Come and get it!
Its here, but I bet you miss it and of course CNN doesn't make mention of it.
It’s important to note that no one, including AAA, recommends not getting these features because of repair costs. Systems like automatic emergency braking, blind spot monitoring, and rear cross-traffic alerts can reduce your chances of getting in a crash in the first place. That’s one reason automatic emergency braking is now nearly universal on new cars and, in a few years, will be required in the United States.
Besides avoiding the need for repairs by reducing crashes, they also help prevent injury to vehicle occupants and pedestrians which is, after all, far more important than a dented fender.
Some of these systems can cut crash rates in half, said Greg Brannon, director of automotive engineering at AAA.
That last line is obviously a lie.
Were it not a lie then collision insurance, which pays when you are in a wreck to fix your car, would be going down in price, specifically for those vehicles with such features since it would reduce the crash rate "by half."
Instead the price of car insurance is skyrocketing.
These "features" are in fact worthless.
But the facts of insurance are simple. Insurance companies are state-regulated and can only make a 10% profit. If they make more the state will force them to reduce premiums. Therefore there are only two ways for an insurance company to grow its profit in dollar terms across a given customer base: Either have more claims or more expensive claims.
Its not rocket science folks. Tarted up vehicles full of these sensors, never mind $2,000 headlight assemblies instead of $200 ones that takes ordinary bulbs wildly increase collision repair costs. If they actually reduced claims by the claimed dramatic amount then the total cost would go down to the insurance company and your premiums would go down too because state law forces that to happen when claim costs decrease.
These people are lying and of course CNN laps it up and feeds you to it on a spoon.
Oh, and incidentally, the same thing applies to health "insurance" as well. Health insurance companies, for example, have been caught issuing bribes to pediatricians for children that are "vaccinated according to schedule", for example, and this extended to the Covid shots as well during the pandemic. That is, rather than offer professional advice based upon what a physician believes is best for a given person instead they're bribed to do what an insurance company wants and, I remind you, the only way for an insurance company to make more money IS TO HAVE EITHER MORE CLAIMS OR MORE EXPENSIVE CLAIMS so spare me any LIES about how this scheme was "best for the person"; it must-certainly WAS AND IS NOT.
Insurance is a necessary evil but it is a felonious business as soon as the "insurance" firm is allowed, in any way, to influence the underlying thing being insured whatever it may be because such a firm always has as the only way to grow its business to either increase the number of claims or the cost of claims.
Always.
You won't like this opinion -- I guarantee it.
Nonetheless its true.
Why did the King, in days of old, get out in front of his troops on his horse, with his superior barding and the best of swords? Why didn't he go hide in his castle while his army prosecuted the war?
He didn't do that out of valor.
He did it because he knew that if his army lost the other side would come to his rather-obvious place (its not like you can hide a castle!), kill him and every other person in his family line except perhaps the women and girls who would be raped and forced to bear the children of those who vanquished him.
He thus had every reason to do everything he could to prevent that, and if he was going to lose he might as well lose big right up front because the outcome for everyone else was not in doubt.
This also meant he didn't go to war in the first place unless he really had to because while you might have numerical and tactical superiority things go wrong in a war as soon as the first shot, sword or arrow is loosed. Your intelligence gathering can be wrong, you can be flanked, the other side may have allies you don't know about or just plain old-fashioned bad luck, such as weather, can screw you and there's nothing you can do about any of that.
You want less war?
Then advocate for and accept that everyone on either side, especially any politician but also including all civilians are always and everywhere legitimate targets of the other side. Fuck the laws of war and fuck anyone who says otherwise.
There has never been a war where civilians are not absolutely responsible for the waging of said war. Even in times of old the horse had to be fed as did the soldier, the armor, arrows and swords had to be made, the ore or trees had to be dug, harvested, forged and worked, the tents and mess kit had to be created, maintained and tended and so on.
Every bullet, missile, bomb, tank, airplane, drone, communications device and similar in a modern military action was created and assembled by civilians either in whole or part. Exactly zero tanks, planes or ships move a single millimeter without fuel, lubricants and parts and all of that is created by civilian infrastructure.
