Eugene David
...The One-Minute Pundit

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THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.

THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.

THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.

THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.

PERMALINKS:

THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY

THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY

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Sunday, October 18, 2009

Posted 8:51 PM by Gene

The catastrophe of Toyota's floor mats shows that perhaps high-tech has its limits. When I first heard this story I thought, why not shut off the engine? You have to hold a button on a fob for at least three seconds. Or in other words:

The shutdown procedure reflects a larger problem: As auto manufacturers adopt increasingly complex electronic features, it becomes more difficult to explain how they work, said Paul Green, a human factors expert at the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute. A study by the institute found that in some cases, owners manuals would have to run up to 1,000 pages to fully disclose everything.

"In the past, systems were pretty simple," Green said. "You put a key in the lock and turn it. Now we have a fob with functionality."

TRANSLATION: The BUGMEISTERS ARE building automobiles. And that's no joke.

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