Colorado First State to Take Control of Smart Thermostats – Green Energy Initiatives About to Kill – This Winter Will Be Terrible – We Need 487 New eCar Charging Stations Per Day For Next Eight Years

If you got my newsletter this week, you might have noticed that almost everything is about the power grid. Well, it, it kind of is. And we’re going to be talking about some of the implications here…

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Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about California and the amazing power shortages that they have out there.

It’s terrible, right? On a hot day, they’re running out of power and on a cold day, they’re running out of power. I remember when I lived in Southern California for a couple of years, well, I’m more than a couple, but I had an apartment in one of my first and the only heat was an electric heater that was on the wall between the bathroom and the living.

[00:00:44] And, and that’s it. Right. So everything in the apartment was heated from there. There was a, a bedroom. Okay, great. Isn’t that wonderful, but there’s no heat in the bedroom. So if it was a cold day and I wanted to heat, I had to turn the temperature way up on without electric heater. In the living room slash bathroom, keep the bathroom door open.

[00:01:07] And then it would allow me to kind of heat up the rest of the apartment. Right. It had a separate kitchen with the door. It had the bedroom with the door and it had the big living room. So think about that for a minute. Think about how much it really can drive. Electrical demands and California has been having some real problems about 30%, just slightly more comes from what California calls, renewable resources.

[00:01:37] and there’s a great, great quote here. This is from CBS news saying that governor Newsome signed legislation potentially allowing the state’s last remaining nuclear plant to stay opened beyond the plan 2025 closure. In order to provide more power for the energy grid. Again, it kind of makes sense. You might remember back in the summer of 2020, there were some real problems with the grid and they had rolling blackouts.

[00:02:09] They’ve managed to mostly avoid that, but they’re asking people, Hey, don’t charge your cars, your electric cars don’t charge. ’em the grid’s under great stress. And we’re seeing in Colorado another problem, right? Yeah. Isn’t it great here, Denver residents have been able to just go ahead and yeah. Get a hundred dollars bonus for installing smart thermostats.

[00:02:34] A hundred dollars. Yeah. And also on top of that a hundred dollars, they get $25 after the first year. Now why that what’s the advantage to these smart thermostats? You know, you look at it at the surface, it says, well, yeah, that’s probably a great idea, right? Some of these smarter thermostats measure who’s in the room.

[00:02:56] Well, you know that there’s people in the room, there’s a heat source in the room. There’s movement in the room. So it either turns it up or turns it down. Some of them are, are very simple, like mine, right? They’re not connected to the. At all and we’ll turn the temperature up and down on certain times of certain days so that I can, you know, have a comfortable temperature, but these ones are interesting because what’s happened here in Denver.

[00:03:25] is it the residents have lost control of their thermostats. Yeah. So Colorado’s having an energy crisis. Let me see, what are these states have in common? Hmm. I wonder Colorado and California. And they’re deciding now that the power grid, the, the guys that run it, you know, they that have the monopoly they get to make, what is it?

[00:03:49] Five or 10% of the gross. Income as profit, which is really kind of cool because you know, what that means is the more expensive electricity is to produce and deliver the more money they make. Right. So they just constantly go to the public utilities commission and say, Hey, we need a rate increase. And isn’t that wonderful.

[00:04:11] Cause if it was you, would you rather have 5% of a hundred million dollars or 5% of 200 million? I I’ll wait.

[00:04:25] Okay. So you’d rather have 5% of $200 million. So, so would the electric grid companies, so why would they want to invest in increasing the electric power when there’s so many reasons? Not. Two, you see, let’s talk about this for a minute. To build a new plant is very expensive in New Hampshire. The Seabrook nuclear plant was designed.

[00:04:51] They, they were gonna have two major reactors there. Powering New Hampshire. Putting power into the Northeast grid, which would help to service Maine help to service mass. Right. It, it was gonna be just a wonderful thing. And then Jane Fonda’s people got gathered around and said, no, no, you can’t do that.

[00:05:11] Right. China syndrome, China syndrome, which isn’t true. These types of reactors don’t have that problem. And, but the newest reactors really don’t, we’ve talked about those on the show before, because they’re intrinsically safe. Doesn’t. It, they can submerge them. You can cut out all the power to ’em doesn’t matter.

[00:05:30] Well, I’ll, um, Let me see, do, do I want to, as a power grid company, go to the expense of a couple of things, right? Do do I want to, first of all, go through the latest, uh, number I saw was about six year process to try and get a basic approval for nuclear power plant. Of course, on top of that, you got way more that you have to worry.

[00:05:54] Approvals from, you know, federal and state and county and city, et cetera, et cetera. And, uh, we, so you gotta put your money into that and then you gotta build the darn thing and Seabrook in, which is the one I just mentioned in New Hampshire is an expensive thing to build. So if you put, build a Seabrook nuclear power plant, right.

[00:06:18] And you’ve got it sitting there, but you never get to quite finish it, then what. While the construction cost of Seabrook. And this is, uh, right now owned by next era. Next era energy resources, Seabrook cost, $17 billion to build, and it never went fully operational. So let me see if I’m a power provider. Do I want to build a nuclear power plant?

[00:06:49] Well, probably not. Probably not. Well, how about a, a gas, power plant? Well, one of the nice things about gas or coal or wood, or even nuclear is they all have the same basic backend. So you might ask me, well, what is that, Craig? What kind of a backend are you talking about here? Well, we’re talking about the back end.

[00:07:14] Steam think steam, locomotive, right? What happened with steam? Well, it’s still out there and it’s still the back end of all of our electric production, at least almost all of it. Right? So you can take an old coal plant and convert it to nuclear. For instance, there’s even some ways to convert them to solar, but that’s a more expensive process and a lot of stuff has to be changed.

[00:07:39] So 17 billion. To build Seabrook and it never goes into production. And now the people in New Hampshire are paying 17 billion, right. For a nuclear power plant. That’s only partially in use. So let me see what other options do they have? Well, of course they could build a cold plant, you know, maybe. Try to anyways, and then what’s gonna happen.

[00:08:03] Well, it’s gonna get shut down and it’s gonna probably take 20 years nowadays to try and get approval for it. Even though we have some pretty darn good clean coal plant, plant technology out there, uh, other options. Well, we mentioned natural gas if we can get it right, but we can’t frack in a lot of areas, which is where we get a lot of our natural gas from so natural gas, even though we have more.

[00:08:27] Any other other country or supplier in the world, we can’t really use natural gas can because it’s, we don’t know what’s gonna happen here in the future, solar. Well, you know, it doesn’t work at night, uh, wind. Well, it, it doesn’t work. If the wind isn’t blowing, uh, battery technology distort it. We just don’t have it.

[00:08:47] Hm. So if you are a provider of electricity, maybe your best choice is to restrict the production of power. Don’t bother investing in new power plants, at least, you know, pretend you are, but don’t bother. And then ultimately all you have to do is raise your prices. So you raise your price and wait a minute.

[00:09:09] What was that formula I talked about before? Would you rather have 5% of a hundred million or 5% of 200 million? Hmm. Let’s see here. Um, what was the answer to that? Oh, 5% of $200 million wins. So the less efficiency that they can have so that they can charge the higher price means they can pull more to their bottom line and life is good.

