▪️If you thought there’s no way Green New Deal is actually dumb enough to post a picture of the first gasoline-powered scooter and label it the first electric scooter, we’ll you’d be wrong! That’s exactly what they did (and this wasn’t April Fools).
▪️This is an Autoped, which was launched in America in 1915, it was the first mass-produced motor scooter. The Online Bicycle Museum explains it as:
🔹”Essentially an enlarged child’s scooter with an engine mounted over the front wheel, the air-cooled 155cc four-stroke engine claimed speeds of 30mph; though the clutch and brake were activated by moving the steering column forwards or backwards, so it could be unsteady over 20mph.”
https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/1918-eveready-autoped-scooter/
▪️The big box in the middle contained batteries, but not to power the vehicle. It powered the front and rear electric lights.
▪️It never gained widespread popularity, primarily used by the affluent for recreation and young criminals to get away from police. The picture GND posted is of Lady Florence Norman riding it in London.
https://mashable.com/archive/1916-suffragette-scooter#yf580grP5ZqS
▪️There we’re brief attempts at businesses using it, for example the US Postal Service tried them out as delivery vehicles. But ultimately they weren’t a commercial success; they were more expensive than a bike, but less comfortable and fast as a motorcycle.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/motorized-scooter-boom-hit-century-dockless-scooters-180971989/
▪️As for calling the switch to internal combustion engines and fossil fuels “a lost century,” that’s a bizarre way to portray the most spectacular increase in human flourishing in human history. It’s not just dumb, its ugly and anti-human to its core.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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