One of the dumbest things I’ve seen in a long time
December 26th, 2008
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I don’t even know where to start on this. I read the this post on Slashdot, a website which has really really fallen badly from the days when it actually did appeal to nerds. I guess nerdism is not what it used to be, because now a days just being a CS major is enough to make you a nerd. It really shows. This is another topic entirely, but really the whole “nerd” mentality seems to be melting down. People these days call themselves nerds despite having neither a call sign nor a soldering iron.
Let me just point out the following:
1. Maglev trains have few advantages over conventional wheeled trains. Currently they can go marginally faster, but the cost of a maglev train is astronomical. They’re also not necessarily all that effecient because they require a lot of energy begin sent through a lot of magnetic coils. Unless those coils are cooled with something like liquid helium to allow them to function as superconductors the energy used is extremely high. Super conductor coils or miles of copper coils? Ridiculously expensive versus just insanely expensive.
2. China does have a commercial maglev train, yes this is true. It’s not very long. They say they want to expand it. Japan says they want to build one. Is this actually going to happen? Maybe or maybe not. You know why China built a maglev train? Because they could. They built something astronomically expensive and really cool with plenty of gee-wiz factor as a showpiece to the world. It’s just like the World’s Fair or the 1936 Olymics.
3. The US could not be layed out worse for railroad travel to be the major method of transport. The population distribution and geography make railroads good for short distance travel, freight and some regional use. Sure, railroads work great in the North East, but the idea that you could have the level of high speed rail travel of a small densely populated country like Japan is idiotic. High speed rail has its place, but it will never be enough to sustain GM or replace the automobile.
4. The car companies are not failing because they make big gas guzzling cars. They actually make those for a good reason: They can’t make a profit on small cars. The labor costs of US car companies are astronomically high, ridiculously high, crippling high. Their material costs are nominal and since labor costs per car are less on bigger cars, they can only generate a profit by selling fewer more expensive big cars that many small cars.
You know what caused this crisis? Here’s a good explaination.
The Unions seem to have no concept of reality. No company in the modern world offers all workers a pension, certainly not unskilled labor! Pensions pay people not to work. The cost is staggering. That’s why companies these days offer something like a 401(k) that they will help match WHILE YOU WORK. Pensions were acceptable when the average worker died shortly after retiring. These days UAW forces old standards on the big three and is sucking them dry.
Here’s a crazy idea: If you think your employer is not giving you fair benefits then GO GET A JOB ELSEWHERE. And if you can’t find someone who will employ you at the wage and benefit level you think you deserve, then maybe you need to take a long hard look at what your definition of “fair” is ajnd what you think you’re really entitled to versus what the fair market says.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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December 27th, 2008 at 12:22 am
The automobile will be the primary transportation system in North America for the foreseeable future, and any attempt to get rid of it is doomed to failure. The funny thing about the Slashdot post is the assumption high speed rail can replace cars when in fact it replaces short haul aviation. Public transit cannot be high speed in any case, simply because the distance between stops is too short.
Generally this personal vs public argument is an artificial issue – public transit will only grow when the market wants it to, it is that simple.
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December 27th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Free trade and good health and safety conditions/wages are incompatible.
Most Americans would probably like to eliminate the former, but their politicians are hell bent on eliminating the later.
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December 27th, 2008 at 1:40 am
Metatron said:
What on earth makes you think that you can’t have descent freedom while having good health and wages? I think the two are actually entirely dependent on that. I guess it depends on what you consider ‘free trade’ because I’ll be the first to agree we need some basic laws on commerce. Child labor laws, to prevent those too young to decide their own being taken advantage of is one example. There need to be laws that prevent practices that are outright dangerous or hazardous to the enviornment like dumping into rivers. We need to have laws to avoid fraud like telling workers you’ll pay them something and then paying them something else.
However if you think there’s some kind of necessity for legislation beyond that to control benefits, I disagree strongly. Nothing would be more powerful in dissuading me from ever considering opening a company in a given country.
DV82XL said:
Oh, I don’t know about that. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Boston but they have a great public transit system throughout the city and rail links to the local communities. It’s a popilation distribution that lends itself to that. Also, in cities where they have a subway it often is the fastest way to get around.
I could see public transit having room to grow in a few areas. The problem though is you really need to have a very extensive and well serviced system before people will start using it.