[00:09:39] Don’t you love these types of government regulations are protecting us. They’re keeping the prices under control, making it so everything so much better for us all across the board. So California. is doing a couple of other things that are also absolutely ridiculous. One of the things California is doing and, uh, you know, have, have a look at this is 2035.

[00:10:06] You might have heard of this one too. What’s happening in 2035. Well, in 2035, California says they will not allow the sale of any new gasoline or internal combustion engine. Cars, at least maybe trucks as well. So let me see if their electric grid is hurting. They’re complaining right now because one of their most reliable sources of energy, uh, nuclear they’ve been shutting down.

[00:10:37] So I mentioned Gavin, Newsome’s bringing nuclear back on the table, keeping that plant running. Uh, the other big one of course is water power, hydro dams, right? Uh, and guess what they’re running out of out there is the water. And they’re having trouble with keeping hydro plants running. So production of electricity, there is way down and to top it off, they want electric vehicles.

[00:11:04] So we’re gonna get into this some more where we get back the insanity. Has just gone way overboard here, way, way overboard. And you haven’t even heard the half of it yet. Visit me online. Make sure you get my newsletter. My free insider show notes. Visit Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[00:11:28] We’re talking a little bit about green energy, green quote, unquote. Right? Because a lot of it is anything but green. We’ve talked about many of those things before, but right now we’re gonna start out with Germany. What is up over there? The greenest of green.

[00:11:45] Germany has been a leader over in the EU in a number of ways.

[00:11:49] Right? Well, number one, it’s the biggest economy in Europe. It’s an incredible economy and it has frankly supported many of the EU. Uh, com countries over there from going broke, right? The, the P I G S the Portugal, uh, Italy crease in Spain have been taking a lot of the money from Germany. That’s part of the reason that Britain decided to get out of the EU.

[00:12:18] It’s just kind of crazy. Right? So Germany being a major provider of some of the financing for some of these program. Has kind of run the EU, even though it’s in Brussels there in Belgium, the headquarters anyways. Right? Well, Germany is facing a complete collapse of its power grid system, complete collapse because of the demand for electric.

[00:12:47] Now I’m gonna get into a little bit more of what’s happening here in the us with California. You probably saw all of the stuff in my newsletter this week. Craig peterson.com/subscribe in my free newsletter. Uh, and. Here’s what’s happening over there right now because the gas was cut off to Germany.

[00:13:11] People are panicking. It’s also been cut off to pretty much all of the other European countries, France has been playing footsy with Russia. And, uh, because of that, they haven’t been completely cut off yet. I haven’t seen the latest numbers, but basically Russia’s cutting way back, 80% or more to these major.

[00:13:33] European countries. Well, we’re looking at a problem in the us too. I burn home heating oil. Most of that comes from Canada. A lot of people burn natural gas in my neighborhood. There’s some people that burn LPG, liquified petroleum gas, which is a blend of waste gas gases for the most part. But because we are competing on an international stage, we got a bit of a different problem that we would have otherwise.

[00:14:04] you might know one of my daughters and sons-in-law son-in-laws sons-in-law yeah, that’d be right. Have been working for an, um, a company that transports various types of natural gas and LP gas. So they’ll take that gas. At least I used to work for them. Uh, they’ve moved on, but they’ll take that gas and they’ll move it from one place to another, for instance, in Boston.

[00:14:32] A few years ago, her ship was sitting in the Harbor. They pull up this buoy from the bottom of the ocean, pull it into the bottom of the ship. And once it was in the bottom of the ship, now, they were able to take the liquified gas that they had on board reg gasify it, and provide the Northeast natural gas grid with natural gas for the winter.

[00:14:55] So she was sitting there at anchor all winter and. Was providing us with natural gas. So one of the beauties of these regas ships is first of all, mass, that two sets did not want a Rega plant on land. So they built a ship with it right there. And then secondly, if you are doing that, you can fill up your LP.

[00:15:18] Uh, ships, right? Because there’s some that just transport the liquified gas and some that, that hold a smaller amount and reify, you can take that anywhere. So one year she was sitting off the coast of Israel and they were filling up of course, from the other ships that would come in with the liquid gas and they would reify it and pump that directly into Israel’s.

[00:15:46] Pipelines for natural gas. So natural gas is now a worldwide commodity. You can sell it pretty much anywhere because of these new technology ships that are out there that have Rega plants right on them. So all you have to do is give them access to your main pipeline for natural gas. For the area or for the country and they fill it up and you’re off and running.

[00:16:14] So now we’ve got countries all over the world that are competing for the natural gas that we’re selling. The natural gas of Russia was selling, right. That some of the natural gas from some of these other places around the world, that means this winter Europe is going to be buying more and more and more natural gas.

[00:16:38] People are gonna die over there. Don’t get me wrong because of the cold. They are gonna have a hard time providing natural gas to enough people because everyone’s bidding the value, the price of natural gas. And the same, thing’s been true for oil for a long time. Right? It’s you, you get a ship, it’s got however, million barrels of oil on it.

[00:17:01] I’m not even sure. And they deliver that anywhere you want it delivered. One of the things all of these companies do is they sit off shore, so they get filled up and they just sit there waiting for the value of their cargo to go. Now that’s been true forever, right? There’s what are called tramp ships.

[00:17:25] And, and they’ll just go pick up whatever, and they’ll sit around and find out, okay, where do you want me to deliver it? And off they go once the price is high enough. So they’re already doing that. They’re staging some of these ships with oil, they’re staging some of them with natural gas or LPG, and there’s watching the markets and waiting for the time that the price goes up.

[00:17:49] So many people in Germany are worried about being able to get any heat. because natural gas, man, it’s gonna be rashing something awful. If Russia doesn’t turn those pipelines up all of the way. Remember president Trump warned them about that at the UN and the German representatives were sitting there in the UN on camera snickering that president Trump would suggest that buying all of their natural gas from our friends over in Russia was not the best idea possible.

[00:18:20] Right. So they really messed that one. The people in Germany have been going out and doing what. The sales of electric heaters are higher this year than any other year. So far in 2022, Germans have bought more than 600,000 electric heaters. Isn’t that something, and that’s a 35% increase from usual. Just to let you know, you can put that in some perspective.

[00:18:51] And of course that number keeps going up and their critical infrastructures now facing this massive strain, this 20 million Germans have homes that are dependent on natural gas, 20. Million and are switching to electric heaters. We’re gonna be doing the same thing here. I’m sure. And I mentioned earlier about my first apartment down there in California that had electric heater and that was it.

[00:19:20] That’s how we heated the whole crazy thing. So think about that. Germany’s been having power problems. They had them last year. They’ve had them for a few years because they’ve been turning off reliable sources of energy and trying to move to windmills and solar, which are not ready for prime time. So they are expecting some problems here.

[00:19:44] As remix news is reporting. Blackouts who are not just hit private households, but also affect German infrastructure, including cash payment systems, mobile phone networks, street light. Now that’s, uh, from a gentleman, from the association of electrical engineering, and he’s saying all of these networks would be down for long periods of time.

[00:20:08] You remember the year 2000 Y2K, the world is gonna come to an end. Computers are gonna go down. Yeah. turns out they were off by about 22 years. Right? Meanwhile, This is the daily fetched reporting German. These biggest cities are preparing for an energy crisis as a country prepares to limit heat and shut off warm water and shut off lighting.

