Capitalism Gone Wild

Here’s another in my long list of posts labeled Old Man Grapples With Philosophical And Political Concepts More Properly Digested In High School.

So I watched a video a couple days ago on the YouTube channel Connecting The Dots about the auto industry, specifically about the industry’s shift to Electric Vehicles. The video talked about all the challenges involved in this transition, and especially about two of the big players, Toyota and Ford, who, he says, are facing a life or death moment. I drive an EV, and the inevitability of the world transitioning to this technology is not news to me. And I think it's abundantly clear that the legacy auto industry will need to retool how it works. But I haven’t really thought out the details, and it turns out there are devils in those details. And some of the details of the transition are like the pork secretly hidden in an appropriations bill in Washington, incidental yet fraught with consequences unintended by the original impetus.

I’ve had a Ford F150 Lightning electric pickup as my daily driver now for over three years. I loved it—like, crazy love!—at first drive, and after 60,000 miles I remain absolutely smitten. The Lightning is brilliant for daily use, and my hat goes off to Ford for the engineering involved. Three years in I have almost no complaints of any kind—and this from a guy who is normally looking at new cars before a year has elapsed on the current one. This truck is my favorite of the 50+ vehicles I owned before it—by quite a margin. I’m actually still excited every day to have an excuse to go drive it. But it was a very ambitious undertaking for Ford, a step away from much of the institutional knowledge they’d accumulated over a century. It’s an expensive vehicle, and even at the eye-watering sticker price the sale did not cover the costs to the company for producing it. But this was part of the pain of transition, right? The world was changing Ford was wrestling with that change. My truck was proof. 

But then about a year ago, after four years of production, Ford abruptly canceled the Lightning leaving them with the Mustang Mach-E as their only EV. They also halted construction on a big battery plant and announced that present EV plans were being curtailed (they cautioned that the change did NOT mean they were abandoning electrification; but what DID it mean?). This was shocking and profoundly disappointing to me. I had joined a new and exciting club, and now Ford looked to be retreating from all that, and the alternative path was just so obviously a dead end. Cue the huge sad trombone as the air left the balloon. Yes, there might be profit in the short term with ICE and hybrids, but long term the world will sing a different tune, and the big task must be undertaken. (None of this was helped by the stupefying Trump Administration faceplant as it implemented, among its endless stream of multiple daily faceplants, its Project 2025 self-immolating war on climate science and green energy. The tax credits that were intended to help the auto industry work through the immense costs of the changeover were abruptly withdrawn, and chaos and uncertainty became the order of the day—in cars as in everything else these people touched. The switch to EVs was underway in Europe, and China is WAY ahead. And we’re still stuck on Drill, Baby, Drill, falling further and further behind.)

Toyota and Honda—of which I’ve owned many examples—were a whole different flavor of disappointing. They didn’t just misread the winds, they seemed to refuse to read the winds altogether. They showed no interest in EVs at all—which is especially baffling when both were early developers of hybrids, and Toyota with the Prius brought at least partial electrification prominently to the mainstream 20 years before anyone else. And yet the next logical step seemed not to interest them. It’s like orbiting the moon and having no thought to land on it. Both companies made half-hearted attempts at an EV or two and then… Look At Our New Hybrid! About the same time that Ford killed the Lightning, Honda announced it was pulling the plug on a trio of ambitious EVs, and very recently Toyota announced the abrupt cancellation of their coming flagship Lexus EV, leaving us in both cases with an uninspired old school lineup. Even as Toyota chalked up 11 million sales last year making them the largest carmaker in the world by quite a margin, their CEO made a recent public speech saying that the company was in a death match with China and if it did not radically rework how it operated it would not survive—again, this in the midst of very healthy sales. On the surface, none of this adds up.

Well, they’re reading the winds now. The Connecting The Dots video addressed all this, dissecting what is afoot at both Ford and at Toyota. And his conclusion is that both companies have had the same realization that the industry is in an existential crisis, and each is attempting to avert disaster—albeit in rather different ways.

The key player in this drama—the wrench in the machine, if you like—is Tesla. Not only did Tesla almost single-handedly turn the electric car into a viable household item, but in the process—and as part and parcel of the product itself—the company radically reworked the whole car business. I mean, everything: the basic car design, the process of designing it, the building of it, how it’s fueled, how it’s sold, even how it’s driven. The gloom and doom from Ford and Toyota can be traced almost directly to each company’s dissection of a Tesla Model 3. After that it was obvious to both that a complete ground-up reworking stood between the present day and the companies’ survival. (I wonder how many such tectonic shifts there have been in history, ones affecting such large industries, so many people, so many billions of dollars?)

So what is this shift and why is it so disruptive? My Lightning is a second generation product of a legacy industry, a company adapting to a new reality. By the inception of the Lightning, Ford could already see that electrification was coming and would take over. And so the company began retooling for what management expected the new reality to look like. Generation 1 EVs from the legacy builders involved swapping electric components into existing ICE drivetrains. Put a battery where the gas tank was, and an electric motor where the gas engine was. Ford’s first serious EV, the Focus Electric, was just that: an ICE car with electric components swapped in. My truck, and the Mustang Mach-E, were Generation 2: new conventional vehicles with purpose-built electric drivetrains in place of ICE components, not a revolution but mostly familiar cars designed by legacy engineering teams and built more or less on existing factory lines. With the Lightning, Ford took its single biggest selling product, the F150 pickup, one with a healthy profit margin the buyers of which expect to write big checks, and banked on those characteristics being able to shoulder the burdens of these changes to the company and the industry.

But Tesla was playing a different game entirely. They started with a clean sheet and reworked *everything,* and their innovations made this whole legacy structure untenable. The design team, materials acquisition, the factory layout, the supply chain, the assembly protocols, the marketing approach, the sales model; none of the old ideas worked in Tesla’s new world, at least not without a ground-up rethink. And Ford and Toyota could now see this. This is why the Lightning was killed, not because it wasn’t a good vehicle, but because scaling this technology and these manufacturing methods was just scaling a fundamentally inefficient methodology, ensuring bigger and bigger losses, digging a deeper hole. The new approach was just vastly more efficient on all fronts. And both companies could see that without reworking to this new reality they were on the ropes. As it killed the Lightning, Ford announced some $19 billion in write-downs for its EV transition, and now admitted they were on the wrong track. $19 billion! And what they could now see was the real work was not yet done. In fact, the crucial bits were not even started. But if we dig down, the efficiencies found by Tesla are not without knock-on effects. I have questions.

