkets and globs of artificial processed cheese curds.

        It’s not your right to forbid living anywhere, but in one of the duly ordained grids of habitability zones. And disallow anyone at all from living outside their endless mechanisms of command and control.

        • And I agree basically with what you’ve said. It is a totally perverted system for anything if you value freedom. it’s midnight and I’m toasted but there’s a book I can’t call the author of now but it’s worth reading and has to do with all of this and a bit more “A Winter’s Tale”. Remind me manana and i’ll dig it out and give you the author. Right now though you can stick me with a fork…..I’m done. Vaya con dios.

        • Hi Tor,

          A thoughtful post.

          As an admirer of Brave New World (much better than 1984, in my opinion – as prose and as social criticism) I sympathize with much of what you’ve written and agree with a lot of it, too.

          It’s a rip-tide situation. Consider, for example, sail fawns. I am among the few holdouts. But I can only “get away” with not having one (for now) because I am self employed. If I were not, it would be de facto impossible. Not illegal. But the pressure to buy one and use it would be virtually irresistible. This is how the system works.

          It applies equally to many things, to most things. The choices open to us are pre-boxed and pre-defined. The real choice – none of the above – is rarely available. See Carlin on Coke vs. Pepsi or Chevy vs. Ford.

          We live in a hive.

          The dilemma is that life outside the hive is hard – if not altogether impossible.

          • Cell phones are a useful tool, and it is up to you to decide how much to use them. The arguments against the devices are valid (I was a holdout too 10 years back) but similar arguments were likely made against other modern technologies like laptop computers, automobiles and even wristwatches.

            • Employers, for the most part, expect people to have a phone of some sort. For those employers, I’d say provide me one as they used to.

              I have a cell phone since it’s no more expensive(less, that old “long distance fee crap”)and I save money having one plus it’s hard to unspool cable from a landline going 80mph.

              I don’t know how you use a landline and not pay for long distance. Since area codes are so convoluted now, you’d go broke having to pay long distance fees, even if that meant you could have “free” long distance that’s not really free. You pay through the nose for it if you ever check your landline bill. Sure, as with everything now, long distance is included in a package but the package is expensive.

              Years ago when I did some govt. (USDA)work they’d absorb some of your bill. They may still do that but very few private employers will.

              And you’re right about other technologies. So many jobs are not available if you have no car and at one time, a wristwatch was a must. Laptop computers, once a must for many have been replaced by smart phones.

              I recall my first mobile phone was very expensive, about the size of a breadbox and calls were $.45/each just to place. Other carriers wanting in the biz cut it to 35 cents and then 25 cents and then free for anyone with the same carrier and now it’s simply a fee per month regardless of useage and soon the internet fee will drop like a rock so everybody will have a smart phone and won’t have to know much about computing or the internet to use one.

              One thing I still haven’t given them is my name but for years now certain senators in the US Congress have wanted to make that mandatory and tried to force retailers like Walmart into making ID’s mandatory. Of course the carrier I use is constantly trying to get my ID. I’m to the point I don’t care so much. I spoke with a fellow trucker for more than two hours last night. If the NSA wants to hear about Cat 3406’s, Detroit Diesel 60 Series’, Cummins ISCM’s and a myriad of transmissions and rear-ends and axles and brakes and loads we’d been hauling and were expecting to haul and searches for different trailers and rebuilding front ends and going through the A/C then let them. They won’t know what it is anyway. And they won’t need to capture me and take me to a foreign prison and waterboard me to find out.

              • When they started charging a monthly fee for long distance on land lines regardless if one made calls or not I turned off the long distance. It was a bit of customer unsupport drone a-thon but in the end the long distance got turned off.

                • Had that bite us last week needing to send a long distance fax. The phone company knows this and so many internet providers don’t provide the ability to use your computer and fax as was once common.

            • Hi Escher,

              Oh, I don’t disagree. But, because so many people seem unable to not be constantly gabbling/texting/staring at that stupid screen, civilization – well, civility – has been greatly undermined. Remember when you could have a conversation with someone and not have it interrupted by some idiotic “ring tone” (and the person you were talking with just has to take the effing call)?

              And: Because employers and everyone else expects everyone to be “reachable” at all times, everywhere, we no longer have those delicious moments of precious silence; the alone time is gone.

              • A true “smart phone” would never ring. It would screen calls and take messages. Only “whitelisted” callers would be able to interrupt you, and only after meeting the criteria for interruption.

                But most people will take the call because they’re still caught up in the idea that face to face communication is cheap and electronic communication is expensive, so therefore, it is more important. Of course the reality is the opposite is true, given that at least one party has to travel to see the other, while electronic communication has basically been valued at fractions of a cent per minute. The Pavlovian response to bells ringing has a lot to do with it too. And I imagine there’s a fair amount of showboating and perhaps they think the incoming call might be better than the conversation that they are currently engaged in.

                I carry two phones when I’m at work or on call. When I’m not on call, the work phone is shut off, or at least sitting on the charger. If more people took to the rule that if you want me on stand-by you will compensate me, there’d be far less calling after hours.

              • Agree with you 100% on the decline in manners and common courtesy introduced by cell (and especially smart) phones. It’s bad enough to cut off a face to face conversation for a phone call – now people do it to reply to an email or text.
                Employers that pay for their workers’ cell phone plans more than get their money’s worthodox from the unpaid overtime they are able to squeeze out of their workforce. It is us who lose out on the quiet moments, and after a while we get withdrawal symptoms when we are not plugged in.

            • My Dad was a holdout on having a credit card years ago. Then he tried to make a hotel reservation without a credit card. Well, that seemed to do it. I believe my Dad understood the folly of doing business based on credit. I believe he was right. Look at where we are today.

              • The big problem is because most people are debtors and consumers today is that we don’t earn interest on savings. Which in a non central-banking system, where money isn’t controlled by politics, would mean very high interest rate earnings, but I digress. But credit cards have 1-5% cashback. That’s an order of magnitude or more better than bank accounts for spending money. Use the credit card, pay it off in full, take the credits.

              • breadman, that’s it exactly and the way we got our first credit card. I could always ask my wife for our bank balance and she’d know it pretty closely. I banked in my wallet and my savings were in the pasture in Thermos plastic water bottle siliconed shut, not detectable by anything other than digging the entire pasture up 5′ deep.

                One X mas we were in her parent’s home town and wanted to avoid the over-crowded house(the bed we were normally assigned always left me and my back problems sleeping on the floor, can’t do a soft bed)so we went a motel and no dice w/o a credit card. I even offered a couple hundred dollars deposit but somehow, they think that no matter how you appear, you’re liable to strip the entire room and leave…..as if having your DL and license plate weren’t enough.

                We ended up in a place with a gap so large under the door the N wind nearly froze us out and surly attendants were no help.

                My parents had always been on us to get a credit card but our philosophy on life is if you can’t pay for something right then you can’t afford it. That’s not a difficult concept but one the bankers abhor.
                We got a CC after that and the next thing you know, we’re paying fees at the minimum no matter if we used it or not. Now that’s a sweet deal…..for the banks.

                And now, the price of nearly everything makes it nearly impossible to carry that much cash. I used to keep about $10K hidden in my pickup mainly for paying at auctions where I bought cheap and sold for a profit, used to be a good business but then the auctions got the no cash bug too.

                If I weren’t old and a bit wiser, I could get the impression I could afford anything, just whip out that plastic. Another sign bankers have taken EVERYTHING.

                • What did company towns do Eight? They got everyone working for the company in debt to control them, to make them slaves and serfs of the corporation. What does the present economic system do? It gets everyone in the nation in debt to make them slaves and serfs to the corporatist system.

                  Housing bubble -> debt.
                  Student loans->college bubble->debt.

                  Everything is about punishing savers and catering to debt. Then for those who aren’t taking the bait requiring massive debt to live half way decently. They make us slaves through debt. Everyone can afford everything up to his debt servicing limits if he’ll be a good slave and go along to get along. Show up for work and produce for the owners.

                  Just like in the company town, keep working hard because of the chains of debt. At least the cages are nice. For now.

        • I enjoy my job, that is to say my work. Given a choice between working and sitting around I would choose work. I don’t know why that is, just that it is. I look forward to the day when I no longer need to be concerned with earning more money, but when I think of that time I don’t see myself doing nothing, nor do I see myself as purely a consumer. Contributing to society is a worthy endeavor. We can’t all be poets and film makers, just as we all shouldn’t be subsistence farmers either. Society benefits from productive individuals. As individuals leverage technological advancement to increase productivity the nature of work changes, as does the opportunity for new types of employment, which might again increase our level of understanding of the universe, which again advances technology, leading to greater productivity.

