foam?

Like the power on over-steer available at all times when you have a big Porsche hemi V-8 under the hood? ;)

I love the 911 too, but there is plenty or room in my world for TWO great Porsche design philosophies. :)

Oh....to stay on topic....Foam.

:D

Here is one of my favorite quotes. To the thoughtful, it can help illustrate the insanity of blaming commercial problems on the workers. Plus, it has an excellent chance of getting Pat really wound up.

"All that serves Labor serves the nation. All that harms Labor is treason. If a man tells you he loves America yet hates Labor, he is a liar. If a man tells you he trusts America yet fears Labor, he is a fool. There is no America without Labor, and to fleece the one is to rob th other."
Abraham Lincoln

Make up your mind. I thought this was a cocktail party.

It was, but Gumby left with the booze.

Superman, good quote and point taken.

Not so fast. Come back here and fight like a man!

Kidding. I never expect to hear respectful phrases from a discussional adversary, so I hope you'll pardon me while I recover my senses. I'm feeling a little faint.

The rest of you, take a lesson. See how mature and intelligent Ben seems when he agrees with me?

That's what most people think, but the FAA serves two masters. One of it's prime missions is promoting air commerce - meaning the airlines. Like it or not, it's a fact that change (from the regulatory side) comes about as a direct result of body count. The FAA *does* look at safety - if it doesn't cost too much - but they typically do so after-the-fact. There are a lot of safety improvements that could be made but which have not, simply because of cost. That doesn't help you if you're at the bottom of a smoking crater; it's the pilots that will keep you out of the crater in the first place. Oh, yeah - the FAA *loves* paperwork.

It doesn't hurt to remember that airline management does not come from "operations" today - meaning pilots and engineering types. They come from finance and marketing and have no clue what it means to demand that you take an aircraft into weather on one remaining generator to a destination at minimums with thunderstorms. No clue. And they get very irate when a pilot says NO. We're not talking about a union that demands paying someone $100K/year to mount tires, were talking about an association that helps the pilots stay in the cockpit when they do what is necessary to keep you alive. The pay pilots receive is widely misunderstood, but I would be willing to bet that if you surveyed the passengers of an aircraft in trouble, none of them would think them overpaid.

Agreed, but that's what's happening.

Nothing wrong with that. Until you added the capitalization. :D I wonder what he would think about how Labor fleeces labor, and whether that robs America or not?
That is the core problem. When a company, or a union pension fund, or even the federal government, takes money from a worker to pay for retirement and the worker doesn't get that money back. That's wrong no matter what entity does it.

As Jim says, that is what's happening. In the Enron case, the judge seized the funded defined benefits program to help pay stockholders. That is the most complete ****ing horse**** bull**** asinine crap I have ever heard of. Why in the world would workers' retirement monies be used to cover the mistakes of management and pay off investors that accepted the risk in the first place? Bull****. Pure bull****.

+1 that was/still is plain wrong. Huge difference between investing (taking a risk) and the poor guys who worked, paid into a system expecting to have these funds to live on in his golden years.

Thx, Byron. As I have said here many times, we mostly agree. Conservatives and liberals want the same things. Freedom. Opportunity. It's the tactical details where we sometimes do not agree. From my viewpoint, one of the main differences between the groups is that liberals do not lose sight of the belief that it's all about people. We don't subjugate those interests under that of corporations, for example. We don't shift into the "What's good for commerce is good for people" trap. Focus. Eye on the prize.

Back to basics: I think we can agree that, ultimately, it is all about people. And freedom. And opportunity. Commerce and greed sometimes support that agenda. And sometimes they do not.

land shark

I find foam very exciting