How GM sank, by Bob Lutz

Bob Lutz is a long time GM executive responsible for product development. He calls himself a "car guy", although the real GM car guy was Zora Arkos-Duntov the father of the Corvette. Lutz claims the bean counters are responsible. He describes what happened to Cadillac. Once upon a time Caddy was top of the line, best car out there. A new Caddy sold for maybe three times what a new Chevy sold for. Cost to manufacture a new Caddy was about the same as a new Chevy.
According to Lutz, GM decided to ramp up sales of Caddy, to sell more Caddies than Ford sold Lincolns. Production was increased, vast numbers of Caddies were sold to rent-a-car companies, who turned around and sold nice clean low mileage Caddies for less. Resale value of Caddy dropped, a lot, and used Caddies were so cheap anyone could and did buy them. People with money stopped buying new Caddies 'cause they were a dime a dozen, everybody had one. The lucrative new luxury car sales went to Mercedes and BMW.
Lesson not learned, a top of the line product has to be scarce, if you make to many of them, it stops being top of the line.
Then Lutz talks about Saturn. "despite some heroically mediocre cars there were at one time vast legions of happy Saturn owners." But Saturn was more than just a product, it was a whole car company with it's own engineering, personnel, dealership network, legal staff and so on. This massive overhead had to be paid for by the sales of just one compact car.
Lesson not learned, save money by consolidating the overhead operations.
This all comes from the Wall St Journal's excerpts of Bob Lutz's new book.

"We have turned this economy around"

The Democratic National Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, delivered this preposterous assertion on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday morning. This was too much for even the NBC moderator David Gregory, who called her on it, on air. It's so outrageous that Fox News is rerunning it today, just to make sure nobody misses it.
Either Debbie is totally clueless or she is deliberately lying. Either way it's a bad sign. How many other office holding democrats believe they have turned the economy around?

Quid Pro Quo.

The US needs, (or thinks it needs)to increase the national debt ceiling. Which we have hit. Treasury figures they run out of money beginning of August, say eight weeks.
Republicans are reluctant to do this. They are milling around, making ugly noises, but they haven't figured out what they want as a trade for raising the debt ceiling.
They could ask for ending farm subsidies, and abolishing the Agriculture Dept. They could ask for abolishing the Education Dept. They could ask for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. They could ask for tax reform. They could ask to abolish the EPA.
They ought to ask some damn thing...

We must be doing something right.

This website ranks NH first in freedom in the United States. What's no to like?

Greece, the debt bomb.

Apparently one of the things keeping the Greeks afloat, is the European Common Bank, who fears that a Greek default will crash some sucker banks that bought a lot of Greek bonds 'cause they liked the high interest rate. So the EU is trying to find support to loan the Greeks a wad of Euro's that the Greeks can use to pay off their bonds, which will save the sucker banks from big losses. In short, the ECB wants to transfer the losses from the sucker banks to the European taxpayers. There is a good deal of resistance to this idea among German taxpayers, and the resistance is rising daily.
Sooner of later something has got to give. The Greek government is still spending more than they take in taxes and covering the difference by borrowing. They owe something like 130% of GNP, which, to be real about it, they can never pay off. The EU bailout payments just push the day of reckoning into the future. Reportedly one IMF official uses the sound of a can being kicked down the road as his ringtone.
This is kinda like watching a bull fight, to see who gets gored first, the sucker banks or the taxpayers.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission

The news has been carrying stories of unprofessional conduct on the part of Obama appointed NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko. According to the Wall St Journal, Jaczko was appointed to kill off the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository. This was to make the Nevada greens happy and get them to vote Obama in 2008. Jaczko has been accused of various illegal and unethical actions by the NRC inspector general. The affair ought to be on TV this coming week as Congressional hearing get under way.
A couple of things one ought to know, that the MSM doesn't talk about.
First, the nuclear wastes, actually spend fuel rods from commercial power reactors, don't need a super expensive under mountain storage facility way out in the desert. Fuel rods removed from reactors are placed in pools of water (swimming pools essentially) on the reactor site. They are very happy there, and it's safe, and economical. They can stay there, just about forever.
Second, if we were to recycle the fuel rods, the problem would go away. The spent fuel rods are still 90% fissionable uranium. All that is necessary is to remove the 10% fission products and you have most of a new fuel rod, ready to go on producing more electricity. Most other nuclear countries recycle their fuel rods.
What we really have here is a political contest between the greenies who want to shut down nuclear power generation, and the NIMBY's who don't want Yucca Mountain to open up in their state.

Simvastatin will kill me?

NHPR got my attention this morning when it ran a piece about the FDA bashing the anti cholesterol drug Simvastatin. I happen to be on Simvastatin, so that story struck right home. The FDA spokeman was strongly against use of Simvastatin and said it should have been taken off the market years ago. There are many other drugs that are better. Well, yes there are, namely Lipitor. Trouble is, Lipitor costs $3 a pill, Simvastatin costs $0.13 a pill at Walmart.
So I googled to find out what is going on. FDA ran a big study, 6000 people using the big 80 mg dose of Simvastatin and 6000 people using the smaller 20 mg dose. Less than 1 percent of the 80 Mg users came down with a rare muscle ailment that I never heard of. Less than 0.1 percent of users of the smaller 20 mg dose suffered from the same ailment. Well, that's statistically significant. The FDA gave no information linking the difference in risk to the drug, as opposed to underlying conditions in the patient. Patients taking the 80mg dose are doing it 'cause their cholesterol counts were higher and needed a stronger dose of Simvastatin to control it. Could be that patients with higher cholesterol counts are more vulnerable to the rare muscle ailment, but we will ignore that.
Checking my medicine cabinet I find I'm taking the 40 mg dose, not the 80 mg dose, so I'm OK there. Plus, rare muscle ailment usually strikes within a year of starting Simvastatin and I've been on it for longer than that.