The Two-story Outhouse Principle

The average GM assembly line worker makes $27/hour, the average Toyota assembly line worker makes $25/hour (but with profit sharing and overtime, the average GM worker makes $29/hour and the average Toyota worker makes $31/hour). So clearly the wages of line workers are not the problem with competitiveness. But the "corporate culture" of the United States cannot assign blame to management and government policies because that violates the hierarchical principal underlying all large organizations, the most sacred of which is "sh*t falls downwards". That is, no executive in American corporate (or governmental) culture today will ever admit that blame lies in flawed management decisions. That conflicts with the culture of arrogance. Rather, all blame will automatically be passed downward until it reaches the level of people unable to pass the blame further down even if said people have nothing to do with the decisions that led to the current problems -- line workers, in the case of Big 3 auto makers.

-- Badtux the Auto Penguin

Trip update

The Silver Demon worked perfectly on this trip. Granted, I didn't do any hard-core offroading -- I didn't even need to disconnect my sway bars. But it was just reliable as dirt. Which is pretty much what you expect from a design that is as simple as dirt.

I'm going to eventually put a long-arm suspension system and some big-ass tires on the beasty, but that'll wait until it's paid off. Until then, its current configuration -- a Jeep on the cheap -- does everything I need, if not necessarily everything that I want.

-- Badtux the Jeeping Penguin