By Jim Cramer and the AAP Team Ford’s Capital Markets Day kicks off this morning at 9:30 a.m, and the company made several big announcements ahead of the event in the press release here. Most notably, Ford (F) announced plans to accelerate its investment in electric vehicles and battery development to more than $30 billion by 2025. This is a solid step up from the $22 billion Ford previously earmarked to investment in electrification, and we think investors will appreciate this increased focus given how fast the industry is transitioning away from internal combustion engines. Additionally, Ford finally put a target around how much of their global fleet will be fully electric by the end of this decade. Ford now anticipates 40% of its global vehicle volume to be fully electric by 2030. Ford’s EV fleet includes the Mustang Mach-E, which has brought in so many new customers to Ford, the newly introduced F-150 Lightning, which now has 70,000 customer reservations, and the upcoming E-Transit, which Ford said will be on the road later this year. We continue to believe Ford’s highly recognizable car brands positions them to be a leader in EVs. The company is also establishing a new global vehicle service and distribution within Ford that is dedicated to commercial and government customers. It’s called Ford Pro, and the company plans to increase the commercial market for hardware and adjacent and new services that are addressable by Ford by providing customers with greater value and higher productivity. Ford sees this business achieving company revenue of $45 billion by 2025, up from $27 billion in 2019. Connected Services is also a big focus. Ford said it will have about one million vehicles that are capable of receiving over-the-air system updates on the road by the end of this year. Ford said it will exceed Tesla’s (TSLA) volume by July 2022, scaling to 33 million OTA-enabled Ford and Lincoln vehicles by 2028. By deploying distinctive connected functions like Ford’s BlueCruise driver-assist technologies, new features and upgraded software content, and EV charging to improve the user experience, Ford believes it will capitalize on the $20 billion projected market by 2030. Last but certainly not least, Ford said it expects to achieve an 8% adjusted EBIT margin in 2023. We’ll look for management to trace out a credible path to this goal during their presentation. Shares of Ford are rising back above $13 in early trading Wednesday. We’ll be tuning in to the presentation to find out more about management’s EV and connected services plans.

from https://www.meadvilletribune.com

The state Senate has unanimously approved legislation introduced by Sen. Michele Brooks to enact a “lemon law” for motorcycles, to better protect consumers who purchase or lease motorcycles with manufacturing defects that cannot be remedied after several attempts.

Currently, the Automobile Lemon Law protects those who purchase vehicles by requiring manufacturers to repair any defect that significantly affects the use, value or safety of the vehicle, as long as the defect emerges soon after it is acquired.

However, no similar protections are offered to those who purchase motorcycles, leaving the owner to either pay for repairs or fix the problem themselves. S.B. 82 remedies this inequity.

“Whether a vehicle has two wheels or four, consumers who make major vehicle purchases should be protected from manufacturing defects,” said Brooks, whose 50th District includes Crawford County.

Under the bill, a defective motorcycle would be replaced, or its cost would be refunded, if it could not be repaired after three attempts within one year of the delivery of the cycle to the purchaser, or during the term of warranty, whichever occurs first.

S.B. 82 heads to the House of Representatives for that chamber’s consideration.

Lemon laws are United States state laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance. Although many types of products can be defective, the term “lemon” is mostly used to describe defective motor vehicles.

Tomorrow, Wednesday May 26th, David Chipman is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee whose meeting starts at 10:00 a.m. EST. David Chipman has been nominated by President Biden to serve as the new ATF Director, and we are opposed to him serving in this role due to his long history as a gun control advocate. You can read more about his background here. We are asking that you please contact your Senators and urge them to opposeDavid Chipman as ATF Director by clicking the red button below.

The first of several Executive Actions that President Biden announced back in April now requires your input. President Biden directed the Justice Department to “propose a rule to help stop the proliferation of ghost guns” — and they have done just that. On Friday, May 21st, the proposed rule was posted in the federal register and the 90-day comment period officially opened. You can read the proposed rule here. We ask that you take some time to formulate your thoughts and submit a personalized comment by clicking the blue button below.

All comments are due by August 19th. Given that we have a couple of months before comments are due and any action can be expected by ATF, we are taking some time to go through the proposed rule and will be updating everyone on what the most egregious parts of this new rule are. In general, this proposed rule seeks to prohibit private individuals from possessing certain unregulated components commonly used by hobbyists to make their own firearms.

Yours in Freedom,

Ken Lan
NRA-ILA Grassroots Programs & Campaign Field Operations
http://www.nrailafrontlines.com/

by Stefan Boscia from https://www.cityam.com

The UK will review its tariffs on US products like whiskey, tobacco and motorcycles in a bid to get Joe Biden to drop Trump-era tariffs on British steel.