          This positive feedback loop eventually gets so far ahead of the human condition that it allows for massive misallocation of labor and wasted effort. It tends to make obsolete worker skills and even entire industries, especially those that cannot adapt and take advantage of change. But more importantly, carpetbaggers and opportunists take credit for (and some output of) societies advances. As more and more of the population believes these people are somehow able to provide for them (as opposed to trusting in their own ability to produce), more and more of the productive output will be consumed by them. These days, we producers are surrounded by them. We call them “leaders,” “agents,” “brokers” and “politicians.” I might also throw “lawyers” in that pile, but at a meta level, the productive need lawyers to counteract the effects of the others.

          But they have to be very careful. As they increase their level of consumption, eventually they will cross an inflection point where the productive will no longer be able to support them. They then conspire to insure their survival, at the expense of the productive, by compelling producers to pay them off under threat of harm. Of course it’s not presented that way, they are extremely skilled at convincing the naive they are the benefactors and the productive are the villains. Ironically, as they consume more and more production, they are less and less effective at doing what they claim they could do to begin with. We may have already passed that inflection point in the United States. A shame.

      • No human should say: topic-du-jour. Or teen-driving. Ever. Even a semi-moronic epsilon minus shouldn’t humor such nonsense.

        Topic of the day. Quote of the hour. Kardashian of the week. National pie flavor of the month. This year in feministic history. The selfie generation. Kissable spring lip gloss colors. No. A thousand times no.

        Teen driving. Middle aged sandwich making. Toddler sleeping positions. Neighborhood playground surveilling. Geriatric tax record keeping. Underwater terrorist interrogating. HOA potluck coordinating. Stop. Just please, none of this.

        You’re all better than. Don’t jargonate yourself into a soma coma.

  12. Seems to me there’s a lot of speculating going on around here. Anyone actually talk to teens to find out what they think about cars, or are we all just assuming we know?

    Yes, financial reasons are high on the list, but these kids are also the ones who’s grandparents and parents buy them whatever they want (my nephews have more toys then anyone I’ve ever seen, but I’m told that’s fairly typical). Why should parents who throw thousands of dollars of toys at them change their tune with automobiles?

    P.J. O’rouke thinks teenagers don’t want cars because the parents were at work, so they didn’t need to get their groove on in the back seat, just engage in some after-school activity in the comfort of their own beds.

    I think it has more to do with parents (and society) keeping kids “young” for greater lengths of time. Many of you have mentioned that you had part time and even full-time jobs while in high school. I remember playing trombone in the city band (for pay -I even had to join the union), and singing in church and symphony choirs, alongside adults, including some of my teachers. I was treated as a peer, not a student. I was expected to behave like an adult, know my part and concentrate for the entire 2+ hour rehearsal. It was very hard for me to go back to school and think it was important after that. I don’t know that that happens so much anymore, because there’s a band for every skill level these days and everyone gets to participate. But that’s just me speculating. Maybe I should ask a teenager…

    • Interesting POV, Eric_G. I would guess you are at least partially right.
      Kids these days graduate HS, then go off to party 4 (or more) years at college. Finally graduate (or give up), have a butt load of debt, but can’t get a decent job, and move back in w/Mom & Dad. A lot of times Mom doesn’t mind, she’s glad to have ‘her baby’ back home.
      Why grow up if nobody makes you? Why buy a cow when milk is free?

    • I think it has to do with the economy….or lack thereof. The jobs most young people can get don’t pay crap so how do you live by yourself or afford a car? Pay has progressed in this part of the country from about $12/hr for a decent job(nothing great, just staying alive)back in ’88 to a whopping $14-16hr. and that’s for a skilled job. Just consider the value of money from then to now.

      There were some good paying jobs(by today’s standards) last year in the patch but how many people can or will do that work. Long, really hot or really cold days, six days a week minimum unless they’re not untypical 7 day a week jobs. But last week I got the employment report for Texas. Non-ag jobs fell by 25,000 in the first quarter of this year in Texas. That’ ain’t gettin you outta dad’s house unless you’re one of the 2/3rds that get to hang out in jail for a while.

      What’s going on in this country is a crime and it started with NAFTA, continued with GATT and TPP will be the icing on the slave’s cake. 55,000 manufacturers(not employees)gone since NAFTA was enacted. But the pols don’t worry. They don’t worry about anything but terrrisstttssss. And they should worry more about the “domestic” type than any and I think they do considering all the ammo being bought by various federal agencies.

      Clovers are scared DC will get nuked by some foreign power and I’m scared it won’t.

      Big news story, This is a Red Alert. All citizens(comrades)are instructed to stay in their homes and not travel. Washington DC was just nuked with what is to be believed a 100 megaton nuclear device. No word yet of the extent of damage.

      Me, driving down the highway “Well, it’s about time”. Blow off the no alcohol in a commercial vehicle law and go by the liquor store and stock up, plenty food in the freezer, pull in and lock the front gate behind me. Pull up and play with Cholley Jack a while and the kitties. Sit down in my rocker on the porch with a cold one and reflect on it all. It’s easy to nap with a Mac in your lap.

      • Hi Eight,

        Yeah. I think you’re on to something there. Looking back, things were very different – and better – for Generation Xers like me. I was able to buy (and feed!) a V8 muscle car while in high school, on a fast food/part-time job (weekends/nights). The fast food joints in those days – the ’80s – were staffed by people like me at that time… that is, by teenagers. We also cut grass, did odd jobs for cash.

        I distinctly remember being able to fill up my ’78 Camaro for about $20. The car itself cost $3,500 but the key thing was I could fix almost anything that needed fixing on my own, or with the help of a friend’s older/wiser brother. Insurance was mandatory, but Big Brother was much easier to dodge in those days…

        And after graduation from college, there were salaried jobs available in abundance. In journalism. In my mid-20s I was making close to $50k, with benefits. That is almost inconceivable now.

        • eric, I have two nephews who grew up in the Dallas metroplex. One, a computer genius, works in Seattle for a company that’s a household name, does lots of retail and computer stuff. He has no car, no place to park one and no place to really drive it. The other lives near Houston and has scads of guns and ammo, drive a big Dodge Cummins megacab truck. Kids not of big cities seem to have a vehicle, mostly pickups and expensive one too even if they do live with parents(but low pay doesn’t hold them back as much since everything else costs less)and of course, not all the pay is low. Rural, most of Tx., kids are big on vehicle owning since you just about have to be. City kids, not nearly so much.

          A couple weeks ago about 30 miles from home I’m going along and near a road that connects two highways, there are burnout marks for what look to be a quarter mile, pickup size, obviously a big hopped up diesel. They must have left most of the tires in that one burnout. I don’t think i’ve seen one that long my entire life. And that’s not uncommon here or for hundreds of miles around. If you want to see scads of blinged out pickups the west and north of Tx will show you every combo you can imagine. And then there’s the hot car crowd with even some rat rodders. To me this indicates the clover culture in large cities and the raise hell culture in rural settings. And rural kids just seem to work harder, not nearly the lack of sense or morals you see in the city.

          As a armchair sociologist, it would be a very interesting subject to delve into. BTW, good work on your log-in. Much obliged.

          • eightsouthman,
            A few years back we were at a county fair and, as a former farm boy, I noticed with interest the huge difference between the ‘city kids’ and the ‘country kids’. It was visibly obvious. The urban kids ran in babbling packs up and down the midway bouncing from one amusement to another and, even though late at night, the rural kids hung out in the livestock barns and took care of their animals (and each others). Their conversation was more about serious things and they were respectful to each other and others. The difference was palpable. Being handed responsibilities at an early age they knew hard work and cared about it. I doubt any of them carried college debt or moved back in with their parents unless it was to carry on generations of valuable work. Made me proud of every one of them.

            • Nils, I’ve seen it too. City kids look through you, nothing to see there and country kids will look you in the eye and say Yes sir. Compliment them on their livestock and see them smile and say Thank you. Ask a question and they’ll tell you what they know.

              • Eightsouthman,
                I grew up in what I’ve come to view as the best possible conditions. Hard work coupled with time to play hard as well. Nothing fancy but always warm, loved and well fed. We were rich in ways that had nothing to do with constant contact with social media. Conversation over meals lingered as long as we wanted and we turned in at the end of a day and rested like we meant it. Great way to grow up. If I do half as well as my folks with my son he will be o.k. And yes, I trust him to drive responsibly as my folks did with me. Thanks for your response.