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December 27th, 2008 at 2:02 am
An Actual Scientist said:
I live in Boston’s French-Canadian cousin, Montreal, (ask anyone that knows both cities) and we do have a subway system liked with commuter trains from the burbs, and with all the local bus companies linked with a single pass system that serves the whole region. My statement was not a criticism of the utility of public transit. However it is somewhat simplistic to believe that the only thing that keeps people from using it is its penetration.
This ‘build it and they will come mantra’ that is taken as given just doesn’t happen and won’t until the costs of owning and operating an automobile rise past the point where it outweighs the convenience, and flexibility of the car and we still have a long way to go before that happens.
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December 27th, 2008 at 2:03 am
There is room for improvement on the rail transport system but current regulations prevent anything major from happening. High speed rail is a great way to get from New York to Philly or from Tampa to Atlanta, but the way the system is set up Amtrak has a monopoly on interstate passenger rail and the government subsidizes Amtrak and makes them serve all markets. Idiotic. The passenger rail system works well for regional stuff, but Amtrak is forced to maintain totally unprofitable runs like NYC to California and can’t focus on the ones that have a good shot.
Even worse, the mainlines are not apt to upgrade their track for higher speeds because it would make depreciated equipment suddenly become a more taxable asset.
IMHO, the bigger future is in high speed freight. By high speed I mean like 75 mph and especially freight in containers. The railroad can ship a truckload faster and cheaper than a truck and they should be able to compete more with trucking for long-haul or even delivery stuff, and take it for at least part of the trip, but the regulations now are not prone to promiting small unit fright.
Also, big speed reduction comes from the thousands of multi-mile long coal trains moving around at 30 mph which is an issue for shipping that can compete with trucks. I think the railroads are happy with the continuous income from coal though.
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December 27th, 2008 at 2:24 am
In some countries they have a very good system of truck to rail transport where rail is used for long distance freight and then the freight goes on a truck for the last mile. The sad truth of the matter is that our system is not designed for that and most freight customers are not shipping a single container but many of them. It would be nice if stuff like UPS packages and grocery store food was actually shipped by train a bit more often. In France the TVG is actually used for high speed freight but in North America too much of the railroad is dedicated to hauling coal and/or bulk stuff like minerals or chemicals and there’s zero incentive to add more passing zones in the rail system.
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December 27th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Does anyone honestly think the maglev in China was built because of its utility as a transport mode?
It goes from the international airport to the financial center of the most internationally visited city in the country and the same city that hosted the Olympics. It is so blatantly obvious in every way that it exists to wow the international visitor. How the hell often does the average Chinese need to get from the financial center to the airport? It’s super high tech and super fast and super impressive and it is there becasue China has always been a third world country full of dirty factories and an oppressive government and the one thing they want international visitors to see is an amazingly sleak and clean maglev.
Anyone who thinks that is not its primary purpose has just fallen entirely into what China hoped they would. It’s so obvious. Maglev might be good in the future for some things, but instead of cars????? PLEASE GIVE ME A BREAK!
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December 27th, 2008 at 2:40 am
There is nothing wrong with high speed rail and maybe we’ll end up seeing more in North America. That does not change the fact that the linked to post reaks of green lies and is basically another one of the new communist ideas for government backing of everything combined with this idea that ‘no, things are different now. we won’t live in that way anymore. people are all changing’
Bull**** anyway
Slashdot has fallen badly. It’s full of idiots. I don’t read it anymore. It’s just for IT people really, which can be nerdy and everything but you’re right that it is no longer the relhm of nerds. As it as gone mainstream the quality has dropped. Too many people think they’re a techie because they bought a nintendo shirt at Hot Topic.
Too bad there aren’t more communities for people who actually know what they’re talking about in general.
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December 27th, 2008 at 4:13 am
DV82XL said:
I think one factor that the anti-car lobby overlooks is that people like the privacy that cars provide.
An Actual Scientist said:
What’s the point of having a minimum wage (or any other law to protect workers) when employers can circumvent it either by moving the work to a cheap-labour hellhole, or by using illegal immigrant workers who dare not complain to the authorities?
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December 27th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
There are other technical and political issues that work against the adoption of high speed rail in North America. The first being that it is problematic to combine slow freight and fast passenger on the same road. First there is scheduling, the freighters can’t move to the slow lane to let the faster train pass. Then there is banking on curves. Optimal banking for fast light traffic would cause slow heavy cars to tip and fall off.
