Oracle of Delphi

Yes ocn's nursing home locks the doors at 6 PM sharp ...

Happy Birthday, sorry I'm a little late but I have been very busy ....

I know, I used to date your mother. In fact, I think you're my son ... I want to thank each and every one of you for the Birthday wishes, oddly I feel the same as I did when I was 20. It's been one heck of a year for me, with my father passing away, the Wilmington plant being shut down, Pontiac being fazed out, Saturn and Saab being sold and Opel turning quasi GM, and me moving to BMW, but looking back, no matter if you are a FWD or RWD fan, we are all GM fans, sometimes that gets lost in the heat of discussion, on my part I am sorry for that. Perhaps we should all make a greater effort to say no matter what u drive it's still GM and we celebrate that as a group on a internet forum. As the famous philosopher Rodney King asked, "Can't we all just get along?" Here's to a better year for all of us and mostly for GM, hopefully! See, as you get older you get wiser, at least that's what I've been told ...

I do, for my birthday my wife has given me helicopter lessons, I had my 1st lesson last Saturday, I learned how to auto-rotate. No ocn, it's not what you think ...

Perhaps with your delicate stomach, you should not eat out ...

The US gasoline-industrial complex has had its day. In Asia's frontiers of globalisation the green machine is pulling away Some companies go bust ­because of bad management, and some get crushed by unrelenting ­recession. But once in a while you get a business whose death is about much more than supply chains or sales targets; it sounds the death knell for an entire era. And the funeral bells surely tolled this week when General Motors filed for bankruptcy. Start talking about GM, and the superlatives soon run out. What's now the largest industrial failure in US ­history was for so many years the biggest company in the world. More than that, the 100-year-old giant was the corporate embodiment of the American Century. Everyone knows the one about how a former boss of General Motors (nearly) said that what was good for his company was good for America, and vice versa. Today the statement is used for easy irony, but at the time Charles Wilson was voicing a truism. He was speaking a few years after the second world war, during which carmakers supplied the US military with hundreds of billions of dollars-worth of planes, tanks and other military equipment. The management theorist Peter Drucker said it was not the generals but General Motors who "won the war for America". And they were rewarded handsomely, with cosy regulation and ridiculously low taxes on fuel. The gasoline-industrial complex, you could call it, and for much of the postwar period it held up well enough. Not any more. Of the Detroit Three, GM and Chrysler are now enfeebled, on an IV-drip of government money. Only Ford has avoided the same fate, by taking out a giant loan three years ago and beginning its own painful restructuring. The official line is that GM is not dead, it's just regrouping. Even as he administered the last rites this week, Barack Obama heralded "the beginning of a new GM". Yes, and I'm sure we all look forward to the continued banking success of Sir Fred Goodwin. If there are no second acts in American life, the world of business is barely more forgiving. Even optimists admit that whatever emerges from Detroit will be a shrunken, modest thing, shorn of its pomp and might. Just as Detroit's rise was about more than business, so too is its demise. When people talk about the rising economic might of Asia, they normally paint it in genteel, gradual terms – photo­ calls at international summits, say. But sometimes this slow shift of power becomes more of a lurch. Sometimes it's marked by an industrial humiliation. For Porsche, BMW and other luxury marques, Shanghai is already the second most important market in the world. And this year, for the first time ever, the Chinese are set to buy more cars than recession-hit Americans. But the developing countries of Asia are not just consuming more, they are closing the gap in manufacturing. In doing so, they are on a well-trodden path to industrialisation, following Japan and South Korea. Those countries pioneered cheaper, small cars; this time, the new frontiers of globalisation are leading the way on electric cars. Yes, you read that right: the green auto, the will-o'-the-wisp of the motor industry, is already being made in smoke-belching Asia. The world's bestselling plug-in car, the G-Wiz, was invented and built by an Indian firm, Reva. The company that has got the furthest in developing a battery-powered auto which can go for long distances is called BYD (short for Build Your Dreams) and is based in Shenzen, southern China. True, the little G-Wiz is a funny-looking thing, more milkfloat than motor. Then again, the Americans used to laugh at Toyota – and now it's the world's no 1. When pleading for Washington aid, GM execs made much of their new electric vehicle, the Volt – but that's still years from going on sale. Such slow-footedness is hardly a surprise from a company whose vice-chair, Bob Lutz, last year reportedly described global warming as "a crock of $h!". Once a petrolhead, always a ­petrolhead. And that's the other big ­difference about the electric brigade – strikingly few of its leaders are motor men. Reva's founder comes from the solar-power industry; BYD used to make mobile-phone ­batteries, and only got into cars this decade; Shai Agassi, the leading designer of a ­system for ­charging electric ­vehicles, is an Israeli who used to be big in ­accountancy software. "The car industry is heading for a showdown between discipline and imagination," says John Wormald, a British consultant to auto firms for over 30 years. "The old giants have plenty of discipline and heft; but the start-ups have got far more imagination." Or, as a Chinese car executive put it to the New Yorker not so long ago: "We have no brand name, no recognition, nothing. We are simply aggressive." Plenty of people will read all this as a triumph of free-market economics: the old overtaken by the new, the public good served by an eager private sector, and creative destruction writ large. I'm not so sure. Anyone who's ever been to India and China knows that what they really need is fewer cars and more cheap public transport, powered as cleanly as possible. And all that is far more likely to come now that America's Big Three have less of a stranglehold on the auto sector. From this week, the car industry is ­living in the AD era: After Detroit. Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...na-electric-car

