Maybe the genes didn't mutate but were somehow forced into commonality by similar ancestral proto-ecolocation behavior.

Car dealers already take in skimpy profits on new-car sales, as consumers are able to use the internet to find out what dealers pay for a car, plus the sales-based quarterly/yearly bonus money that the manufacturer gives them. So increasingly the negotiations are up-from-cost rather than down-from-sticker.

So the parts and service departments are where most of the money is made. But guess what? New cars don't need much service, used ones last a long time too, and parts are also available over the internet. A future with many electric cars also suggests that parts & service will see declining revenues.

Younger generations aren't into cars the way older ones were, so the "superconsumers" are going away. Add all this up and I just don't see how the industry will support anywhere near the number of car dealers that it did in decades past. Getting rid of Pontiac, Hummer, etc. removed some capacity but there's still a long way to shrink.

It's the CEO's job to forsee and avoid strategic dead-ends. Many aren't so good at it.

As a Linux fanboy since 1994, UNIX and OS/2 guy before that, I was aghast when corpoations picked Win 3.1 on what, DOS 5.0? as a standard. "But X Windows is so much more modular, flexible, and portable! You can even run it on DOS machines!" I was right of course, and Win 3.1 standardizers spent much more hidden money on virus problems than it ever would have cost to get things going with Linux in the 1990's.

The best start companies can make to solve their jam-up is to modularize their old systems using the old tech. Then they can slowly replace bits and pieces with more modern, open, standards-based solutions -- Python? it has a small footprint -- at their leisure. When everything possible has been moved to portable tech, find a way -- virtual machines, emulation -- to move the last pieces. Now at last you can run on a modern OS -- any modern OS, you're not stuck any more.

I see companies making the same mistakes today by standardizing on .NET, the iPhone, and the iPad, with the same uncomfortable vendor lock-in and inability to move to cheaper and more robust platforms as they become available.

The reason companies get jammed up this way is their corporate culture. Short-term thinking has been identified in many posts here. Another factor is, simply, inflexible fear-based, cog-in-the-machine, just-tell-me-what-to-do employees. The bigger and more stable the institution, the more attractive it is to such people. Great, as long as the world doesn't change, which it seems to be doing faster and faster these days.

If the corporation itself was more modular and standards-based, it too would be more flexible, able to outsource, delegate, disentangle various business processes. Do we really need all the departments that our inflexible old software supports? Order fulfillment, customer service, marketing, manufacturing, design, bookkeeping -- all can be outsourced. We may choose to keep these functions in house, but let's define the interfaces between departments and their supporting IT, so that it's modular and we have flexibility in the future.

Have the realism and courage to state that the economy, being based on finite natural resources, can't grow forever, or even much longer. We were 20 years behind the curve in responding to global warming, which is just one more clue that we're f*cking up a nice place to live. Let's not stay in denial about the fallacy of perpetual growth and the immorality of waste, and develop policies that acknowledge it -- consumption taxes being a great starting point.

As tribal family groups we're capable of living in a tremendous range of environments, even when riddled by disease and beset by violence. All that's required is for people to live a few years past the start of their ability to breed. Before industry, technology, and development are able to ruin every ecosystem for human habitation, industry, technology, and development themselves will collapse. People from near the north pole to the south seas will then carry on as hunter/gatherers and simple agriculturalists, just as they did for hundreds of thousands of years before civilization. And, of course, living in social isolation, the groups will evolve their own languages and beliefs, and therefor tend toward war when they interact.

The problem isn't the mass, it's the surface area. Fewer thicker bags affect the environment less than more thinner bags. And half-decent people *are* walking into the stores with reused bags.

FYI

> I hope they take advantage of the marketing possibilities offered by civet-processed coffee.

Just had a bit too much to drink...

Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization takes a similar approach, going from the boolean logic of a transistor gate up to the OS and application level. I took a class with the first edition of Tanenbaum's book as the text in 1983 and l learned more about computers from it than from any other class before or since.

Separate from the issue of Cash for Clunkers taking used cars off of the market (and with them their maintenance cost and poor gas mileage), note that the poor suffer disproportionately from the effects of air pollution. So if removing cheap old stink-bombs from the road hurts the poor in one way, it may help them in a much more important way.

Isn't this airbag mess more an example of the free market in action? Just like letting Huwei build our telecom equipment? And didn't the government just quash that particular bit of business?

The share of Chinese imports gets substantially higher when you subtract oil from the total, at $400-500 billion per year.

Since Linus is speaking honestly, he makes the entire community look good.

Such pictures may help people appreciate the oceans more, and Tel Aviv more too for that matter. Maybe we won't travel as much, but we may come to a greater appreciation of what we have.

>This method is not recommended for controlling the audio output of animals or children.

Why'd you leave women off the list?