The other problem that turns up is one that has plagued various attempts to operate a high speed link between Montreal and Toronto up here in Canada. The towns in between start pushing for stops and ultimately this impacts the total time between centers to the point where it is no longer competitive with taking a car. It’s not for lack of trying; they have run turbine powered trains, (The Turbo) high-speed light trains (The Rapido) and now the LRC that has a banking system that compensates for the centrifugal force created when rounding turns, on that corridor and still there isn’t any big advantage to using the service.
In other words it’s not just a matter of building rolling-stock, the whole system would have to be built from the ground up, and that is not going to happen.
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December 27th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
An Actual Scientist said:
Only when you try to compete with countries that don’t have child labour laws, environmental regulations, health and safety laws, etc., you find that you can’t do that. In the 1960s(during the time of Apollo and other good things) the US had a $60-$70/h median wage for industrial workers(adjusted for inflation of course) and some pretty high tarrifs. They were doing pretty well. Then the “free trade” ideology came in and now the “business leaders” are saying that Americans need to work and earn like Chinese to be “competitive”. 100 years of improved labour conditions down the drain.
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December 27th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
DV82XL said:
There are many such problems with the high speed train used in the US. Currently Amtrak has the Accella which is a high speed link that goes from Boston to Providence to New Haven to New York City to Philadelphia to Washington DC.
The Acela has been reasonably successful as it runs on the one leg of the system, known as the main northeast corridor that can generate a profit because it’s popular and has a lot of traffic. The line is advertised as being the fastest method of traveling city to city, because it gets you to the city center, which they claim is faster than air travel when you account for the airport taxis, bag checks and everything, even though the actual flight would be shorter.
Like I said, the train is reasonably successful, but it does have issues. For one thing, the tracks are cluttered by lower speed passenger trains and even worse freight. The northeast corridor has a lot of track that is exclusively for passenger rail, but not quite enough to make it a complete run.
The track was never really intended for such high speeds. Thus the train needs to tilt, which is technically challenging. They had to modify the track a lot to get the train to run at high speed. All the grade crossings have been removed in favor of over or underpasses – extremely expensive.
Then the other thing is that the train can’t run at high speeds in all situations. The town I live in, for example, the train has to go through the small commuter train station which is just a platform next to the rail. It slows down for areas like this, because it would be dangerous for people to be standing on a platform with no clearance from the track while a massive train blows through at 125 mph. The wind and noise alone would be an issue.
They’re working on improving it – but it’s an evolutionary thing, not revolutionary. It’s a problem.
The sad thing is that as things stand the trip from Boston to NYC on the high speed train is about three and a half hours. The same trip on the standard Northeast Regional is a little over four hours. Not that much of a savings of time. Of course, it’s more time saved if you go longer distances. However, the problem is that despite being totally capable of going 120 mph, the train goes much slower than that for a large portion of the trip.
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December 27th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
What you’ve just said there reminds me very much of British express trains (which also run at about 125 mph). The true high-speed railways found in France and Japan run on specially-built high-speed tracks, with little or no other traffic.
How did the Japanese (with a similar population density to England and much worse terrain) ever manage to build the Shinkansen lines without ruinous expense? Do they have less NIMBY problems than the English-speaking countries (due to their more collectivist culture)?
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December 27th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
George Carty said:
The Japanese did not really have the problem of integrating new systems into existing infrastructure or the problems with clearing the way for new routes. The US went ahead and…. cleared all the old stuff out of the way for them.. they had a clean slate.. except for a bit of rubble.
Seriously though, there’s a strange benefit to cities that have been bombed to rubble: They don’t have to deal with the patchwork of infrastructure, right of ways, legacy systems and alike that cities that have been built over the course of centuries do.
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December 27th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
George Carty said:
drbuzz0 said:
The other thing too is that English-speaking cultures take a really dim view of eminent domain, and any government that has the temerity to exercise it. In fact in some parts of the U.S., the UK., Canada and Australia too much of it could come close to touching off a civil war. (ya, I’m exaggerating, but not by much)
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December 27th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
DV82XL said:
That’s true too. Eminent domain is somewhat tolerated in the US for infrastructure, but it gets steep resistance. The big thing in the US is that when eminant domain is used to take property there’s usually a high price paid for it. If the price is not more than fair then it will easily become a lawsuit.
