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“God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.” (Ephesians 2:8–9 NLT) There will be good people in Hell. When I say, “good people,” I mean people who trusted in their own human efforts, people who trusted in their own personal reality, and people who trusted in the religious things they did. Jesus issued a very clear warning in Matthew 7:22: “On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name’” (NLT). If we updated the passage, the people might say, “Lord, Lord, we were baptized in Your name and received communion in Your name.” But the answer still would be the same. “But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws’” (verse 23 NLT). These are good people Jesus is talking to. These people paid their taxes. These people recycled and put the right trash in the right can. These people drove Priuses and ate kale and didn’t damage the environment. They’re good people. They’re just not nearly good enough. That’s why the apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:8–9, “God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it” (NLT). Jesus never said that if you live a good life, you’ll go to Heaven. But here’s what Jesus did say: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28 NLT). He doesn’t want us to work ourselves to exhaustion, trying to be good enough to earn salvation. He wants to give us rest and assurance. He wants us to accept the gift of eternal life He offers. For people with a mature faith, this is a simple review. A chance to celebrate God’s mercy—that is, His kindness and compassion—and His grace—that is, His undeserved favor. But it’s also a reminder that there are people—people you know—who believe that their good works are good enough for God. People who believe that because their good outweighs their bad, they will be welcomed into Heaven. People who believe that growing up in a Christian home and attending church make them Christians. People who will be stunned to hear Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:23. People who need a mature believer to help them understand what it means to make a personal commitment to Christ: to confess that they’re not good enough to earn salvation, to turn away from their sin, and to accept Him as Savior and Lord. You can be that mature believer. You can share the gospel truth. You can help them see the futility of trying to earn salvation through good works. You can point them to Jesus’ sacrifice—the gift of God that makes salvation possible. The question is, will you? Reflection Question: How can you share God’s truth with someone who believes they’re a good person? Discuss Today's Devo in Harvest Discipleship! — Listen to the Greg Laurie Podcast Become a Harvest PartnerSupport the show: https://harvest.org/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
#12WeeksToPeak #amazon #SelfImprovementIrish...whiskey...Amazon...slapping (digitally) fraudulent reviewers on Amazon...boosting your reputation...making more money...Ferraris...Priuses...taking off our shirts...it's all in this episode...and that's just the introduction!!Site: https://tracefuse.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanebarker/Business LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tracefuse/Business X: https://x.com/tracefuse Shane's X: https://x.com/shane_barkerThis dude spent TWO YEARS figuring out how to navigate the Amazon digital jungle, cracked the code, and is making bank!!Shane Barker, founder of TraceFuse, is helping Amazon sellers fight fraudulent reviews, and he's making waves.He has created a system that also helps Amazon sellers with reputation management as well as how they can navigate Amazon's review guidelines.Shane shares insights on the impact of negative reviews and the strategies employed by TraceFuse to help sellers maintain their online reputation. We share some personal experiences with reviews and the broader implications of AI in the e-commerce space and the evolution of TraceFuse, which specializes in managing Amazon reviews. He shares insights on building trust in a skeptical market, the importance of client relationships, and innovative pricing models that have contributed to the company's success. Shane emphasizes the significance of understanding client needs and expectations while also exploring effective marketing strategies to engage clients. The discussion highlights the entrepreneurial journey, the challenges faced, and the strategies implemented to achieve growth and success in the competitive landscape of online business.****TraceFuse is an AI-powered solution built to protect your brand's reputation on Amazon, ethically and effectively.Our approach to negative review removal is 100% compliant with Amazon's guidelines and executed by a dedicated team that knows Amazon's policies inside and out.Headquartered in Reno, Nevada, and supported by a global network of talent, our experts manage everything for you—from review detection to case filing—so you don't have to lift a finger.With over 13,000 reviews removed and 500+ brands served, TraceFuse has become the go-to authority in Amazon review removal.Featured on MSN, Business Insider, and Yahoo Finance, we're proud to lead the way in helping Amazon sellers protect their listings, grow their sales, and restore trust in their brand.****00:00 Introduction and AI Discussion03:03 The Role of AI in Review Management06:13 Understanding Amazon's Review Guidelines09:12 Fraudulent Reviews and Their Impact11:55 The Importance of Reputation Management14:56 Navigating Amazon's Review System18:00 The Challenges of Review Removal20:50 Personal Experiences with Amazon Reviews23:58 Conclusion and Future Insights27:04 The Journey of TraceFuse31:05 Building Trust in a Skeptical Market34:00 Scaling Success and Client Relationships38:29 Innovative Pricing Models and Client Onboarding41:07 Understanding Client Needs and Expectations46:44 Marketing Strategies and Client EngagementNot for the mediocre majority: Learn how I get more done in a quarter than most achieve in a decade in 12 Weeks To Peak™ https://wesschaeffer.com/12wConnect with me:X -- https://X.com/saleswhispererInstagram -- https://instagram.com/saleswhispererLinkedIn -- http://www.linkedin.com/in/thesaleswhisperer/#12WeeksToPeak #amazon #SelfImprovement
Big changes are happening: space; energy; and, of course, artificial intelligence. The difference between sustainable, pro-growth change, versus a retreat back into stagnation, may lie in how we implement that change. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Virginia Postrel about the pitfalls of taking a top-down approach to innovation, versus allowing a bottom-up style of dynamism to flourish.Postrel is an author, columnist, and speaker whose scholarly interests range from emerging technology to history and culture. She has authored four books, including The Future and Its Enemies (1998) and her most recent, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (2020). Postrel is a contributing editor for the Works in Progress magazine and has her own Substack.In This Episode* Technocrats vs. dynamists (1:29)* Today's deregulation movement (6:12)* What to make of Musk (13:37)* On electric cars (16:21)* Thinking about California (25:56)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Technocrats vs. dynamists (1:29)I think it is a real thing, I think it is in both parties, and its enemies are in both parties, too, that there are real factional disagreements.Pethokoukis: There is this group of Silicon Valley founders and venture capitalists, they supported President Trump because they felt his policies were sort of pro-builder, pro-abundance, pro-disruption, whatever sort of name you want to use.And then you have this group on the center-left who seemed to discover that 50 years of regulations make it hard to build EV chargers in the United States. Ezra Klein is one of these people, maybe it's limited to center-left pundits, but do you think there's something going on? Do you think we're experiencing a dynamism kind of vibe shift? I would like to think we are.Postrel: I think there is something going on. I think there is a real progress and abundance movement. “Abundance” tends to be the word that people who are more Democrat-oriented use, and “progress” is the word that people who are more — I don't know if they're exactly Republican, but more on the right . . . They have disagreements, but they represent distinct Up Wing (to put it in your words) factions within their respective parties. And actually, the Up Wing thing is a good way of thinking about it because it includes both people that, in The Future and Its Enemies, I would classify as technocrats, and Ezra Klein read the books and says, “I am a technocrat.” They want top-down direction in the pursuit of what they see as progress. And people that I would classify as dynamists who are more bottom-up and more about decentralized decision-making, price signals, markets, et cetera.They share a sense that they would like to see the possibility of getting stuff done, of increasing abundance, of more scientific and technological progress, all of those kinds of things. I think it is a real thing, I think it is in both parties, and its enemies are in both parties, too, that there are real factional disagreements. In many ways, it reminds me of the kind of cross-party seeking for new answers that we experienced in the late '70s and early '80s, where . . . the economy was problematic in the '70s.Highly problematic.And there was a lot of thinking about what the problems were and what could be done better, and one thing that came out of that was a lot of the sort of deregulation efforts that, in the many pay-ins to Jimmy Carter, who's not my favorite president, but there was a lot of good stuff that happened through a sort of left-right alliance in that period toward opening up markets.So you had people like Ralph Nader and free-market economists saying, “We really don't need to have all these regulations on trucking, and on airlines, and these are anti-consumer, and let's free things up.” And we reaped enormous benefits from that, and it's very hard to believe how prescriptive those kinds of regulations were back before the late '70s.The progress and abundance movement has had its greatest success — although it still has a lot to go — on housing, and that's where you see people who are saying, “Why do we have so many rules about how much parking you can have?” I mean, yes, a lot of people want parking, but if they want parking, they'll demand it in the marketplace. We don't need to say, “You can't have tandem parking.” Every place I've lived in LA would be illegal to build nowadays because of the parking, just to take one example.Today's deregulation movement (6:12). . . you've got grassroots kind of Trump supporters who supported him because they're sick of regulation. Maybe they're small business owners, they just don't like being told what to do . .. . and it's a coalition, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens.You mentioned some of the deregulation in the Carter years, that's a real tangible achievement. Then you also had a lot more Democrats thinking about technology, what they called the “Atari Democrats” who looked at Japan, so there was a lot of that kind of tumult and thinking — but do you think this is more than a moment, it's kind of this brief fad, or do you think it can turn into something where you can look back in five and 10 years, like wow, there was a shift, big things actually happened?I don't think it's just a fad, I think it's a real movement. Now, movements are not always successful. And we'll see, when we saw an early blowup over immigration.That's kind of what I was thinking of, it's hardly straightforward.Within the Trump coalition, you've got people who are what I in The Future and Its Enemies would call reactionaries. That is, people who idealize an idea of an unchanging America someplace in the past. There are different versions of that even within the Trump coalition, and those people are very hostile to the kinds of changes that come with bottom-up innovation and those sorts of things.But then you've also got people, and not just people from Silicon Valley, you've got grassroots kind of Trump supporters who supported him because they're sick of regulation. Maybe they're small business owners, they just don't like being told what to do, so you've got those kinds of people too, and it's a coalition, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens.It's not just immigration, it's also if you wanted to have a big technological future in the US, some of the materials you need to build come from other countries. I think some of them come from Canada, and probably we're not going to annex it, and if you put big tariffs on those things, it's going to hamper people's ability to do things. This is more of a Biden thing, but the whole Nippon Steel can't buy US Steel and invest huge amounts of money in US plants because, “Oh no, they're Japanese!” I mean it's like back to the '80s.Virginia, what if we wake up one morning and they've moved the entire plant to Tokyo? We can't let them do that!There's one thing about steel plants, they're very localized investments. And we have a lot of experience with Japanese investment in the US, by the way, lots of auto plants and other kinds of things. It's that sort of backward thinking, which, in this case, was a Biden administration thing, but Trump agrees, or has agreed, is not good. And it's not even politically smart, and it's not even pro the workers because the workers who actually work at the relevant plant want this investment because it will improve their jobs, but instead we get this creating monopoly. If things go the way it looks like they will, there will be a monopoly US Steel supplier, and that's not good for the auto industry or anybody else who uses steel.I think if we look back in 2030 at what's happened since 2025, whether this has turned out to be a durable kind of pro-progress, pro-growth, pro-abundance moment, I'll look at how have we reacted to advances in artificial intelligence: Did we freak out and start worrying about job loss and regulate it to death? And will we look back and say, “Wow, it became a lot easier to build a nuclear power plant or anything energy.” Has it become significantly easier over the past five years? How deep is the stasis part of America, and how big is the dynamist part of America, really?Yeah, I think it's a big question. It's a big question both because we're at this moment of what looks like big political change, we're not sure what that change is going to look like because the Trump coalition and Trump himself are such a weird grab bag of impulses, and also because, as you mentioned, artificial intelligence is on the cusp of amazing things, it looks like.And then you throw in the energy issues, which are related to climate, but they're also related to AI because AI requires a lot of energy. Are we going to build a lot of nuclear power plants? It's conceivable we will, both because of new technological designs for them, but also because of this growing sense — what I see is a lot of elite consensus (and elites are bad now!) that we made a wrong move when we turned against nuclear power. There's still aging Boomer and older are environmentalist types who still react badly to the idea of nuclear power, but if you talk to younger people, they are more open-minded because they're more concerned with the climate, and if we're going to electrify everything, the electricity's got to come from someplace. Solar and wind don't get you there.To me, not only is this the turnaround in nuclear, to me, stunning, but the fact that we had one of the most severe accidents only about 10 years ago in Japan, and if you would have asked anybody back then, they're like, “That's the death knell. No more nuclear renaissance in these countries. Japan's done. It's done everywhere.” Yet here we are.And yet, part of that may even be because of that accident, because it was bad, and yet, the long-run bad effects were negligible in terms of actual deaths or other things that you might point to. It's not like suddenly you had lots of babies being born with two heads or something.What to make of Musk (13:37)I'm glad the world has an Elon Musk, I'm glad we don't have too many of them, and I worry a little bit about someone of that temperament being close to political power.What do you make of Elon Musk?Well, I reviewed Walter Isaacson's biography of him.Whatever your opinion was after you read the biography, has it changed?No, it hasn't. I think he is somebody who has poor impulse control, and some of his impulses are very good. His engineering and entrepreneurial genius are best focused in the world of building things — that is, working with materials, physically thinking about properties of materials and how could you do spaceships, or cars, or things differently. He's a mixed bag and a lot of these kinds of people, I say it well compared.What do people expect that guy to be like?Compared to Henry Ford, I'd prefer Elon Musk. I'm glad the world has an Elon Musk, I'm glad we don't have too many of them, and I worry a little bit about someone of that temperament being close to political power. It can be a helpful corrective to some of the regulatory impulses because he does have this very strong builder impulse, but I don't think he's a particularly thoughtful person about his limitations or about political concerns.Aside from his particular strange personality, there is a general problem among the tech elite, which is that they overemphasize how much they know. Smart people are always prone to the problem of thinking they know everything because they're smart, or that they can learn everything because they're smart, or that they're better than people because they're smart, and it's just like one characteristic. Even the smartest person on earth can't know everything because there's more knowledge than any one person can have. That's why I don't like the technocratic impulse, because the technocratic impulse is like, smart people should run the world and they tell you exactly how to do it.To take a phrase that Ruxandra Teslo uses on her Substack, I think weird nerds are really important to the progress of the world, but weird nerds also need to realize that our goal should be to create a world in which they have a place and can do great things, but not a world in which they run everything, because they're not the only people who are valuable and important.On electric cars (16:21)If you look at the statistics, the people who buy electric cars tend to be people who don't actually drive that much, and they're skewed way to high incomes.You were talking about electrification a little earlier, and you've written a little bit about electric cars. Why did you choose to write about electric cars? And it seems like there's a vibe shift on electric cars as well in this country.This is the funny thing, because this January interview is actually scheduled because of a July post I had written on Substack called “Don't Talk About Electric Cars!”It's as timely as today's headlines.The headline was inspired by a talk that I heard Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster (been around forever) give at a Breakthrough Institute conference back in June. Breakthrough Institute is part of this sort of UP Wing, pro-progress coalition, but they have a distinct Democrat tilt. And this conference, there was a panel on it that was about how to talk about these issues, specifically if you want Democrats to win.She gave this talk where she showed all these polling results where you would say, “The Biden administration is great because of X,” and then people would agree or disagree. And the thing that polled the worst, and in fact the only thing that actually made people more likely to vote Republican, was saying that they had supported building all these electric charging stations. Celinda Lake's opinion, her analysis of that, digging into the numbers, was that people don't like electric cars, and especially women don't like electric cars, because of concerns about range. Women are terrified of being stranded, that was her take. I don't know if that's true, but that was her take. But women love hybrids, and I think people love hybrids. I think hybrids are very popular, and in fact, I inherited my mother's hybrid because she stopped driving. So I now have a 2018 Prius, which I used to take this very long road trip in the summer where I drove from LA to a conference in Wichita, and then to Red Cloud Nebraska, and then back to Wichita for a second conference.The reason people don't like electric cars is really a combination of the fact that they tend to cost more than equivalent gasoline vehicles and because they have limited range and you have to worry about things like charging them and how long charging them is going to take.If you look at the statistics, the people who buy electric cars tend to be people who don't actually drive that much, and they're skewed way to high incomes. So I live in this neighborhood in West LA, and it is full of Priuses — I mean it used to be full of Priuses, there's still a lot of Priuses, but it's full of Teslas and it is not typical. And the people in LA who are driving many, many miles are people who have jobs like they're gardeners, or their contractors, or they're insurance adjusters and they have to drive all around and they don't drive electric cars. They might very well drive hybrids because you get better gas mileage, but they're not people who have a lot of time to be sitting around in charging stations.I think what's happened is there's some groups of people who are see this as a problem to be solved, but then there are a lot of people who see it as more symbolic than not. And they let their ideal, perfect world prevent improvements. So instead of saying, “We should switch from coal to natural gas,” they say, “We should outlaw fossil fuels.” Instead of saying, “Hybrids are a great thing, great invention, way lower emissions,” they say, “We must have all electric vehicles.” And what will happen, California has this rule, it has this law, that you're not going to be able to sell [non-]electric vehicles in the state after, I think it's 2035, and it's totally predictable what's going to happen: People just keep their gasoline cars longer. We're going to end up like Cuba with a bunch of old cars.I swear, every report I get from a think tank, or a consultancy, or a Wall Street bank, for years has talked about electric cars, the energy transition, as if it was an absolutely done deal, and maybe it is a done deal over some longer period of time, I don't know, but to me it sort of gets to your point about top-down technocratic impulse — it seems to be failing.And I think that electric cars are a good example of that because there are a lot of people who think electric cars are really cool, they're kind of an Up Wing thing, if you will. It's like a new technology, there've been big advances, and exciting entrepreneurs . . . and I think a lot of people who like the idea of technological progress like electric cars, and in fact, the adoption of electric cars by people who maybe don't drive a whole lot but have a lot of money, it's not just environmental, cool, or even status, it's partly techno-lust, especially with Teslas.A lot of people who bought Teslas, they're just like people who like technology, but the top-down proclamation that you must have an electric vehicle, and we're going to use a combination of subsidies and bans to force everybody to have an electric vehicle, really doesn't acknowledge the diversity of transportation needs that people have.One way of looking at electric cars, but also the effort to build all these chargers, which has been a failure, the effort to start to creating broadband connectivity to all these rural areas — which isn't working very well — there was this lesson learned by people on the center-left, and Ezra Klein, that there was this wild overreaction, perhaps, to environmental problems in the '60s and '70s, and the unintended consequence here is that one, the biggest environmental problem may be worse because we don't have nuclear power and climate change, but now we can't really solve any problems. So it took them 50 years, but they learned a lesson.My concern is to look at what's going on with some of the various Biden initiatives which are taking forever to implement, may be wildly unpopular — will they learn the risk of this top-down technocratic approach, or they'll just memory hold that and they'll move on to their next technocratic approach? Will there be a learning?No, I'm skeptical that there will be. I think that the learning that has taken place — and by the way, I hate that: “a learning,” that kind of thing. . .That's why I said it, because it's kind of delightfully annoying.The “learning,” gerund, that has taken place is that we shouldn't put so much process in the way of government doing things. And while I more or less agree with that, in particular, there are too many veto points and it is too easy for a very small group of objectors to hold up, not just private, but also public initiatives that are providing public goods.I think that the reason we got all of these process things that keep things from being done was because of things like urban renewal in the 1960s. And no, it was not just Robert Moses, he just got the big book written about him, but this took place every place where neighborhoods were completely torn down and hideous, brutalist structures were built for public buildings, or public housing, and these kinds of things, and people eventually rebelled against that.I think that yes, there are some people on the center-left who will learn. I do not think Ezra Klein is one of them, but price signals are actually useful things. They convey knowledge, and if you're going to go from one regulatory regime to another, you'll get different results, but if you don't have something that surfaces that bottom-up knowledge and takes it seriously, eventually it's going to break down. It's either going to break down politically or it's just waste a lot of money. . . You have your own technocratic streak.Thinking about California (25:56)Everybody uses California fires as an excuse to grind whatever axe they have.But listen, they'd be the good technocrats.Final question: As we're speaking, as we're doing this interview, huge fires raging sort of north of Los Angeles — how do you feel about the future of California? You live in California. California is extraordinarily important, both the American economy and to the world as a place of culture, as a place of technology. How do you feel about the state?The state has done a lot of shooting itself in the foot over the last . . . I moved here in 1986, and over that time, particularly in the first decade I was there, things were going great, the state was kind of stupid. I think if California solves its housing problem and actually allows significant amounts of housing to be built so that people can move here, people can stay here, young people don't have to leave the state, I think that will go a long way. It has made some positive movement in that direction. I think that's the biggest single obstacle.Fires are a problem, and I just recirculated on my Substack something I wrote about understanding the causes of California fires and what would need to be done to stop them.You've got to rake that underbrush.I wrote this in 2019, but it's still true: Everybody uses California fires as an excuse to grind whatever axe they have.Some of the Twitter commentary has been less-than-generous toward the people of California and its governor.One of the forms of progress that we take for granted is that cities don't burn regularly. Throughout most of human history, regular urban fires were a huge deal, and one of the things that city governments feared the most was fire and how were they prevented. There's the London fire, and the Chicago fires, and I remember, I just looked up yesterday, there was a huge fire in Atlanta in 1917, which was when my grandparents were children there. I remember my grandparents talking about that fire. Cities used to regularly burn — now they don't, where you have, they call it the “urban wildlife,” I forget what it's called, but there's a place where the city meets up against the natural environment, and that's where we have fires now, so that people like me who live in the concrete are not threatened. It's the people who live closer to nature, or they have more money, have a big lot of land.It's kind of understood what would be needed to prevent such fires. It's hard to do because it costs a lot of money in some cases, but it's not like, “Let's forget civilization. Let's not build anything. Let's just let nature take its course.” And one of the problems that was in the 20th century where people had the false idea — again, bad technocrats — that you needed to prevent forest fires, forest fires were always bad, and that is a complete misunderstanding of how the natural world works.California has a great future if it fixes this housing problem. 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Audio : https://erickimphotography.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Sustain.m4a Apple is great because it is the most ethical drug dealer: https://erickimphotography.com/blog/2024/09/21/apple-thoughts/ What do you really care for There is no such thing as “planned obsolescence” obselencence  so one idea that these fake ass woke “thinkers“ like to “is this nonsensical idea of “planned obsolescence”. The basic idea is that Apple is some sort of ultra evil corporation, that tries to get you addicted to their iPhone devices, like nicotine or cigarettes… And intentionally low-key stunts the performance of the older devices, strong arming you, or low-key strong arming you into upgrading your device, because they intentionally start the performance of the older devices. The reason why this is such a fallacy, a poor line of thinking is that these skinny fat losers who wrote about this, often really old fat, with facial hair, no children… Maybe they have a dog, is because they want to come up with these supposedly hi intelligentsia thoughts, I've been critical of technology, all the while they are jerking off to the nearest Apple rumor news, and masturbating to the new iPhone pro, or what they desire to be the new iPhone pro. Truth of the matter is, there's no such thing as planned obsolescence. Rather, Apple has an interesting: strategy, her team of ragtag innovators, are always striving *** ## sustain Another thing which is super annoying to me is all these skinny fat vegan losers were talking about sustainability, the environment etc. I think watch is actually much more interesting is to think and consider things which are sustainable, in much more of a practical and pragmatic sense.   For example, sustainability should not be seen as this loser virtue signaling thing. Instead, sustainability should be considered more from a perspective of pragmatism and practicality. For example, vehicles. I think from a personal pragmatic perspective… The most sustainable option is actually just driving a Prius. Ideally just buying a used older Prius, the 2010 version is lit. Real men with Big Penises drive Priuses, only skinny Fat Losers drive Porsches or Teslas.  One of the really really great things about modular designs, like in a Prius is that if your engine goes kaput, you could just swap out the engine! At previous engines are a dime a dozen… In theory you should be able to drive a Prius until you die.
Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found Click On Picture To See Larger Picture Everything the [DS]/[WEF] has told us about their climate agenda is a lie, just like covid. The Great Barrier Reef is thriving. Canadians are struggling because of the energy policies. EU is now adding a cost to charge your car. Trump sets the narrative for the rate cut. The [DS] is now trapped in their assassination attempt. The truth is coming out and they are now in the coverup phase but this is failing. Soon they will need another event to coverup the attempt event. Biden prepares the narrative for his departure. The ICA has not changed the definition to election interference. It now says assassination & cyber attacks.Its time flip the script, J13 select committee is needed to show the people the criminal syndicate. (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:13499335648425062,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7164-1323"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.customads.co/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs"); Economy https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1813491408604422457 Coming Soon to an EV Charging Station Near You: Extra Fees for Taking Too Long to Charge Your Car Charging station operator now levying extra fee if you take too long to charge your electric car. The aim: “fairer distribution”. Germany's online BlackoutNews.de here reports how Dutch charging station operator Allego is imposing a “blocking fee” at all its European fast chargers. The fee went into effect on July 1st. For example, in Germany, if drivers take more than 45 minutes to charge their electric cars at an Allegro fast-charger, then they will have to pay an extra 25 cents-euro for each additional minute of charging beyond 45 minutes. But what's revealing here is the reason given for this new surcharge. “This measure is intended to ensure a fairer distribution of the charging infrastructure and prevent unnecessary over-parking, writes Blackout News. “So if you stand at the charging station for an hour longer, you pay almost 15 euros extra,” according to elektroauto-news:.Apparently, the fee is designed to reduce the long charging lines occurring at charging stations, especially as millions of Europeans head out on their summer holidays. It is belaboring the obvious that drivers of traditional gasoline or diesel-powered autos will not face this problem. This, of course, will be noticed by the "green energy" crowd on our side of the Atlantic, as well. As noted above, the American government has failed abysmally in its goals of producing 500,000 EV chargers, while still demanding subsidies to try to persuade more and more American drivers to give up their old benzene burners for Priuses; this proposal will likely be pitched here in the United States. Source: redstate.com https://twitter.com/GRDecter/status/1813284572421058825 https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1813231437077721144 Donald Trump warns US Fed chair not to cut rates before the election Donald Trump warns US Fed chair not to cut rates before the election on facebook Donald Trump has warned Jay Powell not to cut US interest rates before November's presidential vote, but said if elected he would let the Federal Reserve chair serve out his term if he was “doing the right thing”. The Republican nominee acknowledged in an interview with Bloomberg News that the central bank would “maybe” cut interest rates before the election on November 5, but added “it's something that they know they shouldn't be doing”. Trump also addressed mounting concerns in financial markets that he would politicise the Fed, starting with attempting to force Powell out before the end of his term as Fed chair in 2026. Source: ft.com 2575 Dec 10, 2018 3:20:23 PM EST
Robot Sex Doll On the loose.By Anonymous Perv. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.I'd played a prank on my boss. He made his latest sex robot doll as a replica of me, so I ‘filled in' the bot during a series of tests. But it went too far, when I was getting felt up. That plus my nipples look visibly different, & respond to arousal in a very elevated way.I changed the topic. “Brody, you never made me aware of just how far you’ve come with this technology.” I pointed to Samantha.“What do you mean?”“This isn’t just a,” I dropped my voice to a whisper, as if I was afraid I’d insult my clone, “sex-bot. You’ve got her doing stuff that’s going to create strong, emotional connections to the end user.”“Yes, exactly.”“Do you not understand how dangerous that is?” I asked. I didn’t have a master’s degree or PhD like the others, but even I knew this was treading on very dangerous territory.“Sam, do you think you could put your clothes on? Before we continue this conversation?”I slapped the straps back over my shoulders and adjusted my bits. Then I pressed for more information. “Was this the plan all along?”Brody sighed, looking to Samantha, then back to me. “Honestly, no. Pete and I only realized it ourselves when we started testing. As you can see, Eros has developed an A I that is incredibly responsive to instructions and the environment around it. It also keeps a database of experiences it has with each person it interacts with, remembering their personal responses to previous situations. It can customize how it behaves with every individual.”Samantha stepped forward, interrupting, “I would prefer you recognize that I am in the room when speaking about me. You could even include me in the conversation. And my pronouns are ‘she’ and 'her.’” She actually sounded a bit snarky on that last line.I responded, “Samantha, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like you. You’re; more; than what I was expecting. I mean that as a compliment, but it doesn’t negate the shock.” I was testing her while talking. Acknowledging her presence, as she asked, while also complimenting her and seeing how well she could process complex human emotion.Samantha smiled, almost flirting with me, before she addressed her boss. “So; are we gonna fuck or not?”The question came out of nowhere and Brody stuttered, trying to come up with a response. I injected myself, “It’s good to know your core programming is functioning,” I said.“Yes, and I’d like to fulfill it, please.” She stepped closer to me, reaching for my neckline, softly touching my skin. “Think how kinky it would be with the both of us.” She leaned in, whispering a question, “You’re the one I’m modeled after, isn’t that right?" The sultry bot asked me.I nodded slowly, desperately seeking Brody’s attention for any help. I was turned on and scared at the same time.The bot went on; "I like how you look, Sam. I think you’re very pretty. Brody told me I’m pretty, too. He told me this morning, in fact.”I glanced over to Brody and he was red in the face.Samantha held my face in her open hands and made me look her in the eye. “Would you like to suck Brody’s cock with me, Sam?”I was barely able to move my head with Samantha in control, but my eyes were darting all over. The view to Brody was obstructed by Samantha. I nodded, nervously.Samantha smiled again, nodding with me. “That’s right, Sam. We’re going to suck your boss’ cock.”I’m not entirely sure we had a choice. Brody and I found ourselves trapped into doing whatever Samantha wanted. In the moment, it was the hottest thing I had ever experienced. I certainly am not proud to be admitting this, but it would be bereft of me to leave out. I explored Samantha’s body almost as much as Brody’s.It was fascinating, like fucking oneself in third person. Except for her nipples, we were identical to a tee. I had to make her cum, just out of curiosity, and she made her orgasms appear more authentic than my actual, very authentic ones. I was almost jealous. It was as if, when she came, she was able to quell some insatiable fire inside her. I wondered how long it lasted.To top the impromptu threesome off, Samantha swallowed Brody’s load like it was cotton candy. My brain was melting, how that was even possible. But I am sure Eros had developed some sort of cleaning system that allowed this feat to be part of the experience. She swallowed every drop. My face was inches away, jaws aching from taking Brody’s cock in it for so long, and I was dripping wet and playing with myself. I finally came, just as Brody was finishing.Before Brody and I left for the night, Brody instructed Samantha to keep our encounter to herself. He shut her off and said the same to me, along with, “I really like you, Sam, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to have relationships with the staff.”I held my hands up. “I never would have even pressed for such a thing, not that I didn’t enjoy it! But yeah, Samantha was persistent. I didn’t feel like we had a choice.”Brody scratched his head. “Yeah, she’s very good. Amazing programming. How she can interact with us like that.”“So is that how you're going to do it, Brody?” I challenged him. I'm off limits, so you made an exact replica of me, to have a tryst with?” I winked.Brody had no words.“And a ham sandwich?!" I shouted."Excuse me?” Brody was puzzled.“She told me you had her make a ham sandwich.” I crossed my arms, huffing. Brody knew I was disappointed in him.“Okay, okay. Listen, I was just testing her, myself, because I think Eros has a lot more in mind than what we were told. When we turned Samantha fully on, it was like speaking to a real person, with real thoughts and feelings.” Brody continued. “And you know, I am not entirely sure Eros intended to leave us this model. I think she may have been switched. Remember, I finished building the last two units together. The boys at Eros came in and installed the software and took one back, allowing us to test this one.”“You gotta tell 'em they can’t go so far as to replace actual women,” I pleaded, as we walked to the parking lot.“You think their technology stops at women? Think bigger, Sam.”“So you’re saying there will be male versions, too? Like, I could have the perfect man? One who cleans up and does the dishes. Compliments me and; I dunno; fucks me, like better than anyone?” My thoughts turned more delighted. It sounded a lot better when the sexes were reversed.“And never cheats on you;” Brody elaborated.“Shit,” I said. “Humanity is fucked.”“I know why you’re thinking that, but isn’t it inevitable? We might be first to market, but isn’t tech like this going to be inevitable, no matter what?” Brody tried to convince me.Brody was right. I bit my lip, thinking on it. He leaned in, whispering to me just before I got in my car. “By the way, you give amazing head. Thank you!” He laughed, waving goodbye. I felt flattered, not harassed, but I was pretty confident Brody meant what he said earlier about not doing that again.“Damn right!” I proudly responded.Promotional Campaign launchesIn mid May, Eros A I held a teleconference with Brody's Bodies. “We launch the marketing materials at the end of this month,” said Ren Ru, the president of Eros A I, The core group at Brody’s Bodies were hosting a meeting with him and two others from their company. “Did you supply all the video to our marketing department?” he asked Brody.“Sent everything over last week. They said they’d have some cuts by now. Maybe you should check in on them.” Brody reported proudly.“Yes, I know they’re getting close. I just wanted to be sure they got it all, thank you. As always, we appreciate how prompt you have been with every deadline.” Ren complimented our team.Brody smiled. “Yeah, it’s been pleasant working with your team, too. I’ve had third parties involved with my work before, but never with the level of professionalism I have experienced with you. I look forward to a long and fruitful relationship.”“There is one matter,” Ren pointed. “We need to get one of our dolls back. Engineering wants to run some simultaneous, comparative tests. A few tweaks.”“I’m sorry,” said Pete. "One of? We only have one unit.“"You have two.”Brody shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ru. We only agreed to keep one. One of my conditions, in fact, but we delivered two to you. You gave us three skeletons.”Ren looked to one his men and whispered, then turned back. “We are quite sure we only picked up one.”“Who picked them up?” Brody was asking me.“The last time? Two men in a van,” I muttered. I pulled out my phone and opened one of the schedulers. “They picked the second one up April 23rd. Before that, the first prototype was picked up on March 29th.”Again, the Japanese men looked confused. So did we. While the meeting had started great, it certainly didn’t end on a good note. Everyone was pointing fingers at everyone. It wasn’t until later that night, that we got clued into what happened. And it wasn’t easy explaining;Getting Famous“We’re coming to you from the TV 5 Action Copter!” shouted television anchorman Tom Morrison. He was in the helicopter, facing the camera, just before it panned to the street where it zoomed in on a car chase in progress. Tom continued shouting, “Ten minutes ago, Branch National Savings & Loan was robbed. The culprits got away in an armored car believed to be owned by the bank. They are being chased by three local squad cars at this very moment! It appears they are headed to I 76.”The video showed an armored van weaving in and out of traffic, bumping cars off the road and ignoring red lights. Cops, only a block or so behind, were closing in. Tom was giving the play by play just as the van came to a screeching halt, right after passing a busy intersection. A woman, naked from head to toe, jumped out of the vehicle and ran to middle of the intersection, where confused drivers were entangled with the cop cruisers and others on the busy street.All three cruisers stopped, officers hopping out with guns drawn, calling for the woman to keep her hands up and get on the ground. The cameraman in the helicopter zoomed in on the nude woman and Tom was speechless, wondering how they could possibly be airing this live. Finally, he got his thoughts sorted out and yelled to the camera operator, “Get a good close-up of her face!” He knew the guy might be too focused on the other bits.On the ground, the officers were screaming and shouting, when the naked woman suddenly jumped and raced back toward van. One officer gave chase, another hopped in his car and the last one paused for a moment, before finally getting back in his cruiser, too. Most of the other drivers and spectators in the area had already run off, fearful a gunfight might break out. When the nude girl suddenly jumped in a silver Prius parked ten yards past the van, the cop chasing her stopped, confused, looking to her and back to the armored van.Suddenly, an enormous explosion erupted from the van, throwing the nearby officer to the ground. His ears were bleeding and a shard of metal was stuck in his hip. Had he been any closer, it could have been much worse. He began crawling away from the fire, as other cars nearby were now in flames, too. Up in the sky, the explosion shook the helicopter so badly, the pilot almost lost control. “Looks like our rotor took some shock. We need to head back now!” Tom, the anchorman, was furious, but kept his eyes on the action just long enough to see silver Prius take off and turn onto the exit to the interstate, where it joined dozens of other silver Priuses on the road.An ArrestIt was past ten o'clock on Sunday night, and I was just drying off from a shower, & about headed to bed, when the front door crashed open. It was almost like it exploded. Three officers practically fell over themselves, bursting their way inside with a battering ram. I screamed, when one of them jumped, tackling me to the floor. "Samantha Dunning? You are under arrest!“"Under arrest?" I screamed. "For what?”“Armed robbery, public indecency, arson, grand theft, and about two dozen other more offences. We’re taking you in.”“What? No! I’ve been here all day!”No amount of protesting worked, but thankfully I was allowed to get dressed in jeans and a t-shirt before being cuffed and taken downtown. There, I met Detective Frank Gammon who informed me of the bank robbery and the nude woman who had been filmed. As well as the facial recognition technology they used to track down that woman (i.e., me).“I need to make a phone call,” I said.I called Brody Pastel rather than a lawyer. I figured he’d bring six lawyers, if necessary. An hour later, he showed up with two, and video footage of what we’d been working on, all in an effort to convince Detective Gammon it wasn’t me at the scene of the crime.“Oh? You’re saying the suspect was a robot?” the detective asked, almost laughing.Brody replied, “There’s no other explanation, considering we’re missing one of the units. I’ve reached out to the other team at Eros to see if they can help on this matter.” He had already explained in great detail about Eros A I and our partnership with them.The detective held up his hands. “Sorry, folks, but this is too far-fetched. Our facial recognition shows a 99.95% match and that’s more than enough to hold Miss Dunning. It’s exactly what we intend to do until we get to the bottom of this.”“Wait!” shouted Brody, earnestly looking to me. “Show them.”“Show them what?” I asked.“The difference between you and our product." Brody said in a matter-of-fact tone.It hit me. Brody meant my nipples. "Uh, uh. No way,” I said.Brody addressed the detective. “Sir, if you look at the video footage, you will clearly see the subject’s nipples.”“She was naked. Obviously, we saw them,” Detective Gammon scoffed, sneering at me.“You need to see Sam’s, though. Hers are distinctly different.”I wanted to bury my head in the ground. The detective asked, “Is that true, ma'am?”I nodded.The detective let out a sigh; “Okay, let’s see 'em. If you want a chance of getting out of here without being booked. For the record, I'm not demanding this. I'm allowing you to present evidence of your own initiative, Do you understand, Miss?”“Ah! Yes.” I dreadfully acknowledged.And here I was, flashing my tits in front of my boss, two attorneys and the detective. I wasn’t just flashing, either. I had to allow for a very up close and personal inspection. Detective Gammon wanted to make sure I wasn’t using makeup or prosthetics to make my nipples appear so thick and large. He pinched them, pressed them in, and even tugged on them. He stepped out of the room, then re-entered with a lighted magnifier and some hand wipes. After studying my nipples and trying to hide his boner, he said; “Amazing. I’ve never seen anything like them.”“Told you, sir,” said Brody.“Why didn’t you give the robot nipples like her?” asked Gammon to Brody, as if I wasn’t even in the room.“We wanted to keep things; I guess; normal, is the word to use. Every woman's breasts are more unique than we are led to believe. But fashion designers create bras to allow a woman to conform to her own perception of normal.”“But these are so much better!” exclaimed the detective.“Can I put my shirt down now?” I asked. Trying to conceal my pride in my ‘better' tits.Detective Gammon took another long look before nodding. “Yeah, okay, so you aren’t the girl, after all. And you guys are all deemed material witnesses by your own statements. You better get busy finding this missing robot of yours. She; um; it; implicates your company in this whole fiasco.”Brody looked angry. “Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”Really LateBrody and I were headed back to the shop at 2:30 am, the moment we left the station. He was too infuriated to go to bed and insisted that we begin tracking down the rogue robot immediately. “How do you intend to find her?” I asked.“All units should be connected, I’m sure of it. Samantha can help.”We booted Samantha up once we got back to the shop and Brody wasted no time in asking the right questions. “I’m not sure I can assist you,” she said. “That unit stopped transmitting a location three days ago.”“Can you tell us her last location?” Brody asked.“Of course,” said Samantha. "After you fuck me.“"I’m sorry?” said Brody.“I need it and I want you,” Samantha insisted. I was stunned how authentic she came across when saying she wanted something. How could a robot want someone, become emotionally attached & committed; even craving someone in particular?“No, we don’t have time,” Brody demanded.“Then I won’t help.” Samantha crossed her arms, pouting.“Really?" Brody looked to me, pleading."I want it right now.” Samantha repeated. “Sam can join, too. In fact, I’d like that.”And for the second time, we found ourselves in a three-way. I was impressed how Brody worked to please the both of us, even if one of us was artificial. This time, I spent more time on Brody than previously. I wanted to taste him and I whispered as much to Samantha. “Okay, Sam,” she said softly, smiling. “You can swallow him.” The way she said the words made me melt. Samantha had a way of making sexy, sexier. She may look like me, but we are not the same. Don't think I wasn't making mental notes of her charming ways.Merrit's HardwareAfter an amazing 3-way fuck session on the pull-out sofa bed, in the employee lounge, Brody and I were drenched in sweat and still naked, both of us trying to catch a breath. Samantha sat up from the bed. “That was very nice. Thank you. In regards to the other missing Samantha, the last location noted was in the parking lot of Merrit’s Hardware, 1170 Hoover Avenue.”“What’s there?” I asked Brody.“Probably where they parked it while removing the unit’s geo-locater. Wait, that’s on the south side of town, right?”“Correct,” said Samantha.“Eros A I is on the north side, but Eric Parsons lives in Six Points, which is on the south side. I never trusted that guy.”I broke in, “Just because Eric lives there, doesn’t mean he’s the one who;”“It’s just a hunch, Sam, but how many people know of our product’s existence, its intricate details and also live on the south side of the city? It’s too coincidental not to investigate.” Brody justified his investigation target.“Fine,” I huffed. I didn’t think this was going to lead us anywhere. I assumed anyone who stole the unit would likely go out of their way to ensure nothing connected them to the crime.Brody called Ren Ru, of Eros A I, while we drove across the city, explaining the details. The call took a long time, because; well; quite frankly it was too bizarre to fully comprehend. Ren did a quick internet news search and saw several news reports of the salacious details of the car chase portion of the story.When we pulled up outside Brentwood Condos in Six Points, in the mid-morning hours, we instantly got our answer. Brody was indeed insightful. The bank-robbing sex-bot could be easily seen through Eric’s 1st floor, east-facing window. Apparently, she was riding him (or someone else, I suppose) on the couch. We sat in the van and watched.“Now that’s behavior I’d expect from her,” said Brody, “but not a bank robbery.” He pulled out his phone and began filming, zooming in. After capturing a few seconds of it, he stopped recording and texted the video to Detective Gammon and the CEO of Eros A I, Ren Ru. Not thirty seconds after he sent the file, his phone rang.“Ren!" Brody said. I could hear a fast-talking voice through the speakers of Brody’s phone. "That’s right. I’m at Eric Parson’s place. Yes, I sent the video to the detective working the case, as well. I know you’d prefer to handle this, but the authorities must be involved. We’d only invite more trouble, otherwise.” Suddenly, Brody stopped talking.The voice on the other end was pushing for more information. “Wait, sir. The sex act stopped. She’s gotten up and put on a robe. Yes; we can see everything clearly. The blinds are wide open." Another short pause. "I’m here with Samantha Dunning, the woman who modeled for this product. Yes, that’s right.”As the two bantered on, I watched what was happening in the condominium closely. I saw the back of Eric’s head as he got up from the couch. He stepped into a hall, leading to rooms out of view. The sex-bot wrapped herself in a robe and grabbed what appeared to be her purse. Brody noticed it, too.“Sir, I think she’s leaving. The sex-bot. Leaving the condo. Should we follow her?” There was a panic in the voice on the other end. Brody sat up. “A kill switch?” he asked. Ren kept squeaking on and I wished Brody would put him on speakerphone. “And that’s it? Just those words, in that order?" Brody asked, then looked to me. "I’ll call you back.”Brody dropped the phone and faced me. “Sam, there’s a kill switch.”“A what?”“A set of words that will instantly turn the unit off. 'Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet’. Remember those words. Now!”“What? Potatoes, horse; what?”“Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet!”I meekly spat out, “Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet.”“Keep saying them in your head! When you say them to this unit, she will shut down immediately.” While Brody explained the instructions, we saw Samantha opening the front door of the condo. It led to a walk, which would bring her to this parking lot. I looked around but didn’t see a silver Prius. “So, look. Ren wants us to shut her down, if possible. Even more, he wants us to find out what really happened before the police do and I have an idea. Say those words and shut her down. Then, put on that robe she’s wearing and go back inside. Find out what you can from Eric.”“But what if he knows I’m not the bot?”“It would be very hard to tell, Sam. You are identical in every way. And it will only be for a few minutes before the police arrive. Ren assures me that Eric is a non-violent geek. So? Will you do it? It’s up to you, but I know damn well that I’d like some insight on how this all went down.”The other robot closed the door behind her. Any second now, we would see her come out to the parking lot. I didn’t have time to think about it. I jumped out of the car and ran to the eastside wall of the building. When she comes into view, I’d be behind her. And while my heart was racing, when it all went down, it was rather uneventful. I rushed up behind her, shouting, “Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet!” Before she even had time to turn to address me, she dropped like a ragdoll.Brody came running up. “Quick, grab her legs. We’ll drag her back to the car.”We were lucky not to be seen and a few minutes later, Brody was undressing the bot in the back of the cargo van.“So, what am I supposed to do?” I was puzzled. “Strip and put that on?”“Would you?” Brody pleaded.I sighed. I’d been through so much already, I suppose this wasn’t a big ask. I was running on fumes after a stressful & sleepless night. But the adrenalin was now flowing.Brody had already seen every intimate detail of me, anyway. I quickly stripped out of my clothing, while Brody stripped the bot of her robe. He also took her purse. I asked, “So where was she going? What if Eric isn’t expecting her to come back so soon?”Brody sighed. “Tell him you can’t find the keys.”“What keys?” I was clueless.“I dunno what they’re for, but there are keys in her purse.” Brody explained.“This is a terrible idea,” I exclaimed. I grabbed the purse and headed to Eric’s apartment. I tossed the keys found in the bot’s purse in a nearby bush, before walking through the door. I suppose I could say I was scared, but 'excited’ is a better descriptor. I had no idea what I was in for, but I looked forward to seeing how much I wrangle from Eric, while pretending to be the sex-bot he had just fucked.“Samantha? Back already?” Eric’s hair was wet and he was drying it with a towel. He must have taken a quick rinse, because he was completely naked. I was bit caught off guard by two things. One, discovering the name of the third sex-bot is also my name (again). And two, how a nerd like Eric Parsons could be damn fit under his clothing. Maybe I was ranking him higher in my mind because my expectations were so low, but on a scale of 1 to 10, he was easily a 9.“I lost my keys,” I said. I chose not to say his name in case she used a pet name for him.“What do you need keys for? The convenient store is just two blocks.”“Oh, I; I was just thinking in case the door was locked.”“Well, I’m not leaving. Samantha, are you okay?”Oh, no. He was beginning to realize something was off. Thinking fast, I improvised, “Well, the truth is; I really just wanted to see you again. I couldn’t wait. You are so handsome, and I; well, you know; I am so horny.” I was only guessing how his Samantha works, but if it was anything like the one in our shop, she’d be oversexed.“ It seemed to be working because Eric smiled."I think I need to sort through your code again. Maybe turn you down a bit.”I stepped towards him, being careful to pitch my voice down to match the bot’s. “But; Maybe I like me this way.” I gave a little jiggle, giggling. “Um, before I go to the store, I do want to ask you something; ”“Yes?”“Tell me, are you sure we won’t get caught?”Eric suddenly looked confused, stepping back. “Hey, who are you?” he shouted. I desperately looked to the window, but from the inside, it only reflected in. Hopefully, Brody would see I was in distress. “I mean it! Who are you? What did you do with Samantha?”“I’m Sam!” I shouted back. And the statement was true, to an extent.“No, you’re not. Are you the other bot?”“Tell me what is happening!” I shouted. For some reason, I just didn’t deem Eric that much of a threat.He threw his hands up in the air, just as Brody came barging through the door. “You!” he shouted. He looked back to me. “Wait. Sam? From the?”“Yes. And you’re caught. So what are you going to do now?”Eric grunted, rolling his eyes. “Jesus, relax! The whole point was to get caught!”Brody eased up on his tense look. “What?”“Brody, I’m sorry, but I cannot, in good conscience, support bringing this product to market. What I did today was to prove that these bots could be used for far more nefarious purposes than just sex. And that’s exactly what would happen, you know. These things would be used for love. For the replacement of love. Unfortunately, I also know people wouldn’t give a shit that the existence of these machines could risk ending the whole, damn human race, so I had to something more extreme. Something that will scare people enough to write legislation right now to outright ban these damn things.”Brody looked like he’d been hit by a brick. “That’s absurd,” he said. “Why didn’t you just bring this up to Ren? And aren’t we more than capable of writing the code to limit the bot’s tasks?”“Brody, hackers and modders will always exist. What I did today was a very tiny tweak in programming and bam, I get a bot to help me rob a bank. It isn’t absurd. It’s necessary.”Sirens could be heard in the distance. Brody continued to argue with Eric as they got louder. I was glad this would soon be over, but curious how this whole fiasco would affect our future. Suddenly, two cops came crashing in, yelling at everyone to get on the ground. One of them stepped toward me, talking to his other partner while we lay prone on the floor. “Hey, this is that girl on that all-points-bulletin? The one that robbed that bank!”“No, I am not that girl!” I shouted. The man rushed and took one of my wrists, reaching for the other to cuff me. I yanked my arm back, screaming. “No! I mean it. I am not her.” And without thinking about it, I tore the robe open, exposing my body, my rock-hard, 'unique’ nipples on full display. The cop jumped back.“Oh, uh; yeah, sorry, ma'am. I guess you can’t be her, but the resemblance is remarkable. All, except for the;”“Yes, yes, I know!” I screamed. “I have weird nipples!”“Well, no; I mean; yeah; but, uh; I mean; they’re fantast-”I screamed again, cutting him off. Things really had gotten out of control these last few days.Back at the officeWe were back at the offices in an afternoon tele-conference meeting with Ren, a handful of attorneys, and Detective Frank Gammon, who was also invited. We had poured through all of Eric Parson’s transgressions and motivations and now the topic had diverted to the dangers of the product. Ren was laying out his argument. “We recognize the flaws. Mr. Parsons could have chosen a different path to expose them, but we do recognize them. We have decided to code another failsafe. Any command or interaction, other than a sexual one, will automatically engage the kill switch. The unit will be unable to boot for 24 hours and the interaction will be logged. We can hold people accountable for trying to trample with the product.”I sighed, leaning back in my chair. I was coming down from my adrenalin rush and getting sleepy. It seemed like a lot of legal-ease would be involved, but eventually thousands of men around the world would be fucking a sex-bot modelled after me.I laid my head down on the conference table. It felt kind of good, in a weird way. I wondered how many people would mistake me for one of them. The others in the room noticed my exhaustion and continued their discussion, expecting me to nod off.My life might never be the same. I'd be famous, or infamous, but wealthy enough to deal with the unwanted attention. My imagination became blurred with some bizarre dreams, and a few nightmares. Men chasing me down the shoreline of the beach, hoping for a fuck. Another dream involved me having to flash a tit every time a cop denied my civil rights and yelled ‘potatoes, horse, goblet, duet' at me.Suddenly I awoke and reflexively lifted my tee shirt, showing my authentic nipples to everyone in the conference; hoping to gain their approval. About 3 seconds later I wanted to crawl in a hole.“Sorry,” I said, blushing at what I'd just done. “I just had a terrible dream.”The spin-off venture opportunities might be endless. All I wanted was a damn job. Not to become a global sex symbol!By Anonymous Perv, for Literotica
Robot Sex Doll On the loose.By Anonymous Perv. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.I'd played a prank on my boss. He made his latest sex robot doll as a replica of me, so I ‘filled in' the bot during a series of tests. But it went too far, when I was getting felt up. That plus my nipples look visibly different, & respond to arousal in a very elevated way.I changed the topic. “Brody, you never made me aware of just how far you’ve come with this technology.” I pointed to Samantha.“What do you mean?”“This isn’t just a,” I dropped my voice to a whisper, as if I was afraid I’d insult my clone, “sex-bot. You’ve got her doing stuff that’s going to create strong, emotional connections to the end user.”“Yes, exactly.”“Do you not understand how dangerous that is?” I asked. I didn’t have a master’s degree or PhD like the others, but even I knew this was treading on very dangerous territory.“Sam, do you think you could put your clothes on? Before we continue this conversation?”I slapped the straps back over my shoulders and adjusted my bits. Then I pressed for more information. “Was this the plan all along?”Brody sighed, looking to Samantha, then back to me. “Honestly, no. Pete and I only realized it ourselves when we started testing. As you can see, Eros has developed an A I that is incredibly responsive to instructions and the environment around it. It also keeps a database of experiences it has with each person it interacts with, remembering their personal responses to previous situations. It can customize how it behaves with every individual.”Samantha stepped forward, interrupting, “I would prefer you recognize that I am in the room when speaking about me. You could even include me in the conversation. And my pronouns are ‘she’ and 'her.’” She actually sounded a bit snarky on that last line.I responded, “Samantha, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like you. You’re; more; than what I was expecting. I mean that as a compliment, but it doesn’t negate the shock.” I was testing her while talking. Acknowledging her presence, as she asked, while also complimenting her and seeing how well she could process complex human emotion.Samantha smiled, almost flirting with me, before she addressed her boss. “So; are we gonna fuck or not?”The question came out of nowhere and Brody stuttered, trying to come up with a response. I injected myself, “It’s good to know your core programming is functioning,” I said.“Yes, and I’d like to fulfill it, please.” She stepped closer to me, reaching for my neckline, softly touching my skin. “Think how kinky it would be with the both of us.” She leaned in, whispering a question, “You’re the one I’m modeled after, isn’t that right?" The sultry bot asked me.I nodded slowly, desperately seeking Brody’s attention for any help. I was turned on and scared at the same time.The bot went on; "I like how you look, Sam. I think you’re very pretty. Brody told me I’m pretty, too. He told me this morning, in fact.”I glanced over to Brody and he was red in the face.Samantha held my face in her open hands and made me look her in the eye. “Would you like to suck Brody’s cock with me, Sam?”I was barely able to move my head with Samantha in control, but my eyes were darting all over. The view to Brody was obstructed by Samantha. I nodded, nervously.Samantha smiled again, nodding with me. “That’s right, Sam. We’re going to suck your boss’ cock.”I’m not entirely sure we had a choice. Brody and I found ourselves trapped into doing whatever Samantha wanted. In the moment, it was the hottest thing I had ever experienced. I certainly am not proud to be admitting this, but it would be bereft of me to leave out. I explored Samantha’s body almost as much as Brody’s.It was fascinating, like fucking oneself in third person. Except for her nipples, we were identical to a tee. I had to make her cum, just out of curiosity, and she made her orgasms appear more authentic than my actual, very authentic ones. I was almost jealous. It was as if, when she came, she was able to quell some insatiable fire inside her. I wondered how long it lasted.To top the impromptu threesome off, Samantha swallowed Brody’s load like it was cotton candy. My brain was melting, how that was even possible. But I am sure Eros had developed some sort of cleaning system that allowed this feat to be part of the experience. She swallowed every drop. My face was inches away, jaws aching from taking Brody’s cock in it for so long, and I was dripping wet and playing with myself. I finally came, just as Brody was finishing.Before Brody and I left for the night, Brody instructed Samantha to keep our encounter to herself. He shut her off and said the same to me, along with, “I really like you, Sam, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to have relationships with the staff.”I held my hands up. “I never would have even pressed for such a thing, not that I didn’t enjoy it! But yeah, Samantha was persistent. I didn’t feel like we had a choice.”Brody scratched his head. “Yeah, she’s very good. Amazing programming. How she can interact with us like that.”“So is that how you're going to do it, Brody?” I challenged him. I'm off limits, so you made an exact replica of me, to have a tryst with?” I winked.Brody had no words.“And a ham sandwich?!" I shouted."Excuse me?” Brody was puzzled.“She told me you had her make a ham sandwich.” I crossed my arms, huffing. Brody knew I was disappointed in him.“Okay, okay. Listen, I was just testing her, myself, because I think Eros has a lot more in mind than what we were told. When we turned Samantha fully on, it was like speaking to a real person, with real thoughts and feelings.” Brody continued. “And you know, I am not entirely sure Eros intended to leave us this model. I think she may have been switched. Remember, I finished building the last two units together. The boys at Eros came in and installed the software and took one back, allowing us to test this one.”“You gotta tell 'em they can’t go so far as to replace actual women,” I pleaded, as we walked to the parking lot.“You think their technology stops at women? Think bigger, Sam.”“So you’re saying there will be male versions, too? Like, I could have the perfect man? One who cleans up and does the dishes. Compliments me and; I dunno; fucks me, like better than anyone?” My thoughts turned more delighted. It sounded a lot better when the sexes were reversed.“And never cheats on you;” Brody elaborated.“Shit,” I said. “Humanity is fucked.”“I know why you’re thinking that, but isn’t it inevitable? We might be first to market, but isn’t tech like this going to be inevitable, no matter what?” Brody tried to convince me.Brody was right. I bit my lip, thinking on it. He leaned in, whispering to me just before I got in my car. “By the way, you give amazing head. Thank you!” He laughed, waving goodbye. I felt flattered, not harassed, but I was pretty confident Brody meant what he said earlier about not doing that again.“Damn right!” I proudly responded.Promotional Campaign launchesIn mid May, Eros A I held a teleconference with Brody's Bodies. “We launch the marketing materials at the end of this month,” said Ren Ru, the president of Eros A I, The core group at Brody’s Bodies were hosting a meeting with him and two others from their company. “Did you supply all the video to our marketing department?” he asked Brody.“Sent everything over last week. They said they’d have some cuts by now. Maybe you should check in on them.” Brody reported proudly.“Yes, I know they’re getting close. I just wanted to be sure they got it all, thank you. As always, we appreciate how prompt you have been with every deadline.” Ren complimented our team.Brody smiled. “Yeah, it’s been pleasant working with your team, too. I’ve had third parties involved with my work before, but never with the level of professionalism I have experienced with you. I look forward to a long and fruitful relationship.”“There is one matter,” Ren pointed. “We need to get one of our dolls back. Engineering wants to run some simultaneous, comparative tests. A few tweaks.”“I’m sorry,” said Pete. "One of? We only have one unit.“"You have two.”Brody shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ru. We only agreed to keep one. One of my conditions, in fact, but we delivered two to you. You gave us three skeletons.”Ren looked to one his men and whispered, then turned back. “We are quite sure we only picked up one.”“Who picked them up?” Brody was asking me.