The political climate in Las Vegas, NV is somewhat liberal.
Clark County, NV is somewhat liberal. In Clark County, NV 53.7% of the people voted Democrat in the last presidential election, 44.3% voted for the Republican Party, and the remaining 2.0% voted Independent.
- Major cities tend to be hot spots for terrorist incidents. For instance:
- Manhattan (New York) had 343 attacks.
- Los Angeles County, California, experienced 156 attacks.
- Miami-Dade County, Florida, saw 103 attacks.
- San Francisco County, California, had 99 attacks.
- Washington, D.C., recorded 79 attacks2.
Did you forget 9/11 ???
Chaos feeds upon itself. There are some easy to spot multipliers in plain view today that will exacerbate bad situations. There are some unforeseen things that always enter the equation at just the wrong time that can change things for the worse, -only rarely alleviating the negative effects. Those of us that witnessed the 1967 Riots know well that it doesnât stop with just one. It spreads like wildfire in direct inverse proportion to force used to put down the violence. Detroit erupted first, followed by 149 more. The damage to Detroit was extensive and essentially poisoned the atmosphere sending whites packing, leaving the city with white money and white jobs and large scars that still have not healed. Look at Detroit 48202 via satellite map. Before 1967 all the green you see in what obviously residential streets outside of downtown are are formerly homes, shoulder-to-shoulder from the river 8 miles north to 8 Mile Rd, 10 miles east, and 7 miles west, all abutting suburbs. Today, a Gordy Howe hockey smile in most of the 139 sq miles. Almost all of those home sites have been abandoned to the city and had to bulldozed at city expense, and now stand fallow; nobody will buy them so they produce no tax revenue for the city.
Of course the university riots wonât have the depth that the Race Riots did, but we can see that the disgruntled students are being managed the same way as The Summer of Love BLM riots, so there is no reason to believe they will end any better. The money backers of the Palestinian gonna-be riots have different agendas and maximum damage is a goal. Theyâre going to get their moneyâs worth.
This was mostly about looting , stealing and beating whites . Every neighborhood blacks move into turn into nasty volient shitholes
This led to the downfall of American cars. When the Japanese built assembly plants in America, they chose the sites carefully: In the farming areas with white population, far away from black inner cities.
Minneapolis, et al, wasnât much different, the rabble rousersâ do their destruction thing which allows the hangerâs-on to move in like rats to cheese and grab stuff without much regard for what it is; theyâll sell on Ebay or Craigâs List what doesnât fit. The only stuff the donât take is whatâs on fire. The media has a field day looking on with horror, but without making moral judgments about the character of the thieves, arsonists, and rioters. After the event, you never see the booking pictures of the arrested, or hear what sentences they get, for the obvious reasons: not many get punished. Crime without punishment.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Mom & Pop stores that had a couple local employees is out of business; almost all for good. They take the insurance money and move on. The employees and local community lose the store and and the few jobs. Itâs not as though there are employers fighting over workers⊠What the locals never understand is the shopkeepers only just barely make ends meet, and only because they pay themselves poorly. so if you add the specter of a neighborhood descended into harboring rioters, why would you not take your insurance money and never return?
Look at areas that were damaged by riots, -anywhere, in any city. They almost never, ever change from the burned out hulks. Eventually, the surrounding parts of the city devolve into uninhabitable.
Didgevillage Said,
ââŠThis led to the downfall of American cars. When the Japanese built assembly plants in America, they chose the sites carefully: In the farming areas with white population, far away from black inner cities.â
Actually, the downfall of American auto companies was well underway at that point for a lot of reasons, To Wit:
The unions had become so crafty in choosing strike targets and dealing with the whole of the Big Three (US auto makers, GM, Ford & Chrysler) that they could wring any kind of pay, benefit & retirement packages they wanted. Thereâs a big But that follows from there: Beware of what you wish for. The unions could force the Big 3 into larger and larger packages and did to the point that they increased out-sourcing of components and were in the process of becoming only assembly lines of parts made outside their own company. Thatâs a long term evolution a little like boiling the frog. Divisions like Ternstedt formerly made all the interior parts, Fisher Body made all the exterior and structural body parts, Guide Lamp & Delco-Remy made electrical parts, Saginaw Steering Gear, Chevrolet Axel & Forge and a dozen other divisions made pieces, and the name plates assembled these parts in name plate plants, like Chevrolet Assembly, etc.