In general, it could be used to clear right of ways, but the strong property rights advocacy in the US will tend to make it at best very expensive.
I think as things stand, it is possible and reasonable in the US to do some expansion, like widen curves and such by taking land, but the amount of land needed to completely build a new system would be unreasonable.
In Japan, the Shinkansen bullet train system was built starting in the mid 1950’s and that was truely the height of reconstruction of the country. I really think that is the main thing that made it possible. The country was already in a major clearing and building phase and people accepted government land development because it was a necessity given the condition of the infrastructure.
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December 27th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
More evidence that we are way behind in lithium storage technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_F3DM
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December 28th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Ken said:
How does that put us behind? The lithium ion storage technology in that car is not anything that is not available elsewhere and the US has actually done some of the pioneering research in that area.
The battery they’re using in that car is actually a bit problematic. It has lifespan issues and is also prone to failure from overcharging due to failed charge controllers. It’s likely the lifespan of the battery will be a big issue with a car like that. The US next generation hybrids are on track and so are the Japanese ones.
BYD Auto also has a dubious reputation when it comes to quality control and safety of their vehicles. I would not be so quick to judge this as a triumph as of yet.
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December 28th, 2008 at 10:44 am
drbuzz0 said:
Only in the circles that you’ll find in the windmills of Ken’s mind.
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December 28th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Actually lithium ion batteries, despite having some very high effeciency have some major issues for automobile use. The company Tesla motors is one of the furthest in the high tech lithium cells, but they have had a lot of issues. The battery packs they currently use can be limited to a life span of less than two years because rapid charging does a number on the cells and the charge control of so many cells, since they’re usually small, is a huge issue because they are easily burned out.
It might be a little premature to be building a production fully Li-Ion battery car for the general market. Some of the new nickle metal hydrate cells are getting really good and the zebra batteries are approaching the energy storage of lithium batteries but they have a theoretical lifetime of up to decades.
Lets just say I’m skeptical of whether BYD’s vehicle is all it’s cracked up to be for long term viability.
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December 28th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
A couple of comments;
The Tokaido Shinkansen happened because Shinji Sogo wanted it, got the right job(head of JNR), at the right time and was willing to cajole, browbeat, humiliate, and be what in Japan was considered being terribly obnoxious to get it done. He built a handpicked engineering team, beg borrowed or lied to get the funds and was known in JNR as “Old man thunder.” The book of the same title makes interesting reading.
http://www.amazon.com/Old-Man-Thunder-Father-Bullet/dp/0965958000/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230521192&sr=8-1
Also, GM has been building railroad Locomotives for almost as long as they have been building cars. that doesn’t mean that they could do any better making trains in the future as cars now. The problem has never been that GM can’t make stuff. Or any of the other big three automakers. The problem is that they have been forced by the UAW to have a dinosaur fascistic business model, that only had viability for a short time in the middle of the last century. The management of GM commissioned a study on how Toyota operates as compared to themselves in the Eighties and had it published as a book. The study pointed out that the problems the automakers were having were cultural and could not be improved by trying to improve the systems without dealing with the internal culture.
Finally I’ve posted this link before, but I think that the old Westinghouse factory before unions looks a lot like that Ford plant in Brazil:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/papr/west/westhome.html
http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1189
One thing is that both places seem to be much better workplaces than I’ve heard of any union shop being.
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December 29th, 2008 at 12:38 am
I’m not a huge fan of unions per se, I’ve worked in both types of place and the presence and attitudes of the union is only one of several equally important cultural aspects of a business. Large concerns also suffer from the Peter Principal, where in people are promoted to the individuals level of incompetence, generalized myopia, and indifferent ownership as much as they suffer from greedy unions. Unions just happen to be a convenient whipping boy when things go sour.
North American manufacturing is doing the same slow suicide by arrogance that British manufacturing inflicted on itself in the Post War period, and it’s going to suffer the same fate if it doesn’t stop looking for scapegoats and faces up to new realities. And that will have to be from the shop floor to the head office.
Workers have been de-skilled. MIS systems have been used instead of leadership, customers are considered suckers, companies futures are stripped to squeeze out a last dividend or stock rally so the CEO can get an obscene bonus and move on to his next victim, and so on and so on. Don’t tell me when you have leveraged out every last nickel of your companies credit and have nothing in the way of production tools or inventory to show for it, that your unions are all to blame.
