Dispatches from a Small Business
Posts tagged ‘Ford’
The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money, has rolled out with an EPA MPGe of 52. But this number is bogus. The true MPGe is worse than a Ford Explorer. Learn why in my Forbes.com piece.
Bruce Krasting at Zero Hedge has been on the case of the Federal Financing Bank. I am still unclear if the agency is actually providing the cash or just the guarantee, but it was the one rolling out the Solyndra loan (under DOE auspices, I suppose).
In July, it was still sending cash of some sort to Solyndra – it may be that this was just a drawdown of money under its original loan commitment, or it may be new money. A couple of things you can see are:
Last week in the race around New England colleges I missed a milestone of sorts – Coyote Blog crossed over 5 million visits. I say “of sorts” because with feed readers, many readers of the blog do not hit the visit counter. In fact, with over 2,000 feed subscribers who check this feed each day, that equates to about 3/4 million visits a year that don’t hit the counter.
Nevertheless, all these numbers, however flawed, are far higher than I ever thought I would reach here (way back on September 29, 2004). Thanks for the support.
PS- Here was that first scintillating post 6-1/2 years ago:
This blog will often touch on the insanity that is the current American tort system. I don’t think there is any greater threat to capitalism, due process, or democracy than the growing power of the litigation bar.
Via Overlawyered.com, which should be an essential part of your daily blog browsing, comes this story. Apparently, after being sued by Okaloosa County for making defective police cars, Ford refused to sell the county any more of this type car. The County sued again, this time to force Ford to sell it more cars of the type it is suing Ford for being defective:
One of Morris’ attorneys, Don Barrett, has said the sheriff firmly believes the Police Interceptors are defective but he wants to buy new ones to replace aging cars because seeking other vehicles would be more costly.
lol. Unfortunately, in the service business, it is legally more difficult to exclude customers from the premises. We have several well-known customers who come to our campgrounds (plus Wal-mart and any other private retail establishment) desperately hoping to slip and fall and sue. In a future post, I will tell the story of a Florida campground that is being sued by a visitor for sexual dysfunction after the visitor allegedly stepped on a nail in their facility.
Everyone, you need to give up you CO2 emissions so that James Camperon can maintain his lifestyle:
But e.g. James Cameron apparently assumes that people won’t be able to notice that he is using
3 houses in Malibu (24,000 sq ft in total – 10 times the average U.S. home), a 100-acre ranch in Santa Barbara, a JetRanger helicopter, three Harleys, a Corvette, a Ducati, a Ford GT, a collection of dirt bikes, a yacht, a Humvee firetruck, a fleet of submarines…
Nevertheless, he demands that people live with less – the same people who made him rich by watching his movies….
There simply doesn’t exist any justification of the need to lower the world population that would make the life of James Cameron sustainable. It’s just amazing to think about the societal atmosphere that makes it natural for him to defend these inhuman concepts.
Update:
A European-style corporate state is typically ruled by a troika of large favored corporations, industrial and public employee unions, and long-time political insiders. Most definitely excluded from power are consumers, entrepreneurs, small businesses, younger workers without seniority, and taxpayers.
I have argued that Obama is not a socialist, but is building a European-style corporate state. Here is a great indicator, from my Princeton classmate Henry Payne:
For the first time in more than two years, SUV sales account for more than half of the U.S. auto market. …
The trend comes even as Washington issued a new edict that vehicles average an absurd 62 mpg by 2025. The current absurd standard — 35 mpg by 2015 — has forced manufacturers to invest billions in new small-car development.
Today, manufacturers are in defiance of their own customers — their marketing departments churning out small-car ads touting their new green products. This puts automakers in a tough spot: Continue to make cars for the government, or listen to their customers.
For now, manufacturers are sticking with the government, telling the Detroit News that “with a slew of new cars coming out, such as the Chevrolet Cruze, the Ford Fiesta and a new Ford Focus early next year, car sales are likely to outpace truck sales in the coming months.â€
If you want a deeper look at how legislation is made in the corporate state, read this fascinating (but very long) New Yorker report on the efforts to pass a climate bill this past year. The author writes it in the spirit of lamenting lost opportunities, but I read it as a great inside view of the sausage factor. Do we really want to give these guys more power?
