Let * go bankrupt

That's what capitalism stands for.

Those who kept a well managed admin and saved for the worst should be rewarded, not those who failed.

I think the post is a bit misguided. The people you talk to about matters of economy and finance are people with a background in finance and economics. For all their other assets entrepreneurs don't know a lot about macroeconomics, big finance, and economic policy.

I'm sure that one layer below this there will be, or at least should be, entrepreneurs that are consulted in order to get the most bang for the buck.

But I honestly don't see Mark Zuckerberg lecturing Robert Rubin and Warren Buffet on how to save the economy...

GM was not ruined by a low-probability devastating event. They made bad management decisions over and over again for decades. This was a train wreck that everyone could see coming from miles away.

Your FTC link is really handy. You should read it more carefully. On that page is a paragraph which directly addresses this situation:

Q: Is it okay for a company to "dry test" a product?

A:"Dry testing" describes the practice of placing an ad for a product to see if there is sufficient consumer interest before actually going to the expense of manufacturing the item. Although the Mail Order Rule doesn't specifically deal with this situation, the FTC has issued an advisory opinion that such ads must clearly disclose to consumers the fact that the merchandise is only planned and may not ever be shipped.

Then it references another FTC publication about the "Mail or Telephone Order Rule" (also known as the "30-day Rule"), available here:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/adv/bus02.shtm

The page summarizes the Rule as follows:

The Rule requires that when you advertise merchandise, you must have a reasonable basis for stating or implying that you can ship within a certain time. If you make no shipment statement, you must have a reasonable basis for believing that you can ship within 30 days. That is why direct marketers sometimes call this the "30-day Rule."

And it provides this relevant paragraph:

Dry-testing

Q: We want to sell by mail or telephone a product that is not yet available. Does the Rule apply?

A: It depends. In an advisory opinion, the FTC told a publishing company that it could "dry-test" its merchandise as long as the following conditions were met:

> In promoting the merchandise, the merchant can make no suggestion that the merchandise will be shipped or that customers expressing an interest in it will receive it.

> In all promotional materials, the merchant must disclose all material aspects of the promotion, including the fact that the merchandise is only planned and may not be shipped.

> If any part of the promotion is later dropped, the merchant must notify subscribers of the fact within a reasonable time after soliciting their subscriptions.

> If, within a reasonable time after soliciting their subscriptions, the merchant has made no decision to ship the merchandise, it must notify subscribers of this fact and give them the opportunity to cancel and, where payment has been made, make a prompt refund.

> The merchant can make no substitutions of any merchandise for that ordered.

If these conditions are not met, the Rule applies.

So the answer is: This is not against the FTC's rules, so long as you are reasonably up-front about what's going on. It's particularly easy to comply with these rules if you avoid taking orders or money, but it seems as if you could even work around that, assuming that you're honest and timely and issue refunds to everyone on demand.

[NOTICE: mechanical_fish is not a lawyer and this is not sound legal advice.]

This is an analysis you won't find outside of the U.S. Typically, the car industry is known for having strong union labors in a lot of other countries (especially in Europe), and while auto makers are always in trouble during recessions, no European one is nowhere near the critical condition of GM.

The real problem is making cars that people want and selling them. I'll give you a clear example with the history of Fiat :

Fiat is an Italian auto-maker that had a very bad decade, the cars weren't selling and their reputation was bad, when you tought about Fiat, the first image that came to you was a subpar car. After they attempted everything else (cutting costs, you guess how), they finally resolved to fire every single guy with a tie in the company, from the simple chief to the CEO, the WHOLE management that was pointing to the high cost workers, unions, etc. as the sole responsible for the demise of the company, all these people that refused to take responsability were fired and replaced by new heads, an unprecedented move.

Guess what ? It worked. Fiat is making a strong come back in Europe and their reputation is building up again. Their cars are not synonymous of subpar anymore, they sell, even if it takes a lot of time to restore confidence and change your image, their strategy is ultimatly working.

I believe GM could take a lesson or two here. The problem is when the management refuses to take responsibility of a failure, they aren't qualified anymore to excercise responsibility, and their real chances of saving the company, bailout or not, are very slim.

It is actually pretty horrible, as it stands.

