As you sit down to gorge yourself on turkey and more today, don't forget those that don't have as much stuff.
With nearly a third of Americans living near or below the poverty line now, many struggle to get by from day to day. As an automotive journalist, many of the media drives I went on wound their way through rural areas like this.
Now it looks like Jaguar will officially blend the two for first time with the upcoming XF SportBrake (Sport wagon + shooting brake). The XF is a great driving car despite my complaints about the gimmicky motorized vents and shift knob and the excruciatingly slow Flash-based infotainment interface. http://www.luxist.com/2010/02/08/review-2010-jaguar-xf-supercharged-a-worthy-leaping-cat/
The question is would I want the 500hp supercharged XF-R or the fabulously torquey and fuel efficient 3.0-liter turbodiesel V6 (unfortunately not available in North America yet)? Now if only the XF was available with a manual transmission.
#jaguar #cars #stationwagon
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Jaguar XF Sportbrake
New Jaguar XF Sportbrake estate car is spied outside company gates
Unfortunately the financial melt-down and bankruptcy put the kibosh on both the V6 and the 4.5-liter light duty truck V8 diesel. Both engines however are ready for production and could be revived. I suspect that GM will look at how well the upcoming Cruze diesel does before making a final decision.
#diesel #cars #cadillac #gm
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Cadillac considering diesel for U.S.
LeftLane. RSS Facebook Twitter YouTube. left. Lexus CT 200h. Lexus CT 200h. BMW Z4. BMW Z4. Cadillac CTS-V. Cadillac CTS-V. Ram 2500. Ram 2500. Subaru Forester. Subaru Forester. GMC Terrain. GMC Terra…
In the spirit of making people feel old https://plus.google.com/u/0/114133424228405038490/posts/JgxRSLugDmd, how many of you know how to operate one of these? I remember the frustration my then 12 year old son expressed a few years back when he encountered one for the first time and could not for the life of him how to make a call.
This has been making the rounds but I think it's great 🙂 If you don't know the connection between these two, well, then you weren't around in the 80s 🙂
Maybe, just maybe, the rapid response by the internet community will help kill these censorship bills.
Frankly censorship is far more dangerous to society than piracy. Creative works will always be created whether Hollywood executives get rich from it or not. Democratic society cannot withstand censorship.
"I thought we’d have to wait 20-25 years before a critical mass of people would defend the net. But SOPA has brought that day a lot closer. SOPA galvanized the tech community, from start-ups to venture capitalists to the largest web companies. SOPA was an unexpected shock and a wake-up call. Well, guess what? Now the internet is awake. And I don’t think it’s going back to sleep any time soon."
Read the post for more info, including some simple steps you can take.
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Progress against SOPA
Progress against SOPA. by Matt Cutts on November 21, 2011. in Personal,Web/Net. When I did my blog post about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last week, things looked quite grim. The fight isn't…
I've watched this video several times and thought about it even more. There's a lot to say including some interesting thoughts in this Atlantic piece
Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike – Alexis Madrigal – National – The Atlantichttp://bit.ly/rxCpEc
But I want to focus on another thought I've had but only voiced briefly in a standup show last night.
The authorities in all these #OWS crackdowns are assuming a steadily passive reaction from the protestors. Despite the constitutional right to peaceably assemble, governments and post 9/11 militarized police (LRAD!?) are responding with violence against their own people.
The thing about violent uprisings is that you rarely see a steady escalation. These Occupy Wall Street gatherings have been extremely civil and peaceful by and large. And I don't think you're gonna see some slowly increasing amount of violence on the part of the protestors. That's not how revolutions generally pop off. I'm pretty sure that, in general, something just snaps. A student gets shot. A man sets himself on fire. A cop punches an old lady. Then BAM: full scale violent conflict.
So there's that.
But I want to come back to the other risk in the presumption of passivity. There's a frighteningly relaxed attitude to this "Peace Officer" in the video below and among many authorities. It's a condescending attitude based in the idea that these "kids" won't do anything about it. I could be reading too much into the situation, but I think authorities have bought into the narrative that this is a generation raised on iPods and Facebook and MTV reality shows and when push come to shove, they won't fight back.
I would just humbly remind folks that all those factors are true about this generation, but the response may not be. You see, this generation was also raised on collaborative multiplayer combat sims: World of Warcraft, Modern Warfare, 007, Resident Evil, etc. We've literally spent hours building teams and fragging people and aliens and zombies and not batting an eye. Millions of Americans have clocked hundreds or thousands of hours in war simulations. We have all gotten pretty comfortable with coordinated violence.
While it's not "real" war or "real" violence, our brains think differently. We get an adrenaline rush. Our heart rates increase. We sweat. The perception is quite similar, and I just think it's worth some extra thought on the part of the authorities.
I am absolutely not advocating violence, but I can't help but think that you might want to be careful provoking people who have been subconsciously trained on war games.
The death of John Smale on Saturday was a missed opportunity by several outlets to examine the negative impact that he had on General Motors during his tenure as a director and chairman of the board. Smale is best known in the business world for being the former CEO of Proctor and Gamble but like many high ranking executives in American business he served other companies as a director.
The extended obituary published in the Detroit News (written by AP reporter Dan Sewell) only mentions his GM role in passing in the opening paragraph while the brief piece on Autoblog focuses on Smale replacing Bob Stempel as Chairman and helping to bring GM back from the verge of bankruptcy. As chairman, Smale probably had little to do with the actual slashing of costs and spending at GM but he nonetheless had a huge impact on GM in another way and it wasn't good.
Smale was responsible bringing Ron Zarella, one of his former P&G colleagues to GM to institute brand management. Brand management was a totally bungled and wrong-headed approach to building and selling cars. At P&G Smale and Zarella found a way to sell the same products under multiple different brands and get away with it. Unfortunately this approach doesn't translate to the car business and resulting in such an unappealing car lineup that despite growing discounting, GM's market share continued to shrink throughout their tenure and consumer's attitudes to GM plummeted.
GM's lineup didn't begin to improve until Bob Lutz joined up and Zarella left in 2001 and even then it took several years to demonstrate that the company could build interesting vehicles. Even then, the company's problems were so deep seated that time that they couldn't earn enough to avoid bankruptcy in 2009. Perhaps if the company had focused on great products and a pared down brand lineup in 1992 instead of waiting more than a decade, that fate might have been avoided.