[00:20:34] Absolutely amazing. We’re gonna pick this up when we come back. So don’t go anywhere. Look for my podcast. You’ll find it pretty much everywhere. Just search for Craig Peterson and, or go to my website. Craig peterson.com.

[00:20:55] We’ve talked about the internet of things here before many times and the security problems with it. Well, Denver and California are proving that there are more problems with internet of things as governments taking control.

[00:21:11] I mentioned a little bit earlier about how the guys and gals in Denver, Colorado have succumbed to just, well, it really was a very good deal.

[00:21:23] Succumb is probably the wrong word. You see, they would let you have a smart thermostat and they would pay you a hundred dollars. If you bought a smart thermostat that met their requirements. Of course, and then $25 a year. If you kept that smart thermostat online. Now that’s an internet of things. We’ve talked about, the serious problems we’ve seen in the past about them.

[00:21:49] So for instance, Google smart thermostat decided that, uh, well it needed a microphone and, um, it didn’t tell anybody and nobody knew why Google had put a microphone in there because they weren’t using. of course, they kind of make sense to put a, some, our microphone in there, so you can talk to it. Right.

[00:22:09] But none of that was implemented. Then we had some of these smart thermostats being broken into. In fact, some of these, uh, smart thermostats with microphones were not only broken into, but were used to listen the end on what was happening in a. So there’s all kinds of problems with them. I OT internet of things is any device that gets hooked up to the internet gets hooked up to your network.

[00:22:35] Nowadays that’s things like refrigerators that might remind you that you need to buy some eggs and some of them will even place orders for you for groceries. And they’ll just show up. You can expect more of that by the way as time goes. And there are some services that will not only take that order of groceries, but will come into your home and put them in the fridge for you depending on where you live.

[00:23:00] Right. Doesn’t that sound absolutely wonderful. But the internet of things here. Is really concerning cuz we’re tying more and more of our appliances and other electronic devices into this central control system out there. We’ve seen issues where they’re tied in centrally things like your washer. You’re dryer.

[00:23:25] And now they’re being controlled by the utilities so that you don’t run your wash at a certain time of day when they might need the electricity. Now I can see that, that, that kind of makes sense to me, but I think the best way to incentivize consumers is to do a pricing system that is variable. So if it’s peak time, Hey, electricity is cheap.

[00:23:48] If you use it after 10:00 PM or whatever the right time is. And there are some utilities that are doing that, but there are states out there that are again, Democrat controlled. It seems to be the theme, doesn’t it, where they are starting to mandate that you have smart appliances and that they be tied into a control system that ultimately the state can.

[00:24:19] So they know when you’re washing your clothes, they know when you’re ordering your grocer groceries, they know where they’re coming from. Now, of course they can get some of that information. Like the groceries from credit cards, cuz most of us were paying for groceries. The credit cards aren’t we. But ultimately what we’re doing is opening up everything in our homes to external monitoring and potentially to control.

[00:24:44] And that’s what’s happening right now. It really is external. Control and that’s what’s happened in Denver where they had a heat wave and people went up to their thermostat to turn it down because man, it was hot and you know what I’ve had, I’ve had my temperature turned way up because I didn’t wanna waste electricity, but it’s really hot today.

[00:25:06] So I’m gonna turn it up and what. What happens. It says right there in the thermostat that you can’t change it due to an energy emergency, California is going to mandate these types of smart thermostats that control how much heat you get in the winter and how much cooling you get in the summer. They’re also starting to require that your washing machine and dryer, particularly electric dryers are also controlled by this.

[00:25:38] See, it all goes back to what I was talking about before. If you are a power grid. What are you gonna do? Is it better for you to just increase prices or is it better for you to build new sources of electricity? And as I mentioned before, I went through all of this in detail. It’s usually much better for you to just go ahead and increase your prices.

[00:26:02] You’ll make more money. You don’t have that money at risk because man, somebody might pass a law, a rule, a regulation, heck some dictator might sign an executive order cutting off your supply. Right. Might be Putin might be somebody else. You never know. So instead of relying so heavily on things such as our natural gas supply, which president Biden effectively shut down some of the exploration for natural gas because he shut down fracking.

[00:26:35] Uh, we are now burning natural gas to produce electricity. So what happens? Electric prices while in New Hampshire, they doubled doubled from one month to the next. The price of electricity. Now your bill wouldn’t have doubled because there’s also the delivery costs and other things that are involved, but the price of electricity itself doubled, we’ve got to get smart about this stuff.

[00:27:03] So I’m, I’m gonna go to another one. We mentioned, and this was in the newsletter that came out. Um, you can find that, uh, on the newsletter subscription online at Craig peterson.com/subscribe, but here’s another problem we got California is requiring electric vehicles. By 2035, they want half or not half.

[00:27:30] Excuse me. They want all of the vehicles sold in California. All of them to be electric, no more internal combustion engines in California, at least new cars, right? No, probably be, uh, the gas cars for quite a while. So let’s look at this. The federal government wants us to be driving electric cars, all of the car companies, making electric cars.

[00:27:54] Are they making them cuz people want them are demanding them? No. They’re not look at the number of cars sold. Look at how some of these electric car lines have been shut down. Nissan Nissan closed one of their cars off a GM closed one of their cars off, right? These electric cars don’t make sense, but if you are going to stay in business and you’re going to get an executive order or a law coming down from Congress.

[00:28:22] And that law says you’re gonna have to produce electric vehicles. You’re gonna do it. It’s just like the cafe standards. Yeah. Hey, listen, your whole fleet. In other words, all of the cars that you sell, sell half to meet these standards for fuel economy across the board. So what are you gonna do? How are you gonna deal with that?

[00:28:41] Well, you’re gonna make the cars less safe by taking some of this deal out of. You’re gonna make them less safe because you want to make them lighter. You’re gonna get rid of that really great spare tire that was in the back, and you can replace it with one of those stupid little space saver, saver tires, right?

[00:28:57] All, to save weight, all, to meet federal regulations on the mileage the vehicles have to meet. Now, when we’re looking at the electricity, we’ve already established that we don’t have the electrical supply to power. These cars. We Don. We don’t, we’re already having brownouts in the summer and in the winter, in different parts of the country.

[00:29:22] Well, let’s also talk about one more thing and that is okay. So how are we gonna charge the cars? And obviously getting the electricity is a very big deal. And there was a new nuclear plant license that finally went through. It started the application process. Back at the pretty much the beginning of the Trump administration and was signed off by the Biden administration for one of these new nuclear plant.

[00:29:53] And the nuclear plant is by the way, intrinsically safe. It’s made enough. Factory. It’s not custom made on site, whole new world. And then how are we gonna charge the cars? That’s another problem. it hasn’t been addressed yet. So we’ll get into all of that stick around. Of course, listening to Craig Peterson, you can sign up and find out more.

[00:30:19] Craig peterson.com.

[00:30:21] So, how are we going to charge the mall? man, this is gonna be a problem. We’re gonna get into that right now. Uh, again, man talking about the cart before the horse, what’s the matter with these people? It’s crazy.

[00:30:38] You know, I am all for electric cars. I think they are cool.

[00:30:43] Very neat. But they are not green. Okay. Don’t fool yourself. They are not green. The manufacturing of the batteries where they’re mining, how they’re. Processing it we’re just outsourcing the pollution to third world countries, making people there sick. Right. Why, why bother you? You remember the Olympics that were held in Beijing and how the air was just so nasty people were wearing face masks?