This is the same as saying the only ones to blame for the credit crises were the stupid people that maxed out their credit cards and took out mortgages they couldn’t pay, and try to claim that it was the lenders who were victimized. In all of these cases it took two to dance.
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December 29th, 2008 at 12:50 am
There are a lot of recurrent problems that I’ve seen in big companies that end up going down the tubes. I do not like unions at all, and they are a problem but I’ve seen some others that stick out in my mind.
One big issue I’ve seen has been trying to shave costs by reducing features or specs of a product. That’s a valid business decision to a point, but eventually quality suffers enough to drive customers away. I think it’s possible to push the valid concept of building something as efficiently as possibly too far. Eventually you reduce the materials and construction to the point where the failure point is a razor thin margin away.
I’ve seen many examples. Palm, for example. Palm has had horrible leadership, terrible software support, an old operating system and so on. However, one thing that sticks out in my mind is when they produced a new product, the Treo 700p, they gave it 32 megabytes of storage space. This is not nearly enough to really store what is needed internally. The rational was expense – storage chips are an expensive part of the phone. They saved a few bucks on each unit by not putting in more.
The problem with this s that despite saving a few bucks on each unit, many customers were very dissatisfied. This combined with other lacking of features made people leave. They were willing to pay more for other manufacturers who put more into their products.
Also, my family used to have a Zenith television back in the 1990’s. It conked out with a blown tube after a few years. Before throwing it out I opened it up and was pretty disgusted with the quality of the internals. It was obvious the components were very very cheap and shotty. The wiring was all very narrow gauge with almost no insulation on it, the circuit board was just barely sitting in the chassis.
There’s a such thing as overbuilding a product. There’s also a such thing as underbuilding a product.
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December 29th, 2008 at 5:47 am
One question to all the anti-union people:
Why do you believe that it is a good thing when capitalists join forces (in corporations) but a bad thing when workers join forces (in unions)?
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December 29th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
George Carty said:
Corporations can be overbearing too, but they have much more regulation and competition. The primary difference is that unions can get a monopoly that allows them to dictate the terms of employment.
The laws are very pro-union. They basically stop companies from avoiding union workers and allow unions to do things like charge all workers dues even if the worker does not want to be part of the union. In many cases they deny workers the right to act as free agents and negotiate aside from the union. The kind of contracts that they’re able to get the companies to sign really make them locked into things.
This is in part the fault of the company for signing into these contracts, but they don’t always have a lot of choice. The laws allow the unions to often dictate the terms. Companies are forbidden from discriminating against unions so if union workers want something that companies don’t think is fair, they can’t just say screw you, we’ll find others to work here.
The big difference is that if GM wants to charge ridiculous prices for a car, I don’t have to buy it. I can buy a Chrysler or a Ford or a Toyota or I could even buy really old car from a junk yard and restore it off-frame.
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December 29th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Part of the problem is reasonable unions, and responsible corporations don’t get a lot of press. There are cases where unions have taken deep cuts to bail their company out, and corporations have gone the extra mile for the communities they are sited in by that sort of thing rarely gets on the evening news.
Having said that, unions are swiftly becoming anachronisms that have outlived their usefulness, and their reason to exist, but then again the same might be said of the mega corporation.
Its been said that a major economic collapse is like a forest fire; much is destroyed but it prepares the ground for fresh new growth. I doubt that ether of these two institutions will be recognizable when we reach the other side of current events.
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December 29th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
My take is that unions for the most part have their hearts in the right place, but have a lot of their strategies wrong.
Case in point: A friend of mine got a job at Great Lakes Steel, and related to me that it was the union that was responsible for making acceptance of overtime a condition of employment. Unions have also been known to oppose labor saving automation.
I believe the problem is to a large extent the division-of-labor paradigm itself. It has made possible almost all of the standard of living we have, but at a cost when carried too far. Back when 90% of the population produced food for a living, at least people had a firm grasp on what it took to produce a loaf of bread. Nowadays, people have lost the grasp on what it takes to produce even their own company’s products. So we have people trying in panic to protect their own niches at the expense of each other, and calling for public policies that must fail to produce any improvement of conditions.
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December 29th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I can give you an example of a union activity that I found absolutely reprehensible – absolutely unacceptable and disgusting.
The New York MTA Transit Workers’ Union went on strike a couple of years ago after talks for a new labor contract stalled. This caused the shutdown of the New York Subway and almost all city buses – the only ones being the exception were a few operated on contract with private companies that were not unionized.