In-house production allows economies of scale and control of production & quality. As the unions got greedier, the Big 3 gave in here and there what they had to do business, but slowly has pieces made outside the mother company and closed down old plants without building replacement facilities. They made fewer & fewer parts in-house and built assembly factories anywhere in the world where there was cheap labor near a market, and closed, one-by-one, their inside factories. By the time the union figured out where that was going, it was too late to curb managementsâ appetite for having fewer employees. Labor developed an attitude and quality in-house eroded.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Japanese were in the process of building cars for the world that were surprisingly high quality. They didnât start that way; there were a lot of dogs along the way, but they overcame shortcomings and with Americaâs inflation cycle what it was from 1960s on, they weaseled their way into the US market and did things that the insiders said would never happen. They made luxury lines from scratch and the Big 3 said nobody would pay big money for a Japanese car because they could only build good, solid cheap cars that were ruining Big 3 sales in the high-inflation 70s when sales were booming. The Big 3 were coincidentally have quality problems, partly with outsourcing at the lowest possible price hurting the better suppliers in favor of suppliers who made cheap stuff. (We outsiders used to quip to each other, âYou bought the cheapest part you could and you are surprised itâs cheap junk?â) But they Big 3 drove a hard bargain and in turn, a lot of good suppliers into bankruptcy.
There was a confluence of factors in the late 70âs that conspired to bury The Big 3. Beginning with the USâs wild inflation accumulating from Johnsonâs 60âs guns & butter Vietnam war spending, the doubling of oil prices by the Arab Oil Cartel in the 70âs and gas waiting lines resulting from Nixonâs price controls had raised US inflation and car prices by the â79 recession, escorting Jimmy Carter to the door. Adding to big quality problems of the Big 3 beginning in the 60âs with Corvairâs unsafe at any speed, Pintoâs exploding gas tanks, several other compact car lines that were intended to compete with VW & Japanese compacts were received poorly because they were cheap and had quality problems. The market dropped like a rock in the recession starting in 79 which brought on a glut of US cars that were selling poorly, anyway. The last nail in the coffin? At exactly that time the quality of the Japanese quality was at a peak and several makers had a full line of cars, at better prices. That included new lines of luxury lines that Detroit said wouldnât be able to compete with Cadillac, Chrysler and Lincoln because you have to build a base of peopleâs acceptance of âexpenseâ cars. That was wrong, too.
For Detroit that only had a couple auto plants left in the city, and Michigan with Flint and Saginaw winnowed down to mere shadows of their former industrial base, it just got uglier. Outsourcing and building new plants elsewhere began in earnest, and hasnât slowed down yet. Quality is better now, even good. But, the Koreans are well ensconced and here come the Chinese, too.
American cars are junk. Unions suck and so do the manufacturers. There ya go⊠and Iâm a die hard MOPAR guy.
Average UAW worker getâs an average of $28.00 per hour. That isnât jack shit by todayâs standards. Cars should be built like tanks and be reliable as hell if thatâs all the manufacturers/union are paying the workers. $75,000.00 for a new truck is outright thievery. I have no sympathy for the auto business. They made the bed⊠they can lay in it and cry.
This was the Japanese style of manufacturing cars which turned out to be more efficient. Whether this model could be applied to the US, I donât know, as it required high quality from the much smaller subcontractors (who manufacture parts).
I donât know what other factors entered the calculation for the Japanese to build assembly plants in the US. Maybe car import bans?
VW obviously failed in the quality aspect. But the German and Japanese success stories in 1960s and 1970s were partially due to rising gasoline prices which promoted Americans to buy more fuel efficient cars.
Yes. And 50 years of history is impossible for someone like me to distill into a few words, so many of the pertinent details were left out. I wouldnât want to act like I know it all, because I donât. There were a lot of forces acting upon everyone involved, not least of which the US govt forcing standards deadlines on fuel efficiency & emissions that were not realistic, such that cars were produced that met the standards, but wouldnât run right. The makers couldnât very well just stop making cars, so they sold what they had and the public blamed bad outcomes on them. The technology couldnât be invented instantly, but the govt could and did demand it. The foreign makers had much smaller and lighter cars they had been selling in their own countries for years which met the standards, or they withdrew them from our market when they didnât meet the our standards. They could do that because our market was the icing on their cake. Detroit was selling larger cars which were/is what the US public wanted, so the situation was impossible to avoid. Big cars didnât then and still donât have much foreign market, so the playing fieldwasnât even.