        • eric, also those states with high age DL qualifications are much less conducive to driving. Here in the wide open, kids are literally stuck 10-30 miles from town and work for the most part. They have to be able to drive and speed limits are suggestions anyone can mostly beat in court.

          i can barely recognize this state from the one I grew up in but compared to all others, it would seem to be heaven on earth. Of course Alaska was a laid back place in the 70’s and probably still is but living there is another thing. S. Ca. is still the climate place but who can put up with everything else. When Goldwater said he’d like to take a big knife and cut the eastern seaboard loose and send it into the Atlantic I understand what he was speaking of. The home of yankees, the internationalists who have ruined this country and the uber nanny state. And the poor southern states are still under the gun of the NE bankers.

          I was just thinking today of where I’ve seen Nazi uniforms on police for dress. Not sure any place but Dallas and Houston qualify and not really the NE Nazi style. Cue Goldwater again.

            • silly savages accepting trinkets as value!

              Instead of shiny beads, they could have held out for more like we just did with TPP.

              We just sold the island of Manhattan for 28 trillion in GENUINE federal reserve notes. Let’s all do the make it rain dance around Wall Street in celebration.

              #winning #goodjuju #greatspiritofcapitalism
              – – –
              P.S.

              Thanks for your emails and texts of concern regarding Earthquake Elvis. It’s already shaping up to be a trying earthquake season in the SW. My fellow Las Vegan comrades and I are pulling together and clearing the rubble in solidarity.

              We Will Rebuild

          • Them folk ain’t got the brains God gave a goose. Even when they start off w/a good premise, they twist it up – e.g., yes, the war on (some) drugs does turn out racist in its execution, but that’s not the intention. The intention is control.

          • Morning, Bevin!

            Oy, that was a harsh read first thing in the morning… . The thing that always stands out is “rights” defined by genitals (and how you use them) and/or skin color, socio-economic status, etc. – and the subtext of implied violence necessary to secure these “rights.”

            “Progressives” rely on inherently demagogic terms – like “progressive” – that have no fixed meaning but imply something beneficent.

            “Progress” is a generic good. Anything (everything!) “progressives” advocate must therefore be “progress.”

            The salt necessary for this slug is the NAP.

            • Yet pouring salt on a slug is aggression.
              And fatal.

              I hope to be wrong, but again – they outnumber us. Allow them to breed, the demographics result in Idiocracy.

              Sterilize them, or cauterize the land they’d steal, and let them die… That’s the LEAST violent I can think to be with a cancer.

          • Yeah Tor, those FRN’s were created with the sweat of billions of brows and a few strokes on a keyboard. And the walls, come tumbling down and the walls, come tumbling, tumbling, tumbling dooowwwwwnnnnn!

              • Nazi Germany surrendered the day after Chuck Norris was born. Coincidence?
                Hey Tor, why is that kid drinking a Miller LIte? Doesn’t he know that the blue in red, white and blue stands for Blue Ribbon?

                • PtB, it was because they had their new Hitler. It’s amazing you can’t even find out on the net about Chuck’s violent proclivity when it comes to peaceful people. He used to go on drug raids with his buds in the HPD and Harris county sheriffs.

                  They busted the door down on a family of a mom and dad and a couple kids one night, guilty of possessing a couple J’s, real desperadoes. Chuck shoots one cause his little dick kept getting smaller and he needed some gunpowder testosterone to give him some whiskey courage. What a POS he is.

                  BTW, he’s an Okie….you know that little state that ISN’T Texas?

                    • Perfect fact checkers don’t exist. Just check out an old Encyclopedia Britannica…..what a frickin joke but people took it for gospel. Wanta find out about the origin of petroleum? They even had hand drawn pics of the source of it. Well, my motto is “learn and live” and I hopefully learn something every day.

                      Not sure how much I learn(facts)from FB or Twitter. I know people who can barely pull themselves away from FB, no telling what they’re learning.

                      And “facts” seem to constantly change. I believe what I have in my hand that’s doing what it was advertised to do and can verify it….most of the time……

                      It’s hell to be 65 years old and know, for almost a fact, that most of what you have believed in your life is bs…..for the main part. And the icing on the cake is tomorrow I’ll find some more “facts” I thought I knew that were anything but.

                      And so I’ll lay me down to sleep and in the morn I’ll think I have lived another day, only when something hurts real bad. Yep, I am alive, or so it seems.

                • Maybe he’s cuttin back on some carbs? Looks a little chubby there.

                  I was a “horseshoe beer” man myself back in my yootz. I also thought the Hamm’s bear was pretty cool.
                  https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/483717636186841088/fMH7MDjg.jpeg

                  I don’t have a funny caption yet, but this is my all time fave photo of what being a kid used to be like. When did all them sharia nurse ratchet types manage to grab them good ol’ meriKan boys by their nuts at such an early age?

                  • Tor, I always like Olympia but couldn’t get it in Tx. Seems like I could get it on my trips to Co. Extremely allergic to cigs so that was never an option. I used to chaw when I was a teen but then realized that wasn’t a turn-on to the gals and a deplorable habit to boot.

          • Tor, to be honest, that dates from back in the early Letterman days(Late Night with David Letterman) when he wore tennis shoes and jeans. Early 80’s, late night and he is doing a skit relating to gang home invasions of elderly people in NYC that were endemic at the time. He’s sitting in a rocking chair looking like an old woman with a shawl on when the door slams open and 4-5 guys rush in. He has a pillow in his lap and is nearly asleep when it happens. He jerks awake, whips up a Mac 11 and sprays the other side of the room taking out the entire gang. He then looks into the camera and says “It’s easy to nap, with a Mac in your lap”. I was drinking some WT and branch water at the time with my big black tomcat Du Bois, who also drank the same thing. It was hilarious and not at all like his show would eventually turn into but David never really bought into the whole liberal BS. He got lots of tickets back then and pissed off a lot of the highbrow friends driving a beater ’76 Chevy PU. He laughed about it and said it was a great truck and did just fine for him. He once showed it getting towed after he stopped in to see some friends in a neighborhood that cops didn’t allow that sort of vehicle. I’m not sure he’s changed all that much but had to put on a suit to get the really big bucks and keep his job. And we all know what happened after that.

    • Mr. Eric_G nails it. The totalitarians, collectivists, egalitarians, Democrats and present day Republicans have made it impossible for children and adults to do anything without a threat or warning. Absolutely nothing is allowed.
      I cannot imagine what it must be like in publik skool today. I presume teenager’s stifled by driving laws are stymied by the insurance-bank-lawyer cartel in everything they do, or not do.
      I share the same musical experiences as a kid in the early 70s. We were drawn to ‘adult behavior’ not by threat, but that we were expected to perform, behave and act like adults. The school’s control freaks (feminism, collectivism, social reformers) could not hold back their instinct to suppress and control. I hated school for it. It sickens me today to see kids walk to those skools knowing, that if not for some of these children’s parents, these kids are doomed.

  13. What should the young do? The ones I’ve encountered mutter in ominous cryptic riddles. Saying an old dog like me won’t be able to learn their new tricks. Wait until we’re in charge, things are going to be different and you’re going to be sorry.

    What exactly do they imagine they’re going to take from me that isn’t already spoken for. Whatever I’m still holding on to, its mainly due to skill in hiding and squirreling things away. On paper my net worth is below zero, and nothing is on the horizon that’s going to change that.

    Watercooler talk these days of the former middle and upper middle classes is about how to quitclaim your house safely and abandoning mortgaged businesses and rental properties back to the bank without to much pain.

    There’s no credit available anymore. Unless you count buying trinkets on the installment for twice of three times their actual worth, plus usurious interest of course. No one will stake you as an investment, unless you’re already a success.

    That’s most of business right there. Keeping two sets of books. Perfecting two different faces. One for the government and lawyers that shows how broke you are. Another set that shows vendors and creditors how wealthy you are and how great your cash flow is.

    Most of what we grew up with is obsolete now. There aren’t going to be longterm stable jobs. Guaranteed rates of pay. Reasonable services you can rely on you. Everyone is a two face, looking to scam the other guy just to try to survive.

    Whatever honorable professions and establishments that still exist out there. There’s hordes of zombies swarming them and looking to assimilate them and eat the flesh right of their bones.

    Reputations. Contracts. Fair dealing. Reasonable pay. Quality work. Fulfilling promises. Loyalty. Friendship. Win win. More and more, this stuff doesn’t work. It’s all vanishing and becoming a relic.

    What’s new is how do you cut corners. How do you get something for nothing. What can you take from your family and get away with. Or from you spouse and her family. Your neighbors and friends. Your workplace. What can you grab when no one’s looking.

    Things are upside down and inside out. And suddenly you understand why grandma always stuffed her purse with condiments at restaurants. Because things only stay good for so long. To survive you have to make compromises.