WASHINGTON — It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism. But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry. Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born. A bit laconic and looking every bit the just-out-of-graduate-school student adjusting to life in the West Wing — “he’s got this beard that appears and disappears,” says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force — Mr. Deese was thrown into the auto industry’s maelstrom as soon the election-night parties ended. “There was a time between Nov. 4 and mid-February when I was the only full-time member of the auto task force,” Mr. Deese, a special assistant to the president for economic policy, acknowledged recently as he hurried between his desk at the White House and the Treasury building next door. “It was a little scary.” But now, according to those who joined him in the middle of his crash course about the automakers’ downward spiral, he has emerged as one of the most influential voices in what may become President Obama’s biggest experiment yet in federal economic intervention. While far more prominent members of the administration are making the big decisions about Detroit, it is Mr. Deese who is often narrowing their options. A month ago, when the administration was divided over whether to support Fiat’s bid to take over much of Chrysler, it was Mr. Deese who spoke out strongly against simply letting the company go into liquidation, according to several people who were present for the debate. “Brian grasps both the economics and the politics about as quickly as I’ve seen anyone do this,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the head of the National Economic Council who is not known for being patient whenever he believes an analysis is sub-par — or disagrees with his own. “And there he was in the Roosevelt Room, speaking up vigorously to make the point that the costs we were going to incur giving Fiat a chance were no greater than some of the hidden costs of liquidation.” Mr. Deese was not the only one favoring the Fiat deal, but his lengthy memorandum on how liquidation would increase Medicaid costs, unemployment insurance and municipal bankruptcies ended the debate. The administration supported the deal, and it seems likely to become a reality on Monday, if a federal judge handling the high-speed bankruptcy proceeding approves the sale of Chrysler’s best assets to the Italian carmaker. Mr. Deese’s role is unusual for someone who is neither a formally trained economist nor a business school graduate, and who never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the future of the American and Japanese auto industries. He lives a dual life these days. He starts the day at a desk wedged just outside of Mr. Summers’s office, where he can hear what young members of the economic team have come to know as “the Summers bellow.” From there, he can make it quickly to the press office to help devise explanations for why taxpayers are spending more than $50 billion on what polls show is a very unpopular bailout of the auto industry. Several times a day he speed-walks to Treasury, taking a shortcut through the tunnel under the colonnade, near the kitchens. The other day he talked about how sharply perceptions of the industry’s future changed after Mr. Obama’s election. “At the first meeting with Rick Wagoner,” he said, referring to G.M.’s recently deposed chief executive, “they were in a very different place. He said publicly that bankruptcy was not a viable option. It’s been a long process getting everyone to look at the options differently.” In fact, from before Inauguration Day, few in Mr. Obama’s circle saw any other choice. Every time Mr. Deese ran the numbers on G.M. and Chrysler, he came back with the now-obvious conclusion that neither was a viable business, and that their plans to revive themselves did not address the erosion of their revenues. But it took the support of Mr. Rattner and Ron Bloom, senior advisers to the task force charged with restructuring the automobile industry, to help turn Mr. Deese’s positions into policy. “The president’s instruction to us was that we had to come up with a solution that would work on a commercial basis, that didn’t involve indefinite federal financing,” Mr. Deese said. “But we didn’t want liquidation, which would have even worse effects. So the question was how do you design a very substantial restructuring, and do it fast.” Mr. Deese’s route to the auto table at the White House was anything but a straight line. He is the son of a political science professor at Boston College (his father) and an engineer who works in renewable energy (his mother). He grew up in the Boston suburb of Belmont and attended Middlebury College in Vermont. He went to Washington to work on aid issues and was quickly hired by Nancy Birdsall, a widely respected authority on the effectiveness of international aid and the founder of the Center for Global Development. But he wanted to learn domestic issues as well, and soon ended up working as an assistant for Gene Sperling, who 17 years ago in the Clinton White House played a similar role as economic policy prodigy. Eventually, Mr. Deese headed to Yale for his law degree. But his e-mail box was constantly filled with messages from friends in Washington who were signing up to work for the Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigns. Mr. Deese chose Senator Clinton’s. “He was pretty quickly functioning as the top economic policy staffer through her campaign,” Mr. Sperling said. “He could blend the policy needs and the political needs pretty seamlessly.” On the day that the Clinton campaign ended, Mr. Deese left her concession speech and received a message on his BlackBerry from a friend in the Obama campaign urging him to sign on immediately to Mr. Obama’s team. He resumed his policy work there, and found himself stuck in Chicago — unable to fly to Washington with his dog — as the economic crisis deepened. Finally, one night, he decided to get into his car with his dog and just started driving back to Washington. Tired, he pulled over to catch some sleep in the car. “I slept in the parking lot of the G. M. plant in Lordstown, Ohio,” he recalled. The giant plant, opened during G.M.’s heyday in the mid-1960s, is where the Pontiac G5 is produced. Under the plan Mr. Deese worked on when he arrived in Washington, Pontiac will disappear. “I guess that was prophetic,” he said, shaking his head. Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/business...tml?_r=1&hp