[00:31:14] Uh, not because of worried about. Disease. They were worried about the particulate matter in the air. So what China did is they shut down all manufacturing. For well over a hundred miles so that the Beijing Olympics would not look like what it normally looks like in that area, which is just horrific, almost unbreathable air, same thing with the water.

[00:31:45] You look at the plastic in our oceans, which people are complaining about. And I get it. I don’t want microplastics in me and I certainly don’t want that little kid to shove a straw up my nose. Like he did the turtle, but that’s really what we’re looking at here. We’re outsourcing our pollution elsewhere and that pollution.

[00:32:08] Ends up here. It ends up in our aquifers. It ends up in the oceans, obviously. Right. And in the air, which blows around the globe. And some of it settles down to the earth and that gets washed away by the rains and then ends up in all kinds of nasty places. So don’t, don’t let them convince you that electric cars are.

[00:32:33] they are cool. They’re wonderful. They’re really neat. They’re fast. Uh, we should talk again, some point about the autonomous systems I’ve been driving, Ford’s latest, uh, you know, semi-autonomous system. And we can talk about that. What I like and don’t like about those things, but, uh, when we’re talking about the electric cars, I, I love what my daughter said.

[00:32:57] Who’s living in Norway. They have a Tesla. Uh, I think it’s a. What is it? Model three, I think. And they’re driving in Norway. Now in Norway, you get a, a 25% price, uh, difference, um, buying electric versus gas. The government gives you 25% off because this tax free and the sales tax is 25%. Can you believe that?

[00:33:21] Right? Oh, but things are cheap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. What they are saying. Cause I asked my daughter, I said, now, you know, that Tesla is not green. Right. And she said, yeah. And I said, well, how about people in Norway? What are they thinking? Why are they buying it? Why is Norway the most, uh, populated electric vehicle country in the world?

[00:33:46] Per capita, they have more electric cars than any other country. Well, the main reason for that is because of the massive tax incentives, but the other side of that coin here, frankly, is the, how Norway wants to stay green. They wanna be, have fresh air. They wanna be living in a clean environment. And so what she told me was that Norwegian realizes.

[00:34:11] You know, not everybody obviously, but, um, that these cars, these electric cars are not green. They are hard on the environment, but not the environment in nor. Talking about being closed minded. Right? Very narrow minded. All that matters is that we’re not polluting Norway by driving those cars. Now, ultimately they may be because in most parts of the world, the electric cars, batteries are being put in storage facilities or are ending up in waste.

[00:34:45] Piles, uh, around the world. It it’s really kind of crazy because most of them cannot be recycled. Now there’s some work on that right now. Tesla’s doing some amazing stuff with changing the battery, not just the chemistry, but it’s makeup and in the car. And they think they’re gonna be able to have a car out that gets 650 miles, 6, 5 0 on a charge.

[00:35:08] Which is pretty darn cool by changing a whole bunch of stuff. In fact, the batteries become a structural, uh, component of the vehicle. So that’s really kind of cool. But if we have all of these electric cars on the road, whether they’re polluting or not, how do we charge these things? We’ve got the problem of how do we generate enough electricity and.

[00:35:33] Again, you’ve been listening to me long enough, you know, nuclear, nuclear nuclear are the three best options because we need power that’s on. When the sun’s set, we need power that’s on. When the wind isn’t blowing, we need power in the Northern realms of Alaska. We need power everywhere. So I really like these new intrinsically safe nuclear plants.

[00:36:00] Germany is turning them back on earlier. I talked about how California has now extended the life on this nuclear plant. They were gonna shut down just so they can keep electricity up. And yet we’re talking about millions, more of these electric cars on the. So, what does that mean? Well, it also means that we need to spend 35 billion to meet the demand for an additional 1.2 million public charging stations by 2030.

[00:36:36] And that’s not counting the 28 million that are needed in people’s home. So the us needs to build 30 million EV charging parts. So let’s do the math. Now. We’re not gonna do the math up to 2035, which is the Dday for California. Let’s do the math to 2030. Okay. The math for up to 2030 means that they need to be installing 478.

[00:37:08] Charging stations per day for the next eight years. And that’s of half the drivers switched to electric. I don’t think that’s gonna happen that quickly, but it is eventually going to happen. So right now we have about 128,000 public electric vehicle charging outlets. And I’ve shared some articles in the past talking about how so many of them don’t work.

[00:37:34] They won’t work with your car or, or just plain broken. Uh, there’s a lot of those out there. So 128,000 public and at least 4,500 private ones currently in comparison with 150,000 gas stations. Okay. So, although EV sales have climbed a lot each year since 2016, most consumers like myself are really concerned about the batteries.

[00:38:01] How long will they last? How far will they go? And then how long does it take to charge? Where can I charge them? Right. It’s uh, very, very big deal. So that’s a huge number. Isn’t it. Now. And then, then we’re talking about putting charging ports into our homes. and you probably have to get an electrician to come into your home to hook up a charging port to charge up your car.

[00:38:27] Right? So it’s an interesting set of problems. So when I talked about having the cart before the horse, the obvious problem here is we’re pushing electric vehicles and pushing. All out really heavily, the tax incentives have changed recently due to this, this, uh, inflation and increasing act. Right.

[00:38:57] Reduction. I Ugh, crazy. But anyways, I. We are seeing more and more of these vehicles. Some manufacturers such as Tesla are losing their, the federal, uh, chip in other manufacturers like for GM and others, uh, have gone ahead and raised their prices to match or exceed the amount of money that federal government’s chipping in.

[00:39:23] Oh boy, I hate it. When that happens, goes down the wrong way. Where are we gonna end up? How is this going to happen? Um, we’ve got the car before the horse was pushing these cars. The car manufacturers have said, oh, wait a minute. There’s gonna be a $5,000, uh, chip in by the federal government, by the taxpayers.

[00:39:44] Yeah. By the, you know, the widows, the people who are working really hard, driving the trucks and everything. Yeah. Those loose guys are gonna pay for electric cars, which by the way, vast majority electric car owners are our wealthy people. Thank you very much. Well, have the poverty line. So we’re gonna take money from people at, or below the poverty line and give it to those people.

[00:40:04] And uh, $5,000. No problem. So what do the automakers do? They went ahead and raised their prices by at least the amount of money that the federal government said that they were going to chip in. Is that a surprise to anybody? It shouldn’t be it. It’s kind of like the student loan problems. Right? Why is tuition so expensive?

[00:40:28] Well, let me see. Government is making it possible for people to borrow more money, to go to college. Government’s giving the. Pell grants and others for people to go to college. Uh, they’re letting you pay it off over your lifetime. Yeah. It’s the same sort of thing. So those, those benefits of thousands of dollars that are in this new bill that was passed, that are there to help you buy electric vehicles won’t matter because they have raised their prices of the cars.

[00:41:03] At or above the amount of money the government’s going to contribute yet you and me are going to contribute, you know, the small business people that, um, you know, readers, digested a survey of small business people and found out we only have to work a half a day. Did you know that only a half a day? And it doesn’t really matter which 12 hours you work, which is true.

[00:41:23] Right. I’ve had like two vacations in, in my whole adult life. That’s it because I care about my customers. Right. I try and make sure everything’s going fine for them. So we get to pay for these electric cars they’re being bought by people who are in the highest levels of, uh, income in the country. It’s absolutely crazy, absolutely crazy.

