Showing posts with label liars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liars. Show all posts

Monday, November 20, 2023

EV Sales are Booming, Worldwide. So Why Do Many People Believe That They're Dropping?

Worldwide, 2.1 million electric vehicles were sold in 2019, 3 million in 2020, 6.76 million in 2021, 10 million in 2022, and sales in 2023 are expected to top 14 million, which will be well over 20 percent of total motor vehicles sales. Overall sales of motorized vehicles  have actually declined over the past several years.

So why are there so many stories about an alleged decline in the sales of EV's? I can only think of bad reasons, such as: people really are that bad at math. So bad that they would look at numbers as simple and clears as those I just gave you, and think it means that "the EV craze" is over. It's hard for me to believe that there are people smart enough to be able to read, but still that bad at math. But not as hard as it would have been before the 2016 Democratic US Presidential primaries.

Could it be because people think only of Teslas when they think of EV's? It seems a lot of people do. And Tesla's share of the EV market is shrinking in the US. And a lot of people, especially in the US, think only of the US when they think about how things are going in the world. 

Could it be because some bad people are flat-out lying to broad segments of the public who trust them and look to them for vital information about the world? It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that some influential bad people are doing exactly that, and trying their utmost to convince the public that "the EV craze" is over. 

I would guess that a combination of all of the above -- people's inability to do math, their tendency to do math, their tendency equate Tesla in the US with EV's globally, and lying big shots -- have led to the perception that the EV sector is doing poorly. 

This would be an example of the importance of investing in education, for instance, education in math and in critical thinking. Investments staunchly opposed by a lot of of those very same bad liars.

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

"Only 4% of the population can answer 75% or more of these questions about Rock n Roll correctly! How many do YOU know?!"

I keep seeing these "Suggested Posts" (advertisements) on Facebook that say something like "Only 4% of the population can answer 75% or more of these questions about [...] correctly! How many do YOU know?!" With questions about Hollywood stars or geography or history or whatever. People I know on Facebook keep clicking on these links, and commenting that they got 90 or 100% and that this means that they are experts on the subject in question.

So does this mean that I know a lot of geniuses on Facebook? On the contrary, unfortunately, it means something quite different: it means that these websites put together a bunch of very easy questions, and then just outright lie about only a small percentage of the population knowing most of the answers -- they just make up a small figure -- and they make these lies into ads on Facebook, enticing people to take the tests in order to be told how smart they are.

What are these sites selling? Ad space. People click on the ads on Facebook, and then click 15 or 30 more times to take the quiz and be flattered about how brilliant they are.

This is to the present day what junk stocks and bonds were to the 1980's. I'll bet that a lot of the very same people who sold junk stocks and bonds back then are running these websites today. And I'm getting pretty tired of it.