Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon

I'd say a Cadillac, GMC truck, Buick, Pontiac, Chevy truck is a mighy
shit better than a Honda- if ever there was a massed produced "burger"
of a car, it's a 4-cylinder Honda-bomb

you got SCREWED !!

(BWAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA !!!)

ps- you could've had a V-8 !

 

now we're starting to understand why, "bicycle" was divorced, tried to
commit suicide, got kicked out of the Navy, and is now on Prozac.

you got quite an obsession going there, Bikey...nothing else better to
do ?

so much for all your alleged Ebay sales.

and no, you don't get to see my Saturn wagon, until I drive it down
your street one day, and park in your driveway

 

More projection from someone waiting for their next SSI check.

I outsell you 20 to 1, deal with Mr. Ex-Power Seller.

Here we go again, come on anyday Charlie, you'll puss out quicker than
you lost your Power Seller status.

 

I AM CHARLEY NUDO ! GOD SPEAKS THROUGH ME ! HE SAYS GM IS BEST ! HE
CONFIRMED THAT WITH RUSH LIMBAUGH !

YOU ARE ALL COMMUNISTS ! GEORGE BUSH IS THE CHOSEN DISCIPLE ! YOU
WILL ALL DIE WHEN WE TAKE OVER THE WORLD !

I SOFA KING, WE TODD ED !

I SOFA KING, WE TODD ED !

I SOFA KING, WE TODD ED !

THE COPS TOLD ME TO SAY THAT OUT LOUD THREE TIMES REAL FAST AND YOU
WILL ALL JUST GO AWAY !

 

He's so obsessed that he is actually taking the banned usernames of the
person he was warning everyone about- he's finally cracked !

do your worst, Boob- live up to that reputation as Usenet's most
unemployable troll !

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA !!

 

Uhhh...Noodles? That would be YOU! I certainly hope you take that
SSI check and your Medicare card and get some psychiatric help...soon.

There we have a good example of "projection," punctuated by a
maniacal, if written laugh. Do your socket puppets start eating each
other at the end of EVERY month, or just when money gets tight?

You need meds, and possibly institutionalization....stat!

 

Are two cripples better than one?
Well if their disability is different it's possible there is some gain.

 

Yup, I remember having some problems with Lucent about 10 years ago.
They refused to ever let you talk to any Engineer. Customers were only
allowed to talk to salesmen. They expected you to specify a part and
risk the success of a project based on inadequate documentation and the
claims of their salesmen.

eBay turns a blind eye to Mom and Pop computer assemblers who are
selling computers without UL or FCC certification. I suppose it is
legal to sell computers without safety certification, but it isn't
legal to sell them without an FCC sticker. The bottom line is that some
of these Mom and Pop system integrators are buying ultra cheap parts
(that don't last long) and are ripping off the public.

Anyway, it's hard to convince anyone who hasn't seen it first hand that
we have a serious problem in the U.S. with corporations with an
attitude. In the meantime jobs will continue to go to foreign companies.

 

True. Example is my old reliable grocery getter, the '77 Accord. In
New England, throughout the Rust Belt and the Great Lakes region,
these cars didn't last long at all because of body rot. However, out
here, it's almost 30 years, and not a spec of rust at all anywhere.
The only time cars rust in California is if they're by the beach, or
up north, where it rains a lot. In the desert here, it's very common
to see old bodies from the '40s with only light surface rust that can
be wiped off with some #500, since the original lacquer and primer was
eaten years ago by the excessive UV from the sun. The '55 Dodge Royal
Lancer I had put a bid on had the same...zero rust, and mid-'50s
Chrsyler products were well known for having rust problems elsewhere.
Take away the body and chassis rust problem, and add good maintenance,
you have a car that can last as long as you can get critical moving
parts spares...and I can STILL get most part needed to keep that
Accord in top running shape from either Honda or aftermarket
suppliers. Cars in Los Angeles proper, however, do suffer some
surface corrosion damage due to salt air and a lot of fog caused by
the onshore marine layer.

I agree that "Japanese quality" is more myth than reality now, but 20
years ago, the Japanese were building far better quality cars than
were the Big 3, especially in "eyeball" areas, like fit and finish. As
was proven by Mitsubishi and some others, though, sometimes their
mechanical designs weren't very good. OTOH, you had pioneer Japanese
cars like the Datsun 510 that could easily outlast a Chevy Nova three
engines to one. That's what started the exodus away from the Big
3...a true quality reputation, not just a "perceived" one. Now, the
Big 3 has narrowed the gap considerably since around 1980, when GM
especially was building some of the shittiest cars in the world.