[00:41:52] And we only have to build about 500 charging stations a day. So there you go. And then, you know, there’s this minor problem of the electricity, where’s it gonna come from? But you know, don’t worry about that. Right? Cuz Bernie natural gas, that’s the way to do it. And natural gas prices have gone up, which means electric prices have gone up just like I mentioned before.

[00:42:15] Hey, you know, it, it is probably time to do an upgrade on that computer of yours for windows 11, or maybe you’re gonna move over to the Linux world. That’s what I did with my older computer, frankly. I it’s Linux now much faster, but there’s more to it.

[00:42:31] Hey, I send out my newsletter, my insider show notes every Monday morning.

[00:42:37] Usually sometimes it’s Tuesday, sometimes it’s Wednesday depends on the week. This week I was at a client’s site over the weekend, actually, and Monday and Tuesday down in Atlanta. So I, I was busy down there. This is a DOD subcontractor. They just. Parts, but they are required by CMMC these new regulations I’ve actually been around for a while now to really keep an eye on their cybersecurity.

[00:43:06] And so of course they bring me in and my team cuz you know, that’s what we do. But I told you that because of my newsletter this week, I got some comments from a few people that the cybersecurity section in my newsletter was. Two articles from 2015 and , they both pointed it out. I think it’s great that everybody’s paying that much attention.

[00:43:32] I actually, there’s a few people that notice that, and it was my fault for not explaining what I was trying to do. And, and that’s because I was in a hotel room and I was getting ready to go to the client site and do. Dates fix a couple of things, check the seals on computers and you know, all of those sorts of maintenance things you have to do clean them out.

[00:43:53] I brought down a, a little blower and stuff. They, they were amazingly clean cuz we put them in a special cabinet that has these big air filters on them and stuff. Anyhow. The two articles this week on cybersecurity in my newsletter. Well, this was even in the free newsletter, talked about two different things.

[00:44:12] Lenovo was installing software and laptops, and they apparently have still kind of done that. This was some years ago. like, uh, seven years ago now, I guess. And they were putting it on there and you had no control over it. Okay. It was a real problem. And then the other one was. About your hard drives and what NSA did for years in modifying the firmware on the hard disk drives of a number of computers, many computers out there.

[00:44:48] And in both cases, Lenovo and the NSA, their national security agency. Put software on the computers so that even if you erased your computers, you would still have their software on it. They would reinstall itself. And Lenovo has been caught again, doing that. Okay. So there there’s articles out there talking about.

[00:45:13] Just all of the stuff they’ve been doing. So here’s what I want propose to you guys. And I did not make this clear in the newsletter. And for that, I apologize. I was in a hurry and that was my intention and it just had never happened. Not, but not being in a hurry was my intention. But I, I, I intended to explain this a little bit better and I did on the radio a little bit this week as well.

[00:45:37] And I’m doing it right now. My intention is to let you know that for decades now, bad guys have been able to embed malware into parts of your computer. So instead of just the operating system where they might have re. Placed some sort of a library file. And now when your machine boots up, it’s going to pull it in from that library file or one of the many other ways, uh, they, they will go beneath your operating system.

[00:46:12] So they’ll put things in the boot blocks of your computer and. As we just mentioned here, they will put things in the hard drive itself, not on the blocks of the hard drive, but in the controller of the hard drive right there on the hard drive’s board motherboard, if you will, for the hard drive and they can make it persistent.

[00:46:37] now we’ve tried to get around some of these problems. Apple came up with the T two chip and what the T two chip does is really lock things down on your apple computer. And that’s always a good thing, right? And the apple T two chip keeps track of. Passwords and makes things bootable and everything else.

[00:46:59] And apple has also really kind of spun things out a little bit here with their T2 chip. They had some security problems. Uh they’re in all of the newer apple computers. In fact, the one I use a lot is an older computer that doesn’t have that T2 chip in it, but what Microsoft has done now, and this isn’t really Microsoft, it’s really the hardware vendors.

[00:47:25] They have something called a TP. And this TPM is there for security. It’s the trusted platform module. You want the version two or better, uh, as they come out, right. Kind of keep it up to date. But the T2, this trusted platform module is kind of like the apple two chip. It is nowhere near as. Complete, if you will, as the apple T two chip is, and it’s designed primarily for booting your computer, which is really kind of cool.

[00:48:03] There’s a cute article over on medium. And it’s saying that the author’s, uh, professor bill Buchanan. The author of this article says, uh, the TPM chip in your computer is perhaps a forgotten device. It often sits there not doing much and never quite achieving its full potential. You bought the laptop because it had one, but you just can’t find a use for it.

[00:48:25] The chip itself is rather jealous of the apple TTU chip and which does so much more and where people actually buy the computer for the things it bring. Few people actually buy a computer, cuz it has a TPM, but lots of people buy a MacBook and an iPhone because it is trusted to look after your sensitive data.

[00:48:45] And he’s absolutely right about that stuff. Now I’ve got clients who have been buying servers and other computers and the T2 chip has been. Option for them. I think that’s probably almost gone nowadays. It is probably added in by default. These things are pretty cheap, cuz again, they don’t really do much, but they are now a part of it because of what Microsoft has done.

[00:49:14] Microsoft has made it so that you pretty much have to have one of. T2 chip or TPM chips, I should say the TPM 2.0 cuz you know, it’s gotta be as good as apples T2 the TPM 2.0, which is a crypto processor so that you can run windows 11. Now, I don’t want you to think that having this TPM chip in your computer, all of a sudden makes it.

[00:49:40] But it does do a few things that are very, very good. First of all, it has a random number generator, which is super important when we’re talking about encrypt. And that random number generator is used to generate keys that are used for your disc encryption and potentially other things. So if you are encrypting the disc on your windows machine, you are really moving ahead in a very big way, because now if your computer is stolen and it boots up, they won’t be able to.

[00:50:13] at any of that data, it’ll all look like random trash. If it’s done its job. Right. And it can also of course store the user’s password in the chip. It has some what’s called persistent memory. I told you all of the stuff cuz of what I want to tell you next. All of this stuff from Lenovo, from the NSA over the years.

[00:50:36] And, and of course the bad guys, whether it’s Russia, China, it can be really anywhere. North. Korea’s been big on this. Iran’s been doing this sort of thing. All of those guys may well have had access to your computer in the past. If you have an older computer. And because some of this software, some of this malware is persistent.

[00:51:00] And because windows now is, as I said, pretty much requiring one of these TPM chips, the TPM 2.0 or better is what you want. I think that it’s time to seriously consider buying a new windows computer. Now we’re working with a client right now that has an engineer who has been continually upgrading his windows computer since I don’t know, windows XP days, I think.

[00:51:29] And every time he gets a new computer, he just goes ahead and migrates everything over. Doesn’t upgrade. Doesn’t update to the newest operating system. And for him, anyways, life is good. Well, it ain’t so good folks because he has all kinds of nastiness, little turds. If you will, that are hiding all around his computer.

[00:51:54] The registry is going to be scattered with these things. Some of them probably installed by some form of malware over the years, his disc is gonna be cluttered, everything. So I’m saying right now, Get a new computer and go ahead and make sure you reinstall windows. That’s the first thing we do. In fact, what we do for our clients.