For the kind of students who party their way through college, it would merely be a big waste of time. (Yes, waste. Forced community service always ends up going into lame make-work projects.) But for more earnest college students it would be a disaster. For the kids working their way through college, it would be a crushing burden to lose 2 1/2 weeks of fulltime work every year to government mandated projects. And for students who already spend their time on genuinely public minded projects, like open source, it would mean either (a) filling out a lot of paperwork to get the project certified, or (b) being yanked away from it for 100 hours a year, which is a large fraction of the time a college student can afford to spare for side projects.

The marketers working at the company should be taken out back and flogged. Show me the device and tell me how it works!

From what I can tell, it's like taking a big stack of paper, gluing all the pages together and then carving it into the object of your desires. (The carving and stacking order may be reversed.) And apparently, it's cheap, since it's run-o-the-mill paper.

It is ugly, though, to see the pigs begging for a place at the trough. What was sold as a bailout to sore up systemic instability in the financial sector has become an everybody-invited tax money giveaway free-for-all for the favored donors and supporters of Congressional election campaigns.

The next time I complain about high taxes and someone says "STFU the government does so much for you like libraries and fire stations", I am going to throw this trillion dollar pile of shit in their face.

We're up against some MzScheme memory limit. Usually it's not a problem because we lazily load items from disk. Eventually, though, the news process runs out of memory and starts GCing excessively. We have other software that notices this and restarts it, but this time it missed the problem.

There are two ways to use advisors. On one hand, you can use them to help you make decisions. On the other hand, you can use them to lend credibility to decisions you've already made.

Interestingly, the bigger and more prominent your board of advisors, the harder it becomes to use them for the former purpose and the easier it becomes to use them for the latter.

Interesting article, but the fact that Peter Thiel didn't bet any money on it was disappointing. It could just be a case of the halo effect. There's just too many stories of "I predicted this too!". A broken clock is right 2 times per day.

I doubt this would happen. Of all the players involved, it's probably the UAW that has the most to loose in a Chapter 11 situation. What's killing GM (and the other American auto manufacturers) is the unreasonably high labor obligations they have accumulated back when the industry was an oligopoly.

The question is, will a president who ran as union-friendly allow UAW workers to loose a ton? GM has a lot of people on payroll earning more than many computer programmers who are simply idle - they don't do anything, don't show up to work, etc. The average labor cost per hour for GM's manufacturing is over $70/hour.

While GM has made significant mis-steps in their management, the fact is that no management no matter how brilliant they were could compete when they have labor costs like that.

I'm tired of reading posts by internet libertarians, blaming the GM employees for the sins of the company.

GM's labor costs are high because of pension costs. They promised an entire generation of workers old-age benefits if they gave their life to the company, and now the company wants to eliminate that deal, because they simply didn't plan for it correctly (oh yeah...they also made crappy, fuel-inefficient products that nobody wants).

My grandfather was one of those pensioners. He retired from GM after over 30 years -- having sacrificed his hearing and his back to the job -- and the pension gave him a modicum of comfort until he died. His widow still relies on it to survive. There are thousands of other people just like them, who made a deal with the company in good faith, that the company would just love to revoke.

I think GM should be allowed to go into bankruptcy, but if they do, the judge would do well to fire or eliminate the salary of every executive who failed to plan for pension costs, resisted fuel-efficiency standards, eliminated new product programs, and otherwise destroyed the company. Then, perhaps they can think about cutting the pension benefits of the blue-collar guys who gave their health to a corporate machine.

> Those who kept a well managed admin and saved for the worst should be rewarded, not those who failed.

There's an interesting issue there, though. Given:

1 - in general, higher risk => higher reward (if the risk comes off ok) 2 - fast growing competitors can dominate a market, wage a price war or buy slower-growing companies

Isn't there a potential problem that companies which are sensibly prudent can be simply out-competed by those which don't hedge against low-probability devastating events?

i.e. the natural state of the current economic system could be said to favour companies which grow more quickly by accepting risks which mean they cannot survive in the long term?

Sheesh. Enough already!

I like pair programming. It's not stupid - it's counterintuitive, and like any counterintuitive idea is vulnerable to snap dismissal, as your comment appears to exemplify.

Anyone who's ever spent hours going down a rabbit hole that in retrospect was an obvious mistake may have a conception of why it's not necessarily a waste of resources. That, and anyone who realizes that programming isn't straightforward and he may not have all the best ideas about how to do something.

It's too bad that the discourse around pair programming is dominated by people who think it should be mandated and people who think it's stupid.