What Ford must rework, exactly? The video identifies four “anchors” which he says are “dragging Ford down to the depths,” to wit: 

1) Union contracts, 

2) Pensions, 

3) The “Wall Street trap,” and 

4) The dealership model (which he calls the “dealership mafia”). 

If China—and then Tesla—don’t have to abide by union contracts nor pay pensions to retired employees, obviously their costs are substantially reduced. Cars made under that model will undoubtedly be cheaper. The extensive use of robots eliminates even more costly employees. So is that the end of it, to be successful we just have to eliminate employees? But who SHOULD pay pensions to retirees? How SHOULD older people sustain themselves? What protections SHOULD workers have? Whose prerogatives should be honored? (And are the costs of Ford’s vast management structure not similarly a liability? Surely AI can do the work of a middle-manager as well as it can run a welding robot.) Why is it OK for money to go into the pockets of shareholders, but money going to the people, you know, actually doing the work is a waste?

As to dealerships, for as long as I’ve been paying attention they have been floated as a prime cause of the failure of EVs to take root here. As the video points out, dealerships make their money not in selling cars, but predominantly in repairs and maintenance, both of which are much curtailed by the mechanical simplicity and basic operation of an EV. So naturally, the dealers are reluctant to sell them, or they stick high markups on the sticker price (when I bought my Lightning, the dealer was quite frantic to get me into a hybrid or ICE truck and I had to insist on the EV. They really didn’t want to sell me one. Maybe not coincidentally, the sales guy who gave me my test drive knew far less about the truck than I did). What to make of this? Are the dealers insane for not wanting their business to suffer or for maintenance jobs to go away? Is it just inevitable that progress puts all jobs out to pasture? I recall that when diesels came to the railroad industry and supplanted steam power in the 1930s-40s, something like 90% of the maintenance staff got let go. Of course the idea of continuing with steam power just to keep maintenance guys in jobs was not the answer. Surely the solution to progress is not to entrench needless inefficiency. But where does it lead? Do we end up with 100% robotic factories, machines with AI brains building the other machines? And what happens to the profits from that new approach? I can see value in getting rid of most of the dealership networks, but it’s not surprising that those workers do not want to vanish quietly.

And lastly, the Wall Street Trap, the need for Ford to remain a stable, blue-chip stock that people can buy to reliably prop up their portfolio. That seems another whole can of worms having nothing specifically to do with the car industry, and it feels to me like we’re looking at a very specific pathogen in a petrie dish—one which I suspect has quietly metastasized throughout our whole culture. I have long felt that pleasing shareholders—that is, rewarding the people who have gambled some of their excess and unneeded money hoping that money will make them MORE money—has become the tail that is manically wagging the dog, to the point that it's shaking the dog apart. The notion that sensible and responsible retirement strategy now consists of large scale institutionalized gambling—a setup which looks suspiciously like it was dreamed up entirely for someone else’s benefit—seems insanity itself. But I simply don’t know enough about business and banking and taxation and any of it to feel very informed in my opinions. 

I just don’t know what to do with this information, especially when the pathway to set workers aside is being advocated by the world’s richest man, one who could divvy out half his yearly income to the people at his factories doing the actual work, to genuine benefit to them and virtually no pain to himself. But—surprise!—the notion of widespread profit sharing is not part of the Big Change discussions. Talking up that option is not part of the coordinated response from the MSM—who are, not coincidentally, owned by exactly the same billionaires who sent American manufacturing jobs overseas. CEO-to-worker pay ratios have never been so divergent as they are now, and the complex pay packages and hidden bonuses and off-the-books perks and crazy tax laws are now kind of the whole playbook of big business. Political conservatism seems always to have been at odds with democratic self-government, a small cadre of rich elites have always worked to keep outsize control over the worlds in which they live --tho glee from those in power at the suffering their greed caused has not always been such a big part of the picture. (And all this is quite separate from questions of unlimited riches and political influence in the hands of sociopaths while we hope they'll do the best for us.)

But is this what ails the American auto industry? Or is this just the pain of progress?

What’s the alternative? Artificial make-work to keep people employed? Even when, especially when, the jobs could be done faster and cheaper and better with automation? But faster and cheaper to what end? Musk has said that automation will take over most jobs in short order; what does that look like? Are the people making this prediction, the people working for its implementation, in favor of a Universal Basic Income? Communism, the bogeyman of economics in the West, is supposed to take from each according to their ability and give according to their needs. Where does UBI fit into this scheme? Is it not the ultimate thing for the right to hate? Or will the machines just quietly eliminate us from the equation altogether? (I mean, even better than machines making cars for us would be machines not needing to make cars for us—or roads or any automotive infrastructure.)

I see now that the Connecting the Dots site has even more dire predictions for GM. But that's another post.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

I wrote a post a few years back which I did not publish about the saga of being fitted with a CPAP machine and its implications for my working life. I recently deleted that draft, since (as I’ve mentioned several times—and will doubtless keep mentioning) I’ve decided to start my clock to retirement, which fact makes the whole issue moot.

Or so I thought. I guess I just didn’t think hard enough.

The issue a few years back was this: I’ve been overweight my whole life, hovering around the BMI figure where in my career as an airline pilot I might be evaluated for sleep apnea. The FAA looks at BMI and neck size (not sure how they know this figure) and blood pressure and determines whether further scrutiny is warranted. So my AME (Aviation Medical Examiner) for years would tell me “You’re right on the line for needing a sleep apnea evaluation, so don’t gain any more weight! Better, yet, you ought to lose 15 pounds and you won’t have to worry about it.” I never gave the issue much thought, since I know I do not have sleep apnea. I have the most challenging sleep circumstance of anyone I know, and if I were suffering from sleep issues I’d sure as hell be the one to know it (to say nothing of the guarantee that my wife, the world’s lightest sleeper, would march my ass to the doctor the morning after she heard me gasping in my sleep). I was confident that if I were evaluated for sleep apnea I’d be cleared.

But that’s not how the game works.

