The usual behaviour is for the larger, more established company to rest on its laurels until it's far too late to re-establish their position in a given market. Think North American auto industry, IBM in the PC world, Lotus and Borland in PC software and a host of other examples.
What's interesting about this is the peek inside Yahoo! while all this was happening and the illusions they were under as to what it is they did that made them the market leader.
If I thank Google for much of anything other than search it was a few years of peace and quiet from banner ads everywhere, though they're making a comeback which means it's time to crank up AdBlock Pro again on a lot of sites that are littered with the damned things. I'll watch TV if I want to see bad singing, dancing, leaping ads thank you.
"copyleft" is a term coined by Richard Stallman to describe the purpose of the General Public License and it's successors and out growths such as the Lesser General Public Library.
To those that have extended it as you describe they have either misunderstood that copyleft, in the software sense, is a copyright license not a total abandonment of IP.
The ecosystem it's created does share the resulting tools of production such as the GCC compiler, various other tools such as GREP, editors such as vi and emacs and much much more.
Stallman, by the way, is very careful not to use the phrase open source as he prefers "free software".
That the ecosystem gave birth to Linux, among other things, (remember linux is the kernel not the distro) doesn't mean it can be extended easily to other areas where real property is concerned.
The bail out happened because the stock market would have sunk even further if it happened and that wouldn't have helped the banks that government(s) had already bailed out one little bit.
"more money to the train system when they could innovate to compete with cars and airplanes."
Just a minor point here, though I'm no defender of railways. Car/truck transportation out competed rail, in many cases. because the roadbed that they used was "free" while railways paid for theirs maintenance and all.
Well we do pay for our roads and highways in our taxes remember that there's an unholy screech when jurisdictions propose tolling those roadways or part of them to pay for a part of the maintenance or construction costs. Rail pays for it all themselves.
As for continental Europe after World War II there was precious little left of public or private highways and railways in Germany, France, The Netherlands, Italy, Greece, The Balkans or Poland and Czechoslovakia. The occupiers and governments of the day got to build new and better of both. North Americans built roads, the English neither built roads or upgraded rail and we know about what happened in England by the 1960s up the that awful woman Thatcher. Japan got the same advantages as continental Europe because they got hammered from the air as well.
In some respects the United States is playing catch up now in terms of passenger rail. (Canada never will, sadly, until we're forced into it.) Like interstates it'll be expensive but, I rather suspect, in the end, it'll be worth it.
Until recently the notion of trains competing with air would have been laughable but with recent improvements in rail bed and laying technologies as well as efficiencies in electrified rail for inter city use it's quite possible.
Funny how the experience is different, often, in different plants as for as how the work force is organized, isn't it?
The union plants in Canada did the exact opposite of what you're portaying and for a while it worked, the plants were "nimble" but were still hopelessly outdated and they're gone.
There's one thing missing in your rant about workplace organization and that's the employer had to agree to these conditions, most of which were in place prior to unionization occurring, thanks to a fantasy known as "scientific management."
My point is less how the workplace is organized (union or non union, work rule obessed or not) it remains that as long as the formerly big steel companies made money hands over fist for years while the dominated the world industry with out a penny of reinvestment. What clearly illustrates that point is that both union and non union plants and companies went down.
It's equally true that as the industry has reappeared it has done so in specialty areas, in brand new plants and new work processes (heaven forbid we call them rules anymore!) whether the employ union workers, non union or a mixture. And it's thrived.
"the dark ages show what happens when you don't bother to save any industry."
Huh? Let's have a look at this, shall we, the technologies available to Rome continued to exist in Western and Central Europe for some time after the last group of "barbarians" to angrily visit it decided all it was good for was sacking and leveling.
Western and Central Europe quickly fractured into small, often tiny, Kingdoms which couldn't support the "industries" if they'd wanted to, which they often did. In short, while Rome had over extended itself and bankrupted itself paying for wars on credit, the size of the western empire still supported such industry.