Every single one of those firms in the modern world is funded and operates as a result of the capital markets so each and every banker, every single institution of such and similar are all personally liable and responsible for each and every single act of war in every single case.
Every single person on both sides and any entity or nation that supplies them, every institution and especially every politician and all of their family members and property are all legitimate military targets when a conflict is underway in each and every case.
Would Biden and Congress commit funds and equipment to Ukraine if it was clearly understood that the Russians would consider every one of them, and their children and spouses along with their property to be legitimate military targets and if spies or other infiltrators could get into the United States they would be targeted and destroyed?
Would we have had an open border with Mexico for the last three years if this was the consequence of our involvement?
Would any of this have happened in the first place if back in 2014 McCain's entire family was slaughtered like pigs and all their homes and property burnt to ash for his advocacy ON THE GROUND at Maidan by members of the losing side who infiltrated (or worse, were already present) in the United States?
Is there anything wrong with Russia finding a way to get people into the United States and burning Zelenskyy's property here in the US? No. He is the chief belligerent in that conflict just like Putin is so yes, if the other side can do the same thing to Putin, well, that's the price of war.
You want less war then you want much more of this.
Today not one single member of the House, not one single member of the Executive, not one single executive in the Defense Industry or banking system fears being tied up, forced to watch their spouse and children be raped and/or murdered and then executed themselves with all their property burnt to ash.
Yet that was the penalty in days of old when you lost -- and often before you lost, if things went poorly and they could get to you.
The acts and decisions of old weren't really about "noble choices"; that is a convenient fantasy run in tales of old.
Knights and Kings of old in fact did what they did simply because they understood the risk and thus only if it was worth it did you undertake the action of going to war in the first place. Sometimes you had to -- you judged that indeed it was worth it -- and thus you did so, damn the consequences.
War is as old as humankind and that will never change.
But what we can change is to force skin back into the game for those who actually are responsible for the capacity and actual waging of war by advocating for and fully understanding that if you commit to war that is the potential price for each and every person in the society involved and if that's not acceptable then you stop the government from waging said war no matter the personal cost since every single person can only die once, you will die anyway if you refuse to act and thus you might as well die for a just cause rather than an unjust one.
There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
You can look at this however you'd like but there is an underlying and very-seriously negative problem in here that nobody wants to acknowledge: If we do not address not only the rate but the balance of who's having kids and what they're inculcating in those kids we're screwed, and we do not have years or decades to do it either.
Simply put only the productive children -- that is, those who grow up and then produce more than they consume can keep a society going. Some percentage of children are never going to be productive and for those who are unproductive simply due to bad luck its not their fault nor that of their parents -- fortune just is that way, and a just society doesn't treat them like a deformed puppy and cull them.
But you cannot make up for the lack of said productive children in your society by throwing open the borders and inviting "everyone" in. Those who come here with their first act as a criminal one are demonstrably unfit right up front to fit into a social order that has "law-abiding" as any part of its requirement. Oh sure, some will change their minds but their general mental position, which is "screw the law, I want mine" is not one you can permit on a mass-basis if you want to have a society at all.
There's an "interview" going around of a Biden advisor tying himself in knots verbally trying to explain the entire premise of government finance. He makes the often-repeated claim that the government cannot go bankrupt because it can "print money."
Nobody can print money. Not the government, not industry, not banks, not The Fed nor you. NOT EVEN GOD can print money because money is the outcome of productive activity by humans.
But anyone can emit credit. The only requirement to do that is the capacity to find someone else who believes you will produce something of value later worth at least as much as what is lent. That's it. You do it when you take a mortgage to buy a house or take out a loan to buy a car. I do it when I take my Discover card out of my wallet to buy gasoline. In days of old many taverns allowed you to do it for a drink, writing your name down and how many drinks you'd consumed. They did that because they believed you would come settle the tab come payday, which you got in exchange for performing actual work of value for someone.