Well, my old AME that I had used for 15 plus years ended up dying from COVID. (That’s another post—he had fallen down some rancid Alex Jones rathole and had decided that, despite having several big risk factors and despite formal training in virology and infection, he would eschew traditional medical practices and “protect” himself with a magic key fob around his neck that emitted some kind of magic Jesus Wave that warded off the evil viral spirits. And Darwin came calling.) So I found a new AME. And that guy, unbeknownst to me, was actually a pulmonologist in real life. So if anything were to happen to me medically in my job that warranted any kind of investigation, this guy would have ho place to hide. He would not be able to say (as the last guy, a retired dermatologist, might have done) “Yeah, I looked at him but he assured me he was fine.” The FAA would call it dereliction of duty that a pulmonologist didn’t report a fat guy for a sleep apnea evaluation.

And so the certified letter from the FAA duly came, and after 28 years of flying without incident I found myself headed to a sleep clinic. This seems bad enough, though it’s a fair question to ask whether some scrutiny is not warranted and when that line might be crossed. But I wasn’t unduly worried, as I knew I had no sleep issues.

But strangely enough, nobody ever asked me about my sleep issues and habits. What I thought or wanted, and what my experiences were, was of no interest to anybody. I was given two separate evaluations and found to have no obstruction, no diminution of my blood oxygen. So, good, right? Well, only if the results of the tests actually mattered. But no, they prescribed a CPAP machine regardless, despite my vocal protests that such a therapy would be EXTREMELY intrusive in my line of work. My objections were met with stiffer and stiffer resistance, eventually bordering on abuse. I had the distinct impression that the staff were used to fielding objections and had ready responses to them. (As the controversy escalated, I contacted our pilots’ union for advice and was told “Oh yeah, if you are evaluated for sleep apnea then you’re getting a CPAP machine. The results of the test don’t matter.” It would have been nice to know this information beforehand.)

In all, I was out of work for five and a half months while this all got sorted (the diagnosis of sleep apnea caused me to lose my medical until such time as the FAA granted a “special issuance” medical with the condition listed) so I had the summer of 2023 off for literally no practical reason, though it did let me take retirement for a test-drive. (We do have loss of license insurance, so I was able to pay my bills, but the leave of absence was nonetheless a pretty substantial pay hit.)

Fast forward to today. I was able to get my special issuance medical (there are loads of CPAP machines among airline pilots) and I returned to work about 10 months ago and have been steaming along since. In the back of my mind, I’ve been looking forward to the escape valve of retirement when I can jettison the unneeded and unwanted CPAP machine—along with freedom from all the other bits of intrusive scrutiny the job entails. But I hadn’t properly considered what this might look like going forward. If I intend to do ANY flying in retirement—even recreationally, to say nothing of potential side work—then I’m going to need to qualify for a medical. And now I have a historical diagnosis of Obstructive Sleep Apnea on my record (despite my pointedly NOT having Obstructive Sleep Apnea). To procure that medical (of whatever class) I’m going to have to present documentation that I’ve been using the CPAP machine for the entire preceding year. It’s not something I can fudge; the machine itself tracks its usage and reports it via its own cellular connection to my medical facility, which then provides the documentation to the FAA. It’s VERY big brother.

I’m not a medical skeptic, though I certainly believe that big pharma needs regulating just as big business and free markets absolutely do. But this little CPAP wormhole seems like a scam, an iron-clad way for the clinic and supporting structures to get their cut of a $1000 machine and yearly visits (I am contacted every six months and solicited to take my box of insurance-approved replacement supplies—hoses and masks and filters—all at no cost to me! Thus the medical supply company pockets another $600). 

I do this or I stop flying. Those are my options.

I decided that playing along was the easiest option for my last year or two, but a part of me would like to do my part in dismantling the whole rotten enterprise. Don’t get me wrong, I know sleep apnea IS a thing, and if one has it then I understand this technology can be life-changing. But the bar seems to be set very low, and the hooks are very deep. They put me in charge of a $200 million machine but I’m not allowed to assess my own sleep life.

For now I'm content to stay out of the cockpit. If I decide I'd like to fly again, I *may* be able to hold a third class medical without reference to the sleep apnea. But I wouldn't be able to be paid to fly. So maybe I can find a sleep doctor who will play ball with me and get my diagnosis expunged. Or maybe I start using the damned machine again. But I doubt it.

The Spice of Life

I started playing the drums in the school band in fourth or fifth grade. Mrs. Franklin (I think) was the band teacher at Nisswa elementary school, and I remember announcing to her on a whim that I was maybe interested in playing in the band. “Maybe? Or you’re interested?” she asked. So I had to commit. And when she began suggesting instruments I picked drums without hesitation. A couple years later, in 7th Grade, I made a friend on the first day of Mr. Aarestad’s band class who had much jazzier “moves” than I had ever heard, and I was immediately smitten, dying to learn what he knew. That started a lifelong friendship that involved exploration of contemporary drummers, as well as listening to all kinds of music. (Music featuring drums was the gateway drug, but we quickly moved into more classical realms, a shift that has stayed with me, the tail that wagged the dog become almost nothing but tail—tho I retain an appreciation for drums and drumming.)

Any focus on drums, especially with any kind of a jazz bent, leads inevitably to the great Buddy Rich, still considered probably the greatest drummer ever. But we listened to other people as well: Peter Erskine with Maynard Ferguson, Sonny Payne with Count Basie, Ed Thigpen with Oscar Peterson—as well as Nigel Olsson with Elton John and Liberty DiVitto with Billy Joel, anything with Steve Gadd, many others. Despite my big band orientation, one group I didn’t listen much to was Glenn Miller—maybe because my focus was so centered on drumming, and Miller was a more horn-oriented group. But along the way I ended up with a couple Glenn Miller recordings, both from the late 50s with bandleader (and drummer) Ray McKinley. I loved the more upbeat songs, and I especially remember loving a particular version of Miller’s longtime hit Kalamazoo.

Like all good obsessions, my fascination for the 1959 recording of Kalamazoo waxed and waned, but I remember listening carefully to it years ago and the appreciation of that study has stayed with me. 45 years later, I find myself zoomed in on it again. In addition to an updated arrangement (updated from his original '40s hit recording), and the letter-perfect execution by the band, I’m realizing that I’ve underestimated the drumming in the song—more than that, I'm thinking I've spent years missing a very different approach to drumming with a big band.