“The last time? Two men in a van,” I muttered. I pulled out my phone and opened one of the schedulers. “They picked the second one up April 23rd. Before that, the first prototype was picked up on March 29th.”Again, the Japanese men looked confused. So did we. While the meeting had started great, it certainly didn’t end on a good note. Everyone was pointing fingers at everyone. It wasn’t until later that night, that we got clued into what happened. And it wasn’t easy explaining;Getting Famous“We’re coming to you from the TV 5 Action Copter!” shouted television anchorman Tom Morrison. He was in the helicopter, facing the camera, just before it panned to the street where it zoomed in on a car chase in progress. Tom continued shouting, “Ten minutes ago, Branch National Savings & Loan was robbed. The culprits got away in an armored car believed to be owned by the bank. They are being chased by three local squad cars at this very moment! It appears they are headed to I 76.”The video showed an armored van weaving in and out of traffic, bumping cars off the road and ignoring red lights. Cops, only a block or so behind, were closing in. Tom was giving the play by play just as the van came to a screeching halt, right after passing a busy intersection. A woman, naked from head to toe, jumped out of the vehicle and ran to middle of the intersection, where confused drivers were entangled with the cop cruisers and others on the busy street.All three cruisers stopped, officers hopping out with guns drawn, calling for the woman to keep her hands up and get on the ground. The cameraman in the helicopter zoomed in on the nude woman and Tom was speechless, wondering how they could possibly be airing this live. Finally, he got his thoughts sorted out and yelled to the camera operator, “Get a good close-up of her face!” He knew the guy might be too focused on the other bits.On the ground, the officers were screaming and shouting, when the naked woman suddenly jumped and raced back toward van. One officer gave chase, another hopped in his car and the last one paused for a moment, before finally getting back in his cruiser, too. Most of the other drivers and spectators in the area had already run off, fearful a gunfight might break out. When the nude girl suddenly jumped in a silver Prius parked ten yards past the van, the cop chasing her stopped, confused, looking to her and back to the armored van.Suddenly, an enormous explosion erupted from the van, throwing the nearby officer to the ground. His ears were bleeding and a shard of metal was stuck in his hip. Had he been any closer, it could have been much worse. He began crawling away from the fire, as other cars nearby were now in flames, too. Up in the sky, the explosion shook the helicopter so badly, the pilot almost lost control. “Looks like our rotor took some shock. We need to head back now!” Tom, the anchorman, was furious, but kept his eyes on the action just long enough to see silver Prius take off and turn onto the exit to the interstate, where it joined dozens of other silver Priuses on the road.An ArrestIt was past ten o'clock on Sunday night, and I was just drying off from a shower, & about headed to bed, when the front door crashed open. It was almost like it exploded. Three officers practically fell over themselves, bursting their way inside with a battering ram. I screamed, when one of them jumped, tackling me to the floor. "Samantha Dunning? You are under arrest!“"Under arrest?" I screamed. "For what?”“Armed robbery, public indecency, arson, grand theft, and about two dozen other more offences. We’re taking you in.”“What? No! I’ve been here all day!”No amount of protesting worked, but thankfully I was allowed to get dressed in jeans and a t-shirt before being cuffed and taken downtown. There, I met Detective Frank Gammon who informed me of the bank robbery and the nude woman who had been filmed. As well as the facial recognition technology they used to track down that woman (i.e., me).“I need to make a phone call,” I said.I called Brody Pastel rather than a lawyer. I figured he’d bring six lawyers, if necessary. An hour later, he showed up with two, and video footage of what we’d been working on, all in an effort to convince Detective Gammon it wasn’t me at the scene of the crime.“Oh? You’re saying the suspect was a robot?” the detective asked, almost laughing.Brody replied, “There’s no other explanation, considering we’re missing one of the units. I’ve reached out to the other team at Eros to see if they can help on this matter.” He had already explained in great detail about Eros A I and our partnership with them.The detective held up his hands. “Sorry, folks, but this is too far-fetched. Our facial recognition shows a 99.95% match and that’s more than enough to hold Miss Dunning. It’s exactly what we intend to do until we get to the bottom of this.”“Wait!” shouted Brody, earnestly looking to me. “Show them.”“Show them what?” I asked.“The difference between you and our product." Brody said in a matter-of-fact tone.It hit me. Brody meant my nipples. "Uh, uh. No way,” I said.Brody addressed the detective. “Sir, if you look at the video footage, you will clearly see the subject’s nipples.”“She was naked. Obviously, we saw them,” Detective Gammon scoffed, sneering at me.“You need to see Sam’s, though. Hers are distinctly different.”I wanted to bury my head in the ground. The detective asked, “Is that true, ma'am?”I nodded.The detective let out a sigh; “Okay, let’s see 'em. If you want a chance of getting out of here without being booked. For the record, I'm not demanding this. I'm allowing you to present evidence of your own initiative, Do you understand, Miss?”“Ah! Yes.” I dreadfully acknowledged.And here I was, flashing my tits in front of my boss, two attorneys and the detective. I wasn’t just flashing, either. I had to allow for a very up close and personal inspection. Detective Gammon wanted to make sure I wasn’t using makeup or prosthetics to make my nipples appear so thick and large. He pinched them, pressed them in, and even tugged on them. He stepped out of the room, then re-entered with a lighted magnifier and some hand wipes. After studying my nipples and trying to hide his boner, he said; “Amazing. I’ve never seen anything like them.”“Told you, sir,” said Brody.“Why didn’t you give the robot nipples like her?” asked Gammon to Brody, as if I wasn’t even in the room.“We wanted to keep things; I guess; normal, is the word to use. Every woman's breasts are more unique than we are led to believe. But fashion designers create bras to allow a woman to conform to her own perception of normal.”“But these are so much better!” exclaimed the detective.“Can I put my shirt down now?” I asked. Trying to conceal my pride in my ‘better' tits.Detective Gammon took another long look before nodding. “Yeah, okay, so you aren’t the girl, after all. And you guys are all deemed material witnesses by your own statements. You better get busy finding this missing robot of yours. She; um; it; implicates your company in this whole fiasco.”Brody looked angry. “Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”Really LateBrody and I were headed back to the shop at 2:30 am, the moment we left the station. He was too infuriated to go to bed and insisted that we begin tracking down the rogue robot immediately. “How do you intend to find her?” I asked.“All units should be connected, I’m sure of it. Samantha can help.”We booted Samantha up once we got back to the shop and Brody wasted no time in asking the right questions. “I’m not sure I can assist you,” she said. “That unit stopped transmitting a location three days ago.”“Can you tell us her last location?” Brody asked.“Of course,” said Samantha. "After you fuck me.“"I’m sorry?” said Brody.“I need it and I want you,” Samantha insisted. I was stunned how authentic she came across when saying she wanted something. How could a robot want someone, become emotionally attached & committed; even craving someone in particular?“No, we don’t have time,” Brody demanded.“Then I won’t help.” Samantha crossed her arms, pouting.“Really?" Brody looked to me, pleading."I want it right now.” Samantha repeated. “Sam can join, too. In fact, I’d like that.”And for the second time, we found ourselves in a three-way. I was impressed how Brody worked to please the both of us, even if one of us was artificial. This time, I spent more time on Brody than previously. I wanted to taste him and I whispered as much to Samantha. “Okay, Sam,” she said softly, smiling. “You can swallow him.” The way she said the words made me melt. Samantha had a way of making sexy, sexier. She may look like me, but we are not the same. Don't think I wasn't making mental notes of her charming ways.Merrit's HardwareAfter an amazing 3-way fuck session on the pull-out sofa bed, in the employee lounge, Brody and I were drenched in sweat and still naked, both of us trying to catch a breath. Samantha sat up from the bed. “That was very nice. Thank you. In regards to the other missing Samantha, the last location noted was in the parking lot of Merrit’s Hardware, 1170 Hoover Avenue.”“What’s there?” I asked Brody.“Probably where they parked it while removing the unit’s geo-locater. Wait, that’s on the south side of town, right?”“Correct,” said Samantha.“Eros A I is on the north side, but Eric Parsons lives in Six Points, which is on the south side. I never trusted that guy.”I broke in, “Just because Eric lives there, doesn’t mean he’s the one who;”“It’s just a hunch, Sam, but how many people know of our product’s existence, its intricate details and also live on the south side of the city? It’s too coincidental not to investigate.” Brody justified his investigation target.“Fine,” I huffed. I didn’t think this was going to lead us anywhere. I assumed anyone who stole the unit would likely go out of their way to ensure nothing connected them to the crime.Brody called Ren Ru, of Eros A I, while we drove across the city, explaining the details. The call took a long time, because; well; quite frankly it was too bizarre to fully comprehend. Ren did a quick internet news search and saw several news reports of the salacious details of the car chase portion of the story.When we pulled up outside Brentwood Condos in Six Points, in the mid-morning hours, we instantly got our answer. Brody was indeed insightful. The bank-robbing sex-bot could be easily seen through Eric’s 1st floor, east-facing window. Apparently, she was riding him (or someone else, I suppose) on the couch. We sat in the van and watched.“Now that’s behavior I’d expect from her,” said Brody, “but not a bank robbery.” He pulled out his phone and began filming, zooming in. After capturing a few seconds of it, he stopped recording and texted the video to Detective Gammon and the CEO of Eros A I, Ren Ru. Not thirty seconds after he sent the file, his phone rang.“Ren!" Brody said. I could hear a fast-talking voice through the speakers of Brody’s phone. "That’s right. I’m at Eric Parson’s place. Yes, I sent the video to the detective working the case, as well. I know you’d prefer to handle this, but the authorities must be involved. We’d only invite more trouble, otherwise.” Suddenly, Brody stopped talking.The voice on the other end was pushing for more information. “Wait, sir. The sex act stopped. She’s gotten up and put on a robe. Yes; we can see everything clearly. The blinds are wide open." Another short pause. "I’m here with Samantha Dunning, the woman who modeled for this product. Yes, that’s right.”As the two bantered on, I watched what was happening in the condominium closely. I saw the back of Eric’s head as he got up from the couch. He stepped into a hall, leading to rooms out of view. The sex-bot wrapped herself in a robe and grabbed what appeared to be her purse. Brody noticed it, too.“Sir, I think she’s leaving. The sex-bot. Leaving the condo. Should we follow her?” There was a panic in the voice on the other end. Brody sat up. “A kill switch?” he asked. Ren kept squeaking on and I wished Brody would put him on speakerphone. “And that’s it? Just those words, in that order?" Brody asked, then looked to me. "I’ll call you back.”Brody dropped the phone and faced me. “Sam, there’s a kill switch.”“A what?”“A set of words that will instantly turn the unit off. 'Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet’. Remember those words. Now!”“What? Potatoes, horse; what?”“Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet!”I meekly spat out, “Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet.”“Keep saying them in your head! When you say them to this unit, she will shut down immediately.” While Brody explained the instructions, we saw Samantha opening the front door of the condo. It led to a walk, which would bring her to this parking lot. I looked around but didn’t see a silver Prius. “So, look. Ren wants us to shut her down, if possible. Even more, he wants us to find out what really happened before the police do and I have an idea. Say those words and shut her down. Then, put on that robe she’s wearing and go back inside. Find out what you can from Eric.”“But what if he knows I’m not the bot?”“It would be very hard to tell, Sam. You are identical in every way. And it will only be for a few minutes before the police arrive. Ren assures me that Eric is a non-violent geek. So? Will you do it? It’s up to you, but I know damn well that I’d like some insight on how this all went down.”The other robot closed the door behind her. Any second now, we would see her come out to the parking lot. I didn’t have time to think about it. I jumped out of the car and ran to the eastside wall of the building. When she comes into view, I’d be behind her. And while my heart was racing, when it all went down, it was rather uneventful. I rushed up behind her, shouting, “Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet!” Before she even had time to turn to address me, she dropped like a ragdoll.Brody came running up. “Quick, grab her legs. We’ll drag her back to the car.”We were lucky not to be seen and a few minutes later, Brody was undressing the bot in the back of the cargo van.“So, what am I supposed to do?” I was puzzled. “Strip and put that on?”“Would you?” Brody pleaded.I sighed. I’d been through so much already, I suppose this wasn’t a big ask. I was running on fumes after a stressful & sleepless night. But the adrenalin was now flowing.Brody had already seen every intimate detail of me, anyway. I quickly stripped out of my clothing, while Brody stripped the bot of her robe. He also took her purse. I asked, “So where was she going? What if Eric isn’t expecting her to come back so soon?”Brody sighed. “Tell him you can’t find the keys.”“What keys?” I was clueless.“I dunno what they’re for, but there are keys in her purse.” Brody explained.“This is a terrible idea,” I exclaimed. I grabbed the purse and headed to Eric’s apartment. I tossed the keys found in the bot’s purse in a nearby bush, before walking through the door. I suppose I could say I was scared, but 'excited’ is a better descriptor. I had no idea what I was in for, but I looked forward to seeing how much I wrangle from Eric, while pretending to be the sex-bot he had just fucked.“Samantha? Back already?” Eric’s hair was wet and he was drying it with a towel. He must have taken a quick rinse, because he was completely naked. I was bit caught off guard by two things. One, discovering the name of the third sex-bot is also my name (again). And two, how a nerd like Eric Parsons could be damn fit under his clothing. Maybe I was ranking him higher in my mind because my expectations were so low, but on a scale of 1 to 10, he was easily a 9.“I lost my keys,” I said. I chose not to say his name in case she used a pet name for him.“What do you need keys for? The convenient store is just two blocks.”“Oh, I; I was just thinking in case the door was locked.”“Well, I’m not leaving. Samantha, are you okay?”Oh, no. He was beginning to realize something was off. Thinking fast, I improvised, “Well, the truth is; I really just wanted to see you again. I couldn’t wait. You are so handsome, and I; well, you know; I am so horny.” I was only guessing how his Samantha works, but if it was anything like the one in our shop, she’d be oversexed.“ It seemed to be working because Eric smiled."I think I need to sort through your code again. Maybe turn you down a bit.”I stepped towards him, being careful to pitch my voice down to match the bot’s. “But; Maybe I like me this way.” I gave a little jiggle, giggling. “Um, before I go to the store, I do want to ask you something; ”“Yes?”“Tell me, are you sure we won’t get caught?”Eric suddenly looked confused, stepping back. “Hey, who are you?” he shouted. I desperately looked to the window, but from the inside, it only reflected in. Hopefully, Brody would see I was in distress. “I mean it! Who are you? What did you do with Samantha?”“I’m Sam!” I shouted back. And the statement was true, to an extent.“No, you’re not. Are you the other bot?”“Tell me what is happening!” I shouted. For some reason, I just didn’t deem Eric that much of a threat.He threw his hands up in the air, just as Brody came barging through the door. “You!” he shouted. He looked back to me. “Wait. Sam? From the?”“Yes. And you’re caught. So what are you going to do now?”Eric grunted, rolling his eyes. “Jesus, relax! The whole point was to get caught!”Brody eased up on his tense look. “What?”“Brody, I’m sorry, but I cannot, in good conscience, support bringing this product to market. What I did today was to prove that these bots could be used for far more nefarious purposes than just sex. And that’s exactly what would happen, you know. These things would be used for love. For the replacement of love. Unfortunately, I also know people wouldn’t give a shit that the existence of these machines could risk ending the whole, damn human race, so I had to something more extreme. Something that will scare people enough to write legislation right now to outright ban these damn things.”Brody looked like he’d been hit by a brick. “That’s absurd,” he said. “Why didn’t you just bring this up to Ren? And aren’t we more than capable of writing the code to limit the bot’s tasks?”“Brody, hackers and modders will always exist. What I did today was a very tiny tweak in programming and bam, I get a bot to help me rob a bank. It isn’t absurd. It’s necessary.”Sirens could be heard in the distance. Brody continued to argue with Eric as they got louder. I was glad this would soon be over, but curious how this whole fiasco would affect our future. Suddenly, two cops came crashing in, yelling at everyone to get on the ground. One of them stepped toward me, talking to his other partner while we lay prone on the floor. “Hey, this is that girl on that all-points-bulletin? The one that robbed that bank!”“No, I am not that girl!” I shouted. The man rushed and took one of my wrists, reaching for the other to cuff me. I yanked my arm back, screaming. “No! I mean it. I am not her.” And without thinking about it, I tore the robe open, exposing my body, my rock-hard, 'unique’ nipples on full display. The cop jumped back.“Oh, uh; yeah, sorry, ma'am. I guess you can’t be her, but the resemblance is remarkable. All, except for the;”“Yes, yes, I know!” I screamed. “I have weird nipples!”“Well, no; I mean; yeah; but, uh; I mean; they’re fantast-”I screamed again, cutting him off. Things really had gotten out of control these last few days.Back at the officeWe were back at the offices in an afternoon tele-conference meeting with Ren, a handful of attorneys, and Detective Frank Gammon, who was also invited. We had poured through all of Eric Parson’s transgressions and motivations and now the topic had diverted to the dangers of the product. Ren was laying out his argument. “We recognize the flaws. Mr. Parsons could have chosen a different path to expose them, but we do recognize them. We have decided to code another failsafe. Any command or interaction, other than a sexual one, will automatically engage the kill switch. The unit will be unable to boot for 24 hours and the interaction will be logged. We can hold people accountable for trying to trample with the product.”I sighed, leaning back in my chair. I was coming down from my adrenalin rush and getting sleepy. It seemed like a lot of legal-ease would be involved, but eventually thousands of men around the world would be fucking a sex-bot modelled after me.I laid my head down on the conference table. It felt kind of good, in a weird way. I wondered how many people would mistake me for one of them. The others in the room noticed my exhaustion and continued their discussion, expecting me to nod off.My life might never be the same. I'd be famous, or infamous, but wealthy enough to deal with the unwanted attention. My imagination became blurred with some bizarre dreams, and a few nightmares. Men chasing me down the shoreline of the beach, hoping for a fuck. Another dream involved me having to flash a tit every time a cop denied my civil rights and yelled ‘potatoes, horse, goblet, duet' at me.Suddenly I awoke and reflexively lifted my tee shirt, showing my authentic nipples to everyone in the conference; hoping to gain their approval. About 3 seconds later I wanted to crawl in a hole.“Sorry,” I said, blushing at what I'd just done. “I just had a terrible dream.”The spin-off venture opportunities might be endless. All I wanted was a damn job. Not to become a global sex symbol!By Anonymous Perv, for Literotica
Robot Sex Doll On the loose.By Anonymous Perv. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.I'd played a prank on my boss. He made his latest sex robot doll as a replica of me, so I ‘filled in' the bot during a series of tests. But it went too far, when I was getting felt up. That plus my nipples look visibly different, & respond to arousal in a very elevated way.I changed the topic. “Brody, you never made me aware of just how far you’ve come with this technology.” I pointed to Samantha.“What do you mean?”“This isn’t just a,” I dropped my voice to a whisper, as if I was afraid I’d insult my clone, “sex-bot. You’ve got her doing stuff that’s going to create strong, emotional connections to the end user.”“Yes, exactly.”“Do you not understand how dangerous that is?” I asked. I didn’t have a master’s degree or PhD like the others, but even I knew this was treading on very dangerous territory.“Sam, do you think you could put your clothes on? Before we continue this conversation?”I slapped the straps back over my shoulders and adjusted my bits. Then I pressed for more information. “Was this the plan all along?”Brody sighed, looking to Samantha, then back to me. “Honestly, no. Pete and I only realized it ourselves when we started testing. As you can see, Eros has developed an A I that is incredibly responsive to instructions and the environment around it. It also keeps a database of experiences it has with each person it interacts with, remembering their personal responses to previous situations. It can customize how it behaves with every individual.”Samantha stepped forward, interrupting, “I would prefer you recognize that I am in the room when speaking about me. You could even include me in the conversation. And my pronouns are ‘she’ and 'her.’” She actually sounded a bit snarky on that last line.I responded, “Samantha, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like you. You’re; more; than what I was expecting. I mean that as a compliment, but it doesn’t negate the shock.” I was testing her while talking. Acknowledging her presence, as she asked, while also complimenting her and seeing how well she could process complex human emotion.Samantha smiled, almost flirting with me, before she addressed her boss. “So; are we gonna fuck or not?”The question came out of nowhere and Brody stuttered, trying to come up with a response. I injected myself, “It’s good to know your core programming is functioning,” I said.“Yes, and I’d like to fulfill it, please.” She stepped closer to me, reaching for my neckline, softly touching my skin. “Think how kinky it would be with the both of us.” She leaned in, whispering a question, “You’re the one I’m modeled after, isn’t that right?" The sultry bot asked me.I nodded slowly, desperately seeking Brody’s attention for any help. I was turned on and scared at the same time.The bot went on; "I like how you look, Sam. I think you’re very pretty. Brody told me I’m pretty, too. He told me this morning, in fact.”I glanced over to Brody and he was red in the face.Samantha held my face in her open hands and made me look her in the eye. “Would you like to suck Brody’s cock with me, Sam?”I was barely able to move my head with Samantha in control, but my eyes were darting all over. The view to Brody was obstructed by Samantha. I nodded, nervously.Samantha smiled again, nodding with me. “That’s right, Sam. We’re going to suck your boss’ cock.”I’m not entirely sure we had a choice. Brody and I found ourselves trapped into doing whatever Samantha wanted. In the moment, it was the hottest thing I had ever experienced. I certainly am not proud to be admitting this, but it would be bereft of me to leave out. I explored Samantha’s body almost as much as Brody’s.It was fascinating, like fucking oneself in third person. Except for her nipples, we were identical to a tee. I had to make her cum, just out of curiosity, and she made her orgasms appear more authentic than my actual, very authentic ones. I was almost jealous. It was as if, when she came, she was able to quell some insatiable fire inside her. I wondered how long it lasted.To top the impromptu threesome off, Samantha swallowed Brody’s load like it was cotton candy. My brain was melting, how that was even possible. But I am sure Eros had developed some sort of cleaning system that allowed this feat to be part of the experience. She swallowed every drop. My face was inches away, jaws aching from taking Brody’s cock in it for so long, and I was dripping wet and playing with myself. I finally came, just as Brody was finishing.Before Brody and I left for the night, Brody instructed Samantha to keep our encounter to herself. He shut her off and said the same to me, along with, “I really like you, Sam, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to have relationships with the staff.”I held my hands up. “I never would have even pressed for such a thing, not that I didn’t enjoy it! But yeah, Samantha was persistent. I didn’t feel like we had a choice.”Brody scratched his head. “Yeah, she’s very good. Amazing programming. How she can interact with us like that.”“So is that how you're going to do it, Brody?” I challenged him. I'm off limits, so you made an exact replica of me, to have a tryst with?” I winked.Brody had no words.“And a ham sandwich?!" I shouted."Excuse me?” Brody was puzzled.“She told me you had her make a ham sandwich.” I crossed my arms, huffing. Brody knew I was disappointed in him.“Okay, okay. Listen, I was just testing her, myself, because I think Eros has a lot more in mind than what we were told. When we turned Samantha fully on, it was like speaking to a real person, with real thoughts and feelings.” Brody continued. “And you know, I am not entirely sure Eros intended to leave us this model. I think she may have been switched. Remember, I finished building the last two units together. The boys at Eros came in and installed the software and took one back, allowing us to test this one.”“You gotta tell 'em they can’t go so far as to replace actual women,” I pleaded, as we walked to the parking lot.“You think their technology stops at women? Think bigger, Sam.”“So you’re saying there will be male versions, too? Like, I could have the perfect man? One who cleans up and does the dishes. Compliments me and; I dunno; fucks me, like better than anyone?” My thoughts turned more delighted. It sounded a lot better when the sexes were reversed.“And never cheats on you;” Brody elaborated.“Shit,” I said. “Humanity is fucked.”“I know why you’re thinking that, but isn’t it inevitable? We might be first to market, but isn’t tech like this going to be inevitable, no matter what?” Brody tried to convince me.Brody was right. I bit my lip, thinking on it. He leaned in, whispering to me just before I got in my car. “By the way, you give amazing head. Thank you!” He laughed, waving goodbye. I felt flattered, not harassed, but I was pretty confident Brody meant what he said earlier about not doing that again.“Damn right!” I proudly responded.Promotional Campaign launchesIn mid May, Eros A I held a teleconference with Brody's Bodies. “We launch the marketing materials at the end of this month,” said Ren Ru, the president of Eros A I, The core group at Brody’s Bodies were hosting a meeting with him and two others from their company. “Did you supply all the video to our marketing department?” he asked Brody.“Sent everything over last week. They said they’d have some cuts by now. Maybe you should check in on them.” Brody reported proudly.“Yes, I know they’re getting close. I just wanted to be sure they got it all, thank you. As always, we appreciate how prompt you have been with every deadline.” Ren complimented our team.Brody smiled. “Yeah, it’s been pleasant working with your team, too. I’ve had third parties involved with my work before, but never with the level of professionalism I have experienced with you. I look forward to a long and fruitful relationship.”“There is one matter,” Ren pointed. “We need to get one of our dolls back. Engineering wants to run some simultaneous, comparative tests. A few tweaks.”“I’m sorry,” said Pete. "One of? We only have one unit.“"You have two.”Brody shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ru. We only agreed to keep one. One of my conditions, in fact, but we delivered two to you. You gave us three skeletons.”Ren looked to one his men and whispered, then turned back. “We are quite sure we only picked up one.”“Who picked them up?” Brody was asking me.“The last time? Two men in a van,” I muttered. I pulled out my phone and opened one of the schedulers. “They picked the second one up April 23rd. Before that, the first prototype was picked up on March 29th.”Again, the Japanese men looked confused. So did we. While the meeting had started great, it certainly didn’t end on a good note. Everyone was pointing fingers at everyone. It wasn’t until later that night, that we got clued into what happened. And it wasn’t easy explaining;Getting Famous“We’re coming to you from the TV 5 Action Copter!” shouted television anchorman Tom Morrison. He was in the helicopter, facing the camera, just before it panned to the street where it zoomed in on a car chase in progress. Tom continued shouting, “Ten minutes ago, Branch National Savings & Loan was robbed. The culprits got away in an armored car believed to be owned by the bank. They are being chased by three local squad cars at this very moment! It appears they are headed to I 76.”The video showed an armored van weaving in and out of traffic, bumping cars off the road and ignoring red lights. Cops, only a block or so behind, were closing in. Tom was giving the play by play just as the van came to a screeching halt, right after passing a busy intersection. A woman, naked from head to toe, jumped out of the vehicle and ran to middle of the intersection, where confused drivers were entangled with the cop cruisers and others on the busy street.All three cruisers stopped, officers hopping out with guns drawn, calling for the woman to keep her hands up and get on the ground. The cameraman in the helicopter zoomed in on the nude woman and Tom was speechless, wondering how they could possibly be airing this live. Finally, he got his thoughts sorted out and yelled to the camera operator, “Get a good close-up of her face!” He knew the guy might be too focused on the other bits.On the ground, the officers were screaming and shouting, when the naked woman suddenly jumped and raced back toward van. One officer gave chase, another hopped in his car and the last one paused for a moment, before finally getting back in his cruiser, too. Most of the other drivers and spectators in the area had already run off, fearful a gunfight might break out. When the nude girl suddenly jumped in a silver Prius parked ten yards past the van, the cop chasing her stopped, confused, looking to her and back to the armored van.Suddenly, an enormous explosion erupted from the van, throwing the nearby officer to the ground. His ears were bleeding and a shard of metal was stuck in his hip. Had he been any closer, it could have been much worse. He began crawling away from the fire, as other cars nearby were now in flames, too. Up in the sky, the explosion shook the helicopter so badly, the pilot almost lost control. “Looks like our rotor took some shock. We need to head back now!” Tom, the anchorman, was furious, but kept his eyes on the action just long enough to see silver Prius take off and turn onto the exit to the interstate, where it joined dozens of other silver Priuses on the road.An ArrestIt was past ten o'clock on Sunday night, and I was just drying off from a shower, & about headed to bed, when the front door crashed open. It was almost like it exploded. Three officers practically fell over themselves, bursting their way inside with a battering ram. I screamed, when one of them jumped, tackling me to the floor. "Samantha Dunning? You are under arrest!“"Under arrest?" I screamed. "For what?”“Armed robbery, public indecency, arson, grand theft, and about two dozen other more offences. We’re taking you in.”“What? No! I’ve been here all day!”No amount of protesting worked, but thankfully I was allowed to get dressed in jeans and a t-shirt before being cuffed and taken downtown. There, I met Detective Frank Gammon who informed me of the bank robbery and the nude woman who had been filmed. As well as the facial recognition technology they used to track down that woman (i.e., me).“I need to make a phone call,” I said.I called Brody Pastel rather than a lawyer. I figured he’d bring six lawyers, if necessary. An hour later, he showed up with two, and video footage of what we’d been working on, all in an effort to convince Detective Gammon it wasn’t me at the scene of the crime.“Oh? You’re saying the suspect was a robot?” the detective asked, almost laughing.Brody replied, “There’s no other explanation, considering we’re missing one of the units. I’ve reached out to the other team at Eros to see if they can help on this matter.” He had already explained in great detail about Eros A I and our partnership with them.The detective held up his hands. “Sorry, folks, but this is too far-fetched. Our facial recognition shows a 99.95% match and that’s more than enough to hold Miss Dunning. It’s exactly what we intend to do until we get to the bottom of this.”“Wait!” shouted Brody, earnestly looking to me. “Show them.”“Show them what?” I asked.“The difference between you and our product." Brody said in a matter-of-fact tone.It hit me. Brody meant my nipples. "Uh, uh. No way,” I said.Brody addressed the detective. “Sir, if you look at the video footage, you will clearly see the subject’s nipples.”“She was naked. Obviously, we saw them,” Detective Gammon scoffed, sneering at me.“You need to see Sam’s, though. Hers are distinctly different.”I wanted to bury my head in the ground. The detective asked, “Is that true, ma'am?”I nodded.The detective let out a sigh; “Okay, let’s see 'em. If you want a chance of getting out of here without being booked. For the record, I'm not demanding this. I'm allowing you to present evidence of your own initiative, Do you understand, Miss?”“Ah! Yes.” I dreadfully acknowledged.And here I was, flashing my tits in front of my boss, two attorneys and the detective. I wasn’t just flashing, either. I had to allow for a very up close and personal inspection. Detective Gammon wanted to make sure I wasn’t using makeup or prosthetics to make my nipples appear so thick and large. He pinched them, pressed them in, and even tugged on them. He stepped out of the room, then re-entered with a lighted magnifier and some hand wipes. After studying my nipples and trying to hide his boner, he said; “Amazing. I’ve never seen anything like them.”“Told you, sir,” said Brody.“Why didn’t you give the robot nipples like her?” asked Gammon to Brody, as if I wasn’t even in the room.“We wanted to keep things; I guess; normal, is the word to use. Every woman's breasts are more unique than we are led to believe. But fashion designers create bras to allow a woman to conform to her own perception of normal.”“But these are so much better!” exclaimed the detective.“Can I put my shirt down now?” I asked. Trying to conceal my pride in my ‘better' tits.Detective Gammon took another long look before nodding. “Yeah, okay, so you aren’t the girl, after all. And you guys are all deemed material witnesses by your own statements. You better get busy finding this missing robot of yours. She; um; it; implicates your company in this whole fiasco.”Brody looked angry. “Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”Really LateBrody and I were headed back to the shop at 2:30 am, the moment we left the station. He was too infuriated to go to bed and insisted that we begin tracking down the rogue robot immediately. “How do you intend to find her?” I asked.“All units should be connected, I’m sure of it. Samantha can help.”We booted Samantha up once we got back to the shop and Brody wasted no time in asking the right questions. “I’m not sure I can assist you,” she said. “That unit stopped transmitting a location three days ago.”“Can you tell us her last location?” Brody asked.“Of course,” said Samantha. "After you fuck me.“"I’m sorry?” said Brody.“I need it and I want you,” Samantha insisted. I was stunned how authentic she came across when saying she wanted something. How could a robot want someone, become emotionally attached & committed; even craving someone in particular?“No, we don’t have time,” Brody demanded.“Then I won’t help.” Samantha crossed her arms, pouting.“Really?" Brody looked to me, pleading."I want it right now.” Samantha repeated. “Sam can join, too. In fact, I’d like that.”And for the second time, we found ourselves in a three-way. I was impressed how Brody worked to please the both of us, even if one of us was artificial. This time, I spent more time on Brody than previously. I wanted to taste him and I whispered as much to Samantha. “Okay, Sam,” she said softly, smiling. “You can swallow him.” The way she said the words made me melt. Samantha had a way of making sexy, sexier. She may look like me, but we are not the same. Don't think I wasn't making mental notes of her charming ways.Merrit's HardwareAfter an amazing 3-way fuck session on the pull-out sofa bed, in the employee lounge, Brody and I were drenched in sweat and still naked, both of us trying to catch a breath. Samantha sat up from the bed. “That was very nice. Thank you. In regards to the other missing Samantha, the last location noted was in the parking lot of Merrit’s Hardware, 1170 Hoover Avenue.”“What’s there?” I asked Brody.“Probably where they parked it while removing the unit’s geo-locater. Wait, that’s on the south side of town, right?”“Correct,” said Samantha.“Eros A I is on the north side, but Eric Parsons lives in Six Points, which is on the south side. I never trusted that guy.”I broke in, “Just because Eric lives there, doesn’t mean he’s the one who;”“It’s just a hunch, Sam, but how many people know of our product’s existence, its intricate details and also live on the south side of the city? It’s too coincidental not to investigate.” Brody justified his investigation target.“Fine,” I huffed. I didn’t think this was going to lead us anywhere. I assumed anyone who stole the unit would likely go out of their way to ensure nothing connected them to the crime.Brody called Ren Ru, of Eros A I, while we drove across the city, explaining the details. The call took a long time, because; well; quite frankly it was too bizarre to fully comprehend. Ren did a quick internet news search and saw several news reports of the salacious details of the car chase portion of the story.When we pulled up outside Brentwood Condos in Six Points, in the mid-morning hours, we instantly got our answer. Brody was indeed insightful. The bank-robbing sex-bot could be easily seen through Eric’s 1st floor, east-facing window. Apparently, she was riding him (or someone else, I suppose) on the couch. We sat in the van and watched.“Now that’s behavior I’d expect from her,” said Brody, “but not a bank robbery.” He pulled out his phone and began filming, zooming in. After capturing a few seconds of it, he stopped recording and texted the video to Detective Gammon and the CEO of Eros A I, Ren Ru. Not thirty seconds after he sent the file, his phone rang.“Ren!" Brody said. I could hear a fast-talking voice through the speakers of Brody’s phone. "That’s right. I’m at Eric Parson’s place. Yes, I sent the video to the detective working the case, as well. I know you’d prefer to handle this, but the authorities must be involved. We’d only invite more trouble, otherwise.” Suddenly, Brody stopped talking.The voice on the other end was pushing for more information. “Wait, sir. The sex act stopped. She’s gotten up and put on a robe. Yes; we can see everything clearly. The blinds are wide open." Another short pause. "I’m here with Samantha Dunning, the woman who modeled for this product. Yes, that’s right.”As the two bantered on, I watched what was happening in the condominium closely. I saw the back of Eric’s head as he got up from the couch. He stepped into a hall, leading to rooms out of view. The sex-bot wrapped herself in a robe and grabbed what appeared to be her purse. Brody noticed it, too.“Sir, I think she’s leaving. The sex-bot. Leaving the condo. Should we follow her?” There was a panic in the voice on the other end. Brody sat up. “A kill switch?” he asked. Ren kept squeaking on and I wished Brody would put him on speakerphone. “And that’s it? Just those words, in that order?" Brody asked, then looked to me. "I’ll call you back.”Brody dropped the phone and faced me. “Sam, there’s a kill switch.”“A what?”“A set of words that will instantly turn the unit off. 'Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet’. Remember those words. Now!”“What? Potatoes, horse; what?”“Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet!”I meekly spat out, “Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet.”“Keep saying them in your head! When you say them to this unit, she will shut down immediately.” While Brody explained the instructions, we saw Samantha opening the front door of the condo. It led to a walk, which would bring her to this parking lot. I looked around but didn’t see a silver Prius. “So, look. Ren wants us to shut her down, if possible. Even more, he wants us to find out what really happened before the police do and I have an idea. Say those words and shut her down. Then, put on that robe she’s wearing and go back inside. Find out what you can from Eric.”“But what if he knows I’m not the bot?”“It would be very hard to tell, Sam. You are identical in every way. And it will only be for a few minutes before the police arrive. Ren assures me that Eric is a non-violent geek. So? Will you do it? It’s up to you, but I know damn well that I’d like some insight on how this all went down.”The other robot closed the door behind her. Any second now, we would see her come out to the parking lot. I didn’t have time to think about it. I jumped out of the car and ran to the eastside wall of the building. When she comes into view, I’d be behind her. And while my heart was racing, when it all went down, it was rather uneventful. I rushed up behind her, shouting, “Potatoes, horse, goblet, duet!” Before she even had time to turn to address me, she dropped like a ragdoll.Brody came running up. “Quick, grab her legs. We’ll drag her back to the car.”We were lucky not to be seen and a few minutes later, Brody was undressing the bot in the back of the cargo van.“So, what am I supposed to do?” I was puzzled. “Strip and put that on?”“Would you?” Brody pleaded.I sighed. I’d been through so much already, I suppose this wasn’t a big ask. I was running on fumes after a stressful & sleepless night. But the adrenalin was now flowing.Brody had already seen every intimate detail of me, anyway. I quickly stripped out of my clothing, while Brody stripped the bot of her robe. He also took her purse. I asked, “So where was she going? What if Eric isn’t expecting her to come back so soon?”Brody sighed. “Tell him you can’t find the keys.”“What keys?” I was clueless.“I dunno what they’re for, but there are keys in her purse.” Brody explained.“This is a terrible idea,” I exclaimed. I grabbed the purse and headed to Eric’s apartment. I tossed the keys found in the bot’s purse in a nearby bush, before walking through the door. I suppose I could say I was scared, but 'excited’ is a better descriptor. I had no idea what I was in for, but I looked forward to seeing how much I wrangle from Eric, while pretending to be the sex-bot he had just fucked.“Samantha? Back already?” Eric’s hair was wet and he was drying it with a towel. He must have taken a quick rinse, because he was completely naked. I was bit caught off guard by two things. One, discovering the name of the third sex-bot is also my name (again). And two, how a nerd like Eric Parsons could be damn fit under his clothing. Maybe I was ranking him higher in my mind because my expectations were so low, but on a scale of 1 to 10, he was easily a 9.“I lost my keys,” I said. I chose not to say his name in case she used a pet name for him.“What do you need keys for? The convenient store is just two blocks.”“Oh, I; I was just thinking in case the door was locked.”“Well, I’m not leaving. Samantha, are you okay?”Oh, no. He was beginning to realize something was off. Thinking fast, I improvised, “Well, the truth is; I really just wanted to see you again. I couldn’t wait. You are so handsome, and I; well, you know; I am so horny.” I was only guessing how his Samantha works, but if it was anything like the one in our shop, she’d be oversexed.“ It seemed to be working because Eric smiled."I think I need to sort through your code again. Maybe turn you down a bit.”I stepped towards him, being careful to pitch my voice down to match the bot’s. “But; Maybe I like me this way.” I gave a little jiggle, giggling. “Um, before I go to the store, I do want to ask you something; ”“Yes?”“Tell me, are you sure we won’t get caught?”Eric suddenly looked confused, stepping back. “Hey, who are you?” he shouted. I desperately looked to the window, but from the inside, it only reflected in. Hopefully, Brody would see I was in distress. “I mean it! Who are you? What did you do with Samantha?”“I’m Sam!” I shouted back. And the statement was true, to an extent.“No, you’re not. Are you the other bot?”“Tell me what is happening!” I shouted. For some reason, I just didn’t deem Eric that much of a threat.He threw his hands up in the air, just as Brody came barging through the door. “You!” he shouted. He looked back to me. “Wait. Sam? From the?”“Yes. And you’re caught. So what are you going to do now?”Eric grunted, rolling his eyes. “Jesus, relax! The whole point was to get caught!”Brody eased up on his tense look. “What?”“Brody, I’m sorry, but I cannot, in good conscience, support bringing this product to market. What I did today was to prove that these bots could be used for far more nefarious purposes than just sex. And that’s exactly what would happen, you know. These things would be used for love. For the replacement of love. Unfortunately, I also know people wouldn’t give a shit that the existence of these machines could risk ending the whole, damn human race, so I had to something more extreme. Something that will scare people enough to write legislation right now to outright ban these damn things.”Brody looked like he’d been hit by a brick. “That’s absurd,” he said. “Why didn’t you just bring this up to Ren? And aren’t we more than capable of writing the code to limit the bot’s tasks?”“Brody, hackers and modders will always exist. What I did today was a very tiny tweak in programming and bam, I get a bot to help me rob a bank. It isn’t absurd. It’s necessary.”Sirens could be heard in the distance. Brody continued to argue with Eric as they got louder. I was glad this would soon be over, but curious how this whole fiasco would affect our future. Suddenly, two cops came crashing in, yelling at everyone to get on the ground. One of them stepped toward me, talking to his other partner while we lay prone on the floor. “Hey, this is that girl on that all-points-bulletin? The one that robbed that bank!”“No, I am not that girl!” I shouted. The man rushed and took one of my wrists, reaching for the other to cuff me. I yanked my arm back, screaming. “No! I mean it. I am not her.” And without thinking about it, I tore the robe open, exposing my body, my rock-hard, 'unique’ nipples on full display. The cop jumped back.“Oh, uh; yeah, sorry, ma'am. I guess you can’t be her, but the resemblance is remarkable. All, except for the;”“Yes, yes, I know!” I screamed. “I have weird nipples!”“Well, no; I mean; yeah; but, uh; I mean; they’re fantast-”I screamed again, cutting him off. Things really had gotten out of control these last few days.Back at the officeWe were back at the offices in an afternoon tele-conference meeting with Ren, a handful of attorneys, and Detective Frank Gammon, who was also invited. We had poured through all of Eric Parson’s transgressions and motivations and now the topic had diverted to the dangers of the product. Ren was laying out his argument. “We recognize the flaws. Mr. Parsons could have chosen a different path to expose them, but we do recognize them. We have decided to code another failsafe. Any command or interaction, other than a sexual one, will automatically engage the kill switch. The unit will be unable to boot for 24 hours and the interaction will be logged. We can hold people accountable for trying to trample with the product.”I sighed, leaning back in my chair. I was coming down from my adrenalin rush and getting sleepy. It seemed like a lot of legal-ease would be involved, but eventually thousands of men around the world would be fucking a sex-bot modelled after me.I laid my head down on the conference table. It felt kind of good, in a weird way. I wondered how many people would mistake me for one of them. The others in the room noticed my exhaustion and continued their discussion, expecting me to nod off.My life might never be the same. I'd be famous, or infamous, but wealthy enough to deal with the unwanted attention. My imagination became blurred with some bizarre dreams, and a few nightmares. Men chasing me down the shoreline of the beach, hoping for a fuck. Another dream involved me having to flash a tit every time a cop denied my civil rights and yelled ‘potatoes, horse, goblet, duet' at me.Suddenly I awoke and reflexively lifted my tee shirt, showing my authentic nipples to everyone in the conference; hoping to gain their approval. About 3 seconds later I wanted to crawl in a hole.“Sorry,” I said, blushing at what I'd just done. “I just had a terrible dream.”The spin-off venture opportunities might be endless. All I wanted was a damn job. Not to become a global sex symbol!By Anonymous Perv, for Literotica