Most of GM's problem is mutton-headed management, a culture that was
permanently installed under their worst CEO, Roger Smith. They, like
those at the "old" AT&T, were imbued with a sense of imperviousness to
competition, that they set the standards and would always be #1. This
started back in the early '70s with the "less car for more money"
decontenting campaign, but Smith turned it into an entire culture.
After getting rid of him, Stempel and other followers, like Armstrong
at AT&T after they got rid of Allen, didn't have a hell of a lot left
to work with, and the "corporate culture" was completely in charge, no
matter what the guy at the top did. Armstrong at AT&T didn't have the
guts to go up against a huge executive corps of power wielding
snipers, and I'm sure Waggoner has wound up with the same problem
already in Detroit.

That's simply not true. The UAW has conceded, years ago in fact, that
automation is now part and parcel of manufacturing.

A shill article designed to keep GM (one of their big advertising
accounts) happy. The truth is somewhere else. You seem to think that
GM, Ford and DC all have disparate labor agreements, and they don't.
The "Big 3" still do "pattern bargaining," much the same way they did
with UAW in the days of Walter Reuther. Thus, what one of them gets,
they all get. Chrysler, under Iacocca, got Belvidere III because he
was smart, could negotiate with the UAW, and worked toward a goal,
something GM management cannot do, because they do not understand the
definition of "work."

Again, not true. GM COULD do this if they wanted to, but rather that
do it and do the WORK necessary to design, refit and deploy full
robotics, as well as redeploy and/or early retire idled auto workers,
they send the workers to the "job bank" to sit and read the paper for
8 hours a day. Even UAW rank and file AND their elected leaders know
this is a complete waste, but they're trapped. Rather than shuffle
the staffing assignments and offer the worker's an early pension
incentive, GM would rather pay them full pay, plus benefits, to go sit
in the "job bank," usually a large room in a shut down plant somewhere
in Michigan, with chairs and tables, and a GM manager with a watch,
waiting for someone to leave the table for more than 15 minutes on
break or a half hour for lunch. THIS is the kind of management that's
killing GM, NOT their "legacy costs" they keep whining about. This
entire issue was covered in depth by the LA Times, the Financial Times
and the Washington Post awhile back, NOT by the GM-licking Detroit
News.

True to a certain point, but you still need support staff to run the
robotized assembly plants. The UAW wanted GM to retrain assembly line
workers for these jobs, but GM decided, AFTER the negotiations, that
didn't want to do so. So, off to the job bank go all the otherwise
laid of workers, to sit...making full pay and benefits, while GM
management sits in King Henry Ford II's Renaissance Center with their
hands up their collective asses.

Due to GM's lousy management being so entrenched, about the best thing
that could happen to the company now IS a complete shutdown and
elimination through a complete takeover. That's what happened to
"old" AT&T. Whitacre gobbled up the old New Jersey giant, shitcanned
all the prima donna Bob Allen management, and now has SBC people from
the former SWBT and Pacfic Telephone RBOCs running the show, with the
middle and executive level goofs that sunk "old" AT&T forced into
early retirement or into simple layoff. Whitacre himiself is an SWBT
RBOC veteran of some 30 years, and knows how telephone companies are
supposed to work, and he knows exactly how AT&T screwed up over the
years, as does anyone with half a brain who worked there at the time.
An indication of how well this is working is that, since getting rid
of all the "old" AT&T management, AT&T's common stock, which was in
single digits under Armstrong, is now back on the rise even after
factoring in the addition of SBC equity, as is their customer base.

The only way GM and Ford are going to turn around at all is a THOROUGH
replacement of current management. Billy Boy Ford, being the good rat
he is, already jumped the sinking ship, and now it's Rick Waggoner's
turn. But just making a CEO walk the plank isn't enough. As Iacocca
learned at Chrysler, you have to cut DEEP and know WHERE to cut, and
have talent at the ready to fill the vacated responsbilities. This
takes hard work, something most American managers these days are
allergic to doing, simply because of an attitude of entitlement and
freedom to delegate real work to others who don't have the authority
to do it. If Iacocca could do all this with Chrysler (which was in
worse shape than both GM and Ford are in now), those two behemoths can
do it fairly easily IF each finds the right guy to do the job. The
problem is finding someone for that leadership position with the
brains and the knowledge to pull it off. There ARE no new Iacoccas in
the US auto industry anymore...they're all Bill Ford and Rich Waggoner
clones.

GM has one ace in the hole, and he's an ex-Iacocca protégé...Lutz, a
real "car guy." Ford has no such sleeper in the wings, and in that
regard, is in real trouble. Billy Boy Ford, being the paranoid scion
of King Henry II, made sure to burn bridges for anyone competent
beneath him so as to insure his tenure as long as he wanted it. When
things started getting too hot for him, he simply bailed out, leaving
the S.S. Ford to flounder. Now, he can tell his screwy relatives,
"Hey...wasn't MY fault!".