[00:52:17] We have a version of windows that we have updated stream updated and. We don’t have any of that bloatware on it, that the manufacturers get their 10 bucks from the various of vendors, you know, to put the Norton antivirus and all this other useless stuff on your computer. So by reinstalling, just the windows.

[00:52:40] And of course, since its windows, you go to install all of the drivers for your computer, too. But by doing that, you’re getting rid of all of the bloatware. And then what you wanna do is either copy or restore your files onto the new computer. And then when you’re done with that install, Your applications, the newest versions of your applications.

[00:53:05] And I can hear people right now complaining, cuz I hear this all of the time. My gosh, I’ve had that application for 10 years and you can’t even get it anymore. Blah blah. You know what? You should not be using that application. You need to get the newest version or if that vendor’s out of. You need to make sure that you go one more step, find a compatible vendor or whatever.

[00:53:29] We have to stop using old computers and old software. Uh, there’s options here, but seriously, consider this because of what’s been happening to us for years. Hey, visit me online. Sign up for my newsletter, Craig Peter son.com.

[00:53:48] Well, autonomous cars are on the road and there was an accident in Germany. We don’t have all of the details yet, but it’s really concerning. And it’s about the anonymous cars. Yeah. Autonomous cars. And, uh, we gotta study out. I want to talk about as well.

[00:54:05] There are various levels of autonomy, I guess. Yeah.

[00:54:09] That’s the right word in these autonomous vehicles that we have and that we’re looking forward to level one is kind of the gold standard, right? That’s where we want to get. That’s where the cars don’t even need a churn wheel pedals, your tension, nothing. They just drive themselves. We’re not there. And you probably guess that.

[00:54:32] and then there’s level two where you’re the driver’s supposed to pay attention, but the car’s pretty much going to drive itself. Well, there is an article here from the associated press talking about what happened in Germany. And, uh, this is a, a few weeks back, and this is the first time I’ve seen this article, but they’re saying that a test car with autonomous steering capability veered into oncoming traffic in Germany, killing one person and seriously injuring nine others.

[00:55:10] A spokesman for police in the Southwestern town of Rogen said the electric BMW. Nine with five people on board, including a young child swerved out of its lane at abandoned the road. Triggering a series of collisions involving four vehicles after brushing an oncoming search, the BMW hit a Mercedes van.

[00:55:37] Head on resulting in the death of a 33 year old passenger in that vehicle, the 70 year old driver, the Sitan lost control of her car and crashed into another vehicle with two people on board, pushing it off the road and causing it to burst into flame. Ruly again, police spokesman. Michael Shaw said four rescue helicopters, and dozens of firefighters responded to the incident and the injured were taken to several hospitals in the region.

[00:56:11] They included the 43 year old driver of the BMW three adults aged 31 42 and 47 and an 18 month old child who are all in the test. The article goes on, uh, is the police said in a statement, the crash vehicle was an autonomous electric test car, whether it was being steered by the 43, 3 year old driver or not is a subject of investigation.

[00:56:40] So this is called a level two driving assistance system. It’s already incorporated in production vehicles today. They can support the driver on when the driver turns them on according to BMW with the level two vehicles, the driver always retains responsibility. In other words, if that car gets into.

[00:57:04] Accident while you are behind the wheel and responsible for it, it’s your fault. So that solves the problem of whose insurance covers what doesn’t it? Yeah, it, it does it pretty well because it’s your fault is kind of the bottom line. So we are in the process of investigating the exact circumstances of the crash.

[00:57:25] BMW said, of course we are in close contact with the authorities. It’s it’s concerning very concerning and I am not ready yet. Autonomous vehicles. Now we’ve seen, and we’ve talked about on the show before a number of problems with some of these different vehicles from Tesla and others, and they are on the roads in many states right now, even in the Northeast, not just the Teslas, but these fully autonomous test vehicles.

[00:57:59] There are a number of things to be concerned about here. For instance, how can an autonomous vehicle determine what to do when there’s a police officer in the middle of the road or a flagman? Or obviously it really can’t determine it because it can’t make out. What’s what, in fact we might remember, and I’m sure they’ve made some adjustments here over at Tesla, but a Tesla car went ahead and, uh, struck and I think killed a lady who was crossing the road with her bicycle.

[00:58:36] I think she was walking it across when she was hit. How can they tell, how can they tell the difference between a car that’s wrapped and has someone’s face on it, maybe a politician full body on the back of a box truck as an advertisement. How can it tell the difference between that and a person that might be standing there?

[00:59:00] It, it gets to be a real problem. We’re already seeing that some of these autonomous vehicles go directly rear end fire trucks stopped at the side of the road with their lights on police cars stopped at the side of the road with the lights on. Just completely rear-end them. We’re seeing that. So how about when it gets a little more difficult than a fire truck parked on the side of the road?

[00:59:25] Now these cars, apparently autonomous steering and, uh, lane detection and correction, all that sort of stuff. These vehicles are looking at things and trying to determine, well, what should I do here? And oftentimes what they determine is, oh, well, okay. That’s just something that’s fixed at the side of the road.

[00:59:45] Like, like a sign post, like a speed sign. When in fact it’s not. So we’ve gotta solve that problem. It, it still isn’t solved yet. What caused this car to steer directly into oncoming traffic and, and head first into a Mercedes van? I, I don’t know. They don’t know yet. Anyways. I’m sure they’ll find out soon enough, but there are real questions here and then I wanna take it to the next levels.

[01:00:18] If the car is in, let’s say level one where it’s full autonomous, even if it’s not, even if it’s a level two, like this car was, or is, uh, what happens when the car is either going to hit a pedestrian or go over a cliff or into a brick wall? That’s even better. Cuz the car might not know the cliff is there.

[01:00:43] What decision should the car make? What kind of ethics should it be? You know, executing here, can it even make an ethical decision? And this is the trolley testing in case you’re not familiar with the whole trolley test thing. It’s, let’s say you are. A trolley operator, you’re going down a hill and there is a fork in the tracks.

[01:01:09] And all you can do is select tracks at a or track set B you can’t stop the trolley. You can’t slow the trolley down in tracks at a there’s a group of seniors walking across the tracks that you will hit. If you go down tracks at a tracks at B. There’s some young kids playing on the tracks and if you choose B, you’re gonna kill the kids.

[01:01:35] So ethical dilemma here, who do you kill? Cuz that’s what the whole trolley test is about. Look it up online. There’s a lot of different variations of this, but what about the car? What decision should the car make? Should the car make the decision to protect you the driver, or should the car be making the decision to protect the pedestrian?

[01:01:59] If it’s going to protect the pedestrian by plowing into that brick wall and potentially killing the occupants of the car. How about when there is the decision of the old people or the young people? There is a lot to solve here. And some of these companies, including Mercedes have come out already with their decisions, Mercedes said they will protect the occupants of the vehicle.

[01:02:27] now when you’re driving the car yourself, of course, you’re making that decision in a, a split second, maybe something you thought about, maybe not, you might make a rational decision. You might not. It’s, you know, it’s hard to say. And you’ll find these articles in my newsletter this week at, uh, Craig peterson.com.

[01:02:49] If you’re not on the newsletter list, you can sign up. It’s absolutely free. This is the free newsletter and you can see all my insiders show notes every week, but it’s an issue. Isn’t it. The car veering into traffic hitting another one head first. How about later on when it’s completely autonomous, what should it do?