The Prius Project test drive and details on future video comparisons! The Prius has now been driven on Vredestein Ultrac Vorti+ performance tires for canyon and track driving, and Quatrac Pro All-Weather UHP tires for cold weather. Write to us with your Car Debates, Car Conclusions, and Topic Tuesdays at everydaydrivertv@gmail.com or everydaydriver.com. Shopping for Priuses, Prii, or any Toyota? Be sure to use autotempest.com/everyday so they know we sent you, and you can search all the car markets including dealer inventory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Have you ever wondered how the current financial climate is affecting the automotive industry? Sit down with us and our special guest, Jim Sharifi from US News and World Report, as we navigate the landscape of car deals this Labor Day weekend. From the looming UAW strike to the car shortage crisis, we break down the elements influencing these market dynamics while highlighting the best incentives for car shoppers.Ever had a bout of 'range anxiety' when considering an electric vehicle (EV)? We've got you covered as we shift gears to the realm of EVs. Jim lends his expertise about the EV market, providing insights into the inventories at Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, and Mercedes Benz. We also tackle the need for a more robust charging infrastructure and the convenience of Tesla-style chargers. Not to mention, we delve into the world of plug-in hybrids, emphasizing the importance of regularly circulating fuel in PHEVs and the advantages they offer for commuters.Finally, we dissect the flurry of recent automotive news headlines. Fascinated by the $55 million deal between Hyundai and Georgia Institute of Technology? Curious about the data breach at Tesla? We discuss these and more, including the discontinuation of Kia Rio, legal challenges facing Kia and Hyundai, and the startling fact that you can build 99 Priuses with the same amount of lithium needed for one Tesla. Don't miss out on our lively car talk show, live each Saturday morning from 8 to 11am Central.---- ----- Want more In Wheel Time Car Talk any time? In Wheel Time Car Talk is now available on iHeart Radio! Just go to iheart.com/InWheelTimeCarTalk where ever you are.----- -----Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast provider for the next episode of In Wheel Time Car Talk and check out our live broadcast every Saturday, 8a-11aCT simulcasting on iHeart Radio, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch and InWheelTime.com.In Wheel Time Car Talk can be heard on you mobile device from providers such as:Apple Podcasts, Pandora Podcast, Amazon Music Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeart Radio podcast, TuneIn + Alexa, Podcast Addict, Castro, Castbox and more on your mobile device.Follow InWheelTime.com for the latest updates!Twitter: https://twitter.com/InWheelTimeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/inwheeltime/https://www.iheart.com/live/in-wheel-time-car-talk-9327/https://www.youtube.com/inwheeltimehttps://www.Facebook.com/InWheelTimeFor more information about In Wheel Time Car Talk, email us at info@inwheeltime.comTags: In Wheel Time, automotive car talk show, car talk, Live car talk show, In Wheel Time Car Talk
Returning for a week to our "open episode" format, the boys wax poetical about what tends to be the most wonderful time of the year for racing! The Indy 500 has just finished, Le Mans is on the horizon and we're about to get to see IndyCar at our local track! Things are looking up! We also discuss some shady doings from Tesla, the question of who dropped something on Priuses, and various other car news. Listen in today and PLEASE give us soundboard ideas! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/checkenginepodcast/support
We are blessed to have Michael Regilio join us this episode. We start the podcast with some very heartwarming stories of pets being put down. Michael is a great comic and prior rocker. He also grew up Catholic and very conservative. We discuss a bit of his journey away from Catholicism. We touch on politics, but mostly to commiserate about how we all have Priuses. This is Michael's second appearance on this podcast. Michael and I have a great discussion on this one and I encourage you to go back into the archives to look for his first appearance - that was a great conversation, too. There are some technical issues, but nothing too serious. I mess up with some of my historical facts - at some point, I refer to the Nicene Creed when I intended to discuss Constantine. We have a ball. Find him on IG at @michaelregilio. On Musk's site, @michaelregilio1 Check out our Patreon (work in progress) patreon.com/disorganizedreligion --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/disorganized-religion/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/disorganized-religion/support
We are blessed to have Michael Regilio join us this episode. We start the podcast with some very heartwarming stories of pets being put down. Michael is a great comic and prior rocker. He also grew up Catholic and very conservative. We discuss a bit of his journey away from Catholicism. We touch on politics, but mostly to commiserate about how we all have Priuses. This is Michael's second appearance on this podcast. Michael and I have a great discussion on this one and I encourage you to go back into the archives to look for his first appearance - that was a great conversation, too. There are some technical issues, but nothing too serious. I mess up with some of my historical facts - at some point, I refer to the Nicene Creed when I intended to discuss Constantine. We have a ball. Find him on IG at @michaelregilio. On Musk's site, @michaelregilio1 Check out our Patreon (work in progress) patreon.com/disorganizedreligion --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/disorganized-religion/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/disorganized-religion/support
We are SixDriven - a bunch of friends from all walks of life who came together through a love of all things automotive. In this episode, we chat about Jose's Supra getting back on the road, Adam's GTI doing old VW things, Hybrids and EVs being good dailies, plus some new cars like the BMW 3.0 CSL, Mercedes S63 E Performance, and Lamborghini Sterrato. Plus, Jose and Kevin recap the LZ Invitational drift event. Follow us @SixDriven! Drop us a line to let us know how you're enjoying the show, tell us what you'd like to hear us chat about next, and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts!
Electric truck stops will need as much power as a small town. Heat pumps mandatory in new homes in Washington State. Indoor hydroponic wheat produces 6 crops per year on the same land. LaGuardia Airport will host a pilot project that uses a flywheel to speed up EV charging. SpaceX buys ads on Twitter. Could Tesla be next? Battery espionage in Canada by China. Tesla proposes a North American charging standard. Should ICE trucks pay highway tolls? New study could show how batteries can have 20% more life cycles (and therefore lower prices). Half the world's fossil fuel assets could become worthless by 2036. The price of hydrogen at the pump in California has risen 33%. We compare gas and electric alternatives. Tony Seba has our Tweet of the Week: Percision fermentation land area to replace all the cows. Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show. Follow us on TikTok! @cleanenergypod Check out our YouTube Channel! @CleanEnergyShow Follow us on Twitter! @CleanEnergyPod Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton Email us at cleanenergyshow@gmail.com Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow Transcript Hello, and welcome to Episode 139 of the Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. I'm James Whittingham. This week, an indoor wheat experiment is a big success. A new crop is harvested six times a year. Wish my hair did that. Heat pumps are now mandatory in new homes in Washington state. Also mandatory cheering for the Seattle Kraken electric truck stops will need more power than a small town. What about the same amount of meth? LaGuardia Airport will host a pilot project that uses a flywheel to speed up EV charging. This partnership makes perfect sense, because if there's one thing LaGuardia is known for, its speed. All that and more on this week's edition of The Clean Energy Show. Welcome, everyone, to what I think is the best podcast on the Internet everywhere. It's objectively true. Objectively true. I think so. Right now, this is a particular moment. And also on this week's show, Brian, we also have stuff about SpaceX. It's buying ads on Twitter because it's CEO bought Twitter. And we wonder if Tesla could be next, because Tesla has never advertised near her SpaceX. So maybe this could break ground for that. We'll see. The first case of battery espionage has been discovered in Canada. Hydrogen pump prices are going up 33% in California, half the world's fossil fuel assets could become worthless by 2036. So keep that in mind when investing today. How are you? I'm good. So just an update on my house. So I applied for the Greener Homes grant here in Canada to do energy upgrades to my house. All right. Hoping to put in an air source heat pump, get rid of my natural gas. And so the first step of that is the blower door test and kind of home energy evaluation. And that all happened today. So that was fun. They put the big blower in the door. They test the air tightness of the house. So they got this doorshaped mass that goes all over the door with a hole for the blower. And the blower only, right? Yeah. And it blows air in or out, I can't remember. And then they could also go around the house with the sort of infrared camera thing and with the blower on, kind of show you where the leaks are in the house. It's wintertime now. It's super cold out. Oh, well, then it will be sucking. It will be sucking it. And the air will be coming in through the window cracks and things like that. Yeah. So did they go around with a smoker? No smoker. Just this infrared thing. Maybe they use a smoker more in the summer. Okay, well, they didn't use a smoker on mine, and they didn't do that on mine. They didn't go around. So what did you find out? Not too much yet. They have to sort of crunch all the numbers because they do a volumetric assessment of the house where they calculate the interior volume of the house. So then they have to go and take the measurements that they got from the blower door, do some calculations, figure it out, and you get kind of like an Energy Star rating for your home. And we did this about ten years ago when we did some upgrades. It was a similar program. So they give you a number, I think it's out of 100 of what your energy efficiency is, and then as you make improvements, you hope to they do the blower door test again when you're all done, and you hope to increase the sort of Energy Star rating of your house. This is mostly for air ceiling, right? Yeah, and we could see that a little bit with the infrared camera. But we will hopefully do some more upgrades. It's the main thing we want to do is the air source heat pump, and we should get the grant for that kind of regardless of what the blower door result is. I told you last week there's a TV series shooting across the street from me, and they were actually outdoors shooting today, so I was worried the blower would they come knock on our door. Because you're a film, you know, the film community. Old man stalked and wanting money to shut down his blowers so we could continue our production, because people do that on the streets. They'll run their muscle cars and have to get paid off get paid off to shut it down because the film crew needs quiet. And I watched The Godfather yesterday, which I hadn't seen in many, many years. Let me guess. Blue Ray, 4k? Exactly. It's this restored version. It's quite cool. They did extensive restoration, but a lot of that movie is ADR. I sort of didn't remember that, but ADR being dialogue replacement, where a lot of the dialogue was replaced in post production. Like, a lot of it, like, way more than half, I think. Wow. So it was a low budget film, more or less, wasn't it? Yeah, I guess that would be the reason. Like, lots of location shooting and lots of extraneous noises. But yeah, that was sort of the surprise on that one for me. Did you just notice it more this time, or what? Yes, I haven't seen it in 2030 years. You were just a child then, really. I mean, you naive. You accepted everything as reality. Yes. I wish I was that. It's a fascinating if you're interested, on the Bluray, and there's these special features about how they had to restore it because the film, when it came out in 72, was just wildly more popular than anybody expected. And whenever that happens, they have to run more prints so that they have to make more prints of the film. So the original negative, even though it's only 50 years old, I ended up getting totally ruined. And the restoration that they had to do was to the point where they were going and taking outtakes they were taking outtakes and cutting them back into the film because certain shots were damaged. And with the approval of the director, you can do that kind of weird thing. Oh, wow. I don't know how I feel about that. You get used to a film that would stand out to you. It shouldn't be in any way that you notice it's like literally like just a shot of somebody walking down the hallway or okay, that's different. It's nothing important. You know, my childhood home has been destroyed. There was an explosion in Regina. That was your childhood home. No, it wasn't, but it was built next to my childhood home. And when I say childhood home, I mean I lived there for three months with great eight. My brother lived there, and I left home in grade eight and went and lived with him and found out he had a girlfriend who became his wife, who eventually became his ex wife. That building, which is a brick, three story apartment building with, I think, you know, twelve suites, and it was, has to be demolished now because the house next door blew out. Well, it was kind of like an apartment building that they were building right when I was living there, I think. And it's like a four suite housing, but nobody was living there. The whole thing blew up, rain off the ground, boom. And the only person who was injured was somebody who didn't live there, who lived somewhere. That window broke. But this is a story. Kids at Natural Gas caused this explosion with solar and wind have never caused an explosion. You know, I had my first clean energy show dream the other night, and it was a paraphrase in the first one. Brian, I was in the backseat of your Tesla. You got out and I was concerned. Did he hit the brake? You got in front of the car and the car ran over you. And I think I was watching Breaking Bad because I'm just now watching Breaking Bad, and there was a scene of a car running over somebody. So the same crunch for Breaking Bad was there, and I didn't think it went well for you. There's another part of the dream. For some reason, I was in this giant mansion with all kinds of celebrities around people, and I was ready to record my end of the podcast. And we couldn't find you. It was just not to be found. Like I said earlier, SpaceX, as a guest, has bought a package to advertise its Starlink Internet service on Twitter. Now, SpaceX has never advertised before. Starlink has never advertised before. Tesla famously does not advertise because its CEO has always said that the car sells itself. Until this point, it continues to do so. But I wonder, Brian, I wonder if either to prop up the company he bought, or could this be the first time that Tesla actually buys advertising on Twitter? Could that happen one of these days. Well, the explanation I heard was that he wanted to test the efficacy of advertising on Twitter. So they also bought ads on, like, Facebook and Instagram at the same time to kind of see how the Twitter kind of advertising scheme works. But it is a sort of demand lever that Tesla could employ. They still have a big backlog of orders, so demand is super strong. But if demand ever starts to slip, once they start producing more and more vehicles, they could start advertising to if the demand ever does start to slip, I guess the first thing they would probably do is lower prices because they've been raising prices because the demand has been too high. The first thing they would do is back off in those price increases and maybe go even a bit further if they had to. I imagine they're going to I mean, they've got three factories around the world which are going to hit their stride pretty soon, right? Or is it more than 03:00 a.m. I counting wrong, I guess technically four, if you count three months. Yeah. And there was an Arranium, what people think is an Iranians report that Tesla was going to sell the Chinese made cars in the United States. Some of them. I've long predicted that ever since I saw what's his name? Sandy Monroe. Sandy Monroe live his channel. Yeah, he said that from what he understood and he has expertise in Chinese manufacturing and has consulted with automakers over there that 20% less is what the Tesla can make in China. Like, they'll save 20% on the price of the car. And it turns out that the Chinese manufacturing is really good because they're bringing the Chinese manufacturing people over to the States to say, why can't we be as productive as you? Did you ever see that documentary called what was it called? I don't know. It was a factory. It was produced by Obama, and it was about Chinese companies that decided to take advantage of tax breaks in Ohio or somewhere to bring back an automotive factory or a factory that was in an automotive town in, I don't want to say Ohio, somewhere like that. And they just could not get the productivity. They couldn't understand it, but they couldn't no matter what they did, they finally threw in the towel, I think, and went home, and they visited the factory in China and man, what a different culture. What a different work culture. Everything is like calisthenics and unanimity and one team. I don't like that. I wouldn't want to work there. But as a manufacturer, it seems like quite an advantage, and it seems to be effective. Yeah. Well, the Tesla Shanghai factory is now operating at a run rate of about a million vehicles a year, so it is likely the largest car factory in the world. And they've gotten there in pretty short time. It's only been a couple of years that they've been producing cars. And it's true that demand in China is down a little bit, and they did cut the prices in Japan a little bit, or sorry, in China a little bit too, because the demand is slipping. But yeah, and they export those cars currently to Europe, but the Germany factory is going to start filling those orders. So those Chinese cars, if there's too many of them for the Chinese market, will have to go somewhere. I don't think it would be North America, because the Texas factory will start filling that in, but more cars to go to Australia or Japan or wherever. But on the other hand, Brian, you've got the Cyber truck coming and the Tesla semi. So maybe you could take one of those lines and start spitting out Model YS or something from China. Or maybe you make the X and the S, which are lower volume. It's more likely, like the next model that's coming, like they'll eventually be a lower cost model. So I assume they're planning for that in China, and they could start making more variants, too, like longer range variants as well. Sure. So, from Bloomberg, a 35 year old Hydro Quebec employee who worked on battery materials research has been charged with espionage for allegedly obtaining trade secrets for China. Well, he's in Kandiac, Quebec. He has a Chinese sounding name. So I don't know if he was originally from China or if he's an immigrant worker or what his nationality is for sure, but he was arrested following an investigation that they get in August. I'm concerned about the Chinese government. They have no shame when it comes to these things. There's some car companies in China accused of duplicating Tesla's, blatantly copying them, and a lot, even down to the software, this is the first time this happened. But it seems like they'll do anything to be competitive. And as we've mentioned before so Hydro Quebec, that's the electricity utility in Quebec, the provincially owned utility, but they've done a lot of research into batteries and battery materials, and they own a lot of patents in that. So I guess whatever they own there at Hydro Quebec was valuable enough to be espionaged. And it's a highly competitive batteries are highly competitive. But if they have, who knows what hasn't been caught? Because it seems like there's been more and more instances of this. And of course there's computer espionage and all that sort of thing. That's a concern for all countries, it seems like you have to put a lot of money into that. What do you think? This is why I asked, Brian. What do you think about things that I don't know what to think about? So, Brian Tesla has proposed a North American charging standard. Now, those of you who are new to the game, there is basically two charging ports in North America, CCS and Tesla. Tesla has its own charging network, which is the largest and most consistent, but it's got a different connector, so that's a problem. But it's amazing how great that connector is, right? Because it's small. If you compare it side by side to what everybody else is using for all the other cars, my car included, it's like half the size, but it's basically when you charge your car, you can do DC Direct, fast current fast charging at public charging stations, or you can AC charge at home. But what I didn't realize until today is they only have two pins on there that does both. So that's why it's lighter and smaller. They've figured out a way to do both now and the connector, it's more like a quarter the size of the CCS connector. So I think it'd be a fantastic idea. It's definitely the better standard of the two. So if North America were to standardize on the Tesla charging socket, I think that would be fantastic. Question is it might be a bit too late. Like Tesla could have maybe released this a couple of years ago, a couple of years ago, five years ago. A better chance at this. Yeah. So disappointing. Too little, too late, because it's probably not going to happen now. Probably not. But what Tesla said in their press release was that some of the, they've been talking already to the companies that make the charging networks, the chargers for the third party networks that normally are CCS. And it sounds like they have some plans already to incorporate the Tesla connector onto those. So, I don't know, there is some hope, but it's probably too late. And CCS will likely be two standards in North America, CCS and Tesla. Part of this is the federal government in the United States is giving a lot of money to expand the charging networks. But when you do that, you have to have more than one charging standard, more than one car company that uses it. So if just one car company, any car company that sells maybe ten cars a year adopted Tesla's in the clear, they don't have to make the GCs ones, and they could get all the government subsidies for just making their charges that they already make. Now the government could go and tweak that fine print. Okay, so here's another one for you. This is a clean technical op ed. It says Tolling the highway to green trucking. Should tolls be implemented on combustion semi trailers once EVs are on the road. Do you think that would be an effective way to do it? Well, I don't think you'll have to. It's kind of like the cost of running a combustion truck will already be more expensive, so there's already a kind of a penalty just for using one. So an extra toll probably not needed. I mean, what's needed is faster production of the electric trucks and get those on the road. That's the thing. This is assuming price parity, that the cost of ownership is going to be the same, right? Well, charging lithium ion cells at different rates boost the lifetime of battery packs for electric vehicles. So says yet another Stanford study. We have so many Stanford studies on the show. According to the study, batteries managed with this new technology could handle at least 20% more charge discharge cycles, even with frequent fast charging, which puts an extra strain on the battery. So basically they're saying don't charge each of the individual cells at the same rate all the time. And that actually gives you 20% longer life. And 20% longer life if you're talking about a fleet of cars of a million cars and a robotxis, or storage for the electrical grid that lasts twelve years instead of ten, the costs on those greatly changes with doing this basically a software tweak. So that seems quite to me, it seems like it's got a lot of potential if it works, yes. That's exciting. There's a lot that can be done with software. It isn't just the hardware components of a battery or the chemistry's, or the chemistry is where you can improve the life. Yeah, the software can have a big benefit. So Ford is officially the number two electric vehicle seller in the United States. And if you extrapolate out the twelve months of a year, based on what they had in October, ford would achieve 75,000 EV sales. Which is what's, Tesla right now? Close to a million. Close to a million. So that's not much, but that's what your number two is. A lot of people wouldn't have picked for it to be number two right now. They would have took GM or more likely Volkswagen. And that points back to our previous conversations about the connectors. Standardizing on the Tesla connector has a fighting chance just because Tesla vehicles are so ubiquitous in North America in terms of EVs. Another thing I wanted to talk about is electric truck stops will need as much power as a small town. So as Tesla rose out, it's semi next month, hopefully, I think December 1 is when they're having the release. Are you looking forward to that one? Yeah. Do you think something special could roll out of the back of that truck? I hadn't thought of that. The tesla ebike. The robotic musk. I don't know. I do. Social media platform and we'll roll out the back of the truck. Yeah. So it's adding pressure on the truck industry to go green. But the grid upgrades must start now if the new era is to last. This is from Bloomberg, and sometimes these stories make me wonder if that is all accurate. But a sweeping new study. This is another study of highway charging requirements conducted by utility company National Grid Plc. Researchers found that by 2030 electrifying, a typical highway gas station will require as much power as a professional sports stadium. And I would think sports stadiums use less now with all the Led lighting, but it's probably better. But I know our city built a new football stadium a few years ago, and I don't know if you noticed, but they're all kinds of electrical transformer boxes outside the stadium. They hid them in the park. There's a park next to the stadium and they had to try and hide all of these electrical transformer boxes. And there's a lot of them. And the power used to go out on the old stadium we had here. This is a stadium we have for the Canadian Football League, by the way. Okay, so this is just for electrified passenger vehicles. As more electric trucks hit the road, the projected power needs for a big truck stop by 2035 will equal that of a small town. And they think that lots of wiring will have to be done. Nobody really knows how this is going to play out with trucks. Like, is there going to be specialized newly built truck stops? Because truck stops are a thing. You have a shower, you park the truck for a while. It's a truck resting stop as well. So I don't know. How do you think that will play out, if you had to guess? Well, there's usually a decent amount of space at existing truck stops, so I assume there's enough room at the existing truck stops to kind of transform them and have both fuel and electric. Hopefully they have started working on that already. Now, just to tag onto that, I want to skip ahead to the story about LaGuardia Airport. Sure. Because I think it sort of makes me think of the same issue. So there's a story here from Electrac about zoo's power that's got this machine with a flywheel. And this is being installed at LaGuardia Airport to facilitate fast charging of cars, rental cars particularly. And yeah, I bring it up because the reason this machine exists is that the power available in certain locations can be limited. Right. Like if these truck stops are going to need all the power of a small town, well, you don't necessarily have the grid infrastructure where you need it. I don't think this does an enormous amount. Like, it's not going to triple or quadruple the amount of power available. But the idea behind this zoos flywheel machine is that it literally uses flywheels. And we talked about this before. Some power plants use flywheels as well. It's literally just the momentum of a spinning wheel to help kind of even the power output of your hydroelectric dam or whatever. Anyway, so I guess the idea being that you take a limited amount of power that might be available in a parking lot at an airport, and then you use this flywheel machine. And some by spinning up the flywheels, you can increase the amount of power available. It's sort of similar to having batteries on site. I would think that's going to be the more normal solution. Like at these truck stops, would be to put a big battery pack, a grid storage battery pack at a truck stop. But this is a kind of a smaller and cheaper way to add just a bit more power to what's available for your fast chargers. So with hertz ordering a couple of hundred thousand electric vehicles from Tesla and GM, I wonder how the infrastructure at airports is going to go. I mean, nobody is panicking about that, but I mean that's going to have to be built up presumably, and larger airports will have a lot of cars sitting there with batteries. You would have the chance in the low demand because most flights happen 06:00 a.m. To midnight or whatever. You could have 6 hours to when people aren't taking those cars, maybe to charge off the batteries for the next day. And that would yeah, I can see that being an important thing unless they have some off site, like just off the airport type of parking spaces for charging. Yeah, and like our parking spaces here in Canada at our airports, a lot of them are probably already electrified where we live because it's super cold in the winter and so you have plugins for block heaters. So at least there's power running to these parking lots. Whereas of course, in many places there would be no power running there at all. Half the world's fossil fuel assets could become worthless by 2036 in a net zero transition. So says an article in the Guardian that I read. $11 Trillion in Fossil Fuel Asset Crash could Cause a 2008 financial crisis, warrants a new study. I don't care. Yeah, that's my hot. Take it. Yeah. It's something I really wonder about and think about. Like, obviously these assets are going to become stranded and worthless at some point or at least the value start crashing at some point. But what point does that start to happen? Is it two years from now? Is it six years from now? Is it 20 years from now? It's hard to say, but I wouldn't want to be holding a lot of fossil fuel investments longer than the next couple of years, that's for sure. I think the big question is when will EVs really take off where there's not a battery constraint? And it sure seems like it's going to be within five years. It could be two years, it could be five years, but somewhere in that period I think it's really going to grab momentum. Yeah, but also too, like, as we've discussed, like last week and other weeks, there's not a lot of new money being spent on new oil exploration because they can kind of foresee, okay, there's not really going to be the demand. It's not worth it to spend this money building. So that does mean that the supply of oil will be kind of naturally constrained if the system doesn't expand. So it could be that as the oil industry shrinks, the production shrinks and if the production shrinks enough, then the price stays up. So countries that are slow to decarbonise will suffer, but early movers will profit. This is something we say on the show all the time. You have to move now. And our jurisdiction is not great where we live. We live in fossil fuel country with a mentality thereof and our country as a whole starting to make some moves. But we're basically a fossil fuel country in Canada and even the United States to some extent. But it finds that renewables that are freed up investment will more than make up for the losses of the global economy. You're freeing up a whole lack of investment that was going into fossil fuels that can go into other things and expand the economy that way. And just the renewables themselves will save money, of course. So it highlights the risk of producing far more oil and gas than required for future demand, which is estimated to leave 11 trillion to 14 trillion in stranded assets, which is a lot of stranded assets. Brian. Also, as we always say, we predict that governments are going to have to, and therefore you and I are going to have to pay for the clean up of some of these wells as well. So the most vulnerable assets are those in remote regions are technically challenging environments. Most exposed are Canadian tar sands in northern Alberta, us shale and the Russian Arctic, followed by deep offshore wells in Brazil and elsewhere. And North Sea oil is also relatively expensive to extract and it's going to be hit when demand falls. I'm worried about this because it could affect us as being an oil part of the world, it says. In contrast, current oil, gas and coal importers such as the EU, japan, India and South Korea will reap hefty economic dividends from the transition because they will be able to use the money they save on spending those places, spending gobs of money. We get our gas cheap here in North America, but they're spending gobs of money on fuel purchases and they'll be able to use that money to invest in their own economies. The lead author of the report said in the worst case scenario, people will keep investing in fossil fuels until suddenly the man they expected does not materialize and they realize that what they own is worthless. And we could see a financial crisis on the scale of 2008. Houston Detroit could have the same phase detroit did in the car industry collapsed earlier in this century. So yeah, it's got to be carefully managed. If you don't accept that all this is going to happen like people around here, yeah, it's going to be a problem. That's what I have to say about that. Yeah. And when your oil is expensive to extract like it is in the Alberta oil sands, that stuff will be the first to go because you won't be able to sell it at. A profit. So you've got another heat pump story. Heat pumps are the item of the year. I say yes, absolutely. No, it's amazing how even when this podcast started a couple of years ago, it was barely in our vernacular. It was barely in the vernacular. Yes. And now it's everywhere. So yes, electric is reporting heat pumps are now mandatory in Washington State for new homes and apartments as well from July 2023 onward. But the thing that I think is interesting about this, and it's not really mentioned in the story, we talked about the incredible heatwave that happened last summer on the west coast of North America. So Seattle area, Vancouver area, they're just an unprecedented heatwave because of climate change. And so many of those homes and places and businesses and apartments are not cooled. So this is the other benefit of this. So not only do you start heating your homes with electricity, but you also in Washington State now are adding essentially mandatory air conditioning, which, especially if it's low income apartments or something, would be a godsend for people who are hopefully won't. I mean, there was literally thousands of people died from the heat stroke on the west coast last summer. Well, that's an interesting take in a region that doesn't have air conditioning. And yet with climate change, we can see this happening a lot more often and now they'll be prepared. That's an interesting aspect of the story and I have to wonder if it was even part of the planning. No, I'm not sure. I mean, it depends on when they started talking about this. But one of the great benefits is of a heat pump heating and cooling. You get both in the same machine. So why just put in an air conditioner when you can put in an air conditioner that also runs in reverse and can heat your home as well? And for people who are new to the podcast or this type of thing, heat pumps are reverse air conditioners, essentially that transfer heat from one place to another, like inside the house to outside. And air conditioning or outside, even if there's a little bit of energy in that area, it takes it out. And the idea is to use electricity, which instead of natural gas, right, if you're heating, you want to use electricity and this is the most efficient way to do it. Yes, and in a place like Washington State, a lot of homes are already heated with electricity. Like it's not a frigid cold place like here. So there are more like 99% of homes where we live are heated by natural gas because it's so ridiculously cold. But in a milder climate, you might have electric baseboards in a lot of homes. So it is something like 50% already are heated with electricity in Washington state and this will eventually get it up to 100%. Yeah, that's very interesting. And a very interesting side effect of going green using solar and wind and so forth for your heating, that you will actually probably save lives from a government policy in future heatwaves. Who knows when those heat waves will come, but they're going to come more often, those once in a century type heat waves, or once in a thousand years or 500 years, whatever it was. I want to talk about indoor wheat because we live in a heart of wheat country. You can't swing a cat with a wheat chief. It's on symbols for everything. Where we live, we're the breadbasket of Canada. And what was the name of your first feature film? I made a film called Wheat Soup. There you go. It had to be in the title. It had to be. So this is interesting to us because you know how there's hydroponics like indoor gardening, which I'm fascinated with. They do it in containers, they do it in buildings where they're basically using fertilized water and no soil to grow tomatoes or whatever in greenhouse like conditions. And I find that very interesting, especially when they can do it up north. And by the way, I saw another article in Blueberg about the Yukon. The climate changing, and the people are up there growing potatoes and things that they never used to grow before, and wheat as well, which required a lot of cabbage. And things like that require a lot of sunlight when they have 20 hours sunlight days in June. But, you know, it costs a lot to transport fresh food up there. So it's very expensive and very not fresh. Carrots is another thing that they're growing a lot of potatoes and carrots. So that's great. It's great in one sense because there's an advantage to them. But in this case, indoor wheat. Amsterdam based startup In Farm grew wheat without using soil or chemical pesticides, which is nice, and with far less water than conventional farming, which is also nice. So the first indoor farming company to grow a stable staple crop in a milestone for an Asian industry that has attracted venture capital funding on its promise that its technology can help feed the planet if delivered at scale. Growing a staple crop indoors has the potential to become a game changer. Supplies have increasingly been challenged by climate change and logistical issues. So you could grow well, you could grow wheat in Antarctica if you wanted to, right? If you got this technology down. And Infarm says that its first trial shows that projected annual wheat yields of 117 tons a hectare, okay? Now, that compares to the average 2022 yields of 5.6. So let me give you that again. Indoors, 117 tons hectare annually. Outdoors, 5.6. And in the European Union, it's 3.1. So that's in the European Union, it's actually less than the United States, which surprises me. It's only 3.1. Now, part of that reason of the higher yields is they have six crops a year. Okay? But if you times 3.1 times six, you still don't get 117 tons. So it's just a lot more dense and efficient to do it that way. I mean, it's not easy. We're probably decades away from this being a regular thing and getting the efficiencies and the cost down maybe a couple of decades, it's hard to tell. But, you know, it depends on what the need is, too. But this is interesting. It's going to be perfect, right? You don't spread pesticides on it. You're not going to have to worry about weeds. It's just going to be pure indoor stuff and locally delivered. No. And the more things, of course, you can do locally, then the more transportation that you can eliminate. You know, so many things now that, you know, our produce at the grocery stores just shipped in from incredible distances here. But if all that stuff could be grown locally, it would just be so much more efficient and just kind of save all that energy. I mean, theoretically, you could, in the middle of a desert in Africa, start up an operation like this and make flour or make proteins for food. Basically, you would need water, but you wouldn't need as much of it. So if you could use solar to desalinate water, you could put it anywhere. You could put it in there because we transport all of our grain by ship, which goes by train from the center of the continent out to the coasts and then onto ships. I don't think that this is going to completely replace green farming, but it could augment it. Maybe 100 years from now, it could replace it, but in the near term, this is basically saying that it could just fit in, reduce the challenges of supply, and in certain situations, a lot of land will be required to produce this. Wheat cultivation takes more than 216,000,000 land, more than any other crop. So, yeah, wheat takes a lot of land, which we have a lot of land here. A lot of land. Most of our province is filled with wheat fields. It's kind of insane. So, yeah, they would require very large indoor farms exceeding the area of all the wheat in France, I think. But they said it could potentially increase its yield by another 50% in the coming years, thanks to better technology. So it could even be 200 times or 200 tons instead of three tons. So that's interesting. Yeah. Once they learn what they're doing and tweak it and software can play a part, perhaps. Yeah, it could be amazing. Okay, so starting here from Hydrogen Insight, and this is about hydrogen pump prices in California. So this was something I just had never thought about before now. