Featured America's Manufacturing Failure (Autoline After Hours)

i have to say, i'm pleasantly surprised with the design and build of my '23 chevy

 

Warning...over an hour.

And mostly anti government and anti intellectual.

Not that he isn't right.

I can't memorize, but give me a problem and my brain just explodes. I graduated from college after studying the classics. But my career (and I stumbled into it out of curiosity) was in bits and bytes and interfaces. I found my fit.
But then maybe he is an old know it all, just as I am.

 

I didn't watch the video, but I can say that I'm rather discouraged with the car selection the USA has and am quite jealous of other countries that have some pretty neat cars. I just got back from abroad and saw lots of neat Chinese vehicles, as well as others. Our taxi driver drove a Renault Kangoo, which I thought was a pretty neat design.

Here in the States everything is the exact same cookie-cut copy repeated over and over again. You got your massive pickups, your massive SUVs, your crossovers and a couple of sedans, and 2, maybe 3 minivans. That's really all that's available over here. And the diversity in technology doesn't seem that great either, gasoline, gasoline hybrid and a seemingly blatant attempt to kill EVs. And everything now needs a touchscreen that you got to cover with your hand to see it in sunny areas like where I live.

 

they build what sells. different cultures have different tastes, requirements, economics, and etc.
that's what makes traveling so interesting, although the world today is much more homogenized then even when i started around 1970. i used to drool over european car design, and they drooled over ours

 

Had a VOIP system that inside the house was the same as the old landline days. Near lightening strike took out 7 upstairs phones and the wiring. Oddly the downstairs TV and Internet and the 3 phones there were fine once unhooked were fine so we didn't realize the problem until a few days later when we went to make an outgoing. Bought new phones and the cable company replaced their modem and functionally we are fine.

A tornado hit just north of Sanford and threw debris 1k feet into the air and across a major road, Destroyed several private planes at the Raleigh Executive Airport which is really closer to Sanford.

Now going through a several week period where we have a storm every night. Amazing to see 5" per hour rains and watch the creeks fill up, hope the dams hold etc. I live on a pond and the dam for it is maybe 100 yards from my backyard.

I have a different perspective having known many politicians, those that work in their offices and many folk that are just very senior government types (like senior civil service rank). Yes org structure had gotten a bit bloated. (IMHO somewhat due to the limits of the politician imposed pay structure and the Civil Service Rules. But the alternative was what we are seeing now, the politicization of the working ranks of the government. A President should appoint 2-3 levels down and not 8 like Nixon and Trump tried to do. 400+ presidential appointments.)

I put the problems squarely on the political types who are personally power hungry. Many have the morals of a tomcat. Both sides if the aisle. Oh for the person who runs, wins, votes his convictions and then departs and lets the next guy see if his ideas work any better. To run now you have to be too beholden to the fund raisers. I recall a congresscritter speaking to a meeting of our local senior managers and he described how much money he had to raise every day in order to run again. He had to scuttle from the floor of congress across to a private building and use the phones there. Read a bill ...who has the time now ... which is how the lobbyists got to draft all the language in the bills.

And then the civil servant types get stuck with the ridiculous job of implementing the vague policy that hasn't been well thought out beforehand. Used to be you'd see two congresscritters from opposite parties having lunch or more likely drinks at one of the local establishments. At one time my wife used a hairdresser that had an office in the basement of the Capital via a housemate that worked for her home state representative. The stories I'd hear ....

 

I think the US is the only place with an independent dealer system protected from competition by law. What they want sell without the consumer option of directly going to the manufacturer skews the market. Got about the same situation with cell phone options cause it is more about what the telecoms want, not the consumer.

 

This is the real reason they wanted the chicken tax, to get rid of these:

The car market is lame, and the economy makes it hard to justify buying a car. It's torture at this point, that you either live like an indigent because you don't have a car or you live like an indigent because you do.