Comments for G.M.\'s Latest Plan Envisions a Much Smaller Automaker »
Posted By engineer 8 months, 1 week ago in Business & FinanceFor all the uncertainty swirling around General Motors , the troubled automaker said Monday that one thing was clear: it must become drastically smaller if it hopes to remain a viable company, regardless of whether it has to file for bankruptcy.
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calitennflo8 months, 1 week ago
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I laugh and I would cry with the ones that this has effected...but everyone knows what happens when you or a community relies on just one employer. The reason I laugh...is I watched the two do this...farm out every job they could find...to China or anywhere...and avoid incarceration at the same time. Bush would be behind bars today...if the police did not go and satisfy what Samuel Alito, Jr did...ruin the 4th amendment, and ruin the due process...in a close 4-5 vote...and I still laugh...the supreme court is no place for a conservative or liberal...it's th place for someone that knows the laws...plus reads and writes and communicates the English language.
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FrankHummel8 months, 1 week ago
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The Passing of Pontiac-
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It is SAD that many fine traditional product lines and old names now have to be retired --- but there is hardly any choice any longer.
What I have heard theorized is that GM is now looking to split itself into two pieces, corraling its VIABLE businesses and assets into one of them and letting the other go bankrupt.
But those VIABLE assets will include the Chevy VOLT --- which is CLEARLY the prototype of the whole automotive technology of the future, since it points the way to ELIMINATING up to seven-eighths of "our" abject, addictive dependency on foreign OIL to refine into gasoline to brainlessly burn up as a mere fuel to power automobiles!
GM has also, as I understand it, put in for $2.6 Billion in "bailout" funding to COMPLETE the Volt initiative (which has already been just about completely engineered and is all but "ready to go" --- having been "under development" for the past two or more years now already), and that plans are now afoot to extend the technology to the Cadillac and Buick lines as well.
And THAT, I submit, would be about the SMARTEST $2.6 Billion the government will have spent in the whole massive attempt to underwrite the reestablishment of a functional economy for this nation. For THAT would be the "skeletal framework" on which the whole automotive industry could rebuild!
But better get busy actually WORKING on all of that, folks --- for, contrary to a FALSE notion fondly perpetuated by many of the older heads among us --- "we" are NOT any longer (if indeed "we" EVER actually were) the only center of technological advance in the world. The EUROPEAN counterpart of the VOLT (which has been jovially dubbed the AMPERE) is now SLIGHTLY AHEAD in the "development derby" --- having been UNVEILED already at a major European auto show. And you can BET that all those clever folks over in ASIA are ALSO "hot on the trail" as well!
I submit that it is WAY PAST high time to nostalgically long for the "good old days" of "business" to return --- and time to instead "roll up our sleeves" and GET BUSY doing the ALTERNATIVE ENERGY THINGS that are going to be needed in the aftermath of "cheap, easy" oil. Those technological alternatives DO EXIST, and they HAVE INDEED already been "explored", investigated, and many even "piloted" going back MANY YEARS NOW ALREADY. What needs to happen now is that they are actually going to have to be IMPLEMENTED --- and that "green-collar-economy" about which many have been talking NEEDS TO ACTUALLY BE INSTITUTED AND SERIOUSLY PURSUED!
So get busy DOING that, people, instead of milling about aimlessly like cattle in holding pens at a slaughterhouse. If WE don't do the job --- you can RELY on it that OTHERS ELSEWHERE WILL do it "for" us. And I wonder how many people here will then enjoy being in a position of "economic subservience" to folks of OTHER ethnicities and cultures... -
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FrankHummel8 months, 1 week ago
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By the way --- for the benefit of those who may not yet know what the Chevy VOLT initiative is actually all about:
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There is only ONE area of endeavor that is actually “big enough” to serve as the “skeletal framework” on which to reconstruct “our” economy. That would be if people would actually wake up and GET SERIOUS about actually IMPLEMENTING a whole new energy-diet paradigm --- which is something “we” now very much need to do ANYWAY for basic CLIMATOLOGICAL reasons.
“We” DESPERATELY need to RECONSTITUTE much of “our” entire fossil-fuels-based technology, and to actually IMPLEMENT that “green-collar-revolution” about which some have long been dissertating. But that will be HUGELY DISRUPTIVE of much in “our” economy that is based on good old, familiar, “tried and true” solutions that are now OBSOLETE because they are no longer SUSTAINABLE --- given that “we” have now ALREADY CONSUMED about 70% (per Hubbert-inspired analysis) of “our OWN” Providential Endowment of oil (and specifically the “easy” stuff). And it proves to be WAY expensive to endlessly “buy” the endowments of OTHERS who still DO have supplies (for a LITTLE while longer) --- e.g. from the Saudis, and increasingly in future from the Russians (who now have by far the greatest remaining reserves), to neither of whom, surely, “we” would wish to be economically “subservient” --- or alternatively, to try to “otherwise expropriate” the stuff (as from the “Iraqis”). So therefore WE NOW HAVE NO CHOICE!