I remember reading that Buddy Rich himself expressed admiration for how Ray McKinley “drove” his big band, tho McKinley's approach is different and less ostentatious than anything I’ve heard Buddy attempt. Having said that, and before I discuss how I think this is so, it’s worth noting that the existing video clips of Ray McKinley at the drums make him seem much more circus showman and “entertainer” than Buddy’s more serious, all-business approach. McKinley raises his hands theatrically and does little wiggling flourishes (a '40s equivalent to a modern rock drummer twirling his sticks) and throws his arms out to the sides to no earthly purpose except to *look cool* to audiences of the time. It’s a showier version of what you might see on Lawrence Welk. So his approach to the drums was evidently NOT about avoiding ostentation. But—and I’m using Kalamazoo as my Exhibit A—his actual drumming is much more in a supporting role than Buddy’s. And his silly moves on video do not erase a really stellar performance on vinyl. 

There are stylistic things. His drums sound fairly low-pitch and are not loud, sounding like the calfskin heads and gut snare wires of 30 years previous. (Pictures show McKinley sitting at the kit with a steeply angled snare between his knees, very Chick Webb.) Where modern drums are individually miked, McKinley's kit seems just to be captured by the mikes set up for the other instruments. This contributes to the sense of his drums as a supporting, background role. He drives the band not with his ride cymbal but with a strong hi-hat swing, the cymbals held fairly loose by the foot and manipulated with the left hand while the right hand plays the rhythm. This technique harks back to the earlier era from which the Miller band came—again, like Chick Webb or Gene Krupa with Benny Goodman. By contrast, most drummers of the early ‘60s had shifted more to ride cymbal patterns as a foundation—and you hear that with any modern version today of the old songs: nobody drives a band with the hi-hat. His bass drum, instead of marking each quarter note quietly seems almost absent until needed for an emphasis. And this makes its use much more striking (it could be that without individual mikes you only hear the bass accents). Backbeats on the 2 & 4 are reserved only for climaxes, and then just for a bar or two. Emphasis.

I’m trying to decipher how or if these elements contribute to the success of the recording. Chicken or egg, there’s a clear sense that this driving and time-keeping is for the band’s benefit, enabling THEM to do the swinging. I think that’s the whole banana: his drumming is almost entirely focused on facilitating THE BAND swinging hard, whereas Buddy’s playing and drive are overwhelmingly front-and-center. Whereas one finishes a Buddy Rich song (let’s use the Sammy Nestico tune Ya Gotta Try from his “Class of ’77” album) with a breathless awareness of how hard Buddy has driven the band, you finish Kalamazoo with an awareness of how hard the band has swung the tune. You just naturally want to dance to it, where with Buddy you just stare in amazement.

Drums are an ostentatious instrument. Especially in modern times, the drummer is often center stage, encased in a large, imposing kit that makes a high proportion of the band’s noise. I think many aspiring drummers are drawn specifically to that noise and ostentation, and our own playing reflects this (like the high school girl who wants to sound like Mariah Carey—yes, I’m showing my age—by putting too much sugar on everything she sings, until it’s all sugar and no substance). I think I’ve always had a tendency to overplay, and I’m naturally drawn to the Buddy Riches and the Dave Weckls rather than the Elvin Jones or Art Blakey types. And maybe as I get older I begin to see the error in this thinking. While I don’t think anyone would consider the drums absent from McKinley’s 1959 Kalamazoo, he plays a more obviously supporting role than what Buddy Rich would have provided, and I think the song benefits from this. His playing is exquisitely musical, his time keeping deliciously metered, and the drums are used almost entirely to keep the band together and to accent. He steps up as needed—much like the trumpet section hits very specific notes at very specific times. And where I want to accent *everything* the band is doing, he lets THEM do the work and he accents either 1) what will help them hit their marks, or 2) points where the brass punches need a little extra for maximum effect. I’m used to Buddy emphasizing or underpinning everything, such that it’s almost like his band is supporting HIM. Which, as the named artist and the one people buy tickets to see, maybe they are.

All this calls into question my own approach to the instrument as being a constant, driving presence in any song, whereas McKinley seems to see the drums as a spice, an instrument intended to speak occasionally for emphasis. Is this an actual tectonic shift in how jazz was conceived or played? Or is it just the difference between the drummer as sideman versus the drummer as headliner? Ed Thigpen as part of the Oscar Peterson Trio is present at just about every moment, he and Ray Brown and Oscar sharing the microphone like the Andrews Sisters. He’s neither retiring nor just present for emphasis. Yet he’s not the star of anything either. I guess I struggle with how to place Ray McKinley who is doing (very competently) what drummers-as-sidemen always do, but driving from the very back seat in the bus, as it were. (And the whole discussion kind of sidesteps the different roles of the jazz drummer and the rock drummer.)

For decades I’ve read interviews with drummers talking about what the music needs and about playing what’s appropriate for the song, and I mostly dismissed that as lip service (tho guys like Steve Gadd or the late Jeff Porcaro have in fact played on recordings covering a huge range of styles). But nowhere have I heard someone drive a big band as skillfully as Ray McKinley without drawing any attention to his playing (at least not sonic attention). (Maybe it’s because he’s also the band’s singer, and that makes for attention enough. Fair question.) But I find myself asking why the song hits its marks so well, and how it does so when it avoids all the drumming conventions I instinctively favor? And that makes me ask what makes any song successful, and of course there's not one answer. But finding a different answer than what I'm used to seems like opening a door into a new room.

(This video does not very effectively support my thesis. The drums are at least as prominent here as any other instrument, and there's a strong emphasis on flash. But it does show Ray McKinley's style and musicianship.)

