"Government Motors" returns to top of world's auto sales

Hypocrisy? You really need to look up the definitions of A LOT of words.

You didn't quote the post I responding to. I was responding to the preface from you about me screeding and me being famously mocked. I told you to mock away. That's you're problem, not mine. I could give two shits if you mock me. Comprenez vous?

 

That wasn't a government subsidy, which is what we were talking about. What you'd think is amazing based on some attitudes today, is that we achieved transcontinental flight without government involvement.

Did the Orteig Prize give us transcontinental flight or was it a prize offered for something that was going to happen on its own anyhow? Orteig first made the offer in 1919. The prize offer expired and he extended it. Lindbergh made his flight in 1927. I wouldn't automatically jump to any conclusion that the prize incentive is the thing that gave us transcontinental flight. That is 8 years.

Things like the Orteig Prize were very common from the late 1800s through the 1920s. That was a time when private individuals and companies offered prizes for technological advancement (for their own reasons), but it was nearly always an incentive to achieve something we were already on the brink of (and for which there would be actual demand).

There were prizes for the development of the automobile, for example. It doesn't mean we got the automobile because people offered prizes. We got it because of the market for it. There were three dozen or so prizes for incremental advancements in airplane distance, elevation, and speed between 1908 and 1915. Did those prizes really give us airplanes or were we on course for them anyhow?

Either way, these were privately offered "incentives." There was no heavy government hand in trying to sponsor R&D in those days.

 

I am pretty consistent about how I treat people. I have lots of back and forth with people on here who disagree with things I post. Treat me with respect, and you earn my respect back. When you jumped in with the juvenile, "professor" thing, I took you not as someone trying to have a respectful back and forth, but someone incapable of that without trying to get a rise out of me first. Don't go there. ... and then act all thin skinned.

First you told me that gas is subsidized by $12 a gallon (or was it $15? Or $45 given what you next linked to was from 15 to 20 years ago?) by the U.S. government, and didn't back it up. Then you responded to my next post with a link to that tired silliness that I believe has floated around since 1995 or so (which I don't think you realized), whose methodology at the time somehow turned U.S. military spending and government-created regulation into subsidies. ...redefining the word subsidy. You can assert anything in America has been subsidized by however many trillions of dollars you want that way, by asserting that our military-industrial-complex was an ex post facto subsidy by whatever arbitrary amount you want.

When I responded to that, then came the "professor" thing. To my mind, you were NOT someone respectful of what I was posting. Don't go there, and then act thin-skinned when I respond to your unsupported statements with sarcasm.

What is amazing is that you expect me to be thick skinned enough to deal with the fact you can't just respond to what I say, but have to preface it with "professor" or stupidity about what "I am famously mocked for." Yet, the fact that I was sarcastic toward you got you THIS hot and bothered.

But since that's the case, I apologize for hurting your feelings.