Dumb And Dumber -- August 26, 2017

Updates

September 6, 2017: California scraps the $3 billion bailout to Tesla.
 

Original Post

 

From The Los Angeles Times:

Over seven years, the state of California has spent $449 million on consumer rebates to boost sales of zero-emission vehicles.

So far, the subsidies haven’t moved the needle much. In 2016, of the just over 2 million cars sold in the state, only 75,000 were pure-electric and plug-in hybrid cars. To date, out of 26 million cars and light trucks registered in California, just 315,000 are electric or plug-in hybrids.

The California Legislature is pushing forward a bill that would double down on the rebate program. Sextuple down, in fact.

If $449 million can’t do it, the thinking goes, maybe $3 billion will.

That’s the essence of the plan that could lift state rebates from $2,500 to $10,000 or more for a compact electric car, making, for example, a Chevrolet Bolt EV electric car cost the same as a gasoline-driven Honda Civic.

Outside observers and analysts raise eyebrows at the $3-billion budget line. Supporters say the money will come mainly from the state’s cap-and-trade auction revenue, although they are vague on details. 

I say "go for it." The Danes learned the hard way that rebates on EVs were a really, really dumb idea.

$3 billion / $10,000 = 300,000 vehicles. About where they are now.

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The Complete Notebooks of Henry James

The Authoritative and Definitive Edition

edited with introductions and notes by 
Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers

c. 1987 

From page xii:

In some passages the novelist [Henry James] is candid about his underlying depression that remains with him not only after the failure of his play-writing but is a pat of  his mood swings in his daily life.

He speaks of his failures, as all writers do, of "indolence, vagueness, inattention," and in one exalted passage is "discouragements and lapses, depressions and darknesses."

In all writers there are resistances to work: the words won't come, the  mind sinks into a bog of inertia and staleness. And yet even in his deepest depression -- after his theatrical failures -- James is able to pursue his work. Criticism has failed to recognize that depression itself can be a driving force to powerful creation.

I think of T. S. Eliot writing The Waste Land when he felt his own life to be a waste; the depression may have caused some of his misjudgments which Pound corrected, but the created power was generated by despair.

Another modern instance is Virginia Woolf, who created her novels as a defence (sic) against melancholy and relapsed into her manic state when they were done.

This is the trisitimania described by the first great American psychiatrist, Benjamin Rush, and we see its presence in Proust, in Joyce, in Gide -- whose long narcissistic journals he himself published frequently; or in the endless journalizing of Anaïs Nin who began her notebooks as a long letter to an absent father.

Notebooks, diaries, journals are often repositories of grief and despair -- Kafka told us that writing was for him a form of prayer. Even the more camera-like journals of Edmund Wilson, or earlier the nature-mirror journals of Thoreau, reflect existential struggles, an overpowering need to write the book of the Self  in order find peace of the soul.