Why aren't diesel engines allowed to be sold in those states you mentioned?
Those states have very stringent maximum vehicle emissions, and diesels do not meet those emissions standards.
It often seems like diesels are a cycle in back of California emissions (diesels of today are meeting California emissions of ten years ago.) Since Europe doesn't have the same standards, and diesels aren't popular enough here...it doesn't pay for automakers to try to meet California emissions (which are the most severe in the world. )
There's also an issue with diesel fuel. I've heard that the high-sulfur diesel fuel used here has also been a barrier to automakers, whose engines are designed for the low sulfur diesel fuel used in Europe (it causes various mechanical issues, and I believe VWs engines are specially designed to deal with the high sulfur fuels.)
Low sulfur fuels will become much easier to obtain in the US in 2007, and will be the only thing available by 2010. I suspect, therefore, that there will be a big increase in automakers importing diesel cars in the next two years. On the other hand, I believe that in 2007 California emissions will become yet more stringent, and a bunch more states will have higher emissions standards by then too.
Another barrier is that diesel fuel is usually more expensive than regular gasoline...and diesel engines costsmore, so the cost savings are not easy to obtain unless you drive around a lot. (If we had $5/gallon gasoline, the cost savings would be much more realizeable.)
I should also add that diesels were widely sold and available in the US in the 1970s, but the experience with them wasn't very good, and some consumers are still reeling over that.
they really do make hybrids look like nothing more than a neat but pointless gimmick.
Hybrid technology is mateable with a diesel engine. I suspect you will see diesel/hybrids in the next few years. In the meantime, hybrid gasoline engines are a reasonable response to the issues of the American market, in particular because they meet our notoriously high emissions standards.
About $52,000. It's the only diesel luxury vehicle sold in the US right now, but there are other diesels made by European luxury makers that are luxurious and have good performance, and get over 40MPG. No others are being sold in the US (other than the VW Passat, which I believe has a diesel engine option. In the US, the Europeans sell fewer vehicles and are loathe to add the complexities and cost of selling, marketing and maintaining more engines that may not sell as well as they do in Europe (especially since these engines cannot be sold in a bunch of states, including NY, MA and CA--large consumers of luxury vehicles. So they choose to stick with only gasoline engines.)
I believe that Lexus will be bringing out some hybrid sedans with over 40+MPG.
The Concorde [snip] I never understood this, why did they ground it after a single crash? There must be more to the story.
The aircraft were grounded immediately after the crash, until they figured out what occurred (fuel tank too easy to puncture issues) and fixed it (bladders installed into the fuel tanks.) The Concorde resumed flying for less than a year at which point British Airways and Air France figured out that the plane had just become too expensive to maintain and fly.
Good keyboards are hard to come by, but there are some specialized vendors around.
That's for damn sure. Of particular note is the horrible keyboards Dell is equipping with new PCs. I can get used to the fact that they feel lame, but now they are making them slightly smaller and rearrangeing some of the keys (such as the arrow keys and cursor movement keys (home/insert/end).) It drives me mad because I've become so accustomed to those keys being in a particular place.
And if that's what Tommy Thompson is going to sell it as, then here's my proposal to him.
Any VeriChip enabling legislation has to come with an amendment to the US Constitution saying...
a.) No person shall be required to have a VeriChip if they don't want one
b.) Verichips may contain useful health background data, but they may not carry personally identifiable information. (Such as name, bday, SSN, et cetera.)
If that occurs, and passes, you may possibly have my support.
While IANAL, I do remember reading somwhere that yes, under English law you would at least be partly responsible.
I don't believe this is a common law concept, but, at least in the US, I know that there are specific laws regarding drug offenses and property owners. For instance, in some states, a landlord is *required* to evict someone whom he knows has drugs on premises, or faces charges for failure to do so. This law is yet another offshoot from the War on Drugs, but doesn't necessarily mean that a landlord whose tenant is doing something else illegal is required to evict.
but I got my first Job at 16, and they required Drug Testing, and I'm fairly sure it was a pretty standard procedure by then.
On a slightly different but related note, pre-employment/random drug testing is, essentially, a fetish unique to the United States. It's unheard of outside of the US.
Weirdly, the people who are most aghast at the idea of drug testing are people in other Anglo-Saxon nations (like New Zealand, Australia and Canada.) It remains a mystery why Americans were so milquetoast in how they dealt with drug testing, whereas other nations thought it was entirely unacceptable.
Actually I believe the problem is that thinking under stress works poorly, and trying to come to a good conclusion/plan of action under such a scenario takes too long. A lot of your martial arts is spent clearing your mind so you can think effectively in spite of the situation. Thinking is actually pretty important.
