General Motors is now the subject of a Justice Department inquiry over its
failure to recall cars with a defect that is linked to 12 deaths. ...
Prosecutors said that Toyota concealed problems related to floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals and made misleading statements to consumers in an effort to defend its brand image.
..
While regulators have not given an exact number of deaths associated with the defect, the company still faces many wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits.
...
While the $1.2 billion penalty is the biggest ever for a carmaker, it still represents a small fraction of the more than $60 billion that Toyota has in cash reserves.
..
The company has admitted in filings with federal regulators that it had proposed fixes for the problem on at least two occasions, but did not follow through.
Toyota Is Fined $1.2 Billion for Concealing Safety Defects
By BILL VLASIC and MATT APUZZO MARCH 19, 2014
New York Times
[emphasis JS]
Ah, but, the logic of “consumption” is quite different, and goes like this:
1. we need to employ people all the time,
2. such employment produces a surplus,
3. people need to be convinced to purchase the surplus through marketing and advertising,
4. the surplus has to be quickly converted to waste, so people will purchase again,
5. this is accomplished by denying basic needs to everyone so that they have to work in order to consume.
Paul B. Hartzog
Put all these advances together, say the authors, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity and to societal stability. They suggest that we consider lowering taxes on human labor to make it cheaper relative to digital labor, that we reinvent education so more people can “race with machines” not against them, that we do much more to foster the entrepreneurship that invents new industries and jobs, and even consider guaranteeing every American a basic income. We’ve got a lot of rethinking to do, they argue, because we’re not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We’re in a technological hurricane reshaping the workplace — and it just keeps doubling.
If I Had a Hammer
New York Times
JAN. 11, 2014
Thomas L. Friedman
[emphasis JS]
“Our generation is going to have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation, like self-driving cars and trucks, but we have the potential to do so much more than that,” Zuckerberg said.
