Electric car Price War, Fading Facebook and the story of a Polish war hero.
January 23, 2023 Volume 3 # 41
Electric Car Price War
Tesla cut prices about 20% on its Model 3 and best-selling Model Y. It looks as if Tesla is reacting to competition especially from the likes of Hyundai and its popular Ioniq 5.
Tesla has room to cut. It has pushed prices so high that the compeitition must be worrying it. Now it looks as if it is going for market share.
“Tesla is in a perfect position to with the EV price war,” says Electrek, an online electric car magazine. The reason is Tesla makes so much profit on each car it sells.
High prices for electric cars, along with range anxiety, the big reason people shy away from going electric. Tesla might be able to price some competitors into quitting.
Commodity Prices over the Last 10 Years
Lithium and Nickel are two elements used to make electric cars and they are one two in the latest list. Natural gas prices way up and in number three, courtesy of Vladimir Putin. Some with Corn prices; Ukraine related.
Gold
Au not even on the 2022 list and it was down in 2021. John Ing of Maison Placement in Toronto is a big gold buff and he thinks that is going to change this year. He points out gold is up 5% so far this year.
“We believe gold is a barometer of investor anxiety, and today there is much anxiety. Consequently, a major realignment is taking place between the dollar and gold. Gold’s new bull market is only just beginning and will surpass $2,200/oz in coming months,” predicts John Ing.
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The First 747 and the Last One
This is the last year Boeing will deliver its last 747. Over its 53 year lifespan between the Boeing 747-100 and the latest 747-8i, there were many changes. The biggest noticeable change is the extended upper deck
Pan Am Boeing 747-100 taxiing at LAX.
Look at that stretched upper deck on the 747 8i. Lufthansa is one of just three airlines still flying the 747.
Facebook is so Yesterday (and for old people)
Chart from this week’s Economist.
If You See Something, Say Something.
The man who came up with the slogan died late last year. A native New Yorker, Allen Kay came up with the slogan the day after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. According to his obit in the Daily Telegraph, he was inspired by the wartime slogan “Loose lips sink ships.”
“In World War II, the message was to keep your mouth shut,” he said. “And now the message is, in the trains, don’t.” The reference to trains is the NYC subway.
The US government rejected the slogan at first. Now it is everywhere, including in the lobby of my apartment building in Toronto.
Cheapest places to rent and own in Canada
Most of the cheapest places are in Quebec.
Essay of the Week
A Polish War Hero from an obit I wrote in 2014.
Alexander Topolski, who has died at the age of 91, was a boy soldier in Poland in 1939 when he was captured and imprisoned by the Soviet Army. He survived to fight in the Middle East and Italy in a re-formed Polish Army. After the war he became an architect in England then set off on a round the world trip in the mid 1950s. When he stopped to visit a friend in Chelsea, Quebec, he fell in love with the place and spent the rest of his life there.
Alexander Topolski at a Remembrance Day ceremonies in his adopted hometown of Chelsea, Que., on Nov. 11, 2004.
Boguslaw Alexander Topolski was born in Naklo in Poland in 1923. His father was a high school principal but Alex never had a chance to finish high school. He was just 16 when Poland was invaded by Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east.
The Soviets were as brutal as their then allies, the Nazis. Under orders from the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, they executed (`liquidated’, in Soviet-speak) intellectuals and the officer class. At Katyn Forest in April and May of 1940 the Soviets executed Polish Army officers, policemen and other members of the Polish elite. The total killed was about 22,000.
Stalin blamed the Nazis, which the rest the world readily accepted, and it wasn’t until 1989 after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the truth came out. Russian legislators condemned Stalin for the slaughter.
The Soviet Union annexed large swathes of Eastern Poland, much of which is part of Ukraine and Belarus today. Poland lost about 70,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of New Brunswick.
Alex Topolski, known by the nickname Dzidek in Poland, had been in the equivalent of the cadet crops in high school and so was a soldier, though not in a combat unit, when he was just 16. He tried to escape over the border to Romania, but was captured by Soviet troops and imprisoned in Czortkow (now Chortkiv in Ukraine). Alex was not full grown at 16 and looked more like a boy than a man.
“My mother, accompanied by my sister, Maria, who made many trips ….trying to see me or at least to deliver some food and warm clothing for me,” wrote Mr. Topolski. “My enraged mother paraded back and forth in front of the prison gate holding aloft my little shirt -- I still wore the size for a twelve-year-old -- and shouting at the guards and passersby, "Look at the size of prisoners the Soviets are keeping in their prison!"
From Czortkow he was shipped to number of prisons, first in Poland then the Soviet Union. He ended up in Kiev, and was put to work as a draftsman in a foundry, in part because of his small size, luckier than his friends who worked at hard labour. While he was in Kiev he perfected his Russian. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941 Alex and other prisoners were transported in boxcars to Gulags in the sub arctic.