[01:03:14] By now you’ve seen one of these new cars with that big screen right there in the center of the console. I’ve got a few problems with this, more than a few problems with you people, right. To quote Seinfeld. Yeah. Let’s talk about it.

[01:03:31] You know, it, it’s very cool to have that display in the center of the car console.

[01:03:36] One of the major reasons that the automotive manufacturers are putting that console right there in the center is because we are demanding, uh, the apple car play the Android car functions in order to have. Really cool stuff, right. Where we can just run our apps and have all of this, uh, wonderful information.

[01:04:02] What I really like about it and Android auto and, uh, the apple car both provide this. What I really like is you can use the navigation system that you prefer, that you like, that you want that’s in your. I have switched over to apple maps. Now I used to use ways. And before that I would use Google maps and way before that map question and others, my wife could tell you some stories of us trying to use some of the very first generation GPS stuff, having a, a lap.

[01:04:38] Top in the car and then having a hockey puck up on the dashboard to try and pick up at least three satellites. And, and, uh, if you went off course at all, went the wrong way, took the wrong. it would just insist on bringing you back to where you were when you went off course, as opposed to taking you from where you are, to where you want to go, which they do nowadays.

[01:05:01] But I like that. Right. And, and I like the new features that are always coming out in these apps that we run on our smartphone. I do not like the fact that the cars have navigation in them. Eh, some of them are pretty cool. They’re nice. Like in our car, if you use the incar navigation, it mutes the music or the radio, whatever is playing on the driver’s side speaker there in the front of the car.

[01:05:32] And then it gives the driver the direction. So everyone else can just keep listening to whatever they were listening to before on the radio, et. You I’ll need features like that. But what I don’t like is they wanna get six or 800 bucks out of us in order to get new maps in order to get new software for the mapping system.

[01:05:53] When we can get things like apple maps for free. Where they’re not even using our data against us, like Google does right Android. Uh, very, very nice. I, I really like them. And the apple maps now is really good. I don’t know if you remember how bad it was when it first came out, but Steve jobs brought all of the mapping, senior management into a room and asked them what happened.

[01:06:20] Why is it so bad? You might remember that it took some people in Australia. Way off the beaten track out in the middle of nowhere with no water, with no fuel and they could have died out there, you know, Australia, everything’s out to kill you and they might well have died and they didn’t, which is good news.

[01:06:42] But even in the us, it was just messing up. It wasn’t very good. Wasn’t taking it always to the right place. And certainly not the best route. Now it’s just gotten amazingly good. Very, very good. So I can choose, right. If I still want to use ways I can use it. If I wanna use apple, I can use it. Google maps. I can use it some third party.

[01:07:01] I can use it, but if I’ve got the stuff that’s built into the car, I’m stuck with the stuff that’s built into the car, and maybe I can pay to upgrade it. A lot of people have found recently, Hey, guess what? That two G data network went. and that means now that your remote control for your card doesn’t work anymore, you might have found your navigation doesn’t work anymore.

[01:07:28] I remember I had a Garmin that got live traffic updates, but it was using FM carriers on FM radio stations. And many of them dumped that. guess what your garment’s no good anymore. At least that part of it isn’t any good and garment charging for map updates. And I don’t blame ’em for this stuff. Right.

[01:07:48] But I would prefer to have my own device to use. So that’s part of the problem. In fact, that’s indicative of what I see to be the very big problem with these new in car systems, because that display in the computer behind it. Isn’t just handling your navigation. It’s controlling your seat, heaters, the radio, the music you’re listening to the lights, the dimming, the headlights, almost everything in the car goes through.

[01:08:23] Infotainment system, right? Yeah. Figured out where I’m going next, because that infotainment system just like the maps on my car right now is going to become out outdated. And then what are you gonna do? And when I say out outdated, I don’t just mean, oh, well I want the new features. It might be that you want the new maps.

[01:08:48] Yeah. But what happens when it breaks? This leads us to a study that happened here. A Swedish publication had performed a test. They took 11 new cars alongside an older car, a Volvo C 70 from 2005. now that Volvo had buttons and knobs, buttons and knobs. I’ve always liked that. And those 11 new cars all had these wonderful infotainment systems, all in one touch screens in the center of the console, they tested this whole thing and they timed how long it took people to perform a li list of tasks in each car.

[01:09:35] So. Included things like turning on that seat, heater, turning up the temperature inside the car, the defrost, adjust the radio, reset the trip. Computer. Turn off the screen. Dim the instruments. The old Volvo was the clear winner. Yeah, indeed. So according to this article in ours, Technica, the four tasks were handled within 10 seconds flat using buttons and knobs in the Volvo.

[01:10:06] So in the amount of time it took them to do all of the tasks, the four tasks that they were given out of that selection here. I just read the car, drove a thousand feet at 68 miles per hour. Now most of these other cars with that wonderful infotainment system required twice as long or even more to complete those same.

[01:10:34] Tasks. So some 30 seconds. So you’re talking about traveling two or 3000 feet while you’re messing around with that display in the central console. Looks cool. Isn’t this the neatest thing ever, but the problem is you have to hunt and Peck now, before you say, oh, well, Craig, these people weren’t familiar with that console.

[01:10:58] Well, yeah. Okay. I’ll give you that. But what they did with this test is. They let all of the participants play with the cars systems before they started the tests. In other words, they knew the menus, they knew where things were and it still took that time. You see what we’re really talking about here is muscle memory, the ability for your car or for you to know your.

[01:11:29] so you can reach out and you can turn that volume knob. You might have to glance real quick to make sure you got the volume knob, but you don’t have to hunt and Peck through menus. I like that. So as you can tell, I am not all that hot on these new, all touch interfaces. BMW has an interesting solution to this and that is that I drive system that little knob people didn’t like it at first, but you get used to it, right?

[01:12:00] So, you know, if you need to turn on their seat heater, you just press a knob up, up right down. And then TA your seat heater and you get to adjust it right there. That is muscle memory as well. So we’ve got some work to do here. Uh, there are some decent systems out there in Acura, MDX Mazda, CX 50, neither one of them uses a touchscreen infiltration inform attainment system.

[01:12:29] So that’s good. We’ll see how it all goes. Make sure you’re on my newsletter. So you can read this article and more. Craig peterson.com.

[01:12:39] We’ve had a chip shortage. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. And it’s been a real problem for everybody from car manufacturers through PC makers. Well, now we’re seeing a sudden downturn what’s happening now. The Congress has funded it.

[01:12:56] Hey, surprisingly enough. Congress comes along to fix the chip problem with the chip bill, billions of dollars, tens of billions actually being spent on our chip plants here to help the chip industry make more chips, cuz we need chips, chips, chips, right?

[01:13:16] Well, ArsTechnica has a great little article. They’re actually taking it from the financial time searched waters. Uh, I subscribe the furniture times for quite a while, but I don’t anymore. And they’re talking about how we went from a boom economy when it came to chips, these microchips, everything from, uh, Intel corporation out through the manufacturers of some of these much more common chip styles nowadays, the arm chips and how this new.

