General Motors to Lay Off 2,000 Employees in Ohio and Michigan

It certainly isn't, and this won't be the last.

I see plenty of small cars around, but they're the Prius, Civic, Accord, Corolla, Camry, Fit, Golf, and Mazda3.

It's pretty hard to convince someone in Pennsylvania that free trade deals are good for them when the only factory in town just shut down because China flooded the marked with unbelievably cheap steel.

My opinion is that there should be tariffs to make up for the differences in laws anywhere without similar laws - if you want to pay workers pennies a day no problem, but you're going to pay the difference on the way in. China might let you destroy their local environment but you'll pay for the effects of your pollution on the way in.

Trade deals should come with negotiations that will help us with our global warming problem at the very least - if you want to have a trade deal you'll need to match or beat the regulations we follow or the tariff will reflect an approximation of the difference in cost.

I think that it is a bit problematic that the majority of those for free trade also want policies that discourage domestic manufacturing like an increase in minimum wage and increased environmental regulations.

What I see with "free trade" agreements is exploitation and creative accounting. Send your manufacturing one mile across the border to hire cheap labor through "third parties" that have much weaker workers' rights laws, no healthcare, and lax environmental oversight.

Then send those products back to the US and reap tremendous profit, while having your hands clean of any environmental or human exploitation because it was done on another "set of books" across the border. Same amount of damage, but we reap massive profits while keeping our noses clean. What's not to love about that ?

you mean all those empty intermodal containers that head out of our ports ?

  > Republican voters said loud and clear that they haven't 
  liked being disrupted.

The reality is that they help out their friends. There's only one way to generate jobs for coal miners.

Sectors that require, or are helped substantially by, the government to innovate will almost certainly suffer but what makes you think he would interfere with private enterprise?

Trump doesn't like business regulation and seems to want to make it easier for businesses to operate. Obviously that has negative consequences some some things but would also mean he wouldn't interfere.

Where he does want to make changes is in regards to trade and outsourcing jobs and manufacturing to foreign countries.

As far as Republican leadership in the House and Senate, there is no doubt that they'll play favorites with lobbyists but Trump's main appeal was that he WASN'T like that. If he is like that, we'll have a Democratic Congress in two years and a new president in four.

The way forward isn't tied to any particular brand. Its pulling back from a marketing driven world which has convinced people that not only do they need all of it they deserve it.

(Passenger miles really aren't so bad, an airliner with a few hundred people on it is doing a lot more work than a commuter's SUV)

Agree with the sentiment, though. We all want to make improvements. The strongest way to cut waste probably is less around making our current lifestyles cleaner (electric cars, easier to grow food), and more around making our lifestyles themselves cleaner (walkable cities, stop eating as much, or as much meat).

EDIT: Yeah, maybe I shouldn't ever cross the Pacific. It is a luxury in itself.

I got to break it to you, this is not about making sure you get your fair share of the pie. This is about there being any pie at all.

And whatever the reason is that people are deliberately choosing massively more costly vehicles (in terms of gas and capital costs), there needs to be a lot more persuading of people in their purchasing decisions. It needs to be not cool to buy a truck to drive to the office.

I'm sure their will be an electric F350 (massive torque! The Model S P85 weighs half as much but has 50% more) but do we all need to drive one to work?!

Choosing SUVs and trucks and other oversize vehicles that are bigger than your actual use case calls for also violently inflicts greater risk of death and injury upon other road users at no benefit to you.

This is because doubling the weight of two cars in a collision does not make either driver safer; it's a zero sum game. (It's also because bigger vehicles reduce visibility for everyone else.)

It also indirectly creates more congestion -- the vehicles have to fit on the road, slowing maneuvers at intersections and making it less feasible for jurisdictions to manage traffic by repainting N lane roads as N+M lane roads with narrower lanes.

I'm all for getting a large vehicle if you actually use it to haul, but I get angry[1] whenever I see people driving around massive brand new pickup trucks with totally empty beds, two rows of seats, and all the luxury passenger-oriented option as a "lifestyle choice" because it "looks cool" to their buddies. It's essentially a sedan with a bunch of wasted weight and horsepower that fulfills the same goal a T-shirt reading "I'm a real man who needs a truck" would fulfill.

Some references:

http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2014/pounds-kill... http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2002/suvs-really... http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2012/slower-road...

[1] Although I temper my anger with a grain of salt since maybe they do use the bed, just not this time. My anger is against the general trend, not any individual. Still, two rows of seats in a pickup truck is usually the tipoff that the owner primarily uses the vehicle like a sedan. And when I do see stuff in the bed, it's rarely something that wouldn't have fit in a station wagon or minivan. It's just so rare to see someone actually using a pickup truck to haul the kind of weight that kind of horsepower is made for...