| 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. <snip>
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.
============
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 at
http://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.
===========
: 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.” <snip>
=============
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
========
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.
=============
'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
============
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
$75,817 a year and San Jose high school teachers earn an average $73,361 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
$124,000 vs. the $55,000 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.
==========
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.
=========
: 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
===================w
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