Sir Your Certified Pre Owned Bugatti Veyron Is Here

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.

I Woke Up In A Certified Pre-Owned Bugatti

If you’re like me, you can’t afford a new Bugatti. Hey, some of us have regular jobs and didn’t do something insanely lucrative like invent canned soup. But let’s say that owning a new Bugatti is just barely out of reach for you and not akin to becoming an astronaut. What do you do? Drop some serious cash on something that may have been totaled while the driver was allegedly distracted by a low-flying pelican? Absolutely not, Bugatti is here to help by launching a certified pre-owned program, even if the first paragraph of the press release is a little bit puzzling. While this statement largely succeeds in making people hungry, Bugatti’s using the “round badge” definition of macaron. Wait a second, didn’t Bugatti just kill its round badge? Anyway, Bugatti’s CPO program includes a one-year (lol) limited warranty and that’s about it other than prestige. Hey, maybe buying a flood-title Veyron isn’t such a bad idea after all.

No One Out Three-Wheels The Hut

I’m at the Pizza Hut. I’m in the three-wheeler. I’m in the combination Pizza Hut and three-wheeler. Yes, if you live in certain parts of California, your next pie might come in an Electrameccanica Solo three-wheeler. Electrameccanica has partnered with American West Restaurant Group, the biggest Pizza Hut franchisee in California, to fit these tiny little EVs with special pie-slinging gear. While the three-wheeled Solo makes a puzzling commuter car, it almost seems born for pizza delivery. It can squeeze in tight gaps, park on a postage stamp, and doesn’t cost nearly as much as say, a Kia Rio. To prep the little things for your next office party, ElectraMeccanica replaced the standard car’s Smart Roadster Coupe-like hatch with a dedicated pizza holster. While only 14 of these nifty little delivery vehicles will be in service to start, here’s hoping that three-wheeled pizza delivery catches on. Who wouldn’t want their pizza delivered in a weird and joyous little car? [Ed note: This is not the Deliverator we were promised! – MH]

Boeing Settles With SEC Over 737 MAX Claims

Reuters reports that Boeing will pay $200 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission claims of misleading representation of the 737 MAX’s safety. It turns out that Boeing’s claim that the 737 MAX “as safe as any that has ever flown the skies” simply wasn’t true. Shocking, I know. You’re probably thinking “gee, $200 million sounds like a slap on the wrist considering 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people,” and you’d be half-right. While $200 million doesn’t seem like a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, it comes on top of a $243.6 million criminal fine, $1.7 billion in restitution to airlines, and a $500 million victim fund. Looking at this breakdown, the victim fund should’ve been bigger, given how $500 million divided by 346 only works out to about $1.44 million per victim. You can do a lot of things with $1.44 million, but money can’t bring a family member back to life. “In times of crisis and tragedy, it is especially important that public companies and executives provide full, fair, and truthful disclosures to the markets,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a statement. He added that Boeing and Muilenburg “failed in this most basic obligation.” The SEC said Boeing and Muilenburg did not admit or deny the SEC’s findings. The regulatory agency said a fund will be established for the benefit of harmed investors.

Toyota Finally Gives Up Hope On Russian Production

Some automakers take quite a while to change course. Case in point, Reuters reports that Toyota has finally given up hope on restarting Russian production. The automaker suspended production in St Petersburg in March due to supply chain disruptions and stopped vehicle imports into Russia. The factory, which has a capacity of 100,000 units a year and produced the Camry and RAV4 models, will be preserved and may be sold in the future, Kommersant’s sources said. Toyota has not decided to quit the Russian market completely but sees no prospect of resuming car production there, the sources said. It’s surprising to hear that Toyota held out hope for resuming Russian new car production in the face of sanctions against Russia, particularly since the company has a reputation for lean, flexible manufacturing, and since competitors like Renault threw in the towel fairly early on in the war with Ukraine. Perhaps just-in-time delivery and plant redundancies eased some of Toyota’s short-term pain. Regardless, the people of Russia need new cars, but they likely won’t be made by Toyota for quite some time.