I remember hearing that women who have taken self-defense don't necessarily do any better than women who have taken self-defense (in situations in which life/property are at risk.) The problem stems from having too many tools in the weapons arsenal, and not being sure which one to use. The training may cloud good thinking because, in the end, the most effective self-defense mechanism is simply running away (where possible.) The untrained run away, and the trained stay when they should have run away.
yup, using cryptic model names is bad for business as far as I'm concerned.
There are exceptions to this, but I'm not sure if they really are exceptions, or the companies think they are exceptions.
One of the main ones is luxury vehicles. European brands (MB, BMW, Saab, Volvo) never named their cars, and stuck to number/letter combinations. When Honda introduced Acura, they kept to the Japanese idea of naming vehicles, but, when Infiniti and Lexus were introduced, Nissan and Toyota, respectively, wanted to emulate the European style of number/letter combinations. Eventually even Acura dumped names for number/letter combos. (As I said, I'm not sure if it makes any difference or not.)
Another example is home appliances. You can go to Best Buy and find the exact same Whirlpool washer that's at Circuit City and the two of them will have completely different model numbers (which will be long and violently complex.) One hypothesis a friend of mine has, to explain this, is that all appliance stores have policies saying they won't be undercut on the same model, and the way they can get away with such a a policy is by not selling the same "model." I can't see any reason why Whirlpool would build the billions of different types of washing machines that's offered by the model number combinatorics, so I remain mystified.
Yes, and there are actually a lot of different ways to maximize shareholder value.
There are those who would say that General Motors, by persuing large and quick profits by overselling its SUV lines was "maximizing shareholder value"--because it brought significant profits back to its shareholders in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
A GM shareholder might not have been pleased being a Toyota shareholder. Toyota, during the time period that GM was making crazy profits on SUVs, was nurturing, at enormous expense, hybrid technology, and then selling an econobox hybrid vehicle when gasoline was at its lowest price in decades, at a sizeable loss per vehicle. However history shall show that Toyota, too, was "maximizing shareholder value" by taking a long term to very long term perspective on the future of automobiles, at the expense of short term profits. Suffice it to say, GM would not have called what Toyota did "maximizing shareholder value" and Toyota would not have called GMs practices "maximizing shareholder value."
Wall Street analysts bitch all the time about Costco, which they claim is not "maximizing shareholder value" because of its costly employee reimbursement packages. They wished the company was on the stingier side, like Wal Mart. Amusingly, Costco is, at this point in time, a better investment, but in any case, the board of directors of Costco believe that "maximizing shareholder value" includes not just dividends and share performance, but also being a company that has an enviable reputation, and that people want to be associated with, and therefore, invest in. Much like Toyota, Costco is a great stock for the long run, because it's a company that believes that certain things are important in the long run, at the expense of the short run.
Boston Common has raised the interesting idea that Cisco could hurt its reputation by selling its wares to governments who use them poorly. Whether you believe that argument or not (I'm sitting on the fence) there's no doubt that reputation has something to do with shareholder value. If the situation blew up for Cisco, it could result in the loss of many clients (in particular, state and local governments, who are sometimes targetted by activists regarding their procurement decisions.)
Shareholder social activism, incidentally, is not a new thing. The California Public Employees Retirement System is one of the nation's largest equity holders, and they have been agressive in throwing their weight around in recent times (and to say they're too big to buy out is an understatment.) The idea that activism could occur this way is finally starting to dawn on progressive activists (slowly) and I think you're going to see quite a lot more of it in years to come.
Re:I argued about increased business and royalty
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The Case for Free WiFi?
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· Score: 2, Funny
The coffee shop owner may be thinking: "I only have seating for 12 people. If 5 people sit here for an hour, sucking up my bandwidth...where will the other customers sit?"
I remember reading somewhere that McDonald's had purposefully designed the seating in its restaurants to become uncomfortable after about 10-15 minutes. They don't want people hanging about (and they definitely don't want homeless hanging about. Wendy's has more comfortable seating, and I see homeless in there all the time.)
Sorry, but I am going to have to call this total bullshit.
I get the information for my post from the Economist. In particular, an article entitled "Dreaming of the other side of the wire" from their edition of March 10, 2005. I apologize that the entirety of the article is not available for me to show you. But the following two paragraphs come from that article:
"Paradoxically, the best solution might well be to relax, not tighten, the restrictions on immigration. The libertarian-minded Cato Institute argues that when barriers to entry are low, migration becomes a circular process. Under the bracero (strong arm or labourer) programme that ran from 1942 to 1964, Mexican workers entered and left the American labour market almost at will (albeit under deplorable working conditions). By contrast, when barriers are high, there is every incentive to come and then stay.
