Well a lot of them were paid, just not according to NCAA rules. Auburn alumni/ boosters were always vying for the National Championship of under-the-table recruitment. And not just under Tumorville.
More proof republicans don’t care about people.
Inside, the county’s board of commissioners, dominated by a group of ultra conservatives, voted to cut the department’s budget by $2.1 million—against pleas from public health officials and community members.
And the main culprit here?
John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official hired as county administrator by the board of commissioners, initially proposed an annual budget of $2.5 million, a cut of 63 percent, including “discontinuing all COVID-related grants.” Gibbs said the cuts were “returning to pre-COVID budget levels.”
And, finally, a voice of reason and responsibility:
“All this because we tried to get you to act with a little compassion and empathy during a pandemic that killed one million Americans,” Neiboer testified during the public comment session. “Well, you did it. You have your revenge. Now we must all live with the consequences of your choices. We at the county will do our level best to continue serving this county, but it will be difficult without the resources to do so.”
GOP debate turns into kindergarten.
The best part about it, though, is the moderator is from Univision. That has to gall at least some of the GOP voters.
“Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting”
sounds like the highlight
Is that it? I was looking for some debate commentary here this morning, but that’s the main thing to take away? Wow.
Didn’t Trump speak last night, too? Nothing there either? More of the same we’ve heard before, I guess. Sad.
From the reporting I’ve read, it was his standard stream of bullshit, but with the kicker that he went to a non-union shop.
And of course the crowd consisted not of the shop workers, but his paid shills.
One person held a sign that said “union members for Trump,” but admitted to the newspaper she was not a union member. Another carried a placard with the words “auto workers for Trump” and confessed he was not an auto worker when the outlet requested an interview. Neither identified themselves.
And in a giant - DUH
Dear Tiny Handed Asshole, EV means Electric Vehicle. Vehicles are autos (and trucks, etc…), therefore not death of autos.
Maybe he’s talking about the Pokemon? You’ve got to watch out for those Jolteons in particular.
There is considerable informed speculation in the auto industry that the US Big Three will fail at EVs as badly as they failed against the Japanese car invasion of the 1970s. Back then they went from a 90+% market share in the US to barely 60%.
Right now the US Big Three are ~40% of the US market. Which could become 10% in <20 years if the Chinese succeed in their plans to dominate low-price EV manufacturing. Right now Tesla controls the high end and the traditional US makers are scrambling for scraps.
Overall, trump is an idiot grasping at straws and fomenting FUD in search of fear- and anger-fueled votes.
But there is actually well-founded FUD about the medium- & long-term future of GM, Ford, and what was Chrysler. There is a lot more to winning in this industry than just “cars is cars.”
How long has it been since GM, Ford, and Chrysler were American companies? Toyota is more American than them.
It’s rather disappointing that some folks’ solution to that is to not build electric cars, rather than for American companies to build good ones.
The switch to electric cars is happening, and will continue to happen. We can’t stop it; we can be part of it, or we can watch the future pass us by.
In terms of employment, Ford & GM are pretty US-centric. I grant that ownership is rather different.
I agree completely.
But in most industries that undergo a major revolution, the biggest of the old guard companies are not usually the biggest after the dust settles. Sears does not in fact occupy a controlling place in internet retail. The list of major airlines that did not survive long post-deregulation is legion.
The argument simply is that e.g. GM is too ossified, and too wedded to how to do what it excelled at previously, to succeed against new competitors foreign and domestic for new markets making new products in new ways.
If one is a middle-aged union GM worker, that ought to scare the shit outta you. It won’t be your fault when your plant closes due to your management’s ossified failure to compete, but it will be your problem to feed your family the next week.
Yes, head-in-sand (AKA ICE forever! Fuckk Yeah!!1!) is not the answer either.
That’s an improvement compared to where the head is currently lodged.
Kodak didn’t foresee the switch to digital cameras.
How many went completely out of business, though; didn’t most of them get bought out and merged?
Agreed, but their best chance is to have a successful electric-car industry in the U.S. Maybe GM bucks the odds and makes the transition. Maybe Tesla moves downmarket. Maybe someone we never heard creates a startup tomorrow that fills the niche. I don’t know what the answer is, but, as you said, burying our heads in the sand ain’t it.
Many were merged. Which usually laid off about half of the bought company, and sometimes all of them. Managers and investors may have made money on those deals, but the net effect for rank and file employees was almost universally neutral at best, disastrous at worst, and shitty on average.
The workers trump is courting are similar. They don’t really care what kind of cars they make. They just care that their employer makes cars at the same plant in the same town. Using about the same number of workers. They would not mind greatly if the name on the factory changed as long as they kept working there.
Making the industry work is a task for the suits and the poiliticians. Making the cars is a task for the workers.
Oh, yeah, they did. They owned some of the seminal patents on digital cameras.
What they didn’t foresee is how they could make anywhere near the kind of money on digital cameras as they did on regular old analog cameras and film. And they were right - digital imaging was going to be a smaller market, dollarwise, than analog, and try as they might to move into markets in magnetic media and the like, they simply weren’t going to survive at anywhere near the same size.
If a CEO had arrived in the 90s and announced plans to shrink the company by 75% over the next decade so it could compete in the new digital era, the board would have fired him. If the board had tried to make similar plans, the investors would have canned them. Eventually, the investors figured out that their nice, solid, dividend-paying industrial stock was crashing in value and would have to stop paying dividends, but by then it was too late.
Just seeing disruption on the way doesn’t make it a cinch to adapt to it, particularly in an industry that will suffer through the transition regardless.
I worked for a Kodak competitor in the 1980s. Digital imaging came up every time we had a business meeting. Nobody there had any real idea of what we were going to be able to do, either. It’s sobering to look around a meeting room and think that your best case scenario is that perhaps one person there in ten has a job at that plant in 15 years.
The amount of non-collision maintenance on EVs is expected to be maybe 25-30% of that of ICE. Worst case. Maybe 10% best case. And to a greater extent than an ICE, it’ll be back-loaded late in the useful life of the vehicle.
IOW, every car dealership and 3rd party auto repair place is looking at 2/3rd to 3/4ths to maybe 90% of their business disappearing. And disappearing faster / sooner than the local EV adoption rate is climbing.
Dealerships need their service center revenue for their business model to work. If that goes away, their margins on cars need to grow a lot. Or else a lot of dealerships shut down and a new marketing channel with much lower overhead takes over. Given how much federal and state law has been written to shield old-line old-style car dealerships from competition since the 1950s, it’s gonna be a bloodbath, with major legislative impact.
Car dealerships are one of the most entrenched special interest groups in government, second maybe to the defense industry. Every state legislative district has a dealership. Owners tend to be well connected, as their livelihood depends on their reputation in the community. And they have lots of cash to lavish on politicians and lobbyists to advance their interests. Tesla, which has an enormous factory outside of Austin, cannot sell direct to consumer in Texas because dealers have consistently thwarted any attempt to roll back their protections in the Legislature.
Also my understanding is that the amount of labor it takes to make an electric vehicle is a fraction of what it takes to make a internal combustion engine. So there is real reasons for the UAW to fear electric vehicles since the companies could fire a large amount of their workforce. But that doesn’t mean that Trump’s not an asshat.