Today this is almost-all abstracted through a third party of some sort but the bottom line hasn't changed. The same thing is true at a local, state or national level but of course the Federal Government (and State governments) are "more believed" than you as an individual because the Federal Government can tax you and nearly everyone pays those taxes without having to having to be threatened with being jailed or shot first. That is in virtually every case you file and pay your taxes and for most they're withheld automatically so its actually somewhat of a pain in the ass not to pay. This is the premise on which the government can issue bonds and thus borrow.
The abstraction layer, with you whipping out a credit card or the government issuing bonds, makes it all appear to be some sort of magic. It is not. The clowns running the "MMT" scam are lying and they know it, as I demonstrated on Lauren Lister's show quite-adequately in a two-up debate on air over a decade back, and for anyone who wants to take me on in this regard -- I'm up for a rematch anywhere, anytime, in any forum. The truth is no different than the tavern 100 years ago. You can print the credit for that drink because the owner of the bar believes you'll pay, and while he knows a few people won't because they can't the loss is small enough that he can absorb the occasional deadbeat and remain in business, and by allowing you to emit that credit you spend more than if you would have had to save it first.
In short money and credit both spend the same but they are not the same and governments can never create money because government is, by definition, a consumer of resources to provide common goods and services. Government does not produce; it provides necessary functions (e.g. collective security, otherwise known as a "military") by distributing the production of individuals.
As you shift the percentage of people who will earn the money (by performing a useful task for someone at less renumeration than its value, which is of course necessary because otherwise they'd be stupid to hire you) toward those who do not and will not the percentage of losses goes up. But this is not instantly apparent -- well, not unless you look, and in fact we do look and its reported all the time.
The national debt exists because there are more freeloaders in greater size than there are producers who provide more value than they extract. As with all exponential functions this looks like a free lunch when you start but if you don't cut it out the end is always disaster as the system in question collapses. That this will occur if you keep at it is mathematical fact and mathematics are never false nor can they be voted upon or changed by political whim.
To fix this you have to change the incentives.
You have to cut off the freeloaders -- all who do not produce more than they consume -- and, those who are not citizens must be forced to leave -- right here, right now.
You have to incentivize citizens to form stable, bonded heterosexual pairs that, with only one of them working and the other raising children can do so with an economic surplus and demonstrate that such a surplus is possible to obtain in such a system so their children see that from their first moment of sentience forward. No, not everyone will succeed, but a critical fraction must succeed because you must inculcate that in the next generation or you get the degenerate behavior we have now. This in turn means that the cost of assets to do so must have their speculative premium reduced or entirely eliminated and thus collapse in price. Yes, this means houses and other living units for openers.
If you demonstrate to children that you can blow up a two-parent home with kids and fuck up everyone's life for your own adult perversions, whatever they might be, why would those children go down that road when they don't believe it will work out? Yes, some people do willingly smash their finger with a hammer, but a logical person calls such an individual mentally incompetent because they are!
In addition we had better roll back all of the things we've changed in terms of what go into children that have produced a fifteen percent educational disability rate. That is either real and we did it and had better stop it right now under penalty of death for those who have and are doing it or its false and we're screwing both the kids and the parents -- and in the latter setting the example that your odds of being bankrupted by having a child are roughly one in seven! Any middle-class couple would be nuts to produce kids with that set of odds and especially to have a second one when that second child has a one in seven chance of screwing not just the adults but the existing normal child!
There is no simple, one-answer prescription for all of this but all of these issues must be addressed right here, right now, with no excuses accepted. The idea that banning abortion, for example, will "do it" is functionally insane. A woman who chooses to abort a child obviously is in a position where she believes that having said child is a bad decision. The "cheap and easy" answer is "ban the procedure" where the real problem is that you don't want to fix the underlying reason she thinks having the kid is a bad decision.
Well, here we are with a wide-open border and a crap-ton of people coming in -- and what's worse is that the vast majority of those currently having kids -- including those coming here through said open border are in fact not productive beyond their consumption and proof of this is found in the wildly-escalating National Debt.
We don't have 10, 20 or 30 years to reverse this.
We must reverse it right now because it takes about 20 years to grow a human from conception to adulthood and if we don't reverse it now there will be no ability to keep this crap up long enough to reverse what is about to happen at all.