    Most of us agree on what’s the right thing to do. And what’s the wrong thing to do. And a lot of time is spent determining who is good and who isn’t. Maybe that’s not the answer anymore. Maybe everyone deserves to enjoy their consumption, so long as the consumption doesn’t hurt the other.

    The ghetto kid has a stolen bike. At least he should be left in peace to enjoy the thing. The neighbor girl brought everyone some free DVDs because it was her last day, and why not load up the car, and give herself a going away gift. So you take one and you watch the movie, consuming is a pleasurable experience.

    Maybe everything isn’t related to everything else. Maybe the kids eating the food stamp steak dinner ought to just enjoy themselves. Every bit as much as the widowed father who works three jobs to support his daughters and cook them a generic macaroni and cheese meal.

    What’s right and good will win out in the end. Cheaters cheat themselves. They end up in the gutter or an early grave likely as not. You have to believe in that. It’s when you try to cobble together some half-assed system to punish the bad guys, that things get so confused and worse than they already are.

    Most of the value being traded these days is done in a militaristic command sort of way. Very little of what we consume is freely chosen and optional. We’re just kidding ourselves when we think we have all these options and choices. Few of us do, if you evaluate your situation honestly.

    The whole point of non-aggression. Of economic cooperation. Of not attacking each other and respecting each other is consumption. The only point of being a laborer is to consume. The point of being an owner is to consume. The point of accepting handouts is to consume. Fellow consumers of any kind are not our enemy.

    Our enemy is those we are commanded to employ. Commanded to pay. Commanded to obey. The ones that tell us what we can and cannot consume. The one’s who promise one thing, and then deliver something quite different.

    Communism. Nationalism. Fascism. Corporatism. Theocratic authoritarianism. Socialist authoritarianism. The evil can be most simply observed by its interference with consumption.

    It is not worth any kind of enforcers and leg=breakers, to prefer technicians over brute laborers. To favor industrial machinery owners over vast families of manual laborers. To prefer saving over spending. Not even to prefer creating over taking handouts.

    So long as no force is used. So long as each is not prevented from consuming things however each sees fit. The noble stoics and the profligate spendthrifts will each reap what they sow.

    This means fiat money. Savings account. Deeds of ownership. Titles. Licenses. Permits. Everything that’s based on the administrative slavery state. Is under question. It’s vulnerable. It means those we might say are the good guys who earn an honest living. Might in the final accounting, be the bad guys who prop up the slave owning class and keep us all in chains.

    Maybe you’re the problem. No cashier owes you a smile. Courtesy. Good service. No worker on the job owes it to care about what you as a customer feel you are owed. Those who own nothing have no obligation to those that own everything. Not when such ownership is wielded in such an inhuman fashion.

    Let’s start with everyone is just people. Whether you’ve never worked a day in your life. Or whether you’ve busted your ass and had taxes taken from you to support a dozen deadbeats. That’s neither here nor there as to your obligations as an adherent of the NAP.

    It should be clear by now you have no rights. Not when rights are bequeathed by a murderous tyrant mob with no honor or sense of proportion. You only have obligations. If you want things to be better, you have an obligation to see everybody as they really are. And make your peace with it.

    Maybe you’re going out to work on an oil rig or drive a truck or clean toilets all day. And you have the same amount of disposable income as your neighbors with five kids and a stream of welfare checks paying for it all.

    People are fat. Sedentary. Autistic and mentally confused. Because that’s what works best these days. Nobody owes anybody anything. Including being productive. Or curbing their consumption. Live and let live means especially let the worsts of the worst live.
    – – –

    I remember what someone said to Eric a while back. About what he is owed.

    He “finds” things and he shares them, he pays nobody. Nobody pays him. It’s all free. Because consumption is occurring I lean towards thinking this is a good thing. Sure there might be even better things. But don’t let even better be the enemy of the good enough.

    He says: “I don’t expect to be paid to share ideas for a better world. Although you don’t have many root-striking posts [at EPautos] anymore so I don’t visit as much, you roll the same line as many bloggers who think their content is worth a living, like Stefan Molyneux for example.

    It’s not. There are hundreds out there sharing these ideas for free. My website is just one. Perhaps write a book and I may buy that.

    It seems you would advocate the ability to maintain what you take on, like your cars. Yet you don’t seem to be able to find your own IP address. A website costs absolutely nothing to maintain above a few hundred bucks a year if that.

    I’ll have none of the pay services, perhaps you should make it a subscription only site. That would put people like me to rest.
    – – – –

    That’s a lot to process. Stefan’s channel has 56 million views. As a ballpark amount, I’d say he deserves 56 million dollars for all the effort he put into those vids. If things were fair and just, he have something of equivalent worth.

    Not dollars, because those all get spent paying ransoms, and caging opponents, and killing enemies. And wasting on boondoggles. But something of great worth.

    This inability to pay Stefan hurts us all. Makes us all continue in our powerlessness. Because we don’t see right actions receiving just rewards. So we become cynics. And waste effort deciding who to blame. Instead of building a new system for us each to keep up to date on what we owe and what we are owed. So we can all behave logically and do for others so they do for us.

    This dismissive negation of the obvious value Stefan has given with little compensation isn’t from a mouth breathing clover. This isn’t some well fed government trough sow. This is the future that’s facing us. This is from one able to think. Able to produce. Able to relate and cooperate. This is how the young people I talk to think about things. This is how many of them are in my direct observation of them.

    They have no conception of the principles we hold dear. They’re just waiting for us to retire and to die. Or else for a chance to make a grab for everything and just take what they feel is due them. Because they’re younger and they’ve been promised things. And that’s just how the world works, you take what you can for free.

    They buy from a megagiant retailer box what they must. And nothing more. They have telecoms, media, cloud connectedness, insurance, vehicles, through expensive credit. They get most of the rest for free in whatever way they can. This is the reality of today’s consumers. It seems pointless to waste a lot of words saying what is good and what is bad about them. We already know that, we agree with each other, we also know the younger people aren’t listening to a word of it.

    It’s going to be up to us to find new ways to trade value for value. The old ways are impossible now. The young will never afford what we once could. What little they’ll buy and own, they’ll never be as free to enjoy, everywhere there’s the zombie hordes looking to take anyone’s surplus, any way they can.

    We can teach them a better way. But we’ll only succeed if we approach millenials and the young at their level of understanding. Which we’ll only know by asking them. Listening to their answers. And keeping to ourselves how horribly misguided and deluded everything they say is.

    And work slowly to correct them and give them the wisdom they sorely need, while taking the energy and new knowledge they offer.

    The young hate nearly everything. And they have long complicated negative opinions about everything. And except for the few with skills, knowledge, and wealth, no one is going to listen to them or get anything useful out of them if they stick to the old norms and expectations and don’t find new ways to interact and evolve.

    New ways to give and receive value for value. A small group of old set in their way guys have limited options and chances for success. If some of us really listen to the young, and only after really hearing them and understanding them. Find ways to get through to them, and shake the cobwebs out and get them thinking productively. Maybe we both still have a chance in all of this.

    • Good rant Tor. Too bad it couldn’t be broadcast on one of those MSM news shows the sheeple love so much. But there’s a disconnect to that too and it’s called lack of education, non-ability to read and understand what’s in front of you.

      My wife works with a lot of women and to the last one, boss included, she has to read official correspondence sent to them and explain what it means. Luckily, one asked her to read a letter she got. Well, that kept her out of jail…..barely, after my wife explained what it said in simply terms. I guess if it were posted on Facebook she might have understood it but I doubt it.

      And the Just Us system has wrought its havoc on the entire country. Something like 2/3rds of the people who can work in this country have either been through the system or are in it. Those badged heroes are like sport fishermen. They know the honeyholes and check one out every time they see one they recognize. And like catching a big bass protecting her nest, they’re still there and waiting to be had for something else……or the same thing.

      Like you say, nobody has decent credit now. I had credit I could just sign for anything I wanted. It got flushed in 2008 when the economy collapsed and it ain’t coming back.

      The only people doing pretty well either have enough money to not need a loan as you said or work in some form for the govt. This includes the landed gentry class that’s arisen in the last couple decades and even more so since the big crash. If you farm you can still lose your butt but not if you subsidy farm so everybody is on that train no matter what. And they’re well compensated for it. Their kids may not know shit but they know how to work that system and become another of that class, waiting with the banker for someone to die off or to make a mistake so their land can be used.

      On the other side is those who grew up having nothing(most kids nowdays)and expect no more. And when they get busted and absorbed into the system for any tiny reason(cop said he didn’t like the way I looked), they’re off on just their first round, added to the database and their honeyhole number marked for future incarceration/robbing by the state.

