California to reduce carbon emissions by... banning black cars?!

[Andrew Walker]

Well keep in mind that this legislation would not only ban black cars, but many "dark-colored" cars. Metallic gray, maybe? I mean, to me, this is so insane that it reads like an Onion article. Are you going to have to break out a California-state-approved "color card" and match it to your paint to see if you are in violation?? hahahaha.

You laugh at this now but the people running this state are that stupid. I'm hoping people can look at this and see that its the most retarded thing to have as a law. Why not just have sun shades for open parking lots that protect the cars from the sun during the most extreme points of the day. In AZ I think this should be standard for any exposed parking lot as the heat from the sun can destroy things left in the car...and that whole AC thing too.

It's like the AIG bailout thing in Washington. They caused the whole problem in the first place, then made it worse by bailing AIG out, then they have to pass more laws to kill the bonuses that their legislation actually authorized! We are paying these people to chase their own tails, while meanwhile they are bankrupting all of us.

I would have also liked to see AIG fail along with the other banks. At least then we could start over with the whole thing and make it better. But now we are just bailing the water out of a sinking ship. Its going down and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

I have always been so proud of my home state of California. It sucks to see these monkeys bankrupting and humiliating us.

How about if they just do NOTHING. We would all be a lot better off.

I use to be proud of being from CA but for the last couple years I have been using my AZ ID for most instances that require an ID because I hate what the a-holes in Sacramento are doing.

Also I prefer shooting rugers to glocks. I have a friend with a Ruger MkII or III not sure which. Tons of fun. Great target shooting gun.

The Glock I can shoot filled full of sand or mud. Its like the AK of the handgun world, except it shoots straight. AK's aren't known for their accuracy. Not saying anything bad about Ruger...the 10/22 is a really fun rifle.

 

[Tom Lowe]

I think economists on both sides of the political spectrum would say that that course of action would not in fact result in us being better off.

Gavin, the Austrian School of economics does not agree with this. The Austrians, like Peter Schiff and Tom Woods, were really the only ones predicting exactly how this whole mortgage meltdown and resulting financial meltdown were going to happen. Why should we listen to the 90% of "experts" who got it totally wrong -- who missed the whole thing?

Check out this video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

The notion that you can spend 1 dollar on make-work jobs and somehow magically you are supposed to get back a dollar and half just makes no sense. It's nonsense.

I for one want to live in a nation that still has banks.

We've already promised to bail out the banks. It's called FDIC. If FDIC has to swoop in and bail out all of the banks which fail because of AIG then the cost to the tax payers is higher.

But actually, organizations like the FDIC and SEC cause more problems than they solve. The FDIC backs all the banks, so people depositing money in 100K blocks don't need to do any investigation into the banks, to make sure they have enough money in reserve to back their accounts. So we had banks with 30-to-1 leverage or more... this never would have happened if people just relied on consumer reports.

Even worse, look what happened with Bernie Madoff. There is no chance in hell that Madoff could have pulled off his Ponzi scheme for as long as he did if the federal SEC wasn't "certifying" him as a legitimate outfit every couple of years. People figured, "Well the SEC gives him their stamp of approval, so Madoff must be legit." Wrong.

Actually, without the SEC, investors would have taken a little time and done some checks on Madoff. It wouldn't have taken much investigation. The guy didn't make a single trade for like 15 years, on any exchange. Anyone with any brains whatsoever could have discovered Madoff's scam in five minutes. But not the government!

People think that government is so great and is looking out for them, etc, but actually, they are doing more harm than good most of the time. We just are not taught this point in view in schools or on TV, so most of us accept that the government does more good than harm, and we keep turning over more and more of our liberty to them.

 

[kmikami]

Guys, this is a total lie. I'm not sure what's worse, the people who spread B.S. propaganda like this to try to make Californians, environmentalists, and liberals look bad, or the people who buy into the nonsense so willingly. You all got trolled.

http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2009/03/27/is-california-really-banning-black-cars/

 

[Tom Lowe]

Actually, it sounds like they were floating test balloons.

And BTW, is it any wonder that people have absolutely no problem believing that the government might be trying to do something like that? After all, these are the people who banned toilets that had enough water to actually flush and mandated that everyone install toilets with smaller tanks -- which ended up causing people to have to flush 2 or 3 times!

 

[Michael Schrengohst]

Guys, this is a total lie. I'm not sure what's worse, the people who spread B.S. propaganda like this to try to make Californians, environmentalists, and liberals look bad, or the people who buy into the nonsense so willingly. You all got trolled.

http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2009/03/27/is-california-really-banning-black-cars/

It was something they were looking at - they are still going to re-visit the issue: The point is - they did not do anything AT THE PRESENT - I am sure enough of a ruckus was raised. Now with the government controlling GM it might go forward with a vengence.

...And because at this point we didn’t have a solution that was cost-effective and technologically feasible, in this round we’ve decided to focus instead on the windows. We’ll address paints down the road.”
Young says the board may bring back car paint proposals in the next few years, perhaps when technology improves.

And that*should come as a relief to all those limo-loving movie stars in Hollywood*…

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Paaalease. The FDIC caused this mess because peopel got lazy? Yeah because before FDIC we never had runs on banks. We never had people put their money in lousy banks. *rolls eyes*

The Austrian Economists were hardly the only people predicting this crisis. The over leveraged american economy has been a point of great contention for years. Anyone who looked at the average household debt was saying we needed to do something to get citizens back into the black and out of debt. Now most people were predicting it would be a credit card bankrupcy collapse. Which we 'fixed' by preventing people from going bankrupt.

It was obvious for well over a decade the credit industry was carelessly running up the debt on people who had no hope of ever paying it back. Only problem was they tried it on a product which has no return policy (houses) and got burned themselves.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Gavin, do you think banks would have been taking all these insane risks with people's life savings and that people would not have checked out the banks' balance sheets if the whole mess was not 100% guaranteed by the FDIC? When the government says they are "looking out for you" people stop looking out for themselves. And now we see the result: trillions in bailouts and the FDIC bankrupt.

What about my point about Madoff and the SEC? Do you think all these intelligent retired people would be sinking 90% of their assets into Madoff's scheme if the federal government and SEC were not constantly "certifying" him as being legit? There is no possible way. That Ponzi scheme would have been discovered quickly. But again, when the government tells people, "Don't worry... we're protecting you from con artists," suddenly people stop doing their own homework.

A lot of people have way more faith in the government than I do. I tend to want to let people to make their own decisions in life.