Bankruptcy and Reorganization for Detroit?

There _is_ that aspect of it.

I was absolutely flabbergasted that 4 Supreme Court justices were able
to label the concept of owning a gun as being an individual right to
be "a stretch," as it is immensely clear what the FF's meant from
their writings and the use of the phrase "the people" in amendment
itself, etc. Those 4 appear to operate on the idea that the original
meaning is irrelevant and they're going to do what _they_ think is the
best thing for 21st century America (IOW, they're going to change the
Constitution by edict rather than by the process prescribed by the
Constitution itself) and thus proclaim themselves to be smarter than
the FF's. They need their asses kicked.

 

Heaven forbid we have minimum government and be free instead of being
slaves to the ruling class for half the year or more.

What do you think the ruling class in the US is? They are are warlords
and thugs just on a larger scale. Look at how the ruling class uses the
US military. Just like organized crime and warlords use their muscle.

Keep that 'left-right' delusion of yours. The real division is rulers
and serfs.

 

If you knew anything at all about the history of the constitution you would
understand that the FF saw gun ownership as a way for the STATE governments
to counteract the power of the FEDERAL government. None of the 13
colonies would have ever signed the US constitution if they had any idea
that
they would NOT be allowed to secede from the Union any time they wanted.

The idea was to permit states to create militia's which would in effect be
their own private armies, and the 2nd amendment was put in place to
prevent the federal government from ever taking away the authority of
the individual states to run their own armies.

Of course, Slavery and the Civil War saw an end to this. States Rights
today are dead as a doornail. Note also that the 2nd amendment wasn't
written for GUN ownership it was written for ARMS ownership. As in,
ANY kind of arms, including machine guns, explosives, etc. Because
after all, a state's army would need military weapons.

It IS a stretch that the Constitution has been interpreted this way. But,
you seem to fail to understand that law is
built not only on the written laws but the many, many precedents of how
those laws have been interpreted. The past interpretations of the 2nd
amendment today have as much legal weight as the amendment itself.
The justices understand that, which is why they understand it's stretched,
but they also understand that they still have to give weight to that
stretching.

Ted

 

This is called a "diversified economy" We need BOTH types of jobs, both the
manufacturing and the programming.

Service jobs are just as required. Consider the people who paint the Golden
Gate
Bridge. They start at one end, and by the time they make it to the other
end they
have to start over on the one end again. By your definition this isn't a
produced
product that has value for a very long time. However, if they stopped doing
it,
the bridge would rust and collapse.

All these jobs are part of a diversified economy. All are needed.

That isn't true. However, why would we want to? Those battleships are
sitting ducks and were obsoleted by modern nuclear subs.

Both General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding build the
nuclear subs used in the US Defence fleet today. GD in fact bought
out GM's defence divisions back in 2003, and Chrysler's defense divisions
back in 1982. Loral corporation bought out Ford Motor Company's
defense division back in 1990 then later sold them to Lockheed.

It's called "institutional knowledge"

Apparently nobody can spell it either - Stradivarius, not stradavarius!

And as for the assertion that nobody can make a Strad, that is wrong.
The Strad's secrets were figured out pretty recently by
Texas A&M University biochemist Joseph Nagyvary who made one
and arrainged for a blind audience test - the audience preferred his
instrument over the actual Strad. As you might imagine, Nagyvary makes
violins today:

http://www.nagyvaryviolins.com/bio.html

Keep in mind that the tonal qualities of a Strad cannot be adequately
reproduced on an audio recording, the microphones we have today are
not good enough. You have to hear an actual Stradivarius in a live
auditorium to hear the difference between it and a different violin.

It's also known that each Strad was hand-tuned during manufacture,
as Strads are not all identical, and are not even symmectrical. Most
violins
today that are manufactured and sold to your typical violin student are
made for looks, and they look great. Sound quality isn't as high on the
list.

It's not "lost" knowledge. This is like the Saturn V rocket. We no longer
have
the blueprints, tooling or dies to make a Saturn V. But, we have some
Saturn V's
in mothballs somewhere. If we really wanted to make another one, we could
study the ones we have. Sure it might take a few years to develop a process
for making one again, but with enough money spent on the project it could be
done.

can do.

But, is it really? When you include all the environmental costs of cleaning
up
after heavy industry I think you will find it isn't nearly as profitable as
you claim.

There's other reasons that there's not a lot of money in programming
these days.

This is a eugenics argument, and it is morally bankrupt. Even if it were
not,
per the "Normal distribution" for IQ scores (where your getting this from)
only
around 20-25% of the population has an IQ of 85 or lower, and only around
20-25% of the population has an IQ of 115. The majority of people have IQ's
between these amounts. Your arguing in effect for continuing the factory
system
for only 25% of the population.

IQ measurements are on a curve. If the entire population's IQ increases
then
the median point - the 100 - simply moves. Thus you will ALWAYS have some
portion of the population with a "lower" IQ unless every single person
scored
exactly the same on the IQ test.