Using as his example Puerto Rico, which like Mexico is poor but which, unlike Mexico, has no immigration barrier to the American mainland, Cato's Daniel Griswold notes that during the 1980s, 46% of the Puerto Ricans who moved to the mainland stayed for less than two years. By the 1990s "out-migration had stopped completely, despite persistently high unemployment." Legalising Mexican migration, says Mr Griswold, would at a stroke "bring a huge underground market into the open" and improve working conditions for millions of the low-skilled."
I believe that Perot, incidentally, at least tacitly acknowledged the idea (of the time) that NAFTA would slow south-north migration (after all, who would work all the jobs sucked south? CAFTA has now been passed with a similar thinking, which is funny, because NAFTA had very little effect on that, as noted.) On this note, he was wrong about NAFTA.
I'm not sure how it makes the point in the long run...NAFTA played no role in the long run export of jobs to China (which some are saying are coming back to Mexico for costs anyway.)
Does Dubya like illegals? I think for entirely different reasons than noted: inherently conservative, once citizenized, the hispanic population would make this country overwhelmingly Republican voting. I don't think he sees any connections to blowing through labor unions (who are blowing up all by themselves) and illegals tend not to do work which would be in conflict with that done by those in foreign countries (they tend not to be in manufacturing, for instance. They do service work.)
Post 9/11/2001, illegal immigration across (primarily) the USA's southern border increased by more than 33%.
The border was tightened after 9/11, and I believe that the increase proves my, and The Economist's, point.
And lets cut this crap out of if you're born here, you're automatically a citizen. If your parents are citizens...you aren't either.
That makes for a rather complex situation if you take it to its logical conclusion. It could mean that newborn children could only be citizens if you could prove that their parents inherited their citizenship "properly." You could not strip the parents of their (ill-gotten) citizenship, but you could prohibit the newborns from having their parents citizenship because their parents may not have come from a line of legal immigrants.
There is some chance that the law would have to function like that in order to be constitutionally viable.
But, I wish we could 'wall up' the borders, at least on the southern border...and help turn the flood of illegals coming across.
Actually the dramatic increase in illegals living in the US has been caused by implimenting your desires as stated above.
In 1996 the Clinton administration erected walls and other anti-crossing devices in the main crossing regions (such as San Diego-Tijuana.) Prior to that time, the quantity of illegals who would remain in the US was relatively small--instead, they would cross in the US to work for a few months, and then generally return back (once they made some cash. Life in the US tends to be too hard and expensive for illegals to want to remain permanently.) In any case, if they needed cash again, they would come back for a few months and return.
When they started closing the border, the blow to the head reality of economics kicked in. The only way in now is the really hard crossings, which many don't survive. Economic migrants got shit-scared...so
a.) they started flooding northward, afraid that if they didn't make it now, they may never be able to make it
b.) they stayed, because it's so hard to cross, and they didn't want to risk going back south and trying another migration northward
c.) having children on US soil becomes vitally important. Illegals with children who are US citizens are undeportable. (Oddly, the parents are still illegal...there's no easy way for them to become legal, and when Bush suggested asylum, Congress went mad.)
So, in essence, Clinton's attempt to appeal to the anti-immigration types dramatically increased illegal immigration. (Some say from 100k per year to 1 million per year.) Because people don't understand the issue, regardless of their political leanings, the obvious/workeable solutions will remain off the table.
Look at it this way...there was a change of about 100 votes against the Patriot Act since it was passed the first time.
357-66 on October 24, 2001 257-171 on July 21, 2005
In about 4 years that's a lot of crow eaten. (Mostly democrats admittedly, but 11 more Republican votes against than in 2001 (14 now to 3 in 2001. Wikipedia was the source for the link above incidentally.)
Disney officials said the finger scans do not take an actual fingerprint
On a side note, I'm not really crazy about the argument that they are not exactly taking fingerprints, but they kinna are. Technically so do police...while the entire fingerprint is taking, only certain points are consequential to them.
In either case, I find the solution excessively complex. I remember hearing that the individuals who used to work for the railroads would ticket punch the tickets with the basic description of the individual ticket holder so that they couldn't switch tickets with someone else (basically the information that used to keep driver's licenses from being switched with someone else, but is still found on the license anyway...height, weight, eye color.) Perhaps Disney could use a similar system, at far less expense (though admittedly, such a system is more human intensive...but likely just as reliable.)
as a brasilian, let me add that another force driving changes in our dialect of portuguese is the presence of natives, africans and other immigrants. this probably happened in US and the spanish america too.
I wanted to thank you for your post. I took a Portugese class (an advanced one for Spanish speakers) about two years ago, and I was fascinated. Learning more about voce was on my list of things to do. I wanted to mention a bit more about Portugese, but didn't have enough background to feel confident about my connection (I was hypothesizing that Brasil was likely a lot like the US in being less class conscious. It was the only other country I could think of like the US in this respect.)