 

The End Of Something

Shenzhen, the J.W. Marriott. We arrived on a jumpseat from Anchorage about 18 hours ago, and we depart for Singapore about three hours from now. What exists on paper as a 24 hour layover is in reality about 20 hours, and getting some activity and some food and decent rest is the order of the day. And because we’re on almost the exact opposite side of the globe from where we were 36 hours ago, our body clocks are out of alignment with the sun. However we manage it, the body clock will begin to shift, working its way (at about an hour per day) toward alignment with the local day-night cycle. I got to the hotel about 3:30AM, and waited around until 6:30 to head out for a walk (with a little nap in the interim). It’s hot and humid here, so my 8 mile walk nearly did me in—partly because by my body clock I’m starting a long walk at 7:PM. By the time I’m back in the hotel (after a McDonald’s breakfast of scrambled eggs and a slice of cheese on a hamburger bun with a squirt of ketchup, yet another regional variant—simple and tasty) it’s about 10:30 local, and my body is saying it’s bedtime. This is why it’s so important to have decent blackout curtains, as getting good sleep in bright sunshine doesn’t work for most of us, and doing this job without being rested is difficult and hazardous. This time I was successful, dropping off in my darkened room about noon and waking up around 8:30 PM, just as all the restaurants out my window are shutting down for the night.

My intent was to write about some of these experiences at career’s end, a series of snapshots from a life’s work. This is my last trip as an airline pilot, capping off 31 years in the profession, just over 24 years of that time with UPS. And circadian management is a big part of what doing this job entails—apart from the regulations and company rules and arcane bits of FAA and airplane knowledge that every airline pilot navigates. I find I’m scrutinizing each little activity on my last couple trips in heightened fashion, as in so many respects I likely won’t pass this way again. I have mixed feelings, of course; nostalgia for all the really extraordinary parts of the job, but also a sense of relief that I won’t have to live under the microscope of scrutiny that goes with it—the medicals and simulator training and recurrent study and regulation reviews and check rides and paperwork audits. I’ve accepted years ago—in a kicking-and-screaming kind of way—this high-scrutiny aspect as a necessary element of the career. But I’ve always hated it and I’m eager to be out from under it.

The payoff from making peace with this scrutiny has been the world at my doorstep. Before UPS I hadn’t done a whole lot of traveling, and virtually all of that was domestic (I made two brief trips to Europe in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and we saw some Bahamian islands when I was a kid). After moving to the magnificent MD-11 in 2009, I began regularly to circle the globe. Literally. We used to take off and head East or West and keep flying until we were back in Kentucky. This was an entirely new experience for me, and I gained a little familiarity with so many places: Cologne and London, Warsaw and Budapest, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Almaty, Sydney, Dubai, parts of Canada, Mexico City. 50 places, virtually all of them places I’d not seen before—and, from the perspective of this last trip, places I’ll almost certainly never see again.

It’s been a dual experience: on the one hand, it’s exposure to how people live in other parts of the world (at least in the big cities), with the food and music and strange currencies and odd brands of automobiles and modes of dress and languages odd to my ear, and, a favorite of mine, the regional modes of transportation. Subways in China, Jeepneys in Clark, the train in Dubai, the street cars and the Star Ferry in Hong Kong. Most of the world has a different experience and outlook on life from our own, and visiting these places is the surest way to drive home this point. And on the other hand, one quickly realizes that these places are just places, like the places where we live. There are lovely little coffee shops everywhere in the world, but they’re not vastly different from the lovely little coffee shops in Appleton, Wisconsin. On the home stretch of my career I find I’m more aware of the scrutiny I’ll no longer be subject to than of the coffee shop I won’t see again. But what a privilege to have seen enough that a coffee shop in Vienna seems a bit mundane.

And for all of this I’ve been well-paid, quite beyond my expectations. It’s gauche to talk about money, but the pay of the industry is kind of the elephant in the room. It’s the thing that accords the job some status, and that in turn gives me a patina of accomplishment in the larger world—a status that, had I kept driving a city bus, I would not have been given. I don’t think of myself as caring much for that, but I’m aware that I hold that blasé disinterest from the comfort zone of everyone else thinking I’m accomplished in life—even though I know perfectly well that I’m just an ape and this is just my job. Particularly in my work setting, the uniform and four stripes puts me on the top of this particular food chain, with people deflecting to this status as a matter of course. In some concrete way, I move through life as the embodiment of a status that society attaches to the profession. 30 years into it, I’m lying if I say this is of zero account. 

For many of my coworkers, this status is expected and proper. Particularly from a background of military flying, many guys are accustomed to being at the top of the food chain. By this yardstick, of course they’d be well paid and at the top of the ladder. But my background is driving a city bus after floundering through nine years of college (for my four-year degree!). The money is not an expected thing for me. I’m not a money guy, and never have been. I’ve always been adept at spending it, but I find investing boring and the prospect of amassing wealth just supremely uninteresting (thankfully, the corollary of this disinterest is that gambling holds zero interest. The lure of the big payoff just isn’t there for me). So where many of my coworkers hold the attainment of wealth a key personal goal, I’m content just to have not screwed up. (It would be so unsurprising to find myself a slave to credit card debt, having several mortgages, a big payment on an airplane, a huge car payment, lavish vacations. I’ve flirted at the edges of some of these, but have managed to avoid the trap that ensnares so many of us—think of the number of pro football players or lottery winners who march straight to bankruptcy.) My wife deserves much more credit for this than I, but I’ll take credit for an awareness early on that her control of our finances would benefit me. And so it has been.

So many weirdnesses with the job: the strict regulation of everything, being locked down to a by-the-minute schedule, the tight choreography with 30 other people of the airplane coming and going from its parking spot, the life in hotels and the private cars shuttling us around, the extreme routinization of operating a transport jet. One of the weirdnesses is how little I understand of how the jet works mechanically. I have zero ability or expertise about keeping it running: I cannot fuel it nor put oil in it, I cannot load it nor tighten a loose panel, I’m not qualified to brush snow off the wing surfaces. I’m not even allowed to replace a burnt-out lightbulb. I’m the guy who is brought in to sit in THIS seat and manipulate THESE switches—and by way of this rarified routine we take 50 tons of stuff 7 miles up at 500 mph to a destination 3000 miles away. My world is this tiny room, and none of the zillion other employees at this huge company has the first clue what to do in this room—though their jobs are 100% reliant on mine. And that’s where the money comes from. Weirdness.

