The Boondocks blog, No. 19 for the week starting March 12, 2007.
Spitzer Promotes Fishing and Hunting in Outdoors Agenda
Adirondack Council's Latest Offensive on ATVs
Nissan Scales Down Pickup Truck Development
134 Dairy Farms Remain in New Hampshire
What To Do About the Champlain Bridge?
Energy looks at high energy prices and our future.
Enviroman looks at man and the environment.
Hayseeds looks at politics and life in our nation.
Individual looks at myself and how I'm changing
Outblog is all about my outdoor experiences.
Transit looks at the changing ways we get around.
Truck gives you stories and trips in my Ford Ranger.
It looks like Governor Spitzer wants to promote sportsmanship in a variety of ways.
Fishing and hunting generate about $100 billion in yearly revenue nationwide and the industries employ 2.6 million people in the United States, Spitzer's office said. The governor said he is directing the "I Love New York" tourism program to emphasize outdoor activities in its promotions as a way to capture more of those tourist dollars and revitalize the upstate economy.
Spitzer, in seeking to limit landowner liability, said private landowners would be more likely to provide public access to their land for hunting and fishing if they did not have to face lawsuit risks if an accident happened on their land.
As part of his outdoor agenda, Spitzer said no new gun law will be adopted without hunting group consultation and that the state will support a major fishing tournament in the coming year.
Interesting. This all is in response to criticism leveled against Pete Grannis, who is seen by many as more of a New York City liberal then an active environmental advocate and sportman whose gotten his hands dirty more then once in recent years.
Also from in article, Spitzer proposes:
As many of you know they are now suing Lewis County to stop their trail program. Essentially, they are saying the county violated SERQA by illegally giving a negative declaration to opening a trail fund.
This is what the article we got in the office today [pdf] argues:
The Lewis County project could cause impacts including degraded water quality, habitat fragmentation and destruction, disruption of wildlife reproduction, and poor air quality. Instead of taking a hard look at the impacts that their local law would have on the environment, the county glossed over the issues and inaccurately stated that there would be no significant environmental effects.
From the article:
All I see there is a mud puddle and a truck trail in the woods. Destroyed forest? I see a very viable and productive forest in this picture. Significant environmental impacts? We aren't talking a suburban development here.
It looks like Nissan is totally doing away with it's heavy duty pickup line, on grounds that it's not profitable and scaling down it's development of trucks on grounds that people aren't buying enough of it's trucks.
“A lot of heavy duty [sales volume] is predicated on the relationship [manufacturers] establish with light duty truck owners,” says Dominique. “Our research shows that one in three buyers wouldn’t consider buying a foreign truck, and we’re looking at the market seeing gas prices going up and full size truck volumes way down. Today, with Titan, we’re only competing in a narrow segment [extended and cab] of light duty trucks – a little less than a million units sold in [these configurations] last year, of which we’re selling about 75,000 to 90,000 Titans a year. To compete with a heavy duty we’d need multiple variations - at least three wheelbases. But we have to have a business case that works to make this decision, based on higher light duty sales volumes because people will move from a light duty to a heavy duty truck. Looking at where we are today, we’ve decided to invest in other segments outside of pickups for a greater return than we believe we could get building a heavy duty truck.”
Also factoring into Nissan’s HD business case is their hesitancy to compete with the domestics when it comes to price - mindful of rebates the domestic incumbents are likely to use to goose HD volumes should they start to fall.
“Heavy duty pickups are the most profitable trucks that Detroit makes, and the domestic [manufacturers] are extremely dependent on this segment. We’d like to stay above the incentive fray. The Titan is profitable today, as are all our cars and trucks. That’s not necessarily the case with the domestics with all of their cars and trucks. It’s another reason we believe we can invest in this money [meant for HD Titan program] in other areas for a greater return than if we have to lose money over volumes.”
Jim Hossack, vice president and pickup truck consultant at AutoPacific, comments that Nissan’s decision to shelve the heavy duty Titan is probably correct, given the rigorous business case analysis they performed. “If you don’t have your heart in it [building a heavy duty pickup], it just won’t work,” Hossack says.
The question of the foreign truck versus the American truck is a complex one—actually one that I wrote my Macro Economics Term Paper on four years ago. Most foreign trucks are better made, and when new are very competitive to American ones (old ones hold their value really good, so buying a used one is often not worth it—but owning a used one is). They last longer then American trucks, even though American trucks are built far better then American cars.
But on the other hand, when you buy an American truck, your getting a product made in Detroit by well paid unionized workers. Foreign trucks are more likely to be made in Appalachia by not as well paid non-union workers. These jobs are very lucrative for the people of Appalachia, but they are also built in a very exploitative non-community friendly kind of way.
On WCAX/NBC 13 in Burlington yesterday they had an interesting little blurb about the few remaining farms left in the state of New Hampshire. NH was a small state to start out with, having relatively few dairy farms, and now it has even fewer.
As many of us who have gone over that beautiful but narrow and rotting away Champlain Bridge, the question is when will it be repaired or replaced, and how will the new bridge look.
People over in Vermont like this neat looking old bridge. It certainly has a lot of character, and is a unique design, unlike the flat deck bridge that they are proposing to replace it with, that will look like every other interstate flyover ramp. But the bridge as it stands is unsafe and narrow.
The reality is if we put off replacing it or repairing it much longer, things are going to eventually happen to it that will make it unusable. That will cut off a critical link between Crown Point and Vergennes, that allow people to get across the central span of the lake. That's a problem for all kinds of businesses, from the Champlain Bakery to International Paper to even Vermont dairy farmers who depend on New York fields to spread their manure in the winter.
