Worldwide? I would guess that most criminals are Asian in "ethnicity".

Yeah, it looks like California has further requirements of selling a certain fraction of zero-emission vehicles, or buying appropriate offsets. Seems as though Fiat is being treated just like all the other car manufacturers, but complaining about it more.

I thought they just had to have a certain fleet average fuel economy, rather than a certain number of electric vehicles. Why are no other companies complaining about how hard this is? Did the other companies just do something else like get better fuel economies on their gas guzzlers? Is everyone else making electric cars without "losing money on each one", or are they just keeping quiet about it?

You mean the article is misleading? Doesn't give a proper context? And a company is trying to blame someone else for their difficulties?

I am shocked! Shocked I tell you!

Charging a "nominal" amount (a quarter per ride or $10 per month) might discourage abuse of the system while still providing much of the benefits of a "free" system.

To be fair, we should also consider how much of the operating costs are involved in collecting the fares. If it is significant, there would be a stronger case for eliminating it.

Another option is to save money on enforcement and accept that there will be some "cheating". Vancouver's Skytrain system has operated for almost 30 years with no fare-gates - it has always been kind of nice to feel that people were trusted to pay their way.

Unfortunately many people felt that there were too many cheaters, so they have decided to put up expensive gates to make cheaters less able to cheat. The expected cost of the gates and related infrastructure are much greater than the estimated amounts "lost" to cheaters, but it makes some people feel better I suppose.

Vancouver seems to have less than 5% losses due to cheating across the system - about $18 million per year, and that the fare gate system will reduce this by about $7 million per year. While the new "Compass" smart-card system will be a pleasure to use in comparison with cash and paper tickets, it is not clear to me that installing turnstiles in all the stations was a cost-effective decision. I think things would have worked fine with a continuation of the historical system of trusting people to have paid their fare when they go get on the train. But I suppose this exercise does provide economic stimulation in the form of jobs for gate installers and the like...

https://buzzer.translink.ca/20...

AC and DC have the same resistive losses at the same voltages. No differences.

It has historically been much easier to transform AC to different voltages, thus has been generally easier to get AC up to the high voltages that make it economical to use it over long distances. In modern times, I think this trend has reversed and DC is now being used preferentially for long distance transmission:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

For underwater power cables, HVDC avoids the heavy currents required to charge and discharge the cable capacitance each cycle.

I thought the iPhone was making something like 80%+ of the profit of the cell-phone industry?

OK it is not 80%: "Apple made more money than all of its competitors combined, taking in 56 percent of the profit in the mobile device market."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/to...

If you are making the majority of the profit from a market, you aren't doing too badly. Even if you only sell to the "luxury" segment of that market.

About what?

I doubt very much that the "other party" would have done things significantly differently. Of course they would have framed it differently. And then THEIR opponents would talk about "corporate welfare" and how the working man was getting a raw deal.

As an aside, how could the UAW block such a purchase? I can only imagine they could do so if they had some financial right to how GM was disposed of, in which case you might say that one of the owners blocked the sale, which seems a perfectly reasonable thing to be allowed to do. If I had come in and said "I'll buy the assets of GM" but did not make an offer that the owners found acceptable, why should them accept it?

These are interesting issues of public policy. What rights and obligations does society have to help/protect business owners and workers? Certainly the community has an interest in who does what. Society is ill-served if large fractions of the population are under-employed or under-paid. Society is ill-served if it is too difficult or not profitable enough to invest in new and continuing businesses.

If you think that these types of interests are easy to balance then I think you aren't thinking enough.

I don't disagree with most of Solandri's arguments - in a properly functioning economy, bankruptcy of one place is not particularly tough on the system as a whole, and the statements about the GM situation have been exaggerated and/or simplistic.

It should be considered however that much of the economic troubles at the time were driven by uncertainty, lack of confidence and liquidity. If the government had not stepped up with the cash infusion as was done, it is not clear that anyone would have stepped up to buy the pieces available in liquidation and kept any of them operating. In "normal" times perhaps there would have been the 80%-90% retention of the employees and subcontractors, but in this case it seems quite possible that without the confidence brought in by the government bailout it could have been the catalyst of a negative feedback loop that would have had huge follow-on negative repercussions.

I do think that the question "would it have been more expensive to let them go under" IS a valid argument/question. In a sense, the system worked as designed - as I understand, GM did file for bankruptcy (chapter 11), and reorganized and ended up with new owners (one of which was the US Gov). Without the involvement of the US Gov, it seems likely that the reorganization would have resulted in much larger disruption to US Gov interests. In this case, the US Gov acted just like some deep pocket investor who thought that they could turn a profit on supplying some capitol.

Poe-tae-toe, poe-taa-to.

The "bailout" (it is reasoned) prevented the factories from shutting their doors and putting a whole wack of people out of work, which would have had tremendous negative consequences for government expenses and revenues.

Should labour and management have made different decisions in the years leading up to this problem? Probably. Is either party blameless? Probably not.

This presupposes the existence of enough people in each city to actually be wanting to do this, RIGHT NOW, who are only being prevented by their thoughts that the ever vigilant authorities will prevent their nefarious plans. I just don't buy it. "They" just do not exist in large numbers. If "they" were actually out there, the types of investigation of suspicious packages that is currently done would be totally insufficient to prevent the "thousands per city" type of threat.

No one is saying "don't react", they are saying "react appropriately". You put together a well thought out response plan BEFORE the event, then follow it. Such a response plan should not call for busting down the doors with guns blazing on the strength of a single anonymous phone call. Not following the plan is what should result in disciplinary actions.