The Flush

Whelp, time to drop the lid on today’s edition of The Morning Dump. Happy Friday, everyone! The weekend is very nearly here. Today’s question is one about music. If your car had a theme song, what would it be? For my 325i, I’m going with Dropkick the Punks by The Faint. What can I say, infectious fuzz pairs beautifully with the induction noise of a partially-uncorked inline-six. Lead photo credit: Bugatti https://youtu.be/uKcAMo4rcWk The Beige Unicorn? “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce https://youtu.be/O_BEFyNNIvM … wow. Just… wow. Contrast with Porsche CPO which can be applied to literally any Porsche up to 6 years old (8 years for select models) based on a very specific, actual inspection and repair program. If the car is under new vehicle warranty, add 2 years and unlimited miles from the date it runs out. If the new vehicle warranty has expired, you have 2 years and unlimited miles. That’s it. Anything breaks? You take it to the Porsche dealer, they fix it as a warranty repair. Logged 110k miles in 18 months with your CPO? Unlimited miles is unlimited miles. Warranty is warranty. While the three-wheeled Solo makes a puzzling commuter car, it almost seems born for pizza delivery. It can squeeze in tight gaps, park on a postage stamp, and doesn’t cost nearly as much as say, a Kia Rio. And that’s very much the sort of thing these make sense for. Local food delivery and the like. Very light duty short haul. Unfortunately, that’s really the only thing that they make sense for. Which means the market is extremely limited. Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, etc are franchises. So while a large franchisee might buy 14-30 of them, that’s very far from nationwide adoption. Especially when it didn’t originate from corporate. It’s unlikely smaller franchisees would even be able to purchase these from the manufacturer (something like this always has a minimum order commitment or an incredibly high price tag.) So I doubt we’ll see any outside of this one small area. “Reuters reports that Boeing will pay $200 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission claims of misleading representation of the 737 MAX’s safety. The SEC also said former Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg had agreed to pay $1 million. That $200M they’re paying will be more or less coming out of the pockets of the shareholders, of course. All decisions must be in the interests of the almighty shareholders unless you can make them pay for your criminal actions. Boeing’s revenue for 2021 was $62.29B, by the way. Which makes this fine not even a rounding error in their spreadsheets. Dennis will be paying his fine from the petty cash of course. Upon resigning, Boeing paid him over $62.2M in stock and pension in addition to the more than $100M in cash and stock he was paid during his tenure as CEO and chairman of the board. And this is exactly why companies laugh their asses off at any fines by the SEC or FTC or CPFB. They already built it in as the cost of doing business. Literally the only reason they give the least shit about killing people is the optics of it. If the 737 MAX had instead simply randomly killed 2 passengers per flight, there wouldn’t have been any action by the SEC or regulators, and the cost of settling with dead passenger families using automated form letters would have been built into the margins. Oh, and let’s not forget – the whole reason they got to build and sell an aircraft that was known to be fundamentally unsafe was because of collusion with the FAA. The very agency that’s supposed to prevent such things. The automaker suspended production in St Petersburg in March due to supply chain disruptions and stopped vehicle imports into Russia. Which is exactly why Toyota can fuck off along with their vatnik buddies. They’ve been trying like hell to dodge and work around sanctions and prop up Putin’s regime since the start. Which tells you everything you need to know about their ethics, or more accurately, total lack thereof. Today’s question is one about music. If your car had a theme song, what would it be? … fucking spam filters will eat me if I link all of them. Sigh. Anyhow. ’86 Dodge Daytona – AdhesiveWombat, Space Raptors (available on Soundcloud) ’95 Acura Integra GS-R – Psyqui feat. Such, ヒカリの方へ ’01 Saab 9-3 Viggen – Knife Party, Superstar ’12 Carrera 4 GTS – Wolfgang Gartner feat. k?d, Banshee ’08 Stormcaller – The Presets, You Belong A fellow college graduate I know had skills as an embedded system designer. In college, he built a self-balancing unicycle from scratch and did all of the programming himself. He still uses it to this day as transportation, in fact(he can’t afford a car, more on that below). Companies were supposedly unable to find people with his skillset to do the work. Applying to jobs was something he did multiple times a day fresh out of school during the start of the great recession, but he was never contacted. Eventually, he ended up homeless after college and his student loan