Nearly 50% unemployment means your city is effectively DESTROYED; it has entered what practicioners and students of aeronautical engineering call an unrecoverable death spiral, it has lost too much critical resource, and it won't be able to sustain itself.
It won't get any better. It daren't be allowed to fail entirely and return to seed,
It can't sustain itself, and so it will be propped up on governmental life support, hoovering up blood and treasure.
Certainly, there will be "incentives" designed to attract the normal mechanism of recovery, private investment (buy low, sell high), but until the underlying conditions change that created this mess, it will be known to be a sucker's bet (buy low, but the value is already low, and look at all the strings!), unless your gameplan is to soak the taxpayers via the .gov.
There is, however, one category of entity that will happily invest in Detroit.
After nearly everyone with means, a clue, or capability has fled, what they leave behind a population primed for recruitment by any nascent Mass Movement in need of cannon fodder.
I hope that guy and his cameraman were paid hazard pay. You'd have to pay me a LOT of money to get me to go inside of one of those houses or factories without a resperator and a shotgun. I'm surprised he didn't come across a dead body - or become one himself.
I saw some numbers on how many houses they're knocking down a year in Detroit.
Which was slightly staggering. Until you divided by the number of government working days - and it came out to be (depending on year) between 7-10 *per day*.
Figure it takes more than a day to knock down a house and cart it off - that means they've got at *least* 15 crews who do nothing but that?
Sorry, still reeling from the $74 an hour to make cars the UAW workers are getting. That's as much as I made working as a contract software engineer for a Bay Area firm. And, to be blunt, I strongly suspect that I have rather more education, training, and skills to do my job than those folks have to do theirs.
Man, they really need to fire all those people and hire new ones at a third that rate. Hell, given that I haven't had a contract job in over a year now, I'd probably make cars for $25 an hour. Well, if the job wasn't in, y'know, Detroit.
jsid-1262540294-84Ed "What the" Heckman at Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:38:14 +0000
"Man, they really need to fire all those people and hire new ones at a third that rate."
They're union shops. They would burn the factories down if they tried that. Come to think of it…
Might stand some chance of actually working. 'Course becuase it's being done by a white guy the race baiters are in opposition.
One thing I'll never understand is the instance on maintaining a system that claims (falsly) a guarantees that you'll get one loaf of bread provided by someone else rather than switching to a system that would allow the opportunity to get 100 loaves of bread on your own. Granted that also involves the risk that you wouldn't even get one loaf, but that risk is pretty small if you have any sense of self preservation.
Ed: Surely the factories are insured? And then they could set up somewhere that wasn't Detroit. Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Texas or New Mexico might be nice places to manufacture cars.
As a GM skilltrades retiree, retired for the last 10 years,
I agree with 99% of the PJTV video, with a few minor exceptions.
In 30 years at GM, I went from $1.95 per hour as a janitor, up to $23.15 an hour as a
Journeyman Machinist/Machine Repairman. Over the years the UAW declined offered pay raises to increase our health benifits and vacation time. The MOST paid yearly vacation time I ever received was 2 weeks. Yes, in the 30 years I worked there, I got approximately 225 vacation days. Our health coverage got progressively worse over the last 10 years I worked, and have gotten to be almost none existant now that I've retired. A typical doctors office call costs me $160, and the 4 presriptons I currently take to stay alive, cost me $250 every three months. We do not have eye or dental care!
An odd thing about not having eye and dental care is, it cost me very little more out of pocket, now that I pay the "real" bill.
I haven't been a "Union man" for 25 years, and agree with everything the article said about the unions.
I'm not interested in arguing the above facts, because I lived them. I just hate to see UAW workers, (many who were forced into the UAW), lumped in with the crowd. It's hard to quietly accept the exagerations about shop workers. Especially since my second career was in the public school system. I saw first hand how the school employees downrated shop workers for their suppsedly extravagent pay and benefits, even though most of the school employee's, (my self included), got better benefits, vacations, and pay than the shop workers.
Crap on a crutch... I have absolutely no shame in admitting that guy has significantly larger balls than I do... Were I to do the same kind of thing, the footage would constantly have the guys I hired to watch my ass scattering out of the camera angle every time it moved.
Driving up to/through Chicago, we saw much the same things, but from the road/highway, and we tended to speed up a little when we came across them. It is undeniably sad to see certain portions of America simply rotting away, but, after all, that is exactly what some people wanted... or, more specifically, it is a demonstrable and predictable byproduct of what they wanted...