Think so ???

I'm sadder than I have been in a long time, the people who work at Wilmington are good and decent people, all I'm going to say ...

I'm not sure which Targa she picked, I will find out later today and wire the money to the dealer. My daughter won't need the car until next week anyway, as she has finals until next Thursday ... The money transfer will happen today, before June 1st, because I'm not sure there will be an Employee discount any longer after that date ...

Yep, thank God for mom, I'm running out of room to store vehicles ...

How am I a hypocrite? My name is not on the title, the car is not legally owned by me ... My wife wanted it, and now she has it, I don't deny my wife much of anything ...

I was feeling a bit nostalgic for Texas today ...

What was it about then? I'm confused ...

Who knows what standards or taste will be like in 20 or 30 years? I'll take my chances, however this car is Mrs. PCS's not mine, so the automatic was her doing ... I recently came into a bit of money with my father's estate being settled, and some other monies I got from my retirement at GME and a signing bonus @ BMW, not to mention the house in St. Croix that my father left me ... So life is good, at least from my standpoint ... The Solstice was a gift to my daughter, who got accepted to the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, a year early and with a scholarship. Besides, she is half Irish after all ... Seen the light no, seen the dollar signs as a future investment, yes .... I may be crazy, but I'm not dumb ... So now there are 3 GXP's sitting in my garage in Delaware, don't challenge the gate ... I spent a good portion of this week and last crossing the Franco/Italian border, pics of the cars will come eventually when I return to the USA ... I've decided to have the Pontiac Custom-S completely restored in Texas next month, work will begin on that in about 30 days. The Nox will sit in my driveway, as I like to have a CUV on hand just in case the villagers should storm the gate and attack my castle, but I'm thinking the new Cadillac SRX should take its place ... :AH-HA_wink: That's about all I have to say on my new car purchases for now ...