The common thread here is that all that was lost when Rome itself fell and the "barbarians" took over.
Part of the Roman Empire fell. The western part. The Eastern Empire continued to exist and, largely, prosper for close to another thousand years and develop and extend the technologies and markets the west couldn't or had forgotten because they were of no use anymore. They continued trade with asia and the far east as they had for centuries before. As Islam rose Byzantium traded knowledge and with them as well. After western "christians" sacked Constantinople in a crusade, Byzantium exported what written Greek culture it had left east with Islam because they no longer felt it was safe with them. (Seriously compressed, btw).
"Unfortunately, there are many important trades that are being less valued by society than entertainment." This has been true, I suspect, since the dawn of human kind. We crave entertainment and distraction from the grind of daily life. The more technically proficient and wealthy we become the more we seem to need it and seek it out.
Keep in mind that we are not creatures of economics, economics is a creature of humanity. Should we vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow so would economics. Hard science wouldn't, it would grind on as it alway has. Social "sciences" including economics would vanish with us.
I hate to tell you this that the first store that starts to use RFID that I shop at will lose my business right there and then.
That said, he does say that technological change does create new pitfalls and opportunities. And it is highly disruptive. My trade, for example, has moved from being primarily manual to overwhelmingly mental in the 35 years I've done it. I'm now what you call a knowledge worker or techologist. Mind you the manual part of the job is still there and still necessary but it's not the whole thing.
Voice recognition, as I said is an order of millions of times more difficult to handle with rule based programming, and all of it is at one stage or another, because human language like the creature that uses it changes contanstantly.
English, in spite of efforts to enforce such things as "proper" grammar and "real" words changes yearly on an order of half a million words, according to the OED, a few of which stay in use long enough to actually get included in the global edition. Slang changes more frequently and often. The list of definitions for words in English lengthens daily. Inflection changes meaning. Word order changes meaning sometimes drastically. In English, in comparison to Romance languages and the Germanic languages from which it came, word order is of ultimate importance because you can change meaning in ways those languages can't by a combination of word order AND inflection.
English speakers handle all this with ease. I'm not sure a computer can when part of the inflection, in English, may also be the tone of voice and the expression on the speakers face.
Take a simple phrase. Two one syllable words which can drastically change meaning depending on how it's said and the tone of voice and expression. "Fuck you". Beyond that I don't think I need to point out that if it's said with a smile and light tone of voice it means something else than said another way. Emphasize the first word with the smile and light tone of voice it's light joking banter. Said the same way with emphasis on the second word it's still in the same ball park but often as a warning the listener they've gotten to close to crossing a line. Things are ok but it's still time to back off a little. Said with an angry tone of voice and with the emphasis on the second word you've definitely cross the line Expression has changed to angry but is still several steps from hostile. Said louder and still angrily with the emphasis on the second word the expression is likely to be angry bordering on rage. Said with emphasis on both words sound is more rage filled bordering on hostile and you need the clue of facial expression to fill it on. Loudly with emphasis on both words a native English speaker knows full well that either the fight is on or it's time to apologize and slink off. The expression is the last factor here if it's rage and hostility then there's usually not much choice in the matter unless you grovel.
Worse are languages in the Chinese group of languages including Japanese where inflection and darned near everything including meaning with facial expression filling in what's left over.
Have a storage medium the size of the moon to store all that always changing data on?
At the moment, as I said, voice recognition technology is barely able to understand small phrases said with flat intonation in "standard" English (whatever the hell that is) and not much else.
I don't think that will change in my lifetime or that of my child's.
The problem is that humans are comfortable with natural language not constructs that program designers would need to impose. That's been reinforced repeatedly over time, particularly with English speakers who resent and repel almost all attempts to standardize the language. Humans are, bless us, irrational and emotional not logical results of if/then/else constructs.