However, what happened in Brasil was unique. Certainly we have words of Native origen in English (especially placenames and foods native to the Americas) and some Native words penetrated Spanish (particularly in Mexico, and the placename phenomenon is there too)--but the interaction of that Native population was very different. The indigenous population of Brasil was much more integrated into what is now Brasilian culture. There were interconnections between slaves from Africa, indigenous Brasilians and Portugese that were just trying to get by, that we in the US really didn't have.
In this respect, Brasil is very different from the US or Latin America.
Is America the only country where the native language is so disappointingly mangled by the vast majority of native citizens?
Probably, and for the very simple reason that America has a very weak historical attachment to class.
The idea of a "proper language" manifests through the concept that the language spoken by people higher in the social/financial hierarchies is better than that spoken by those who are less fortunate. People high up only want to deal with those of the same class, people in lower classes wish to emulate them and in time join their clique.
America was always less class oriented--judgements regarding an individual were made less on class indicators (like the ability to speak the language in a particular way.) The concept of an individual being able to transcend their birth was uniquely American for quite a long time.
While the French were fascinated by equality, they had a class system develop in time with the intellectuals looking down on everyone else--hence the Academie Francaise. The Spanish, and their theta pronounciation of Z, C, was done in emulation of a prince years ago who had a speech impediment. Today it sticks. Swear words developed from perfectly normal words that the upper social circles didn't want to talk about, so they started using euphemisms and in time the original words became vulgar (in both ways.:-) There is a post in the this thread about Russian, which can fill volumes with their expletives, whereas English has relatively few. I believe the class phenomenon has a role to play there.
And of course, the changes that occurred in American English, Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portguese all reflect the fact that the people in the Americas just didn't give a rat's ass about impressing the British, Spanish or Portugese any more, and they let their language "flatten." (The higher social classes tended to remain back at home and people became less and less connected to them.) In comparison, Indians are still very very class oriented (I suspect this is a carry-over from the Hindu Caste system), and an Indian's use of English is taken very seriously. Amusingly, Indian English carries terms from British English that the British themselves no longer use.
I remember several years ago a local TV station was testing the break/fix abilities of local stores (Best Buy, Circuit City, et cetera.)
The contrived test they came up with was to bring a computer that won't boot up--the cause was the ribbon cable on the hard drive was upside down (which is unusual today because ribbon cables have the little notch to prevent that.) The solutin they were looking for for the technician to put the ribbon cable correctly.
Everyone failed the test except for one store (as I recall.) A lot of places recommended replacing the motherboard and/or hard drive.
I don't think the test was appropriate. If you bring in a computer and say its broken, you would not have expected this type of "sabotage." It's like going to an auto mechanic with your spark plugs upside down. It just doesn't happen.
I used to joke that insurance companies didn't care about the very imminent geological dangers that face California, because, they reckon, once the big one hits, there won't be anyone left in California to make any claims.
On the other hand, it's been pointed out to me, semi-recently, that most Californians do not have earthquake insurance.
I dunno about you, but that, with the combination of homes which average $509k, is a source of worry for me. Any Californians able to comment on earthquake/tsunami insurance?
You have to be kidding me. UPS? To transfer secure information?
I know of a tape vault firm who felt that UPS was the way to go. Anonymous brown packages everywhere with normal UPS pickup. The head of the firm worried too much that the Iron Mountain-like experience brought too much attention to the packages.
I know the idiotic/. solution is that the poor people who can't afford to plop down cash can just get an old card - one that isn't anonymous. Toss equal rights right out the window. The rich get to be anonymous. The poor get tracked.
That's not an insignificant issue. Of course, not a damn person here has mentioned that the poor are also the least likely people to have and ID card in the first place. There are lots of states in which an ID card is $20 and over.
On a side note, my Ohio has a law (4507.52) that states:
No agent of the state or its political subdivisions shall condition the granting of any benefit, service, right, or privilege upon the possession by any person of an identification card. Nothing in this section shall preclude any publicly operated or franchised transit system from using an identification card for the purpose of granting benefits or services of the system.
No person shall be required to apply for, carry, or possess an identification card.
A strict reading of this law implies that no person would be required to have or show an ID card in order to get a library card (and on that note, I did indeed get one of my library cards without showing my driver's license, though I showed other documents which credentialed my identity in some way.)
In any case, the more time passes, the more we come up with processes, workflows, technologies and procedures that make it less necessary to have an ID card, not more. I'm willing to defend the concept of anonymous, collateral based library cards...perhaps in time we'll come up with a better solution that doesn't require collateral.
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Why aren't diesel engines allowed to be sold in those states you mentioned?
