TeamsterGrrrl

A sleeper option would have made the Titan a sales success. I go by the Mack dealer in Sioux Falls every couple weeks, and every South Dakota spec 4 axle tractor I've seen there had a sleeper. But 17 axle double trailer rigs running at over 75 tons gross weight are routine in South Dakota, and a 13 liter 505 HP engine just doesn't have the starting torque or HP to handle those weights. In a northern state where a blizzard can show up unannounced and strand your for days a sleeper is a necessity, and the lack of a sleeper doomed the Titan from the start.

Rowdy, stupidity is not a crime, nor should it be. Dirtymilkman, Social Security is an insurance program, and unlike Madoff never claimed to be a brokerage or promised a return on investment.

Rowdy, you're trying to apply failed neo-con theories to this township. No crimes have been committed, and the real victims are the tax payers who refuse to demand better basic services instead of almost no taxes. Your chemically dependency treatment based theory doesn't work, either- All too many addicts and drunks die while help is withheld in hopes they'll reform their ways. One of our counties in Minnesota did a study and found that a sample of homeless alcoholics was costing them around $100,000 a year each to jail them, treat them in emergency rooms, etc.. They found it was cheaper to spend less than $10,000 a year to give them housing instead of waiting for them to accept treatment and quit using.

You oughta see the Township that surrounds my city... Town hall ain't fit for human habitation, so they've had to share our city hall for meetings. Can't make up their mind if they want to maintain the town roads themselves or contract it out, so first they spend $$$ to fix their plow truck, then they change their minds and decide to contract out to the town drunk with a tired grader, then they change their minds again. They've got at least a hundred million dollar tax base, but they're too cheap to keep up their potholed roads. They get away with this because the cities and counties keep rescuing them- The Township residents use our city park and the county maintains the main roads for them, despite the fact they get state aid for stuff like that. Sorry, but the townships are often the "deadbeat" level of government.

Rowdy, this may come as a surprise to you, but your republican party is the party of big business and they love monopolies. I'm watching our Minnesota legislature on public TV this morning, and the republicans are trying to push through a bill that will give at most a handful of insurance companies nearly a billion dollars in hopes they'd still sell insurance in Minnesota! What happened to all this republican talk of deregulation, free markets, and an end to (corporate) welfare?

That's what I was thinking... Will VW have to save Navistar to protect their previous investments?

If it wasn't for the Justice Department Antitrust Division we'd have only one insurance company and maybe only one hospital chain too.

With that sleeper, the Titan would have been a big seller in South Dakota, a state over 400 miles across with no gross combination weight limits.

Do you really want to go shopping for emergency rooms in the middle of a heart attack? And competition... Minnesota is typical with Blues and Health Partners HMO having a near monopoly. The same two companies have most of the group market, and 3 hospital chains pretty much control that "market". It's even worse in the Dakotas and western Minnesota, with the Blues controlling most of the insurance market and just 2 hospital chains controlling that market. I'm 6 mile away from one chain's hospital, it's 20 miles to the other, and 40 miles to a competing single hospital that will probably soon be gobbled up by one of the two chains. Where's the competition?

Like every other market, they'll probably get down to only 4 players. That's because most of the world's antitrust regulators use a formula that takes the square of each competitors market share, adds them up, and doesn't allow any more combinations when that sum is over 2500. In a market with 4 competitors with each having a 25% market share, the square of 25 is 625, multiply by 4 competitors and we get an index of 2500 and no further combinations are allowed. The EU is a bit tougher and bars combinations that will raise the index substantially even if the result will still be below 2500, but if France becomes afflicted with the current epidemic of nationalism they may leave the EU and it's authority.

Unless we stop the cost inflation, the "health care" industry will destroy our U.S. economy. If you guys want to talk about freeloading, look at the way the drug companies can set their own prices for drugs will little or no effectiveness. And how about the hospitals with their new buildings and equipment and million dollar executive salaries? Then the insurance companies tack on their massive profit margins, while they make more money investing the premiums we pay them on the side. Is it any wonder that while the rest of the world's industrialized countries pay less than 10% of GDP for health care, we're paying nearly 20% and rising? The ACA reformed the system a bit, but let the drug companies, hospitals, and insurance companies keep their massive profits. The GOP's "replacement" rearranges the deck chairs on this Titanic of a health care system a bit, mostly giving better more profitable seats to the same profiteers. The only real solution is to do what most industrialized companies did decades ago- Throttle the insurance companies profits or kick them out of the market, tell the drug companies what they'll be paid IF their drugs are actually effective, and stop the hospital building boom and cut back hospital administrator's million dollar salaries.

Does Mack even have a factory built all wheel drive?

VW doesn't need Fiat+Chrysler! That said, all of these deals may get derailed by the European Anti-Trust enforcement agencies. While the U.S. seems to only block mergers and purchases when they will drive market share above a certain point at which they consider a near monopoly, in Europe any consolidation that substantially consolidates market share tends to be rejected. I'm sure GM and PSA know that. Perhaps they're thinking isolationist Marine will win the upcoming French elections and pull France out of the EU?

After wages, health care is usually the biggest labor cost for employers, and that cost is making it hard for them to compete with foreign competitors. In Canada, Japan, Europe, etc. health care isn't even an issue.

To give you an idea of the depth of the relationship, the Saudi royal family comes to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for their health care. For decades they're rented a suite year round at the prestigious Kahler Hotel near the clinic, and the Hotel's parking ramp has a section set aside for their security detail's vehicles.

This is an admission that GM can't compete for the auto buying Euros and Pounds of the world's most critical drivers.

Rowdy, nobody was even requesting your medical services...

You really are trying to jump from the frying pan into the fire... If you want your truck finished for the parades next summer, keep the Mack motor. If you want to spend the next couple years and thousands of dollars fabbing up engine mounts, transmission mounts, air intakes, exhaust pipes, plumbing, etc. sucker for the Cat. To be honest, nobody will know the difference- Even if you can persuade the parades to let you run with the hood up blocking your visibility to show off that yellow engine, not even 1 in 100 knows the difference between a Mack and a Cat motor. If you're still worried about impressing that 1 in 100, paint the Mack engine yellow. If they ask any questions, act like an expert and tell them it was a product of a long forgotten 70s deal where Cat sold Mack engines, wouldn't be the first time Cat stooped to selling someone else's product as their own!

IIRC, Trump has business interests in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Egypt. He probably had to clear the list with Putin too...

GM just got a lot more boring.

A lot of the "farm" exemptions are being abused by huge corporate "farms" and those loopholes will ultimately be tightened. Down in Florida I've seen stripped down straight trucks with the cabs removed and no license plates, ROPS, or even a seat belt passed off as "orchard tractors". The corporate "farms" there are so huge that I often saw them running down the highway at 60 MPH for 10 miles or more between fields.

Typical Volvo "engineering"... They design for at most a million kilometer/10 year life, Mack designed for a million+ mile/20+ year life!

Think of it as a farm commodity price support program...

SEC= Securities and Exchange Commission.

Actually, there are some trucking companies out there that are already about 99% autonomous, they haul a couple hundred trailers with just two crew members. Just one of them hauls 20% of the freight in North America, they could haul more but they chase away freight that isn't hugely profitable, and they make money like crazy. They're called railroads...