Bankruptcy and Reorganization for Detroit?

Then they'll have to accept the natural rate of pay for those types of jobs or get comfortable doing something else.

Why are those jobs "better" Dave? First of all, let me say that the plumber and electrician jobs require more skills, so they ought to pay better. But the second thing is that the plumber and electrician jobs are local service jobs. The manufactured stuff is for more than the local area. You're not going to export the services outside the local area. But you're going to have to export the manufactured products outside the local area.

That means the local wages for manufacturing must be determined by what people in the other towns, states, and countries make. Light assembly work isn't worth much because this skills required are low.

I agree with what you're saying as far as value but that's no proof you need manufacturing. You need something - anything will do - that you can export.

Not true anymore. Modern weapons systems cost a lot of money and so are bought in small numbers. In a modern war, a country will win or lose with the equipment it started with. It can't lose large amounts of equipment in the beginning, and then build its way to victory.

Even on the low end... what's a Humvee cost versus an old Jeep? Look at the more expensive stuff. And look at the high end. During WWII, the US built over 10,000 B17s. They were obsolete by the end of the war and were scrapped. But the entire run of B52s was fewer than 800 units and they're still in use 50 years later. The intimal run of B2s was a mere 20 units. Modern military weapons system are low production items, hugely expensive, and virtually handbuilt, in small numbers, and are not suitable for mass production. So you don't need mass production factories.

Nationalize the transplant auto plants. Gee.

Embargoes hurt the embargoing country. Nobody can do that for very long.

No, it doesn't matter what you sell to someone else as long as you sell something you can make money on. But you can't make money on manufacturing the types of stuff you want to manufacture at the wages you want to pay.

Battleships have been obsolete for their primary role since the late

1930s. Why do you care whether you can build them or not?

So much for ISO 2000!

I'm just sure that a Stradivarius is a high volume sales item and essential to national defense.

No its not. That's why worldside wages are lower than what you want to pay.

No its doesn't. That's why natural wages for this work are lower than what you want to pay.

Then people had better adapt to reality.

You don't get that by subsidizing the types of work that **used** to be high paying jobs.

No its not, because those jobs don't pay anymore.

And so you shouldn't pay those people like they're doctors, etc.

Well, two points we agree on!

Headstart? Let's just look at GM. They've had 50 years to figure out how to build a small car. They tried the Corvair. It sold well for a couple of years then bombed. Don't blame Nadar. Go drive one.

Ten years later they tried the Vega. Nice looking, very heavy, cramped, and had a rattlely engine that toasted itself. Then we have the Chevette, which was an old European design modified for the US and was rear wheel drive. VW was already selling a roomier front drive car in the US, Chrysler had the similar layout Omni/Horizon two years later, Ford had the similar layout Escort three years after that, and GM **never did** build a small front drive car in the US. It then started buying its small cars from Suzuki etc and stuck its name on them.

Auto safety is not harder for large cars/trucks. All crash tests except one are performed against the vehicle's own weight, making vehicle size irrelevant. The side impact standard is against a fixed weight and so is more difficult for smaller cars.

Same old story that you're not going to give up on.

Which have been met successfully by the transplants.>have had a growing consumer manufacturing industry, too. But the greens were

Of what you've mentioned only air bags are required. You have bad info.

Do you know that large engines would have never had a chance to survive except by an interesting twist that in their natural state they burn cleaner than small engines? Has to do with the ratio of surface area to volume in the cylinders being lower. (And the reason the rotary engine is such a gross polluter in its natural state.)

Baloney. Aircraft and tanks have nothing to do with defending the US against terrorists.

If you want to defeat terror, you're gong to have to stop being afraid. Its the only way.

Terrorists never could destroy the US by their actions. Only Americans, by their reaction, could. Thank you President Bush!

Reply to
edward ohare
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Glad you mentioned that. I was puzzled at the Subaru TV ads touting that they don't have any facilities (I don't rememebr whether they said dealerships or manufacturing facilities) built on landfills. I've been wondering about that and why they would mention that in an ad. What's that all about. What's important about not building on landfills, or is that some politically correct B.S. to sound good to gullible consumers (although I still can't figure out the reason that that would necessarily be perceived as a good or a bad thing)?

Reply to
Bill Putney

That's where the plumber comes in. :)

Reply to
Bill Putney

However there are people who can't separate that real need from the false economy of the proverbial "broken window" scenario, to wit if some technology were developed that would preclude the necessity of painting the bridge (the effect being a contribution to the overall standard of living, i.e., nationally averaged same wages for less hours of work) would demand that the painting of the bridge continue so as to keep those jobs in the economy (union mentallity).

Reply to
Bill Putney

The thread is x-posted.

Reply to
Brent

If it's constitutional, then it isn't the same as organized crime. The reason that organized crime is crime is that it doesn't have the authority of the Constitution to legitimize it. I will leave it to you to determine if the taxation that our government does is authorized by the Constitution, but organized crime definitely lacks that legitmization.

Reply to
Bill Putney

Real wealth creation is in making things. Ultimately the ills of the economy rest on the fiat dollar, it's status as reserve currency, and the federal reserve system.

