I've been thinking for some time now that the wholesale, forced move to external combustion cars will never happen-- because reality will assert itself. What about people who live in apartments and are parked in the street? How about people who live outside of city limits and have long drives to get where they're going? How will a couple of hundred million cars added to the electric grid possibly work, when the grid already is hanging on by a thread? And so forth and so on.

Here is just such a case-in-point. External combustion vehicles were such a disaster for New York City that the city "Sanitation Commissioner" said this, bold emphasis is mine: "Given the current state of the technology, I don't see today a path forward to fully electrifying the rear loader portion of the fleet by 2040." Remember when it was 2030, then 2035? Now it's not even 2040. In fact, it will be never: external combustion cars are only useful for a tiny subset of use cases, and fail at absolutely anything else.

They've been tried numerous times over the past century, and the concept was abandoned for good cause every time. The only reason they've hung on so far this time is because billionaire ideologues are funneling billions if not trillions of dollars globally into trying to make these paperweights float. But no amount of money can make water not wet, or gravity not pull.

And by the way, these trucks cost New York City over five hundred thousand dollars each! It's a perfect microcosm for what consumers face as well: external combustion cars are expensive, and simply can't do the things internal combustion engine cars can-- not even close in fact. In the case of these trucks, they "conked out" after plowing snow for only four hours. And want to guess what happened when they "conked out"? I bet they were towed back to base by an internal combustion engined tow truck.

Changing subjects and in the "bad news" category, I only have five more days off on my vacation. On the "good news" side of the ledger though, I got through everything I wanted to get done this December:

• Caught up on my fairly large backlog of reviews, including "Siralim Ultimate", "Sonic Origins", "Pokemon Scarlet", and others.
• Finished video card musical chairs: my RTX 2080 went to my son, his RTX 2060 went to my daughter, and her GTX 1070 went into the server. This was all in preparation of my incoming new PC.
• Got Windows 10 reinstalled for my daughter, this time on her fast NVMe drive.
• Got through the gauntlet of doctor's appointments, trying to figure out my low copper, low white blood cell, and high bilirubin count issues. We're rounding the corner on the problems now.
• Made so much progress in therapy that I was able to create a customized "cheat sheet" for myself, with thought-correcting mitigation steps for all of my most common thinking errors: for example, instead of dreading how future events will impact me, look instead at how I can impact the events.
• Took every single material possession I own out of boxes; organized them into piles; threw away and recycled a bunch; then put remainder into transparent plastic tubs, uniformly labeled, and organized onto a single shelving unit.
• Got my Xbox Series X sold: I won't need both it and my new PC; they perform the exact same function, except that the PC will be many times more powerful.
• Successfully steamed all of the wallpaper off of the kitchen walls; taped, "primered", and re-painted the whole room with two coats.

I'm actually looking forward to going back to work in January-- it's about time to get back to creating versus consuming. Aside from work, January will just see a smattering of doctor's appointments to finalize conclusions. I will also need to land one of the inbound "RTX 4070 Ti" cards; for the time being I will put an old 1050 Ti in it, which I had laying around-- that will at least let me get the system all built, and get Windows 11 installed and set up the way I want it.