Mail 611 February 22 - 28, 2010 (original) (raw)
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
probably the truth in the Toyota "fault"
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748704506104
575083180509210638.html
Secret National Security Agency transcript of CEO Akio Toyoda's inner monologue as he prepares to testify in today's congressional hearing into the Toyota recall crisis:
Oh what a feeling. I wonder what Hank Paulson does for the dry heaves?
How I envy Ford-san. At least the Firestone mess involved a real defect, a tire spec unsuitable for Americans accustomed to cruising all day in hot weather at 80 mph on underinflated tires.
Toyota is battling a "defect" it can't find and may not exist. Our crisis management has not been the best, but . . . oy vey.
I wouldn't be here if not for an accident fluky and bizarre even by unintended-acceleration standards. A San Diego Lexus dealer installed an unapproved and ill-fitting floor mat in a loaner car. The mat was placed in the car upside-down and wasn't fastened down. The dealer ignored a previous customer's complaint that the mat interfered with the gas pedal. The next borrower didn't or couldn't shift into neutral when the pedal jammed. Four people died in a horrible crash.
Before the accident, Toyota issued recalls and service bulletins related to floor mats. How is this not the dealer's fault? Not a single incident of runaway speeding has been traced to the sticky pedals Toyota subsequently recalled. No electronic defect has been found.
Phil
I saw that one, and I tend to agree. The actual number of cases is small. Most of this is probably operator error. People do panic.
The troubling one is the highway patrolman. Not likely he panicked, although he didn't think to put it in neutral, and he crashed and burned. That accelerator must have been stuck. No data on whether had the bad floor rugs. There are a few other disturbing stories, but there were lots of stories about cars suddenly going into reverse told by clearly sincere people.
If someone wants to give me a Lexus I'll be glad to drive it; perhaps I can chant "put it in neutral" as I drive, just in case. I don't think there's a fundamental problem with Toyota. Mr. Toyoda is being assaulted by photographers even as I write this. I wonder which Congresscritters will grandstand this. Surely at least one will.
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SA'10 Preliminary Conference Info, 02/24/10.
Space Access '10, our upcoming annual conference on the technology, politics, and business of radically cheaper access to space, featuring a cross-section of leading players in the field, will once again be the place to hear the latest on the fast-moving entrepreneurial new-space industry. Space Access conferences are set up to maximize opportunities for trading information and making deals. No rubber-chicken banquets, just an intensive single-track presentations schedule in a setting with plenty of comfortable places nearby to go off during the breaks, grab a drink or a bite, and talk.
SA'10 is less than two months away. Book your flights and rooms soon - early April is still winter sunshine tourist season in Phoenix, so affordable rooms and good airfares can be hard to come by at the last second.
We are well along on organizing the conference presentations at this point and the agenda is shaping up nicely, but it's not complete yet - stay tuned for further additions to the program athttp://www.space-access.org. One way we get the up-to-the-minute latest on this new industry is to stay flexible right up to the last minute. Look for a detailed program schedule about two weeks before the conference starts.
Overall Conference Schedule:
- Thursday April 8th, sessions 2 pm - ~10 pm
- Friday April 9th, sessions 9 am - ~10 pm
- Saturday April 10th, sessions 9 am - ~ 6 pm
- Space Access Hospitality Suite open till late all three nights.
I may or may not be going. I didn't make it last year, but Niven did.
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: Fw: A sign of things to come?
Jerry,
A follow-up to the earlier article about Rhode Island teachers being fired. The superintendent was backed by the Central Falls school Board of Trustees.
http://www.projo.com/news/content/
central_falls_trustees_vote_02-24-10
_EOHI83C_v59.3c21342.html
Every Central Falls teacher fired, labor outraged
10:00 AM EST on Wednesday, February 24, 2010
By Jennifer D. Jordan
Journal Staff Writer
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. � The full force of organized labor showed up in Central Falls Tuesday, with several hundred union members rallying in support of the city�s teachers and bringing plenty of harsh words for the education officials who were about to fire the entire teaching staff at Central Falls High School.
�This is immoral, illegal, unjust, irresponsible, disgraceful and disrespectful,� said George Nee, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, to shouts and cheers from a crowd of more than 500 at Jenks Park. �What is happening here tonight is the wrong thing � and we�re not going to put up with it.�
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What is the worse threat...
>Such things happen; but the answer remains, in my judgment, local control, not some attempt to impose a "fair" system. Note that >LAUSD in effect cannot fire an incompetent teacher no matter how ineffective. I cannot believe that in all of LAUSD there have not been >more than seven incompetent teachers in the past ten years. > >Which is the worst threat here?
Wow, does that question resonate. I think that you have asked the question that requires at least as much study and is far less understood than "climate change." Depending upon your position and viewpoint, the worst threat changes drastically.
While capitalism combined with a representative democracy seems to me to be the best political system that humankind has came up with, it is not "fair", "just", or "equitable." This presents a "threat" to anyone, though most of us tend to relish the challenge and more or less succeed.
Those who do not succeed, or whose success is particularly fragile, have a wildly different opinion on what is the worst threat, than those who are more secure financially and professionally.
