I think that a big part of automobilie appeal was the illusion of freedom associated with it - an illusions nuirtured by Hollywood. I think that illusion is finally starting to wear thin.
Wojtek
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> ``..Part of the reason could be economic, the firm said. During the
> worst recession since the 1930s, the cost of owning and maintaining a
> car likely
> makes less sense than it did when gas was 30 cents a gallon and every
> red-blooded American teenager yearned for a Chevy Camaro or a Pontiac
> GTO.''
>
> -----------
>
> This passage opens up a whole iceberg of thoughts.
>
> I think economic is almost the whole of it. The combination of mandatory
> insurance, the cost of buying a car, and the fact that almost nobody can
> fix them except expensive professional mechanics pretty much covers it.
> You can toss in smog laws too.
>
> I kept my 83 Honda going for years to avoid buying another car. It was
> cheap enough to operate, and the registration fees stayed relative low.
> I still couldn't fix the engine, because I didn't have the time and
> lacked the more up-date skills. I paid a machine shop to rebuild the
> engine the first time it died. It died for good in June. So I had to
> replace it. I bought a used small truck.
>
> In the distant past I rebuild or help rebuilt about half a dozen engines
> as a kid. We hung out at each other's parents garage. It was a great
> social and learning scene. Two of our fathers were engineers
>
> The other interesting thing about kids and cars, is you can get a
> concrete insight into exactly how capital expropriation works. Part of
> that is containing the spread of skills and knowledge to within the
> capital sphere of domination and control, i.e. fewer and fewer backyard
> mechanics. With the design phase, the meticulous use of increasingly
> modular systems.
>
> This modularization process does a couple of capital friendly things.
> Operations that used to use (x) number of skilled workers, now requires
> (x-n) workers. The unrepairable module requires a full replacement.
>
> It was fascinating to watch de-skilling, speedup, and expropriation
> process repeat itself in the durable medical equipment industry. It was
> also a kind of fascination to watch my own demise as a case study of the
> destruction of the US middle class.
>
> CG
>
>
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