Of all the things he talks about voice recognition is by far the hardest thing to do _and_ get right. In the English speaking world considering that a person from the countryside in Yorkshire or Cornwall has problems being understood by other English speakers as do people from some areas of the United States and Canada. Then there's the Caribbean, Australasia, Africa and all the ESL people from the rest of the world. (Chinlish or Japlish anyone?) THEN take into account local slang that a native English speaker has a chance of figuring out when it's heard in context. I don't know of a "successful" voice recognition program that can do all of that or one that can understand more than a few words spoken in preprogrammed phrases in the correct accent and delivery.
Anyway, these days the accent at the other end of the phone is more likely to be Phillipine than India. Call centres in India are getting too expensive cause people with actual brain cells can make more money, more easily elsewhere in India now. ;-)
I'd go look at your history again. Rome no more had a free market (no ancient economy did) than Stalinist Russia or Maoist China did. Rome's bureaucrats controlled, as best they could in the time, production of most everything Rome itself needed and to hell with the rest of the Empire. Everything was aimed at feeding, housing, watering and weaponry that Rome needed.
From a military perspective Rome didn't fall because of outsourcing their defense "industry" than they did by loose discipline, the employment of too many mercenaries who had no real interest in defending Rome itself, Rome's complete inability to respond to "pagan" (in the ancient sense rather than popular sense today) and "barbarian" adaptations of new or improved technology and the simple reason that it was costing far too much money for Rome to continue to hold onto everything.
And we tend to forget that when Rome itself fell the Empire continued to exist for another thousand years in the East with the capital city of Constantinople by and large because they did make military adaption, were more efficient administrators and, to a small degree, the adaptation of an early form of something we'd recognize as free markets.
"Much of the demand has shifted to overseas maekets where workers are willing to work fo less pay leading to cheaper steel."
Surely you mean must of the _supply_ has shifted, right?
By and large it had nothing whatever to do with the workers that markets moved off shore as much as it did with the reality that steel makers in North America never reinvested in their businesses to update and modernize plants something the Japanese did and still do. Chinese plants are brand spanking new with all the bells and whistles. Same for plants in India.
I have to admit I get tired of workers getting the blame for this and that (code for unions, far too often) while mostly it was aging plants and a lack of innovation from the companies themselves rather than overpaid or lazy workers. Both union and non union plants in North America have gone down so "workers" hasn't been the problem. Cost per unit because of old, outdated plants was much more the problem.
The companies that still make steel in North America, and there are more than a few of them, are the ones who reinvested in plants, became nimble and able to shift product production in specialty products at the relative "blink of an eye". There's actually no one better at that kind of thing as Americans and Canadians, the border doesn't really exist for steel any more than it does for automotive products, regardless of the pay of the "workers" so we're world beaters as far as those products are concerned. North America is also the leading economy in terms of recycling and reuse of steel.
So yeah, bulk steel production has moved off shore but the value added steel industry still exists here. Maybe not so much in Pittsburgh and Hamilton, ON anymore but it's still here. But bulk steel is a commodity now whereas specialty steel is where the real money is.
While I'm somewhat tempted to agree with you, let's have a look at the reasons for the bailouts of GM and Chrysler again.
In GM's case it's fairly easy to tell or see what happened in the last 20 years. The quality of the end product went down the toilet, by and large, which meant that potential customers, both individuals and fleet buyers, looked twice before purchasing and often went elsewhere. They built and promoted the hell out of gas guzzlers which didn't hurt until the price of fuel went through the roof again and then it did. They were glacially slow in decision making and reacting to the market.
Chrysler hasn't quite decided what it wants to be when it grows up. That's half it's problem there. It's had one "hit" in the last two decades, the PT Cruiser, and nothing else of note. Daimler's ownership was a bit of a disaster.
Ford, on the other hand, from the late 90s till now aggressively addressed it's problems with quality, style, model selection and so on. Now it's turning a profit and you'd be hard pressed to find a better built or engineered vehicle.