went into default. From there, the interest and fees piled on. For a period, he was working TWO menial jobs and because of wage garnishment, was still priced out of a cheap apartment, so continued living on the street. Fast forward some years later. He already paid more on his student loan than he ever took out from garnishments, but it kept increasing in balance. Boeing advertised the jobs for designing the 737Max onboard systems, and he applied. He was totally ignored. Boeing instead claimed to the government they couldn’t find anyone with the skillset in the U.S. They got approval to bring in some VISA applicants from India and then paid them only $9 per hour to do the work that should have been well over $100 per hour. The new hires hadn’t the slightest clue how to do it right, and didn’t complain about the wages lest they get sent back to their home country. And their design ended up killing hundreds of people. Someone who might have been able to do a much better job was ignored during that period and went homeless for lack of income. Just one of many ways younger generations are being screwed in all directions. Talking heads in the media wonder why millennials and gen Z aren’t buying new cars. The uncomfortable truth is that more than 80% are completely priced out of even the cheapest models. This whole country is going to go down as a result. Its leadership ate this country’s seed corn and the consequences are coming to bear next harvest as a result. My experience as a scientist ranging from B.S. to Ph.D. in the American STEM labor market was similar to that of your friend’s. I’ve been hearing cries of “labor shortage!!!!” for DECADES from all around yet my actual experiences have reflected a long term STEM labor glut. It’s been that way since at least the late 80’s/early 90s. The universities push the myth as that brings in scholarships, tuition, grants and a flood of cheap, highly exploitable labor in the form of students, technicians and post docs. Industry pushes the myth to make sure they get multiple, highly skilled and experienced applicants at all times and a glut obviously keeps wages down . There is NO downside for them to perpetuate the myth. I’d have thought the rise of the internet would have exposed the myth long ago and to some extent maybe it has but TPTB have a loud megaphone whereas busting only happens in whispers. The mythos is strong too, especially among the non STEM folks who only hear the megaphone, not the whispers and the boomers who still believe it’s the 1950s. Of course this is a generalization. There are a few labor hot spots here and there but the hot spots do not make up for the overall STEM glut. Neither do the wild success stories of those with ivy league educations and recommendations from Nobel laureates represent the reception by industry of those those with only state level educations and recommendations from mid level managers and professors.
IMO when companies are forced to actually pay corner office C-level compensation packages (with parachute) to un/underqualified but trainable people across a broad range of STEM positions THEN they can bitch about a shortage. Till then their hyperbole is all bullshit. I’m routinely approached by companies because they catch wind that I’m one of the very, very few embedded C people with a vanishingly rare confluence of skills – C, RTOS, complex architecture, and automotive with experience in engine management systems. Know how many actually competent programmers there are in that field? I’m just gonna point you to your car’s atrocious infotainment. And Toyota’s lies about unintended acceleration. (No bugs in their code my ass. I’ve found operational bugs in their fucking engine code just driving.) Because boy oh fucking boy do manufacturers love the mythical man month. Occasionally, I will simply reply back to them with: “While I’m not actively looking, this does sound like an interesting position. One I’d definitely be open to talking about. However, before we begin, my minimum salary for this role would need to be equivalent to what I charge direct clients currently, which is $250 per hour.” The few that have replied have acted incredibly offended at the ask and insisted that $75k to $95k per year is “really high wages” and “extremely competitive” because they have a 401k match sometimes (not a pension, of course.) I usually shoot back that I am not interested in changing from being an SRE/DevOps person for a 50% pay cut. And I have never had a single client complain about my base rate being $250 per hour for engine management systems. Because one of the first things I educate them about is that there is literally no way for any one person to even fully comprehend what might happen in 2.5+ million lines of code, and even more impossible for a team of 100+ people working individually on that to have any hope of not introducing bugs. And the risks only skyrocket the second you introduce bullshit like “our car runs on Linux.” (Great! Terrible code, even worse design, unpredictable