Government spending does not help the economy because government takes money from the private sector. Either it points it's gun at people and takes the money, it creates it, or it borrows it. In the first case people can no longer spend the money on the goods they want so the resources get misallocated by the political class. In the second case the savings of the people are diminished in value and they can buy less plus the misallocation. In the third case the money available for businesses to borrow shrinks. Government spending is good for those connected to the government and bad for everyone else.

The problem is that government sided with its friends and decided its friends could spew and dump their waste and harm other people's property. The current system only limits how much they can dump into the lakes, rivers, leach into other people's land, etc. This government granted privilege should not exist and a strict property rights interpetation should have been used from the get go. Businesses would have been forced to contain, treat, and dispose of the waste on their own property or forced to find another business to handle it.

The places with the weakest property rights have the most pollution time and time again.

The US automakers suffer more under the regulation because they are severely limited in behaving like global automakers. They can't just shift product from their factories around the world to make up for changes in the market quickly. For most import makes the US is their biggest market so they have been able to adjust their designs for US DOT requirements. They don't have to worry as much about the import and domestic CAFE split. They also don't have to deal with the UAW. Unlike the imports, the domestic manufacturers can't just make a new version of a car in their european or asian factory and send it to the US for sale.

The end result is that import makes can use their global resources much better than the domestic makes.

Irrelevant. If the US federal government wasn't interfering in other people's business around the world there would have been no attacks. Also if it wasn't for the US federal government's interference to benefit some connected businesses, set up managed trade (which is called 'free trade' in the media), and so on the market for US made goods would be far bigger.

No, the US government found a scape goat. It was home grown though, just probably not some lone nut.

Reply to
Brent

Which side are you arguing? :)

It might be interesting to know which services were cut. Maybe it was a good thing. And perhaps they cut good services and left some untouched that maybe should have been cut or eliminated.

Reply to
Bill Putney

Governments are either created by or become infested with criminal enterprises. The USC is unique in that this recognized when it was written so it is written as a limitation on government and designed to create infighting and make it as difficult as possible for criminal enterprises to take the whole thing over. It ultimately failed. Organized criminals use it in name only to conduct their buisness.

Reply to
Brent

Huh!? Please explain.

Reply to
Bill Putney

FWIW, according to the classic business school definition of creating wealth, wealth is created by one of 3 things: mining, growing, or making (manufacturing from what is mined or grown).

Reply to
Bill Putney

I'm in FL. Professors at state universities haven't had raises in years and have left, to move from places like coastal FL to the semi-rural south for more money.

Pinellas Bayway has two bridges. You can cross both for a 50 cent toll. The toll hasn't changed for 30+ years. The state dept of trans decided they needed to raise the toll so the bridges could be replaced. People griped. FDOT said no, we need the money. People griped some more and FDOT got over ruled.

FL Gov Charlie Crist is such a wimp he couldn't even get a sin tax past the talking stage... proposed an increase in the cigarette tax, which is a mere 39 cents. Backed down after a week.

Reply to
edward ohare

Like you, I just heard the ad. I assumed they wouldn't advertise it if it weren't true.

Subaru has some guillable customers. Take a look at their website for their explanation of why their flat four is superior to a V6 from a vibration standpoint. I know you're an auto guy. You'll have a good laugh. Those V6 powered cars must be a bear to even drive down the road straight! (If you believe their website.)

Reply to
edward ohare

There was - it's called hot-dip galvanizing I believe. ;-)

Of course! They would demand it because the color of the bridge is historically significant!!!! ;-)

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

If you repair a broken car that would otherwise be scrapped, your "making" a car from this definition, are you not?

After all your repairing the car is no different from a new car maker buying the scrap cars, melting them down and making new steel then making the cars from the steel.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

Anyone else got information or at least a theory on why it would be an evil thing to build on a landfill? I would have thought that would be considered a good thing by the greenies. But then again, you never can tell with them. You were the devil if you did a certain thing last week, but if you *don't* do that very same thing this week, you're now the devil. Windmills a good thing? Why certainly! Oh - wait - they kill birds, so now we can't have windmills.

I owned a 1986 Subaru turbo wagon as my daily driver and sold it running beautifully with the original engine and turbo unit with 275k miles on it. I can tell you that the flat H (known as the "boxer" design because the motion of the pistons and conn. rods resembles the motion of opposing boxers hands and arms) is unbelievably smooth.

You can understand why that is so. A V design has inherently unbalanced vector forces and impulses that could never be balanced out. I'm not saying that Subaru's description of that imbalance isn't exagerated, but they *don't* exagerate the inherent smoothness of the flat H design.

Reply to
Bill Putney

Oops - two g's in exaggerate.

Reply to
Bill Putney

Bill,

I'd suspect it is not possible to build on top of a closed landfill since the ground would constantly be shifting/sinking as the landfill's contents decomposed. I'd also suspect that the methane gas that was released as the stuff decomposed would be stifling. (Not particularly an attractive place to live or work, but on a positive note, if the gas could be harvested, the new owner could probably heat a structure from the methane produced there...

Bob

Reply to
Bob Shuman

They built a Walmart on a landfill hearbouts and have wells sunk to draw off the methane.

Reply to
WaIIy

OK - thanks Bob.

I guess it just begs the question of why someone who is buying a car cares whether the factory that built it is built on a landfill or not. People just seem to be nuts about the stupidest things sometimes.

Reply to
Bill Putney

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