Maybe the biased reporting was the result of the college recruiters cabal. Heck, it cudda even been one of your three alma matas.
No, youâre reading more into it than that. It was just a general bitching session bout how awful our society is that these people exist without solid education and training. This filming was being done in an area of strong suburban schools and famed universities: U of Pa, St Josephâs, Villanova, Drexel, Temple and many smaller schools like Swarthmore, Haverford, Ursinus. I donât think they were targeting any group per se, just a blanket condemnation. My alma maters are in central PA, Indiana, and local, one that everyone loves so Iâm sure they werenât targeting any of them.
Given that the piece was to be broadcast locally to a population in an area of high-quality schools and universities, could it be that the TV crew was trying to come up with a report that presented the intended audience with the biased news that they WANTED to hear?
Do you think that some employers use university certification as a shortcut to the hiring process? Is academic performance always a valid indication of future job performance?
No doubt there are those that do take the lazy way, but my first 10 years out of college were spent as what today is euphemised as Human Resources, back then it was known as Personnel Mgmt. and I knew no one who was not thoroughly competitive among my peers at surrounding companies. The Schuylkill River corridor northwest of Philly was developed from colonial days as regional manufacturing centers due to river, then rail, highway transit systems. I worked for heavy machinery manufacturers-machine tools, tertile machines, construction machinery, aerospace components and had to compete with places like General Electricâs Missle/Space Division (6000 employees) and such for people. Nobody took shortcuts.
The TV audience was well-educated to some degree, but not to the majority. One of PAâs loudest complaints is that graduates get educated here then migrate elsewhere. Like any large city, Philadelphia had a large population of uneducated and low-skilled manual labor, and further out in the far 'burbs many rural farm workers, seasonal itinerants and such. If the TV crew was doing any targeting, Iâd put it in the âweâre better than you, so stay tuned here and pay attention to what we sayâ mode.
Given you HR background, do you have an opinion on why some jobs are open only to those applicants who are college graduates?
I can only speak for my own situations: I ALWAYS had the ability to override the requirement for certain pre-ordained requirements. It rarely was necessary because those people applying for a certain job title generally had those certifications, (e.g. a BSME for a mechanical engineer)
Given that education IS a fast track way to amass the knowledge of the foregoing human experience, personal experience and personal study CAN equal formal educational requirements if the employer is willing to investigate the ability of the individual concerned. That takes time, and the employer is well within their right to use job requirements like degrees to minimize the time spent in sifting through prospective employees.
Again, in my experience, force of personality can trump educational requirements, given sufficient talent to handle the technical aspects of a job.
Sorry for the delay in responding, Iâm having medical issues from an accident to my eyes so can only respond when conditions are right, plus my email is behaving strangely so is not aiding me at this time.
Thereâs a huge perception gap on this issue. When EV service providers were surveyed about reliability, they said their equipment works 95%-98% of the time. âThe data from the two surveys suggest there may be a disconnect between what drivers are experiencing and what the EVSPs are reporting,â the CARB report drolly stated.
What drivers are experiencing has been abundantly documented. The analytics firm J.D. Power said this year that 20% of all EV drivers reported visiting a charger that did not or could not charge because it wasnât working or there were long lines. The dissatisfaction rates ranged from 12% in the Cleveland-Akron-Canton area to 35% in South Florida. The firm said the trend is moving in the wrong direction: As more people buy EVs, âoverall satisfaction continues to decline.â
A University of California, Berkeley, study last year found similar results: only 72.5% of chargers in the Bay Area were functional. A newspaper columnist in California described the charging experience as miserable. âThe misery was meted out in several ways,â he documented. âCharging stations were hard to find. Maps that locate stations were not reliable. Paying for a charge with a credit card often proved troublesome, sometimes impossible. Worst of all, way too many chargers were broken or otherwise out of order.â
He warned of a public backlash against the stateâs mandate banning the sale of non-electric cars in 2035 if the situation doesnât improve.
This year, an exasperated Los Angeles Times columnist declared sheâs ready to trade in her EV because charging is such a hassle. She wrote that chargers are sometimes blocked by cars that arenât charging, exposed to blistering sunlight, charging at lower levels than advertised, or âit may shut off mid-charge with no warning or reason.â
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The counter to that is having a home charger---- BUT âa huge number of people living in urban apts do not have this option.
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History tells us itâs a familiar story. From the University of Houston - College of Engineering:
Gas Stations | The Engines of Our Ingenuity.