Add to that the fact that trade was unequal. Foreign countries protected their markets from outsiders with high tariffs while the US had rules that they cleverly circumvented and low tariffs, too. For instance, in the US imported trucks had higher tariffs than passenger cars. Back in the day when the S-10 mini pickups were introduced they were a hot seller and the US had an advantage. The Japanese saw that the definition of a passenger car was carrying 4+ passengers. They bolted 2 seats into the back of their own version, imported them as passenger cars. And, they stole a big chunk of the market. A lot of those pickups were leisure vehicles anyway and the govt let them get away with it. They did it with big pickups, too, when they saw the lax enforcement, and eventually Detroit screamed loud enough to make our govt change the definition. A foreign govt would have acted while the first load was still on the docks. So, the foreign makers sold in both markets; dumping here if necessary to get their gross up, hurting us either way. Dumping is selling below cost or below what you sell the same vehicle for in your own market. Profit is always a function of selling volume. The costs of designing & building the cars, and the plants & equipment to assemble them are very big. Often, billions for a carline of 6 or 8 models. If you can spread that cost over sales of 7 or 8 million cars in the ~7 year~ lifespan of a design versus only 4 or 5 million units, you can mentally calculate how much lower the costs of a vehicle line can be, hence profitable at lower market prices. The difference is your extra margin. If you can sell units in a different market just a little over breaking even, you are still making more gross revenue to divide costs by.
So, you can see where the govt rules; yours and theirs, -can work for you or against you. âFree marketsâ are good for buyers, but for makers are very much a double edge sword and you need YOUR govt to help YOU. Thatâs just a couple of the complex factors in the middle of a lot of others over 50 years. If you widen that window to 100 years, the back & forth; up & down details boggle the mind.
American car manufacturers tried to sell American cars in Japan and Europe, but nobody wanted them. Germans called them âStrassenkreutzerâ which meant âcruiser (ship) of the street,â meaning cars taking up too much space on a street.
Ford which bought Mazda tried to replicate a small Ford model (I forgot which model) in one of the Mazda plants in western Japan, but the car was not successful. Ford Motor Company of Japan - Wikipedia
I donât know the whole philosophy of the American industrial production, but major industries (automotive, steel, aviation etc) were hollowed out and America became the theatres of unrealistic finances and software dealings, fraught with frauds, played out by Wall Street and the Silicon Valley.
Hey Michelle! If you are not a man show us your pushy!
Itâs pooping off soon!
I donât ever wonder about it, I know who they are! Some of them I used to work with! Fking pussies!
âThe public I served had a right to know what the F.B.I. was doing in their name.â
Really eye-opening, for me. Mind you I always suspected the Government (including Government Agencies, like the FBI and CIA) of fabrications and lies. Mine was a gut feeling, This affirmation comes from the horseâs mouth.
Everyone is a victim until convicted true!
By now youâd think that people would understand what tariffs are really for: protecting your own market from willy-nilly competition that comes from everywhere, because people everywhere need employment and if goods are only to be made in the lowest cost country, then eventually the countries with higher living standards will have sent all their wealth to that lowest common denominator, and as Margaret was fond of saying, âSooner or later, you run out of other peopleâs moneyâ. She said that of socialism, but whole economies need whole work forces and whole industries so people can support themselves, pay taxes, and countries can maintain some reasonable level of industry to defend itself from the rest of the world in times of war. Weak countries are seized by aggressive countries, or just abandoned. Nobody attacks strong countries. Only working people can pay taxes and support themselves, or for people who donât think we need the industries that we donât work in ourselves, we can support the people that did or would have. See how that works?
Individuals canât practically sort thru the marketplace and only buy our own countriesâ goods; we need the govt to develop an overall economic strategy for us, with insight and foresight and make decisions based upon the whole economy, so the whole country prospers. Is that too much to ask of govt?
Every Swiss citizen has an obligation to own a rifle and keep it ready for a combat.