We Should See Other Blogs

My industry is in large part driven by automotive sales. So when I say that General Motors deserves to die, I say it despite the negative impact it will have on my well-being.

But it really does deserve to die. Much like Chrysler deserved to die (but got government money instead) and now appears to be ready to die again (or more likely get government money instead).

General Motors has been manufacturing cars that are less reliable, less enjoyable, less comfortable, and less well-engineered than its Japanese counterparts for decades now. Decades! They’ve had this long to re-engineer, re-tool, re-design, and re-brand. They’ve had their chance. They’ve made vehicles that fewer and fewer people actually want to buy, and while their Japanese competition have been putting out solid vehicle after solid vehicle, General Motors has been chasing market trends around and failing time after time to actually catch those trends. When the market wants small cars, GM invests in SUVs, pickups, and crossover utility vehicles; when the market wants SUVs, pickups, and crossover vehicles, GM has just figured out that they’ve made a few too many small cars.

Contrast this approach to Toyota, who practically created the hybrid market before oil even reached sky-high prices earlier this year! Toyota is predicting or creating markets, while GM is (unsuccessfully) chasing them around. And while GM tries desperately to re-tool, Toyota has cornered the market.

It must have come as a shock to Toyota when GM announced the Chevy Volt, it really must have. GM doing something before the Japanese? Unheard of. Yet the Volt is still — still! — just a concept car without a marketable prototype.

The one single GM product that could spark some life into its flaccid branding, and it’s not even a production car, or even close. The one thing. All the while GM has to decide what to do with its insane pension and medical load, deal with cratering sales in the US market, production costs that haven’t gone down due in large part to ridiculous collective bargaining agreements with unions who have done more harm (by far!) than good, and a general public who sees them mostly as a cheaper, crappier alternative to the Japanese brands.

I think we got into this mess with a lot of short-term thinking. A lot, a lot of short-term thinking. I think we got into this mess because GM has been chasing the market instead of being the market. GM has never learned how to do something well and keep doing it well. Toyota, who used to be a joke of a brand, has consistently proven that it wants to — even if it’s just perception and not reality, even with that caveat — do something well. Whether it does or not is a good question, but whether or not it does is moot, since people think it does. That’s all that matters.

Honestly, I wouldn’t buy a GM vehicle any more. My wife’s Sunfire is a testament to the general inattentive and slovenly design and manufacturing practices GM is rightly known for: it’s neither fun to drive, nor nice to look at, nor able to drive 10,000 km without something or other failing, nor worth anything at resale. It seems designed by gorillas, engineered by apes, put together by monkeys, and generally not worth two bananas.

If my own GM experience has been that bad, is it any surprise that that the public at large are now voting with their dollars and saying that their experience has been that bad too?

General Motors deserves to die. It probably won’t: the governments of our various countries will prop up the guttering skeleton until Ford, GM, and Chrysler together are a third of what GM was ten years ago, because we as MPD socialist/capitalist countries seem to believe in privatizing profits and nationalizing losses. But at the end of the day GM richly deserves to be consigned to the dust-heap of history, as hard as that may be to see.

I’m a Christian in Canada. I’d probably be considered an evangelical Christian by anyone bothering with the taxonomy. For the most part, this means I should be voting FCP or Conservative.

The FCP is just dangerous. Mixing politics and religion is a recipe for the corruption of both.

But the Conservatives are much more benign, right? They’re like the Liberals, except just a bit more trustworthy and industry-friendly, right?

I don’t care anymore. When the current Conservative government introduces its copyright legislation, when I read that legislation and it appears carbon copied from the disastrous US DMCA and practically written by American corporate interests, they will have lost my vote. And I don’t mean in this election, I mean for as long as I feel they are corrupt and beholden to interests other than the interests of Canadians.

This is what bothers me. They are not serving voters. How will DMCA-like provisions in Canade aid people on the ground? Not at all. It will not provide them with jobs or health care or safety or any other measurable public good. It will simply make yet another class of thing against the law, and trust me, we already have enough ridiculous things that are against the law here. (For instace, smoking pot. There’s no way that should be illegal. Ill advised? Sure. Illegal? No.) There’s no public good here. There’s a supposed good for American content producers, of course, and for an American copyright regime spreading almost virally around the world.

We’re not even acting in our own national interests here. We’re acting in the interests of the USA. We’re the Eastern European nation that does whatever the might America says in the hope that one day we’ll be shown a photo of a pot of jam.

We’re helping to propagate the myth that the USA and its knowledge economy can dominate on the world stage as long as everyone everywhere obeys the same set of laws. And these laws are not, I might add, tilted in the favour of customers and citizens. The USA is using its international power to create and Information Technology Hegemony where it creates the content and the rest of the world has no choice but to consume said content.

It won’t work in the long term, of course. But in the meantime we’ll be saddling ourselves with a law whose intentions are not to help Canadians but instead to hinder them. Not to hinder them in order to help them, but to help media companies stick their hands further in citizens’ wallets.

I’m supposed to be Conservative, and for the most part I am still conservative. But this party and this government is slowly but surely starting to represent the interests of the industries and countries it has aligned itself with. They should be representing me and people like me who voted for them.

But they’re not. And if this policy comes to pass, I simply will not vote for them. It’s that simple.