International trade secretary Liz Truss announced today that she would launch a six-week consultation with British businesses to consider “re-balancing measures” that could see some of the tariffs scrapped.

Truss said she wanted to “de-escalate trade tensions” so that the “US and UK can move forward to the next phase of their trading relationship”.

The UK’s tariffs on US goods were in retaliation for Donald Trump’s Section 232 tariffs on British steel and aluminium.

Trump’s White House said the trade barriers were required for national security reasons, however the policy was widely thought to be a part of the ex-president’s attempt to boost US manufacturing.

“We now have the power to shape these tariffs so they reflect UK interests, and are tailored to our economy,” Truss said.

“The UK will do whatever is necessary to protect our steel industry against illegal tariffs that could undermine British industry and damage our businesses.

“Ultimately, however, we want to deescalate these disputes so we can move forward and work closely with the US on issues like WTO reform and tackling unfair trade practices by non-market economies.”

Truss successfully got the US to agree to suspend US tariffs on Scotch whisky and other products earlier this year in a large step toward de-escalating trade tensions.

City A.M. exclusively reported in March that Truss and her allies believed this milestone could provide a path to the US scrapping other Trump tariffs.

Read more: Exclusive: UK to begin backdoor push to get Joe Biden to dump Trump’s steel tariffs

Resolving the trade dispute with the US over steel tariffs could mark another step toward the UK and US agreeing to a free trade deal.

It is believed that at least half of the deal has been drawn up, however there are a number of sticking points around US agricultural exports and the UK’s current digital services tax.

From Bags to Riches – a book by Suzanne ‘Bag Lady Sue’ Austin.

You can find out more about her and order the book from her website www.bagladysue.com

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The mall near where I live, and which has a bowling alley emporium has declared that at least until further notice customers may actually eat food in the “food court.” Which is where you get-and-eat food to eat in the food court, but which has been forbidden-behavior for nearly a year and a half in the interests of safety.

– J J Solari

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The mall near where I live, and which has a bowling alley emporium has declared that at least until further notice customers may actually eat food in the “food court.” Which is where you get-and-eat food to eat in the food court, but which has been forbidden-behavior for nearly a year and a half in the interests of safety so that 3,000-year-old-granny and 3,000-pound Normal American Diabetic Big Fat Pig-Lady won’t die of the flu.

The emphasis and claim and theory and idea and notion and hunch and guess and maybe and could be and “let’s do this!” of closing the food court to food and also to the eating of food within the food court is that if you do things that have absolutely no bearing on whether or not you get the flu….you will be “safe” from the flu. A flu which is not inherently dangerous to 99% of the human population, assuming there still is a human rather than a subhuman population on this planet.

So in other words….if you do things that have no bearing on whether you will or will not get a virus that you will easily survive even if you do get it, and which if you do get it, it will likely come from a source that you have not been ordered to avoid or from a behavior pattern you have not been ordered to discontinue….if you do all these meaningless things (and in fact counter-productive, things, since becoming-unemployed, becoming isolated, becoming-paranoid, becoming-anxious, and becoming-angry are some of the safety protocols your Government Health Removers have put into place to put you into place, and in fact to lower your resistance to viruses)….you will be safe!

You want to be safe, don’t you? What could be worse than not being safe? I’m thinking, nothing! Remember: “In safe there is freedom.”

So……as I meandered around the food court watching all the people now being allowed to use the food court to eat food in, I made my way over to the nearby nightclub-like bowling emporium which had been shut down for almost a year and a half, so that people would be safe from bowling. And as I entered and tried to reacquaint myself with pre Insane-Health-Advisor life I meandered slowly around the bowling palace with my still-mandatory mask on, watching the still-mandatory masked bowlers with their still-mandatory masks on, and I noticed 1: they didn’t have gloves on and I noticed 2: they all had rented shoes.

I remember I looked at all this and contemplated quietly what I was seeing. My mind began an electrical and chemical journey of thought that took me down a pathway filled with fascinating logical anomalies.