Those states have very stringent maximum vehicle emissions, and diesels do not meet those emissions standards.
It often seems like diesels are a cycle in back of California emissions (diesels of today are meeting California emissions of ten years ago.) Since Europe doesn't have the same standards, and diesels aren't popular enough here...it doesn't pay for automakers to try to meet California emissions (which are the most severe in the world. )
There's also an issue with diesel fuel. I've heard that the high-sulfur diesel fuel used here has also been a barrier to automakers, whose engines are designed for the low sulfur diesel fuel used in Europe (it causes various mechanical issues, and I believe VWs engines are specially designed to deal with the high sulfur fuels.)
Low sulfur fuels will become much easier to obtain in the US in 2007, and will be the only thing available by 2010. I suspect, therefore, that there will be a big increase in automakers importing diesel cars in the next two years. On the other hand, I believe that in 2007 California emissions will become yet more stringent, and a bunch more states will have higher emissions standards by then too.
Another barrier is that diesel fuel is usually more expensive than regular gasoline...and diesel engines costsmore, so the cost savings are not easy to obtain unless you drive around a lot. (If we had $5/gallon gasoline, the cost savings would be much more realizeable.)
I should also add that diesels were widely sold and available in the US in the 1970s, but the experience with them wasn't very good, and some consumers are still reeling over that.
they really do make hybrids look like nothing more than a neat but pointless gimmick.
Hybrid technology is mateable with a diesel engine. I suspect you will see diesel/hybrids in the next few years. In the meantime, hybrid gasoline engines are a reasonable response to the issues of the American market, in particular because they meet our notoriously high emissions standards.
Why do no manufacturers offer nice cars with even near the above mpg rates?
Mercedes Benz E320 CDI. Fully loaded luxury sedan. 0 to 60 in 6.6 seconds, 200 hp, 360 lb/ft torque, 37 mpg/gallon highway.
About $52,000. It's the only diesel luxury vehicle sold in the US right now, but there are other diesels made by European luxury makers that are luxurious and have good performance, and get over 40MPG. No others are being sold in the US (other than the VW Passat, which I believe has a diesel engine option. In the US, the Europeans sell fewer vehicles and are loathe to add the complexities and cost of selling, marketing and maintaining more engines that may not sell as well as they do in Europe (especially since these engines cannot be sold in a bunch of states, including NY, MA and CA--large consumers of luxury vehicles. So they choose to stick with only gasoline engines.)
I believe that Lexus will be bringing out some hybrid sedans with over 40+MPG.
The Concorde
[snip]
I never understood this, why did they ground it after a single crash? There must be more to the story.
The aircraft were grounded immediately after the crash, until they figured out what occurred (fuel tank too easy to puncture issues) and fixed it (bladders installed into the fuel tanks.) The Concorde resumed flying for less than a year at which point British Airways and Air France figured out that the plane had just become too expensive to maintain and fly.
Good keyboards are hard to come by, but there are some specialized vendors around.
That's for damn sure. Of particular note is the horrible keyboards Dell is equipping with new PCs. I can get used to the fact that they feel lame, but now they are making them slightly smaller and rearrangeing some of the keys (such as the arrow keys and cursor movement keys (home/insert/end).) It drives me mad because I've become so accustomed to those keys being in a particular place.
Of course, VeriChips are for medical use only.
And if that's what Tommy Thompson is going to sell it as, then here's my proposal to him.
Any VeriChip enabling legislation has to come with an amendment to the US Constitution saying...
a.) No person shall be required to have a VeriChip if they don't want one
b.) Verichips may contain useful health background data, but they may not carry personally identifiable information. (Such as name, bday, SSN, et cetera.)
If that occurs, and passes, you may possibly have my support.
Thank you for your post. You just solved a conundrum I've had for the few years.
While IANAL, I do remember reading somwhere that yes, under English law you would at least be partly responsible.
I don't believe this is a common law concept, but, at least in the US, I know that there are specific laws regarding drug offenses and property owners. For instance, in some states, a landlord is *required* to evict someone whom he knows has drugs on premises, or faces charges for failure to do so. This law is yet another offshoot from the War on Drugs, but doesn't necessarily mean that a landlord whose tenant is doing something else illegal is required to evict.
but I got my first Job at 16, and they required Drug Testing, and I'm fairly sure it was a pretty standard procedure by then.
On a slightly different but related note, pre-employment/random drug testing is, essentially, a fetish unique to the United States. It's unheard of outside of the US.
Weirdly, the people who are most aghast at the idea of drug testing are people in other Anglo-Saxon nations (like New Zealand, Australia and Canada.) It remains a mystery why Americans were so milquetoast in how they dealt with drug testing, whereas other nations thought it was entirely unacceptable.