All had self-inflicted cost issues which they've addressed if not solved under government pressure finding the UAW and CAW much easier to deal with than they imagined on these issues. (Hint to employers. Open the books, don't plead poverty -- show it and the unions will react much more pleasantly than you think.)
Parts suppliers also serve manufacturers such as Honda, Toyota, Volvo and other auto makers not normally seen as North American though they build here so if GM or Chrysler went down Ford would have survived nicely.
That leads to this: don't confuse the auto industry in North America with The (no longer so) Big Three because it hasn't been that in quite some time. If they'd died, unlikely, the jobs would have appeared elsewhere as other manufacturers would have taken up the slack because their domestic markets would have grown.
On a personal note, late last fall I bought a new pickup. The order I looked at them was Ford, Dodge, GM, Toyota, Honda. Honda dropped out almost immediately because I didn't like the look or practicality of the vehicle, Toyota was/is overpriced which left the Big Three. With GM I wasn't impressed with the Siverado's build and fit though I admit to looking at it with a jaundiced eye which left Ford and Dodge. All other things being equal, and they were, the decider was safety and one other thing -- which trucks were still out there on the road and being used as work trucks after, oh, say 30 years. More Fords than you can shake a stick at, a good representation of Dodges though nowhere near as many and you can't see a Chev or GMC out there much more than 20 years old more than likely 10. Ford got the deal on safety and the fact the I just liked the model I got more than any Dodges I saw.
What I'm saying is that the automotive sector didn't need "saving" as much as GM and Chrysler did. If they'd gone belly up the market would have ensured that something took their place. More than likely Toyota, Honda, Ford and maybe Volvo, to name but 4 companies as well as, I suspect, a North American based company out of the ashes of GM and Chrysler.
There are ethical reasons why a doctor or psychologist would not record and store an interview with a patient just to reveal it later. Among them having had doctor/patient confidentiality, which we all take for granted, blown out of the water.
Then I wouldn't tell my shrink any more about my kinky sexual fantasies about a teddy bear, dawn detergent and....
There'd be no need or requirement for "cease and desist orders" of it was open source.
Anyway, it would have been something on the order of a copy of Myst if it had been open source programmers working on open source software. Why waste your time on PacMan?
The sad thing is that yes, these groups are more than willing to exploit already exploited children for their own ends.
What's just as sad here are the attempts a being funny, fob it off or basically agree with them (yeah I'm speaking to you the first AC on the list). And TV shows.
It is long past time they were called on it. Long past.
On the post: Why Big Companies Almost Never Notice Disruptive Innovation
Re:
The usual behaviour is for the larger, more established company to rest on its laurels until it's far too late to re-establish their position in a given market. Think North American auto industry, IBM in the PC world, Lotus and Borland in PC software and a host of other examples.
What's interesting about this is the peek inside Yahoo! while all this was happening and the illusions they were under as to what it is they did that made them the market leader.
If I thank Google for much of anything other than search it was a few years of peace and quiet from banner ads everywhere, though they're making a comeback which means it's time to crank up AdBlock Pro again on a lot of sites that are littered with the damned things. I'll watch TV if I want to see bad singing, dancing, leaping ads thank you.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
To those that have extended it as you describe they have either misunderstood that copyleft, in the software sense, is a copyright license not a total abandonment of IP.
The ecosystem it's created does share the resulting tools of production such as the GCC compiler, various other tools such as GREP, editors such as vi and emacs and much much more.
Stallman, by the way, is very careful not to use the phrase open source as he prefers "free software".
That the ecosystem gave birth to Linux, among other things, (remember linux is the kernel not the distro) doesn't mean it can be extended easily to other areas where real property is concerned.
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re:
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re:
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re: Railways?
Just a minor point here, though I'm no defender of railways. Car/truck transportation out competed rail, in many cases. because the roadbed that they used was "free" while railways paid for theirs maintenance and all.
Well we do pay for our roads and highways in our taxes remember that there's an unholy screech when jurisdictions propose tolling those roadways or part of them to pay for a part of the maintenance or construction costs. Rail pays for it all themselves.