Oh to be 16 again .... Happy Birthday ...

Utt Ohh, you're going to have Bathy ranting about why we need another Gay Marriage thread again ... :rotflmao:

What does ocn know about boxes?

Cryptic Messages so early in the morning, I just woke up! Just so we're straight, this vehicle is in Mrs. PCS' name :AH-HA_wink: MSRP STANDARD VEHICLE PRICE*: $37,610 * * DISCOUNT OPTION PACKAGE * Leather Trim, Onyx/Red * Interior, Onyx/Red * Liquid Red * Tire & Wheel Spare - Delete * Seat Adjuster, 6-Way Power, Driver * SENSOR INDICATOR INFLATABLE RESTRAINT, FRT PASS PRESENCE DETECTOR * Remote Start * Cargo Convenience Net * Seat Adjuster, 6-Way Power, Passenger * Seats, Front Bucket Sport * Key, Common * Airbags, Side-Impact, Driver and Passenger * Floor Mats, Front * Floor Mats, Rear * Decklid Liner * Vehicle GM Prod Week 44 * Identification Breaking Point 2009 1/2 M.Y. * Sunroof * Air Conditioning, Dual Zone w/Auto Temp Controls * Spoiler, Rear, Low-Profile * Mirror, Inside Rearview with Compass and OnStar * Mirrors, Outside Body Color * Country Code: USA * Suspension, High Performance * Limited Slip Rear Differential * EQUIPMENT ADDITIONAL USA * Axle Rear - 3.27 Ratio * Pedals, Sport Metallic * Stabilitrak * Brakes, Front & Rear Disc Antilock * Seats, Heated Driver & Right Front Passenger * Vehicle Drive, Left-Hand Drive * Engine, 6.2L V8 SFI * 6-Speed Automatic Transmission * Exhaust, Dual Outlet, Stainless Steel * Steering Wheel, 4-Spoke, Sport * Rack-and-Pinion Steering * EMISSION SYSTEM CALIFORNIA, LEV2 * Tire Inflator Kit * Wheels, 19" Polished Aluminium, 5-Spoke * Tire, P245/40R19-94W, Summer, Blackwall * Gas Guzzler Tax * CONTROL SALES ITEM NO. 83 * Interior Trim Pricing Code * Sales Processing Stock Orders * Headlamps * XM Radio * CALIBRATION TELEMATICS, HOLDEN ASSIST/ONSTAR * Antenna, Roof Mounted * OnStar * Sound System, AM/FM Stereo w/6 Disc CD Player * Conversion HBD * Pontiac G8, GXP * LICENSE PLATE FRONT FRT MOUNTING PKG * Shift Lever, Leather Wrapped * Emissions, CA * MODEL CONVERSION PONTIAC GRAND PRIX '367P' TOTAL OPTIONS: $2,600 TOTAL VEHICLE & OPTIONS: $40,210 DESTINATION CHARGE: $685 TOTAL VEHICLE PRICES*: $40,895 I still don't know what this is - * MODEL CONVERSION PONTIAC GRAND PRIX '367P' 3K off at the time plus my GM Employee discount.

Many Happy Returns ...

My mother's garage in Plano, Texas ...

You don't need a chisel, all you need is a blow dryer ...

Now you know a G3 does not come in a GXP wrapper, all three cars in my garage in Delaware sport a GXP badge ... :AH-HA_wink: The nox is lonely and sits outside now ...

Well I bought two new cars in the past 4 weeks, these two will be auctioned off at Barrett Jacksons Car Auctions in 20 or 30 years ... Now I'm going to start collecting BMW's of my youth ...