Kelly Bullis: Stupid things politicians do

I wanted to end this year with some good laughs. We live in a crazy topsy-turvy world led by some of the dumbest folks imaginable. There was somebody out there who created the Darwin Awards to acknowledge obviously very stupid actions taken by some people. The joke is basically saying, in the Darwinian theory of evolution, there is something called the “survival of the fittest.” To receive the “Darwin Award” you are being tagged as probably NOT qualifying as survivable.

So for this year's “Politician-related Darwin Awards” I present the following to you.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom sets 2035 as deadline for end of gasoline car sales. Think about this. How many small businesses are tied to the fossil fuel industry? Has Newsom thought this through?

Gas stations cannot make money on reduced sales, instead, they will go out of business or raise their prices so high that nobody will want to purchase fuel, effectively still making them go out of business. Where will folks with existing gas cars get their gas?

Plastics in every possible form come from fossil fuel production. If refineries can’t make enough profit on making fossil fuels, they will go out of business. How will we get plastics? Oh, here’s one… Tar. It’s used to make roads. No fossil fuel production means no tar. How will California make any future roads for all those electric vehicles? There are a lot of other spin off products from making gasoline. I could go on and on.

But the real stupid part of this is electricity production. Currently, California isn’t able to produce enough electricity. If everybody suddenly is trying to charge their electric vehicles, their electric grid is going to crash. Do they have any major new power plants being built. No. It usually takes about 10 years to build a power plant. Better get going on that Newsom!

Here is the one that takes top honors. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul just signed a bill in New York to limit cryptocurrency mining. The thinking of these very stupid politicians is to save electricity (and thus reduce carbon emissions) by making it illegal to make some money on the side doing crypto mining.

Most of you are asking, “What is cryptocurrency mining?” Basically, you sit at your home computer, log onto a website, click on a crypto transaction, go through some steps to verify its authenticity, then click a box to make that transaction permanent in the blockchain. (Blockchain is an accounting tool used for keeping track of crypto transactions.)

How much electricity is used for this activity? The real question to ask is, “If folks can’t use electricity to do crypto mining, what will they do instead?” Play video games, watch TV, surf the internet, etc.? Oh I know! Hochul thinks that they will turn their computer off and go outside to study daisies in their backyard. Is there really anything dumber than this?

The real Darwin awards should go to all the voters who put these people in office.

Have you heard? Ecc 7:25 says, “I turned around, and my heart sought to know and to search out, and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know that wickedness is stupidity, and that foolishness is madness.”

Kelly Bullis is a Certified Public Accountant in Carson City. Contact him at 882-4459. On the web at BullisAndCo.com Also on Facebook.