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New York, 3:59 AM
Mon Nov 23
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/30/09
10/29/09
1. Make a new Twitter account (or use an already-established one),
2. make sure it's public -- so that its tweets will show up on search.twitter.com -- and then send out several tweets,
3. make sure that the tweets have variety: normal, trivial ones; @replies to non-famous people; nice @replies to famous people; mean @replies to famous people (to both some of the same people that some of the nice @replies were sent to and new ones); etc.,
4. conduct a ton of different searches on search.twitter.com and track the results: search immediately after sending tweets, a couple of hours after, a day after, etc. and then see which ones a) never showed up in the search, b) showed up but then disappeared, and c) showed up and stayed,
5. see what the results tell you about the question you're trying to answer.
I'd be happy to test it out if you'd like me to do so. Let me know. #twitter
10/29/09
10/29/09
I think it'd be hilarious if I did it with either @dinalohan or @kiera_knightley. The problem, though, is that Dina technically doesn't really know how to @reply to people and Keira is too much of a snob to really bother. #twitter
10/29/09
10/29/09
10/29/09
Although on further reflection, I could probably get behind that plan.
06/29/09
06/29/09
06/29/09
Mickey can do no wrong. His word makes it so. Down with Rattner! Down with the LA Times! Down with John Edwards! Down with whatever immigration thing - I understand none of it - that Mickey doesn't like! I'm in love I'm in love and I don't care who knows it!
06/29/09
06/29/09
C'mon it could be worse... Imagine what form a Cary Tennis crush would take?
06/03/09
@EVERYONE: Of course, this certainly doesn't help: [www.pbs.org]
Basically: Both sides share responsibility, or lack thereof.
SÃ, se puede?
06/02/09
It's not about the little man versus the big corporation. Unions distort what should be a normal "reward for performance and risk for nonperformance" dynamic that everyone else outside of the union faces on a daily basis. If there is no downside to union workers, what incentive do they have to be productive, create quality work product, etc.? Judging from what I've seen of union shops, the answer is none. Most do their eight and hit the gate.
06/02/09
Then you must really hate executives. Which I think is taking things a bit too far.
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
-1986 GMC Suburban
-1967 Chevy pickup
-1979 Corvette
-1999 Pontiac Grand Am
I currently drive a Ford. I drive a ton, at least 30K miles a year, and have few complaints.
06/02/09
Micky Kaus is not far off - or is Gawker suddenly a Labor Relations thinktank?
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
The highly adversarial relationship between workers and management is older than all of us and unfortunately has helped lead to the current crappy outcome. It isn't by any means the sole reason for the collapse of the Big Three.
And writing off the UAW as indefensible in all its demands and its members as "unskilled" is absolutely ignorant.
06/02/09
06/02/09
unions exist because management isn't smart enough to work with labor instead of against labor
duh
06/02/09
quite frankly the "unskilled" "uneducated" manual workers were putting out a better product.
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
This would put them a bit over the average wage of ~$50,000 per year. In other words, solidly middle class.
Is there something wrong with having people be able to be middle class without a college degree?
06/02/09
The expectation is to meet that with two incomes. So, uh, it's over by double.
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
"The real median earnings of men who worked full time, year-round climbed between 2006 and 2007, from $43,460 to $45,113. For women, the corresponding increase was from $33,437 to $35,102"
that's census data, just fyi. it's not hard to look up, and we need to stop making up stories about "couples with two children" since ain't none of you know anyone's situation, and being married to a non-wage earner or spouting out children doesn't entitle you to any more money than anyone else working the same job so if we're gonna speculate seriously on income let's just use some actual hard numbers, no?
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
Claiming that the UAW has no responsibility for "front office" decisions and behavior is silly. I'm not eager to just blame the unions but you can't draw a clear line from any one party within to bankruptcy. Wagoner didn't take on all the debt and was largely stuck with the big union contracts. The UAW didn't choose to make SUV's or decide to overexpand. Neither of them were responsible for marketing's total inability to cope with decades of bad PR that stretches back to "Unsafe at any Speed." They all contributed to creating nothing out of something and frankly they all deserve each other.
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
Perhaps. I think making that claim with certainty is a case of overlaying your hopes onto your analysis. While your grain of truth about 60's equipment may be accurate, it doesn't address the argument that labor costs influenced management decisions. And it seems to ignore that, up until 2005? 2006? GM was aggressively expanding production capability with new factories.
WHY are they using 60's equipment? Because Rick Wagoner likes flying planes? I don't think so.
06/02/09
But what I was talking about was this one particular set of factories that GM exclusively owns and operates. Oh and its not a grain of truth. But thanks for assuming I'm full of shit.
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
06/02/09
The argument I've tended to support is a little more complex. I think that GM couldn't build better cars in part BECAUSE of unions. They became dependant on high-margin vehicles because their cost structure could not compete in low-margin small car markets. All those obligations baked production costs into GM vehicles that meant a Chevy Cobalt had to be constructed cheaply to be in the same price range as a Honda Civic. That will be an ongoing debate between unionists and corporatists for some time.
The more important question for me, though, is why the hell did we prop the thing up? Hasn't every environmentalist, futurist, etc. been telling us for decades that we need fewer cars, less roads, etc.? The jobs aren't even being saved!
06/02/09
And quality controls, what the imports did in terms of improving line manufacturing wasn't followed by the big 3. At all. The unions may have some small role to play in this, but management's failure to innovate, the insanely large over saturated dealer network, lack of compelling reliable cars led to their demise.
And yes. I know they've "improved." It's just that it takes time to win people over. If they were truly committed to turning the tide, they would do what Huyndai did when it started to improve quality.
06/02/09
Unions defined large portions of the cost structure, jets notwithstanding. I will re-state that cost structure was the basis of and/or major contributing element to a decision to focus on high-margin vehicles. That business decision was based on fact - the fact that low-margin small cars and family sedans were not competitive markets for companies laden with high, inflexible labor costs.
06/02/09
But the problem is actually that GM didn't focus on high-margin vehicles -- instead, they insisted on trying to stay in the low-margin, high-volume segments while building themselves upmarket at the same time.
As long as the company's number-one profit driver was finance, and thus they had two whacks at earning a profit on many vehicles, that strategy worked well enough. But once the GMAC golden goose stopped producing, their only hope was to hang on long enough to push big chunks of their production overseas (look at their aggressive moves into China).
Unfortunately gas prices spiked, people's buying habits changed, and they simply ran out of time.
I do suspect that GM could have survived even with its current cost structure if its operational decisions hadn't been so horrible. Jalopnik had a good post on that topic yesterday. But I think you've correctly diagnosed the symptom that killed the patient -- costs, leading to a lack of flexibility to adjust to a changed market -- while missing the cause: strategic confusion.