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KillFort

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  1. Good points... and for a moment let's just take out the "jealousy" factor and consider the following: I will agree that one can look at it from this perspective: Is it better to once have sight and go blind, or is it better to be blind the entire time so you do not know what you are losing? It is difficult to give up a certain standard of living once you've enjoyed it. But we must be grateful that our parents' generation was afforded such opportunities to help pay for our educations. Older generations are just that, old and certainly too old to "go back to school." I concede that the older one gets, the slower one is to adapt and accept new ideas. But where you must stop and question is in consideration of the actual net benefit from the change being proposed. Here's one example: Globalization. Good or bad for the United States? Does free trade exist? It does not appear so because of child labor and currency manipulation in other countries. Who is getting screwed here? Should we do away with the unions, the same group that helped dismantle unfair child labor so that we better compete? Do we need to go backwards in time after the way has been paved to our quickly deteriorating standard of living? I do not think that is the answer. Furthermore, not all people are college material disregarding age. I do not wish to convey this in a derogatory way. What I mean is that you can have two individuals. One is great at making charts, the other great with their hands and pipe fitting. Take the individual that fits pipes and get them to make the charts. It may never happen. Correspondingly, get the individual that makes charts and get them to fit pipes. This may also never happen. My point is if we have 100 million working adults in this country with degrees, are there enough quality jobs to support them? I do not believe there is a balance in the social structure any longer to allow all people with different but equally important talents to find opportunities and still make a decent middle-class living. Should we just forget about these displaced people? And just as you pick out the so called 5% of UAW members who feel entitled and "don't deserve to be protected", I ask that you also call out the portion of management that also does not deserve to be protected. I think I'd rather have a country where you can have unions with a smaller portion containing "bad apples" just as you have management groups with "bad apples" to balance out the greed and lack of accountability. The net effect is that there is a counterbalancing effect. There is a voice to better, although admittedly not perfect, represent all those involved. Accountability will come from representation. An easy example to see what happens when you remove representation is in regards to our country's current Executive Branch. Where's Congress and the Judicial Branch? They have been removed from the equation. At least our founding forefathers understand the more parties you have representing a cause, the better EVEN IF a minority of each party is equally corrupt. Another easy example is having only a two-party political system. But consider the alternative. What if we only had Democrats or we only had Republicans. Would we as a whole be better off? I don't believe so. We are better off, even if both parties have certain corrupt minorities than only having one group representing. Moreover, we would probably be better off yet if we had three parties representing. I think you get the point. The alternative approach is to not have unions and simply have management teams operating under scorched earth policies. Thus, the counterbalancing affect is lost. A good life is about good balance. Balancing work, balancing school, balancing health and exercise, balancing friends and family, balancing time in general. We are seeing more and more problems in this country because balance is being lost.
  2. CARBIZ... good post but this part "but then perhaps they should have gone back to school and become a CEO, too, rather than trying to blackmail their employer every 3 years into giving them what they are 'entitled' to." I respectfully disagree with. The reason is that everyone can't be a CEO.... they are part of the top 1% and I'm not just singling them out either. Do we need a large corporation (80,000 to 100,000+ workers) with 70,000 people with CEO titles even considering they all have the necessary education as you asked for? You still need other workers and perhaps more importantly, consider that leadership starts at the top. And today's social and political climate lends itself to little accountability. Just look at the past eight years of the Bush administration. They do not even have an automated e-mail backup system to properly save e-mails, which is breaking federal law by the way. Even the Clinton administration retrofitted Lotus Notes to have an automated backup system. The current administration uses Microsoft Outlook and gave up when the Lotus system would not retrofit again. And this is just one example where accountability is non-existent. You can start to ask as you did, why celebrities or sports players get multi-million dollar contracts these days. Is the work harder or are they working harder? Or is the work of a CEO in the last twenty years that much more complicated, or at least proportionately so to their compensation? I don't think so. Unions, while imperfect, help balance the employee/corporate structure out. It is analogous to competition in economic terms. The more firms you have within an industry, typically the greater the benefit to the consumer. Similarly and in general terms, the more parties you have representing a cause, the better. Otherwise, the scale becomes tipped too far to one side. One should not forget unions helped pave the way to fair labor laws that we take for granted now that America is beyond the Industrial Revolution. In other news... other countries without labor laws exploit children for 18 hours a day to make shoes or lead-laced products for our naïve consumption. Besides, education while important, does not instill common sense in an individual no matter how brainwashed and trigger-fingered we are in believing it performs such miracles. What we need is common sense. The sad part is that the country is losing its middle-class. This is one of the most important but quickly fading factors that once made the United States the envy of the world. One should consider that you may encounter three groups of people: (1) One group works hard and is NOT fairly compensated for their hard work (2) Another group works just as hard but IS fairly compensated for their hard work (3) One group knows all the right people and that gets them whatever they want despite their work ethic. On a final note, here is today's common sense tip and hopefully it hits home for some folks out there: If things are so economically great as certain politicians would like you to believe, why are they sending you an economic stimulus check in the first place?