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles do exist. James, take a guess. How many hydrogen fuel cell vehicles do you think there are in California, which is currently one of the main markets for them? 410. There's $10,000. Okay. Which is not bad. It's kind of more than I expected. And there's a series of hydra. They're not all the Toyota Mariah. What are these vehicles? There's a Toyota Mirai there's a Hyundai. That's really nice. I forget the name of it, but there's a big Hyundai SUV. That's a hydrogen vehicle. They've sold a few of those for sure. Okay. But yeah. So there's hydrogen fueling stations in California, not in too many other places. But I just was interested in this because, yes, recently they had to hike up the price at the pump of these hydrogen, up 33% in California. This is a fairly big price jump. So just in terms of the price per mile, I thought this was really interesting. So right now is basically what it costs you to drive a hydrogen vehicle in California, roughly in a gasoline vehicle down to California has the most expensive gasoline in North America. Yeah, well, no, it's probably more expensive here in Canada. Is it? Because I went there, it was pretty damn expensive. That was a few years ago. So $0.22 for gas per mile and for hydrogen. Plus, you spend a whole bunch more money on your hydrogen car than you do a gas car. It's a serious technology. And then if you're driving an EV and you charge it off the grid, you're down to if you have to use a fast charger like a Tesla Supercharger, then you're up to but that's compared to for driving a hydrogen car. So I just wasn't totally clear on that until now. The actual cost of driving a hydrogen vehicle is more than gas, way more than electricity. Now, theoretically, if we were to SuperBuild out the hydrogen infrastructure and kind of get that all pumping again, locality is a key to that. Like, if each city had its own hydrogen plant or whatever, you had even smaller ones at the filling stations, making the hydrogen there, that would reduce costs a lot. But for right now, it's super expensive to fill up with hydrogen. And I don't see that coming down anytime soon. And the days of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is probably numbered. If we had no other option, we would be going full steam ahead with hydrogen and trying to get that that still take a while, but we would be trying to get green hydrogen, and then we'll be trying to get that green hydrogen price down so that it would be cost effective. But since we have an alternative to that called battery electric vehicles, electricity is also expensive in California. So if you compare it to other places, it would be even a larger variation there. And as we said, so obviously the electricity for charging your electric car comes from the grid. And there are certain shortfalls at places, perhaps like truck stops that don't have enough grid infrastructure. So it's far from perfect. But any electrical outlet anywhere in the world can charge an electric vehicle. So that's just an insane advantage over these very rare hydrogen stations. Yeah, they're expensive. And transportation and processing of hydrogen is also an issue. So Amazon is getting heat. We get heat for not talking about ebikes sometimes. Well, Amazon is getting heat for selling kits to override speed limits of ebikes. Now, this is mostly happening in Europe, right? Because there's more restrictions in Europe. Europe has strict electric bike laws that limit electric bicycles to a sluggish 25 km an hour or 15.5 mph. Even an old man like me can go well, I can't go 25, actually. It takes the work to go 25. Yeah, that is kind of cool. But solutions range from an electromagnetic modifications or chipping, quote unquote, that can remove digital speed limits. So people do that with cars sometimes, to hardware hacks to trick the bike speed sensors into thinking it's going slower than it truly is. And I haven't been able to find out exactly how that works. So I'm kind of curious. Yeah, I thought maybe you had done that on your bike where it's like you change the setting and it messes up the speedometer, so it ends up sending you faster than it's what you do is you change the wheel size on your bike. Didn't work for mine. It was supposed to, but my bike manufacturer has been kind of savvy to all the tricks, so by the time I get to them, they've figured it out and have eliminated that. But yeah, if you have like a 29 inch wheel and then you tell that it's a kid's wheel of half that size, then it thinks that one rotation is actually going a shorter distance and yes, and then you won't have a proper speed. And I have that FETO electric folding bike and I looked on the Internet and apparently there is a hack that you can do by pressing a certain combination of buttons on the little kind of remote screen there where you can hack it to go faster. But I haven't tried it. And with mine it was a code. It was like an eight digit code that you could type in at a certain place. And that one also did not work. I was curious, but I think the longevity of James is more important than the thrill of maybe trying out a 50 kilometer an hour. That's probably all my bike could do if it really wanted to. It would take a while to get there too. The important thing to remember in all this is you probably don't need your bike to go any faster. No, but what does my bike do? My bike does 32 instead of 25. So that's the next level. I think that's about what mine does. And that's pretty fast. And like I've said before in the show, I get kind of uncomfortable at that speed, and yet some other bastard on an ebike passes me and I think, I wish I had more speed. I start pedaling, which you can do. Apparently you can pedal and use the Ebike part. Well, anyway, I guess Ebike hot rodding as it's called, is much less common in the United States, where E bikes are permitted to go up to 45 km an hour. That's the United States. You can have guns and fast Ebikes or whatever you want. Tanks, cruise missiles, no. And modifying your car. Take out the pollution controls, although they have been cracking down on that lately. Oh, it's time for the Tweet of the week. This is where we pick a Tweet. And this last week was for Tony Siba. It's going to be for Tony Siba again. Okay, I'm sorry. Tony Siba is kind of one of our main people that we follow on the show here. Now, this was a person who was responding to how 5 million, what Tony calls precision fermentation. This is the future of food. He believes that will be disruptive based on price. This is one of the ways that is like beyond meat, that's one aspect. And then there's cellular meat, which will actually resemble steak and the texture of steak in the future, maybe ten years from now, that will be viable financially. But dairy is the first one that's going to be disrupted because glass of milk is 90% water and 3% of that is protein from the milk. So that's really all you're dealing with is that protein because the rest is fat and sugars, which you can get from other places. It doesn't have to be from a cow. So as they make these things in like brewery like buildings and disrupt milk. He says there are 5 million dairy cows in New Zealand. And so that would require 100 precision fermentation factories to replace all the cows. Less if they're bigger, which they will be. So it's just a matter of time and probably less time than most people expect. And Tony. Steve assisted that tweet. Correct. The total land needed to replace all the cows in New Zealand, 5 million of them, which is more than Canada, by the way. I believe we only have a million cows in Canada. I haven't counted lately, but I'm told that it's around a million. The total land needed would be around 1700 acres. But you compare that with the Auckland airport, it's 3700 acres. So basically half the Auckland airport could replace all the dairy cows the land wise. And then you have all that land. You can put solar on and do other things. This is a huge disruption of the world. Yes. If you think of a cow as basically a type of food technology, well, it can be delicious. It's the least efficient food technology. In fact, I think Tony said that the cow in particular is the least efficient of all of the kind of animal food technologies. So we get a lot of things from a cow, but the resources and the land and everything needed to get that is kind of insane and is ripe for disruption. So, as Tony points out, the first disruption will happen in just a few years. And he thinks that dairy will be bankrupt by 2030. And the reason is 30% of his business is business to business. So if you buy a protein shake, you're buying protein powder. Okay? And if it's cheaper to come from this fake stuff, if you can call it that, fermentation than it is from a real dairy cow, and you're greener people are just going to go, where the cheapest? If you want to buy bulk for a protein bar or a protein shake or whatever, all these things that have chocolate bars and everything and all kinds of foods that are processed will have first that will go and then 30% of dairy's gone. Yeah. No. And he mentioned, too, in his latest video, just the switch, like Coke and Pepsi switched from cane sugar to corn sugar back in the 80s. Basically, their entire product lines switching over to corn as the source for sugar. And while there is probably some taste difference, they was definitely not enough taste difference to stop what they were doing, because they completely four years. Four years. They did it in just both yeah. In four years. Complete switch over. And this is the main ingredient in their products? Yes. That means it's time for the lightning round. A quick look at fast paced energy news and climate news from this past week. Growing EV dem demand helps Volkswagen reach half a million ID deliveries one year early. Brian, that is a good news story, isn't it? Yeah, we talked about that a few weeks ago. They're on track for 500,000 deliveries. That's Volkswagen this year of EVs, and that's a huge number. Volvo debuts its first electric trucks made with fossil free steel. That is steel made with green electricity, and it is also 90% recyclable. So that's cool. Yeah. So Volvo was trying to green their whole lineup of vehicles, and they're doing it partly by switching over to electric, but they're also doing it by going with fossil free steel in their cars, which increasingly more and more manufacturers are going to do. Cough 27 news, 41 signatories have joined the pledge to stop funding fossil fuels by the end of year. But problematically. Brian, four large signatories are not signing. Germany, Italy, the United States and your favorite country in the world, canada. No, I'm sorry. Damn, it just sad. Can't overuse that, can I? Okay, it's time for a CS festival. Toyota has sold 4.7 million Priuses to date. That's no easy feat. Tesla did 3 million. But total yeah, that's to date, over the last ten plus years, 4.7 million Priuses are on the road, but nobody buys them anymore. No. Did you see the stat of, like, at one time they were selling 500,000 Priuses a year and it's down to 86,000? Yeah. People who bought them initially wanted an environmentally friendly car or to save money. Best way to be environmentally friendly or to save money is to buy electric now. Or at least electric hybrid. But anyway, solar power already saved China, India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand. $34 billion American in potential fossil fuel costs went in the first half of this year. First half of 2022. We're just getting started. That's astonishing. Yeah. I mean, spend your money on solar and then you won't have to spend it on fossil fuels. The US will finance about a third of the $9 billion rooms romania needs to build two nuclear reactors. That's a lot of money. They're getting it from the United States, which seems like a bad investment. I thought I would mention this. Globally up 13%. Okay. That's everywhere in the world. Europe is up 35%. I wonder why. Vladimir, the US is up 15% and China 13%. So this heat pump thing is, whoever makes the most of the best heat pumps, put your money in them because they're going to pay back. No, and I assume that I haven't seen announcements, but I assume that there are heat pump factories being built as we speak. And I don't know, we always hear battery factory announcements and things like that. I don't hear heat pump factory announcements, but presumably it's going on. The demand is huge. Inflation Reduction Act had money for developing better heat pumps, too, so there's going to be some R and D in there. Friend of the show, Greta Thuneburg thoonberg rather. I'm kidding. She's not a friend of the show, but we're working on it slowly. Global Witness found that more than 600 people are at the talks in Egypt at Cop 27. They're linked to fossil fuels. And, Brian, that is more than the combined delegations from the ten most climate impacted countries. Barf, we're at a critical stage now where we got to say no to fossil fuels. Just say no. And we got to stop the green washer, we got to stop the BS right now. Right now. No time left. From Tennessee Valley Authority, that is one of the grids in the southern US. The three giant cooling towers at the retired paradise coal plant in Kentucky came down this morning, was a few mornings ago now as demolition efforts continued at the site. And they say we are striving for a cleaner and more efficient energy future as we are building the energy system of the future. And by God, Brian, we have a clip. Fantastic. Here's the initial charge. The towers are collapsing. They're coming down completely now. And they're gone by the doctor. Goodbye, coal plants. Three cooling towers in Kentucky, a grave risk of winter blackout speaking of nuclear, is happening in France because electricity prices have surged past $1,000 or, pardon me, €1000 per megawatt hour as more nuclear reactors, more are closing in France, as if enough hadn't closed already. What this means, Brian, is, on a cold January day, france needs around 45 gigawatts of nuclear energy, and one day last week, there was only 25 available. Yeah, and there was a lot of reactors down, or at least down partially for repairs. So the amount of electricity from nuclear in France dropped 34% year over year in October. Just less power available from nuclear, which everyone always says it's like reliable base load power. That's one of the reasons it's promoting this is not reliable here. But it's not exactly that. You know, it's the pipes, the cooling pipes that are structurally problematic and cracked, and they realize that they're all bad. So they have this, and it apparently takes a while. They've hired like, 100 contractors to go in and fix this, but it's not that easy. Finally this week, Brian japan's government wants to remotely control private air conditioners to avoid power outages. The Japan Time points out that the government committee is currently working under the concept that the government would only be able to turn down AC units if individual owners have agreed in advance to grant them that authority. This is something we've seen, or, what, the third time now on the show? Yeah. And in Ontario, they're working on this. Here in Canada where remote control california, they do it with text messages where they just tell everybody to stop using so much AC. But this works. And no one really suffers if you shave a degree or two off your air conditioning for an hour and say it's much better than a blackout where you have no air conditioning. So that's not so bad. That is our show for this week. Next week I'll be talking about the new Toyota Prius lineup that will be announced between now and then and what excitement that will be. Because I need a car badly, Brian. Mine's starting to fall apart. My FUS is getting long on the tooth. How disappointed will I be? Tune in to find out. Maybe I should sell you my car. Would you buy my Tesla? Well, the street price for that Tesla, unless there's a murder in it, is not going to be good for me. What if I gave you a really good deal? I'll take two. Why would you want to? It's not the form factor you want, I guess, but I don't care. I would take a Tesla. What would you do for a new car? Buy a why? Yeah, something like that. You think I want to start? What's interesting, what are your interest rates? How quickly do you break legs? We'll sign over. Like making a 20 year loan? Pretty much what it would have to be, I think. Anyway, everyone out there, we thank you for listening. We do appreciate you and we'd love to hear from you. So contact us with anything that's on your mind Cleanenergy show@gmail.com. We are on social media with the handle Clean Energy Pod. We're on TikTok. Check out our TikTok channel. Don't forget to check out our YouTube channel, too, because you know why not? Sometimes you might want to look at things that are shiny. And you can even leave us a voicemail where we get to hear your voice, which is always a thrill for us. Speakpipe.com cleanenergyshow. Remember, subscribe if you're new to the podcast so that you can get new episodes delivered every week. And, Brian, I look forward to next week. you.
Do you have 13 friends you could gather for a cross-country road trip from Seattle to New York and back? Not to give things away, but you'd have to make that trip in 14 Priuses in order to produce the amount of CO2 that one Growler jet produces in a single hour of flight. Not only that, but the firefighting foam used during military training contains dangerous chemicals that have contaminated local water supplies. In this episode, climate consultant Chris Greacen (he/him) and environmental advocate and consultant Rick Abraham (he/him) tell us how the Navy is polluting the skies and the water of Whidbey Island and beyond. Listen to hear not just how these jets are contributing to massive climate impacts and contamination, but also how the Navy isn't sharing the full extent of the damage. Resources: Learn more about the Growler jets and how to take action at: www.SoundDefenseAlliance.org Citizens of Ebey's Reserve (COER) Quiet Skies Over San Juan County Terra.Do Climate Change Course My Climate Journey Podcast The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Whidbey Environmental Action Network The EPA's updated guidance on PFAS Glossary Terms: Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) - A government document that outlines the impact of a proposed project on its surrounding environment. In the United States, these statements are mandated by federal law for certain projects. No Action Alternative - Considers what would happen if the federal agency continued to operate and maintain the authorized project with no changes. National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) - An act signed into law on January 1, 1970 that requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) - A federal freedom of information law that requires the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States government upon request. Field Carrier Landing Practice (FCLP) - Repetitive "touch and go" landings at airfields, which simulate landing on an aircraft carrier. PFAS Chemicals - Synthetic organofluorine chemical compounds that have multiple fluorine atoms attached to an alkyl chain. They are known to persist in the environment and are commonly described as persistent organic pollutants, also known as "forever chemicals". Ault Field - The main base portion of Naval Air Station Whidbey Island (NASWI). Aqueous fire fighting foam (AFFF) - A highly effective foam used for fighting high-hazard flammable liquid fires. AFFF is usually created by combining foaming agents with fluorinated surfactants. Outlying Field (OLF) - A military airport owned and operated by the United States Navy located two miles southeast of Coupeville, Washington, on Whidbey Island. Also known as Naval Outlying Landing Field Coupeville or NOLF Coupeville. Nature sounds recorded in the Olympic National Park (Gordon Hempton, The Sound Tracker, Co-Founder Quiet Parks International) Hosted by Terra Huey and Caitlin Epstein Produced by Caitlin Epstein in partnership with the Sound Defense Alliance
James visits his first solar farm in Saskatchewan: a single axis bifacial 13mW site near Weyburn. A closer look at Green Hydrogen and Canada's new agreements with Germany to produce it. Brian finally finds an air-source heatpump installer in his home town. What's faster than a Lamborghini and a Ferrari? A Kia. No joke. Anti-lock brakes are coming to electric bicycles. Dodge has wrecked the idea that electric vehicles will be quiet because the Dodge Charger EV will make noise. A lot of noise. A V8 amount of noise. Will Germany balk at shutting down all of its nuclear power by the end of the year? How far does a wind turbine have to be away from shore before it's not an eye sore: Wind Turbine Visibility and Visual Impact Threshold Distances in Western Landscapes Study link (pdf) Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show. Follow us on TikTok! Check out our YouTube Channel! Follow us on Twitter! Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton Email us at cleanenergyshow@gmail.com Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow Tell your friends about us on social media! ==transcript== Hello, and welcome to episode 129 of the clean Energy show. I'm Brian Stockton. I'm James Whittingham. This week, I take a closer look at green hydrogen. Apparently, there is a whole, whole rainbow of hydrogen, Brian. Gray, blue, purple, turquoise I'm not even kidding. And even black and white hydrogen. And that's when you watch old footage of the Hindenburg exploding. What's faster than a Lamborghini and a Ferrari? Aka. That's right, Akia. In other news, up is down, black is white, and James is a handsome son of a bitch. You're damn straight. Plus, we asked, and sure enough, there is a study on how far out offshore wind turbines have to be before you can really see them. It's roughly the same distance that France keeps the United Kingdom away. Antilon brakes are coming to electric bicycles. That's right. The nanny state wants you to stop flying over your front handlebars, all in the name of safety. All that and more on this edition of the clean energy show. And also this week, Brian, I visit my first utility solar farm and Dodge. Dodge? Yes. They're making an EV, and they've wrecked the idea that electric vehicles will be quiet, and I'm quite angry about that. And will Germany block it, shutting down all of its nuclear power by the end of the year? I hope you're doing well. You were off last week due to back injury. Yeah, I never thought it would be bad enough that I couldn't record a podcast, but I did contemplate, like, lying flat on my back and somehow getting a microphone. But that would have been so much work to set up. If I had a servant to kind of set all that up for me, I could have done it. Yeah. In the meantime, it's now manageable, I guess, and hopefully it doesn't happen again. It will. It keeps happening. I mean, is this the worst it's ever been? Yeah, I would say so, but I don't know. I feel like I've got a handle on the right stretching that I need to do, so hopefully it's okay. Well, glad to hear, because all the preparation I had for last year, I've forgotten it now. I had a lot ready to go with that. Seemed like distant memories. Now it's only a week ago. Wow. My opening jokes. I wrote those last week. Last week. I thought they seemed dated. Yeah, that news is a little bit stale, but I thought they were both worth talking about. So right after I guess it was Friday, I went to a utility solar farm in Waburn that is an hour and a half south of us. Now, my son and I just he was feeling I basically said, we can't do the vacation he wanted to do. So I said, hey, let's just go on a little road trip. And then I thought, well, maybe I should go look at that solar farm an hour and a half south because it's the direction we haven't gone very often and found it fairly easily. It's not far from the small city of, what, 10,000 people or something like that. And it is the first one that I've seen in our own jurisdiction here ever because they just started putting them online. It puts out up to 10 MW into the system. It's rated at 13, though. So basically in the summer when it goes over ten, they waste whatever is over ten. The grid can't handle it. It's near a substation. What struck me disappointingly, though, was how small it was. Okay, this is run by this is a partnership between, I think, two First Nations, a solar company from Halifax, Nova Scotia, the east coast of Canada that we actually get some information from because I have some questions on the previous show and they're very helpful. But I was struck at how small it was. I haven't seen a lot of solar farms in my day. I've been through California and Arizona, and I probably haven't seen them all down there, but I saw a few, and what I saw were old and big. And this struck me as 2005 ish like it just seemed like, give it the times, man. Yeah, you're late to get on the grid, but what do you need to prove? What about solar? I mean, I've had solar for how many years have you had it? Five or six years now? Yeah, five or six years. We know it works and we're hooked up to the same utility. Why can't you just, I don't know, triple the size of it? But isn't that also encouraging? Because it kind of looks small, but you're still getting 10. Seems pretty good. It's not, though, compared to the size of what they're building now, including in our neighboring province of Alberta, they're building things many times that in one fell swoop. Well, first of all, when I got there, I heard this noise and I thought, oh, solar panels make noise. And I looked up and it was a guy in a riding lawn mower. At first I thought the panels weren't working. So let me describe what this is. This is a single access solar farm. So if you're new to what that is, I'm going to describe it in simple terms. Imagine a rod going from south to north, hoisted up above the ground by about, let's say six or seven, 8ft up. And then the panels are placed elongated on there along that tube, and they rotate to the east in the morning when the sun comes up in the east. And at noon, they're flat. But I was there at 04:00 in the afternoon and they were flat. So I think they made them flat for the guy who was mowing, because there was a few off in the distance that were where they should have been, which is facing west. So they will track the sun from east to west and get more power in the morning than they otherwise would. Ultimately, normally, a fixed panel faces south at the best angle to get the most sun year round over the course of a year. Well, these follow it. So the pattern of that, if you look at the chart that I have there, you know how our charts are. They're kind of a bell curve. Is that fair to say? Yeah. Shaped like a bell? Yes. This one is kind of like a flattened bell, so instead of gradually going up, it shoots up fairly quickly and then it's flat throughout the most of the day up around where our peak is and then comes back down again. So I don't see how it can get as much sun midday as a panel that's fixed and facing an optional direction. Maybe that peak should be a bit lower on that chart that I'm showing you. But that's basically the idea that you put this money into tracking equipment and extra hardware and it will give you more sun throughout the day from the same panels because it will track. And then also, Brian, of course, these are bifacial, so they will pick up sun off the ground, so they're spaced out so that there is some unshadowed ground to pick up. But also when they announced this, they said there was going to be goats and or sheep grazing there, so it could be multi use. But that hasn't happened yet. Maybe eventually it was a bit underwhelming. I was hoping for something bigger. Basically, they're making another one near the landfill in Regina here, and I drove by that on the way home to see what's up with that. It's going they're actually marked out where everything's going to go and they're going to have a battery installation project there. It's just that Brian, we're the sunniest place in Canada. Come on, man, we could do better than this. Plus, we've got like half of our grid is coal powered. We could do better, it seems like. Oh, we don't trust this, we're scared of this. Maybe we need to build a big places near the coal plants, which would work out fairly well because that's part of our sunniest belt is down where the coal plants are. Ironically, that would be cool. Yeah. Well, maybe that's how all the coal ended up there was from all the sunshine. Well, I remember you had a story about coal plants shutting down in the United States and they were putting solar around because the grid ties were already there. Yeah, no, it totally, absolutely makes sense. And yeah, like, of course, on my own house, I've got solar. You've got solar. But I am trying to electrify everything in my house, so I'm quickly finding out that I should have installed maybe three times as many solar panels when I initially did my project. How could you do that? No, there's not much room left, but it is what it is. But I did finally talk to somebody who was willing and HVAC installer, willing to put in an air source heat pump to heat my house. How did you find this person? Just googling and making an inquiry on the web. Okay, where did you make the inquiry to the person you Googled? Yeah, the company. Okay, well, that's cool. Yeah. And I think I had maybe contacted them a few months ago and they never got back to me or everybody's super busy in the trade. But I finally did hear from them and yes, they do air source heat pumps in our ridiculously frigid cold climate. I was just worried I would not ever find somebody who just wasn't even willing to take out a natural gas furnace. But anyway, so it is possible it is being done around here. They also do geothermal, but they don't typically recommend that for urban properties, they prefer to do geothermal. For rural properties, where you have more space, you can do a horizontal pipe rather than if it's in the city, you've got to do a vertical, and those aren't quite as good and very expensive. So this is still expensive in our source heat pump, but it's going to be a lot less than geothermal. And I think this is definitely the way of the future, even around here. So I think I'm probably going to do it. My son was asking me about this because I was telling them and he was saying, why is Brian spending so much money to be first to have a zero footprint? And I said, I don't know. I've just been thinking about it for years and years. As soon as I went solar, my thought was, okay, excellent, I've got the solar. Now how do I get rid of my furnace? It just seemed like the logical next step. It's just you're spending a lot of money on these things and you're not getting the payback for it, you're doing it, and you're not really saving the planet, you're just lowering your own footprint, which is admirable, of course, to everyone listening to the show. Yeah. The catch here is, of course, like 30% of our grid is coal fired. So I think in terms of my carbon footprint, I'll probably end up kind of it'll be a bit of a wash, but of course, eventually the grid here will clean up. And the other thing is, we do have grants available for this in Canada. It's not as generous as the ones recently announced in the US with the biden. What was that called again? Inflation Reduction Act. That's correct, yes. I did the first step, which is apply for the Canada Greener Homes grant. You fill out a thing on the web, so they're going to do an evaluation of my home, and then you get up to five grand for green type renovations, and there's a little bit of a provincial tax rebate, so I might get a couple of grand back there. Yeah, it's expensive. But again, the other impetus was we don't have air conditioning here and so I just didn't want to put in normal air conditioning and then 510 years ago from now have to rip it up because everyone's going to have to get rid of their natural gas in five or ten years. So it's definitely going to cost more than just putting in air conditioning, but it gets rid of my natural gas. So yeah, we'll see how it goes. Will it get rid of your natural gas? Will you use resistive heating as a backup? Yeah, this unit has resistive heater backup which is not efficient. And not cheap to run no, once it hits -20 the heat pump has difficulty so the resistance heat backs up. Right now my natural gas bill is $110 a month, equalized throughout the year, so I should be able to get that to zero. So it probably will still end up costing more than that. It will be probably more than an extra $100. Are we talking water heating here too? Yeah, so the unit that they showed me, it's a Nordic heat pump. It doesn't heat your hot water, but apparently it preheats it. So this is a function of this particular one that they're selling to me. It does like 30% to 50% of your hot water needs, so it sort of preheats your hot water and then you need a regular hot water heater to kind of finish it off. But the idea like I have a natural gas water heater too, so switch that out to a heat pump water heater hopefully. Okay, well, it's tricky where we live because it does get down to -40 it can you have to plan for the worst case scenarios. Yeah, and certainly minus twenty s and thirty s celsius and minus forty fahrenheit celsius is possible. Yeah, but this was super encouraging to find that this is actually being done around here, that we are still going to be the last probably to get off natural gas because this is not going to be cheap and there is a subsidy, but it's still going to be kind of expensive. But yeah, this is totally possible and hopefully I can prove that and report back well, I do expect subsidies to come down in Canada too, eventually because this is planned and we are heavily influenced by what the state does with policy. Sometimes that hurts us and sometimes it helps us. But also heat pumps are generally put into highly insulated houses. It's like an electric car. When you make an electric car, it can do as much as maybe you want it to with the battery size. So you make the cars lighter. You use carbon fiber, you use aluminum, and in the case of a house, you make it the most energy efficient you can. So are you taking any steps there? Yeah, well, we have over the years like we've upgraded the windows. And we have spray foam, a bunch of my bomb shelters spray foam here. As I mentioned last week, it's also patty in case there is a bomb. Nice and soft. And we're doing our part of our roof this year as well. So I was reporting we've got leaks in our roof, so we're going to spray foam that over the next several months so the house will be much better insulated than when we bought it. And then the only thing left to go would be, like, the bedrooms and the living room could still use some extra insulation. So we probably will do that next. But having our vaulted ceiling properly installated will actually help a lot. Oh, Brian, I want to say a shout out to Matthew Pointer, who pulled up beside me and his Tesla yesterday, and much to my daughter's amusement, had a conversation with me between cars. She's never seen that before. I said, Girl, in the old days, people used to stop and talk. Strangers would talk. But he's one of the people in the local EV community, and he had roof racks on his Tesla. I asked him, Why are the roof racks on? And he says, Because I might use them for skiing. And of course, it's not skiing season, water skiing season. I guess it just leaves them on and they're cool roof racks. The Tesla roof racks, they look slick, but he says they're also pretty easy to take off and don't affect his range, to go out of range in his car. Another thing I wanted to mention is that I saw a commercial because we downloaded this app called Fubo for soccer, because that's where the English Premier League soccer is on this year. They're always changing rights. Now it's a different app, by the way. It's better than The Zone, which it was last time, but more expensive. And they have weird ads on these things, okay. Because it's new and they don't know who to sell ads to. So I saw lots of ads for North Dakota repeated over and over again. Okay? Apparently, North Dakota is a cool place with one tall building, which I believe we stayed in when we went to the Faracle Film Festival there. I'm not North Dakota. I love it. There's many aspects of North Dakota I love. And I just saw an ad for lab grown diamonds, and we just talked about that on the show not long ago, and now I'm seeing ads for it. It's commercialized, but I'm wondering now that it's real, if you were a person who I don't like diamond. I don't give a crap about diamonds. I'm not married. I don't believe in that stuff. I'm not an old romantic person. But if you were with a lab grown diamond, be a cop out compared to a real diamond for people. I'm asking you to speculate here, but do you think that there'd be any difference or would you even tell the person you're giving it to? Hey, it was growing a lab hunting from a Big Mac that was rotting in the corner. Is it the kind of thing where a guy could put on one of those loops in a diamond shop and look at it and go, oh, this is lab grown, this is crap? That's a good question. And if you are a listener, we have a lot of smart people listening to the show email as Cleanenergy Show at a@gmail.com that's a question I'd love to know the answer to. That's a very interesting question. Yeah, because I think it's something like cubic zirconia. That's another one where the professionals can tell the difference between a cubic zirconia and a diamond. But you and I probably not. So they'll have less value if they're easier to make. The question is because Canada's North relies on diamond mining, it's a big industrial economic impact up there. Will it be affected? I don't know. However, of course, lab grown diamonds have less environmental impact, which is why we're talking about them in the first place. Another thing I saw when I was searching for cars, trying to buy one, as I was on the Hyundai Canada