"What do you call places that sell gasoline? The Yellow Pages list them under service stations, but they offer little service these days. The first public gasoline servers were simply called filling stations. They were just curbside hand pumps, and they began appearing in 1907. There was no service in 1907, either. You did your own repairs in those days.
Henry Ford and the great explosion of automobiles after WW-I changed all that. Those millions of new cars needed a huge infrastructure of supply. So a new American institution came into being. It was what we called the gas station.
The gas station started taking shape around 1910. By 1920 it was well-defined. It was a small building with gas pumps in front. But it also offered supplies â tires, batteries, and oil. It offered simple services â lube jobs and tire patching.
In 1920, America had 15,000 gas stations and only half that number of curbside pumps. By 1930, we had over 100,000 gas stations, and curbside pumps had all but vanished."
Itâs called growing pains, I think theyâll figure it out. 
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But the fact is: "In the United States, the majority of housing units are single-family houses â about 82 million out of the total 129 million occupied units in 2021. These homes are mostly owner-occupied, but a small share is rented.
Yep. But how will the remaining 47 million manage? [assuming those 82 m will all get home chargers]
Short term, itâs hard to say, it could be that the parking spaces for apartment dwellers will be equipped with chargers and the same solution would work for office workers. In the longer term itâs likely that weâll see charge-in-motion wireless solutions where EVs will charge like todayâs cell phones.
But presently we still have a huge number of people who can charge at home. We presently have a lot (about 25 million) adults in the US who do not drive cars at all.
My daughter lives in an apartment in NYC. When she moved there 2 years ago she sold her ICE car and has not replaced it. Many in large metro areas do not need a car. On the other hand, I live in a home with a garage that already has a 240V subpanel. A perfect setup for an EV. But I donât need a car right now. We have a nice comfortable low mileage ICE vehicle for long trips. But will probably buy an EV for short trips when our other high mileage car wears out. This is why I am not rushing to trade in my ICE for EV and I suspect I am not alone.
That kind of logic makes sense to me. We had a 2012 Sonata we loved with 68k mi on it with a new engine, (courtesy of Hyundai) and an opportunity presented itself to help out an extended family member going thru hard times. So we gave the Sonata away and bought a Volvo EX40 Recharge.
Admittedly Iâve always been a techno heat-seeker and I thrive on change. And lots of biases color everyoneâs decisions, not the least is most peopleâs propensity towards risk aversion.
I think the risk angle is being played up by interests, like big oil & automotive labor unions, that will suffer financial harm from ICE vehicles being replaced by alternatives⌠like EVs.
People who build new cars and the people who service existing ICE cars will take a big hit if EVs replace most ICEVs. But itâs the way things are and have been throughout our industrial history.
YepâŚand I believe you are seeing the unions trying to get out in front of it with their latest strike.
I feel bad for them⌠but thatâs life. I was employed with IBM during the demise of centralized computing. In 1992 I was given a choice⌠take a yearâs severance pay with full retirement at age 51, or stick around and face the possibility of getting fired⌠I opted for the former.
Nothing is forever, itâs the way the world works.
All true but progression should come natural. Some states and the current administration are setting arbitrary dates to force conversion. As if to think this wonât affect those that can least afford it.
We didnât force the end of the horse and buggy by mandate.
Hopefully a political price will be paid but probably not. I donât expect enough people will realize what happened until its too late.
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True. Historically, Americans donât like to be forced into anything.
You mean like the MPG requirements that have been imposed on the auto industry since the 70s? They went kicking and screaming every time it was raised but somehow seemed to be able to do it. In the 70s, V8s could produce about 300hp max and get 12 mpg. Now we make turbo 4s that produce 600hp and get 20-30mpg. You think the auto manufacturers would have done this if there werenât any âincentivesâ? Nothing happens if you let it âcome naturalâ.
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Oh⌠I dunno about that⌠
⌠with no push from regulators for better ICE efficiency and pollution controls, I think youâd see a lot of engineering talent put toward increasing profits.
I was a car performance enthusiast during the 70s & early 80s when regulators tightened emission standards, we hot rodders, (I include myself,) howled in protest because we could no longer run high-compression street engines. It spelled an end to the muscle-car boom of the late 1960s.
For a while so-called âmuscle carsâ of the 1980s were a joke. But, with competition from the Japanese, American auto manufacturers finally decided to get serious and in the late 80s and early 90âs started producing performance cars that didnât pollute.