I thought about all the middle and ring fingers and all the thumbs that were penetrating deep into the boreholes that bowling balls have, and wriggling around in there and then doing this over and over again, as the ball left their fingers and then rolled back to their hands, which had the fingers on them, and which balls were then fondled and caressed and hurled again via the hands of the teens and young adult males and females, these bowling hands frequently going, not only into the bowling balls but also going into the crotches of themselves or into and down the crotches of others in delight and exultation at a “strike” or a “spare” with all manner of homosexual and heterosexual clasps and grips and enclosings of fingers onto breasts and butts and cocks and balls, and every one of them, once in a while, on and off, one at a time, or maybe in pairs, leaving the lanes and ambling over to the shit-and-fecal depositories called “restrooms” and doing all manner of dactyl tasks involving zippers and underclothing and toilet-porcelain and – maybe actually there, maybe not – toilet paper, and bowling fingers approaching and/or entering rectal canal passageways for internal sewage transport via wiping or moving-around or smearing anal smudge from one location, over and into an intermediary transport route via bowling fingers, for release into a municipal plumbing apparatus called a toilet that is “cleaned” MAYBE once a day, the bowler’s fingers now having visited their own syphilitic anuses and groins and crotches and urinators and fecaloria and using them for the opening and closing of the sewage-room doors and grappling with the fecal-smearing waxlike toilet “paper” and the bowling fingers doing some housekeeping regarding the de-smegging of the foreskin-rollover accumulations, and the guys, as they will, clawing at their testicles just for fun and a quick cheap thrill, and of course the gals dealing with their issues of blood and erupting herpes colonies and penicillin-resistant gonorrhea and chlamydia outbreaks and patches of Martian Vulvic Toxic Shock Coagularia-mold and of course the “homeless” of both sexes who now have mandatory accessibility to everything up to and including the stabbing of children to death and who use “restrooms” to sleep in and sometimes to die in….and meanwhile the bowlers in their masks are stepping on and stepping over these people, most of whom have more diseases wafting off their body-heat than the bowlers would have in a gallon of spit that they poured into a sewer and then scooped out and drank….

….and THEN…..they’re doing all this bacterial, viral, and godonlyknowswhatelse-al activity….. in someone ELSE’S wtf SHOES!

Or I should say Countless Others’ wtf shoes. Which shoes are all filled with fungus and athletes’ skin-eradicator disease, trenchfoot, fungoidal toe blight, Blister Ooze Anomaly disease, pustule foot-leak, Toenail Sewage Syndrome, gelatinous heel drainage, callus/corn crapflow crust rot and which shoes rats likely use to sleep in at night when everything is dark and all the stinky bowling shoes are back in their open-air slots for the rats and mice to piss and vomit in before the next day’s masked and staying-safe customers come in to not get the flu.

I thought about bringing all of my meandering thoughts and imaginings and suppositions and points-to-ponder to the human dirigible grease-metabolizer “working” behind the step-up-and-get-drunk counter and snack-dispensary, but then I realized, no: that would be like talking to a dead-and-fallen pine tree in the middle of an abandoned and prehistoric forest on the dark side of a lost and isolated moon circling the sun in an orbit that was far beyond the elliptical pathway of Pluto.

He was overflowing and radiating every qualification necessary to be a city mayor or a State governor or maybe even a health advisor because he was certainly physically repulsive enough and he had the life force of a farm animal. He waved me goodbye, and I waved back and said “Stay safe!”

He gave me a thumbs up and hollered “Stay the course! We’re almost there!”

I thumbs-upped back and yelled through my mask “Good times!!” I made the victory sign and shouted “Peace, mah bruhthuh!!!”

I could feel his spiritual energy change from torpid dormancy to sudden, lustrous, radiating, invigoration joy.

Hey, it’s a gift: fucking with people and convincing them that I’m not. Not that Americans seem to have a problem being fucked with.

I would make a fantastic bureaucrat.

Stay safe!

J.J. Solari,
cub reporter
food court update dept.
Bikernet.com Medical Center
Los Angeles

 I know it is going to be good reading because she wrote it and she does have a story to tell. Though I have learned a lot about her over the years I am sure I will even learn more by reading the book.

If you have ever seen her perform as Bag Lady Sue or have heard about her I am sure you will find her story interesting.

You can find out more about her and order the book from her website www.bagladysue.com

If you have an event, club, bar, veteran’s organization etc. and want to liven it up she is also doing shows.

 

by EditorDavid from https://tech.slashdot.org

“Pardon me while I feed the meter on my critical safety device,” quips a Hackaday article:
If you ride a motorcycle, you may have noticed that the cost of airbag vests has dropped. In one case, something very different is going on here. As reported by Motherboard, you can pick up a KLIM Ai-1 for $400 but the airbag built into it will not function until unlocked with an additional purchase, and a big one at that. So do you really own the vest for $400…?

