“I think the right way to phrase that would be: “Tax funded programs that benefit the taxpayers are inherently good”.”

As a liberal myself, I would actually qualify this in that “benefit” means that an alternative method of arriving to the conclusion without government interference (or a method with less government…

The EU “are not proponents of free trade”.

Except with:
Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chile, Egypt, Georgia, Iceland, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Norway, the Palestinian Authority, San Marino, Serbia, South Africa, South…

Yeah - some of it is correlation, of course - what leads to high sulfur emissions also tends to cause high particulate emissions, but there is some causal effects, too. I don’t remember the exact ratio, though, so it might be 99% correlation, 1% causation, or 50/50, etc...

Pretty typical response from someone who knows they’re not correct - “I won’t look it up, you have to”.  You know, there is this thing called Consumer Reports, where you can find out what the actual failure rate is, right?  Because it isn’t really any different than average anymore.  Do some fail?  Sure, but…

2 years, since they were recalled in 16 (I’ve got an ‘06 Fusion). Dealer is now telling us here that they’re getting ready to start scheduling repairs, so parts must be just about to flow...

At least I can hope.

2% wouldn’t be that much over industry average failure rates. If it was that low at its worst point, people wouldn’t avoid it.  20% is horrid.  But you said “pretty much all”, which isn’t accurate at all, or even close to accurate.

np... but to be fair, it was completely accurate on sulfur emissions (ie, particulate emissions) from those ships before standards improved.  They let those things belch insane amounts of smoke...

No, “luck of the draw” is not acceptable.  I would have avoided the powershift myself.  But “pretty much all” is nowhere close to the truth.  It was a high percentage, but not that high, and its pretty much average now.

Your allegation is not supported by any data.

So if its less than 1% of total sales that would fall under these lower emissions rules, can we all agree that even if the higher efficiency and cleaner vehicles are more expensive to operate, cutting off all sales of gliders would have no appreciable increase in cost of transportation?

“Also, vehicle emissions have been one of the smallest contributors to modern air pollution and has been for some time now “

All depends on what you call pollution - sulfur compounds or particulate matter? Sure. Nitrogen compounds? Not so much. And certainly with CO2 not the case.

I’d like to think so...

But a few years back they proposed putting in large increase in mpg requirements for semis. The industry howled in protest about it being too expensive and undoable.

Turns out the manufacturers were able to start hitting their targets at costs so low that the extra purchase costs were generally…

shipping costs barely moved as they’ve imposed drastic reductions in pollution from all sea-going ships, so I think that’s a little overblown...

To be a bit more accurate, the high pollution levels you are referring to from the supercontainer ships was sulfur compounds only, not all types of pollution.

And they have passed regulations to address sulfur emissions from ships worldwide.  They’ve been tightening standards already, and we’re close to the 89%…

Pretty much all? That’s an extreme exaggeration not supported by any objective data.  All major sources show that, yes, they were unreliable for a modern transmission, but it was still a relatively small % that failed, and those problems have been solved now...

By that logic, why does any automaker ever have any recalls? They should all have it right by now, right?

New designs bring new potential problems.

Especially since future cashflow still looks to be highly negative...

Sooo.... he’s impressed that they built a low-quality vehicle at a high price, WAY over what they advertised and promised, and are making money from it?

That sounds almost like being impressed that Walmart makes money selling low quality crap at inflated prices.

You’re still clueless. You substituted to an unrelated issue where there was no negative threat involved and then said “see, its only negative if you have a bias!”

Oh, and why should you benefit from union-negotiated rights, benefits, and coverage without compensating them a (small) amount for their work?

You’re beyond…

So in your extremely warped worldview, he could essentially say:

“I won’t install devices to rip your arms off if you don’t join a union.” and that’s perfectly fine? My god, you have no understanding of the law, do you?

And you also clearly don’t understand that the union is REQUIRED BY LAW to give you FULL…