In the same spirit, I commented thus on Kevin Drum’s post discussing the growth of campaign spending this year, and lamenting that it is going to the nasty old Coke team instead of the Pepsi team:
There is a really simple solution to this — reduce the coercive power of government to break individuals or corporations or to hand them windfalls, and all this spending goes away.
The spending has not gone up because the rules changed, because the Supreme Court rules did not substantially affect this kind of campaign spending (there is a ton of sloppiness in the media on this point).
The spending has gone up because Obama & the Democratic Congress has put more of the US economy in play in their attempts to form a European-style corporate state. When Obama and Pelosi engage in populist public speeches vilifying whole sectors of the economy, groups are going to try to defend themselves from the onslaught, either by throwing the current office holders out or buying the favor of those they can’t unseat.
Today’s episode — the shut down of the new debt market
Ford Motor Co.’s financing arm pulled plans to issue new debt, the first casualty of a bond market thrown into turmoil by the financial overhaul signed into law Wednesday.
Market participants said the auto maker pulled a recent deal, backed by packages of auto loans, because it was unable to use credit ratings in its offering documents, a legal requirement for such sales. The company declined to comment.
The nation’s dominant ratings firms have in recent days refused to allow their ratings to be used in bond registration statements. The firms, including Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings, fear they will be exposed to new liability created by the Dodd-Frank law.
The law says that the ratings firms can be held legally liable for the quality of their ratings. In response, the firms yanked their consent to use the ratings, hoping for a reprieve from the Securities and Exchange Commission or Congress. The trouble is that asset-backed bonds are required by law to include ratings in official documents.
The result has been a shutdown of the market for asset-backed securities, a $1.4 trillion market that only recently clawed its way back to health after being nearly shuttered by the financial crisis.
While private banks are paying back their TARP money, Fannie and Freddie have been given a new blank check:
It’s a favorite government trick to announce bad news on a Friday afternoon, so it appears in Saturday’s paper, the least likely edition to be read. By Sunday and Monday, it’s old news. The Obama Treasury just went one better, announcing on Christmas Eve that they were uncapping the amount they believe will have to be invested in Fannie and Freddie. The Bush Treasury first estimated the government-sponsored enterprises’ (GSEs) losses at $100 billion each. The Obama administration, which has been using the GSEs to stabilize the housing market by reducing their underwriting standards, upped the ante to $200 billion each. Now the administration has thrown in the towel completely, and dropped a large lump of coal in each taxpayer’s stocking—it won’t even try to estimate the total losses of Fannie and Freddie.
For extra special bonus style points, Fannie and Freddie executives will apparently receive multi-million dollar pay packages that the pay czar will be denying to many private banks.
But even as the administration was making this open-ended financial commitment, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disclosed that they had received approval from their federal regulator to pay $42 million in Wall Street-style compensation packages to 12 top executives for 2009.
In other news, the Feds are also propping up another quasi-governmental agency with more cash
GMAC, the ailing financing arm of General Motors, is set to receive around $3.5 billion in government aid, ABC News has learned. The funds would be the third infusion of federal support for the troubled lender.
The latest government aid would bring the total federal assistance for GMAC to $16 billion when combined with the $12.5 billion that the lender has already received dating back to December 2008. Due to its prior cash infusions, the government already owns 35 percent of GMAC.
GMAC continues to lose money because every time it gets more taxpayer money, it starts offering zero percent financing deals.