      I only see one way out of this and it won’t be by voting. I won’t live long enough to see it come to fruition either although I’d surely like to see it all or at least see enough that I could die with a smirk on my face as the pols twisted in the breeze and the Just Us bunch in its entirety strove to stay out of sight. They’ve all gone to ground anyway. Find a judge, a lawyer or a cop and you only find their business number. They’re so aggressive they fear the light of day without their official uniform or in their own den or courtroom.

      Look for the address of your banker. Good luck with that. Morpheus said something about that but I can’t remember what it was right now.

      Meanwhile, the rest of us scratch up a living where we can find it and if it’s welfare, then so be it cause nobody wants to starve and most who are on welfare would rather not be no matter what the Republicans would tell you.

      And some just know no other way. It’s been this way their entire life. There seems to be an underlying rage that hasn’t come to maturation yet. God help us all if it ever does en masse. Peace brothers, we certainly need some.

      • “I only see one way out of this and it won’t be by voting. I won’t live long enough to see it come to fruition either ”

        Our loss.
        Incrementalism: Take a gander.
        http://www.thedailysheeple.com/the-danger-that-there-will-be-no-big-event_052015

        I think maybe the author is correct, that the plan is to wait out each person’s “line in the sand” while the next generation grows up ever closer to being fully enslaved…
        Pushing for the beast to reveal itself would be better….

        • Jean, I guess incrementalism IS the plan now they have so many laws that are un-Constitutional and courts will uphold for such as holding a sign and standing in public.

          I marched in the streets, participated in other mass showings and shouted down the govt. over Vietnam. No one is fired up enough now to do so.

          MSM is completely controlled now whereas it wasn’t always so.

          Everybody has the torq on their neck with no fight to get it off.

          I have no illusions as to Rand Paul but he’s filibustering right now to stop the Patriot Act and I am helping the only way I can. I didn’t vote for him, couldn’t vote for him but I will support this endeavor. If everyone would call their senators and fax them and show support, they’d have to listen. Yep, next month they’ll have some other authoritarian bill up for a vote but you can’t fight a battle until there’s one there to be fought.

          Reckon how many high minded libertarians are going to vote for a 3rd party? Voting only shows I give them power over me. So not voting shows what? I don’t care? You already have the power and I have given up? I don’t see that working too well.

  14. According to .gov there are 330 million people in the fusa. 110 million get food stamps or some other .gov assistance. 93 million can’t find jobs because there are no jobs thanks to .gov. That which can’t go on forever won’t. I only hope these young people are smart enough to keep a list of who needs to be hung when the time comes.

  15. I don’t think most kids hate cars. The “disinterest” is due to cars being increasingly out of reach for teens. There are no longer any inexpensive used cars to buy to begin with (thank you cash for clunkers). Even if you can find one, in order to get a plate on it, you probably have to fix a number of things. Then there is insurance. The insurance itself can cost more then a minimum wage job will produce, and that is if a teen can even find that job. Many teens today that truly want a job have little chance of finding one. Then to even get a drivers license now a days, yikes.

    Back in the day, $400 got you a car, now a days you buy a computer or an iphone. No wonder teens (and increasing older people too) withdraw into that insular “online” world. The real world is a hassle (for everyone not just teens) and only getting worse and worse in that regard. And you know how teens avoid hassles when they can. Just wait until they are in their 20’s and 30’s and they haven’t outgrown that.

    It doesn’t help that most schools now a days badmouth both cars and part time teen jobs too. They were starting up with that even back when I was in high school (88-92), and they have only turned up the rhetoric on that since. School is your job, they would say…….. I remember a teacher tearing into a guy in my class for working nearly full time during school. Thankfully that guy blew that teacher off because he knew he had a good work ethic and preferred making money over school (his grades weren’t bad). Working that much didn’t hurt him at all, he does well today.

    When I had to do hiring in college for other students for janitor jobs, it was eye opening. How many of my fellow students had NEVER had any paying job before applying for the jobs I was filling. There was a guy who had no idea about showing up on time, or doing the job or anything and he drove me crazy with how much time I had to spend supervising him. He was already 22 years old! There are college grads today, that their first job will be the one they get after they graduate from college!! Imagine them not understanding showing up on time, employers must be thrilled.

  16. The ultimate goal here is to make driving and owning a car such a stinking hassle that only the overlords and other “privileged” folks will do it. The rest will be forced back onto mass transit. So much for those summer road trips.

    • I think so, too – and consider it conscious, deliberate… policy. At one time, mobility (personal mobility, via car) was encouraged. I remember it. Today, it is being actively discouraged via numerous negative incentives.

      The young, especially, are being “turned off” to cars and driving.

      • I think so, too – and consider it conscious, deliberate… policy.

        Of course it is, and it serves as evidence of how thoroughly Cloverized the majority is that something so obvious has not only not been recognized for what it clearly is, but hasn’t sparked a full-scale revolt.

        I frequently hear people claim that the “current generation” (i.e., the millennials) are “different,” that they are “waking up” and “pushing back” against the status quo. I don’t know what planet or alternate universe these people live in, but they’re not talking about the same millennials I encounter every day. The ones I encounter display the inevitable characteristics of those who have been marinated for their entire lives in the toxic broth of progressive modernism, characterized above all else by an inability to think critically. Exceptions and degrees, certainly, but the exceptions prove the rule.

        In short, we’re screwed, as is the future.

        • Liberranter said:
          “I frequently hear people claim that the “current generation” (i.e., the millennials) are “different,” that they are “waking up” and “pushing back” against the status quo. I don’t know what planet or alternate universe these people live in, but they’re not talking about the same millennials I encounter every day. The ones I encounter display the inevitable characteristics of those who have been marinated for their entire lives in the toxic broth of progressive modernism, characterized above all else by an inability to think critically. Exceptions and degrees, certainly, but the exceptions prove the rule.”

          Lib,
          I think the “Millenials” per se ARE more awake.
          What you’re seeing and commenting on is a collection of results, rather than the question of, “Are they awake?”
          Making things difficult – introducing the pain principle – is a negative reinforcement.
          Costs, difficulties, bureaucracy, and infantilization are all negative incentives, meant to curb the “bad behavior.” That “bad behavior” is non-profitable (to the parasites) behavior. Self-reliance. Thought. Questioning. Knowledge. Wisdom. Maturity. Travel (goes to all of them.) communication with others (Face-to-face, as most communication is in fact non-verbal. For comparison, dogs with docked ears and tails are unable to communicate clearly. If we’re always face-down in an electronic gizmo, we have been similarly “docked.”)

          The Millenials seem quite aware of the game.
          They have chosen to avoid all the problems and costs – to “opt out.” Can’t blame them – they KNOW the game is rigged, so the only solution is “not to play.” But while they’re thinking, “Global thermonuclear war,” they’re ignoring the fact that they are Luxembourg or Angora… They’ve only been TOLD they are the US or Russia. There IS NO real “opt-out,” you’re Tron in the Matrix, like it or not. Luxembourg, Angola, Haiti, Wake Island, Cuba, Etc, Etc, Etc. – they’re all IN THE GAME. If the “big two” pushed the button? All these little countries that “opted out” are still cinders, irradiated, covered in radioactive ash.

          The problem is waking the Millenials up to the need to be Sisyphus, REGARDLESS of it being a never-ending effort. To RAGE against the dying of the light…even though you’re going to die, don’t go easy.

          Ultimately, parasites overwhelm the host and kill it, unless outside influences remove the parasites. Our “outside influences” are injecting parasites everywhere they can (E.G., DHS is busing in f*cking African Muslim illegals, apparently… Putting MS13 gang members on planes to Hawaii, FFS! WTF?)

          In a sense, we have (been forced and coerced to) walk(ed) away from our responsibilities of educating the less-capable.
          Forced and coerced with the same techniques used on the Millenials: reduced economic and physical mobility, poor education, enforced indoctrination, government control of our lives, price fixing for goods and services. (Most people don’t want to see this, either – and even mentioning it gets you labelled a “Right Wing Fanatic.” Pointing to such things as the recent California bill for mandatory vaccinations, also now in the Senate IIRC at the federal level… Pointing out that if you can be FORCED to buy “X”, and imprisoned for buying “Y” – and that that means you ARE NOT FREE, and ARE, in fact, a PRODUCT – a “Human Resource” for exploitation…. And you must be an evil right-wing violent extremist religionist gun-loving fat-cat 1%er. Those Tolerant, Big-Tent Liberals, right?)

          We are meant to be the Killer T, Helper T, and the B-cells of the immune system of this human organism (society.) The red blood cells can’t think for themselves, can’t respond to infection – it’s up to US, those who can see, to eradicate the roots every chance we get. (Unfortunately doesn’t go well for us. we’re not part of the “pleasure principle” in social gatherings, with this focus. But it need not be our ONLY focus.)

