Kevin Drum lists all the ways that Trump’s actions so far helps Musk’s businesses. These include getting rid of the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, the body that imposed large fines on his company SpaceX for violations of regulations. Also nearly half of the people at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who are tasked with overseeing the safety of autonomous vehicles and monitoring crashes were fired, thus pretty much disabling oversight of his cars. Trump is also threatening to cut off Ukraine’s access to the Musk’s Starlink satellite network if they don’t agree to hand over their minerals to the US as part of the ‘peace deal’ that Trump wants them to sign with Russia.
One of the mostpetty decisions by Trump is to call for the removal of all the EV chargers at the locations of the General Services Administration.
The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down all of its electric vehicle chargers nationwide, describing them as “not mission critical.” The agency, which manages contracts for the government’s vehicle fleets, is also looking to offload newly purchased EVs.
The GSA currently operates several hundred EV chargers across the country, with approximately 8,000 plugs that are available for government-owned EVs as well as federal employees’ personally owned vehicles.
…“Neither Government Owned Vehicles nor Privately Owned Vehicles will be able to charge at these charging stations once they’re out of service,” it concludes.
At the GSA’s Denver office, employees were told that EV chargers at four federally owned buildings would be taken offline next week.
What is the point of removing chargers that are already installed? Oh yes, now all the GSA vehicles will have to charge at the commercial chargers, many of which are owned by Tesla.
The government and Musk’s businesses are rapidly becoming a single entity.
my husband once wrote a story where a town was in the thrall of a very oppressive religion, where once a week everybody went up to the temple to kiss statues, and it was understood and accepted that the priests would go down into town while they were up there and just steal from their houses whatever they wanted. gonna find out if that’s acceptable to magats pretty soon.
Not directly relevant to the topic, but we deserve some merriment among the horrors.
A fun fact I just learned about the Stable Genius:
When he heard ‘the conservatives’ had won the German election, he was delighted; he thought the CSU is like MAGA or Elon Musk’s favv party AfD.
He is genuinely stupid and ignorant, on the level of a ten year old.
When he finds out CDU is pro-Ukraine, pro-Europe and the party leader wants to reduce the dependence on USA he is going to be pissed off.
birgerjohansson @2: Similar to an incident during the Republican 2016 presidential primaries, when Carly Fiorina, in search for support among Jews, went to a Conservative synagogue, not realizing that Conservative Judaism is not politically conservative at all.