For one thing the strike was illegal. Courts had ordered that the union not strike because it was a vital public transit system and the strike would pose significant harm to security and commerce. They did anyway. The union president ended up going to jail – it was a slap on the wrist though, it was just a few days or something and he used the opportunity to grandstand about how he was fighting for the workers.
Fighting for the workers? The strike was not against people like JP Morgan and Andrew Carnagie in their big padded offices. This was not a strike against consolidated steel. Millions of New Yorkers couldn’t get to work. Tourists didn’t come to the city because of the strike and it was the holiday season. Everyone from the guy who plays violin in the subway station to the people who ran gift shops in Chinatown bled over this. It made everyone’s lives a living hell in the city.
So what was the strike over?
First of all, they wanted a pay raise. These unskilled workers were already being paid more than most teachers in New York City. They also were up in arms over plans to cut the workforce for certain jobs. New York City had plans to get rid of most of the signal workers over the next twenty years by putting in a system that would be safer, cheaper and more effecient – a fully computerized system that would remove most manual signalling.
Think about the gal there. They think they’re so entitled to their jobs even if they are no longer needed that they want the jobs kept instead of a cheaper and safer system. Those who would be cut would have been offered more than fair compensation in terms of severance, early retirement packages and so on. Do they think the system exists for no reason than to give them jobs? Do they expect vacuum tube changers to keep their jobs even when progress makes their position obsolete?
The union claimed they were working with the city and had made some very reasonable concessions. They conceded that they would allow the retirement age to be raised from 60 to 62. 62?!?!?! How about 65??? That’s generally the standard retirement age. Hell, plenty of people retire at 68 or 70 if they’re in a job that doesn’t require any heavy lifting.
The trems of the contract the city offered were more than fair, especially considering the MTA was in terrible financial shape. By 2005 they had spent tremendous amounts of money on the rebuilding of the entire Cortland Street connection and the Liberty Street and South Ferry stations after September 11th and had also spent a lot of money on the upgrades to the security on the system. If there was ever a time that the system could be forgiven for being in bad debt it was after the reconstruction.
Anyway, due to this strike and other strong armed tactics, the MTA ended up having to pay the transit workers and give them compensation greater than almost any other unskilled city workers or general labor. Someone who repairs buses gets paid way more than they could ever make in a private diesel garage. Someone who repairs subway tracks actually gets more than a city worker with a similar job description who repairs potholes and bridges – just because they’re not in the same union and thus the same contract. Many police officers get less compensation.
This also means that jobs with the transit authority are almost impossible to get – at least the fully unionized ones. The contract is so generous there’s almost no turnover and to get the jobs you need to have connections to get in.
Worst of all, the fares for busses and subways have been hiked more than the city wanted to try to compensate for the benefits. The city still has to subsidize the system and bleeds on every train and bus, but the increase in fair is an attempt to get something back. The fair went up something like a dollar in the past two years. That’s actually quite a bit to those who ride it every day and don’t have much money to begin with.
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June 6th, 2009 at 10:08 am
When US car companies started running into problems, why did no major politicians suggest “ban foreign cars” as the solution?
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June 6th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
George Carty said:
I’m not sure. Possibly the fear of a trade war? In any case, I don’t think that’s really the problem that caused the car situation in the US. The automakers hit hard times for a number of reasons, not the least of which includes their financing situation. They all had big stakes in the moneymarket system that was destroyed by the bond collapse. There is also the fact that it’s astronomically expensive to manufacture cars in the US.
The US car makers are not (normally) entirely supported by the government like European makers are and they don’t have a free labor force like in Asia, so that makes things difficult.
The government is making things much much worse since it started exerting so much control on things.
Everyone seems to think that the problem is that these companies are making big cars and not little “green” cars. That’s bull****. Even if the market for big expensive cars has shrunk, the profit margin on them is huge, so only a small number need to be sold to get a descent return. Small cars are very difficult to make a profit on and damn near impossible in the US manufacturing system. They require a huge turnout and a huge initial investment.
We went through this same idiocy before, where it was thought that car makers needed to make “small” and “Green” cars that are “affordable” and “smart.” It damn near ruined us the first time, but after enough Gremlins fell apart and Pintos exploded eventually the industry came to realize that this was not how to do things. It took most of the 1980’s to get things back on track and now this again…
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