          We need those who remember; those who communicate and coordinate; and those who just go out and destroy the pathogens.
          We have ZERO neurons, RBC’s, muscle cells, bone cells, etc, etc, etc, who will actually assist us. They can’t, they’re meant for a different purpose. But the cancer we face pretends to be each of those types of cells, even OUR types of cells, so it’s a difficult, endless process…

          And the organism STILL eventually dies.

          We’re screwed not because “they” (whomever) aren’t awake – but because not ENOUGH are both Awake, and Willing. It’s discouraging, but cancer is successful because it appears to be part of the body – because it IS, in a sense. Each of us was a nascent Clover until we learned better. But those that become RBCs, for example, will never be anything much… Just the cell type. Platelets, ossified bone cells (dead, IIRC), hair, nails, etc, etc, etc. They’ll NEVER be awake – they’ll just succumb to the disease. Never realize what’s happened. Never care. Even after death, the heart may continue beating; hair grows, nails grow, digestion may continue. The body doesn’t know it’s dead, so it’s just “business as usual.”

          And it’ll be “business as usual” here, too, until the Crescent flag is raised on the white house, and they call us to prayer 5 times a day. (For an obvious example that’s happened in Dearbornistan, Michigan.)

          Maybe we need to apply Newton’s laws? In order to get force F, we need a mass AND an acceleration. If we don’t act to change the state of motion, the object will continue in its present state of motion. And when we DO act, there will be an opposite reaction, to try to maintain the status quo.

          Education without action won’t win this battle.
          And we’re dealing with a cancerous version of HIV (attacks the immune system, and hides inside the body until after the body’s been compromised – it’s a hidden threat until the immune system – us – has been compromised too much to be effective. BTW, AIDS is the syndrome induced BY THE MEDICATIONS. Not the disease itself. And the standard meds were created before HIV became a “thing,” as chemotherapies. They were too destructive of healthy tissue…. then HIV was “found” and suddenly there was a market for the drugs deemed too toxic for use. Coincidence…? Don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy anymore, either…)

          Sorry, long-winded.
          But Eric’s right with it being systemic, deliberate, all “part of the plan. ”
          As Joker said, “You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan.” But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!

          Funny how we can’t have guns, but “they” can have armed guards (paid for by us), security escorts & search points (pointed at us, paid for by us), armed with guns (paid for by us, training paid for by us, ammo paid for by us), and they can have guns and carry permits – because they’re part of the cancerous parasite class…

          Just by itself, it’s enough to know the system is BROKEN for anyone who wants freedom. We are denied the ability to stop those who would victimize us, while those who INTEND to make us victims remain armed.

          Mangling two quotes together…

          Joker: Don’t talk like one of them. You’re not! Even if you’d like to be. To them, you’re just a freak, like me! They need you right now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out, like a leper! You see, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.
          (Join)
          Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just… do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.
          (Join)
          It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm? You know… You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan.” But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
          Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!”

          OK, I’m not the type to just burn things to watch them burn, but it’s hard to keep that moral barrier sometimes, when we start putting the pieces together.
          And one wonders, why, when the odds are that these naked apes are Clovers, imbeciles, or parasites anyway….
          And you’ve already been marked (IE mark of caine)…

          Why bother? What’s to lose?
          And what might others gain? (Even if they’re too stupid to understand it.)

          Thoughts? Other than “TL;DR.”

          • Jean, I worked a few years as an electrician, a job I didn’t really like mainly because of the people I worked with and the customers themselves. But still things were fairly straightforward with only the slightest supervision since the main supervision came when you turned it all on anyway and we basically had the same ways of getting the job done anyhow.

            Recently I needed about a foot of #14 stranded wire and was on a construction site so I ask this woman boss who wears a couple little scabbards, one with a big electricians knife(worthless junk, get you hurt but mandatory for them)and this scissor looking thing that serves as a wire cutter(mandatory too) where I’d normally use a set of linesman pliers with cutters, knurled jaw ends for twisting and the like and one side always good for use as a hammer. She cut a length of two wire cable and very ineptly cut the very end of the outside covering so she could hold it there and cut back towards herself with that electricians knife. Cutting the outer covering down the center and straight back to her body, the way they were supposed to do it. It was strange to say the least and not one bit safe looking. I told her I’d strip it so she handed it to me. I whipped out my little Buck Prince, a knife(doesn’t matter what sort of knife if it isn’t an electricians knife)that would get you fired from the job immediately, even just having it and not using it. Wow, now that’s some strange thing going on there. So I use my very sharp little knife to simply take the side off the outer covering and left one wire completely free in just a few seconds. Had I been employed as an electrician I would have been fired simply for having that knife not to mention using it. But I did what she was going to do and presented no safety problem for myself or anyone else and had less chance of nicking a wire than she did. She nodded approval as I whipped this wire out and thanked her.

            But I can’t forget everything she told me. It doesn’t make sense. I finally realized those linesman’s pliers are multi-tasking tools and big enough to clock someone into the next world. My little knife with an 1 3/4″ blade was pointed, a potential weapon I suppose. It was then I realized the “safety” aspect of those tools, less mass to use against someone else. I must confess i’d never been in a knife fight with another electrician or been attacked with a big set of wire cutter/pliers. That’s the only thing that makes any sense of it. I didn’t ask how they cut big cable but it was probably not with big old cutters like I use.

            And job sites these days spend more time doing “safety” work as they do working on the job. First thing in the morning, big safety meeting and the same speech every day. Gee, how many times do you need to hear it? Evidently, at least a few times a day. Why? Probably so that “safety” person who makes really good money doing basically nothing but some paperwork has a job.

            So here I am, a truck driver, wearing a hard hat and hoping nobody notices my boots aren’t steel toe and they didn’t……good enough. I’m a man of two hats, a regular hat and a hard hat and ne’er the twain shall meet so to speak. If I stick my head out the window or get out, it had better be with that hard hat.

            Just a hour or so into the day I have a part of my trailer break, it keeps the doors from opening too far and has adjustments but it’s been broken before and repaired shittily. The pin on one end breaks but I only realize it when I look bad and see my door opened fully. I get out, hardhatted, and go to check it out. The two big pieces of steel are only held on one end so that leaves the other trailing the ground and bent back up under the dump doors. Shit, thinks I , how to get it off. Welders close by so I ask if they had a big bar and they did. I try to pry the other end over the pin but no luck. I did get it to budge though and when it did, the bar, with my hand behind it slammed into the front of the door section giving my middle finger on my right hand something I could think about for months. Next time I saw the safety man I stuck that finger in the air for him, bloody side to him and said “you’re right, safety first”. Every time I’d see him I’d show him that finger. BTW, I did the the offending piece off…..with a cutting torch but being the safety minded person I am, I allowed a welder’s helper to cut it.

            And when the onus is on the company to get a job completed nobody cares what’s in your piss but the moment someone decides they can do without a few workers, out comes the piss cops at the safety meeting and only those they can do without are tested. Maybe we should do that to congress and the cops and judges and DHS, combat engineers, lawyers, prosecutors…..ah hell, everyone but who’d test the testers? And there’s where the rub always comes in ain’t it? Let’s test clovers best friend, government.

            • 8 – you forgot to check your spelling. It’s not ‘safety,’ it’s saaaafety.
              ( I wish I know how to italicize here. I tried cutting and pasting from MSWord and it still reverts.)

            • I know exactly the tools you mean…
              And the exact (real) safety violations she demonstrated by doing it “to the book.”

              (Never cut towards yourself…)

              “This damned human race” as Samuel Clemens called it…

              Need to stop enabling idiots. Not like we have a shortage of low-end breeders, after all. But those with above a room-temperature IQ? Endangered species.

              Spay your local Liberals! the world will owe you (though not thank you.)
              And no, can’t neuter – it’s impossible without the OEM equipment!

              • Well, I have a scalpel and a real nice set of SS emasculators, excellent forceps and some ketamine, Ringer’s solution, IV setup, etc.

                    • LOL!
                      Actually, I was saying even a “male” Liberal was female, therefore lacking the equipment… 😉

                      But I like the effort! And they grow back (Libs, I mean.)

                    • Jean, know your enemies and so I take e’s from various points of view. One bunch, some friends of the earth, sent me one today telling of an oil spill in Ca. that’s polluted 9 miles of coastal water and there’s a big cleanup going on and how BO has ok’d arctic drilling, etc. This is unacceptable for them and they want me to send money to fight to stop oil drilling and keep the oil in the earth where it belongs. It made me think of a scene in Giant where a guy is scared shitless by some other guys lowering him into a well.