The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, put pressure on his new ally, Joseph Stalin, to release Polish prisoners of war and allow them to form a Polish army. The army was under General Władysław Anders who was also released from the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) prison in Moscow. The Polish government in exile in London first needed convincing.
“The British government encouraged the Polish government in exile to do a deal with the Soviet Union. The Soviets called it an amnesty, and the Poles objected to that term,” said Piotr Wrobel, a professor of Polish History at the University of Toronto. “The Soviet wanted to contain the (Polish) army but they couldn’t. Over 100,000 Poles crossed the Caspian Sea to Iran.”
Alex Topolski went to Iran then to northern Iraq where Polish troops guarded oilfields in Kirkuk, close to where ISIS and the Kurds are fighting today. Later the Poles moved to Palestine, which was then under British control. About 3,000 Jewish soldiers deserted to stay in Palestine and join Zionist militias, including Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel. The British asked Anders to track them down but he refused.
While in Palestine Mr. Topolski finished high school before moving to Italy with the Polish II Corps, now part of the British 8th Army, and the Poles stayed in Italy for the rest of the war. Cadet Officer Topolski, his Polish rank, the British classified him a corporal, fought in the major campaign at Monte Cassino in 1944. Close to one thousand Polish soldiers died in that campaign alone and there is a Polish cemetery at Monte Cassino.
Mr. Topolski was with the army in northern Italy just before the war ended. He had fallen in love with an Italian girl, Aegle, and assumed they were going to be married, but nothing came of it.
Alex Topolski was accepted into a university in England and he and other troops sailed for Scotland from Naples. He remembered that he and the other Poles were bitter about what was happening to Poland and they discussed it with a sympathetic British officer.
“Our English captain knew plenty about the Poles and our ordeals. More than once he told us he felt guilty about how the Poles had been betrayed at the summit meeting of the three top Allied leaders at Yalta. He realized what it meant to us that Churchill and Roosevelt gave away Eastern Europe, including Poland, to Stalin,” wrote Mr. Topolski in his latest memoir.
Back in Britain, he didn’t last at university and worked at odd jobs including at a rather Dickensian place in London called the Walters’ Palm Toffee Factory. Later he wrote about quitting that job right in the middle of a shift.
He returned to study at the University of Manchester and received an architecture degree in 1954. He worked for the London County Council, the municipal government at the time. He left England because of a complicated love affair; unlike the Italian girl where he was spurned, it was the British woman who was anxious to marry and Mr. Topolski decided to head to Australia in 1956.
He landed first at Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport in New York and declared his wordily assets as $60. From there he made his way to Ottawa and went to see a friend in Chelsea, Quebec, just outside Ottawa. He cut short his trip and stayed. He went to see an architect in Ottawa. He looked him over and hired Mr. Topolski on the spot, and put him to work that day. In 1967 he joined the civil service, thinking he needed some stability when he finally married for the first time in 1965 at the age of 42. He and Joan Eddis couldn’t be married in a Catholic church so they settled for a judge in an Ottawa police station.
At Public Works Canada he designed a number of government buildings, many of them post offices, including the post office in Wakefield, Quebec, 20 minutes from where he lived. A cultured man who loved opera, ballet and classical music, he returned to university when he retired after 25 years in the civil service. He graduated cum laude with a degree in classics from the University of Ottawa.
“He knew Italy and the Mediterranean so well he wanted to know more about it,” said his daughter Alexa Wagschal. “He travelled a great deal in Europe and the Middle East. He was always reading books and newspapers and for the last 20 years writing about his life.” She said her father knew Latin from his studies in Poland and spoke Polish, Russian, English, French, Italian and some Spanish and German. He also spoke Greek and in his later years was learning Turkish.
Mr. Topolski was an accomplished artist and some of his sketches depicting his time in the Soviet prison camp were included in his first book, Without Vodka, which describes the time from just before the outbreak of war to his arrival with Anders’ Army in Iran.
“He self published it at first but then a Toronto publisher, McArthur and Company, took it on and published it in 2000,” said his wife Joan, a retried journalist and journalism professor. She edited her husband’s books.
Alex Topolski was a charming man with many friends but his wife found him “too bossy” to live with. He and Joan Eddis remained married and were close friends, collaborating on his many projects but for many years they lived apart to maintain the peace.
Alexander Topolski was born on February 23, 1923, in Naklo, Poland. He died of a heart attack while in hospital at the age of 91 on August 14, 2014. His son Greg died of Melanoma in 2008. He is survived by his daughter Alexa, his wife Joan and his sister, Maria.