 announced that it will delay the release of the much-anticipated Ford Bronco two-door and four-door SUVs.
According to Ford, the Bronco’s release will now happen closer to the end of summer 2021, rather than the spring as previously expected.
Note: This delay does not affect the Ford Bronco Sport models, which are already arriving at dealerships.
The delay also impacts the online ordering/reservation process. While you can use Ford’s online Bronco Build & Price tool today, you won’t be able to formally order a Bronco until the middle of January. And the deadline to complete an online order is now extended into March.
Ford says the delay is due to COVID-19-related supplier issues.
Are GM & Chevy Planning to Expand the Corvette Lineup?I'm in HR. My current company runs like this. Our unofficial slogan is that "great people deserve great opportunities, even if sometimes those opportunities are with other employers." Obviously we want to retain those great employees, but assuming that we can't (can't match pay, benefits, commute, whatever) it's better to lose that employee on a good note and have them speak positively about us (especially since great employees tend to be listened to) than to have them feel stuck here and hate the job, and then eventually leave anyway. 

That said, I've worked for places where HR absolutely will watch people's online profiles for signs that they're leaving, and then will give the manager a heads up. I've even seen it happen with the most mundane things like an employee reposting an article about the best places to work or something like that. Super circunstancial evidence that they're trying to leave, but HR will immediately go into "OMG EXIT INTERVIEW" mode.Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the technicians who host the “Car Talk” radio program on National Public Radio (NPR), are calling it quits after 1,200-plus shows. As of this fall, they will no longer record new programs. However, the weekly call-in series will continue to be distributed by NPR drawing on material from show archives.
The Magliozzis — as known as “Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers” — have been taping “Car Talk” at WBUR in Boston for 35 years. The show has been on NPR member stations for the last 25 years.
They will still write their twice-weekly “Dear Tom and Ray” column and stay active online, including on Facebook.
Trump may have just been running off at the mouth, but policy experts agree he’s not entirely wrong about our dysfunctional relationship with NATO.
Among his many recent snafus, Donald Trump’s comments on foreign policy may be most revealing. His insistence that Russia is “not going into Ukraine” and his apparent belief that nuclear weapons exist to be used suggest he is at the very least untutored in foreign policy. Russia has been “in” Ukraine for more than two years, and the architecture of deterrence, which for decades has prevented wars destructive beyond imagining, demands that nuclear weapons remain grounded.
The source of concern is easily recognized, which might explain the near unanimity of Trump’s rebuke. For decades, NATO has been the West’s force and fortress against first the Soviet Union and later Russia. This is thanks mainly to Article V of the treaty, which commits members to collective defense. The alliance rests on trust: the signatories’ firm understanding that this commitment will be honored.
Trump’s comments undermine this trust just as Russia appears especially threatening. Russians have annexed Crimea. Trump evidently does not know this, but they also have invaded Ukraine, where they direct, finance, and fight alongside separatists. Russia operates unannounced combat-training exercises on the borders of Baltic NATO allies already shaken by these and other aggressive moves. Who could think of unraveling NATO at a time like this?
Sober foreign policy minds can see the logic in Trump’s approach, even if they don’t find it wholly agreeable.
But perhaps Trump’s proposal is not so outrageous. For one thing, his statements don’t actually renege on any commitments; Article V doesn’t in fact require that NATO members come to each other’s aid but instead allows each member to behave as it “deems necessary.” This is not a slip of words. The NATO charter explicitly diverges from its predecessor, the Treaty of Brussels, which obligated allies to respond with military force.
NATO members do make direct financial contributions to the alliance, and some of our allies—within NATO and without—regularly pay a portion of U.S. expenses. But these payments are in the millions and low billions. The true bill is far larger, reflecting the costs of deploying abroad thousands of personnel and their equipment to train with allies and stand ready to fight for them. Taking the lead in NATO means the United States must also sustain a military force far larger than is needed to protect itself. This force must be able to deploy to an ally’s aid on short notice, necessitating a hair-trigger stance that also doesn’t come cheaply.
None of this considers lives lost, of course. Nor do cost-benefit analyses account for strategic blunders that might not have occurred without the blessing of multilateralism—such as the NATO wars in Afghanistan and Libya, the wisdom of which are still widely debated.
Even restricting ourselves to dollar terms, though, the price is likely enormous. “The bottom line on this question has always depended on what you count,” says Cindy Williams, a military budgets researcher at MIT’s Security Studies Program. But Williams estimates that the total cost imposed by alliance obligations accounts for roughly half of the U.S. defense budget, or about $300 billion per year in recent years. She points out, though, that if alliances were cheap or nonexistent, this money might be spent for other military purposes.
For Posen, a leading proponent of foreign policy restraint, NATO and other permanent alliances are not just a financial drain; they also arguably make Americans less safe. He points out that U.S. military commitments abroad have inspired defensive responses and alliances against the United States, such as Chinese and Russian cooperation in the UN Security Council. Both countries are spending on military improvements, and Russia sells arms abroad—sophisticated ones, in abundance—fueling terrorist threats to U.S. security.
Our friends also put the United States—and themselves—in difficult positions by provoking strong powers. “The Philippines and Vietnam (the latter of which has no formal defense treaty with Washington)... seem to have figured out that they can needle China over maritime boundary disputes and then seek shelter under the U.S. umbrella when China inevitably reacts,” Posen writes. He argues that the Republic of Georgia acted brazenly in its 2008 conflict with Russia over the disputed territory of South Ossetia because Georgia was “overly confident of Washington’s affection for it.” Russia’s victory provided a foundation of confidence on which President Putin has been building ever since.
Elements of restraint have come to Washington in President Obama’s less intervention-prone second term. In some ways it looks like Trump is ready to continue what Obama started, even to plant his flag deeper in the restraint camp by cutting off costly, entangling alliances.
But there are reasons to believe otherwise.
Trump is inconsistent in his position on alliances. On the one hand, he claims “we have no choice” but to discard allies who won’t pay their way, and he calls out free-riding Japan, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, he has been nothing if not supportive of U.S. alliance with Israel, a wealthy and powerful nuclear-armed state whose defense costs the United States billions of dollars each year.
Whether this alliance benefits the United States, and in what ways, and whether it is a moral necessity even if not a political one, is as hotly contested as any other matter concerning Israel’s past, present, and future. But there is no doubt that exceptionally close ties with Israel strain other relationships, particularly in the Middle East and other heavily Muslim regions, that matter for the security of the United States and its allies. U.S. policy toward Israel is also a source of grievance among Islamist terrorists who have exacted a significant toll. Even so, Trump, whose rhetoric on terrorism is as pugnacious as anyone’s, has called Israel a “strategic ally.” Speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he implied that the United States needed to place less pressure on Israel and said, “When the United States stands with Israel, the chances of peace really rise.” These statements play well in American elections, but a proponent of foreign policy restraint wouldn’t likely agree.
Nuclear weapons proliferation is another area in which Trump departs from the restraint position. While he has argued that Japan and South Korea should build nuclear weapons for their own defense, Posen considers “limiting nuclear proliferation” a key goal of restraint, responsive to one of the few significant threats to American power and territorial safety.
And, whereas Posen argues for decreased military spending, Trump wants to raise it, while slashing elsewhere.
Not every student of foreign affairs promotes restraint or its skepticism toward alliances. But even fellow critics of deadbeat allies don’t necessarily think Trump is taking the right approach to the problem.
As Shifrinson sees it, the challenge is that you “need to scare the allies out of complacency if you want to get them to spend more on defense,” but “you can’t scare them so much that they won’t play along.” Trump and his supporters might contend that this is just what he’s doing, opening