TeamsterGrrrl

Cheapskates! 6 million in a 4 billion dollar election cycle? Fat chance they'll get longer doubles and higher weight limits when they were outspent by most other industries.

Under United States Code, crossing the border without going through Customs is a misdemeanor, like a parking ticket.

No, you shouldn't be doing stuff like that.

No citizen is required to respect the president, and this president-elect is none too respectable!

See why I don't trust Trump?

Well, you guys sure sound like sore winners.

If it "doesn't really matter", how come you guys are still whining about lame duck Obama and Billl Clinton, over 15 years after... You're living in the past. Rowdy, Trump did not win a majority of the vote, he didn't even win the vote!

From a practical point of view, borders are too expensive to protect completely. For example, I live 400 miles from the border but could be in Canada in a day, and back home in the U.S. tomorrow, without bothering to stop at Customs. We could completely stop such illegal border crossings, but the cost would be huge- Expensive personnel on every mile of the border, expensive to maintain remote sensors, thousands of vehicles and ships, etc.. And after all that any idiot could still walk, swim, or paddle across the border on a dark warm night...

And why hasn't the guy who set up the server been charged? And why hasn't Hillary been charged? Because they committed no crime.

I doubt any of the people that actually committed VW's war crimes are still alive to be punished, but current VW Group management is complicit by refusing to admit those crimes.

Sorry, even politicians are innocent until proven guilty in this country, and Hillary ain't even been charged with a crime. And the "B" word... Says something about yourself.

Good luck finding an economist that endorsed Trump. And take a look at the analysis Moody's did of Trumps economic plan- the best case scenario is a recession, and it goes downhill from there.

Except a lot of those "reasons" have disappeared in the last couple centuries...

It was cheap satellite transponder time that we got a couple decades ago that gave birth to multi station talk radio- Before that only a handful of networks could afford satellite or terrestrial relays. Add in the availability of cheap microcomputers to automate programming, and it became more profitable to put a satellite dish outside the station, a computer inside, and lay off the local talent that formerly provided the programming.

I knew before the election that Trump had a one in three chance of winning the electoral college... I follow statistical scientists like the group at 538, not Hillary's pollsters. The actual vote results are well within the usual 4% or so margin of error, with the polls forecasting Hillary winning by around 3%, and she ended up winning by around 1%. As for predicting what Trump will do, he's proven to be pretty undisciplined and that doesn't play well with the republicans, never mind the democrats. Having taken some stats courses, lobbied, and worked on campaigns before, their is a wide range of statistical outcomes from a Trump administration, and a lot of unpredictability.

There was a story posted yesterday at TDI Club about how VWAG is accused of firing a historian who was researching the company's use of concentration camp prisoners in it's factory during World War Two: http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=469137 . The link to the NYT original story now dead ends, which may indicate that NYT doesn't have confidence in the story, or maybe VWAG threatened to pull their ads...

Good points. But the problem isn't that there's not enough news material to fill a 24 hour day- The devil is in the details, and from listing to shortwave over the years I could easily find enough different news stories to keep me amused. Same for the good hosts like Larry King on AM radio, who kept me awake many a night on the road. But now we've got 24 hour news stations that just keep repeating the same stories for days, because it's cheaper than hiring enough reporters to dig up the forgotten stories to fill the day.

Yup, governments everywhere often try to "motivate" excess consumption. Here in the U.S. the government has been heavily subsidizing electric cars for years, even though from an environmental viewpoint they don't accomplish much because they run on power produced by fossil fuel powered plants. And when the batteries get useless after less than 10 years, it costs more to replace the batteries than the car is worth so it get's junked at a point where a conventional car has half it's life left. Same with solar power- I was at a seminar a couple weeks ago where a solar power developer was showing us how we could buy one of his solar arrays and have the government pay for 60% of it, and the power company pay for most of the rest. But their is, as always, no "free lunch"- The folks like us who can't afford new cars every few years and $20,000 and up solar arrays are subsidizing the well off folks who can.

From an environmental perspective, replacing stuff before it's worn out is an environmental disaster all by itself. There's a method of measuring the whole life energy and greenhouse gas cost called the GREET model, developed by Argonne National Lab. It shows that prematurely scrapping even the worst SUV and replacing it with a hybrid or electric car actually uses more energy and creates more greenhouse gases than running the SUV into the ground. Calculations using the GREET model also show that electric cars are no better for the environment unless their batteries are recharged by electricity from renewable sources. The GREET model also shows that diesels produce less greenhouse gases than gas engined hybrids, especially if they're running on renewable fuels. BTW, government's encouragement of overconsumption and planned obsolesce began at the end of World War Two. With millions of soldiers being discharged and coming home unemployed, the government was worried that the great depression would start up all over again... So they encouraged spending with easy credit to boost the economy.

Another wrench being thrown into this whole deal is the coming split between Trump's gutted EPA and the "CARB states". What are the CARB states? "Due to its preexisting standards and particularly severe motor vehicle air pollution problems in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the U.S. state of California has special dispensation from the federal government to promulgate its own automobile emissions standards. Other states may choose to follow either the national standard or the stricter California standards. States adopting the California standards include Arizona (2012 model year),[1] Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico (2011 model year), New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia.[2][3] Such states are frequently referred to as "CARB states" in automotive discussions because the regulations are defined by the California Air Resources Board. The EPA has adopted the California emissions standards as a national standard by the 2016 model year[4] and is collaborating with California regulators on stricter national emissions standards for model years 2017–2025.[5]" So when Trump's EPA approves a fix for the TDI emissions cheat, the CARB states may not go along, and VW will lose some big markets for their fixed bought back TDIs. This is also why if Trump weakens emissions rules, most manufacturers won't exercise the option to produce trucks to meet the weakened standards- It's just not worth it to build different trucks that can't even enter the biggest ports and markets in the U.S..

Sounds like they're suing VW Group's Audi because their transmission does the same "adaptive shifting" as virtually every other automatic built in the last couple decades.

Useful technology, with this we could even run double 53' trailers in the US on the interstates and have them fit in the lanes around the cloverleaf loops. Hallmark wants a pretty hefty price for their technology though, last I checked they wanted almost as much for their dolly as a fleet truck sells for! That price will likely come down though, I suspect Hallmark does not have an exclusive on the trailer steering software. The next step will be a hybrid electric powered dolly that charges it's batteries on braking and gives that power back on uphills and for acceleration.

Tier 3, 4 etc. is a certification for off road engines, and the emissions systems on them aren't configured to fit on trucks.

Not gonna happen, new trucks are designed for the new engines.

I'm not putting a partisan spin on this, just taking a practical view of what will probably happen. I think Trump and the republican congress may cancel or repeal the future fuel economy standards and electric car tax credits, but a rollback to the previous 2007, 2004, or 2001 standards is unworkable. The tooling for the E7 is probably gone, Daimler's Cascadia came out in 2007 and was never designed for earlier engines, Paccar's new conventional is now over half their production and the old one is being phased out, and it was designed only for 2010 and newer engines. IIRC Volvo's pre-2004 engines were pretty much a whole different design, and International's MAN based engine was never sold in pre-2007 form, IIRC. Cummins could probably still build an EPA 2004 engine, but I doubt they 'd want to go through the hassle for such a small market. On the positive side, I suspect Trump's EPA administration will end the war on diesel and I'll be able to buy a new diesel car to replace my TDI when they buy it back.