It is WAY PAST high time for the “general populace” to wake up, roll up its' sleeves, and GET BUSY DOING “ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGY” THINGS THAT WOULD BE GENUINELY CONSTRUCTIVE AND USEFUL --- in place of all that bread-and-circuses “entertainment”, meticulous “financial number-crunching”, and a great deal of other “fluff” (including all the MILITARISM!) on which people have been wasting their time, energies, and intellect over the last 30 years or so.
And the FIRST order of business, that can yield the BIGGEST and FASTEST “bang for the buck”, lies in the AUTOMOTIVE TECHNOLOGY area. “We” need to go ahead and actually IMPLEMENT technological alternatives that ALREADY DO indeed exist and have LONG existed --- contrary to the notion that seems to have been propagandistically cultivated among a largely techologically IGNORANT preponderance of “our” body politic, which seems to have long been beguiled into believing that any meaningful change idepends on hypothetical “exotic, futuristic” NEW developments “in the laboratory” over, say, the next fifty years or so.
But the truth of the matter is that simply by applying very OLD technological concepts --- extending to the mere automobile things worked out MANY YEARS AGO ALREADY in much HEAVIER-DUTY systems --- “we” could LONG AGO now already have easily FLAT-OUT ELIMINATED about THREE-FOURTHS of all that importation of oil to refine into gasoline to fuel “our” automotive vehicular fleet --- had “we” but had the wisdom and wit to do so!! -
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FrankHummel8 months, 1 week ago
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Now however outrageous and outlandish that assertion may sound to many, make no mistake about it: PRECISELY THAT genuinely, simply IS the implication of the “new” ELECTRIC / I.C.E. “chimera” automotive architectural concept --- exemplified by the soon-to-be forthcoming (but really much BELATED) Chevy VOLT --- or if not THAT, then by its now equally-far-advanced EUROPEAN counterpart (jovially dubbed the AMPERE) and/or undoubtedly very soon OTHER “entries” into the “development derby” coming from ASIA. The basic idea involves BATTERY POWER carrying the car a number of miles (in the case of the VOLT, FORTY), with an internal combustion engine kicking in if (and only if) the battery runs down. But FULLY THREE-FOURTHS of all personal auto usage “fits” within a forty-mile power budget! You go to the store, bank, doctor, etc., and you come back home AND PLUG THE CAR BACK INTO THE WALL. MOST OF THE TIME THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE NEVER OPERATES!
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Actually, BOTH components of the “chimera” are VERY OLD technology. ELECTRIC cars have been around since the EARLIEST days of the automobile. And the I.C.E “fallback” component, involving a petroleum-powered engine coupled NOT to an elaborate, troublesome, expensive TRANSMISSION AND DRIVE TRAIN but, rather, merely to a GENERATOR that supplies the ELECTRIC drive motors (which had been powered by the BATTERY until it ran down) is a paradigm implemented on a much GRANDER scale on the RAILROADS and also in the BIGGEST SHIPS on the high seas! Anybody ever hear of the DIESEL-ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE?? Really BIG-MUSCLE machines have LONG relied on relatively simple, UNbreakable MAGNETIC-FORCE drive elements rather than on complex, fallible mechanical ones --- because “we” simply couldn’t BEGIN to engineer a viable CLUTCH for really HEAVY loads!
I submit that the folks who now dither and blather about “our” financial sector “meltdown” are in reality being DIVERTED AWAY from what really SHOULD be the MAIN object of their exasperation --- which is actually a FAILURE of “our” past MISguided (or maybe more like MISBEGOTTEN!) MIS”leadership” (both “political” and otherwise!) to fulfill its ACTUAL obligations to the membership of this society (and others) --- which would have been to OPTIMIZE THE CHARACTER AND QUALITY OF “OUR” PRODUCTS, RATHER THAN TO MERELY MAXIMIZE THEIR MONEY! -
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FrankHummel8 months, 1 week ago
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Now I wonder just how THAT sort of realization must now weigh on all the folks who have THEMSELVES been lured off into fighting a dirty little “OIL war” over in Iraq, making lots of enemies the world over and in many cases coming back dead or permanently damaged, or who may have lost loved ones or friends therein? It is surely a HATEFUL reality to have to acknowledge. But would it somehow be any “better” for people to just meekly try to erect a “psychological defensive barrier of DENIAL”, letting their RIGHTFUL wrath and ire be “harmlessly” diverted over to and dissipated on practitioners of mere artificial "financial" hocus-pocus”??! Would THAT not actually merely COMPOUND the REAL fraud that has been foisted off on the REALLY aggrieved victims??!
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