How?

The whole thing is clearly economic favouritism. GM’s wrongdoing kills 124 people, they pay 900m. Toyota is a victim of false accusations and classic ‘driving while old’ and has to pay over a billion. VW already agreed to comprehensive compensation in the double digit billions (which is fair in may view), investment…

Hitler and ze Germans. Is that your contribution to European understanding?

Yes, steno pools are a thing of the past. So are most cobblers, coopers, train firemen and night watchmen. If technological development had not created new jobs, unemployment would be near 100% now. For every steno pool worker now has the power of Microsoft Office, which allows him or her to be 100x more productive.…

That’s a fallacy in my opinion. The economy is not a cake, but a bakery. Work is not a fixed size entity that needs to be divided. Computers didn’t make office workers redundant, despite what people thought in the 1970s. When productivity in one sector rises through technology, prices fall, employment in the relevant…

I feel strangely attracted to that one actually. It's like someone put the greenhouse of a Town Car on an S-Class.

I think you have too rosy a picture of 1950s prosperity. Most low skilled workers in the 1950s could not afford air travel or two cars or eating a steak more than once a week for that matter.

But the US is actually producing a lot of stuff. Defense, aerospace, high tech manufacturing equipment, optics etc. Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP is pretty close to where it was 20 years ago.

That wasn’t even the weirdest stuff they tried. For a great gallery on W140 development check

Why? Why waste all this road space? You're only making traffic jams longer than they need to be...

I’ve never seen two lanes merge into one without driven speeds dropping significantly.

Yeah, let’s just merge into one lane as early as possible and leave road space unused, that way we can maximize congestion and make traffic jams much longer!

However, if they don’t keep their cost base competitive with the rest of the industry they’ll go bankrupt again in the next downturn...

They will not even out though. If Mexico gets more expensive, low skill work will not magically move back to the high-cost region it came from. The answer to these challenges however is not to cut yourself off from trade in order to artificially preserve a low-skill labor sector in a highly developed country (the…

MB manuals of the 80s and 90s are pretty horrible and clunky though...

NAFTA or not. The fact that unskilled labour paid an extremely comfortable life in North America was the result of a unique historic constellation: A combination of government-paid initial capital stock (war production factories), ever increasing domestic demand (baby boom) and the fact that over half of the world…

They are not. They are Opel Omegas, completely different platform, called the GM V platform, which was initially developed at Opel in the 1960s. This platform, with modifications, was used in Australia until 2007, but never in the US.

“The difference between a crapcan and a luxury car is mostly just what gets checked on the options list.”

Banking embargo still in place. No western bank has electronic payment access.

That is not how international politics works.