  3. ... A lil' birdie tells me a large reason for the strike is due to the fact that management at the new plant is in fact returning to their "ship it" at all costs mentality, preferring quantity over quality with union workers refusing to go along. In other words, they are telling workers responsible for quality control on the line to stop writing up defects on the Lambdas and instead ship it although for awhile, it was the Toyota way of production. Union workers for the majority appreciate building a quality product as it is their livelihood. They do not want to produce junk but expect fair compensation for sacrificing their bodies to the repetitive assembly line work. I do not want to see anyone post that it is as simple as "bolting on a screw" and that pay is too high for such tasks. If anyone does, I will assume you are white collar without any line or assembly experience in your life. One of those kind of people that read it all in a textbook somewhere. As for myself, I am white collar and highly educated with a degree from a Big Ten school and working on my second but did work for Oldsmobile early in my career on the assembly line. Each and every dollar is earned on the line. Stop the union bashing out of your jealousy. It's weird. Too many people in this country want to see their neighbors and fellow country people having a lower standard of living just because they have to work 16 hours a day in Corporate America for the same pay but have degrees so think they are entitled to bigger pay. No, it's just that you don't have the balls to form a union yourself but stand around the water cooler whining about the situation while the CEO makes over 400 times your pay (up from around 40 times the average worker's pay of the 1980's) and who gets a golden parachute in case they rob everything from the shareholders.
  4. No celebrity will work out well if the product can't first stand on its own. Now we have the Enclave. Let's keep things going GM.
  5. I was just counting the days until this happened...
  6. "Enhanced armrest padding." This greatly interests me. GM's biggest problem with their door panels and armrests is that they are all hard plastic. Their armrests suck compared to just about every single other automaker out there and in fact, is one of my biggest interior complaints about GM. Everytime I drive in my Intrigue, my elbow starts hurting after five minutes. The last time I saw a real armrest in a GM vehicle was in my previous car--a 1986 Pontiac Parisienne.
  7. Don't know if the poster is legit or not but I am assuming we won't see a Trans Am sadly. Ain't It Cool News says not legit while other places says it is. Who knows for now.
  8. Rumors are true... 2008 but sadly, it doesn't look like there will be a 1982 Trans Am. It's replacement is still black: http://www.aintitcool.com/images2006/kr2008big.jpg
  9. Hey GM, consumers now have something called the World Wide Web. We can see what you offer in China. Information goes around the world in seconds. Stop treating U.S. consumers like idiots. Did you think we wouldn't figure it out?
  10. Can someone please confirm that the new Motortrend rendering (the black one, not the silver one) is NOT what it is going to look like? No offense regfootball, while I think the G8 nicer than what we currently have, it is still boring to me IMHO. When I see the next Impala, I want my jaw to hit the floor. When I saw that rendering, the only thing that popped up was a number in my head. That number was "1995" because that is what year that car looked like it came from. It looked like it was trying to be futuristic, but what 1995 futuristic would be.. you know, back in the day of animated gifs, Geocities accounts and when Netscape ruled the world...
  11. G8 Teaser on ABC News... Screencaps!
  12. The car itself looks awesome but GM has a real problem. This is a problem they need to address from this point on. Look at the above interior picture. There are foot prints on the pedals and what appears to be a stain on the carpet near the door. Please do not allow the release of pictures before someone reviews them thoroughly. Even if you have to have an entire team of people to work through the pictures, please have a checklist or some form of control with your photography folks. I understand mistakes happen and everyone makes them, but not in situations like this.
  13. I agree.. I think those seatbelt buckles are my favorite interior detail. I miss those ol' GM buckles which seems strange to say since I'm only in my twenties. My first car had them but boy could they get hot in the summer.
  14. Yeah, edmunds must have got it wrong. The info is still posted on their site: http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/articleId=118898 What a bunch of crap.. I stayed up until 3 AM. Yawn.. sleepy today.
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