Author: Serkadis

Filed under: Budget, Sedan, Japan, Recalls, Safety, Toyota

Will it ever stop? Yo, we don’t know. And yes, we’re quoting Vanilla Ice because… well, at this point in the never ending Toyota tale of woe, why not? Anyhow, there have been 83 complaints about the power steering systems in 2009 and 2010 Toyota Corollas, most of which are claiming that the car will veer to the right or left at speeds over 40 mph. Coincidently, the Corolla is one of the eight Toyota models affected by the production and sales stoppage. The alleged problems have purportedly caused 10 accidents and six injuries. Here’s the gist:

Complainants have compared the movement to being buffeted by strong winds, sliding on black ice, or hydroplaning. They said that after trying to straighten the car, it can overcorrect — requiring the driver to use a tight, persistent, two-handed grip on the wheel to travel in a straight line.

Of course, you should always have a tight, persistent, two-handed grip on the wheel. That’s known as driving. Not that people aren’t actually experiencing problems with late model Corollas, but this kinda reminds us of the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic.

If you don’t know, in the 1950s Seattleites began complaining en masse about pits (or holes) appearing in their windshields. Everything from hoodlums with BB guns to sand flea eggs to a million watt radio antenna to atomic testing were thought to be maybe causing the pitting. Also, shifts in the earth’s magnetic field and even gremlins (the fictional creatures, not the AMC product) were blamed.

Finally, after a full investigation Seattle Police Sergeant Max Allison announced that the windshield pitting was, “5 per cent hoodlum-ism, and 95 per cent public hysteria.” This happened on April 15, 1954. All reports of windshield pitting stopped on April 17. Is this related to reports about the Corolla’s power steering ills? More closely than we might think, we think.

UPDATE: There might be a little fire under all this smoke. Our friends at AOL Autos have also been reporting on this breaking story, and have discovered this:

“[I] notice the steeering wheel sometimes pulses only when my cell phone is…docked to the right of the steering wheel,” wrote one Corolla driver in an official complaint on June 26, 2009. “It’s strange I can sometimes tell if my Blackberry is going to ring or get an email. The steering wheel seems to shake or try to steer on its own. This is similar to my other 2009 Toyota Corolla that I resold to the dealer. I wonder if more shielding is needed to reduce any interference.”

If that’s the case, we take back what we said about Seattle.

[Source: USA Today]

Toyota Corolla reportedly suffering from steering woes *UPDATED originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ubisoft has been very tight-lipped regarding Ezio’s next big adventure, but today they’ve decided to at least let slip where the game will be taking place.

There’s nothing quite like striking your man out. There’s nothing like a million bucks too. If you want the seven digit prize money that 2K is handing out (qjnet/news/you-can-win-a-million-bucks-playing-mlb-2k10-seriously.html) to the first guy who pitches a perfect

Since launching PixelJunk Shooter into the PlayStation Store back in December (qjnet/playstation-3/us-ps-store-update-12/10/09.html), Q-Games has gone pretty quiet about their PixelJunk games, apart from tossing Shooter into a bundle with Monsters and Racers. But checking in with G4,

Filed under: Spy Photos, Budget, Sedan, Kia, South Korea

Spy Shots: That would be the 2011 Kia Optima frolicking in the snow originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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(This post originally appeared at the author’s blog)

Something doesn’t add up here.  With the bailout of Greece now a near certainty, the European Union has essentially pledged to be the lender of last resort for all struggling European nations.  As I’ve repeatedly maintained, this is a terrible precedent.  What doesn’t add up here though is the market’s reaction to this news.  In essence, the risk trade has taken off.  The Euro soared on the news, the dollar tanked, commodities exploded and all risk assets shot higher.

Curiously though, this is anything but a Euro strength story.  In fact, this is a Euro weakness story.  For now, this looks like nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction by the massive short position that has recently unfolded in the Euro.   This does not strike me as a “risk on” event.  In fact, it strikes me as quite the opposite.

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See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Is Austria The Next Euro Nation To Get Vaporized?
• This Is The Mother Of All Opportunities To Clean Up The Euro Mess
• If You’re Outside Of Europe, Cheer For A Greece Bailout That Creams France And Germany

The doomsday scenario we’ve feared since World War II has arrived.

In response to the United States’ latest arms sale to Taiwan, the Chinese military has suggested that China sell off some of the U.S. debt it owns to give the U.S. an economic punch of sorts.

Reuters: Senior Chinese military officers have proposed that their country boost defense spending, adjust PLA deployments, and possibly sell some U.S. bonds to punish Washington for its latest round of arms sales to Taiwan.

The calls for broad retaliation over the planned U.S. weapons sales to the disputed island came from officers at China’s National Defence University and Academy of Military Sciences, interviewed by Outlook Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine published by the official Xinhua news agency.