As for continental Europe after World War II there was precious little left of public or private highways and railways in Germany, France, The Netherlands, Italy, Greece, The Balkans or Poland and Czechoslovakia. The occupiers and governments of the day got to build new and better of both. North Americans built roads, the English neither built roads or upgraded rail and we know about what happened in England by the 1960s up the that awful woman Thatcher. Japan got the same advantages as continental Europe because they got hammered from the air as well.
In some respects the United States is playing catch up now in terms of passenger rail. (Canada never will, sadly, until we're forced into it.) Like interstates it'll be expensive but, I rather suspect, in the end, it'll be worth it.
Until recently the notion of trains competing with air would have been laughable but with recent improvements in rail bed and laying technologies as well as efficiencies in electrified rail for inter city use it's quite possible.
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Steel
The union plants in Canada did the exact opposite of what you're portaying and for a while it worked, the plants were "nimble" but were still hopelessly outdated and they're gone.
There's one thing missing in your rant about workplace organization and that's the employer had to agree to these conditions, most of which were in place prior to unionization occurring, thanks to a fantasy known as "scientific management."
My point is less how the workplace is organized (union or non union, work rule obessed or not) it remains that as long as the formerly big steel companies made money hands over fist for years while the dominated the world industry with out a penny of reinvestment. What clearly illustrates that point is that both union and non union plants and companies went down.
It's equally true that as the industry has reappeared it has done so in specialty areas, in brand new plants and new work processes (heaven forbid we call them rules anymore!) whether the employ union workers, non union or a mixture. And it's thrived.
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re: Re: Steel
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Court Rejects Patent On 'Watch An Ad To Get Content'
Of course it'll be appealed but...
They're probably wishing they'd picked that lovely "patent any stupid thing" court in West Texas, now.
On the post: Comcast: We Sped Up Your Internet... Oh, No, Actually, We Didn't
Re: Please CHeck
You're right, read the message though.
And they did terrible job in filtering their address list. Back to Grade 8 Intro to Marketing for Comcast.
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re:
"the dark ages show what happens when you don't bother to save any industry."
Huh? Let's have a look at this, shall we, the technologies available to Rome continued to exist in Western and Central Europe for some time after the last group of "barbarians" to angrily visit it decided all it was good for was sacking and leveling.
Western and Central Europe quickly fractured into small, often tiny, Kingdoms which couldn't support the "industries" if they'd wanted to, which they often did. In short, while Rome had over extended itself and bankrupted itself paying for wars on credit, the size of the western empire still supported such industry.
The common thread here is that all that was lost when Rome itself fell and the "barbarians" took over.
Part of the Roman Empire fell. The western part. The Eastern Empire continued to exist and, largely, prosper for close to another thousand years and develop and extend the technologies and markets the west couldn't or had forgotten because they were of no use anymore. They continued trade with asia and the far east as they had for centuries before. As Islam rose Byzantium traded knowledge and with them as well. After western "christians" sacked Constantinople in a crusade, Byzantium exported what written Greek culture it had left east with Islam because they no longer felt it was safe with them. (Seriously compressed, btw).
"Unfortunately, there are many important trades that are being less valued by society than entertainment." This has been true, I suspect, since the dawn of human kind. We crave entertainment and distraction from the grind of daily life. The more technically proficient and wealthy we become the more we seem to need it and seek it out.
Keep in mind that we are not creatures of economics, economics is a creature of humanity. Should we vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow so would economics. Hard science wouldn't, it would grind on as it alway has. Social "sciences" including economics would vanish with us.
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Where is this ride going to end?
That said, he does say that technological change does create new pitfalls and opportunities. And it is highly disruptive. My trade, for example, has moved from being primarily manual to overwhelmingly mental in the 35 years I've done it. I'm now what you call a knowledge worker or techologist. Mind you the manual part of the job is still there and still necessary but it's not the whole thing.