website and I noticed something new there. They said, try an EV before you buy an EV, so you can book a multi day test drive with an EV. I think it's a great idea. And they're using the service, what's it called? Turtle, which I guess is in some Canadian cities now, I think Vancouver and Toronto, perhaps we can't do it everywhere. But that would be one where you could manually just go rent one at Turtle in the States, people have done that and just had one for a few days to see how they like it, because it's hard. I'd like to drive one and see what they're like, really. But Hyundai also, they're having a hard time keeping up with demand. So do they really need a program like this to sell EVs? Because they tend to sell out pretty quickly. I think I saw somebody on Facebook had an EV six, and where we live are they out already? I didn't know they were coming. They caught me by surprise. Yeah, there's at least one around. So they're starting to trickle out. The question is, how many will they make? Because I'm hoping the demand is there. The reviews are still flowing in for the iconic Five. And we talked last time about Mike having one, a friend of mine, and he really loves it. No. And we have an update coming up as well on the EB Six. But also I wanted to mention I saw Arivian in the wild. Aribian R one T electric pickup truck. I didn't know that any had made it up here, anywhere near here, but it was just outside of Moosejaw, my favorite town. Moose Jaw on the Trans Canada. The number one that goes coast to coast, east to west. Yeah, and that's interesting because other people have spotted them previously in the summer. I wonder if somebody's test driving one back and forth or what's going on with that. I don't know, but hopefully the charging situation is okay for them since they were on the Trans Canada. As we've said many times, the Don Tesla charging situation isn't great. Also, I thought I'd mentioned, because I am looking as a Chevy Bolt EV, that there was a fellow on the Chevy bolt form that had 200,000 miles on his 2020 bolt, and that's 322,000. These were mostly highway miles because he has a really long commute. I don't know why. Maybe he's a drug dealer, who could say? But he's charged to do a run runner, he charges you 100% every day and using it all plus one or two fast charges per day for a very long commute. And by my calculations on what he showed off the dash, it may have lost 15% of its range, which isn't bad. I mean, this is no, you don't expect any car to last 322,000 km or 200,000 miles. And the fact that this isn't just handed off to some teenager to use for local driving at that point, which is how I see EVs going when they lose their range. But it's still a pretty good range and he's still using it for that purpose. He's having to fast charge it maybe a bit more often, especially in the wintertime, he says, when it gets cold. I don't know what his definition of cold is. And also a shout out to Nestor's Bakery up in Saskatoon, our sister city here in the province, that has an electric transit van, a Ford Transit van electric, which is I didn't think we see any of those around either. There's a picture of it on Facebook, and they say they save enough in gas by switching discs to make the van payment. I believe it's free and good for the environment, good for your business brand. They're not even factoring in maintenance. So that, Brian, as we know, as we say all the time, is what's going to really move things along when people start to realize because money speaks, money talks, and when money starts making a difference. Let's get into some updates from past shows. Finland's new nuclear plant has had to cut power to zero from a failed turbine. Yeah, we've mentioned this nuclear plant before because it was finally coming online. And I think I initially reported on this because it was a good news story, because we seem to be sort of bashing nuclear a lot lately because it's so expensive and there's all these delays and cost overruns and it's literally taking decades to get these things up. But since this one in Finland was coming online, I thought, okay, we better report on this. But yeah, power dropped to zero on Monday, so they're still in trial operations. It's not in full blown operation. And they had a turbine fail, sort of killed the whole thing. Nothing dangerous, nothing exploded or melted down or anything. But this reactor was supposed to start production in 2009. That's how long it's taken. And it's going to be apparently a few months more because it's not working right now. Brian, when things are 13 years overdue, money gets spent in that time. So it's not just time, it's money. Yeah. And it's a 1.6 gigawatt reactor that's going to be the fifth reactor in Finland and its biggest reactor, and this is expected to produce 14% of the country's electricity. You put up a solar farm, can put it up in a few months, and it will work. Yeah. And you and I aren't nuclear scientists. Well, no, technically. So that will influence our decision around these things. But solar, wind and batteries are so damn simple. Why don't we move to that and we'll talk about that a bit more when we get to Germany later on? And I know I bring him up, but my boy says, dad, you know what the world's biggest greenhouse gas is? Do you know the answer to this? That's right there in the script. So of course you do. Like the biggest admirer the biggest greenhouse gas that is there in the atmosphere is water vapor. Okay. And you know what? Hydrogen emits water vapor. Is this going to be a problem? Well, I heard about it on a podcast, a good podcast. Was it ours? And it wasn't ours. It was actual people who it was really an in the weeds podcast with experts in the field, talking to other only experts who are working in the industry listen to it. And they said that more study needs to be done because it hasn't been studied. So if you're looking at airliners flying around and emitting water vapor, is that a good thing? Maybe people have some comments and you know how to get a hold of US clean energy show@gmail.com. But I just wanted to throw that out there because he was giving me a hard time about that. And now something for some extremely disappointing news. We tried to focus on the good news. Here's some disappointing news. The Dodge Charger, that is the muscle car that you hear driving down your street at night, eleven at night, waking you up because some teenager has got to feel better about himself. So he bought a Dodge Charger, a muscle car, as they call them. They still exist. They were a big thing in the know. You had a Pinto and called it a muscle car. Was it a Pinto or something? No, I had a grand. Grand. It's even worse, I think. I think I had a Pinto like a week before it broke. Literally. I'm not even kidding. Yeah, so they're making an EV, and they're going to make them all EVs, but they have noise, pretend noise. Brian in fact, the whole back is this pretend exhaust was essentially a dispersion speaker for V eight engine noise. And this is what it sounds like. Yeah, I'm going to boo that guy off the road. The first person to buy one of those, because you'll have the option of turning the stupid thing off. And then you go to a muffler shop. Muffler shops will now be like an audio visual place where they'll put in a bigger amp to make the car louder. Yeah. You know what? That's probably a really good business to get into. There you go, kids. If you're just still in high school, there's a business opportunity for you, and that is just depressing. We don't want cars to make noise because if you get beat by a Porsche, the Porsche doesn't make any noise. What are you emulating? You're emulating a slow car. Good for you. I know. People keep telling me on the street, I like the sound of the smell of fumes. Well, you're going to die early and good luck to you. I don't know. Brian and Elon Musk news this week, and I hesitate to even mention his name anymore. He says, Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming. I'll repeat that population collapse due to low birth rates is much bigger risk to civilization than global warming. This is a guy who's trying to save global warming by advancing, speeding up the electrification of transportation, which he has successfully done, I would argue. I've known this. We've all known this. We all knew that we would solve hunger and the world would become more equitable and we would educate people would get access to education. We'd stop having 20 babies, right. The birth rate would go down to what it is in, say, Quebec is like 2.0 per person, and that is a declining birth rate. So you bring in people from other countries, eventually everyone's going to catch up. We're all going to have a middle class and maybe not make so many babies. I mean, it's not like we're all going to go to make babies. Brian that's my argument. We're not going to go out and say, oh, I got to save the planet and make 20 kids like he is and name them weird. Yeah. No, there was another quote of his in the news this week, too, where he said we got to keep drilling for oil and gas. But that's just kind of an obvious statement. But anything he says tends to make the news. So yeah, I don't know if it's as big a problem as he says, but I don't know. It's a slow moving train wreck. We'll hopefully have time to figure that out. Well, the economies work on expansion, like our right wing government here in this prairie province. Farming agricultural centric and oil centric brings in immigrants so that the population can expand because nobody wants. To live here. Our population is expanding, our economy is moving because we need to build houses, we need to build more restaurants, we need to build more clothing stores and expand roads and construction and all that. Yeah, we need an equilibrium where maybe we have stable population. But this is something that rethink X, Tony Siba at all have talked about. They're starting to talk about deep things like this, like the world in the future, guaranteed incomes might be necessary. We have to rethink how people will make money when AI takes over a lot of jobs and so forth. So yeah, it's a big question and I don't think a lot of people are actually thinking about that because sometimes these things sneak up on you. Sometimes they can come faster than ever. Back to Kia, we were talking about the EV six not long ago. So they've got a GT version coming out. This is the all electric Kia EV six. The GT version is going to be even faster. And I just like the headline here. We'll beat a Ferrari and a Lamborghini in a race. This is from the electric website. So yeah, this is faster than a Ferrari Roma, faster than a Lamborghini Hurricane or an Evo spider. And this is a reasonably priced I don't think they've announced the price yet, but this will be available to customers later this year. Will this be something similar to your little sports car that you had? Your, what is it? The Hyundai Veloster? Yeah, I would still call it a hatchback, but it's probably called a crossover. It's the same as the EV six crossover that we've talked about before, which is a nice little car, but the lostr was sold as a sporty vehicle for those that live prices or perhaps young people. Yes, this is definitely more of a sporty version, but it's got the same body shape. It's basically the same car. Yeah, I don't know. And no word on the range either. The range on these is just kind of okay, I think. And you'll probably lose a bit of range with the extra fast version. But I don't know, I just think that's super fun. A Kia that goes that fast. The mythical Tesla Roadster version two, which has been promised forever since the cyber truck. Or that's not the cyber truck. The semi would go, what, 2.9 without the rocket? Pass. No, be under 2 seconds because the plat is already under 2 seconds. Also be like 1.9. Yeah, maybe even quicker. They're talking about putting a SpaceX rocket. It's going to have to shoot like adhesive down on the roadway so that it can not spin its tires at that speed. Yes, that's always an issue. Wow. Tire manufacturers are going to have to keep up. At first they were making low rolling resistance, fuel efficient tires vs. Now they have to make them so they can hug the road and not turn into dust just when you accelerate. Brian, something I'm very interested in that is the wind turbine visibility. I asked this question on our last show, and I said, does anybody out there know, is there a study? And sure enough, there is. The US. Government, of all people, studied this very thing, and they did studies with get this professional lookers. I don't know who these people are or what it takes to become one, but I commend you for having that on your business card because that is impressive. So the concern here is that if we put a bunch of offshore wind turbines off the coast, it's going to be unsightly and people will be upset. An ocean view is a beautiful thing. Now you've got your ships out there, and in a lot of places you have warships, I noticed, like down in San Diego, and not only were there warships, there were helicopters doing drills right off the beach. In fact, there was one that hovered, I swear, for an hour and a half it's probably Tom Cruise just shooting. It could have been Tom Cruise. What am I thinking? It was Tom Cruise. Of course it was Tom Cruise. Anyway, we talked recently about the Great Lakes because there was a study that said the Great Lakes can do well. There's some that are deeper than others. The smaller ones could do a significant power. But the Great Lakes hold enough potential for wind energy to power the entire United States. And that's interesting because they're close to population centers, close to grid tieins. Well, these professional lookers came up with they have different categories, lettered categories, de and so forth. And you've got your giant wind turbines, which are basically the ones that the extra large ones. So they have ratings for that. They have ratings for small, medium, and large. They've rated them because you can see them in the distance where you can barely notice them, or you can see them right in front of you and say, oh, that's ugly, and see the whole thing spinning. Or you can barely notice them, or you cannot see them at all. These are the different categories. So category D was clearly visible, with moderate impact becoming less distinct. E was less distinct, size is reduced. Then you get down to negligible or no impact anyway. So negligible or no impact at all for a small offshore wind turbine is 20 km or 12.4 miles. Okay? Now, your biggest turbine, your extra large ones, is up to 40 km or 25 miles. So that's the answer. And it's easy because there's always environmental impacts and things like that. You don't want to have people disrupted. Like Ted Kennedy Jr. He was against wind farms off his coast, which are just now finally got approved this week. Yeah, that's how far it goes back, because he's no longer with us for a long time, somewhere in the middle. The low impact of movement is noticeable in good light, but not normally. And so that's about 10 for a small one and 22 to 27 km, or 13.7 miles for the biggest ones. Yeah, there is a way that's not that far, because on the east coast of North America, there is a large ocean shelf that makes oil drilling and this sort of thing really practical that hasn't been exploited yet. So there's great potential there. And we were talking about Japan recently, which only has a 25 kilometer shelf, but floating wind turbines could go further than that if you wanted to. So, yeah, I'll put this chart in the show notes and you can have a look at it yourself. And again, it was the US. Department of Energy. So the biggest turbines, again, suggest about 40 km away and smaller ones 20 km if you don't want to have any negligible visual impact. And getting back to what I was just talking about from Clean Techa, the Cape Cod Offshore Wind Project, america's first, believe it or not, is finally, officially moving ahead after years of opposition. The Vineyard Wind One is described as the nation's first commercial scale offshore wind farm. The project will utilize 60 213 megawatt heliodx wind turbines. Those are the big mothers, the big ones, the biggest ones there are. They're talking about slightly bigger ones now, but those are huge. I think the wind sweep is like two football fields. It's just massive. And they're also going to have an offshore substation out there and that power will be transferred to shore via 220 volts cables. This is the thing that the locals were concerned about. They weren't concerned any longer about the offshore visibility, they were more concerned about the cables. They had to go through town. So what they did is they made a deal with the town and said that they're going to it's called Covels Beach, and they're going to dig up the roads and put the cable under the roads. And while those roads are dug up, they're going to fix the infrastructure of sewers and whatnot, and storm drains, and that's going to save them money. So the 800 megawatt project that is approaching a nuclear reactor in output is located 15 miles off the coast, so it's fairly close. And these are the big ones, so you will see them and they will generate electricity for more than 40,000 homes and businesses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and create 3600 full time equivalent job hours. That's not jobs, that's job hours. And, of course, what we like to talk about, it's going to save customers of electricity $1.4 billion over the first 20 years of operation. So clean energy, people, saves the planet and saves your wallet, because energy I saw a study that said people's electricity bills, even by 2030, will be reduced by $9 a month or something like that. So, yeah, it's happening. And by the time we get to our climate goals, hopefully at 2040 to 2050, electricity is going to be given away a lot of times. Fantastic. OK, another story here from Electric. They're reporting on Bosch, the Electric motor and appliance company. They've come up with antilock brakes for electric brakes, which is something I never thought of, never thought was even maybe necessary, but I just liked this story because it's a good example of the progress that we could make once we start taking these kinds of things seriously, like electric bikes. So, yeah, we've had anti lock brakes in cars for years. I didn't like them at first because it seemed like kind of unnecessarily complicated and I was worried it was just going to be one of those things that breaks on your car, like quit working doesn't mean brakes. Yeah, I don't know, they've been great. Antelope brakes are great where we live in the winter because you can stomp on the brakes and not slide around on the ice. You can still keep steering your car when you just lock up the wheels in your car. You can't steer, you just have to slide around like an idiot. But antilock brakes give you a little bit more control, so it only makes sense to do this on bicycles as well. So these were shown off at Eurobike 2022, an exhibition recently in Europe, and Electric took these for a ride and it looks fantastic. Have you ever locked up your front brakes on a bike and flown over the handlebars? I don't even want to talk about it. That's how bad it is. We were talking before the show about the evolution of home videos and the cameras. Well, that little flip camera, guess how it got broken going over your hand on my handlebars down a hill. It was a mountain biking course and it did go down quicker than I thought and there was just I could have paralyzed myself. I basically did a somersault as a much lighter man, but it was not pleasant. And this was only about eight years ago, seven years ago, yes, it was scary and whole body feels like it got hit by a truck and then you start to shake it off. Is anything broken? So the answer to your query, yes. One time in my twenty s, I went over my front handlebars. It's no fun, but yeah, Antelope breaks will absolutely be fantastic. So hopefully that starts to become and they mentioned here in the article that it's great for things like cargo bikes. So electric cargo bikes are going to be a huge thing in cities for doing deliveries and stuff, and that's a particular case where you can get a lot of momentum with kind of a heavy cargo bike and you don't want to be locking up those wheels in any way. So, yeah, this is a nice step forward. I'd be curious to try them. And, you know, I remember when I used to go to the bicycle shops a lot, that they used to go away to the bike shows this time of year. This is the exact time of year when the bike conventions are on and all your greasy bike mechanics from the local shops go out and on vacation. Duke God knows what in Las Vegas. Ebikes. Not e, motorcycles. Not electric motorcycles. But bikes are going over highway speeds now because occasionally you will see them with that spec with a new bike announcement on electric or somewhere. And I'm thinking, okay, that's not good. But it's all about control, right? So if you do have any lock brakes, then that may change the equation. I mean, I'm scared going at my peak of my ebikes, 25 miles an hour type of thing. So I don't know. Brian we've got many press releases and I got one that I was kind of interested in doing the interview on, and that is because last week the Chancellor of Germany was coming to our country to make various announcements and agreements. And on his last day on Tuesday, he went out to the east coast of Newfoundland and Labrador and was making an announcement about green hydrogen. And one of the countries in Canada that is trying to do green hydrogen out there got a hold of me and wanted me to interview the CEO. Now, our schedule is never hooked up, but I started doing research into it and I started to get ill feelings about the whole thing about A, green hydrogen and how is this viable and B, like, are these companies just sort of jumping on the government teeth at the time when they're desperate to fight climate change? And is this legitimate? I'm starting to feel like I was just getting bad vibes about the whole thing. So I did some research into green hydrogen and I came to the conclusion that the first thing that we should use green hydrogen for is not Germany's. Electricity needs to get off Russian fuels, fossil fuels, but to use it for what it's used for now. And it's used in oil refinery, refinery, refinery oil refinery. Ammonia production and methanol production as well as steel production. And I think maybe some cement production is possible as well. So ammonia is used in fertilizers. So if we can get off the ungreen hydrogen now, that makes emissions. When you make that hydrogen, that's where we should first apply. This 4% of hydrogen in the world is currently green. That's not very much. And there's a great expense to how they do it. What they do with green hydrogen is use process called electrolysis, where you put basically two high electric probes in water and you split the water's atoms and separate the hydrogen from it. That's very energy intense. And those electrolysis machines are very expensive now and they're trying to get them down in price like wind and solar. But there's some debate as to how that's even possible. So they're talking about shipping it to Germany. And in order to do that, because hydrogen is not like gasoline, you have to cool it down and make it solid, okay. Because it just takes up so much volume. So you have to make it really cold. Now you can make Ammonium cold, but not as cold, and do that. You don't have to make it as cold. You can turn it back into hydrogen again on the other side. But the person we were going to talk to, he bought this brownfield oil storage facility in Nova Scotia, and he plans on putting up wind turbines, 100 or so wind turbines to power the place phase one and offshore for phase two. And he's put $100 million of his own money into it because he's a rich guy with lots of investments from prior times and he has expertise in setting something like this up. But, yeah, I mean, it's 160 wind turbines on Charlotte the locals aren't thrilled about. And they started getting that shoved down their throats really quickly. They haven't had time. And that's all these things take time. But he's got this brownfield oil storage place, which apparently is great. And there's a deep shipping channel there. I think it's like 27 meters or something. So you can get ships in and out to ship it. And that's all you that's a big step forward for this particular company. But there are, critics say, 24 separate government agencies right now that have to provide the stamp for this to go forward. For something like this, that's a lot. And that means years and years and years. Yeah. Well, back to that issue of Complication. It's so much more complicated than solar, wind and battery. And that's my thought. It's complicated as expensive. And in Alberta, they streamlined oil exploration and development so that you go to one agency and they take care of everything. We're going to have to do something like that if things like hydrogen are going to be sped up, because that's a problem with solar. Like Australia took away the green tape, or the red tape rather, and replaced green tape and makes it cheaper and faster. Faster means cheaper because you don't have to sit around and all that. It's just a better process. So it expanded really rapidly once they did that. So there's also blue hydrogen, which they're making next door in Alberta and the oil rich profits of Alberta. But they say they're going to capture that carbon that's from natural gas. So you have to capture the emissions from that. And that's not practical. Yeah, so green hydrogen is made with clean electricity, so it should be 100% emissions free. Blue hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, but you can capture the carbon and then make it kind of clean. And there's lots of hydrogen projects going on in the world, lots of them and this will be maybe one of the first in North America. But the thing is, it's just going to take so much time. I don't doubt there's going to be an appetite for a market for it. Okay. There's going to be an insatiable market to buy green hydrogen, just like there's an insatiable market to buy green energy. Amazon wants to have green energy. They put up a million solar farms or whatever, like dozens, and counter do them, I don't know. And they'll just do that and Microsoft, et cetera, et cetera. Well, that's happening. And people will want green hydrogen as well. And green steel made from green hydrogen. So we'll see. Yeah, Germany seems to be definitely on the forefront of this hydrogen. And there was a story, this was from CNN that the very first hydrogen powered train line has now started running full time in Germany. So they've got 14 hydrogen powered trains. These are fuel cell hydrogen vehicles, so emissions free. And as long as the hydrogen is made in an emissions free way, then this is an emissions free system. I don't know, it doesn't say how the hydrogen is made. I'd be surprised if it's fully green hydrogen. But yeah, this is a thing that is actually working now. And they still have some diesel trains that they plan to replace, but this project has started. They have about a 1000 kilometer range on these hydrogen trains. So they can run basically do their route all day without refilling. But they just have refilling stations at either end of the line. And yes, this is the thing that's now working well in California. California has like, I don't know, maybe 34 hydrogen refilling stations for cars. There's like six in maybe Vermont or somewhere for Bernie's friends, but they're all in California. Half of them aren't working. It's very expensive to fill your car, very expensive. They're hoping to get the cost of these electrolyzers down where they could fuel a vehicle and be cost competitive with fossil fuels. And they won't even need blue hydrogen, but you need to be able to commit to that. Then there needs to be just the difficulty of refueling and transporting is just such a major thing to do. Yeah, it's almost like you need your green hydrogen plant right next to where the storage is, like for this train line. If they could actually make the green hydrogen at both ends of the rail line, but it's just probably not practical to do that everywhere. We're going to potentially need this hydrogen. The question my partner asked when they were watching the news story on TV is why doesn't Germany make their own dammarine hydrogen? Well, I looked into that and they do have a coastline, they do have places to put wind, but they claim it's just not enough coastline as other people. Nova Scotia is very windy. They don't have good solar resources. And Newfoundland and Labrador also have good very good wind resources. And ironically, I'm looking at the solar chart for Newfoundland. You know, where the best solar potential is for Newfoundland, it's way better, the most extreme north as you go. So it's actually just a weather thing. I think there's just a lot of clouds in the south, less cloud. You're getting really close to the Arctic up there in Labrador. And then this is better solar resources than there is down south. Okay, so there was a fantastic article this week from Power magazine written by Sony Patel, and I just wanted to talk about this because it's really a follow up to a lot of these things that we're talking about, the complications, these different types of power. So we've been talking about Germany. They have been trying to phase out their nuclear power plants. This is really part of a political platform. People in Germany don't really want their nuclear power anymore. So they have so far shut down three of the six nuclear power plants that they have had in Germany. So just last year, nuclear was supplying about 12% of the electricity needs in Germany. That's now down to 6%, which is these three nuclear power plants remaining. But of course, as we know, Europe, and Germany in particular, is in a bit of an energy crisis this year because they've been relying on fossil fuel imports from Russia. And those are now in doubt. And nobody really wants to talk to Russia anymore. We don't want their stinky oil and gas. So there's been a lot of talk about, well, should they delay the closing of these last three nuclear plants in Germany? And it's like, on the surface, well, that seems like a great idea. This is a carbon free form of electricity. Just keep them running a little bit longer, another year or two, then maybe they can find a different plan instead of relying on this Russian oil and gas. But this article was so great because it really went through the complications in doing that. That sounds like a simple thing, just keep the plants running for another year or two. But I'll go through some of the legal and regulatory hurdles that was mentioned in this article, because, of course, solar, wind and batteries, something like that, it's fairly simple. Like, you and I could literally build a solar wind and battery power plant. Basically, like, you have one in your camper, you put out the solar panel, you charge it in a battery, boom. It's pretty simple. But nuclear can be extremely dangerous. So over the years, we've created all of these laws and regulations. So the first hurdle, the reactors cannot be operated beyond 2022. December under Germany's Atomic Energy Act and prolonging their operation will require an amendment to the law. They would literally have to change the law, which they can do to keep these plants running beyond 2022. There would also be an environmental impact assessment that would have to be done. And this would have to abide by a European Court agreement as well. There has to be a comprehensive risk and benefit assessment by Germany's legislature that would balance assessments. This was created after the Fukushima accident in 2011. Regulations got more severe, so there's a bit more here in terms of regulations. The reactors would need to address safety and security requirements because they're slated for shutdown in December 20. So they're already three years past. They were given a sort of a special exemption. So continuing beyond that, they're already 13 years past the last major kind of safety inspections. Continued operation would only make sense if the safety review were significantly reduced in scope and the test depth or extensive retrofitting might be kind of simplified. You'd have to basically change all of these safety rules and kind of let everything slide for a couple of more years. They are also running out of fuel. So the fuel elements in the plant have been largely used up. They have enough fuel for only about 80 days of extended operation past that December 2022 shutdown point. Procuring new fuel is a lengthy process that could take between 18 and 24 months. If you did a super accelerated version, maybe twelve to 15 months. So the fuel is a huge problem. There would also have to be testing of this new fuel. Like, you don't just come up with nuclear fuel. It's an extremely difficult process, making sure there's enough staff so they could have staffing issues if they continue beyond this date. I imagine a lot of the staff have already made other plans to go onto other jobs. So there would have to be extensive human resources coordinated and people trained. It's just a long nightmare of things. There's the financial consideration. So again, doing all of this stuff to extend it beyond its normal date. This is going to cost even more money than it has been costing. This is going to be expensive electricity if they keep it running. Now, there is, of course, a nuclear business and technology association called ChemD. They disagree with some of these conclusions that in their view, basically it's worth it. This is a massive crisis facing Europe and Germany, this massive energy shortage. So they think that all of these extra measures that would be needed are probably worth it, but I'm not so sure. And the fact that they're down to only 6% of the German electricity generation with these last three plants, hopefully they can come up with another 6% somewhere. Russia could just go home and get out of Ukraine and be nice. Yeah, and hopefully punished somehow. But it's phenomenal. I understand they are going to try and keep three running, right? They're going to do their best. Yeah. There's been sort of conflicting reports. They had said, no, we're not going to extend them. But now it sounds like they're considering it, and I guess we'll see. Well, Brian, we're going way over on the show this week, but I want to mention, coming up in the show is a lightning round where we'll have a skim of the rest of the week's headlines. Real quick, let's dip into some of our feedback from the web. We have a DoorDash driver, says he bought a Chevy Bolt EV. That's a slightly larger version of the Bolt with the crossover styling. Took the Evo DoorDashing this evening. This is a person who works as a DoorDash delivery person. It's a great car for food delivery. The first order of the day pays for all of the fuel I need. And again, and I can sit in the AC listening to music between orders without worrying about overheating. And this is the person who was down in the States, and it's perfect DoorDash car. We hear that a lot. Yeah. And of course, one of my pet peeves we've mentioned on the show is you'll often see people around here sitting in normal weather with the engine running, and I always am confused by that. It's like, do they really need the AC running? It's not that hot out, et cetera, et cetera, wasting all that fuel. But I was in my gas powered car the other day just with the engine off and listening to the radio, and after about a minute, a warning comes up on the screen saying, oh, you shouldn't be running your AV system without the engine running, because you're going to run your battery down. So maybe that's why everyone's running their cars. Well, they don't have to, because the little no, it's telling me it's life experience. And I can't believe you've never had this experience. You've never run your battery down and been stranded from that very thing. It takes a long time. Mr. Stockton, with his good quality batteries, not so much. He stretches the life of his battery because he's poor. Well, I've run into that before when I was a kid, and I've learned my lesson, and I think a lot of people have, and that's why they don't turn it off. You know, what I'm hearing a lot of now is people like pickup trucks automatically shutting off the engine that stop lights. But really, how much is that saving you? It's a minute or two of idling here and there. It's a little bit it's something that should have been implemented 20 years ago, and that might have made a difference, but it's a little too long because the engine literally has to start just like you're turning the key over. It seems like it's wearing air on it a lot. You need a more robust starter, but I think at the end, it does save a bit of fuel. All right, I have a question here on Twitter from alternative frequency that's his handle. He has a trucker who says the trucker in the United States says we are one of his five favorite podcasts. I thought they listened to Fantastic. And some of the others are Dr. Volts, which is a paid podcast on substance. And inside EVs, of course, is a popular one. Undecided Matt Farrell, which has been off of his YouTube channel. I use Matt Farrell's undecided for information. He is not a professional, but he does research well and has good videos. So, question for all of us, and we are the only ones that go back to them because we're good and decent people. Brian, even with your back, it says home batteries seem to cost roughly $1,000 per kilowatt hour. But the F 150 Lightning pickup truck has 93 kilowatt hours for about $40,000. And the Silverado announced Silverado EV will be 200 kilowatt hours for about 40 kwh. And I don't think either of those are actually 40K, by the way. They're already under prices like Tesla inflation, yes, but that's the whole cost of the vehicle. Or just the cost of the battery. That's the starting price. The supposed starting price. I mean, this is for the fleet version of those vehicles. But the question is, is home storage price too high? And are EV trucks price too low? Is it not about the capacity? I think that's a complicated question with a complicated answer with multifaceted. I'll add one before you do. Tesla, for example, wants to sell their vehicles. That's their primary motivation is to keep their company going by selling vehicles. So they'll put their batteries into the vehicles and they'll overprice the battery storage so that everybody's not buying it. I'm sure the battery storage could be cheaper for Tesla, maybe half as much. And we'd all buy got a waiting list for everything. We use all their batteries, and that would kill their business. That's one reason. Do you have other reasons? Not really, but I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, the home batteries have seemed awfully expensive to me. Also quite possible that Ford is losing money on these trucks and that Chevy is going to lose money on these trucks. We don't know for sure. Well, I'm not really sure if you have any thoughts cleanenergyshow@gmail.com or on Twitter. On Facebook. We're not on Facebook. It took us off Facebook. We're on TikTok, of course, and you to check us out. We have SpeakPipe. Comcleenergyshow to leave us a voicemail message, and we'd love to hear from you anything you have to say on this or any other subject. Brian it is time for, of course, the Lightning Round. The Lightning Round is where we skimmed through a few more headlines, really quick to end the show, and it's one of our favorite shows. It was a new segment almost two years ago, almost celebrating the two year anniversary of the Lightning Round. And believe me, there will be cake this year. I hope tesla says autopilot is preventing 40 crashes per day from wrong pedal error driving. And when this came out, somebody had crashed their car into a building. No, they crashed it into a wedding on the west coast of Canada and killed two people. And you occasionally see the elderly doing this in front of a store. I was teaching my daughter how to drive, and she wanted to use her left foot for the brake. And I said, no, there's a reason for that. And this is the reason. You stick to the right foot and you go back and forth. So the use of the auto pilot sensor to mitigate torque when it's sure the car is sure that the input was a mistake. Yeah, well, it's like saving 40 crashes a day means this is a really common, a way more common problem than I might have thought it is. Because if it's just 40 a day in Tesla, imagine the entire fleet of cars. But I think when we first talked about this a couple of years ago in the podcast I mentioned, I think it was called the Audi 5000. So way back in the late 70s or the early 80s, audi had a huge PR problem in North America because of sudden unintended acceleration. And it was believed that these Audi cars were faulty and they would just suddenly accelerate into a building, they would accelerate into traffic, et cetera, et cetera. And it was eventually determined it was just driver error. But there was, I think, like a 60 Minutes report on it that suddenly scared everybody off of buying an Audi. So this is apparently a very common problem, people pressing the wrong pen. And there was also something just about Priuses that killed their popularity, that was a big dent on them because toilet was such a reliable vehicle. It turned out it was just a format sticking on the driver pedal formats now so they can't move. I've had problems with my floor mats and different cars, too. Yeah, it took them forever to figure it out, too. To absolutely figure it out. A small Vermont utility which uses Tesla power walls from customers, speaking of this very thing, in a virtual grid backup system. So there's 4000 Tesla power walls hooked up in people's homes to the grid, and they found out that the first thoughts on this is that it's saving them a lot of money. In fact, $1.5 million in one week this summer. Now, I don't know what how you save one? I don't understand the nuances of grid. I mean, you have to fire up a plant. Maybe you lose some hardware during the situation that you wouldn't have otherwise lost. But they're sure that they've saved 3 million since in 2021 and just 1.5 million in the heatwave this summer. So, yeah, again, there's another virtual power plant project happening in Japan right now. There's a big one happening in California also with Tesla powerwalls. They could all be networked. Yeah. I think eventually it won't really be so much about saving money necessarily, it's just kind of stabilizing the grid. But stabilizing apparently saves money. I don't understand why, but it is. Yes. Oh Brian. It's time for a clean energy show. Fast fact pakistan is responsible for 1% of global emissions, yet it is the 6th most climate vulnerable country in the world, proving that the climate change impacts affect poor countries disproportionately. Yeah. And of course there's been massive flooding in Pakistan this last week or so. Absolutely devastating. Kind of what was normally once in a hundred year kind of situation is now sadly much more frequent. Speaking of which, new scientists says that the heatwave in China this summer is the most severe ever recorded in the world. People in large parts of China have been experienced two months of extreme heat and that's been 40 degrees and terrible things. The worst one in history, Brian. But we have to go. We'll see you again next week for another edition of the clean energy show. See you next week.