The interviews with Major Generals Zhu Chenghu and Luo Yuan and Senior Colonel Ke Chunqiao appeared in the issue published on Monday.

Continue reading ->

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See Also:

• How The %&$! Do You Spend $3.8 Trillion?
• Deficit Hawk Logic: Hummers, Howitzers, And Helicopters, Yes. Health Care, No
• Goldman: January Chinese Loan Growth ‘Excessive’, Tightening Is Too Little Too Late

Google hasn’t had much luck with the social web. Somehow, its approach so far has failed to provide any meaningful products. But social is the future, at least that’s how it looks right now, and, with Facebook becoming stronger every day, Google is worried. After so many misses, it now hopes to score a hit, and is launching Google Buzz, which we got wind of earlier today, a sort of FriendFeed for Gmail with a few Google twists.

The way Google sees it, the social web today is like… (read more)

The weatherman is at it again.

Big snow on the way.

Last week, some of them were really accurate.

And some of them were dead wrong.

A large portion of the U.S. just experienced a snowstorm of massive proportions.

Is that why it’s now usually called climate change instead of global warming?

Where I live, three local television weatherpersons, both daily newspapers, and the local affiliate of the Weather Channel were predicting snow starting on Friday afternoon and that we would see five to seven inches of snow by Saturday afernoon.

Guess how much time I spent on snow removal that Saturday.

Less than five minutes sweeping a dusting of snow off of my front sidewalk.

That may sound like I got lucky that the storm missed me, until you consider all of the postponements and cancellations of sporting, social and scholastic events, evening college classes canceled, etc.

Consider for a moment how many people had to change or abandon their plans, not to mention the financial ramifications.

Everyone knows that the folks predicting the weather sometimes get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong.
The problems caused failed by the weather prediction for my immediate area is one thing, but what are the ramifications when it happens on a global scale?

Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: Blundering Bureaucrats, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Conniving Politicians, Crimes Against Humanity, Enviormental Jihadists, Environment, Fanatics, Fear-mongering, Fraud/Waste, Global Warming, Global Warming Jihadists, Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politicians for the Destruction of America, Politics, Power Hungry, Pseudo-Journalism, U.N. – United Nations (United Nitwits) Tagged: Al Gore, Climate Change, Climategate, Global Warming, United Nations

Gamingnewslink.com’s self-help guide for bioshock 2 Errors, Freezing, Slowdown, Install and Crash to Desktop problems
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IMPORTANT NOTE : If you encounter errors or issues with Bioshock 2 that are not included in the list below, issues which the solutions listed does not resolve, Tell […]

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Filed under: Coupe, Videos, Toyota

We’re used to seeing Digg boosting our stories, but once in a while the popular user-voted news site generates some original content of its own. This time, a Digg correspondent got 30 minutes of camera time with Jim Lentz, who, as President and COO of Toyota Motor Sales USA, very well might be the busiest man in America right now. Lentz fielded a series of questions – mostly related to the recall – submitted by users and voted (or Dugg) into the list. But one of them had little to do with the recall at all; it had to do with sportscars.

The question was whether Toyota had any plans, after years without any real sportscar offerings in North America, to bring back the Supra or offer a new affordable sportscar. Lentz’s answer, as you can see in the video segment after the jump, was enlightening. The short of it was that the Supra won’t be brought back to these shores, but the FT-86 will.

From that we can surmise a few things. First of all, the final production version of the concept will not be called the Supra. Secondly, the FT-86 – or whatever it’s called when it comes to market – will be considerably more affordable than the Supra was. And finally, the FT-86 will be coming to North America. So there you have it. But don’t take our word for it – we’ve posted the pertinent excerpt after the jump, along with the full 28-minute video below it.

[Source: Digg via FT86club.com]

Continue reading Video: Toyota’s Jim Lentz confirms FT-86 (not Supra) coming to America

Video: Toyota’s Jim Lentz confirms FT-86 (not Supra) coming to America originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Right now everyone is focusing on the PIIGS, with special emphasis on the “G” Greece.

If the ECB handles the situation right, then hopefully this goes nowhere. But if it goes bad, then we’re talking about contagion.

So who might fall if periphery Europe goes down?

Check out Austria. As you can see, its CDS spread is just starting to turn higher, and it’s well known that the country has major banks with dicey Eastern Europe exposure.

But for now, let’s hope the PIIGS firewall remains in place.

