Turning Off All 8k EV Chargers at All Federal Government Buildings
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Or maybe "pool" or one of the others:
This is all happening because we've collectively allowed it to (ostensibly, but there are doubts about the legitimacy via gerrymandering, voter precinct suppression, and quite likely, election fraud).
I think the serenity prayer offers useful advice in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer
I guess maybe charge at Tesla superchargers?
Edit: read the article. Apparently sell them all off regardless of the cost
Sounds great for government efficiency
This is more in line with their goals:
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
The fact that most of the IGs were fired before DOGE was given access to anything and the fact that there are no auditors involved is a strong signal that we'll find out years from now that rather than save taxpayers any money while shutting things down, DOGE almost certainly funneled a tremendous amount of money into certain individuals' pockets.
The middle of the road explanation is that it's just more reactionary Lysenkoism.
Edit: From the answers, it looks like efficiency is better when the fuel is burned centrally.
So what can be the benefit of turning off charging stations? If you want to strengthen the fuel industry, wouldn't it be better to burn the fuel centrally and feed the electricity into the grid?
Electric vehicles use half the energy of gas-powered vehicles - https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles...
Levelized Cost of Energy+ - https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
Well-to-wheels greenhouse gas emissions for cars by powertrains - https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/well-to-wheel...
Where Coal Is Retiring, and Hanging On, in the U.S. - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/06/climate/coal-... | https://archive.today/Egwuc
New solar plants expected to support most U.S. electric generation growth - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64364
> So what can be the benefit of turning off charging stations? If you want to strengthen the fuel industry, wouldn't it be better to burn the fuel centrally and feed the electricity into the grid?
Spite and prioritizing the oil and gas industry for economic reasons. Which is somewhat humorous, as China is building EVs so fast, they are impairing the global oil market price. The US government simply cannot take enough action to assist the petroleum industry (for economic gains) to compensate for China's impact on the global oil market.
Trump wants more drilling, but the oil market is already saturated - https://grist.org/energy/trump-wants-more-drilling-but-the-o...
China’s Oil Demand Is Vanishing Faster Than It Looks - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-01-19/china-... | https://archive.today/BMo4N
IEA Says Oil Demand Growth Weakness to Continue on China and EVs - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-21/iea-says-... | https://archive.today/2aN1j
(50% of vehicles sold in 2024 in China were battery electric or plug in hybrids, "NEVs")
> Some 60% of vehicles bought under the program last year came with a plug, and China’s car market is already at a tipping point: Battery and plug-in hybrid cars, locally termed New Energy Vehicles or NEVs, in December made up 49.4% of car sales, and 46.8% across the full year. Conventional and normal hybrid cars will be a minority of the market this year, and the only way is down: Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that NEVs will hit 68% market share in 2027 and 81% in 2030.
If you define it as (say) pounds of CO2 emitted per mile driven, then electric cars are about as efficient as gasoline-powered ones if the electricity comes from coal plants, but significantly better if it comes from natural gas. And of course, way better if you have access to renewables.
However many overlook the other benefit, which as software devs we should easily recognize. Powering your car with electricity abstracts the fuel from the use of the fuel. An electric car doesn't run on any one single type of fuel, it runs on whatever is available in the area.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
> They want to destroy the American administrative state.
You did it a little yourself there. s/administrative//. They want to destroy the American nation state, period.
I really want to have such optimism.
It's a message about values. The message is fuck you. It's stupid on purpose, because fuck you.
So what we have here is the absolute dumbest of people dismantling the machinery of American empire, cheered on by people who think their material conditions suck because there are a dozen trans people who play college athletics and not because billionaires have robbed them blind so they can be slightly wealthier.
USAID is a perfect example of this. USAID spends its budget on American companies and then it uses that product for influence in other countries. American empire cannot exist without exploiting the Global South. Foreign policy and military power exist to subjugate other countries. Domestic policy is simply dividing up the spoils.
All that's happening here is a massive self-own to American Empire that leaves a massive void China will fill. All of this will destroy Tesla. Elon is killing the market for Teslas, making them more expensive and any retributive tariffs by China will most likely target Tesla and the materials required to build batteries.
I'm rapidly becoming an accelerationist because there is no opposition to this and nothing will stop American decline at this point.