Immediately after GMAC became eligible for TARP money, GM reduced to zero the interest rate… on certain models. This, of course, penalizes GM competitors, including Toyota, Honda and other “transplants†whose cars are made in America by Americans for Americans, and Ford, which does not have the freedom of maneuver conferred by TARP money because Ford is not taking any…
GMAC has begun making loans to borrowers with credit scores as low as 621, a significant relaxation of the 700 minimum score the company adopted just three months ago as it struggled to survive. America’s median credit score is 723…
This perhaps might explain why GM, unlike other banks with low stress-test scores, was unable to get any private capital. Because lenders know GMAC will just hand the money over to car buyers with little prospect for getting any value back in return. Incentives for GMAC to take losses to sell cars, always an issue under GM’s private management, will only increase as the Administration looks to create some evidence – any evidence – that their GM investment isn’t a total dog. Witness $3 billion in cash for clunkers funds that went to buy $1 billion of used vehicles.
Postscript: Related news, the 10 most ridiculous uses of stimulus funds. Seems like there would be a lot of competition for this award.
The settlement discussed in this space July 17 — in which lawyers nabbed more than $25 million in fees and expenses, while fewer than 100 consumers redeemed Ford coupons worth $37,500 — was covered by the Associated Press last week, which stirred outrage in many quarters [Krauss/PoL, Greenfield, Cal Biz Lit]. As Cal Civil Justice notes, the settlement was purportedly on behalf of owners who suffered no rollover or other mishap. Instead, it sought damages for losses in the vehicle’s resale value due to adverse publicity, a nicely circular theory, since the adverse publicity was in good measure propelled by various allies of the plaintiff’s bar.
We own about 100 trucks as part of the business, many of them Chevy’s. We are going out right now to replace several, and I just can’t bring myself to do business with Government Motors. So its Ford trucks for now.
From an article about the Edsel:
total new car sales in the United States declined 31% from the 1957 to 1958 model years
Gosh, and we managed to get out of that without spending a trillion dollars. Wow.
Postscript: Sometimes it is hard for fiction to top reality. In vacation, the movie-makers tried to create the ugliest station wagon they could imagine.
They didn’t even come close to topping reality
Via TJIC, who had a much better title, “poor credit risks remain poor credit risks, even after you give them a free pony”
Recent data suggests that many borrowers who received help with mortgage modifications earlier this year tended to re-default on their payments, a top U.S. banking regulator said on Monday.
“The results, I confess, were somewhat surprising, and not in a good way,†said John Dugan, head of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, in prepared remarks for a U.S. housing forum.
“Put simply, it shows that over half of mortgage modifications seemed not to be working after six months,†he said.
You can absolutely, without a doubt, add the Big 3 to the list of folks who will be facing default once again just months after getting their first dollop of federal money.
David Yermack has an awesome essay in the WSJ this weekend, encouraging Congress to just say no to spending $25-$50 billion bailing out Ford and GM. Why? Well, beyond the obvious moral hazard, these companies are value destruction machines of epic proportions.
Over the past decade, the capital destruction by GM has been breathtaking, on a greater scale than documented by Mr. Jensen for the 1980s. GM has invested $310 billion in its business between 1998 and 2007. The total depreciation of GM’s physical plant during this period was $128 billion, meaning that a net $182 billion of society’s capital has been pumped into GM over the past decade — a waste of about $1.5 billion per month of national savings. The story at Ford has not been as adverse but is still disheartening, as Ford has invested $155 billion and consumed $8 billion net of depreciation since 1998.
As a society, we have very little to show for this $465 billion. At the end of 1998, GM’s market capitalization was $46 billion and Ford’s was $71 billion. Today both firms have negligible value, with share prices in the low single digits. Both are facing imminent bankruptcy and delisting from the major stock exchanges. Along with management, the companies’ unions and even their regulators in Washington may have their own culpability, a topic that merits its own separate discussion. Yet one can only imagine how the $465 billion could have been used better — for instance, GM and Ford could have closed their own facilities and acquired all of the shares of Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Volkswagen.
Congressional Democrats announced today that they had agreed to a bailout plan for Republicans after last week's devastating election results. While exact details are unavailable, sources tell us that the Republicans will be given 4 seats in the Senate and 15 in the House. Nancy Pelosi said in a statement today: "We've established pretty clearly over the last several months that failed strategies and management should not necessarily have to result in losses in market share, particularly for well-connected Washington insiders."