By the way, the assertion that somehow robotics cures all
manufacturing ill is also patently false. The UAW local at the GM
Canda Van Nuys, CA plant, in a last ditch effort to save the plant,
entered into a voluntary Saturn-like quality program, headed up by UAW
members and GM floor supervisors, to improve product assembly quality.
The Camaros and Firebirds that were the result of this effort indeed
showed that excellent assembly quality isn't the province of robots at
all...the '90-'92 pony car line was some of the best ever assembled.
The problem was, they had a really shitty car from 1979 to work with!
It doesn't matter HOW good the final assembly is...if the design sucks
as bad as the Camaro/Firebird '79 design did, you wind up with a
shitty car...end of argument! Rather than allow Van Nuys to put out a
good car with the '93 model year redesign, they simply shut down the
plant...they didn't even TRY. This was even after UAW agreed to as
much as 80% robotics in the entire plant and "5 and 5" retirement
incentives. GM management simply didn't want to do with pencil work
and thinking...they just trashed a fairly modern plant, built as a
Chevrolet Division assembly plant in 1946, in their biggest market.
It's now a big shopping mall. So, in '93, to get their "new" Camaros
and Firebirds to their biggest market in the US, they had to be
shipped by rail all the way from Ohio. Prior to that, many LA dealers
simply took delivery right from the factory's door and DROVE the cars
to their lots with "lot boys." Who paid for that extra transportation
expense? The customer, who else?

How do I know? My wife had one of the last '92 Camaros off the Van
Nuys line. The assembly quality was easily the best I'd seen on any
GM car since the early 1960s...but the car design itself was crap. The
well-fitted panels and interior details were sort of like putting
llipstick on a pig! But, we never had one take-back to the dealer for
an assembly screwup....not one. Failing parts body parts due to bad
design? Screwed-up gas tank necks from bad design requring a recall?
Bad speed sensors in the L60E transmission? Badly design "ground
effects" panels that needed constant repaints? Failing AC compressor
cluch solenoids? Failing instrument cluster PWBs? Yeah, we had that,
and more.

 

Two words:

PAT RUSSO.

That attitude was part and parcel of Western Electric's (Lucent's
predecessor name) since around 1920, when their products were
distributed and sold by Graybar Electric, and was part of the "old"
AT&T culture. Bob Allen, when he destroyed Western in the '70s, left
the divisional culture alive and well...he just gutted Western's big
remaining strength...their huge manufacturing plants.

True, and has been vetted in the press time and time again...and
idiots still keep buying them, and Meg & Co. doesn't care...as long as
they get their cut.

Once GM and Ford dies, we're finished as an industrial nation. Wall
St. morons think this is great...no more messy manufacturing, just
rake in the money. The real world doesn't work that way. As we
learned in WW II, the nation with the biggest industrial base wins. We
don't have that anymore, and as John McLaughlin said in one of his
famous "predictions" last week, "The world center of gravity will
continue to shift toward Asia." Thanks to a stupid populace and
stupider leaders, I fear the US is in retrograde...permanently.

 

I saw this first hand as a supplier to Delphi. I've related this on
this newsgroup before, but GM/Delphi has a program they call PICOS
(Purchased Input Concept Optimization with Suppliers) - it's where they
spend a lot of money and the supplier likewise spends a lot of money
with travel and time and in meetings disecting a particular part or
assembly design and production process to squeeze out unnecessary costs
- the up-front "agreement" (turns out to be fraudulent - keep reading)
is that Delphi and the supplier split the resulting savings 50/50 (this
never works out because at the end of the process, they take all your
cost-saving ideas and incorporate them into new drawings of the part or
assemly and put the part or assembly out for global sourcing - AKA
re-quote - so if you want to keep that part of the business (i.e.,
compete against other potential suppliers), you have to give up any
share in the savings - part of the Lopez patented process - but I digress).

The PICOS process starts with brainstroming ideas to investigate (for
cost savings). At this stage, no idea is rejected. In the later stage
of analysing and trimming the ideas down to a short list, the easiest
step is in eliminating *any* idea that meant the reduction of bodies on
the line at Delphi (such as an idea that eliminates a step that is
otherwise necessary for a Delphi body to perform once your assembly
arrives at Delphi). In effect this meant that any savings had to occur
in the supplier's plant, with no part of the savings to result in
changes at the customer (GM/Delphi). In other words - even re-arranging
the Delphi order of assembly to eliminate a set of hands was verboten -
low hanging fruit that could not be picked.