[01:13:51] That’s supposed to, uh, boost production is coming at a point where, okay, first of all, these manufacturers put billions of dollars into building new plants here in the us of a. So that’s a good thing. And then Congress comes along sometime after the fact and gives him tens of billions more. And by the way, managed, and this apparently was Senator Chuck, Schumer’s doing managed to remove a provision in the build that said that none of that money for chip plants could be spent in China.

[01:14:28] So yeah, there you go. China, you get billions more from us, potentially here as we build chip plants over there, but now what do we find out? Well, a bit of a turn here because there is now excess inventory. Dan Hutchinson, who is the chief executive V L S I research. Who’s been really watching the whole chip cycle since 1980s came out and said, quote, I have never seen a time when we had excess inventory.

[01:14:59] And we had shortages. Okay. So the immediate cause of this is a rapid buildup and inventory in the chip supply chain since early the year 2022 here. So compared to February, there are enough chips on hand to support about a month and a half of production. Global inventory levels jumped. Even higher and then even higher in July to almost two months.

[01:15:26] So that’s been an issue. And then on top of it, PC sales have been tumbling. Smartphone demand has dropped, and those have been the main causes as consumers are slowing their spending, why they slowing spending. Because they don’t have the money they used to have because of the non inflation that’s happening right now.

[01:15:48] So we’ve kind of got all of these things happening and to top it all off, as I said, they’re taking tens of billions of dollars of our tax money and, uh, going to be spending it, all of this. It’s just absolutely amazing. But the suddenness of this turn, again, according to the financial times has, was when in.

[01:16:08] Dun wall street with news that its revenue in the last quarter had fallen 2.6 billion, 15%, which of course was short of what they were expecting on wall street. There. This is really quite amazing. They took an inventory adjustment that only hits like once a decade and video man, they are about to, uh, to really get hit too.

[01:16:34] I don’t, I don’t think I talked about this. there’s the largest maker of these GPS, these graphics, processing boards, and supplemental chips that are on motherboards. And a lot of computers used a lot in video graphics, machine learning, and of course, mining of cryptocurrencies, and they have seen it fall dramatically 44% fall in these GPU that have been used for gaming.

[01:17:06] And. Bitcoin and, and mining and, and other of these cryptocurrencies and micron, one of the largest makers of memory chip said it’s free cash flow was likely to turn negative in the next three months after averaging $1 billion in recent quarters. Isn’t that amazing? So all of these problems have been.

[01:17:29] Also throughout Asia last, uh, month here over the last month, the chief executive of Chinese ship maker, semiconductor manufacturing, international corporation, SM IC said that demand had slowed from smartphone and other consumer electronics makers. And some of these manufacturers, electronics makers have stopped orders.

[01:17:52] All together. So guess what happens when you do that? Think about what happened with the lockdown, right? That really spurred this whole thing on a month before Taiwan, semiconductor manufacturing company, TSMC, which is like the biggest guy out there for making many of the chips we depend upon said it was expecting an inventory correction that would last until.

[01:18:17] Next year. So this has been a very abrupt slide. Chip makers in the us are trying to manage this decline at the very moment. They’re laying the ground for huge increase in production because of the. Tens of billions, they have spent plus the 52 billion bill that was signed into law here. What a month or two ago, uh, government support provided by the chips act.

[01:18:47] So on the same day that Congress passed the law, Intel expected to be the biggest beneficiary of all of these government grants of our tax dollars. Sliced 4 billion permits, capital spending plans for the rest of the. Now isn’t that? What happens every time really? Isn’t that? What happens every time? For instance, the, uh, build back better plan renamed the inflation causation actor, I think is what they might have called it.

[01:19:17] Um, that particular bill. Put money in for you to buy an electrical car electric car, like four grand, eight grand kind of depends, uh, across the board. So what do electronic electric car makers do? They increase their prices? Yes, indeed buy, you know, six or eight grand as much as 12 grand. Right? Because now we got government money.

[01:19:42] We don’t have to have you. Pay for it. So we’re gonna take a bigger profit and that profit’s gonna come from the tax dollars that were taken from you and from me and from the widow down the. Right. Yeah. That’s what happens every time? Why do we have this whole thing about the loans for people who went to college?

[01:20:03] Well, why is college so expensive? Well, it, it continued to go up as government started providing grants and started backing loans. Right? All of the stuff the government was doing was ultimately driving up the cost of your schooling. Now they’ve driven up the. Of electric cars because of the money they put in.

[01:20:26] And because of the money that they’ve put in for the chips act the 52 billion to make chips that, Hey, we got a glut right now. Yeah. Um, guess what? The manufacturers of chips, the companies that we’re spending the money in order to create. Plants more plants, more chip factories, fabrication plants have decided they’re gonna cut their spending.

[01:20:53] Why not? Because they’re gonna get money from you at the point of a gun, right? Yeah. That’s exactly what’s happening. Oh man. So for now, again, according to the financial times, most chip supply chain experts predict a relatively shallow downturn provided that the global economy is headed first off landing something that’s obviously not guaranteed, but it has really left them scrambling, trying to figure out what.

[01:21:23] Happened here because it just fell apart so quickly. Gartner group, you might know them. They put together a lot of studies on a lot of different industries had been expecting the growth in ship sales this year to have from 2020 ones, 26%. So it took its forecast down further to 7% and is now predicting a 2.5% contraction in 2023.

[01:21:52] Isn’t that something, um, the, the Philadelphia semiconductor index, if you are an investor, you’ve heard of that before, and that comprises the 30 largest us companies involved in, in chip design, manufacturer and sale. Fell back almost 40% as a stock market corrected this year after rising threefold, after the early lockdown stock market slump, because people were working from home, they couldn’t go in to work people.

[01:22:23] The kids were home, people were buying computers so they could play games or get on a video conference with the office, et cetera. It has really, really changed. And I mentioned Nvidia and how NVIDIA’s been hurt pretty badly. And you’ll find this article by the way, in my newsletter that went out on, um, Monday.

[01:22:45] And if you don’t get my free newsletter, definitely get it to just up to date. Craig, Peter son.com/subscribe. It’s it’s all worth doing, but within NVI. Here’s what’s happening. One of the biggest cryptocurrencies out there has decided that they don’t want to be part of this whole energy problem that we have.

[01:23:09] You know, some of these minors for various types of cryptocurrencies have actually bought power plants, old coal PLA powered power plants that the states don’t wanna buy power from anymore because it’s, it’s. Right. Kohl’s evil. But the private sector came in and said, okay, well, if we run our own power company and we put these GPU’s and special purpose made mining equipment.

[01:23:38] Into the power plant. We can save a lot of money. That’s how much power they need everybody, a whole power plant to run some of these mining operations. And remember the way you mine, the cryptocurrencies. In most cases, you have to solve very complex mathematical problems to prove that you did the. that was needed in order to then, um, be awarded that Bitcoin or whatever it was that you were mining.

[01:24:09] So pretty much all of the major cryptocurrencies are looking at how can we move away from this model? Because in, in some cases, you know, we’re talking about electrical consumption, just for mining cryptocurrencies that serve passes, some countries entire need for electricity. That’s how bad it is. And supposedly here, we’ve got one of the major cryptocurrencies that is changing the entire way you.

[01:24:44] Mining, if you will. Very, very big changes. So expect GPUs and companies like Nvidia that make them to go way down in value here over the coming months. Hey, visit me online. Craig peterson.com. Subscribe to my podcast and find me at YouTube. Take care.

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