Light Rail - Where and how do we get started! (Kettering: middle-class, apartment complexes)

[motorman]

^ Jake, do yourself a favor and quit wasting your time with Brill, okay? (It's a lost cause.)

[natininja]

Originally Posted by kjbrill

Not my generation, I may be old but not that old. I keep hearing about how GM and the oil companies put the rails out of business. Just another one of the Great Conspiracry theories in this county. What put the rail companies out of business were the rail companies. A bunch of small businesses who never got together and asked how do we combat this new personal luxury called the automobile? They didn't and the automobile won. It is still the winner and the only thing which will reverse it is exorbitant costs to operate. We are nearing that point, but not there yet.

It's a well-documented and truth-backed conspiracy, which the courts agreed with, but only punished with a $1 fine. Corruption to the core.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera...car_conspiracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob2bYUtxlxs

I recommend everyone with even a passing interest take the time to watch that documentary in full.

[kjbrill]

^^ The documentary was a well done production, consistent in all of their viewpoints and presentations. I was impressed by the list of credits and the number of people who worked on it. Then I got to thinking who paid for all these peoples time? I went back to take another look at the funding.

. Corporation for Public Broadcasting
. Ohio Arts Council
. California Council for the Humanities

Sound recording - Yellow Springs Ohio, is that not the home of Antioch College?
Special thanks - Wright State University Film Program

Again a well done professional presentation prepared by a bunch of liberals using public money. Do I believe all of their assertations - NOPE! The one thing I came away with was how willingly the owners of the rail systems sold out, a real conviction on their part.

I am old enough to have ridden on some of those old streetcars. They were certainly not the noiseless glamor rides portrayed here. If they were, the public would not have supported a replacement.

GM, Ford and Chrysler built the middle class of this country. The wages people could earn in their plants were the main emphasis to our Post-War housing boom, city expansion, and just about everything good which has happened in my lifetime. The aircraft and aerospace industry has been the other prime driver.

GM is a fraction of its former self, as are Ford and Chrysler. One of the saddest commentaries on contemporary life is the demise of Detroit.

But what is the real cause of this? Is it the robber barons running our big corporations?

No, it is the unions who kept pressing for higher wages for less work. I am all for being paid for an honest days work. But when you create artificial demands the workplace will rebel.

Look at Detroit, they are caught in a legacy cost they can no longer endure. The US auto industry has been in the same boat. They are scrambling to try and crawl out from under. Unfortunately that also means they are leaving Detroit in droves.

[WILWRadio]

Originally Posted by kjbrill

^^ The documentary was a well done production, consistent in all of their viewpoints and presentations. I was impressed by the list of credits and the number of people who worked on it. Then I got to thinking who paid for all these peoples time? I went back to take another look at the funding.

. Corporation for Public Broadcasting
. Ohio Arts Council
. California Council for the Humanities

Sound recording - Yellow Springs Ohio, is that not the home of Antioch College?
Special thanks - Wright State University Film Program

Again a well done professional presentation prepared by a bunch of liberals using public money. Do I believe all of their assertations - NOPE! The one thing I came away with was how willingly the owners of the rail systems sold out, a real conviction on their part.

I am old enough to have ridden on some of those old streetcars. They were certainly not the noiseless glamor rides portrayed here. If they were, the public would not have supported a replacement.

GM, Ford and Chrysler built the middle class of this country. The wages people could earn in their plants were the main emphasis to our Post-War housing boom, city expansion, and just about everything good which has happened in my lifetime. The aircraft and aerospace industry has been the other prime driver.

GM is a fraction of its former self, as are Ford and Chrysler. One of the saddest commentaries on contemporary life is the demise of Detroit.

But what is the real cause of this? Is it the robber barons running our big corporations?

No, it is the unions who kept pressing for higher wages for less work. I am all for being paid for an honest days work. But when you create artificial demands the workplace will rebel.

Look at Detroit, they are caught in a legacy cost they can no longer endure. The US auto industry has been in the same boat. They are scrambling to try and crawl out from under. Unfortunately that also means they are leaving Detroit in droves.

Yep. The Pension Funds are killing most American cities that have a budget crisis. I wonder what percentage of the Cincinnati annual city budget goes toward the cost of these Pensions? Detroit is a real mess and it almost seems as if they need to literally start over from the beginning in order to rebuild. Clearly the economic and political policies of the past have caught up with it and will continue to destroy that city if they are not stopped.

[SWOH]

Originally Posted by kjbrill

GM, Ford and Chrysler built the middle class of this country. The wages people could earn in their plants were the main emphasis to our Post-War housing boom, city expansion, and just about everything good which has happened in my lifetime. The aircraft and aerospace industry has been the other prime driver.

