Astral Codex Ten

GM

3 min read

GM

Article

GM is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 25, 2021 and June 23, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Distribution 1 represents car companies in your region. Again, it has low variance, so they’re all pretty similar. Ford vs. GM”; “what’s good for GM is good for America”; “GM still denies this last part”. It most often appears alongside 1965, 1968 Summer Olympics, 2000 election.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 25, 2021
  • Last seen: June 23, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship
March 25, 2021 · Original source
Okay, now suppose that Distribution 1 represents car companies in your region. Again, it has low variance, so they're all pretty similar. Ford vs. GM, something like that.
Your Book Review: Public Citizens
June 23, 2023 · Original source
By his early twenties, Nader had become something of a hotshot at Harvard Law School, where he developed an interest in vehicle safety after one of his classmates was injured in a car crash. Post-World War II, highway construction had boomed and vehicle sales had boomed along with it, with U.S. car ownership tripling in the two decades following 1946. It was the era of Robert McNamara’s famous quote that “what’s good for GM is good for America.” But these cars were also pretty dangerous, with a per-capita vehicle death rate more than twice today’s. At Harvard, Nader proposed the then-groundbreaking, but now widely accepted, “double-injury theory”: the idea that a car accident is best conceptualized as consisting of two separate injuries, first the car itself hitting something and then the passengers hitting the inside of the car6.
Inline links: 6
GM still denies this last part, but it definitely happened.