behaviors, and security defects in one convenient package!) And go back to the first paragraph. Those are the idiots writing the underlying code operating increasingly heavy guided missiles that have entirely too much acceleration. People who literally insist that 0 and NULL are equivalent; people who are “so super smart” that Google had to invent a programming language for literal idiots to make them useful; entire cults of morons who insist that C is bad because they’re too lazy to write good code and too fucking stupid to understand how the underlying hardware works; an entire fucking generation of people who can’t even be trusted to write a shell script without multiple uninitialized variables that do shit like “rm -rf /$UNINITIALIZED_VARIABLE”; and documentation is for losers, just read their uncommented shitcode. Because they’ve all been told that anybody over the age of 25 can’t possibly know anything at all about computers, and they’re super-special geniuses who can do no wrong. And offshore is even worse. If you can fog a mirror and copy from 10 year old code written for another project, you’re hired, until you expect more than a few pennies an hour, then you’re fired. There’s no ‘might’ about it. Frankly, the Shakespearian Simians(TM) could have done a better fucking job. And of course the FAA was conveniently bribed into saying that they were too stupid to evaluate the safety of aircraft, and only Amit and Bob the CPA, neither of which have ever even been in an airplane, were qualified to do that. There’s races to the bottom, and then there’s pointing your Saturn V at the ground after loading it with nitroglycerine and other high explosives. But Boeing and it’s executives don’t give a flying fuck, nor do any of them. Why should they? They’re too big too fail. So if they have a little oopsie that kills thousands of people, they’ll just cry some alligator tears in front of congress and get another multi-billion dollar bailout. Which they’ll use as justification to lay off anybody that costs more than $3.20 an hour. Although I currently have a decent job at an engineering firm, if I had to do it over again knowing what I know now, I likely would have dropped out of high school and sold crack. It would have allowed me to get an electric vehicle conversion I started designing in high school operable in time to where I’d have had a decent shot at working for Tesla or some other EV startup(That GT6 in my profile is that car, and I lost many opportunities because I didn’t have it running when it would have mattered due to lack of money to pursue it). Designing components for/working with for EVs is what I went into electrical engineering for! I ended up having to settle for a boring job designing circuits for a utility, due to needing to pay student loans, and couldn’t chase my dream job. I lived in a barrio, rode bicycles for local travel, and drove clunker cars I’d fix up for longer trips, in order to pay them off. For about a year and a half, I was out of work in my field with 9 years of relevant experience and washing dishes at a restaurant for minimum wage. Most of the people I worked with at that restaurant ALSO were college educated, some of them ALSO with STEM degrees and years of relevant experience. It took thousands of applications and a year of searching to get THAT crappy minimum wage job when unemployment was supposedly under 4%, and then thousands more applications and another year and a half to get my current job at an engineering firm. 800+ credit score and no criminal record of any kind. “Now Hiring!” signs everywhere, where I’d apply, then hear nothing back, call, be told the job wasn’t available anymore, and the “Now Hiring!” signs would stay up. Meanwhile, I was “lazy” for being out of work, in spite of constantly searching. Something is not adding up with regard to the government’s official statistics on both unemployment and inflation. I can guarantee you I’m probably the only person ever who commuted to a crappy dishwasher job in a scratch-built vehicle that gets the equivalent of 4,000 miles per gallon. What does that say about a “free market” which has no use for my capabilities when we’re simultaneously staring at the consequences of more than a century of wasteful fossil fuel usage: rapidly depleting finite oil reserves, wars for said oil reserves, and incipient global ecological collapse? Most people my age are doing far worse than I am, unfortunately(and by 1960s standards, I’m not much better off than a burger flipper or janitor from back then, even though what I make today is considered very good money). The present is already bleak, but the future staring at us is a creature even worse. We have the likes of Boeing to thank for that. It’s looking more and more each day as if Ted Kaczynski was right about the fate of industrial civilization. I don’t know whether to laugh, or cry. At least now I have the financial means to build or complete vehicle prototypes I designed many years ago. One idea in the pipeline is a mostly-analogue