You of course know all this, not only intellectually, but way down deep, and you automatically account for it and attempt to find a rational solution. I usually tend to agree with you, at least on everything but the goals of most Democrats, and in particular the current President - creeps and nuts being excepted. :)
But- a huge segment of the population does not agree just because they feel threatened. Threat -> Fear -> Anger. Thus you find the people attracted to the agendas proposed by the creeps and nuts. And the country club Republicans foster this fear with arrogant attitudes that at least appear to be an assumption of the "right to rule". It does not matter that they may actually be better fit to govern the country, the attitude scares a lot of people. Fear -> Anger -> Nuts+Creeps.
Even more so, most people are busy just trying to make a living and have a normal life. They really are not terribly interested in what congress critters and other politicians are doing, because it doesn't directly and immediately affect them. So what if taxes get raised? I am going to be paying a ton of taxes *anyway* - do I want to to spend all the time and effort to save say, $100 on my tax bill?
People get just exactly as much government as they are unwilling to oppose. :)
In any event, I am sure that not much, if any, of that thinking is original with me, but it sure seems to make sense. Just like your multi-dimensional scale of political ideology (or should that be political theology? :) makes way more sense than a simple "right / left" scale.
Has anyone built a "threat scale" to measure how threatening any particular idea is to any or all segments of the population? Is there any way to do so in a reliable and rational manner?
I know that pollsters do something similar, but I am not at sure that poll results are any more meaningful that isolated discrete points on an analog scale. You need a whole bunch of them over a length of time significant to what you are trying to measure, to plot any kind of meaningful and objective result.
-Paul
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Note from the Legions
Re: Brian P on Assasination
Hello Dr Pournelle, I'm at an Army school for the rest of the week, and have extremely limited internet access.
The US was unable to carry out targeted killings via drone launched missiles without Progressive complaint prior to the election, I saw many such complaints by those charging lack of proper legal underpinnings for the operation and eroding the goodwill of Pakistan. Those charges vanished as we stepped up the attacks once we had our presidential change.
I don't believe there is anything Israel can do short of unconditional surrender which wouldn't subject them to savage attacks in the media and educational institutions. Certainly a targetting strangling of a known terrorist would seem a no brainer, and it is open source knowledge that Israel stopped the program to blow up those connected to the Munich Olympics killings when they blew up an Arab living in Norway who turned out to be a noted anti-semite but not provably a terrorist. They still came under much protest for that action.
When we kill the wrong target, the enemy ensures their tame media connections trumpet it to the world. There is no such thing as a cover-up, it serves their information operation plan far too well to keep it quiet. Similarly, if we kill the right person, anyone else killed in the mission is broadcast to the media, and if we don't kill anyone by accident, they aren't above making it up because they know they won't get much of a challenge until well after their target audience has forgotten the events.
http://www.longwarjournal.org/ often has reporting on the drone attacks.
I recall the Teddy Bear that appeared in a dozen different stories about the Israeli excursions.
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'Most of the cubicle-dwellers in the CIA�s Directorate of Intelligence are academics who didn�t get tenure and chose the government�s health and pension benefits over the uncertainties of adjunct teaching.'
<http://www.tabletmag.com/
news-and-politics/25811/mcstrategy/>
-- Roland Dobbins
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According to the Daily News in 2009 ( http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_10579911 ):
"Meanwhile, Los Angeles Unified teachers on average earn $63,000, less than teachers in districts ranging from New York City and San Diego to Chicago and San Francisco."
"San Francisco high school teachers earn an average 75,817ayearandSanJosehighschoolteachersearnanaverage75,817 a year and San Jose high school teachers earn an average 75,817ayearandSanJosehighschoolteachersearnanaverage73,361 a year. LAUSD high school teachers have an average salary of just under $62,000."
It seems to me that teachers make a very nice wage, especially when one considers that teachers work an average of 38 weeks a year. The Hoover Institution looked at the issue of teacher pay from a Conservative standpoint ( http://www.hoover.org/publications/
policyreview/3438676.html ), but when the average teacher in LAUSD is making roughly $8,000 more a year than the median annual household income in Los Angeles County ( http://quickfacts.census.gov/
qfd/states/06/06037.html ) -- a median that includes some pretty significant income on the high end of the curve -- one is hard pressed to believe that they are underpaid. If two teachers are married, then their household income is an average of 124,000vs.the124,000 vs. the 124,000vs.the55,000 average for the County.
Add to the salary the benefits package, the limited work year, the difficulty in terminating bad teachers and one quickly begins to wonder why one didn't become a high school teacher. It's no wonder that the teachers I know are driving BMWs and Lexuses (Lexi?).
-- -- Christian
I don't think all teachers are overpaid; the best are getting no more than they deserve; but the top brackets are not for the best, but for the longest serving and the most "credentialed". Actual merit pay and pay for results is not allowed.
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History from 1877 onward...
You may have already seen this. But I wanted to make sure.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,584758,00.html
-Ethan
Forget the Alamo! And what's this about a Revolution? Nothing happened in 1812... And Texas has always been part of the United States.
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: Workflow in the House | The Casual Optimist
http://www.casualoptimist.com/?p=3611
Dear Jerry:
Apparently I'm not the only one with quality issues on e-books.
Regards,
Francis Hamit
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