Re: german corprate greed

> David is on target again. I will NEVER donate so much as a drop of my > blood for ANY blood drive campaign, EVER. Blood donation is a bigger > ripoff than anything Daimler-Chrysler can come up with, even $65 seat belt > buckles. Here's proof. The Red Cross wants your blood for free to sell to > somebody else for $300 a pint.

As a recipient of blood products myself for when I had cancer I think your being pretty rediculous. A coupon system would be rediculous to track plus keep in mind that the hospital administering the blood incurs most of the liability, if you get sick as a result of tainted blood your going to sue the hospital, not the red cross. So even if the cost of the blood itself is free the hospital is still going to load on the costs.

But more to the point, it would be very risky and dangerous to pay for blood. The list of reasons for permanent deferral for donation of blood is rather long. Chemotherapy for cancer, for example, is one reason. As long a blood donation is voluntary, people like me who are on the permanent exclusion list have no incentive to lie to the red cross in order to donate. If you start paying for donated blood then all the druggies and addicts looking for their next fix would be running into the red cross and selling their blood, and of course would lie about being druggies in order to not get deferred. We don't need blood from people like that in the blood system. Besides wasting a lot of money when they test it and have to dump it when they find drugs in it, I don't even think it's possible to test for every single pathogen that might be in someone's like this blood.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt
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Reply to
mic canic

Better be thankful that Chrysler finally is able to built GOOD CARS. The Mercedes know how surely helps them much to improve.

Reply to
neon

Chrysler was not great the last 50 years before the takeover.

Reply to
neon

That may be your opinion, but I have always considered them a quality car and the Mopars of the 60's and 70's were tops.

Reply to
PC Medic

when i think of chrysler the first thing that pops in mind is the poor quality before iacocca. lets face it: chrysler died almost several times and would have died sooner or later without help.

Reply to
neon

How 'bout the *good* quality before Iaccoca? Perhaps you're too young to remember it. How 'bout the bad quality *after* Iacocca? Perhaps you're too myopic to have noticed it.

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

How old are you?

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

don't start with age here. i am driving chryslers since years. I like them, but you can't honestly start to compare them to heavy built german daimlers. my point is that chrysler benefits from the takeover.

Reply to
NiCAP

If you expect others to parse your scrivenings, you'd best make at least a show of pretending to care.

I can and do -- favorably.

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

Alzheimer's?

Reply to
Rick Blaine

Rubbish.

Very very few companies and consumers benefit from corporate takeovers.

Sure, if you have a bank that is on the verge of defaulting, another bank taking it over (as was forceably done by the RTC during the savings and loan issues in the 80's) is going to help consumers.

But most corporate takeovers are merely bids to kill off competition, or acquire technology and products instead of spending time doing the r&d to create them yourself. The people that benefit are the majority stockholders. But the acquired company loses because almost always the acquiring company starts laying off people, and consumers lose because there are less choices in the market.

Many people think it's OK for an industry to have only 2-3 major choices, but this is only because the Sherman Anti-trust act doesen't kick in until you get under that number. But in reality, 2-3 choices for a product is an indication of a moribund industry.

Look at the auto industry today. How much innovation has there been in the last 60 years? Very little. About the only real innovation has been in the area of pollution control and safety. But the pollution control is innovation that could have been completely ignored if the industry had simply sidestepped it and put in electric cars, which produce no tailpipe emissions. Most of the rest has been a constant restyling of the bodies of cars, as if a good looking car somehow becomes ugly 3 years later. It's like saying one of Michangelo's sculptures is ugly just because it's old.

The mere fact your arguing over trifles is screaming proof of this. We have billions being spent in war in Iraq right now and people dying, just because of the oil dependence. Quite obviously what is demanded is revolutionary changes in the automobile to remove this dependence on gasoline, so we can get a better handle on the oil situation. A vibrant industry would attack this problem, not ignore it like a moribund industry is doing. But when the world's automakers are eating each other up, your creating a small group of companies, and that group has too much invested in maintaining the status quo.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

Reply to
mic canic

I would bet my ass, that the sebring would lose EVERY test against the C-Class and the 300 would lose every test against the S-Class. Face it, Dailmer builds the best cars in the world.

Reply to
NiCAP

"NiCAP" wrote

If they're the best, why does the C-class always lose to the BMW 3-series, and the S-class lose to Lexus LS430 in almost every comparison test?

Floyd

Reply to
fbloogyudsr

*Every* test? H'm. I can think of a few tests the Chryslers would certainly win over the Mercedes. Cost to insure and cost to repair come to mind.
Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

Buddy, you've been brainwashed. Lexus can kick Daimler Benz's ass.

Reply to
Jimbo

Yep...the company I worked for had a fleet of 74 Dusters with the slant six engine...nearly all of them lasted well into the 200K+ range with amazingly few problems. Then they bought '79 Aspens....they fell apart before hitting 60K. Really! Stuff actually would fall off of them...body parts, under carriage parts, dash and under dash parts, etc. They rattled and squeaked like there was no tomorrow. What POSs they were. But Mopar was top notch before that time. I'm not sure that Chrysler ever has gotten to the quality it had in those old 74 Dusters and they certainly don't have a engine that will run forever like the slant six would.

Reply to
James C. Reeves

...and the sad thing is, by '74 Chrysler's quality had slipped very badly from where it was a decade or even just three years earlier.

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

Interesting. My exposure to Chrysler products was slim to none before 74. My father bought Chevy's and VW's and the 1st car I owned was a 1967 Pontiac GTO...which lasted fairly well (165K miles before I traded it). Sorry I missed the "good 'ole days!" of Chrysler.

Reply to
James C. Reeves

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