And the jet itself. I’m never far from an awareness that I’m being given the keys to a 220 million dollar machine, a machine that even today still seems absolutely magical and improbable. And that machine is responsible for all the other things that attach to the profession: the destinations and cultural experiences, the money, the food chain on which we all sit, the schedule, the home-and-gone personal life, the living half my life in hotels. To this day I’m a little giddy to do my walk-around before each flight, marveling at what a pinnacle of human ingenuity a transport jet is. The crazy amount of power needed for takeoff; the hushed inner sanctum of the dark cockpit at night; the systems that let us navigate thunder storms or fly through snow and rain. All of it. Because the actual job duties take place in the tiny room of the cockpit—where the 180 foot-long, 200 ton machine kind of disappears—the walk-around lets us connect the miraculous machine to the minute switch-throwing that makes it go. I ply my trade sitting in this seat, but when I do the walk-around—or when I stand behind the jet and watch other jets taking off and landing next to me—I’m able to connect these arcane cockpit tasks to the astounding reality of airline flight.

But time passes and things come to an end. All of the stuff that was remarkable or other-worldly 30 years ago is solidly routine now—even as I still tip my hat to its magic.  Hong Kong is magnificent, but less so on my 40th visit than on the early times. Indeed, I kind of need to look back to the photos of my earlier visits to tap into that early wonder if I am to fully appreciate it today. 

And that looking back is what I expect my retirement to be. The airline and these jets and these many workers and all these places will continue apace without me, but I’ve been fortunate to have dipped my toe in the water during my time. I’m forever grateful for this, but I’m also ready for the next adventure.

My Electrifying Life

 Here’s another for my collection of automotive / machinery geek posts.

I have a post from a decade or more ago listing all the cars I’ve owned in my lifetime—which list is getting rather lengthy. I have another couple vehicles to append to that list, and it’s my current daily driver that is the focus of this post.

Many of my 40+ vehicles over the years have been pickup trucks—off the top of my head, at least 5 Toyotas, a couple Fords, and a Ram. (While I like what everyone else likes about full size pickups, I additionally use the truck to carry stuff to and from our lake house, such that I don’t know if we could actually get by with a more traditional SUV / station wagon.) The Ram was the last gas vehicle I owned, traded off now in 2023 for the subject of this post, a 2023 Ford F150 Lightning. 

The Lightning is an all-electric truck, I believe the first such truck from a mainstream manufacturer on the market (The Rivian R1T came on the scene around the same time). I’ve always been interested in EV tech, but my long drive to work from WI to KY seemed a heavy lift for existing models. But after a couple years’ encouragement from my EV-driving brother, I took a test drive and was hooked. And I have to say of all the vehicles I’ve owned, I have a keener interest in and love for this one—bordering on mania—than for any other. My concerns about regular long cross country drives were not misplaced (more on that later), but I find my enthusiasm for this tech easily trumps my concerns for its penalties. (And there are some penalties.)

When perusing old posts on this blog, I ran across a post about the steam locomotive and the railroad industry’s transition from the crude miracle of steam power to diesel-electric power. Whatever else one may say about the technology and the industry’s upheaval at its hands, the superiority of the diesel tech was so overwhelming—fuel cost, ease of maintenance, dispatch reliability, the prospect of easy redundancy—that its adoption was rapid and overwhelming, inevitable. I recall reading that the maintenance staff needed to run a fleet of steam locomotives could be reduced by some 90% by transitioning to diesel-electric motive power. Bad for careers on an individual scale, but a figure too overwhelming to ignore industry-wide. (This reality must have held sway for nautical propulsion as well, and there's surely an analog in the aviation industry's shift from piston power to turbine / turbojets.)

The world’s present move to electric automotive power is another of those moments, I'd wager. The forces resisting the change seem mostly coming from or funded by industries trying to hang onto their huge share of public spending, but I feel pretty confident these forces will not stop the transformation (tho they could sure slow it up and screw up the details of its adoption). This tech is just so superior to internal combustion that the shift is inevitable (I suspect our use of millions of little thermo-dynamic plants powered by tanks of liquid explosive to move our cars around will shortly seem quaint and antique.)

What won me over initially, apart from the fascination of a truck that looks like every other F150 on the road (and Ford sells 700,000 of them a year, virtually all of them gas-powered) but under the skin is *completely different,* is the driving experience. The truck is so quiet and so stupidly fast, the acceleration so free of fuss and so enthusiastic and so instantaneous, that any normal ICE car can only dream of such performance. Even a fast car requires a wind-up and a series of downshifts to get its engine up into the proper range to accelerate sportily. Not so the EV: just put your foot down and with a silent whoosh you’re doing 90 mph. (My wife, who doesn’t love driving anything this big, is always complaining that she’s regularly driving about 30 mph above where she thinks she is. There’s just no audible cue.) Electric propulsion features “instant torque,” and electric motors produce their maximum torque from a dead stop, so getting started from a stoplight can be instantaneous and a little shocking. But even at highway speeds the truck can accelerate to pass with seemingly no effort whatsoever.

Some of this is the inherent way electric motors make their power, and some of it is the lack of mechanical complexity between that motor and the driven wheels. The EV has no transmission, no transfer case, no locking hubs, no turbochargers, no cylinder deactivation, no variable valve timing, no fuel injection, none of the literally thousands of parts needed to make a modern gas engine work. The electric motors themselves are basically a big rotor with a couple bearings (tho of course they need to run thru a differential and half-shafts and CV joints, etc.--but the ICE vehicles have all that stuff as well). Anyway, the proof is in the pudding: my Lightning just drives like a dream, super-quiet and quick and utterly without fuss or drama.

Everything else in the truck is the same as / similar to the analogous equipment in the regular gas F150: the radio, the heated seats, the sunroof, all that stuff. So it feels in a general sense like any other truck—at least until you push the “start” button and… nothing happens. The truck has to beep at you and swipe the wipers to let you know it’s turned on. But for the climate system blowing some air and the screens coming to life, you have no cues that the truck is running (Tesla goes a step further and there’s not even an on / off switch! The car is ON when you approach and open the door, and it’s OFF when you walk away.) But as an old-ish guy, I must say that this familiarity is part of the Lightning’s charm. While I might relish something utterly space-age after 43 cars or so (think CyberTruck), I can see that a familiar F150 with an otherwise-invisible powertrain upgrade is a smart move from Ford. And a gutsy one: the F150 is the best selling single vehicle in the US, and has been for a couple decades; how to you make big changes when that legacy is at stake? Answer: you do both; you keep the regular F150 line moving forward, and you do the Lightning as a small separate project.

