I'm still not convinced this is Michael Moore. It doesn't sound like him and it doesn't look like him. No bells of recognition ring. His slanted eyes, his no-lips-having mouth, his Princess Leia hair puffs. Nothing matches. But if it really is him then you're forced to ask, "What went wrong?"
I know he gets exercise because he's all over the place.
It must be copious quantities of burgers and burritos and pizzas such as you have on the road and in piles that would halt Adam Richman, the food challenge guy. But even Adam Richman knew he cannot do that forever and he abruptly stopped it [adam richman trimmed down.]
I don't know why they are claiming this video is Michael Moore. I'm baffled. Maybe it was a joke.
7 comments:
I don't like the way Friedman is bullying the kid. He hardly lets him get a word in edgewise. And if it is young Michael Moore I could see Lou Grant complimenting him on his spunk. Anyway we all know Ford had no compunctions about selling death traps.
It's Michael Moore before the Body Acceptance Campaign.
Friedman is talking to him like he's an adult. We're not used to seeing that. If you are of a certain age (maybe 45+) and/or had parents who did not tolerate teenagery revoloootionary confrontational bullshit, you know how this feels (not good) and more likely than not it did you a world of good.
Michael Moore ate that guy to become the Michael Moore he is today so it's him, in a way.
I think he was misidentified.
It is Dinty Moore not Michael Moore. Just sayn'
That doesn't look like a young Michael Moore at all. However, the argument is, is that Ford knew that Pintos could suffer catastrophic gas tank explosions from rear end collisions and kill people and that happened because they didn't put a $13 block like this kid was saying. Fine. This kid wants government to force Ford to put in this safety device in the car which Ford would then have to spend a lot of money to redesign to accommodate a government mandate, which would then force the price of the Pinto to increase which would make certain people looking for an economical car not buy it because it would be too expensive thusly hurting the sales of the car overall, which Ford would lose a profit on and most likely discontinue the building the car.
But you see, that kid couldn't think that far which is why he was getting frustrated with Freidman's first principals argument. What is the essence of the question you are asking? Which is to say, you are the arbitor of the risk mitigation to your life. If you know that Pinto was selling a defective and potentially life ending car, would you still buy it to save a few bucks? Are you willing to risk taking that gamble? And the kid was no no no. He couldn't see the essence of what he was pushing which was government control to choose a winner or a loser and Friedman saying, you shouldn't force that on people, but let people choose if they want to do business with Ford to buy that car as a function of their safety. If not, then economically the car will no longer be produced, but these kids can't see the long view of that at all.
Friedman is great, but that kid (Moore?) was great as well. He argued in good faith. I miss this kind of debate and conversation. I miss Phil Donahue having Friedman on. There are very very few parallels to this around now.
The question arises what did Ford know and when did they know it? Continuing to sell the car even after the correlation was made is not a sound business decision nor good for the market. Their choices distorted the market. Friedman's point is a sound one, but maybe a bit too black and white for most people.
Well, that's the argument isn't it? It's fairly black and white. Like Friedman said, there is a recourse for a company that knowingly makes bad or fatal products, civil or criminal court. If Ford knowingly knew that the Pinto was basically a bomb on four wheels and did nothing about it and people died as a result of it, then courts would have been a recourse. We clearly know that somewhere between 30 and 180 people have died as a result of the bad Pinto gas tank placement design and Ford did a cost benefit analysis that basically said that an $13 part (actually it was $11) was something they could tolerate not having in the design which would have cost them about $110 million and damage payouts where estimated at $45 million. So the calculus was simple. Don't put in the part.
However, this bad design back in the 70's was a serious problem. I remember it well. My mother wouldn't even let me near a pinto. My dad who is a master mechanic showed me what the problem was and why it was a problem. The DoT didn't even deal with the problem until 1977 nearly three years after Mother Jones reported on the problem. A guy in Irvine I think won nearly $135 million, one of the biggest judgements of it's kind against Ford. It was knocked down to $4 million. I'm just going off of my memory about all of this, so I could be in error on a couple of things.
My point being that the market and consumers are good at figuring things out. Sort of like the days before warning labels occurred until people wanted the government to treat them like care bears and do all the thinking for them. Like don't put your fucking hand on a hot iron you dumb motherfucker. Label for that. Don't put a plastic bag over yours or your babies head, you moronic retard. There is a label for that. So on it goes now with government doing the thinking for people because that's what people want them to do, which leads us to the living zombie protester brigade showing up looking for brains whenever they get their daily leftist instructions.
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