My understanding from our rep. in MoTown was that GM/Delphi were under
these rules, and Ford and Chrysler were not, due to horrible unique
union agreements that happened years ago that Ford and Chrysler did not
enter into.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

Good points Ted, but truth be told, GM still leads in car production
units worldwide, and more importantly also totally capitalized on the
recent decade + long trend of huge SUV's with V-8's- along with Ford.

The fact is Toyota isn't "kicking the crap" out of GM- Toyota is just
catching up a bit.

GM has so many holdings in so many areas, including locomotive,
defense, etc.- Toyota could never be as big at GM. The automotive arm
of GM is only one part of GM's business.

Toyota had to move their plants over here, to gain as they did. And
they're still only #2, not #1. GM is #1 in sales.

So how bad or worse off can GM actually be ?

For that matter, how much worse off is the entire Big Three ? They
hold 3 of the top 5 places for car mfg.

When you see someone like DeserTBob spout off, keep in mind he is
someone who has no skills, is semi-literate, and unemployed- and feels
he was denied the American Dream. So he tries to "get back" at the
system by buying Japanese and pushing Jap cars- because that's all he
can afford- he drives a 1978 Honda.

Not the typical car buyer, for sure...

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v214/shiznannigan/loltoyota.jpg

 

More delusional BS from whacko Charlie Nudo.

 

suuuuurre they will...just like they ate us alive in WWII

they know which end of the nuclear stick they're on...

submit, be bought out, or be nuked

 

They, unlike coal diggin ginzos like you, have the ability to learn.

 

That sort of thing is really no big deal. You can walk into Fry's
Electronics
and buy a UL/FCC $199.95 computer today if what you want is a
cheap computer. It may not be that reliable....

The biggest problem with Ebay is that it's used to fence enormous
amounts of stolen goods and it's used to sell enormous quantities of
illegal copies of music and software, as well as enormous quantities
of counterfeit items like women's purses and such garbage. Ebay could
shut all that down if they simply started investigating tips. You can spot
a
counterfeit auction a mile off as well as an auction selling illegal copies
of software and music. But, Ebay ignores any reports that people send
in on this stuff. I've sent in dozens but the auctions lever get cancelled,
so I've given up.

As for stolen goods, Ebay could shut that down simply by requiring
that anyone running more than 50 auctions a month or anyone selling more
than $10K of merchandise per month must post complete verifyable
street address and answerable phone number right in the auction and
must offer 30 day warranty unless material being sold is marked SALVAGE
or some such, and must allow local pickup of goods sold. Anyone
hitting those limits is no longer an individual they are
a business and must be held to the same standards. Fences routinely
state in auctions that they don't permit local pickup, that's one of the
tip offs that your looking at stolen merchandise.

Ted

 

The problem would be easily solved with eBay. Anyone who offers a new
computer for sale should be required to include a statement that says:

"This computer complies with applicable FCC regulations".

 

When I look at what Fiorina did to HP's family oriented corporation
(lay-offs and screw the Packards attitude) - it's so weird. I thought
women were supposed to make corporation kind and compassionate? And her
succcessor, Patricia Dunn, made Fiorina look like Cindarella with her
below the belt investigative techniques on her own directors and
employees. Nasty, truly terrible people.

Who can walk into Fry's? You? I wish.

about eBay I don't know much about that. i ask for serial numbers and
street addresses and don't buy the stolen stuff. I remember a modern
classic on fencing by Karl Klockars. He gave a lecture in which he
pointed out that the fence he was writing about used to buy things
wholesale especially when the thieves were on vacation. Then he would
turn around and sell a lot of it and people would buy it because it was
"hot." That's funny, maybe. What is not so funny is that a lot of his
customers were police, judges, and others in the criminal justice
empire.

 

That's "Korporate Amerika" in toto...and, in case anyone's wondering,
they run this country now. Note how the behavior of the HP thugs
mimicks that of the Mafia ginzos on trial in the '50s, taking the
Fifth rather than face the music. Kudos to Newsweeks, which plastered
a picture of an obviously frantic, mentally unhinged Dunn on their
cover two weeks ago.

I walk into Fry's all the time. Only two words for anything connected
with Fry's: Caveat emptor. Good prices, but you have to know what
you're doing. Their sales help is interested in only one
thing...selling you more stuff.

Receiving stolen property is as big a felony as the original heist.
The LAPD, some years ago, had a huge scandal with stolen property in
their Hollywood Division. Beat cops were busting burglars and fences,
and were bartering "losing the paperwork" and other methods to get
them off the hook in exchange for merchandise. As usual, Daryl Gates
simply "reshuffled the deck", sending many of the perps out to the
Devonshire Divison, where they just did the same thing. This
disgraces the good, honest cops out on the beat, and they become
cyincal and ineffective. It goes on in every town and city in the
country, probably the world.