Small, maybe, in terms of sales. But the engineering commitment from Ford must have been eye-watering, and it must still be. My understanding is that the Lightning (despite its high cost—more on that in a bit) does not make money for Ford, and the prospect of them recouping their billions in development costs must be doubtful, at least in the short term. But they can clearly see what is the thesis of my little review here: the shift to EVs is coming and is inevitable, and the engineering work is going to have to be done. Kudos to them for getting a head start on it, while GM and especially Fiat-Chrysler are behind to various degrees. VW, Kia, Volvo, Audi, and a host of Chinese manufacturers are all moving smartly towards EVs, and joining the bold newcomers—Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, these latter are EV-ONLY—and I believe we’re seeing the lead-up to a sink-or-swim moment for the industry that is going to see some big players fall.

Once I took my test drive I was hooked. Well, more or less. It was obvious to me that this was the future of the automobile, and I was eager to jump into the stream. But there was the matter of cost-vs-value. The 2019 Ram 1500 I was driving at the time was a $60,000 truck and it had been to that point the nicest and best vehicle I had ever owned: zippy enough and well-sorted, beautifully-made and with the nicest interior materials I had ever seen in a mainstream product. Glorious V-8 hemi noises. At the time of my Lightning test drive I had put 100,000 miles on the Ram, virtually trouble-free. The Lightning I test drove was a similar mid-upper trim level, but the initial sticker on the Lightning was just shy of $90,000. In the four years since I’d bought my Ram, prices had risen, so my $60,000 truck was probably close to $70,000 at this point, and maybe even a bit more. But that still meant a good $20,000 premium to buy the electric. There was a strong likelihood that the operating costs for the Lightning would be substantially less than the gas truck, but for me that $20K was just more than I was willing to spring for. Another few years, I thought, and the market would equalize a bit.

But of course three days after my test drive the sales guy called and said “Ford just dropped all their Lightnings by $10,000!” Bastard. My collapse was rapid and complete.

As far as operating costs go, my suppositions were mostly correct. We have very reasonable electricity costs in Wisconsin (about .10 per kWh), and I’d guess I drive my Lightning locally for about 1/4 of what I was paying for gasoline in the previous truck. I installed a high-power charger at my house (the charger came with the truck with its extended range battery, though I had to pay a pretty penny to have an electrician install it—my local utility happy pitched in to help with the install costs, so that helped a little), and I put in a charger at the cottage, so I’m able to drive around WI without using any public charging infrastructure at all—or very nearly so. I still occasionally use a public charger if I’ve strayed from my usual routine. But day-to-day, I love leaving my house with a “full tank” every time, and I haven’t had to go anywhere to get a fill-up in forever. Having to take Susan’s jeep out to get gas seems like a mild inconvenience, and will doubtless seem more and more so. However, when driving cross-country, the electricity costs very closely parallel what I would have paid for gas for the same distance. (Most high-speed DC chargers seem to run .35-.50 per kWh, so about four times my costs at home).

So that’s one downside vs gasoline: the truck is less convenient to drive long distances, and there’s little cost savings to offset the inconvenience. The “fuel tank” in the EV is about 1/3 to 1/2 the size of a gas vehicle, and it takes about three or four times as long to fill up, so it’s a double-whammy. This isn’t a factor of course when you’re filling up at home while you sleep, but driving cross country you need to be thinking always about your energy state and plan accordingly. There are far fewer EV chargers than there are gas stations, and each stop takes you 20-40 minutes versus 7 minutes for a gas fill up. Now, as an old man, I make more stops than I used to, and by the time I pee and get a snack, I’m really only inconvenienced by a few minutes—call it a penalty of 60-90 minutes on my 8 hour drive to KY. But that’s a hassle. Realistically, I’m driving about two hours between charges, maybe closer to three hours in summer. And that increase in total trip time—which I anticipated and which gave me pause before moving to an EV—is a real factor and one which has made me drive this commute less than I have done for the last 24 years. I either bid trips now that begin with a commercial flight to where the trip begins, or sometimes I just buy myself an airline ticket to KY. It’s more expensive than the electricity would be, but not stupidly so. And I just don’t have to do it very often. So there’s a compromise. 

Additionally, the experience of public charging is quite variable. Chargers come in a wide range of strengths, and not all chargers are suitable for all vehicles (there are different plugs involved). With a battery as big as my Lightning’s, you need a high-power charger when on the road to avoid making a 4 hour stop for your recharge. But even among high-powered chargers, there’s quite a variance. Each EV has a maximum charging current it can accept, and you pick your charging stops according to this limitation. But it’s not uncommon for a charger to be out of service or to fail to deliver its rated power. This all means that planning your cross-country drives involves more thought: you need specific chargers, which are fewer in number, and you must plan for chargers that don’t behave properly. There are a bunch of EV-specific apps to help with this, which are a godsend. The overall public charging situation is improving over time, but it’s definitely a factor that must be considered (tho, again, only for public charging. 90% of my driving is within WI, and these things just don’t come into play. Charging at home is quick and painless and easy and cheap.)

And though I never tow anything, the EV is really not suitable for towing except in very narrow circumstances. It’s not a power thing: the Lightning can pull just about anything. It’s a total energy thing. The truck will easily pull your 10,000 lb. boat, but you’ll need to recharge about every 100 miles. So towing a big load cross country is pretty inconvenient (tho I’ve watched several videos on YouTube where the Lightning owner did exactly that and they got by fine; you just have to plan accordingly). This isn’t a factor for me, but it IS a limitation of EV ownership that must be acknowledged.

(As an aside, I’m always amazed at how well-versed people are by our MSM about all the reasons they’re supposed to HATE the technology, despite knowing virtually nothing about EVs and not ever having driven them or talked to someone who actually owns one. YOU CAN’T TOW, says the guy who never tows. Or they decry The Rapaciousness of LITHIUM MINING, as they celebrate ROLLING COAL and “drill, baby, drill” in the Arctic National Wilderness.  I guess this is what corporate ownership of the media gets us: Sell The Controversy.)