Many studies have shown that wild changes in IQ in children can result from
environmental and other program changes. Alfred Binet himself claimed that
IQ
was not a fixed amount. It's know known that providing an intellectually
stimulating
environment for children is one of the most important factors that will
raise
children's IQ. It has also been observed that there's a coorelation between
lower-IQ and poverty; children from poor sections of a city tend to have
lower
IQ's.

My belief based on my lifetime spent observing the situation is that the
ONLY reason
we even have a significant number of lower-IQ people in the US today is due
to
parents - more poor, but some not - who use the television as an electronic
babysitter
for their children. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) agrees with
this
somewhat - they recommend that kids under 2 years old not watch ANY TV
and that those older than 2 watch no more than 1 to 2 hours a day. However
I
think this is far too much. Parents should teach kids that TV is for
occassional
entertainment value ONLY and it is NOT for constant escapism. 1-2 hours a
WEEK
should be it.

What also "ain't happenin" are teachers like your mother successfully
teaching
people like myself - who scored around 130 on the SB IQ test as a child -
yet
never got decent grades in school.

People like your mother can only teach kids who do exactly what they are
told.
Your mothers preconceptions are unfortunately very common among the teaching
ilk. My rough guess is that 75% of teachers in the average public school
are not
capabable of teaching anything other than the absolute median pupil. And
private
schools are 10 times worse because any student in a private school that
doesen't
exactly conform to their norm is "fired" (their parents are asked to leave)

Schools are mills for the average person. Claiming that what they turn out
is
indicative of what can be done with any given person is poppycock. The most
important thing with the student is motivation - a student highly motivated
to learn
can score straight-A's as long as they aren't mentally handicapped, whereas
a
student highly motivated to ****-off and NOT learn is not going to score
decently
no matter how high their IQ.

All of that is true. However as to why waste R&D on small cars, there is
a very good reason to do so - product diversification. This is why Toyota
wasted time tryting to produce the POS Tundra that stank so bad.

OK, so then the import automakers will NEVER produce large cars that
pollute and thus large cars will be wiped out of American roads in 15
years. Yeah, right.

The import car makers "suffer" under the same safety and tailpipe
restrictions
that the domestics do. Thus the idea that the domestics are put at a
disadvantage
compared to the foreign makers due to safety regulations is nonsense.

The guys who knocked down WTC are still in operation in the mountain
regions of Pakistan. For all the money that was spent we still don't have
Osama's head on a pike.

The "terrorist" who got his hands on weaponized anthrax and sent it through
the mail here was home-grown. He committed suicide recently when he was
found out - see Bruce Ivins.

Don't be a moron and equate Afganistan and Iraq. They are different
countries and
Afghanistan was hosting Al Queda, while Saddam was mortal enemies with Al
Quada.

Ted

 

That was the rule in our house from my age of 4 until about 10.
My 4-year younger bro and I were given the task to choose what to view
during those two hours per week, subject to pop's approval.

Ted, your post has appeared in several different groups. Which
of them do you consider your resting place? I enjoyed your post and
method of presentation; I'd like to *see* more of you. There are
several other folks who have also appeared recently in
misc.news.internet.discuss; I'd like the same info from them.

To whomever brought many of you here, thank you! We need some
new input.

 

Yep. But we largely don't have manufacturing any more, at least not nearly
enough of it.

Yes. But, the manufacturing jobs are far fewer than they should be. Not
everyone can paint a bridge for a living. I expect these guys are probably
fairly well paid, but there are only so many bridges. And there are far too
many people that are in the "service sector" that don't make squat for wages,
but could if there were a few more factories in town. Get a "service sector"
job working heating and air conditioning. There's a lot of overhead in
obtaining service vehicles to make service calls to residences and businesses,
plus the wasted time in traveling to and from the customer's site. Unless
you're working on big commercial units and working in a union shop where the
profits can be made to be distributed more equitably, you're not going to be
making a lot of money.

I met a guy at the gym - worked that sort of job for a small business and
wasn't making a lot of $$$. Then he got a job working on large air conditioners
for big buildings such as malls, etc. Via the union, he was getting $70K a
year. Not too bad for not going to college. But those sorts of jobs are way
too few. Lots of people that could do factory jobs just fine are stuck with
things like retail jobs, and working several of those just to stay above the
poverty line. That shouldn't be happening in this country, but the rape of
manufacturing by the tax system, the envirowackos, and the excessive safety
bunch have brought that about.

I read that we couldn't produce a solid piece of metal big enough for some part
of the ship any more, maybe the bow. Not sure. But anyway, nuclear
submarines? Nuclear submarines cannot sit off your shore and pound hell out of
the enemy in the hills above your position, as one of our battleships did in
Lebanon in I believe it was the early 80's, in support of the Marines. Size
matters, and it is seriously awesome to have multiple projectiles each weighing
as much as a Volkswagen bug coming in on enemy positions. You can't demoralize
the enemy like that with a nuclear sub...