Thinking takes too long.
Actually I believe the problem is that thinking under stress works poorly, and trying to come to a good conclusion/plan of action under such a scenario takes too long. A lot of your martial arts is spent clearing your mind so you can think effectively in spite of the situation. Thinking is actually pretty important.
I remember hearing that women who have taken self-defense don't necessarily do any better than women who have taken self-defense (in situations in which life/property are at risk.) The problem stems from having too many tools in the weapons arsenal, and not being sure which one to use. The training may cloud good thinking because, in the end, the most effective self-defense mechanism is simply running away (where possible.) The untrained run away, and the trained stay when they should have run away.
yup, using cryptic model names is bad for business as far as I'm concerned.
There are exceptions to this, but I'm not sure if they really are exceptions, or the companies think they are exceptions.
One of the main ones is luxury vehicles. European brands (MB, BMW, Saab, Volvo) never named their cars, and stuck to number/letter combinations. When Honda introduced Acura, they kept to the Japanese idea of naming vehicles, but, when Infiniti and Lexus were introduced, Nissan and Toyota, respectively, wanted to emulate the European style of number/letter combinations. Eventually even Acura dumped names for number/letter combos. (As I said, I'm not sure if it makes any difference or not.)
Another example is home appliances. You can go to Best Buy and find the exact same Whirlpool washer that's at Circuit City and the two of them will have completely different model numbers (which will be long and violently complex.) One hypothesis a friend of mine has, to explain this, is that all appliance stores have policies saying they won't be undercut on the same model, and the way they can get away with such a a policy is by not selling the same "model." I can't see any reason why Whirlpool would build the billions of different types of washing machines that's offered by the model number combinatorics, so I remain mystified.
what's the phrase? "Maximizing Shareholder Value"
Yes, and there are actually a lot of different ways to maximize shareholder value.
There are those who would say that General Motors, by persuing large and quick profits by overselling its SUV lines was "maximizing shareholder value"--because it brought significant profits back to its shareholders in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
A GM shareholder might not have been pleased being a Toyota shareholder. Toyota, during the time period that GM was making crazy profits on SUVs, was nurturing, at enormous expense, hybrid technology, and then selling an econobox hybrid vehicle when gasoline was at its lowest price in decades, at a sizeable loss per vehicle. However history shall show that Toyota, too, was "maximizing shareholder value" by taking a long term to very long term perspective on the future of automobiles, at the expense of short term profits. Suffice it to say, GM would not have called what Toyota did "maximizing shareholder value" and Toyota would not have called GMs practices "maximizing shareholder value."
Wall Street analysts bitch all the time about Costco, which they claim is not "maximizing shareholder value" because of its costly employee reimbursement packages. They wished the company was on the stingier side, like Wal Mart. Amusingly, Costco is, at this point in time, a better investment, but in any case, the board of directors of Costco believe that "maximizing shareholder value" includes not just dividends and share performance, but also being a company that has an enviable reputation, and that people want to be associated with, and therefore, invest in. Much like Toyota, Costco is a great stock for the long run, because it's a company that believes that certain things are important in the long run, at the expense of the short run.
Boston Common has raised the interesting idea that Cisco could hurt its reputation by selling its wares to governments who use them poorly. Whether you believe that argument or not (I'm sitting on the fence) there's no doubt that reputation has something to do with shareholder value. If the situation blew up for Cisco, it could result in the loss of many clients (in particular, state and local governments, who are sometimes targetted by activists regarding their procurement decisions.)
Shareholder social activism, incidentally, is not a new thing. The California Public Employees Retirement System is one of the nation's largest equity holders, and they have been agressive in throwing their weight around in recent times (and to say they're too big to buy out is an understatment.) The idea that activism could occur this way is finally starting to dawn on progressive activists (slowly) and I think you're going to see quite a lot more of it in years to come.
The coffee shop owner may be thinking: "I only have seating for 12 people. If 5 people sit here for an hour, sucking up my bandwidth...where will the other customers sit?"
I remember reading somewhere that McDonald's had purposefully designed the seating in its restaurants to become uncomfortable after about 10-15 minutes. They don't want people hanging about (and they definitely don't want homeless hanging about. Wendy's has more comfortable seating, and I see homeless in there all the time.)
Sorry, but I am going to have to call this total bullshit.
I get the information for my post from the Economist. In particular, an article entitled "Dreaming of the other side of the wire" from their edition of March 10, 2005. I apologize that the entirety of the article is not available for me to show you. But the following two paragraphs come from that article:
"Paradoxically, the best solution might well be to relax, not tighten, the restrictions on immigration. The libertarian-minded Cato Institute argues that when barriers to entry are low, migration becomes a circular process. Under the bracero (strong arm or labourer) programme that ran from 1942 to 1964, Mexican workers entered and left the American labour market almost at will (albeit under deplorable working conditions). By contrast, when barriers are high, there is every incentive to come and then stay.