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See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Remember When Men Used To Have Jobs?
• CHART OF THE DAY: It’s Official: Obama Is Creaming Bush When It Comes To Jobs
• CHART OF THE DAY: See The Countries Short-Sellers Are Abusing

They’ve finished White Knight Chronicles, they’re on with Professor Layton, but Level 5 Games still has a few titles up their sleeve. According to their president, Akihiro Hino, they’ve got unnanounced games heading for the Wii and

While we keep presenting details of CwF+RtB working for various musicians, big, medium and small, some have complained that there needs to be more data to demonstrate that these kinds of business models can work. So, here we go. I briefly got to meet Shamal Ranasinghe from Topspin at Midem, but unfortunately wasn’t able to go to his presentation. Thankfully, he’s posted his slides along with some data from Topspin’s own artists, who are making these business models work:

Some of the key points they’ve found so far are that fans are paying greater than $20 on average per band on its platform (more than a CD costs) and with big name “branded artists” that number is more like $50. But.. but.. but don’t we keep hearing that no one wants to pay musicians any more? Apparently that’s not true.

Digging into some of the details, Topspin found that while many people do pay for digital downloads, the big chunk of revenue actually comes from physical scarce goods:

And while the number of folks who buy cheaper packages is much higher, the total revenue earned on higher priced packages is much, much higher. In fact, more than 50% of the revenue was earned on price points higher than $25. The under $10 sales, while making up more than 50% of the volume, account for less than 18% of the revenue:



Again, it becomes clear: if you offer things of value people have no problem paying — and often paying more than they did in the past. The claim that fans just want everything for free is pretty clearly untrue.

I won’t go through all the slides, but Shamal also spends a fair amount of time talking about converting fans into buyers, and (no surprise) suggests that it helps to have a real connection with the fans, as opposed to just putting stuff out and expecting people to just show up and buy. You can’t give it away and pray, but have to provide a real connection and real scarcities. But part of making that work is getting widespread distribution (Topspin uses a music playing widget) that helps bring people to the purchasing options, if they like the music. Rather than trying to hold back and hoard access to the music, sharing freely, and connecting it to reasons to buy helps bring in a lot of fans who are happy and willing to buy.

He also highlighted two case studies of amazing conversion rates. The David Byrne and Brian Eno album widget (the very first launched on Topspin) had a stunning 20% conversion rate of plays to purchases. Yes, one in five people who listened to the widget then purchased in the first few weeks of the campaign. That’s an astounding rate — and one I doubt many other bands would see, or sustain — but still an amazing data point. In their case, since the average transaction price was over $15, it meant that every play was worth about $3 in sales. And yet some still don’t believe that music online has promotional value that can lead to sales?

The second case study was with Fanfarlo, who sought to build up its email list — and found that for every 1,000 plays of the widget, 49 fans either purchased or signed up for the email list. The presentation compares that to paid advertising, which found that per 1,000 impressions, they ended up with 0.7 new email users. Once again: the music is a great promotional tool, much better than traditional advertising in actually driving a conversion.

And, taking it one step further, to highlight the massive power of word of mouth, Topspin found that (again with Fanfarlo), the “Shares to Sales” ratio was 1.1. Yes, this meant that for every one person who shared the musical widget, more than one person ended up buying something — though, admittedly, this number was likely skewed greatly by a $1 promo offer that ran for three weeks. But, either way, it shows that if you offer something that people want, at a good price, and you let people share (rather than punish them for sharing), great things can happen.

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Despite all the confusion abroad, our markets have stayed bullish today.

The Dow is currently up 187 points to 10,095. The NASDAQ Composite is up 30 points to 2156.

And the S&P 500 is doing well – up 17 points to 1073. The energy sector is leading the pack currently with nearly every stock on the upswing. Insurance and industrial goods are also showing a lot of gains, along with consumer goods.

Futures are up across the board and posting phenomenal gains, save for wheat and soybean meal.

Oil is way up, now at $73.77 a barrel.

Gold is at $1077 an ounce, up $10.70. Silver is up $0.40 to $15.48 an ounce.

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Last week we wrote that several large hedge funds are getting out of the distressed debt markets.

David Tepper famously jumped on this market and made $7 billion. The concern now is that the market might be dried up.

We spoke to David Young of Courage Capital to gauge his opinion of the health distressed debt market.

He says that the low hanging fruit, the very cheap bank debt that investors bought from companies that were actually very good (that’s why it’s called cheap), is more or less gone from the market.

But Young told the Business Insider that there’s no need to worry that anyone missed the once in the lifetime bond rally. The great distressed debt rally of last year is not over.

Of course last year, healthy companies had distressed yields. The market was averse to risk.

That was a huge opportunity, but it was not really distressed investing – it is an investment opportunity made from unprecedented concern in the market, Young says.

There are still plenty of opportunities left in another part of the distressed debt market, like middle market distressed debt.

And distressed debt opportunities are building inside companies that don’t have to deal with their over-leveraged balance sheets just yet, but will soon find themselves in trouble.

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See Also:

• Ruling Clans Of New York City Are Snapping Up Distressed Real Estate Debt
• Faber: If We Analyzed The U.S. As A Company, It Would Be A Distressed Piece Of Trash
• Phil Falcone Made A Killing In Distressed Debt Last Year