Nevertheless, it provides good jobs for more people like no other endeavor.

There's the part about it being fun, too. Anything that is fun usually doesn't
pay for squat, although programming _did_ pay pretty good until the H1B Visas
and the outsourcing.

What? It is not. It just says that half the people are below average in
intelligence. Its a fact.

And it says there's some jobs that are not available to them. That also is a
fact. They can try, but they will be unsuccessful in competition with smarter
people. That's just the way it is.

Not true. I said that some factory workers are _not_ less than 100 IQ. There
are people in factories that are far in excess of 100 IQ. My Mother used to
work in a factory - I don't know what it was, but I'm pretty sure it was higher
than mine, and mine is above average.

Yep, and those that have no aptitude for purely mental endeavors, which are
mostly what makes good money any more, should have the option of an industrial
job that still pays decent wages.

Before TV, there were still people that didn't make good doctors and lawyers,
but could still do excellent factory work.

Hey, lets just leave Mom out of it - she was an exceptional teacher, who taught
1st grade and had kids reading in a matter of 6 weeks by rejecting the standard
"See-Say" method of "modern" teaching and went back to phonics on her own. Mom
was exceptional in many ways, and was told after taking aptituded tests when
she went back to school that she could have been "anything she wanted to be."

Well, it would have been nice to diversify, but a company can only have so much
money, especially with the gov't sucking money out of the corporations via the
income tax and other taxes which are excessive. If you want less of something,
then tax it heavily. We did, and now we have less of it.

Did you read what I wrote? American car manufacturers were disproportionally
stressed by having to meet a "grams per mile" standard that was an absolute
number, rather than a percentage. So, making a V8 Oldsmobile get X grams per
mile is much harder, and therefore much more expensive, than making a 4
cylinder Fiat or an Opal or an MG meet that same number. American car
manufacturers were much more adversely affected than foreign car manufacturers
because they were making big cars and trucks, which is what the American public
wanted to buy from them.

They are dying in the mountain regions of Pakistan, thanks to UAV's, cruise
missles, and the US Army Rangers. Its a matter of time until UBL is out of
doors someday and a UAV-launched Hellfire missile targets his navel.

Yep. But if UBL gets hold of several tons of the stuff, it _will_ be spread
all over the east coast, you can bet on it. One of those letter-borne anthrax
samples emitted a single spore that traveled from DC to Baltimore and infected
a woman who died from it. A _single_ spore, the doctors believe. Figure a
few tons of it shoved into the atmosphere like a fog. Millions of deaths,
probably. I'll likely be dead if they get their hands on it within the next 3
- 5 years, before I can move back to the midwest where things are cheaper and a
less-interesting target.

And they were both threats to us. Saddam had already proved that in 1991, was
shooting at our planes every damn day, and there was no way to tell for sure
whether he was cooking up a big vat of anthrax to give to terrorists to deliver
to our densly populated regions or not, other than to go in and have a look
like we did. But we liberated millions of people from his tyranny, and, if
everything goes right, will have replaced him with a friendly government in the
middle east, a rarity. We can use more of those.

 

Sorry. What I was thinking but didn't say is that the attitude of
cutting federal taxes, that tax cuts are always good because all taxes
are too high, has made it to all levels of government. My local
statehouse rep ran a campaign that taxes were too high and cutting
taxes would help industry, increase revenue, etc... when they've
already been cut and the decreased revenue has resulted in necessity
of cutting services.

 

The FF's were extremely concerned about that and the government power being
used against the citizens. The object of the 2nd amendment was to have arms in
the hands of the _people_, and not at some armory where it could be turned
against the people by either the federal government _or_ the state government.
The FF's did not trust _any_ government - Feds or States - and meant for
political power to remain in the hands of the people. Chairman Mao said,
"Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun" and the old commie bastard
was right.

It was also to prevent the states from taking away individual liberties against
its citizens. Guns were meant to be owned and kept by the _people_, for the
purpose of being _able_ to form a militia. That's why it says, "...the right
of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Yep. We have too many restrictions on _arms_ ownership already.

The 2nd amendment has been directly ruled upon in extremely rare circumstances.
Most rulings used by anti-gun proponents often are not even made on the 2nd
amendment itself, but on some tangential technicality. But the FF's were
pretty clear in their writings that they meant for people to have the
individual right to keep and bear arms.

 

I can tell you that I saw Brent P mostly in the rec.autos.driving until the
recent attack on the usenet by some gov't agencies that have gotten many
servers shut down, and so has diminished that group by a substantial amount of
traffic.

 

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

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.

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!

 

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)?

 

You like making up arbitrary nonsensical rules, do you? What is the
making up of stupid arbitrary rules a mark of?

Besides there was no ambiguity. Capitalization of words and lack of
same has meaning. You either pretended not to know that or are pretty
ignorant for someone attempting to engage in the types of arguments you do.

 

That's where the plumber comes in.

 

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).

 

The thread is x-posted.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Huh!? Please explain.