McParts may be sinking

Since the employees can access that data, couldn’t hackers get at it too? All they’d have to do is recruit an employee to assist them, right? WikiLeaks presumably couldn’t access to the data Snowden had access to when Snowden worked there, but WikiLeaks got the data anyway with Snowden’s help.

Naw since they’re making $15 an hour now their loyalty is with the company. Can’t be bought. Uh huh, that is so.

When we talk about the US car companies being asleep while Japan invaded, like him or not, Bob Lutz had a different view. In his view the EPA as much as opened the flood gates for Japan to sell their smaller cars knowing the US couldn’t compete. I’m sure the truth is somewhere in the middle but seeing what EPA has been trying to do to cars, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Comrade Bing signing off.

I’m enjoying your posts today CB! … lol … re: “being asleep when Japan invaded” … at that time I was just entering the age where I started buying cars, and my recollection is that the Japanese cars were thought to have a higher build quality. All the panels matched up, all the screws and bolts were installed, the cars were just thought to be better constructed and more reliable. Add to that the mid-70’s fuel crisis, and the Japanese with their higher mpg vehicles were suddenly in the lead. When I was looking to buy my first car then, I looked at the Honda Civics. I don’t recall if I looked at any Toyotas. My opinions of the Civic (at the time) was it was a little too much like a tin can. Rough jittery ride, and very loud road noise. I bought a Ford truck instead, which I still own, and it has been quite reliable for 45+ years. It doesn’t get as good as mpg though as the Civic. It had a couple of problems that should have been corrected at the factory too, the steering wheel wasn’t centered, and one of the doors was poorly positioned, considerably off-center in the opening. Besides that the build quality was pretty good. Ford trucks at that time were very well engineered. “Ford tough” as they said on tv.

Actually, in our ECON class, they talked about how import quotas (ostensibly to PROTECT the “Big 3”) actually helped Japanese autos penetrate the market.

There was a quota of cars (“Voluntary Export Restraint”) where Japan could only import a set number of cars in the 1980s. At the time, Japan produced small, inexpensive cars, almost exclusively. But with a FIXED number of cars allowed…well, you make more money selling big, expensive cars, than you do selling small, cheap ones! By limiting the NUMBER of imports, it had the effect of increasing the VALUE of imports. And Honda sired Aura, Toyota Lexus, and the rest is history.

…a good lesson in “unintended consequences.”

I don’t think the Sears/Amazon story that Mike is pushing is correct. Sears was exiting the mail catalog business in the 1970’s and moving to brick and mortar stores in malls - along with the rest of the retail businesses. That business model got replaced by big box discount stores. And that is being replaced by internet sales. Sears had a gap of over 20 years between the time they decided to abandon catalogs and the rise of the internet. If only they had a cyrstal ball!

As another example, remember JC Whitney?

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Comrade @bing, once again you blame the wrong people. You are wrong about the EPA being at fault for CAFE regulations. That’s like saying the police are at fault for upholding traffic laws. The legislative branch enacts laws and the president approves them. When I think about the EPA or any other government department, I see a group of people carrying out the wishes of our elected representatives that, by extension, carry out the wishes of the American people. If you don’t like it, contact your Congressman and Senator to make your voice heard. IMO, you equate having the DTs with good vibes, so contact President Trump about it. You are in his core group, and he is eager to please the group that got him elected.

Amazon sold books, remember? They didn’t move into Sears product mix until a decade later. How could Sears be broken if big internet competition didn’t exist for another decade or more? It’s about timing, and yours is off by several years. Laughing right back at you.

Amazon hasn’t broken any anti-trust rules. Bing against Amazon because it’s the largest retailer…nothing else.

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I was receiving Sears catalogs AFTER Amazon started. So what that most of their sales were brick and mortar. I’ve read many articles in the WSJ and Forbes back then about how companies better get on the bandwagon with Amazon or be left behind. Sears already had in place a mail-order system. They could easily have expanded that into a on-line system. I agree that Sears probably couldn’t have predicted by year 2000 that Amazon was going to be big. They weren’t even profitable. By 2005 Amazon was growing 30-40 percent a year…Sears did NOTHING. By 2010…Amazon is bigger then Sears…again Sears did nothing.