I am waiting to hear that this all the Republican/conservative/libertarians fault (and their failed policies), as it was said of New Orleans. (verbatim, I think.)
When you can burn down your newly bought house and immediately double its' value, you must be in a "workers paradise".
The worst part of it all isn't the decay or the desolation, it's the fact that even with all the proof, progressives will not see the error of their ways.
I care about my fellow man. I honestly do. The more successful I am, the better I can assist those who are down on their luck. But because I believe that the best way to help people is to let them live their lives with as little interference as possible, the lefties consider me hateful. Yet, look at what their compassion does. It's there in Detroit. It's there in the inner cities. Their compassion does more harm while my supposed 'hatefulness' does more good. Why can't they see this?
This is the end result of the Markadelphias of the world.
As a side note, I've noticed that video games these days like to use decay as a visual device. I've been playing Far Cry 2, and the sad thing is it could have been modeled after this video.
Great video. Too bad it will never air on a major network news show. I worked on a GM line for 3 summers in the mid-80's in MA. The writing was already on the wall. Management had ceded control to the union. At the top they conspired with the union bosses to rip-off the stock-holders and customers. I was back in MA last week for the holidays - scary. Anyone paying attention there sees that state heading for a cliff with their Democrat leaders hitting the gas. They chased most manufacturing out of the state years ago.Now high-tech and other white collar industry have fled the taxes and regulations.Meanwhile, the spending express is accelerating.
Note:
All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost;
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JS-Kit/Echo comments for article at http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/01/detroit-has-been-perfect-laboratory.html (20 comments)
Tentative mapping of comments to original article, corrections solicited.
Nearly 50% unemployment means your city is effectively DESTROYED; it has entered what practicioners and students of aeronautical engineering call an unrecoverable death spiral, it has lost too much critical resource, and it won't be able to sustain itself.
http://detnews.com/article/20091216/METRO01/912160374
It won't get any better. It daren't be allowed to fail entirely and return to seed,
It can't sustain itself, and so it will be propped up on governmental life support, hoovering up blood and treasure.
Certainly, there will be "incentives" designed to attract the normal mechanism of recovery, private investment (buy low, sell high), but until the underlying conditions change that created this mess, it will be known to be a sucker's bet (buy low, but the value is already low, and look at all the strings!), unless your gameplan is to soak the taxpayers via the .gov.
There is, however, one category of entity that will happily invest in Detroit.
After nearly everyone with means, a clue, or capability has fled, what they leave behind a population primed for recruitment by any nascent Mass Movement in need of cannon fodder.
And where does the largest group of Muslim immigrants in the U.S. live?
I have been saying for months that Detroit should rent itself to the military as a training ground.
I hope that guy and his cameraman were paid hazard pay. You'd have to pay me a LOT of money to get me to go inside of one of those houses or factories without a resperator and a shotgun. I'm surprised he didn't come across a dead body - or become one himself.
I saw some numbers on how many houses they're knocking down a year in Detroit.
Which was slightly staggering. Until you divided by the number of government working days - and it came out to be (depending on year) between 7-10 *per day*.
Figure it takes more than a day to knock down a house and cart it off - that means they've got at *least* 15 crews who do nothing but that?
Come visit beautifuol Detroit!
Seriously, can we use the city to play live action Counter Strike? Pretty please????
>>Seriously, can we use the city to play live action Counter Strike?
You've saved Detroit: turn it into a full city paintball park!
Sorry, still reeling from the $74 an hour to make cars the UAW workers are getting. That's as much as I made working as a contract software engineer for a Bay Area firm. And, to be blunt, I strongly suspect that I have rather more education, training, and skills to do my job than those folks have to do theirs.
Man, they really need to fire all those people and hire new ones at a third that rate. Hell, given that I haven't had a contract job in over a year now, I'd probably make cars for $25 an hour. Well, if the job wasn't in, y'know, Detroit.
"Man, they really need to fire all those people and hire new ones at a third that rate."
They're union shops. They would burn the factories down if they tried that. Come to think of it…
Well, at $25/hr in a couple weeks you make enough money to buy up a whole city block at the current real estate prices.
Saw this article on a forum. http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit.fortune/?section=magazines_fortune
Might stand some chance of actually working. 'Course becuase it's being done by a white guy the race baiters are in opposition.