                      I’d like to take some of these people and let them see first hand where oil comes from and how their beloved internet wouldn’t exist without it.

                      But the biggest laugh I got was considering how they’d take it if they knew I moved heaven and earth every day to get that oil out of the ground so I don’t freeze in the winter, boil in the summer and can keep food stored for more than a couple days. I simply need to inquire what their trick of doing this is without oil and do they ride a bicycle everywhere(with wooden wheels)or simply walk. That computer is made from oil mostly as is nearly everything they wear, sit on, sit under(roof) and packages everything they eat.

                      So if we keep oil in the ground where it belongs, how do we cook? The main reason our society exists in its condition is because of electricity and hence, oil, since it takes one for the other.

                      It’s this sort of disconnect that fascinates me. What’s that mouse and keyboard they used to send that e made from?

                      Next time I’m building an offloading station for oil, I’ll e them and make sure they don’t need any for any reason. We sure wouldn’t want to force it on them.

                  • Ketamine is for dogs and cats. Stupid humans might learn better without it but it’s too late then so no need to torture them, they’ve obviously been tortured too much already.

                    I realized one day with a start why I can only communicate with people on this site and intelligence is part of it as well as education and knowledge of all sorts but most of it has to do with younger people not having much knowledge. I don’t say they’re not intelligent, they simply lead a life that’s devoid of the things I know and I suppose that vice versa thing comes in there too and they think I’m lacking knowledge. I guess I am since they speak of the hot topic of the day which always seems to be some celebrity barely out of their teens and I plead guilty to not keeping up with those people.

                    OTOH, unlike Paris Hilton, I do know what WalMart is.

  17. A lot of parents also don’t want their kid to drive on their insurance because of liability concerns, so they make the kid wait until at least 18 & force them to secure separate auto insurance.

    I let my kids drive @ age 16 on my insurance, but I added a $2 million umbrella liability policy, for a total of $4000/year (home+auto+umbrella) for 4 drivers (2 adult, 2 teenager), & 4 vehicles, the newest of which is almost 10 years old.

    • When I was a teen (back in the Dark Ages, i know) I faced the common dilemma – can’t get wheels w/o a job, can’t get a job w/o wheels. My dad would have let me use the “red VW microbus” sometimes – IF if paid the extra insurance premium. Still needed a non-existent job to afford that.
      Then my sister turned 16 and she had more initiative than I did. Heard from one of her friends that Farm Bureau insurance did not charge extra for teen drivers. You had to be a member, but my dad was eligible. So we only had to come up w/ the annual dues between the 2 of us. That was doable.
      Don’t know if they still do that or not. If you are in that situation, it would be worth checking on.

  18. Even the most appliance-like cars are not very appliance-like when it comes to the routine maintenance required to keep it running. Brakes, tires and timing belt replacement might be worth more than the car. Kids can’t afford it and neither can their parents.

  19. It’s not hate so much as indifference. For the kids cars have always been disposable appliances. EXPENSIVE disposable appliances. Heck I’m 36 and just now getting a drivers license because of money. On $12 an hour a $200 a month insurance payment like I have on my 2003 Murano is asking quite a lot, and I have no regular debt, am single, and bicycle 3.5 miles to work to avoid fuel costs, and have been doing this for fifteen years. One traffic ticket already had me worried about making all my bills.

    It really does boil down to a cost-benefit analysis.

  20. The first awakening for me to the fable of the state, of cops as good guys, as courts as being temples of justice, was those first three speeding tickets at age 16.

    I have wasted many years trying to fight the evil of that system because I was programmed with the ideal of it, the hope that if just one man with the stones to stand up and say NO to it could turn the tide of corruption. Hollywood shows us that that’s the way it works, right? And yet year after year I’ve seen the tranzis insist that my right to drive and carry a weapon, much less an effective one, is a privilege for which I must beg the state, because I’m “free”(tm)?

    Could it be that this will backfire with the current generation? That there is a God, or call it karma if you will, and the latest generation has come of age with the illusion of liberty and justice shattered? With the election of the communi**er, might the ripping of the coverings from their eyes be accelerated? With the proof in front of them that the old line demonized racists were in fact right and the “downtrodden” in fact just want to take over and run our society into the ground?

    One may hope that in fact they are simply exercising their right to drive without the BS, at least in an increasing number of cases? Why not, as the system is a joke and it will cost you less to be ticketed for driving without a “license” and insurance than the cost of those things. And how are they to identify you without them?

    Eventually the bad guys will lose. They always push too far, and are hanged on the crossbar of their own towering corruption, greed, and folly. Law can NOT be enforced without the willing acquiescence of a large majority, and already most resent it and resist in some way. So if the kids are opting out on paper, that is a great thing.

    • I think my awakening came when I was about 6 years old. Traveling with my parents and we are about to fall off a big hill, a long grade probably 1.5 long into a town. From the top we all see this semi-camod cop car sitting at the bottom where the road was straight but a steep grade. My mother cautions my dad and he responds he’s seen him already. So we proceed at the PSL and back in the early fifties radar worked by being pointed at the path and having a vehicle pass through it’s beam, not very sophisticated nor accurate. We go by this guy and he throws no his lights since there’s next to no traffic. My dad pulls over muttering words I’d heard before but didn’t quite understand.

      Cop comes up and say the usual, clocked you at x and you were speeding. Then my dad tells him in non uncertain terms he’s lying, he saw him over a mile away and definitely was not speeding and if he kept on he was going to stop in town and jack up whoever was in charge. End result was cop with tail between legs and my dad so mad I thought he was gonna bust. He cussed that cop for everything he was and said and did and the immoral lying coward he was.

      The next time he got stopped it was a repeat of the first. I don’t recall him getting a ticket till sometime in the 70’s and it was a trumped up thing with a state trooper getting right behind him with his brights on and following for miles. My dad did everything but stop to get rid of him so he finally gassed it and that’s when the red and blues came on. later mom told me she thought he was gonna end up in jail for the cussing he gave those troopers who well-deserved it. They were desperate to make someone a criminal and he didn’t take to it much.

      I got my first ticket for running a stop sign at 14 right after getting my license. I saw the troopers sitting there so I didn’t do anything illegal and the stop sign they quoted was on a street, not down the way near the parking lot I cut through. The lying continued and now it was my turn.

      I saw a trooper from a long distance and I was flying but shut it down to legal speed when going by. But he stopped me and lied and ticketed me. I got back in my car and laid rubber for a hundred yards and reached a speed he had no hope of attaining and watched his lights fade into the distance. I met one of his cohorts running toward me and he slammed on his brakes and was soon invisible behind me too. I ran all the way into Lubbock doing about 140 without further ado. I simply quit stopping for them after that and would be going so fast they couldn’t get a plate number. You may not can outrun a radio but you can outrun where they think you’ll be.

  21. Granted, it is an expensive, hassle and discrimination plagued process for young people to get a license, insurance, and then drive. Cars and driving are not as fun or interesting now. And social media provide alternative ways to stay in contact.

    But having a car and license are still Priceless. Without them, your mobility is limited to your feet, your bike, uber, or “public transportation.” A huge amount of self sufficiency, personal mobility, and FREEDOM is sacrificed.

    Hmmm…..this would play right into the hands of The Overlords.

    Wake up young people! Don’t make this terrible mistake.

    • Your argument strikes me more as supportive of f*cking the system than getting a license.
      Learn to drive, get a street-legal bike with a hand-made temporary “plate”, and try to look unimportant.
      Worst case, outrun, hide, paint the bike, rinse and repeat as needed.

      And only use the bike as needed, I’d point out. If they’re dedicated enough, they can track you down, but it’s going to be a LOT of work for very little return.
      (It also has to be a private sale, as I’ve had to provide proof of insurance before I could drive either bike or the car off the lot when I purchased from a “dealer”…)

      Or make it from parts, shipped to various friend’s addresses, maybe.

      (Suggest you watch the grade-B film “Rampage” for ideas – Well planned sequence, he thought of almost everything. “Almost” goes beyond the time frame of the film; he handled every eventuality in the plan except dying, and that would screw up any plan anyway.)

  22. The right to travel, predating this country by several thousand years, is officially gone…

    Eric, when we were teenagers, we also had jobs at 15+ that helped pay for the car that we bought so we’d have something to drive. Good luck getting a full-time job as a 16 year old in the summer…isn’t that illegal now?

    Even if a teenager wanted to jump through all of the hoops that are required in order to exercise their right, they couldn’t afford it, because they’ve lost the right to earn money to pay for gas/insurance/car, etc.

    • Agreed, Mike.