Another downside, and one where I think improvement can be made, is information about your energy state. Whereas your ICE car has a gas gauge and you pretty quickly learn its quirks—whether the last half of the tank goes more quickly, how much time you have from E to a dead car, etc.—the EV is a different kettle of fish.  In place of a gas gauge is of course a battery gauge showing charge remaining, typically displayed as a percentage. Second, there’s a corollary display showing miles of available range before you’re out of charge. This is what most people naturally fixate on: how long can I go before I need a recharge? But unlike an ICE car, this figure is a moving target and not terribly reliable, both because energy usage is more variable in an EV based on load and temperature, and because the size of the “tank” is so much smaller. So a small variation can deprive you of some miles you think you may need. The third thing we look at is the miles per kilowatt-hour, kind of the analog to an MPG gauge in your ICE car. If, for example, I’m showing current usage as 2 miles per kWh, and I have a 131kWh battery, that would translate to 262 miles of range.

In practice, you kind of need to juggle these three figures, maybe supplemented with some seat-of-the-pants intuition based on past experiences, to know where you are, battery-wise (and then figure in where the chargers are on your present journey and of what strength and reliability). This is kind of a pain in the ass compared to your ICE car and its gas gauge—especially with a gas station every 15 feet and the refueling experience being almost completely uniform.

My last word on this topic is a story from my rich trove of firsthand EV lore: A year ago I was driving home from the cottage to Appleton with a friend and Susan and the three dogs and a truckload of cottage stuff—this was before I installed my charger at the cottage—and I needed to stop in Green Bay for a quick top-up. Well, I cut it to the very last second and then MISSED MY EXIT on the freeway to the charger (I was blabbing and not paying attention). I had to go about 4 miles down the freeway to get to a turn-around, and I did not have 8 miles of energy left. The truck took a second before telling me (with alarm-colored messages and chimes) “You ain’t got the energy needed to get to an available charger” and began to slow down. Within a minute or two I was driving 30 mph on the freeway shoulder with my flashers on as the truck continued to slow. I managed to make it to the exit and to turn off into a residential section before I came to a mandated stop.

Luckily, the truck came with free roadside assistance, and a flatbed truck was shortly dispatched to my location (I assume in the future it will be a battery truck for a quick 15 minutes of charge). Interestingly, when the flatbed arrived, the Lightning had found enough juice to drive up onto the truck, and again to back off the truck and into my garage when we got home. So, no harm done (except to my ego).

Thus did I learn that zero is ZERO, and at least for highway driving there is NO RESERVE. My display of miles-to-empty was, I found out, quite accurate. And I don’t expect to ever see this situation again, but the lesson needed to be learned.

I’ll finish with a rant. America at this moment is in a crisis, entirely self-inflicted and by the same people and the same mentality that put us in civil war 150 years ago. Many books will be written about this moment and our response to it, and nobody needs my two cents’ worth. But from the perspective of this little blog post, I’m concerned about the administration’s childish hostility to anything they deem “environmental,” which includes an angry defunding of anything related to EVs and the country’s response to a changing world. Indeed, they’ve vowed to return to BIG COAL (we'd all chuckle if it were an SNL skit; but these very unserious people think they're serious). All moneys for green energy are withdrawn. My dog can see the ludicrous folly in this. This hostility will mean no public dollars to improve public charging infrastructure or to strengthen the grid, no assistance to American automakers for the very daunting and expensive transformation they must undergo (a transformation which, as I said previously, I'd wager they don't all survive--and maybe none of them will), no dollars for energy research at the moment that battery technology is undergoing intense engineering initiatives—indeed, our universities are under attack and funds are being cut if they dare to enroll women or nonwhites. Other nations—China primarily, but also Europe—are not under the yoke of such mandated stupidity, and they will forge ahead on the path that we OBVIOUSLY must tread, only we will be left in the coal dust. And while this falling-down incompetence won’t greatly affect me personally—as Republicans like to say, “I’ve got mine!”—it will discourage people who are sitting on the fence, and that serves nobody (or none of US).

So tho I really adore my Lightning, the future looks pretty hazy. Ford has made only small changes to the Lightning in the last four years, and Ford CEO Jim Farley has said publicly that the future of Ford’s EV programs cannot rest on trucks and big SUVs as they maybe initially intended. Lightnings are selling, but not at the numbers needed to transform Ford, let alone the world. From the moment I bought the truck I’ve said that if it gets ripped off I’d take the insurance check out and buy another exactly the same STAT. And that remains true. Whatever happens at Ford, I fully expect my next vehicle will be another EV. I’m a convert. But exactly what shape that will take remains to be seen. For the moment, there are no changes in the Lightning to warrant making an upgrade (though the addition of a heat pump to improve winter range is certainly welcome and a good idea), and all indications are that my truck should last for years. (Whether it’s wise to have an old EV, especially if Ford distances itself from this program in the future, remains an open question.)

***

ADDENDUM, 12/29/25

So Ford announced a couple weeks ago that they're canceling the Lightning. Production was stopped a couple months ago after a fire at one of their aluminum suppliers; they needed to route the material to models that were making money--which was not the Lightning. With Ford having moved its EV focus to a new, smaller, less expensive platform (due in the next year or so), and Lightning sales slow and not profitable, it just made sense to let it die. So production is not to restart. With the orchestrated stupidity of the current administration injecting doubt and uncertainty into the EV world, sales have slowed and carmakers are pulling back all round. American car makers, anyway (see above). Worryingly, Ford also pulled back from their research on batteries, which is concerning for their future. The Lightning, we are told, will be reborn with a range-extending combustion engine where the fabulous frunk currently is, which will enable 600+ mile range while still retaining the virtues of electric propulsion.

This is not the future, I'd wager, but it might be the immediate future--at least until battery tech catches up. That would be more likely with government grants and encouragement to our colleges and universities and technical institutes. All of which have been targeted for elimination. 

I'm currently at about 45,000 miles on my Lightning, and I've had only two recalls which were handled with a laptop in my driveway. A cracked windshield and a nail in one of my tires, and that's the whole service banana. Sandy Munro's Lightning teardown videos convince me that the truck is engineered for 300,000 miles or more, so I think I'll just keep driving it for the foreseeable future. When something better comes out--which means when a foreign manufacturer makes an electric pickup--I'll probably make the move.