Sears discontinued distribution of the general merchandise catalog in 1993. The company continued to distribute the extremely popular Craftsman Power and Hand Tools as well as licensed specialty catalogs. In 2007, Sears slowly went back into the proprietary catalog business by bringing back the Wish Book and adding new titles including Simply Indoors, Simply Outdoors, Smart Kitchens, The Workwear Authority and Wish Book Toys. (courtesy: The Sears Archives)

Sorry but that’s not how it works. Congress passes broad laws but the details of implementation are in the rules that are adopted by the agencies involved. Congress never approves the rules. That’s the concerning part because the rules are made by career employees, unaccountable to the public, and with a vested interest in expansion of their programs.

That’s flat-out nonsense, and you know it, jtsanders.

There’s a HUGE problem with “accountability” W/R/T “alphabet soup” government agencies. As we might remember from civics class, all of the “alphabet soup” is ostensibly the “executive branch”; yet, alphabet soup ALWAYS survives the POTUS. As Reagan put it “a government agency is the closest we’ll come to eternal life.” Alphabet-soup agencies have WIDE latitude as to how they elect to comply with their myriad mandates, so they effectively act autonomously: if they didn’t, nobody would CARE who got appointed to head these agencies!

And who, exactly, am I supposed to vote out, if I don’t like the EPA? The president? (Remember, EPA is ostensibly executive.) The congress, who PASSED the Clean Air Act? (Tough to do that, seeing as they are largely retired, or even deceased!) And some agencies are even WORSE: if a friend becomes a casualty of the DEA’s “drug war,” the parties responsible for drug prohibition did their thing back when Hitler was best known as a painter! Am I supposed to “shun” their grandkids?

Nobody but an elected representative ought to write regulation; that way, you could, as a voter, PUNISH those responsible! And laws ought to “sunset” within the span of a generation: if they’re “good laws,” nobody will have a problem re-passing them.

When I think about the EPA, I see UNelected bureaucrats, doing as they please, with little regard for, and empathy with, the people and industries they are regulating (in fact, they frequently hold them in contempt.) They aren’t the least bit concerned with, or frightened by, the American Voter, as they are in no way accountable to them. It’s the exact opposite of everything we learned in civics!

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But consider just how bad the air and water became before the EPA forced industry to clean up. The air in Beijing today is similar to what many American cities were facing 50 years ago. And Detroit moaned and whined and swore that the Big 3 would go broke meeting even the first level of clean up. Just removing lead from gasoline was a battle. If left to the politicians Detroit lobbyists would have left us breathing muddy air today.

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Air quality in most major cities is significantly better then it was in the 60’s and 70’s.

Water quality still has a very long way to go. In many areas water quality is getting worse…MUCH WORSE.

No one is talking about the value of certain aspects of the clean air act, DEA, EPA, and so on. It is not a choice between either 0% or 100%. What we are talking about is the danger of the administrative or knowledge state where unelecteds make rules that are never approved by elected officials. Judges bend to these so called Subject Mater Experts and Congress bends to these so called experts. Citizens are forced to comply and go bankrupt fighting the SMEs until they can finally get to a court where there is a jury, but alas too late for most people that don’t have tens of thousands to spend on lawyers. A couple solutions proposed is to eliminate the Administrative judges in agencies in favor of going directly to a real judge, plus have proposed rules reviewed and approved by Congress before being enacted. The crats will fight this like crazy because it reduces their sphere of influence.

Comrade Bing signing off. Gotta go change oil in my ICE.

