Word: buys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What led to the current U.S. debacle? One factor was a slowing in capital spending that began with last year's elimination of the investment tax credit, making it more expensive for companies to buy big-ticket items like robots. Beyond that, the technology was often overhyped. Robots also proved more expensive to operate than many manufacturers imagined. U.S. robotmakers depended heavily on the fortunes of a single industry: automaking. U.S. auto manufacturers have bought 50% of American robots in current use. By contrast, less than 10% of Japan's robots are operated by its auto firms...
Some of those who rushed to buy an expensive robotic system got less than they bargained for. At a Ford Motor plant in St. Louis, snags in 200 production-line robots delayed the 1986 introduction of the Aerostar minivan. Then the discovery that the same robots had been skipping many key welds led to the recall three months later of some 30,000 of the vehicles. In another disastrous episode, a Campbell Soup plant in Napoleon, Ohio, was outfitted with a $215,000 system designed to lift 50-lb. cases of soup. But anytime it encountered defective cases, the machine...
...expected to read them thoroughly. Current books are discussed along with older, often obscure works. "The show is intended to make people read," Pivot explains, "to trap the viewer by letting him know a little of what is in a book and then making him go out and buy it to learn the rest...
...most prominent of Ollie's operatives was Richard Secord, the retired Air Force major general who had helped to create several private companies, including Lake Resources Inc., a Panamanian shell corporation with a Swiss bank account. Through Secord's companies, North was able to move Iranian arms money, buy planes, charter ships and perform myriad tasks that seemed beyond the abilities of the Government bureaucracies. Says Livingstone: "Ollie was in a white rage all the time over the help the CIA gave him." In a computer note to National Security Adviser John Poindexter, North wondered, "Why Dick can do something...
...arms-for-hostages swap, he seemed to shuttle between fantasy and reality, as he devised the most bizarre schemes to reach his goals. He spoke often of duty and what was right, yet he carelessly used money from the profits of the arms sales to pay food bills and buy snow tires. "He was always starring in his own movie," said former Presidential Spokesman Larry Speakes. North was certain about his role in that melodrama: the hero who turned rhetoric into action...