Voice recognition, as I said is an order of millions of times more difficult to handle with rule based programming, and all of it is at one stage or another, because human language like the creature that uses it changes contanstantly.
English, in spite of efforts to enforce such things as "proper" grammar and "real" words changes yearly on an order of half a million words, according to the OED, a few of which stay in use long enough to actually get included in the global edition. Slang changes more frequently and often. The list of definitions for words in English lengthens daily. Inflection changes meaning. Word order changes meaning sometimes drastically. In English, in comparison to Romance languages and the Germanic languages from which it came, word order is of ultimate importance because you can change meaning in ways those languages can't by a combination of word order AND inflection.
English speakers handle all this with ease. I'm not sure a computer can when part of the inflection, in English, may also be the tone of voice and the expression on the speakers face.
Take a simple phrase. Two one syllable words which can drastically change meaning depending on how it's said and the tone of voice and expression. "Fuck you". Beyond that I don't think I need to point out that if it's said with a smile and light tone of voice it means something else than said another way. Emphasize the first word with the smile and light tone of voice it's light joking banter. Said the same way with emphasis on the second word it's still in the same ball park but often as a warning the listener they've gotten to close to crossing a line. Things are ok but it's still time to back off a little. Said with an angry tone of voice and with the emphasis on the second word you've definitely cross the line Expression has changed to angry but is still several steps from hostile. Said louder and still angrily with the emphasis on the second word the expression is likely to be angry bordering on rage. Said with emphasis on both words sound is more rage filled bordering on hostile and you need the clue of facial expression to fill it on. Loudly with emphasis on both words a native English speaker knows full well that either the fight is on or it's time to apologize and slink off. The expression is the last factor here if it's rage and hostility then there's usually not much choice in the matter unless you grovel.
Worse are languages in the Chinese group of languages including Japanese where inflection and darned near everything including meaning with facial expression filling in what's left over.
Have a storage medium the size of the moon to store all that always changing data on?
At the moment, as I said, voice recognition technology is barely able to understand small phrases said with flat intonation in "standard" English (whatever the hell that is) and not much else.
I don't think that will change in my lifetime or that of my child's.
The problem is that humans are comfortable with natural language not constructs that program designers would need to impose. That's been reinforced repeatedly over time, particularly with English speakers who resent and repel almost all attempts to standardize the language. Humans are, bless us, irrational and emotional not logical results of if/then/else constructs.
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re: Where is this ride going to end?
Anyway, these days the accent at the other end of the phone is more likely to be Phillipine than India. Call centres in India are getting too expensive cause people with actual brain cells can make more money, more easily elsewhere in India now. ;-)
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Silphium
From a military perspective Rome didn't fall because of outsourcing their defense "industry" than they did by loose discipline, the employment of too many mercenaries who had no real interest in defending Rome itself, Rome's complete inability to respond to "pagan" (in the ancient sense rather than popular sense today) and "barbarian" adaptations of new or improved technology and the simple reason that it was costing far too much money for Rome to continue to hold onto everything.
And we tend to forget that when Rome itself fell the Empire continued to exist for another thousand years in the East with the capital city of Constantinople by and large because they did make military adaption, were more efficient administrators and, to a small degree, the adaptation of an early form of something we'd recognize as free markets.
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Steel
Surely you mean must of the _supply_ has shifted, right?
By and large it had nothing whatever to do with the workers that markets moved off shore as much as it did with the reality that steel makers in North America never reinvested in their businesses to update and modernize plants something the Japanese did and still do. Chinese plants are brand spanking new with all the bells and whistles. Same for plants in India.
I have to admit I get tired of workers getting the blame for this and that (code for unions, far too often) while mostly it was aging plants and a lack of innovation from the companies themselves rather than overpaid or lazy workers. Both union and non union plants in North America have gone down so "workers" hasn't been the problem. Cost per unit because of old, outdated plants was much more the problem.