The laws are on the books, the President proclaims an executive order, and the government workers responsible for them make rules to execute them. IIRC, 60 days after an executive order is signed, it can’t be changed by another executive order. That means in current times, many of the executive orders signed by President Obama can’t be overturned by an executive order by President Trump. Congress has to pass a law to rescind the executive orders. Then the EPA, in the discussion here, creates rules to implement executive order or laws that they are assigned. They continue to do this until new laws stop them from doing so. There might be executive orders dating back decades with new or revised rules implemented to ensure that those EOs and laws are covered. Those rules aren’t created and implemented in a vacuum. We all have a chance to comment on them and offer improvements if we want to. The FCC is currently considering a rule that would allow ISPs to charge content providers for allowing unfettered access to their content. If content providers don’t pony up, the ISP will slow down their feed or make searches for them more difficult or both. Maybe other stuff, too. They didn’t come up with this on their own, the current Admisitration decided it was a worth goal and started the ball rolling. I mention this because it is a current rule that I am familiar with. Rulemaking starts at the top and filters down. Just because a Rogue Bureaucrat (there’s and concept for ya) writes a rule doesn’t get it on the books. It is vetted to make sure there are EOs or laws that it pertains to. I just don’t see how these evil bureaucrats can undermine America all by themselves. You imagine they are a lot more powerful than the actually are.

It appears an executive order can be overturned at any time by the sitting president:

https://www.countable.us/articles/84

;-]

“But consider just how bad the air and water became before the EPA forced industry to clean up.”

That’s a “false choice” fallacy. If environmental regulations were made by people accountable to the voters, there’s no reason to believe there’d be “zero regulation”: after all, few if any people actively desire to live in a Dickensian dystopia! We’d just get better regulaions…or at very least, if we got crappy regulations, we’d have a means by which we could get them fixed, or held the “glute-brains” who wrote them DIRECTLY accountable.

Right now, the county I live in is under federal decree to rip up and replace our ENTIRE sewer system, at a cost of $1,000 a head, because it occasionally is overburdened in heavy rain. (Notwithstanding the fact our rivers are FAR cleaner then they were 20-30 years ago, and we even are a prime bass fishing destination!) Now, do I want cleaner rivers? Of course–I play in them! However, I would insist (if I could) that we come up with a better “bang for the buck” solution than what’s currently being shoved down our throats. I think there a lot of people who could be helped FAR more with $2 billion than to have “somewhat cleaner rivers.” (We could put a serious dent in poverty or drugs, for example.)

Part of why there is currently a “knee-jerk” reaction against ANY regulation…is that the regs we currently have, are passed by people so indifferent to our wishes! I’d certainly be more receptive to new regs if I knew we could stop them at any time! The current model has us “create a Frankenstein’s monster” in the form of a gov’t agency to deal with the problem, that (just like herpes) will stick around indefinitely.

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Now as a laymens interpretation the EPA has an obligation to clean air water and whatever, and that was by intent.
The EPA was not bound by other specifics or directives as I understand it, from the epa website
"When Congress writes an environmental law, we implement it by writing regulations. Often, we set national standards that states and tribes enforce through their own regulations. If they fail to meet the national standards, we can help them. We also enforce our regulations, and help companies understand the requirements."

I think some lawyers would disagree with your explanation of the process. Executive orders are not laws. They are executive orders. They cannot overturn laws that Congress passes but they, as well as laws can be deemed unconstitutional if reviewed by the Supreme Court. I think what you are alluding to is the requirement for rules to be submitted within a time frame for approval but if they are not (which most during Obama’s time were not), they can be overturned by an Executive Order. Its a little confusing for lay people and lawyers also interpret the processes differently. Suffice it to say that many of the dictates we must live under were made by crats, not Congress.

Now have you ever tried to comment on a proposed rule during the comment period? The change to food regulations in schools pushed through by Michelle was a prime example of 90% of the public comments simply being ignored. Why? Because these experts knew better than parents and local school districts what was best for the kids. So the kids starved while eating healthy meals to solve the obesity problem. My biggest concern was with the poor kids in state schools such as the blind and deaf that were hungry all the time because of the meager portions given to them.

We had this conversation before so we’ll just agree to disagree and my vote counts as much as anyone elses. And as Taryl would say “there’s your dinner”.

Comrade Bing