high-performance electric car. No computers more complicated or fancy than a Motorola 68000, no power-anything, everything repairable with a soldering iron and basic hand tools, and batteries that will last decades(CALB LiFePO4s are awesome for this, but there are others). Thinking of using a Mercedes 240D as a base for this prototype, with a VW Beetle pan as a possible alternative, depending upon how many seats I want this car to have. Companies were supposedly unable to find people with his skillset to do the work. Applying to jobs was something he did multiple times a day out of school during the start of the great recession, but he was never contacted. Eventually, he ended up homeless after college and his student loan went into default. From there, the interest and fees piled on. For a period, he was working TWO menial jobs and because of wage garnishment, was still priced out of a cheap apartment, so continued living on the street. Fast forward some years later. He already paid more on his student loan than he ever took out from garnishments, but it kept increasing in balance. Boeing advertised the jobs for designing the 737Max onboard systems, and he applied. He was totally ignored. Boeing instead claimed to the government they couldn’t find anyone with the skillset in the U.S. They got aproval to bring in some VISA applicants from India and then paid them only $9/hr to do the work that should have been well over $100/hr. The new hires hadn’t the slightest clue how to do it right, and didn’t complain about the wages lest they get sent back to their home country. And their design ended up killing hundreds of people. Someone who might have been able to do a much better job was ignored during that period and went homeless for lack of income. Just one of many ways younger generations are being screwed in all directions. This whole country is going to go down as a result. It ate its seed corn and the consequences are coming to bear as a result. My last car was easier – 2007 Saturn Ion named “Faith” after the protagonist of Mirror’s Edge, theme tune was “Still Alive” (the Mirror’s Edge theme, not the Portal credits song). It had a 6 disc changer and I made a mix CD for when I picked up the car with that as the first track. That disc stayed in that slot for the entirety of my ownership of the car. “What about the Tweel?” And now I learned that anything in less-than/greater-than symbols is excised from the comments here. Holdover from the days when one would use that as visual commentary rather than imbedded code. 🙂 Well, it’s a Volvo, so something by Abba would be an obvious answer, but doesn’t seem right since it is a 2016. Needs something more techno. I’ll go with Swedish House Mafia’s “Save the World” since that goes along with Volvo’s safety reputation. Plus the video has a pack of hero doggies taking out bad guys!!! Seriously, it’s hilarious, watch it… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXpdmKELE1k As for theme songs, depends on the car. I always thought about names. Here my first pass. Z28 – Ridiculous by Redfood. As that is what that is what is it. Fun, party vibe, puts a smile on my face. DTS – Lawyers, Guns, and Money by Warren Zevon. It fits the mob and lawyer car vibe. Crosstrek – Liberty Bell March aka Monty Python Theme. Dunno why, just popped in there. ‘68 GTO: toss up between “Umbrella” by the Hollies (for the 60’s feel of course) & “Cars ‘n’ Girls” by the Dictators (no explanation needed?) ‘74 911 Targa: “Hold on Tight” by ELO. I always imagine that just as I have my foot in it in second and he sings “tiiiii-iiiight…”, the top magically flies off and into traffic… ‘93 NSX: “Full Circle (feat. Boxed In) by George Fitzgerald. Hypnotic night driving jam which drops just as the pop-ups pop up. My other hooning machine, a custom built electric velomobile/microcar, has “Progenies of the Great Apocalypse” by Dimmu Borgir for its theme song. This is going to be a post-apocalyptic and Satanic-themed vehicle with a paintjob to match, as well as being perfectly functional in a resource/energy-scarce environment. It’s getting a rust paintjob with a big red anarchy sign on the side, Baphomet hood ornament, pentagram wheel disc covers, fallout shelter sign as a rear derailleur cover, red/orange/yellow/blue LEDs inside the wheels to make it look like it’s on fire while going down the street at night(and to make it more visible for night riding), among other aesthetic modifications. But it will also be able to be fueled by solar panels, grid electricity, generator electricity, and even human power, any of them by their lonesome, or any combination thereof. Both vehicles are meant to be practical in the context of not just getting around from point A to point B, but doing so inexpensively and reliably while the throttle is being abused(overall operating efficiency was a major consideration which will allow for this). There’s no reason that a practical and efficient machine can’t also excel at hooning, and both vehicles are built with that philosophy in mind.