Asked for comment, Democratic strategist James Carville was giddy. "This is brilliant. It really doesn't give up anything of substance to the Republicans. But it will sap the energy from the Republican Party for making any substantial changes, and make it more likely they will continue the failed strategies that led to this most recent loss. After their recent failures, the Republicans were on the verge of being forced to reinvent their whole organization. This bailout should reduce the likelihood of that substantially."
When asked if bailouts of AIG, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Bear Stearns wouldn't similarly reduce the urgency to change failed approaches, Carville answered "no comment."
I am getting used to the new Typepad editor, but two issues still really cause me to question the sanity of the developers, particularly since this roll out has been going on since June:
Sometimes a proposed law is so wrong and so destructive, but so typical of a certain philosophical bent, that I almost wish it would pass, if for no reason than to have an Atlas Shrugged-type object example of disastrous results. Such is the case for a California ballot initiative that has qualified for the signature-gathering stage. The initiative, in part: (full text linked here)
Beyond the unbelievably Marxist confiscation going on here, it begs the question of just what supply of energy and financial capital that California is not getting today that this will somehow ensure. The implication seems to be that ExxonMobil, GM, and Citigroup are too fair-minded, selling their wares too even-handedly, and that California would prefer their attention tilted towards California.
Of course this initiative is profoundly immoral, so I can’t do anything but deride it, but it would make for a spectacular object lesson (though one would have thought the Soviet Union’s experience to be sufficient to this task, but apparently not). I am sure GM’s troubles would be greatly helped by replacing its board of directors with the California State Legislature (the only American organization running a bigger deficit than GM) and replacing Citigroup’s credit analysists with California social services beauracrats. I would kind of like to see this in the same way I would love to see what happens if I threw a crate of flourescent tubes off a 10th-floor roof — I would never actualy do it, because it would be unsafe and destructive, but I can still dream about how compelling the disaster would be.
Postscript: One could probably label this the Arizona and Nevada economic stimulation act and probably not be far off the mark.
Typically, wealthy individuals and investors will work hard to delay declaration of income and to push taxes off as far into the future as possible. The present value of taxes paid a year from now are less than paying the taxes today.
But over the last several weeks, I have had casual conversations with entrepreneurs and individuals from the moderately to very wealthy, and almost to a one they have said they are trying to pull income into 2007 and 2008 in anticipation of potentially large increases in capital gains tax rates and the rates at the top of the bracket.
On a different topic, a friend and I depressed ourselves in a bar last night laying out the case that the next decade may in many ways be a repeat of the 1970s. Already, we see both parties reverting to the economic prescriptions they promoted in the 1970s. Further, this week may herald the beginning of an inflationary monetary and fiscal policy combined with government enforced structural limits on growth (e.g. Co2 abatement policy, trade protectionism, price controls, high marginal tax rates and capital gains tax rates, lending restrictions, etc.) We are seriously discussing nationalizing a major industry (health care) for the first time since the 1970′s (when nationalizing oil was seriously considered). Currently we have a Republican President who is less market-oriented than his Democratic predecessor, and at least as clueless on economic issues as were Nixon and Ford. All that’s left to do is elect a new Jimmy Carter in 2008…
I often see the stat that US manufacturing employment has shrunk substantially over the last 50 or so years, usually accompanied by much wailing from the left (yes, the same people who criticized manufacturing work as dehumanizing 40 years ago).
The WaPo, via Hit and Run, says that US manufacturing output is at an all time high, and that the only way to reconcile these two is with technology and productivity. Which is certainly part of the story, and its refreshing to see someone telling this story and not trying to cast the manufacturing numbers as a reason to slam the borders closed against imports.
But isn’t there also a measurement problem here? Eighty years ago, if a Ford Motor factory needed the windows cleaned, a Ford employee did it. If it needed the parking lot striped, Ford workers did it. When it needed the bathrooms cleaned at night, Ford janitors did it. Today, the same Ford factory needs its windows and bathrooms cleaned, but an outside service contractor likely does the work. In the economic statistics, haven’t these workers migrated from "manufacturing" to "service" without anything real on the ground changing?
