GM was lackadaisical, maybe even had a bogus warranty system, 20+ years ago, but today they are even further behind... There are now car companies/makes out there that will pick up the car, fix it/maintain it for 5 years and everything is covered... I suspect GM will go broke again … JMO as to GM and their E-Bike, Ha, Ha, that is funny... :lol:

That's not their role in society. A corporation's role is to make money and if the management or any employees actually try to act ethically or altruistically and it hurts the bottom line, they will be fired and/or sued. Proponents will say corporations contribute to the common good by providing employment and products we want (which is a good thing) but there is no mechanism for any internal checks on any spinoff harm they might do. Ergo, it is up to the rest of us to externally regulate them with laws, boycotts, public shaming etc. to ensure the damage they do in pursuit of profit is limited.

They use marketing and lobbying strategies to dismantle actual and/or potential resistance to the business activities that make them money at others' expense.

Then they should stick to their role and stop manipulating culture to market their products and stop lobbying government to manipulate regulations in their favor.

No, we have to look after that as they can't police themselves.

That may at times be true in practice, but it does not accurately describe the corporate role in theory. It is true to corporate behavior is never theoretically altruistic, however it is intended to be ethical as the corporate institution should function in furtherance of its own long term self interests. Toward that end socially beneficial conduct occurs not due to altruism but in recognition of the reality that the long term self interests on the corporate institution rest in part with the long term self interests of the society in which it functions. Ethical behavior is essential to the self interests of the society and thus, in theory, to the corporate actor as well.

The problems we see in corporate behavior are not a function of the theoretical role of the corporation in society, they are a function of avarice in man preventing the corporation from fulfilling its intended role.

Maybe, but then they will use their money to pay other people like us to police them in a way that actually lets them abuse the system to get more money to afford more abuse; and they'll claim it's not their fault by blaming the police they pay to look the other way.

Yeah, the Denali! Great bike.

The problem is that corporations themselves have no means or motivation to stop that avarice from taking over, and instead have motivation and means to enable it.

And if they see that some people are trying to lobby government to protect the gold from total exploitation, they'll buy the government to keep themselves in business. Buying government is just a matter of supply and demand, right?

'Smell that? That smell hanging over the whole thread? I love the smell of P&R in the morning ... smells like ... futility.'

Personally, I think a thread on whether GM is sincere in wanting to promote e-bikes and ease downtown traffic congestion, or are just playing us, is completely relevant to LCF, but if you disagree, start a thread on a topic you think is more appropriate.

I've expressed my view about this thread, as I am entitled to do, and tried to do so in a light-hearted manner. I am not obligated to do anything further.

That smell is all over numerous threads and alleged "LCF discussions" on this list and has been for quite awhile.

Of course you are under no obligation, but I seem to recall we have had this discussion before, about how a few people here repeatedly harp on how the threads in the forum are somehow not right for the forum, and there is an easy fix.So...?

The real reason it's relevant is because these corporations have the power to steer transportation culture to some degree. When automakers like GM and Ford start buying into scooter/bike shares, etc. claiming that they want to be part of a changing transportation landscape, we're supposed to assume that they're not positioning themselves in new markets in a way that obstructs them to steer people toward car/truck purchases instead of or in addition to the new car-free mobility options.

I wonder if they will be barred at some point from getting into the alternative-transportation business because of conflict of interest. Basically these scooter/bike share buy-ins are like mergers between different kinds of media outlets, etc., which are scrutinized pretty closely. For some reason it doesn't seem like automakers get the same critical attention that media does, maybe because people are still getting used to the idea of 'new transportation' the way they had to get used to the idea of 'new media' when digital recording, IT, and internet were emerging.

Smokescreen...
 

Forget History? GM was among the corporations responsible
for destroying rail based public transportation,

Forcing people into buses they made, or private cars,
to be stuck behind those buses..
With the carbon particulate by products of diesel combustion..
blown back at you.

Now PR has them re-positioning themselves as multi modal proponents,
with a product to sell?

:foo:

It would be interesting to know what the ultimate intent behind the elimination of the streetcars and rails was. Maybe it was to subvert public transportation and force everyone into personal vehicle ownership, but maybe they really thought that it would be more efficient to use buses with standardized motors and parts shared with other vehicles.

Maybe the failure of the bus system resulted more from consumer fault than corporate fault. It is possible, after all, that GM would have been perfectly happy to have all the public-transit riders who used streetcars go on using buses instead, and maybe that would have been a more cost-efficient way of maintaining public transportation than the streetcar system. This is just speculation, of course, since I really don't know much about the details of what happened.

Blah, Blah, Blah… The intent was to get people into cars... and sell them those cars... It's as simple as that...

The U.S. was open and vast and nobody considered the future of our natural resources. Not congested and compact like it was in Europe.

A) You could research what happened.

B) Do you really think it has been a 120 year conspiracy?

I have done some research on it, but I should do more.

Idk about a 'conspiracy,' but what I do think happens is that the critics of companies/industries overemphasize the sinister intent to the extent that it doesn't really capture how the business people involved actually thought about the situation. E.g. I was watching Supersize Me recently, and they were interviewing some industry lobbyist, who said that they wanted to provide more education about nutrition so that people could make better choices, but that their job as food suppliers was to offer the broadest range of food options possible. Now, that might have been sincere or that might have been a line to whitewash the practice of adding lots of sugar to foods to weigh them down with cheap filler that tastes good to uncritical consumers.

Anyway, with regard to GM, I think I could do research and find some accounts that are very harsh on GM as systematically attacking public transit and other accounts that say GM was just realizing a common-dream of personal automobiles for everyone because that was what people wanted and thought would make for a good future before they realized congestion and sprawl would turn into a nightmare.

Sprawl is what happens when developers buy up land around a city and develop it with the idea that they can market a subdivision or job-site as 'just a short drive from the city.' At first, there's not much traffic to go back and forth to that area from other parts of the city, but as the developments grow and snowball, the traffic gets worse and worse until you end up with multilane roads, highways, expressways, bypasses, toll roads, etc.

From a financial perspective of investors living elsewhere, the sprawl development is a good thing, because all the road building and development renders concrete sales, contracts to build on the concrete, new business opportunities in the space built, etc. But from the perspective of people who moved out to a rural area to get away from bustle, it's a nightmare. Everyone wants the bustle of business and traffic to happen far from their own backyard.

I think a certain elite could have the lifestyle you're talking about without it hurting the environment too much, but there are too many people for everyone to live like that without it having negative impacts.