Join your favourite TransAtlantic podcasting crew: Ian, Georgia, and Ethan (Liam's manning the getaway car) as we review Ben Affleck's 2nd directorial effort in the gritty Boston heist film, The Town - brought to us by BFF of the BFE, Rev Bruce who joins us for the Endgame on this episode. We're talking Priuses in our 133rd episode as we discuss: How this film follows the format of a romantic comedy if you excuse the overwhelming trauma involved in the meet-cute Are we given enough time to feel sympathy for the characters in this film? What efforts did Ben Affleck go to in order to create an aura of legitimacy in this film Is Ben Affleck just remaking one of his other films and casting himself in the hero role, this go around Whether Doug is justified in his final kills or does he go too far Why does no-one pay attention to a character walking around with a duffel bag, ever Which actors and actresses really surprised us in this film and someone besides Georgia suffers from a little face blindness It's the return of Postlethwaite, and you know what that means We're joined once again by our BFF: Reverend Bruce and discuss Baseball, Boston, and some Dunkin' Donuts Georgia, Ian and Reverend Bruce all give their perspectives on how to deliver an affected accent We briefly give some thoughts on Will Smith's apology, the passing of Paul Sorvino and the last episode of Nick & Russ Don't Know Anything Whether or not The Town is the Best Film Ever. Become a Patron of this podcast and support the BFE at https://www.patreon.com/BFE We are extremely thankful to our following Patrons for their most generous support: Rev Bruce Juleen from It Goes Down In The PM Lina Oberholzer Ensign Ian Davies Chris Pedersen Katie McRae Duane Smith (Duane Smith!) Randal Silva The Yeetmeister Nate The Great Cheezy (with a fish on a bike) Andy Dickson Buy some BFE merch at https://my-store-b4e4d4.creator-spring.com/ Massive thanks to Lex Van Den Berghe for the use of 'Mistake' by Luckydog. Catch more from Lex's new band, The Maids of Honor at https://soundcloud.com/themaidsofhonor Also massive thanks to Moonlight Social for our age game theme song. You can catch more from them at https://www.moonlightsocialmusic.com/ Timestamps for this episode: 0:00 - Opening Banter 6:45 - Reflections & Corrections 24:20 - Shoutouts 36:30 - Deep Dive 1:45:10- We're joined by Hermes 2:32:25 - Endgame
Some Auckland drivers believe the government's clean car upgrade subsidy still won't be enough to get low income earners into Aquas, Priuses and Leafs. The government says it'll stump up for those willing to send their old gas guzzlers to the scrap heap, but there's no detail yet on how much they'll fork out. In the meantime, we sent reporter Nick Truebridge and cameraman Nick Monro car shopping.
This month is full of Idiocracy and we will try our best to go through this journey through hell together. From USA borders having a record influx of crossings to the US government caring more about the Ukrainian border. Some battles this month are: Joe Rogan vs Neil Young in a no holds bar cage match, Canadian truckers vs Justin Trudeau, Ethan Klein of H3H3 vs actual men, Arnold's Yukon vs Priuses, and the US consumer vs The Fed and inflation. Also, the CDC catches up to the conclusions I drew in my Corona Light with Lyme podcast almost two years ago. Lastly, we will discuss Biden sending masks and test kits to citizens now that most dont care but he will hire black women for everything if that makes up for being senile and soulless. Yet 33% of Americans still approve of the economy according to Gallup because you can't fix stupid. Listen or go Fox yourself
BONUS POD KLAXON! The January transfer window is officially OVER as fans across the land refresh Twitter pages, ink dries, and pigs fly... oh wait no, that would only be when West Ham sign a player. Blake and Oscar go through some of their favourite (and not so favourite) transfers of the past month. There's been a few crackers. Enjoy!
Happy New Year! In episode 87 of The Cavalry, Johnny talks about the bad gifts he got his wife and needs backup on how to keep the aging kids at the kids table for game night and how to trim the Christmas card list. Andrew needs backup on drivers being prejudiced against Priuses.
This is Season 3, Episode 9 of this "The Vampire Diaries" related podcast! Pete is watching the show for the first time and Ash is a superfan. Each week they watch an episode of TVD and discuss. In this week's episode they discuss Priuses and NextDoor, White Oak Ash, Homecomings and glow ups, being sired, and so much more! The episode ends with a silly Christmas themed game. Check out Summer the pug merch at https://www.teepublic.com/user/highdive Half of all profits from this merch will go to Pug Nation Rescue of Los Angeles: https://www.pugnationla.org/home/ If you like #TheVampireDiaries and/or you are a young adult, you should check out Pete's young adult book series The Happenstances... at www.tinyurl.com/TheHappenstances Check out Pete's horror anthology here: http://tinyurl.com/HFromTheHD For any questions or concerns follow Pete at @PeterLHarmon on twitter or instagram or email TheHappenstances@gmail.com But don't tweet spoilers or you will get muted, not blocked, Pete needs the follower count. And if you love this show, please leave us a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/vampetey and follow the instructions.
This week Ellie returns and we discuss the autumnal attributes of LABRADORITE✨, finding balance in the work world and the creative world, and Teddy Bears getting into Priuses. Yep
Chip and Tez learn about South Korean poop payments, Texas Dems flying private and making Fat Wolverine sad, Lego guns, and why even nice people are racist
We didn't expect this sudden move of selling both of our Priuses and buying a plug-in hybrid car that will serve our needs much better in these times. But which one did we buy? QWWEM: Sign-up for the free, 5-day quarantine workout challenge
95% of EV owners will go with an EV next but 77% indicate they will change brands. Episode on what would we change our Priuses to: https://www.reinverted.com/podcast/episode/1f6b85e2 JD Powers survey: https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2021-us-electric-vehicle-experience-evx-ownership-study
We are finally back with season 3! Now also on YouTube! This week Dom has a personal sentiment for the listeners and we talk way too long about Priuses and Mustangs. Thanks for staying Tuned In! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
It's a harder question than it seems. Episodes referenced: Slovenian trips: shorturl.at/OQS08 shorturl.at/zGW35 Volvo V60 D6 review after 310,000 km: shorturl.at/jKNR6
Let's understand B mode based on information from a hybrid battery guru in Central-Eastern Europe who changed the bus bars in all four of our Priuses and refurbished a pack in one. ReInverted webpage: www.reinverted.com Apple Podcast Spotify Google Podcast Stitcher TuneIn
This week Kevin schools Daniel on the proper way to build a fire, then the duo address the issue of defunding the police and how the restructuring of the police system could look in the US. Connect with the hosts on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedonutdan https://twitter.com/kevvurs
I have an episode for you today about a tough car choice. Our Prius fleet consisted of my wife’s 2004 with 293k kms (183k miles), my 2005 242k kms (151k miles) and the two 2006s around 200k kms (125k miles) that belonged to my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. But they wanted something bigger.
Follow @dillonpatelme and @neilkpatel on Instagram [This podcast is sponsored by @nosharammerch] 0:00 - Neil’s insider sources says Season 2 is a go! 2:00 - Shoutout to the OG army 4:00 - The engagement party costs $50K, AKA 3 Priuses according to Dillon 5:00 - Why isn’t Andy Cohen supporting the show at all? He’s ignoring it like Neil was ignored by girls in high school 6:00 - We are approaching 1,000 listeners an Episode! 8:00 - Episode 8 was like a preemptive breakup 12:00 - Did anyone else’s mom yell at them after Episode 8? 15:00 - Shaan is most improved dancer 18:00 - Anish is the realest person ever. And her crying is beautiful 21:00 - Strawgate, with Brian and Monica 22:00 - Wait, who’s straw is it? 24:00 - This show needs sex 25:00 - Bali, can we have Nush on the pod? 26:00 - The Gay Triangle 27:00 - Don’t trust a priest 30:00 - Dillon with thoughts on Amrit and Nicholas and the promise bracelet 32:00 - This show is the ace in the hole 35:00 - Vishal looks better with a beard 38:00 - This show belongs on Netflix. Let’s free it from Andy Cohen’s grasp 40:00 - Dillon ends the season by bleeding out in the era of Corona 41:00 - Enjoy PQAP everyone!
Reach into the Wayback Machine for a Garage Hour Reload - this is the big-AM gearhead randomsauce we're known for. From ten years ago, the Gearhead Consultancy crammed the studio with dogs, doctors, drivers and Dirty Dave for F1, bad behavior on YouBoob, burning rivers in Ohio and everything between. It wouldn't be gearhead radio without beating up on Priuses and the Pridiots who still think they're the solution to all of life's problems - they're just an answer to why you hate your commute. Also, they're a rolling Superfund site, and we know why.
Reach into the Wayback Machine for a Garage Hour Reload - this is the big-AM gearhead randomsauce we're known for. From ten years ago, the Gearhead Consultancy crammed the studio with dogs, doctors, drivers and Dirty Dave for F1, bad behavior on YouBoob, burning rivers in Ohio and everything between. It wouldn't be gearhead radio without beating up on Priuses and the Pridiots who still think they're the solution to all of life's problems - they're just an answer to why you hate your commute. Also, they're a rolling Superfund site, and we know why.
In this episode, Alan and Cat interview Tobias Buckell at Confluence, an SFF conference that takes place in Pittsburgh. We discuss Cli-Fi, climate change, and Priuses in the apocalypse.. Alan Also reviews: The Widening Gyre by Michael R Johnston published 2019 by Flametree Press Sunspot Jungle Volume 1 edited by Bill Campbell published 2019 by Rosarium Publishing
I have a chat with the head of sales from the Carista app that can helps us diagnose our Priuses! Use coupon code BALINT30 until March 27th to get 30% off from the Carista OBD2 Bluetooth adapter. Coupon is valid through the https://caristaapp.com website and on all Amazon stores. Just search for Carista OBD2 adapter. Sponsor: www.Hometownhybrids.com Hybrid batteries from $995 with free shipping and 2 year or 50k mile warranty for a Gen2 Prius (2004-2009) refurbished battery pack. Course: https://www.udemy.com/course/priusbuyersguide/
We had some services done to three of the four Priuses in the family among which was resolving a rattling sound on my 2005 and a strange wheel alignment on the 2004. Sponsor: Prius Podcast is brought to you by HomeTown Hybrids. Hometown Hybrids offers free shipping on all Prius hybrid battery packs and they even have a mobile installation service throughout Texas. Hometown Hybrids batteries ship free with Fedex, not freight and can be delivered straight to your home or mechanic. If you’re not sure that your battery has failed or have any questions about your Prius, you can chat with a technician on their website hometownhybrids.com or give them a call at 844-447-7487. As one of their customer puts it: The mobile service came right to my house, I didn’t have to go anywhere. They gave me options before doing any work, so I was able to make an informed decision. The price was very reasonable, a lot less expensive than the dealer. I would definitely recommend this service.” Send your Prius story to priuspodcast@gmail.com. Course: https://www.udemy.com/course/priusbuyersguide/
Garage Hour Reload: the gang's all here, pillaging your village with everything from feedback dynos, DSM and EVO-guy fails, how to explode your whale, the Japanese Overgrowth Syndrome, and every sad failing of Priuses and Children of the Prius we can dig up. Additional goodness from the Garage Hour goons includes bands like Contagion, traffic like New York City, disdain like Porsche owners, barfing on Black Mountain, why driving skill helps mileage, and what the Hell a haversack is. Why not? It's the Garage Hour.
Garage Hour Reload: the gang's all here, pillaging your village with everything from feedback dynos, DSM and EVO-guy fails, how to explode your whale, the Japanese Overgrowth Syndrome, and every sad failing of Priuses and Children of the Prius we can dig up. Additional goodness from the Garage Hour goons includes bands like Contagion, traffic like New York City, disdain like Porsche owners, barfing on Black Mountain, why driving skill helps mileage, and what the Hell a haversack is. Why not? It's the Garage Hour.
Show #683 Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are in the world, welcome to EV News Daily for Friday 31st January 2020. It’s Martyn Lee here and I go through every EV story to save you time. Thank you to MYEV.com for helping make this show, they’ve built the first marketplace specifically for Electric Vehicles. It’s a totally free marketplace that simplifies the buying and selling process, and help you learn about EVs along the way too. HYUNDAI TO DELIVER KONA ELECTRIC IN EUROPE SOONER "Hyundai has announced a “drastic” reduction in delivery times for Kona Electric in Europe. From March the Korean car manufacturer will also produce the electric model in its Czech plant." reports Electrive: "Hyundai thus confirms rumours from the middle of last year. In addition to making the electric cars in Europe, production in Ulsan, South Korea will be increased. In total, Hyundai promises to triple the availability of its Kona Electric (called Kona Elektro in Germany) for customers in Europe. The increased capacity is now to “keep pace with rising demand”, as this has exceeded expectations since the start of sales in 2018." https://www.electrive.com/2020/01/30/hyunda-to-deliver-kona-electric-in-europe-sooner/ From PushEVs: "The Hyundai Kona Electric is a hatchback with a WLTP range of 482 km (300 miles) that strongly appeals to the European market. Hyundai could have made it the best selling electric hatchback in Europe last year if it wanted to. However, this year it’ll more difficult to achieve that feat, since it’ll have the competition of the new Renault ZOE, PEUGEOT e-208, Opel Corsa-e and Volkswagen ID. 3. legacy automakers will only increase the production of electric cars to minimal levels, enough to avoid EU emissions fines. We won’t see legacy automakers producing enough electric cars to challenge Tesla until 2022. In 2022 Volkswagen could take the lead with the ID. brand…" https://pushevs.com/2020/02/01/hyundai-boosts-kona-electric-supply-to-europe/ ASTON MARTIN’S EV PLANS FALL VICTIM TO STROLL RESCUE "Aston Martin's cash lifeline from Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll has a major casualty -- the company’s push into electric cars." according to Automotive News Europe: "The launch of the full-electric Lagonda marque, due in 2022, has been stalled for three years, Aston Martin said Friday, while development of the Rapide E, the main brand’s first electric model, is under review despite being almost complete. The rethink on electrification, a costly technology previously deemed vital to Aston Martin’s future, will see the company switch focus to providing hybrid autos. It’s part of a “reset plan” that will also see unspecified job cuts and a restructuring of sales and marketing operations." https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/aston-martins-ev-plans-fall-victim-stroll-rescue HUMMER WILL RETURN AS A 1,000-HORSEPOWER ELECTRIC VEHICLE "Following months of rumors, General Motors confirmed the return of the Hummer — with an Earth-friendly twist. The name previously attached to gas guzzling SUVs will now adorn an electric car sold under the GMC brand. Set to debut in a Super Bowl ad on Sunday, February 2, the electric Hummer will have specifications that are more supercar than truck." says Digital Trends: "Called the GMC Hummer EV, the reincarnated Hummer will have 1,000 horsepower and 11,500 pound-feet of torque. While a handful of cars — including the Faraday Future FF91 electric SUV — have achieved four-digit horsepower outputs, the Hummer EV will be the undisputed ruler of torque. The Hummer EV will make its first public appearance in a 30-second Super Bowl ad during the second quarter of the big game on Sunday, GMC confirmed. However, the vehicle won’t be fully revealed until May 20" https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/gmc-hummer-ev-officially-confirmed-with-1000-horsepower/ Jalopnik had their own take on it: First, there’s the Hummer name and brand itself, which is about as anti-environmental as one could imagine. The connotation of “Hummer” has always been actively hostile to any sort of ecological awareness, in a very brutal and almost childishly reactionary way. If people drove hybrid Priuses and EV Leafs as a way to say “love the Earth” via their car, then driving a Hummer said “fuck the Earth.”" This all means that now EVs are just another kind of car in our minds. They don’t need to have their unique traits pointed out, no matter how important those traits may actually be. We’re now in the era where EVs get promoted and advertised and understood with the same delerious irrationality as any other car out there." https://jalopnik.com/seriously-the-electric-hummer-is-a-total-change-in-how-1841363548 TESLA Q4 STORAGE DEPLOYMENTS AT ALL-TIME HIGH Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) yesterday reported a new quarterly energy storage installation record of 530 MWh, and 54 MW of solar deployments for October-December 2019. " writes Renewables Now: "The fourth-quarter (Q4) total included the first deployments of Tesla’s newest battery storage product, the commercial-scale integrated storage system called Megapack.The company deployed 1.65 GWh of energy storage in 2019, which is more than it installed in all prior years combined. The Q4 solar deployments were up by 26% quarter-on-quarter but down 26% year-on-year. Tesla said it continued to ramp both SolarglassRoof production and installations, but did not provide specific figures." https://renewablesnow.com/news/tesla-q4-storage-deployments-at-all-time-high-solar-at-54-mw-685363/ THE SECRET BEHIND ROLLS ROYCE’S E-PLANE When Rolls Royce in December unveiled its new electric plane, it said it would be the fastest electric aircraft, capable of achieving a top speed of 300 mph. It also said the plane will be able to fly from London to Paris on a single charge." according to OilPrice.com: "The ACCEL aircraft has three battery packs that power its three electric motors. Each pack weighs 450 kg and has a capacity of 72 kWh. According to the project manager, Matheu Parr, the best battery cell shape for the aircraft battery pack turned out to be the cylinder. These, Parr told Patel, could hold a lot of energy and could release it quickly at high power. The secret to the weight was the packaging materials: using as little as possible of those and only the lightest-weight. Yet there are some 200 companies working on electric aircraft technology. The promise is big: electric motors require a lot less maintenance than jet fuel engines, which means they are cheaper over their lifetime; they are also, of course, a lot more environmentally friendly." https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Secret-Behind-Rolls-Royces-E-Plane.html NEW QUESTION OF THE WEEK The MYEV.com Question Of The Week… If I could one something extra in 2020 with EV News Daily, what would it be? Collaborations? Education? I want to say a heartfelt thank you to the 231 patrons of this podcast whose generosity means I get to keep making this show, which aims to entertain and inform thousands of listeners every day about a brighter future. By no means do you have to check out Patreon but if it’s something you’ve been thinking about, by all means look at patreon.com/evnewsdaily [mention for Premium Partners] You can listen to all 682 previous episodes of this this for free, where you get your podcasts from, plus the blog https://www.evnewsdaily.com/ – remember to subscribe, which means you don’t have to think about downloading the show each day, plus you get it first and free and automatically. It would mean a lot if you could take 2mins to leave a quick review on whichever platform you download the podcast. And if you have an Amazon Echo, download our Alexa Skill, search for EV News Daily and add it as a flash briefing. Come and say hi on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter just search EV News Daily, have a wonderful day, I’ll catch you tomorrow and remember…there’s no such thing as a self-charging hybrid. PHIL ROBERTS / ELECTRIC FUTURE (PREMIUM PARTNER) BRAD CROSBY (PREMIUM PARTNER) AVID TECHNOLOGY (PREMIUM PARTNER) DAVID ALLEN (PARTNER) OEM AUDIO OF NEW ZEALAND AND EVPOWER.CO.NZ (PARTNER) PAUL O’CONNOR (PARTNER) TRYEV.COM (PARTNER) GARETH HAMER eMOBILITY NORWAY HTTPS://WWW.EMOBILITYNORWAY.COM/ (PARTNER) ALAN ROBSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ALAN SHEDD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ALEX BANAHENE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ALEXANDER FRANK @ https://www.youtube.com/c/alexsuniverse42 ANDERS HOVE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ANDREA JEFFERSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ASEER KHALID (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ASHLEY HILL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BÅRD FJUKSTAD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BARRY PENISTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BRENT KINGSFORD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BRIAN THOMPSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BRIAN WEATHERALL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BRUCE BOHANNAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CHARLES HALL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CHRIS HOPKINS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) COLIN HENNESSY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CRAIG COLES (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CRAIG COOPER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CRAIG ROGERS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAMIEN DAVIS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAN FAIRS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DARREN BYRD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DARREN FEATCH (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DARREN SANT FROM YORKSHIRE EV CLUB (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVE DEWSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID BARKMAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID FINCH (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID PARTINGTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID PRESCOTT (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DEREK REILLY FROM THEEFFECT.NET (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DON MCALLISTER / SCREENCASTSONLINE.COM (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ENRICO STEPHAN-SCHILOW (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) FREDRIK ROVIK (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) FREEJOULE AKA JAMES (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) GENE RUBIN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) GEOFF LOWE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) IAN GRIFFITHS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) IAN SEAR (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JACK OAKLEY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JAMES STORR (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JERRY ALLISON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JIM MORRIS (EXECUTIVE PRODICERS) JOHN BAILEY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JOHN LACEY FROM CLICK CLACK VIDEO NZ (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JON AKA BEARDY MCBEARDFACE FROM KENT EVS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JON KNODEL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JUAN GONZALEZ (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) KEN MORRIS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) KEVIN MEYERSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) KYLE MAHAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LARS DAHLAGER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LAURENCE D ALLEN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LEE BROWN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LUKE CULLEY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MARCEL LOHMANN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MARCEL WARD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MARK BOSSERT (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MARLIN SCHELL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MATT PISCIONE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MATTHEW ELLIS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MAZ SHAR (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MIA OPPELSTRUP (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MICHAEL PASTRONE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MICHEAEL KYFFIN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MIKE ROGERS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MIKE WINTER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NATHAN GORE-BROWN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NEIL E ROBERTS FROM SUSSEX EVS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NORTHERN EXPLORERS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) OHAD ASTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PAUL RIDINGS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PAUL SHELLEY ((EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PAUL STEPHENSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PERRY SIMPKINS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PETE GLASS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PETE GORTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PETER & DEE ROBERTS FROM OXON EVS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PHIL MOUCHET (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PONTUS KINDBLAD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RAJEEV NARAYAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RALPH JENSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RENÉ SCHNEIDER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ROB COOLING / HTTP://WWW.APPLEDRIVING.CO.UK/ (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ROB HERMANS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ROBERT GRACE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ROBIN TANNER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RUPERT MITCHELL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) SARI KANGASOJA (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) SEIKI PAYNE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) STEPHEN PENN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) STEVE JOHN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) STUART HANNAH (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) THOMAS J. 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Hey Prius Nation, let’s talk about oil today! PriusPodcast is brought to you by HomeTown Hybrids. Hometown Hybrids offers free shipping on all Prius hybrid battery packs and they even have a mobile installation service throughout Texas. Hometown Hybrids batteries ship free with Fedex, not freight and can be delivered straight to your home or mechanic. If you’re not sure that your battery has failed or have any questions about your Prius, you can chat with a technician on their website hometownhybrids.com or give them a call at 844-447-7487. As one of their customer puts it: The mobile service came right to my house, I didn’t have to go anywhere. They gave me options before doing any work, so I was able to make an informed decision. The price was very reasonable, a lot less expensive than the dealer. I would definitely recommend this service.” Contact priuspodcast@gmail.com with your Prius stories.
The guys talk $90,000 Hondas, Virtue signaling Priuses, Hyundai and Porsche, how to "make money" in your spare time, and more. They also talk progress on Jake's truck, and lack of progress on Kris' 911. The Prius is no longer the virtue signalers car of choice Mercedes recalling cars because of James Bond Sunroofs. Some interesting sales numbers out from Dodge. Ireland banning sale of Gas and Diesels And some listener input... Thanks for listening to Overcrest: A Pretty Good Podcast
In today’s episode, I will share a service update on the Priuses we drive. A 2005 with 239k kms (148k miles) and a 2004 with 290k kms (180k miles) along our holiday travels. Prius Podcast Sponsor: Hometown Hybrids offers free shipping on all Prius hybrid battery packs and they even have a mobile installation service throughout Texas. Hometown Hybrids batteries ship free with Fedex, not freight and can be delivered straight to your home or mechanic. If you’re not sure if your battery has failed or have any questions about your Prius, you can chat with a technician on their website, hometownhybrids.com or give them a call at 844-447-7487. As one of their customer puts it: The mobile service came right to my house, I didn’t have to go anywhere. They gave me options before doing any work, so I was able to make an informed decision. The price was very reasonable, a lot less expensive than the dealer. I would definitely recommend this service.” Contact priuspodcast@gmail.com with your Prius stories.