I have written on this before on the context of Vioxx, but is it really rational public policy to have juries be allowed to effectively ban products, products that both legislatures and regulatory bodies have explicitly or implicitly deemed as legal? Ted Frank takes this on at Overlawyered in a nice follow-up post on a $31 million jury verdict against Ford:
SUVs are designed to have high clearance to traverse rugged terrain.
This raises the center of gravity and affects the handling: it’s a
known tradeoff of the laws of physics. There are a wide variety of
tests of varying degrees of scientific merit one can use to suggest a
vehicle is "too prone" to roll over, and plaintiffs have the benefit of
cherry-picking which tests to apply to which vehicles. You’ll find lots
of lawyers complaining that the Bronco II allegedly responded poorly in
"J-turn tests", where the steering wheel is turned 330 degrees in one
third of a second and held there for another 4.67 seconds. Ford
designed the Explorer to pass the J-turn test to take away this claim,
and the trial lawyers started using different methodologies to claim
that the Explorer was too prone to roll over.Empirically, however, the Bronco doesn’t roll over more than several
other SUVs on the market, which is why NHTSA, in both the Bush I and
Clinton administrations, refused to recall the Bronco when the
plaintiffs’ bar asked it to. When I say Ford was held liable for
producing an SUV, I’m not spinning: it was because it was held liable
for producing an SUV.Moreover, a vehicle should be viewed in totality: an auto that is
more likely to roll over may be safer in other particulars that more
than compensate for that increased propensity. So I question the
premise. One can’t change the rollover propensity without creating a
different vehicle entirely. The vehicle should be viewed holistically,
and holistically, the Bronco is a safe car when used as designed.Perhaps we as a society would be better off taking the nanny-state
step of banning SUVs, forbidding people from wildnerness driving
because too many drivers don’t know how to drive SUVs in highway
conditions, but that’s a decision that not only would end the American
auto industry, but should be made other than by a 12-person jury of
laypeople. This vehicle rolled over because the driver drove off the
road.
I had similar thoughts about the Vioxx cases:
Anyway, the point of this post is that this verdict represents a very dangerous assault on individual choice. Recognize that there are many, many activities in life where individuals are presented with the following choice:
If I choose to do X, my life will be improved in some way but I may statiscally increase my chance of an early death.
You
may react at first to say that "I would never risk death to improve my
life", but likely you make this choice every day. For example, if you
drive a car, you are certainly increasing your chance of early death
via a auto accident, but you accept this risk because driving allows
you to get so much more done in your life (vs. walking). If you ride a
bike, swim, snow ski, roller blade, etc. you are making this choice.
Heck, everyone on the California coast is playing Russian Roulette with
an earthquake in exchange for a great climate, beautiful scenery, and
plentiful jobs.The vast majority of drugs and medical therapies carry this same
value proposition: A drug will likely improve or extend your life in
some way but carries a statistical chance of inducing a side effect
that is worse than the original problem, up to and including death.
The problem is that we have structured a liability system in this
country such that the few people who evince the side effects can claim
more money in damages than the drug was worth to all the people it
helped. For example, if a drug helps 999 people, but kills the
thousandth, and that thousandth person’s family is awarded $253 million
in damages (as in this case), the drug is never going to be put on the
market again. Even if the next 1000 people sign a paper saying we are
willing to take the one-in-a-thousand risk to relieve the pain that is
ruining our lives, they still are not going to get the drug because the
drug companies know that some Oprah-loving jury will buy the argument
that they did not understand the risk they were taking and award the
next death another quarter of a billion dollars….By the way, have you noticed the odd irony here? Robert Ernst (the
gentleman who died in the Vioxx case) is assumed, both by the FDA and
the litigation system, to be unable to make informed decisions about
risk and his own health. But a jury of 12 random people who never
experienced his pain can make such decisions for him? And us?
Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution said it even more succinctly:
How did we arrive at a system in which 12 random Texans are assigned
responsibility for evaluating the scientific merits of statistical evidence of
this type, weighing the costs and benefits, and potentially
sending a productive blue-chip American company into bankruptcy protection?
If George Lucas needs any more money, here is my movie idea for him: Make a movie about Han Solo and Chewbacca in their early years. How did a Wookie prince become a smuggler? How did he meet Han? How did Han win the Millennium Falcon from Lando? In my imagination, the movie would be more in the spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark rather than the most recent star wars movie, putting the emphasis on adventure and action over special effects, Republic politics, and endless light-saber fights. The only real challenge would be casting the young Han Solo part — who would be willing to try to replace Harrison Ford?
Does anyone doubt that this would make a fortune, particularly if you teamed Lucas with someone to do the writing? The series would easily lend itself to a serial format, with multiple episodes, though in that format it might make a better TV show than movie.
PS- I got started thinking about this because I saw Star Wars III again this weekend. As an update to my review: it did not wear very well. The back third from the (attempted) arrest of Palpatine forward was still engaging, but the front half actually had me squirming in my seat. The dialog still sucks, the initial mission sequence still makes no sense, and the battle with General Grievous is still just one more gratuitous light saber battle and chase scene.
Over the past couple of days, the comment period and the resulting debate about FEC rule-making for blogs and campaign finance reform really has me simmering. As a review, McCain-Feingold for the second* time in modern US history created a dual class of citizenship when it comes to First Amendment speech rights: The "media" (however defined) was given full speech rights without limitations during an election, while all other citizens had their first amendment rights limited.
These past few weeks, we have been debating whether this media exemption from speech restrictions should be extended to bloggers. At first, I was in favor. Then I was torn. Now, I am pissed. The more I think of it, it is insane that we are creating a 2-tiered system of first amendment rights at all, and I really don’t care any more who is in which tier. Given the wording of the Constitution, how do I decide who gets speech and who doesn’t – it sounds like everyone is supposed to:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I have come to the conclusion that arguing over who gets the media exemption is like arguing about whether a Native American in 1960′s Alabama should use the white or the colored-only bathroom: It is an obscene discussion and is missing the whole point, that the facilities shouldn’t be segregated in the first place.
I have read my handy pocket Constitution (courtesy of the Cato Institute) through a number of times, and I have yet to find any mention of special constitutional privileges or rights for employees of major media firms. Unfortunately, we seem to act like its in there somewhere, as I wrote here as well, though in a different context.
* Footnote: This is not the first time we have created two classes of citizen when it comes to speech. Over the last 30-40 years, we have differentiated "political" speech from "commercial" speech. Until McCain-Feingold, political speech was pretty zealously protected by the courts, while we have gotten to the point that the government can pass nearly any law it wants restricting commercial speech. Here is a simplistic example. Unless I am over some spending limit, I can buy an ad in the NY Times and print in 70 point type "Bush Sucks" and no court would bat an eye. If I am a pissed off Ford customer, I can print an ad in the Times saying "Ford Sucks" and probably be fine as well. However, if I am a Honda dealer, and place an ad in the NY Times saying "Ford Sucks", I will likely get fined and slapped with an injunction.
When the Constitution says that "Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech" it sure seems like there aren’t any qualifying words like "political" or "commercial"
Frequent readers of this site will know that I am a strong opponent of how the current tort system works. However, I am not a big supporter of damage caps. Damage caps may limit the harm of a broken tort system, but they don’t fix the root problem – the jackpot justice that seeks wealth transfers from wealthy parties irrespective of who was really at fault. For example, note this case, where teens who were not wearing their seat belts were killed by a driver breaking the speed limit and with a blood alcohol level over twice the legal limit. The jury decided the accident was 90% the fault of… Ford, for designing a car with the same glass used by everyone else in the auto industry. But the unfairness of the decision is only the beginning of the outright nuttiness and fraud by the plaintiff in this case. Make sure to go to this article – you have to scroll to the article on Ford appealing frontier justice, but the extra finger work is justified.