      I know – because I lived it.

      In the ’80s… as a teen, I worked at fast-food joints to afford my car and the gas. I had a full/adult license at 16. So I was able to function as an adult for years prior to being regarded as such by the law.

      Such a shame, what’s happened.

      • And don’t forget the (ever increasing) minimum wage. Even if teens are not told outright that they can’t work, it’s tough for most to find a ‘legal’ job of which they are capable. “Entry-level” jobs are supposed to be low paying, while the employee learns enough to be worth higher wages.
        “But,” the bleeding hearts protest, “what can you learn working at McDonalds?” It’s simple: 1 – show up on time, 2 – dress appropriately, 3 – do what your told. Any more questions?
        Also, the ‘child labor laws’ in this country were instigated by union members who wanted less competition.

        • PtB, walk into a fast food place now and the average worker in many of them is about 40. I recently read that the average minimum wage worker was 34. Thanks NAFTA, GATT and those no trade barrier laws that keep the US $15T into a trade deficit while losing 55,000 manufacturing businesses since the passing of NAFTA.

          I’ve pulled the stop buttons on big rigs a million times in my life. Last year the one in the KW I was driving started leaking so it was replaced with a new one from KW(funky looking thing, big buttons, cheap plastic). I pulled the red one for the trailer one day and the button broke in half when it popped out. After that it was pop the yellow one so both would engage and have to push the sharp steel end to release. Right on the box of the new one it said “Made in China”. Well, ,who’d ever guessed? It was a first for me. I had never seen a button break off……ever. And the valve was different too. Instead of popping out like all others, those valves popped so fast they’d hurt you so you had to make sure your fingers were only behind the button and not continue pulling past the point they’d pop or they’d sting hell out of your fingers.

          I considered making a device to pop them with to avoid having your fingers on them when they reached the end of their travel but I haven’t seen another set like that “yet”. New valve set on the Volvo was just like the old without the leak.

          Probably nobody but me cares but if Volvo wouldn’t be such a nanny about everything, they’d be the truck to have. Instead of having a gauge for many things a good operator wants, they have the minimum required by law and idiot lights on the dash in universal code you have to translate. Here’s an example of internationalism. In most rigs, the mirror heater switch says Mirror Heater, sometimes a Left and Right but Volvo has a switch just like the rest of their switches that simply has some curvy lines. That way, nobody in any country can figure out WTF it does without asking since they never seem to have a book.

    • The jobs teenagers should have are increasingly held by adults today. Why? The economy has been wrecked so adults take the jobs they can find and they can out-compete teenagers. But the teenager would be cheaper one says. Not anymore. As the minimum wage is pushed upwards the only thing a teenager could compete on, price, is gone. Adult or teenager the price to the employer is the same. The adult usually will win unless he’s a complete loser.

  23. For young adults (Millenials), they’re opting out of cars because of the expense. They’ve got tens of thousands of college debt to pay for, and a $500 car payment plus insurance plus gas means they can’t swing it. Those that can are either living at home with mom + dad (free rent), or were lucky/smart enough to graduate with a STEM degree.

    They also had their financial formative years happen during the 2008 time-period, when the stock market took a 40% dump. They saw what happened to their parents and/or their friend’s parents, and they’re unwilling to go into debt that is controlled by someone else.

    • There was a time when a college degree was (usually) worth the financial investment, in terms of better earnings with it in hand. Now, not so much.
      First, the cost of college has been increasing much more rapidly than inflation, due at least in part to the gunvermin guaranteed loan program.
      2nd, between the various levels of gunvermin and the quasi-gunvermin Federal Reserve, the economy has been screwed up to the point that there are few jobs available, and many of those that are available involve saying “You want fries with that?”
      Me, I started college in 1968, paying about $1k/semester for tuition + room & board at a private college. And bought my first car (10 yr. old) in 1970 for $150 (including replacing the battery and muffler for $25 ea.). Gnomesayin?

      • I spent 3-1/2 years in college (did some summer school to get out early), graduating in 1991. Tuition was about $7800 in total (mom + dad paid board, and I worked for pizza money). That would only pay for one semester at the same school today.

        The current per-semester fees are on top of tuition: $35 for environmental safety. $35 library fee. $25 post office fee (who uses regular mail any more?) $135 health & counselling fee (which isn’t your health insurance). Then there’s lab fees, expensive textbooks that you can’t resell. And on and on.

        I agree that easy federal money meant that college administration had unchecked growth. “If you’re buying, I’ll take two!”

        • I bet that ‘Health & Counseling’ fee includes your ‘free’ condoms. Plus the advice to “practice safe sex.”

      • PtB, same year for me. I bought my first car, a year old for $2200 but I was working road construction and they paid me something like $3.75/hr. rain or shine and from almost daylight to darkthirty. Big money then. My first paycheck you could see the stunned look on my dad’s face. Then again, they got it all out of me too. There were no easy jobs. I spent the first two months mainly humping pieces of broken concrete into a dump truck or mostly running in front of a grader giving him bluetop depths and driving 1″ steel rods with a sledgehammer into the road on each side ever 100 feet to run the strings on a machine that ground and moldboarded the entire roadway. Running in front of a grader and driving steel with a sledgehammer. Now that would be good for the fatties these days. When I got to college it was easy to see who’d been out in the sun all day busting ass and who hadn’t. There were a lot of those that had been back then at TTU. Lots of those who hadn’t too but for the most, the guys were lean and mean or at least lean and ready to work. My roommates friends thought I was a jock. They’d say So, you lift weights? Yep, a sledgehammer, a shovel, and thousands of bales of hay, building fence and working cattle. Guys from my part of the world went to boot camp and it was a vacation. And the girls hoed cotton and drove open tractors(the only kind then)and were strong and healthy and good-looking. We partied on the back roads, in barns and in the pasture and hardly anybody smoked. I truly feel sorry for people who didn’t grow up in the country. We didn’t even have to worry about food. Everybody had big gardens and put up food for the winter along with the hogs and cattle.

        The only protection we had against anything was our parents saying “Yall be careful with (whatever it was we were doing) that axe Eugene.”

        I know clover wouldn’t agree but that type of life was a blessing.

      • When I started college in 1965 tuition was only $600 a semester, which might have been a fair amount of money back then but nothing like today’s outrageous amounts. My parents paid the first year and after that I landed a job as a janitor on the night shift, which wasn’t a bad gig; if I hustled and got the required amount of floor swept, toilets cleaned, etc. there was time to do schoolwork or catch some z’s. My first car was a hand-me-down from the parents, a 57 Ford wagon, hardly sexy but usefull, and I just had to pay the added insurance. Upon graduation I managed to get a decent job with the local electric company and was able to buy my own car, a 62 Olds Cutlass, now I had sexy but what a pos that car turned out to be!
        Years later after helping my son and daughter pay for college neither one has a car (both in their 30’s) as the hassle is not worth it to them. My daughter (when she did have a car briefly) had it booted more than once for parking infractions – another grabberment scam – so she just gave up.
        Bottom line I think the elitists that own the USSA don’t want us mundanes cluttering up the roadways and impeding their limousine travel.

        • My favorite story along these liens was from Catholic University.
          There was an engineering student who refused to pay parking tickets.
          Well, one day they found his car, and booted it.

          Don’t know how long it was there, but apparrently some time later he walked into Public Safety, handed them the boot, and said, “You wipe out all my tickets, or I tell everyone how to do this.”

          They removed the tickets…. 🙂

    • You sir hit it. Although I own a truck I bought for $2700 back in 2009 (1986 k5 blazer), I have no plans on getting another vehicle anytime soon. Graduated college in 2010, but I am a lucky one with no debt and good savings, though I do live at my parent’s home. Honestly, I don’t really want to get a house either until I see some more property market crash so I can buy for cheap. Real estate has not hit anywhere near bottom yet so far as I can tell.

      • Home prices in Austin are going up and up. Not a bubble – this is pure supply + demand, with lots of them being sold for cash. It’s not uncommon to see asking prices over $1 million these days.

        I drove by a neighborhood with the typical “Homes from the $xxx’s” on it over the weekend. It’s adjacent to a quarry, so lots of heavy trucks and explosions nearby, and the sign used to say “From the 170’s”. Now it says “From the 300’s”

        • Should be nice when I go by, esp. in that country, with my jake Brake on. Of course they’ll put up No Engine Brake signs everywhere but how often will there be a cop to hear it? I know another pit like that near Abilene with the requisite signs. Lots of truckers never even see them. And those are expensive homes. Nothing I’d like better than to get to the through road to go somewhere and it’s solid sand cans. Bllaaaaahhhhhhh, country living at its finest.

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