I'm sure he's pretty confident the federal government will be predominately buying EV's in a few years years regardless of what else happens.
What makes it funny is his alignment with Musk. It’s like when Trump had dinner with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Kayne West.
You can’t make this stuff up.
I understand being against anything woke movement and not caring at the environment for economic growth purpose.
But here it is counterproductive. It is like killing a new better technology when it makes sense and bring you growth. Like cutting budgets for disease and cancer treatments research!
So I guess that's a yes on lead.
Western car brands are about to get a lot of competition.
I don't know about any direct subsidies but I wouldn't doubt that there's something there.
This YouTube video talks about China's lead in EVs and batteries
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjxKu_WQoBU
tl;dw:
- china - have 3.5x more than global battery capacity need for 2025
- china - evs cost less than ice cars
- shenzen - 5-6 yrs ago - transition to 100% ev bus and taxis
- china - 2024 - ev & phev - 47.6% of total car sales
- 2023 car sales - china: 21.7M, USA 16M, EU 10.6M, JAP 4.7M
- 2024 - china owns more than 80% production of every part of battery
- TSLA - relies on China for 40% of battery supply chain
- massive investment in battery and materials since 2000
- chinese govt vehicles, taxies, buses -> evs
- chinese govt - massive incentives for consumers - priority parking, green license plates receive almost immediately for low cost
- but only for cars that use chinese batteries
- researchers - china spent 200-300 billion on ev subsidies alone
- domestic car companies want to milk existing ice technology
- car maker's worker unions don't want to ditch ice car manufacturing for possibly less work
- local politicians don't want to push car makers, cause disruption
The only way out of the quicksand is for each local govt to create a temporary moat and force their local car companies to catch up using local suppliers (who also have to catch up with Chinese component makers).
But that's not gonna happen overnight.
And those local car companies aren't run by software people - the engineers at the local car companies are probably mech eng trained or finance/marketing types.
How do you define the term "woke"?
The redefining it from the original "awareness to systemic racism" should go on the books of Propaganda's Greatest Hits.
So ...?
People underestimate how fast the Government moves when there is consensus. The issue with Americans is that we have rarely any true concensus.
I definitely feel bad for the career civil servants and fear for the loss of their expertise. It will take decades before indiviuals can replicate their job at any level of efficiency. But Government could hire more workers to do the jobs of the old experts, or maybe hire them back or even contract to them as consultants (at grossly worse prices but I don't think any of these experts are dead. Just distrustful and maybe a bit vengeful about the loss of their work environments).
Nothing going on here is permanent loss. Its 'only' a gross level of inefficiency and waste. But if we all agree that 2024 was a better year than 2025, it isn't a big deal to rebuild to the status quo.
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What is truly gone is out soft power across the world. Europe won't have a damn reason to trust us for decades.
The executive moves quickly and is designed to move quickly. Congress and Courts are designed to be somewhat slow and deliberate.
That's why all this change in the President / Executive branch is happening so quickly.
You can see this easily, as China and many European countries have more EV sales. Norway is leading, with 93% of all new cars being EVs.
There is no status quo to rebuild.
Loss of trust, loss of momentum, loss of context, loss of relationships - insofar as any of these things existed, they are permanently destroyed. That's what will need rebuilding. The original process took decades, if not a century or more. You can't just disrupt that and then expect to restore it easily - or expect it to spontaneously reconfigure on its own with reliably desirable outcomes.
People working in the government are not fungible labor units like GPUs or VMs, to be spun up and disposed of without consequence. The network formed between people is even more important than the individual jobs - and it has an insane cold-start penalty.
Maybe if the folks in charge were absolute geniuses in leadership and organizational psychology, something miraculous might happen. But, that's never a thing to expect in general, let alone given the evidence at hand. They're making the classic blunder of trying to rewrite the system from scratch, which has almost never gone well for anyone.
I don't believe those networks are ever destroyed.
In practice, those networks will be transferred to the private sector, and the government will have to pay premium money to hire them back as consultants rather than as government workers.
There's exceptions: maybe there's a 60-year-old super-old guy who is at near retirement age, and takes this opportunity to take an early retirement and refuses to answer any phone calls to come back. But I don't think these people are the norm. Offer any 60-year-old or even 70-year-old enough money and strictly promise them its a temporary rebuilding moment and they'll likely come back.