Using as his example Puerto Rico, which like Mexico is poor but which, unlike Mexico, has no immigration barrier to the American mainland, Cato's Daniel Griswold notes that during the 1980s, 46% of the Puerto Ricans who moved to the mainland stayed for less than two years. By the 1990s "out-migration had stopped completely, despite persistently high unemployment." Legalising Mexican migration, says Mr Griswold, would at a stroke "bring a huge underground market into the open" and improve working conditions for millions of the low-skilled."
I believe that Perot, incidentally, at least tacitly acknowledged the idea (of the time) that NAFTA would slow south-north migration (after all, who would work all the jobs sucked south? CAFTA has now been passed with a similar thinking, which is funny, because NAFTA had very little effect on that, as noted.) On this note, he was wrong about NAFTA.
I'm not sure how it makes the point in the long run...NAFTA played no role in the long run export of jobs to China (which some are saying are coming back to Mexico for costs anyway.)
Does Dubya like illegals? I think for entirely different reasons than noted: inherently conservative, once citizenized, the hispanic population would make this country overwhelmingly Republican voting. I don't think he sees any connections to blowing through labor unions (who are blowing up all by themselves) and illegals tend not to do work which would be in conflict with that done by those in foreign countries (they tend not to be in manufacturing, for instance. They do service work.)
Post 9/11/2001, illegal immigration across (primarily) the USA's southern border increased by more than 33%.
The border was tightened after 9/11, and I believe that the increase proves my, and The Economist's, point.
And lets cut this crap out of if you're born here, you're automatically a citizen. If your parents are citizens...you aren't either.
That makes for a rather complex situation if you take it to its logical conclusion. It could mean that newborn children could only be citizens if you could prove that their parents inherited their citizenship "properly." You could not strip the parents of their (ill-gotten) citizenship, but you could prohibit the newborns from having their parents citizenship because their parents may not have come from a line of legal immigrants.
There is some chance that the law would have to function like that in order to be constitutionally viable.
But, I wish we could 'wall up' the borders, at least on the southern border...and help turn the flood of illegals coming across.
Actually the dramatic increase in illegals living in the US has been caused by implimenting your desires as stated above.
In 1996 the Clinton administration erected walls and other anti-crossing devices in the main crossing regions (such as San Diego-Tijuana.) Prior to that time, the quantity of illegals who would remain in the US was relatively small--instead, they would cross in the US to work for a few months, and then generally return back (once they made some cash. Life in the US tends to be too hard and expensive for illegals to want to remain permanently.) In any case, if they needed cash again, they would come back for a few months and return.
When they started closing the border, the blow to the head reality of economics kicked in. The only way in now is the really hard crossings, which many don't survive. Economic migrants got shit-scared...so
a.) they started flooding northward, afraid that if they didn't make it now, they may never be able to make it
b.) they stayed, because it's so hard to cross, and they didn't want to risk going back south and trying another migration northward
c.) having children on US soil becomes vitally important. Illegals with children who are US citizens are undeportable. (Oddly, the parents are still illegal...there's no easy way for them to become legal, and when Bush suggested asylum, Congress went mad.)
So, in essence, Clinton's attempt to appeal to the anti-immigration types dramatically increased illegal immigration. (Some say from 100k per year to 1 million per year.) Because people don't understand the issue, regardless of their political leanings, the obvious/workeable solutions will remain off the table.
If you go to the trouble to buy the printer at Best Buy...while wearing a full body condom and face mask..
Laugh now, but them mother fuckers didn't even *try* to sell me the extended warranty.
Look at it this way...there was a change of about 100 votes against the Patriot Act since it was passed the first time.
357-66 on October 24, 2001
257-171 on July 21, 2005
In about 4 years that's a lot of crow eaten. (Mostly democrats admittedly, but 11 more Republican votes against than in 2001 (14 now to 3 in 2001. Wikipedia was the source for the link above incidentally.)
Disney officials said the finger scans do not take an actual fingerprint
On a side note, I'm not really crazy about the argument that they are not exactly taking fingerprints, but they kinna are. Technically so do police...while the entire fingerprint is taking, only certain points are consequential to them.
In either case, I find the solution excessively complex. I remember hearing that the individuals who used to work for the railroads would ticket punch the tickets with the basic description of the individual ticket holder so that they couldn't switch tickets with someone else (basically the information that used to keep driver's licenses from being switched with someone else, but is still found on the license anyway...height, weight, eye color.) Perhaps Disney could use a similar system, at far less expense (though admittedly, such a system is more human intensive...but likely just as reliable.)