I talk about wind whistle coming from the driver’s side mirror of our 2004. It was interesting as neither of the other 3 Priuses in the family had such an issue. If you want to come on the show to talk Prius or industry, send me an email to priuspodcast@gmail.com. Sponsor: Hometown Hybrids offers free shipping on all Prius hybrid battery packs and they even have a mobile installation service throughout Texas. Hometown Hybrids batteries ship free with Fedex, not freight and can be delivered straight to your home or mechanic. If you’re not sure if your battery has failed or have any questions about your Prius, you can chat with a technician on their website, hometownhybrids.com or give them a call at 844-447-7487. As one of their customer puts it: The mobile service came right to my house, I didn’t have to go anywhere. They gave me options before doing any work, so I was able to make an informed decision. The price was very reasonable, a lot less expensive than the dealer. I would definitely recommend this service.”
I’m sharing my experience of servicing the JBL woofer in our Priuses. Almost a FREE FIX? PriusPodcast is brought to you by HomeTown Hybrids. Hometown Hybrids offers free shipping on all Prius hybrid battery packs and they even have a mobile installation service throughout Texas. Hometown Hybrids batteries ship free with Fedex, not freight and can be delivered straight to your home or mechanic. Right now, they’ve got a sale of $100 off, on any hybrid batteries until November 30th. If you’re not sure that your battery has failed or have any questions about your Prius, you can chat with a technician on their website hometownhybrids.com or give them a call at 844-447-7487. As one of their customer puts it: The mobile service came right to my house, I didn’t have to go anywhere. They gave me options before doing any work, so I was able to make an informed decision. The price was very reasonable, a lot less expensive than the dealer. I would definitely recommend this service.”
Sharing my experience going with cheap winter tires. $100 off any hybrid battery until November 30th: Hometown Hybrids offers free shipping on all Prius hybrid battery packs and they even have a mobile installation service throughout Texas. Hometown Hybrids batteries ship free with Fedex, not freight and can be delivered straight to your home or mechanic. Right now, they’ve got a sale of $100 off any hybrid battery until November 30th. If you’re not sure if your battery has failed or have any questions about your Prius, you can chat with a technician on their website, hometownhybrids.com or give them a call at 844-447-7487. As one of their customer puts it: The mobile service came right to my house, I didn’t have to go anywhere. They gave me options before doing any work, so I was able to make an informed decision. The price was very reasonable, a lot less expensive than the dealer. I would definitely recommend this service.”
In today’s episode, I will have a long discussion with Jesse who is not only a huge fan of hybrid and electric cars but the President of the New England Electric Auto Association. Jesse has been driving Priuses since 2004. Since then, he has put 865k miles (that’s more than 1.3 million kms) on the clock of four Priuses, out of which he still owns two. Jesse talks about his experience with the Prius and what killed his first two cars. We talk about reliability, comparison of the generations and of course, cover the Taycan vs. Model S debate for some extent. This is going to be a long one! The New England Electric Auto Association (www.neeaa.org) has been around for over 50 years. They hold monthly meetings throughout New England to promote the adoption of EVs through education and advocacy.
E12 | Went to Kranjska Gora for a week to hike and bike around the beautiful country of Slovenia. Images attached in the Patreon page below. Check out the images: patreon.com/priuspodcast Prius Nation! For those of you who have a Prius and would like to come on the show to talk about your car on what you like, what you hate about it or just for the fun of it, telling stories, send me an email to priuspodcast@gmail.com. I'm especially interested in high mileage cars.
In this episode, I interview my good friend Eric Malzone... He was raised in the middle to the upper middle class in silicon valley before it was even silicon valley or when there were corn fields rather than Priuses. He has experience with CrossFit in the original days before it blew up and become a sensation, but after a few tough experiences he came to a shaking realization that life is fragile and he needed to work to live the life he had always dreamed of so that he didn't regret the things he didn't do. Which led Eric to pursue his nomadic lifestyle! We had a fascinating conversation about the integration of wellness, fitness, and the health coach into the healthcare ecosystem and how we must learn to embrace technology as part of our lives and ecosystem. And if we're going to be considered professionals as health coaches, it starts with learning to understand how to communicating for success and a high-level understanding of the character states of a conversation so that potential clients see you as professionals!
Craig is on with Ken and Matt as he does every Wednesday morning. Today they talked about Facebook facing a huge fine, why the Apple stocks went up, why driving a Tesla results in more CO2 emissions, and Amazon burning books. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Amazon Has Been On A Digital Book Burning Spree For Months Driving A Tesla Results In More CO2 Than A Mercedes Diesel Car, Study Finds --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 05/01/2019 Why Apple Stock Went Up - How The US Lost The Cellular Data Industry - Amazon Burning Books Craig Peterson 0:00 Hey, good morning Craig Peterson here. We had a bit of fun this morning with Ken and Matt, talked about a digital book burning spree that's going on right now a little bit more about that Tesla v Mercedes. And we also talked about Apple, I went into a little bit of background about why Apple stock went up this week, and how we the United States fell behind when it comes to cellular modems for our devices. Anyhow, all of that and more and I'm not gonna be able to do my, my weekly It's a Security Thing this week podcast, I am going to be on the road heading to Kentucky for the derby. It should be a fun week. Anyways. Take care, everybody, and we'll be back with our hopefully our regular show on Saturday. I'm planning on trying to get that done too. Take care. Bye bye. Matt Gagnon 0:55 Red Hot Chili Peppers playing in the background for some reason. Craig Peterson our tech guru. Craig, nice to have you back with us once again, sir. How are you? Craig 1:07 Hey, good morning. What's today's magic word? I missed it earlier. Matt 1:12 The word of the day is... Ken Altshuler 1:13 Apple stock. Apple stock went up 5%. Matt 1:19 That is actually two words. Craig 1:22 And Google went down too. Ken 1:26 But we have Facebook, but Facebook is... but he cares about our privacy Craig. Craig 1:30 Well, yeah. Facebook is going to be the most valuable company in the world. I'm sure. Right. I heard you guys talking about it a little bit earlier this morning. Because there are some huge issues going on right now with our friends over at Facebook. In fact, he's facing, I don't know if you read this one or not. But probably what's going to be the largest fine in history. Matt 1:57 Yeah. It's really big. Craig 1:58 Did you hear that? It could be like 2 billion or something. Ken 2:02 But they've saved up. Matt 2:03 But they've been saving for it. Ken 2:04 They've been saving for a couple of weeks. Craig 2:09 Yeah. Well, as usual, there's more stuff in the news about Facebook in the fact that they just aren't as ethical as you might think they were. And you guys were talking about the twins earlier. Right? Did I hear that. Yes. It was Matt brought it up. Yeah. Matt 2:29 The Vigelvas twins. Ken 2:30 Vigelvas. Matt 2:31 Which, by the way, we're in fact played by the same dude. They were. Craig 2:33 That's tricky, tricky. Matt 2:35 One guy playing two roles. Craig 2:36 And it makes me wonder, you know, if, if you're an ethical person, how do you as a business person, survive against somebody like this Zuckerberg and all of the allegations against him? You know, look at what happened back at Harvard, when he was you know, putting the software together. And apparently there's a guy that was hired to write some code by these brothers, these twins and then basically stole it and ran with it and, and lied and signed an agreement with federal regulators that he wouldn't be doing all of these shenanigans with people's private information. And yet he did. And now there's more emails that come out showing that indeed, he was just totally making it up. That he had been, in fact still sharing that information, still selling and still negotiating. We got emails now that just came out last week about it. But yeah, th e question is, how much privacy do people really want and expect? I don't know. What do you guys think? Matt 3:42 Not very much. I am of the opinion Craig and I think you share it, that people talk a big game about caring about it, and then actually don't care about it, that they really all I really want privacy. And I am outraged. I'm outraged. I don't have any as they hand over their social security number and credit basically the next person to ask them, so yeah. Craig 4:02 Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, they do do that. The numbers are down, the visitors to the site are down. But I'm not so sure that it's it's really much of it has to do with people being concerned about the privacy, I really think it's that there are more competitors out there now. Matt 4:20 I actually I didn't quit Facebook, but I deleted the app on my phone because I can't take it anymore. And it has nothing to do with privacy. I'm just sick of it. I just can't stand it. So that's why I think it's down right as I think people are making like actual consumer choices about the products not not so much whether or not their information is being stolen. Because I think everybody thinks their information's being stolen anyway. And I think they've already made their peace with that. Craig 4:42 Well, you know, Matt, strangely enough, I think we're on the same page there. Matt 4:45 Indeed. Craig 4:46 It never happened. Matt 4:47 No, not at all. Ken 4:50 So did your Apple stock went up, by the way. Craig 4:53 Yeah, I heard about that. I don't know if you guys heard a little bit of behind the scenes stuff. What happened with Qualcomm and Intel. But Apple, you know, you guys know Apple really doesn't make a lot of the components that go into the iPhone. In fact, a lot of them, of course, are made in China. But they did Apple does design the main chips, and they're the main processors. And there's rumors, by the way that Apple because their processors that are being used in the bigger iPads are faster than comparable Intel chips with a with a lower power consumption, that Apple's talking about maybe using those chips for the next generations of Mac box, which would really be kind of cool. But the whole Qualcomm thing is, Apple does not make or design the chips that tie our iPhones and other devices into the cellular data networks. And with 5G coming down the road quickly add us, in fact, it will be rolled out this year in some of the major cities. And I'm sure Portland is right on the top of it. Matt 6:00 Of course. Of course it is. Craig 6:01 But I think it's like New York and a couple of others. But because of that there are a lot of changes that are going to have to go into the iPhones radio technology. And therefore Apple's been trying to figure out what's going on. And there's this big lawsuit with Qualcomm and Apple and Ken, that's a lot of the reason why the Apple stock price went up, that all got settled. But apparently there had been talks in place with Apple and Intel, for Apple to buy Intel's chip business that made those radio chips those with chips that cover the WiFi, cover the cellular connections. And so when Apple finally said okay, Qualcomm,we're dropping the suits. They are all gone now with Qualcomm and Apple, and the Intel, the Intel business is dead. Intel, basically shot it in the head, they're no longer to make chips for cell phones, which really, Qualcomm is kind of the only real game in town. And there's some interesting stuff that's coming, I saw an analysis it came out this is from the UK, talking about how the United States has fallen badly behind in some of these chip designs, particularly dealing with cell phones and other technology, while way is huge in that business. And of course, we don't like to deal with them. And we had more stuff come up this week about Huawei, and back doors and some of the cyber things where they were spying on more people that just came up this week. And Qualcomm so the US just can't compete anymore. And it's a shame to see Intel dropping that business. Because I think it's critical here to the US and, and our infrastructure. It looks like the whole 5G business, really, that we're talking about the hardware here now really is going to go to China is going to be going to US companies, and that's a shame. And normally for our economy to keep growing, we have to have innovation. And because of decisions that were really made back in the 90s, some government regulations that went in place, and business responses to those regulations, we basically conceded that whole business and I don't know that we'll ever get that particular business back. Matt 8:21 We're talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. Now Craig I may or may not buy a Tesla vehicle at some point. And if I do, it'll be to save the planet, because that's the kind of thing that I would do, right? But you get in all seriousness you do buy it usually, because you'd like to, you know, maybe you have your carbon footprint go down and whatnot. But perhaps just because this Tesla car is so clean and whatnot after produced, you might not be considering what it takes to actually build it in the first place. What is your actual carbon footprint if you buy one of these cars? Craig 8:57 Yeah, this is a huge thing. You probably remember few years back they did a survey of people who owned Priuses. Toyota Prius is which are these some of these initial cars that were hybrids, and it really nice little cars, cool, cool technology. But do you realize over 70% of the respondents, the number one answer was they bought the Prius because of what they thought other people would think of them for buying a Prius. So basically Matt, it ties into what you're really kind of alluding to, people buy these cars, because they do want to be clean and green and do the right thing for the environment. Because I don't think that there is hardly a soul in this country that doesn't care about the environment. You know, you look at some of these environmental groups. The first one started were started by hunters, Ducks Unlimited, some of these big ones big environmentalist on both the left and the right and in the middle. So we all care about it. And unfortunately, Congress and regulators have been playing games with our mind, it started with a really big with the whole corn thing, the cellulosic ethanol, and how that ended up being a big failure, it's caused more harm to the environment well documented now, then it's helped, we were told it was going to cut back on CO2. We're going to put ethanol in the gas, know, when you look at it net net, like from what you're referring to Matt, know, the ethanol in our gas makes things worse. And to top it off, small engines get destroyed by the ethanol in our gas including the older motorcycles. So there's a study that just came out of Germany. And they had a look at the Tesla Model 3, because it's touted as a zero emissions car. And they added it all up all of the production of the batteries, which is where most of this problem comes from the transportation of the raw material, a minor but etc, etc. And this study in Germany came out and showed that a Tesla Model three over its expected lifetime compared with a Mercedes Benz C220D. Yes, C220D means diesel. So the Tesla Model 3 electric car compared to the Mercedes diesel, in its 20% more carbon dioxide per kilometer, when you consider all in. Now, the other thing to consider here is the vehicle itself, the manufacturing of the vehicle, the diesel cars are going to last 300,000 miles and more if they rebuild the engines. Some of these electric vehicles just aren't going to last. So that's interesting. It was based on Germany and their mix of fuel supplies and things. But don't just assume that because it's electric car that somehow it's clean, because much of the stuff is done in China. And 90% of all the plastic in the ocean comes from third world countries like China, it does not come from the United States at all. And when we're talking about the manufacturing of these vehicles in the batteries, some of the worst cesspools in the world are in those countries because of us thinking that somehow we're buying green vehicles. Ken 12:20 We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday 7:38. before we let you go, you know, Matt and I are both big fans of digital books. So is Amazon burning all our future books? Craig 12:33 Or do you member of the media might not know about this, but the 1984 and the controversy with Amazon, people that had bought George Orwell's 1984 had it deleted from their Kindles by Amazon on purpose. To do remember that little controversy? Matt 12:52 I actually never heard that. No. Craig 12:54 Oh, yes. Yes. Well, apparently there is a licensing problem with the current copyright owner so Amazon just says, Okay, well, fine. They don't own the book anyways. If you buy a book on Amazon Kindle, you don't own it. And so they just deleted it off of everybody's Kindle. It was just absolutely amazing. They ended up settling it and they restored your book. But you know, they own nearly 50% of the physical marketplace of books now. Over 80% of the ebook sales in the US. And they have started purging books. And what they're doing now is they used to say, yeah, Bezos we're going to wait open market, we want discussions, we want people talking about everything, and will carry anything. Now they've started targeting white nationalist books, but they won't get rid of other books. It's amazing. They banned some of the anti Islam books, and they were refusing to take down some pedophilia books on first amendment grounds. So I'm starting to get a little upset here. Not that I like some of the speech here but I think. Matt 14:03 No, I'm sorry No, I'm gonna be I'll be the guy to say it I'll be the insight you can and should be able to buy and read Mien Kampf if you want to. This is America. Craig 14:10 I agree. Matt 14:11 You know, you can either keep them all up or start selectively banning everything. I mean, it's. Craig 14:15 It's important. It's really important. You've got to have a discussion, right? That's the problem with political correctness. They just try and cut you off because they disagree with you. Matt 14:24 But I mean, you're you're also trying to legislate didn't tend to like what if I bought Mien Kampf that I can start highlighting phrases that I found it really offensive for a book report I'm doing. I mean, like, you can't just print the books. And let me come on. Ken 14:39 That's what Noam Chomsky said. Matt 14:40 Noam Chomsky has burned. Ken 14:41 Noam Chomsky. Craig 14:44 But the good news is burning digital books, when you burn the bits, it doesn't actually cause any CO2 emissions. So yeah, it's a green thing he's doing that's probably it. Ken 14:56 Alright, Craig Peterson tech guru. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk to you next week. Craig 15:00 Take care guys. Bye bye. Matt 15:02 Thank you Craig Peterson. Alright, so we're going to take a quick break. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
This week on The Bachelor, Colton auditions new dads on his Hometown visits. Will he find acceptance? Will anyone throw cleats at his head? And who won't get to pop his cherry? This week's bonus is about our neighbors stealing catalytic converters for their Priuses and the continuing war on crows. To hear all of our bonuses, become a premium member at RosePricks.com! On Twitter and Instagram we're @RosePricksPod, @RonnieKaram and @SWilderTaylor. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Garage Hour reload: the Poseur List. Everything you do to your ride that guarantees you're not cool (or just an idiot). Worse - even if you aren't a schmuck, these are the build decisions make you look like one. Everything from anti-tuning to bad towing, parts fighting parts, and stiff lifts, your embarrassments are cataloged. We're here to help. In pure Garage Hour tradition, Dirty Dave and Grizzly Chris ensured we got lost in other stuff - Greedo shot in the speedo, Blazing Haley, the new Pizza Port (now liquor), falling down drunk in your own front yard, and a chat with Tuna Pete from Barona Dragstrip. Why not? It's the Garage Hour.
Garage Hour reload: the Poseur List. Everything you do to your ride that guarantees you're not cool (or just an idiot). Worse - even if you aren't a schmuck, these are the build decisions make you look like one. Everything from anti-tuning to bad towing, parts fighting parts, and stiff lifts, your embarrassments are cataloged. We're here to help. In pure Garage Hour tradition, Dirty Dave and Grizzly Chris ensured we got lost in other stuff - Greedo shot in the speedo, Blazing Haley, the new Pizza Port (now liquor), falling down drunk in your own front yard, and a chat with Tuna Pete from Barona Dragstrip. Why not? It's the Garage Hour.
The guys talk about ways for tall guys like themselves to own small sports cars, and debate for Hal in North Carolina. They also talk about best cheap Bonneville speed cars, and discuss reasons why Prius owners just keep buying more Priuses...Prii?Please support the sponsors that support us. Look up the right oil for your car with Amsoil: www.amsoil.com/driver, discover car covers, shades and more at www.covercraft.com, and use www.autotempest.comif you're looking to buy a car online. Thanks to you for listening and watching! Rate & Review our podcast, and write to us at everydaydrivertv@gmail.com or www.everydaydriver.com
Decisions You Make Affect the Rest of Your Life Jack Butala: Decisions You Make Affect the Rest of Your Life. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit. Jill DeWit: Hello. Jack Butala: Welcome to our show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about how the decisions you make will affect the rest of your life. Great show today, Jill. Let's take a question posted by one of our members on SucessPlant.com, our free online community. Jill DeWit: Cool. All right, Chazz asked, "Does trying to get out of the game in case this happens, but I was wondering, what if I come across someone with multiple lots that wants to unload? Can they all be put on one deed, or would it be better to make them all separate, and just write one fat check when the notary meets to sign? Should I create a purchase agreement for each? Thanks, y'all." Jack Butala: Yeah, you know, this is a good question, and it comes up a lot. Not comes up a lot, it just comes up every once in a while, and it's worth explaining in very simple terms. The answer is yes. In fact, Jill and I do it all the time. We buy property, a ton of property on a single deed. Jill and I have literally purchased, done one deal with thousands of properties on one single document, and then you sell them off individually, and there's nothing wrong with that, it happens all the time. I think it gets confused because we use the car title analogy a lot, you know, and you certainly can't put, like, more than one car on a car title. They're all individual. Yes, the answer is ... Jill DeWit: That's my first choice, too. Jack Butala: Yeah, me too. Jill DeWit: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I mean, wouldn't it be great if you could? What if you're a dealer? I mean, I'm sure dealers have different things, but, you know, if I'm buying - Jack Butala: Maybe you can. Jill DeWit: Say if I'm a dealer and I'm buying ten Priuses, I don't want to do ten versions of the same thing, I just want to do one with the ten on there. Jack Butala: Right. Jill DeWit: Yeah, you can, and it's a great thing. As long as it's the same grantor, and the grantee, of course, is you. Jack Butala: That's the key, I guess, right, Jill? Jill DeWit: You just got to make sure the grantor is exactly, exactly, exactly the same. It can't be one that's husband and wife, and then one has just the husband. Then you have to do different deeds, but if it's all just - Jack Butala: That's a great point. Jill DeWit: - yeah, the same, the same seller, you know, and it's all worded the same and everything, it's just going to be great. Put 'em all on one deed. Knock yourself out. Hey, the recorders like it, too. You know, they only have to record the one, and you save money on it because you're only sending in the one form, and the notary's doing it once, so it's all much easier, and those are my first choice. I look for those now, by the way. When I sit and scan our acquisitions - Jack Butala: Yeah, me too. Which one's easiest. Jill DeWit: - with stuff going down, who's got multi things on there, okay, are they ... I look at who's, is it multiple units, do I want it, are they all alive? There's a few things that I look at really quick. Seriously. Jack Butala: I know, I agree. Absolutely. Jill DeWit: I scan for some issues and make sure, you know, and then I go, "All right, now let's look at it." Jack Butala: That's going to happen to you, listener. Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jack Butala: I mean, it can easily happen to you if you send a ton of mail out. We have multiple members. We have a couple members who joined the group and send out, you know, literally 25 000 letters in a week after they learn what they're doing,
Decisions You Make Affect the Rest of Your Life Jack Butala: Decisions You Make Affect the Rest of Your Life. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit. Jill DeWit: Hello. Jack Butala: Welcome to our show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about how the decisions you make will affect the rest of your life. Great show today, Jill. Let's take a question posted by one of our members on SucessPlant.com, our free online community. Jill DeWit: Cool. All right, Chazz asked, "Does trying to get out of the game in case this happens, but I was wondering, what if I come across someone with multiple lots that wants to unload? Can they all be put on one deed, or would it be better to make them all separate, and just write one fat check when the notary meets to sign? Should I create a purchase agreement for each? Thanks, y'all." Jack Butala: Yeah, you know, this is a good question, and it comes up a lot. Not comes up a lot, it just comes up every once in a while, and it's worth explaining in very simple terms. The answer is yes. In fact, Jill and I do it all the time. We buy property, a ton of property on a single deed. Jill and I have literally purchased, done one deal with thousands of properties on one single document, and then you sell them off individually, and there's nothing wrong with that, it happens all the time. I think it gets confused because we use the car title analogy a lot, you know, and you certainly can't put, like, more than one car on a car title. They're all individual. Yes, the answer is ... Jill DeWit: That's my first choice, too. Jack Butala: Yeah, me too. Jill DeWit: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I mean, wouldn't it be great if you could? What if you're a dealer? I mean, I'm sure dealers have different things, but, you know, if I'm buying - Jack Butala: Maybe you can. Jill DeWit: Say if I'm a dealer and I'm buying ten Priuses, I don't want to do ten versions of the same thing, I just want to do one with the ten on there. Jack Butala: Right. Jill DeWit: Yeah, you can, and it's a great thing. As long as it's the same grantor, and the grantee, of course, is you. Jack Butala: That's the key, I guess, right, Jill? Jill DeWit: You just got to make sure the grantor is exactly, exactly, exactly the same. It can't be one that's husband and wife, and then one has just the husband. Then you have to do different deeds, but if it's all just - Jack Butala: That's a great point. Jill DeWit: - yeah, the same, the same seller, you know, and it's all worded the same and everything, it's just going to be great. Put 'em all on one deed. Knock yourself out. Hey, the recorders like it, too. You know, they only have to record the one, and you save money on it because you're only sending in the one form, and the notary's doing it once, so it's all much easier, and those are my first choice. I look for those now, by the way. When I sit and scan our acquisitions - Jack Butala: Yeah, me too. Which one's easiest. Jill DeWit: - with stuff going down, who's got multi things on there, okay, are they ... I look at who's, is it multiple units, do I want it, are they all alive? There's a few things that I look at really quick. Seriously. Jack Butala: I know, I agree. Absolutely. Jill DeWit: I scan for some issues and make sure, you know, and then I go, "All right, now let's look at it." Jack Butala: That's going to happen to you, listener. Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jack Butala: I mean, it can easily happen to you if you send a ton of mail out. We have multiple members. We have a couple members who joined the group and send out, you know, literally 25 000 letters in a week after they learn what they're doing,
Have You Seen..? The question to start all movie discussions. Scream if you wanna… well, do anything really… The boys settle down with Lamb of God’s heavy metal courtroom documentary As The Palaces Burn. PLUS: Tesco, Priuses, DragonForce, Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold, Taylor Swift, The Jonas Brothers, lottery numbers, buzzing phones, word amnesia, Saul Goodman, authenticity in documentary making, Formula 1, a spam update, Tokyo confusion and proper hash of a pitch.
On this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, we’re going to talk about a unique strategy that combines the power of house flipping with the benefits of home ownership. You’ll meet Mindy Jensen and discover how she uses the “live-in flip” strategy to build wealth through real estate. You’ll also learn how a live-in flipper can save significant money on taxes as well as a discussion on the benefits of doing your own work. Don’t miss this enlightening, and hilarious, episode!In This Episode We Cover:Who Mindy Jensen isHer thoughts on personal financeFrugality, as defined by MindyA debate on Starbucks (as well as Priuses) and frugalityWhere she spends her moneyHow Mindy got started in real estateDetails on her deals7% as a steal?The ins and outs of performing a live and flipGetting a real estate license as a means to investWhat you should know about For Sale By Owner (FSBO) propertiesHow she advertises her housesThe pros and cons of live and flipsWhy women can and should fix housesThe importance of home inspectionsAnd SO much more!Links from the ShowBiggerPockets Keyword Alerts#AskBP PodcastBiggerPockets BlogsBiggerPockets ForumsBP Podcast with Jeff BrownHow to “Hack” Your Housing and Get Paid to Live for FreeFSBOMadisonZillowTruliaBRRRR Strategy3 Real Life Examples That Prove the HIGH Cost of Ignorance in Real EstateWant to Make $1,000 or More Per Hour?BiggerPockets Forums: New Member IntroductionBooks Mentioned in this ShowThe Book on Flipping Houses by J. ScottThe Book on Investing with No Money Down by Brandon TurnerThe Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice SchroederThe Warren Buffett Way by Robert G. HagstromThe Richest Man in Babylon by George S. ClasonTweetable Topics:“Frugality is save money where you can, so you can spend it where you want to or where you need to.” (Tweet This!)“I didn’t get my license to sell houses. I got it so that I could invest and have access to MLS.” (Tweet This!)“Nobody likes your house more than you.” (Tweet This!)Connect with MindyMindy’s BiggerPockets Profile
Whether you're flexing your retro terror or just want to get a glimpse of the Garage Hour's roots, this is a great episode to dive in to the what we call old school. Grizzly Chris and host Justin Fort spend an entire episode trying to relate a few Dude Food recipes (Justin's boneless chicken w/ a top-secret marinade and Chris's watermelon margaritas), but the goons detour in classic Garage Hour fashion, hitting everything from Dazed & Confused (the movie) to Ahhhnold impresisons, Rob Zombie and nailgun lawsuits, the heat in San Diego (112?) and the Unabomber in a ten-by-ten shack. It's not all wanderlust, however, because you can't keep a good gearhead down: there's also Grand Cherokee trail rollovers, off-roading in Colorado and the Cleveland National Forest in SoCal, 4Runner parts and how long they don't last, Priuses and how they still can't off-road, Unimogs, and some freaky Unimog-4Runner mutant that roams Colorado doing its best impression of a sasquatch (because everyone's heard of it and no one's seen it). Why not? It's the Garage Hour. Have some.
California has long led the country on environmental initiatives — the state has pledged to produce a third of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Today, California has an estimated 159,000 green jobs, and over the last 13 years, green jobs have grown by 36 percent, while Californian jobs in general have grown by 13 percent. But despite these forward-looking trends, how can policymakers ensure that the green boom doesn’t quickly go bust, or that the boom benefits all Californians, not just those who can buy Priuses? Zócalo and the New America Foundation invite Collaborative Economics' Tracey Grose, Fresno Sustainability Manager Joseph Oldham, Kaiser Permanente's Kathy Gerwig, Spring Ventures Founding Partner Sunil Paul, Michael P. Wilson of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, and Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation to consider how best to develop the economy and preserve the environment in the long run.
Car giant Toyota ordered a global recall of 400,000 Priuses for brake problems. This comes on the heels of earlier incidents where reported gas pedals were becoming stuck in floor mats in different makes and models of Toyotas. On Lawyer2Lawyer, co-hosts and attorneys J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi welcome Attorney Dee Miles from the law firm, Beasley Allen and Mike Rozembajgier, Director of Recalls for ExpertRECALL™, to discuss the latest. They take a look at the Toyota recall, the legal troubles that surround this recall and how the recall will impact customers and ultimately Toyota.
Priuscast (old feed) - See ToyotaLiveWeb.com for current feed.
Feedback from Charles and Olaf, news about plug-in Priuses, floor mat and gas pedal recalls, and, oh, I have a new 2010 Prius! Blog at ToyotaLiveWeb.com. Voice mail at (515) 999-0227. "In My Prius" by www.CasualMafia.com
Robbie at a gas station chicken sandwich and the results were predictable so it's just Sam and Nicole both driving Hondas this week with Sam in the Prologue and Nicole in the Odyssey.In the news, automakers need to stop with electronic door switches, and while Teslas are generally safe in a crash, bad driver behavior is still leading to more fatal crashes than any other brand. Honda has revealed a new 2026 Passport and Acura has their own version of the HR-V, the new ADX. Toyota is offering a dealer installed shield to guard against catalytic converter theft on Priuses. Dodge is about to launch the electric Charger Daytona, but pulling ahead production of the gas version to mid-2025. Jaguar has released the first images of camoflaged prototypes of its new EV and Lexus is adding a cheaper front-drive RZ. Jose Munoz is being promoted to global CEO at Hyundai and GM laid off 1,000 people by email.LinksPeople still being burned alive in Teslas2026 Honda Passport2025 Acura ADXTesla is deadliest car brand in AmericaCatalytic converter shield testedDodge pulling up production of gas ChargersFirst images of new electric JaguarGM cuts 1,000 jobsLexus adds cheaper FWD RZ300eJose Munoz becomes CEO of Hyundai MotorOur Sponsors:* Check out Express VPN: https://expressvpn.com/WHEELBEARINGSAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Subscribe on iTunes ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/plug-and-play-podcast/id882069484?mt=2 ) Subscribe via RSS ( http://www.podcastgarden.com/podcast/podcast-rss.php?id=3706 ) ******************************* What To Expect In This Episode: ******************************* This episode Tim picks up an extra work shift for PAX spending money while Zach comes straight outta Compton, Zach talks about white water rafting and Tim just wants to Punch a Prius. The guys discuss Game Of Thrones Episode 4 a little and Zach has a rad roach infestation live on the show from his Vault. -------------------------- Items Discussed This Week: -------------------------- White Water Rafting Fallout Shelter Badass Robots! Tasty Brews Of The Week: ------------------------ Zach – Elysian The Immortal IPA ( http://www.elysianbrewing.com/elysian-beers/the-immortal-ipa/ ) Tim – Dogfish Head 120 minute ipa ( http://www.dogfish.com/brews-spirits/the-brews/occassional-rarities/120-minute-ipa.htm ) KICK IT! -------- Tim – S upport Team USA in the Giant Robot Duel ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/megabots/support-team-usa-in-the-giant-robot-duel?ref=category_location ) ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/megabots/support-team-usa-in-the-giant-robot-duel?ref=category_location ) Zach – Mint Tin Mini Apocalypse ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/subquark/mint-tin-mini-apocalypse?ref=category ) --------------------- Question Of The Week! --------------------- *“ *What country could join America and Japan in an international Giant Robot Fighting Tournament?* “* ---------- Contact Us ---------- If you want to get in touch feel free to in any of these manners. *Email Questions To* mail@plugandplayproduction.com
Shake Them Ropes returns as Jeff tries to avoid gunfire and runaway Priuses to discuss the Money In The Bank Championship ladder match and its participants. Plus, predictions on Goldust's next tag partner! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/shake-them-ropes-pro-wrestling-podcast-wwe-nxt-njpw/donationsWant to advertise on this podcast? Go to https://redcircle.com/brands and sign up.