GM is a fraction of its former self, as are Ford and Chrysler. One of the saddest commentaries on contemporary life is the demise of Detroit.

But what is the real cause of this? Is it the robber barons running our big corporations?

No, it is the unions who kept pressing for higher wages for less work. I am all for being paid for an honest days work. But when you create artificial demands the workplace will rebel.

Look at Detroit, they are caught in a legacy cost they can no longer endure. The US auto industry has been in the same boat. They are scrambling to try and crawl out from under. Unfortunately that also means they are leaving Detroit in droves.

Off-topic, but the Detroit / union debate is one I always like to have (that, and my Chem/Physics homework for CC is awful...)

I just completed a degree in operations management. As a part of it, I interned with a major unionized (and non-unionized) area company, as well as worked on client projects with a variety of other union and non-union companies. Most all of these projects involved direct contact with the production floor.


A lot of union workers to this day are slugs. They are horrible, awful, toxic slime that should not be employed by anyone until they are actually able to do a day's work. They sleep on the job, make bad product, couldn't care less about the end customer, and are a lot of the reason why Detroit's product was so bad for so many years. They (along with their pension) were a major part of killing Detroit.


And about pensions... this is an area where both management and unions failed. How long do companies have to pay these slugs to live after they retire? And what incredulous amount of money has to be paid to them for sitting on their a$$ fishing as a "thanks" for the crappy work they never did? For management, it was easy to give away pension benefits, as those only affected the income statement in the long term. It kept the unions happy too. But when the payouts had to come, that's when the Big Three got screwed. Again, it seems like someone should have seen this coming, but no one could seem to look beyond the quarterly stock earnings.

On top of that, management failed by not ensuring a quality product. It was poorly designed (bigger fins > quality, right?), and then poorly made by union workers. The whole system supposedly was "beneficial" because customers would come back to buy cars more frequently. Then the Japanese came, at first with even worse product, but then it improved. Demming showed them how. Standardization, conformance measures, Kaizen, etc. Quality became the new cool, lean cut costs, and the Big 3, along with the UAW, laughed it all off.


So they died. The companies that are GM, Chrysler, and Ford now are not related to the Big 3 of the 1970's. They finally understand quality (Alan Mullay, for instance, is Ford's CEO because of his knowledge of the Toyota Production System). American cars are outscoring Japanese competitors. The Big 3 are not back - and we are all better for it. Gov. Snyder's move to make MI a right-to-work state was the final nail in the coffin of an era every American would like to forget.

And I think they understood quality as early as 2000. Before that, probably not, but they realized they needed to stop laughing. They knew they were going to die unless they made drastic changes, and although what management had to do to the UAW was brutal, it was also necessary. The bailout gave GM and Chrysler a good outlet to purge their bad assets (and unfortunately some of their good ones too, like GM Moraine and the former Saturn Plant in Spring Hill TN which were not UAW and not protected). It gave them the power to challenge their workers to make quality product, innovate, and cut costs. It also helped purge the slugs.


This recession was a blessing to corporations, especially the Big 3. Thank goodness it happened.
I can't wait to see the re-imagination of Detroit which will be happening after the bankruptcy.

[neilworms2]

KJBRILL: Wah wah wah, I won't listen to anything that doesn't fit my outdated worldview. 'nuff said.

[jmecklenborg]

Imagine how much more people could save for retirement if they didn't have to buy 10 cars during their working years...

[kjbrill]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Imagine how much more people could save for retirement if they didn't have to buy 10 cars during their working years...

Why don't you jump on how much more each of us would have if not paying the enormous debt of wars? Is it perhaps because you know that drain is going nowhere? Same as your car drain.

[kjbrill]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Imagine how much more people could save for retirement if they didn't have to buy 10 cars during their working years...

I actually sat down and tried to count how many new cars I have bought from 1962 to present. Frankly I could not remember either the years or the makes. I know it is more than 10. But then I remember we had 4 kids go to college. Each one of them had a car while in school. The one daughter managed to run her Nissan about 8 years out of school and well over 250,000 miles. She is my pride and joy and is still driving Nissans.

So I have purchsed more than 10 new cars over 50 years. As I said, 4 of them were to provide transportation for my kids going to college. They were free to dispose of them when out of school as they desired. So then you are down to 6 new cars over 50 years split between myself and my wife. Yes. we did purchase 2 used cars in that peiod of time.

Frankly, I am so glad to have lived in an era when I was able to earn enough to not only purchase these cars, pay the insurance, but keep them operational. I drove most of my cars into the ground and never regretted it as they performed well for me.

I would have far far more in my retirement account if the ongoing Financial Crises had not wiped most of it out. My cars did not do me in, the financial bigots did.

[ArtVandalay84]

LOL, if anything is a "money drain," it's owning an automobile.