First the earwax.. and this is getting personal so you may want to skip to the next one. I have this weird fascination with cleaning my ears.. I love to get in there with the Q-Tip, and I have to remind myself to stop when I feel resistance (I have a friend who lost most of the hearing in one ear b/c of this.. he’d keep going and then he went swimming and had a bubble in his inner ear that went nasty..) anyways, so I usually have clean ears. Today in the car I lean over to get the radio and I feel something in my ear, so in goes the finger, and out comes this mass of earwax, I swear it was the size of a Jelly Belly (Or an Everyflavour Bean).. Gross eh? So I opened the window and flicked it at a pimped out Escalade.

On to the real meat. I was talking recently about the difference between American and Foreign cars, and I came to some conclusions, or at the very least had some good ideas. When I was looking for a minivan a couple years ago, we looked at a bunch of different ones, and finally decided on a Honda. It’s been great. It was roughly the same cost as a Town and Country (Chrysler) . And we came to a conclusion that if you take almost any American made car and compare it to the best foreign alternative, you end up with the foreign car being the more reliable and often cheaper. The number one reason for this (to our way of thinking) is because of the Auto Unions. GM, Chrysler and Ford all pay people $20 or more an hour for minimum wage jobs, like sweeping the floor or pushing buttons, carrying parts, driving forklifts. I don’t see a difference if you sweep the floor at a local GM plant or at Taco Bell, except one of them gets paid $6.55 and one gets $25 an hour. Is the GM plant a significant amount dirtier? Do they require some kind of special training? Are the floors made of Gelatin, such that they need to be cleaned with a proprietary Jello-Broom? But regardless, I know that unions have done a lot of good work in protecting workers and keeping benefits and stuff, but long term are we going to look back and find that they are the cause of the death of the american automobile?

—–