One thing I'll never understand is the instance on maintaining a system that claims (falsly) a guarantees that you'll get one loaf of bread provided by someone else rather than switching to a system that would allow the opportunity to get 100 loaves of bread on your own. Granted that also involves the risk that you wouldn't even get one loaf, but that risk is pretty small if you have any sense of self preservation.
Ed: Surely the factories are insured? And then they could set up somewhere that wasn't Detroit. Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Texas or New Mexico might be nice places to manufacture cars.
As a GM skilltrades retiree, retired for the last 10 years,
I agree with 99% of the PJTV video, with a few minor exceptions.
In 30 years at GM, I went from $1.95 per hour as a janitor, up to $23.15 an hour as a
Journeyman Machinist/Machine Repairman. Over the years the UAW declined offered pay raises to increase our health benifits and vacation time. The MOST paid yearly vacation time I ever received was 2 weeks. Yes, in the 30 years I worked there, I got approximately 225 vacation days. Our health coverage got progressively worse over the last 10 years I worked, and have gotten to be almost none existant now that I've retired. A typical doctors office call costs me $160, and the 4 presriptons I currently take to stay alive, cost me $250 every three months. We do not have eye or dental care!
An odd thing about not having eye and dental care is, it cost me very little more out of pocket, now that I pay the "real" bill.
I haven't been a "Union man" for 25 years, and agree with everything the article said about the unions.
I'm not interested in arguing the above facts, because I lived them. I just hate to see UAW workers, (many who were forced into the UAW), lumped in with the crowd. It's hard to quietly accept the exagerations about shop workers. Especially since my second career was in the public school system. I saw first hand how the school employees downrated shop workers for their suppsedly extravagent pay and benefits, even though most of the school employee's, (my self included), got better benefits, vacations, and pay than the shop workers.
"...Detroit looks like a goddamned war zone..."
You folks who live out west, in entirely new cities, have no idea of what the older industrialized parts of the rust belt look like, do ya?
TIA: Albuquerque was founded all of 5 years after Detroit. We just don't have any water here, so the decay rate is significantly retarded.
Crap on a crutch... I have absolutely no shame in admitting that guy has significantly larger balls than I do... Were I to do the same kind of thing, the footage would constantly have the guys I hired to watch my ass scattering out of the camera angle every time it moved.
Driving up to/through Chicago, we saw much the same things, but from the road/highway, and we tended to speed up a little when we came across them. It is undeniably sad to see certain portions of America simply rotting away, but, after all, that is exactly what some people wanted... or, more specifically, it is a demonstrable and predictable byproduct of what they wanted...
I am waiting to hear that this all the Republican/conservative/libertarians fault (and their failed policies), as it was said of New Orleans. (verbatim, I think.)
When you can burn down your newly bought house and immediately double its' value, you must be in a "workers paradise".
>>Seriously, can we use the city to play live action Counter Strike?
You've saved Detroit: turn it into a full city paintball park!<<
Get the Hollywood luvvies involved - if they film it, you could call it "Full Metal Undercoat"
Just a suggestion!
The worst part of it all isn't the decay or the desolation, it's the fact that even with all the proof, progressives will not see the error of their ways.
I care about my fellow man. I honestly do. The more successful I am, the better I can assist those who are down on their luck. But because I believe that the best way to help people is to let them live their lives with as little interference as possible, the lefties consider me hateful. Yet, look at what their compassion does. It's there in Detroit. It's there in the inner cities. Their compassion does more harm while my supposed 'hatefulness' does more good. Why can't they see this?
This is the end result of the Markadelphias of the world.
As a side note, I've noticed that video games these days like to use decay as a visual device. I've been playing Far Cry 2, and the sad thing is it could have been modeled after this video.
"Their compassion does more harm while my supposed 'hatefulness' does more good. Why can't they see this?"
Because they are not really "compassionate." True charity is done on one's own dime, not via forced government extortion
Great video. Too bad it will never air on a major network news show.
I worked on a GM line for 3 summers in the mid-80's in MA. The writing was already on the wall. Management had ceded control to the union. At the top they conspired with the union bosses to rip-off the stock-holders and customers.
I was back in MA last week for the holidays - scary. Anyone paying attention there sees that state heading for a cliff with their Democrat leaders hitting the gas. They chased most manufacturing out of the state years ago. Now high-tech and other white collar industry have fled the taxes and regulations. Meanwhile, the spending express is accelerating.
Note: All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost; references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>