Check out the document I wrote in my signature (a newer version is here
As well as my blog.
as a brasilian, let me add that another force driving changes in our dialect of portuguese is the presence of natives, africans and other immigrants. this probably happened in US and the spanish america too.
I wanted to thank you for your post. I took a Portugese class (an advanced one for Spanish speakers) about two years ago, and I was fascinated. Learning more about voce was on my list of things to do. I wanted to mention a bit more about Portugese, but didn't have enough background to feel confident about my connection (I was hypothesizing that Brasil was likely a lot like the US in being less class conscious. It was the only other country I could think of like the US in this respect.)
However, what happened in Brasil was unique. Certainly we have words of Native origen in English (especially placenames and foods native to the Americas) and some Native words penetrated Spanish (particularly in Mexico, and the placename phenomenon is there too)--but the interaction of that Native population was very different. The indigenous population of Brasil was much more integrated into what is now Brasilian culture. There were interconnections between slaves from Africa, indigenous Brasilians and Portugese that were just trying to get by, that we in the US really didn't have.
In this respect, Brasil is very different from the US or Latin America.
The question that I've *never* heard asked...
:-) There is a post in the this thread about Russian, which can fill volumes with their expletives, whereas English has relatively few. I believe the class phenomenon has a role to play there.
Is America the only country where the native language is so disappointingly mangled by the vast majority of native citizens?
Probably, and for the very simple reason that America has a very weak historical attachment to class.
The idea of a "proper language" manifests through the concept that the language spoken by people higher in the social/financial hierarchies is better than that spoken by those who are less fortunate. People high up only want to deal with those of the same class, people in lower classes wish to emulate them and in time join their clique.
America was always less class oriented--judgements regarding an individual were made less on class indicators (like the ability to speak the language in a particular way.) The concept of an individual being able to transcend their birth was uniquely American for quite a long time.
While the French were fascinated by equality, they had a class system develop in time with the intellectuals looking down on everyone else--hence the Academie Francaise. The Spanish, and their theta pronounciation of Z, C, was done in emulation of a prince years ago who had a speech impediment. Today it sticks. Swear words developed from perfectly normal words that the upper social circles didn't want to talk about, so they started using euphemisms and in time the original words became vulgar (in both ways.
And of course, the changes that occurred in American English, Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portguese all reflect the fact that the people in the Americas just didn't give a rat's ass about impressing the British, Spanish or Portugese any more, and they let their language "flatten." (The higher social classes tended to remain back at home and people became less and less connected to them.) In comparison, Indians are still very very class oriented (I suspect this is a carry-over from the Hindu Caste system), and an Indian's use of English is taken very seriously. Amusingly, Indian English carries terms from British English that the British themselves no longer use.
I remember several years ago a local TV station was testing the break/fix abilities of local stores (Best Buy, Circuit City, et cetera.)
The contrived test they came up with was to bring a computer that won't boot up--the cause was the ribbon cable on the hard drive was upside down (which is unusual today because ribbon cables have the little notch to prevent that.) The solutin they were looking for for the technician to put the ribbon cable correctly.
Everyone failed the test except for one store (as I recall.) A lot of places recommended replacing the motherboard and/or hard drive.
I don't think the test was appropriate. If you bring in a computer and say its broken, you would not have expected this type of "sabotage." It's like going to an auto mechanic with your spark plugs upside down. It just doesn't happen.
I used to joke that insurance companies didn't care about the very imminent geological dangers that face California, because, they reckon, once the big one hits, there won't be anyone left in California to make any claims.
On the other hand, it's been pointed out to me, semi-recently, that most Californians do not have earthquake insurance.
I dunno about you, but that, with the combination of homes which average $509k, is a source of worry for me. Any Californians able to comment on earthquake/tsunami insurance?
You have to be kidding me. UPS? To transfer secure information?
I know of a tape vault firm who felt that UPS was the way to go. Anonymous brown packages everywhere with normal UPS pickup. The head of the firm worried too much that the Iron Mountain-like experience brought too much attention to the packages.
That's not an insignificant issue. Of course, not a damn person here has mentioned that the poor are also the least likely people to have and ID card in the first place. There are lots of states in which an ID card is $20 and over.
On a side note, my Ohio has a law (4507.52) that states:
A strict reading of this law implies that no person would be required to have or show an ID card in order to get a library card (and on that note, I did indeed get one of my library cards without showing my driver's license, though I showed other documents which credentialed my identity in some way.)
In any case, the more time passes, the more we come up with processes, workflows, technologies and procedures that make it less necessary to have an ID card, not more. I'm willing to defend the concept of anonymous, collateral based library cards...perhaps in time we'll come up with a better solution that doesn't require collateral.