The Klim airbag vest has two components that make it work. The vest itself is from Klim and costs $400 and arrives along with the airbag unit. But if you want it to actually detect an accident and inflate, you need load up a smartphone app and activate a small black box made by a different company: In&Motion. That requires your choice of another $400 payment or you can subscribe at $12 a month or $120 a year.

If you fail to renew, the vest is essentially worthless.

Hackaday notes it raises the question of what it means to own a piece of technology.

“Do you own your cable modem or cell phone if you aren’t allowed to open it up? Do you own a piece of software that wants to call home periodically and won’t let you stop it?”

This Motorcycle Airbag Vest Will Stop Working If You Miss a Payment
by Aaron Gordon from https://www.vice.com

Airbag vests are pretty much exactly what they sound like, garments worn by people who undertake exceedingly dangerous personal hobbies in order to slightly reduce the risk of severe bodily harm or death. For example, in 2018 the motorcycle racing circuit MotoGP made airbag vests mandatory.

Since then airbag vests have become steadily cheaper and therefore more popular among recreational riders. One motorcycle apparel company named Klim, for example, sells an airbag vest called the Ai-1 for $400. In the promotional video launching the product, product line manager Jayson Plummer called the vest “a whole new era of a platform where analog meets digital and results in a superior protection story.” Which is an interesting way of framing the fact that the vest includes an additional subscription-based payment option that will block the vest from inflating if the payments don’t go through.

This is possible because the vest includes two components: the vest itself made by Klim and the airbag system including a small black box made by a French company called In&Motion called the “In&Box detection module.” The module has the sensors and computer components that detect a crash and make the bags inflate.

The customer buys the vest for $400 which comes with the module, but then they must download an app and choose how to unlock the module so the vest actually works: either plonk down another $400 to own the whole shebang outright—bringing the total vest cost to $800—or, as Plummer put it in the video, opt for the “subscription-based model” of $12 per month or $120 per year.

In the video, Plummer promotes this as a good option for people who don’t ride year-round and therefore may only need a functioning vest a couple of months a year. But when Motherboard asked Klim about what would happen if, say, the customer forgot to turn the subscription back on and got into a crash, a customer service representative confirmed “then, no, it will not go off.” Likewise, if the customer’s card is declined, they will have a 30-day grace period to update their payment information before the vest stops working, according to Klim communication manager Lukas Eddy.

“When it comes to missing payments and airbag functionality, In&motion’s payment notifications and 30-day grace period are reasonable—at some point, if a person stops paying for a service, that service has to be suspended, just like your utilities or a cell phone plan,” Eddy wrote to Motherboard in an email. “Further, if someone pauses their subscription and forgets to restart it, they won’t actually be able to get their In&box into ride-ready status when they go to turn it on. If they then choose to ignore the indicators and ride with the In&box inactive, that’s on them and we can expect it not to inflate in the event of a crash.”

Considering all the truly impressive technology that goes into the Ai-1 airbag vest, the prospect of someone getting seriously maimed or even killed in a motorcycle crash because their subscription to their life-preserving physical barrier got turned off occupies a particularly morbid corner of Internet-of-Things dystopian horror. Sadly, it is also not that distant from what automakers have been doing for decades by making safety features premium offerings that cost extra, and what they will likely do now that over the air updates are rapidly spreading to every new vehicle.

Car companies are increasingly seeing dollar signs at the prospect of paywalling features that need to be unlocked via a software update. It is so easy for me to imagine automakers paywalling airbags just like this motorcycle vest does if it wasn’t federal law they must provide them. So think of the paywalled motorcycle airbag vest as just another glimpse into how much worse our late capitalism horror show would be without previous generations of lawmakers on both sides of the political spectrum understanding the importance of regulation.

Update: This article was updated with comments from a Klim representative provided to Motherboard after publication. It also corrected a statement a Klim customer representative told Motherboard that the vest would be deactivated after a week of non-payment. A Klim spokesperson said customers will have 30 days.

RACE REPORT – NHDRO $67K Big Bracket Shootout Season Opener presented by Liguori Drag Racing
by Tim Hailey

event: NHDRO $67K Big Bracket Shootout Season Opener presented by Liguori Drag Racing
when: May 13-16, 2021
where: National Trail Raceway, Hebron, Ohio, USA

NHDRO’s Brian and Niki Welch have really perfected their Big Money bracket shootout formula with last weekend’s $67,000 Big Bracket Shootout presented by Liguori Drag Racing at National Trail Raceway in Hebron, Ohio. A no-box ladder and delay box ladder (64 bikes each) raced for $33,000 a piece before facing off against each other for a $1,000 bonus. How fair is that for spreading the wealth?

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