The companies that still make steel in North America, and there are more than a few of them, are the ones who reinvested in plants, became nimble and able to shift product production in specialty products at the relative "blink of an eye". There's actually no one better at that kind of thing as Americans and Canadians, the border doesn't really exist for steel any more than it does for automotive products, regardless of the pay of the "workers" so we're world beaters as far as those products are concerned. North America is also the leading economy in terms of recycling and reuse of steel.
So yeah, bulk steel production has moved off shore but the value added steel industry still exists here. Maybe not so much in Pittsburgh and Hamilton, ON anymore but it's still here. But bulk steel is a commodity now whereas specialty steel is where the real money is.
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re:
In GM's case it's fairly easy to tell or see what happened in the last 20 years. The quality of the end product went down the toilet, by and large, which meant that potential customers, both individuals and fleet buyers, looked twice before purchasing and often went elsewhere. They built and promoted the hell out of gas guzzlers which didn't hurt until the price of fuel went through the roof again and then it did. They were glacially slow in decision making and reacting to the market.
Chrysler hasn't quite decided what it wants to be when it grows up. That's half it's problem there. It's had one "hit" in the last two decades, the PT Cruiser, and nothing else of note. Daimler's ownership was a bit of a disaster.
Ford, on the other hand, from the late 90s till now aggressively addressed it's problems with quality, style, model selection and so on. Now it's turning a profit and you'd be hard pressed to find a better built or engineered vehicle.
All had self-inflicted cost issues which they've addressed if not solved under government pressure finding the UAW and CAW much easier to deal with than they imagined on these issues. (Hint to employers. Open the books, don't plead poverty -- show it and the unions will react much more pleasantly than you think.)
Parts suppliers also serve manufacturers such as Honda, Toyota, Volvo and other auto makers not normally seen as North American though they build here so if GM or Chrysler went down Ford would have survived nicely.
That leads to this: don't confuse the auto industry in North America with The (no longer so) Big Three because it hasn't been that in quite some time. If they'd died, unlikely, the jobs would have appeared elsewhere as other manufacturers would have taken up the slack because their domestic markets would have grown.
On a personal note, late last fall I bought a new pickup. The order I looked at them was Ford, Dodge, GM, Toyota, Honda. Honda dropped out almost immediately because I didn't like the look or practicality of the vehicle, Toyota was/is overpriced which left the Big Three. With GM I wasn't impressed with the Siverado's build and fit though I admit to looking at it with a jaundiced eye which left Ford and Dodge. All other things being equal, and they were, the decider was safety and one other thing -- which trucks were still out there on the road and being used as work trucks after, oh, say 30 years. More Fords than you can shake a stick at, a good representation of Dodges though nowhere near as many and you can't see a Chev or GMC out there much more than 20 years old more than likely 10. Ford got the deal on safety and the fact the I just liked the model I got more than any Dodges I saw.
What I'm saying is that the automotive sector didn't need "saving" as much as GM and Chrysler did. If they'd gone belly up the market would have ensured that something took their place. More than likely Toyota, Honda, Ford and maybe Volvo, to name but 4 companies as well as, I suspect, a North American based company out of the ashes of GM and Chrysler.
On the post: Could The Legality Of Google's Cache Kill Righthaven's Copyright Claims?
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Court Says It's Okay To Secretly Record Conversation If Done For Legitimate Reasons
Re:
Then I wouldn't tell my shrink any more about my kinky sexual fantasies about a teddy bear, dawn detergent and....
On the post: E-Voting Machine Easily Reprogrammed To Play Pac-Man
Re: Re:
Anyway, it would have been something on the order of a copy of Myst if it had been open source programmers working on open source software. Why waste your time on PacMan?
On the post: Recording Industry Using Net Neutrality Debate To Try To Link Child Porn With Copyright Infringement Again
What's just as sad here are the attempts a being funny, fob it off or basically agree with them (yeah I'm speaking to you the first AC on the list). And TV shows.
It is long past time they were called on it. Long past.
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