As a follow-on to the issues I raised in this post about the FDA making our risk-reward choices for us, comes this tongue-in-cheek suggestions from Café Hayek: Lets start the FCA, the Federal Car Administration, to approve cars for consumer use:
Choices would be few. Because of the high costs of the approval process, only cars that appealed to large numbers of consumers would receive attention from the manufacturers. On the plus side, the cars that did survive the process would be very safe and very good cars. They’d have to be. Manufacturers would want to reduce the odds of failure to avoid a ten year approval process that resulted in rejection.
It would be great, assuming the bureaucrats in Washington would make exactly the same choices that you would. In other words, it would be great if we all wanted to drive identical Ford Taurus’s.
If you think this suggestion is just ridiculous humor, ask yourself whether this is what Ralph Nader has been after all along.
For several years, I worked for a major supplier to the commercial airline industry. Eventually, I had to leave, because the entire industry just drove me nuts – some of the worst structural problems in any industry I have seen combined with an incredible unwillingness to do anything about them. Marginal Revolution reminds me about the airline industry with this post.
Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The extra weight caused airlines to spend $275 million to burn 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000 just to carry the additional weight of Americans, the federal agency estimated in a recent issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (fee req’d).
As entertaining as this is, the industry is still totally unwilling to address the real problems in the industry.
Continue reading ‘Airline Industry and Inventory Pooling’ »
Assuming Cheney does not want to run for president, which I think is a given, something will happen in 2008 that has not happened in 56 years since 1952: Neither of the two major-party presidential candidates will be incumbents of the President or Vice-President jobs. In 1952 we had Eisenhower vs. Stevenson. Since then we have always had incumbents running, though not necessarily successfully -
1956: Eisenhower
1960: Nixon
1964: Johnson
1968: Humphrey
1972: Nixon
1976: Ford
1980: Carter
1984: Mondale and Reagan
1988: Bush
1992: Bush
1996: Clinton
2000: Gore
2004: Bush v 1.1
I guess the only exception you could make to this is if you called Hillary an incumbent. Full list of presidents and VP’s here
UPDATE
I didn’t just bury the conclusion, but left it out entirely. The point is that 2008 is likely to be a zoo. Not one but two wide open nominating battles, plus of course the general election. Can we please, please before then try to figure out a way to choose our candidates other than just letting Iowa do it?
UPDATE #2
Welcome Instapundit (guess I need to send a check to my host for more bandwidth). While you are here, you might check out my latest roundup on Kyoto and Global Warming, as well as an interesting analysis on the economic and political success of ex-French vs. ex-Anglo/American colonies. Short answer is that you didn’t want the French as masters.
UPDATE #3
Check out the comments section, which has several good posts handicapping the Republican candidates in 2008. Several people suggest a Republican strategy to replace Cheney mid-term with their next candidate. I know that the leadership of both political parties lament their loss of control, due to the primary system, in selecting their nominee, and this certainly would be an intriguing way of getting around that and the Iowa/NH problem. However, the move is so transparently Machiavellian, and I think unprecedented, that the first party to try it will probably get punished in the court of public opinion.
This blog will often touch on the insanity that is the current American tort system. I don’t think there is any greater threat to capitalism, due process, or democracy than the growing power of the litigation bar.
Via Overlawyered.com, which should be an essential part of your daily blog browsing, comes this story. Apparently, after being sued by Okaloosa County for making defective police cars, Ford refused to sell the county any more of this type car. The County sued again, this time to force Ford to sell it more cars of the type it is suing Ford for being defective:
One of Morris’ attorneys, Don Barrett, has said the sheriff firmly believes the Police Interceptors are defective but he wants to buy new ones to replace aging cars because seeking other vehicles would be more costly.
lol. Unfortunately, in the service business, it is legally more difficult to exclude customers from the premises. We have several well-known customers who come to our campgrounds (plus Wal-mart and any other private retail establishment) desperately hoping to slip and fall and sue. In a future post, I will tell the story of a Florida campground that is being sued by a visitor for sexual dysfunction after the visitor allegedly stepped on a nail in their facility.
