Notes From All Over -- December 10, 2020

Re-posting from December 4, 2020:

Ford: the ICE is dead. Long live the ICE! Over at Fox News:

In the spirit of monster movies, Ford is working on a sequel to its “Godzilla” engine. 

The appropriately nicknamed 7.3-liter V8 debuted on the 2020 F-Series Super Duty pickup but is also available for purchase as an a la carte crate engine for racing and custom car applications priced at $8,150. 

In stock form, the iron-block, pushrod motor is rated at 430 hp and 475 lb-ft of torque, but tuners have already cranked it up to over 700 hp without even having to use a supercharger. 

Ford is clearly aware of the powerplant’s potential – and the potential profits it can make by selling an even more potent version of it. 

Ford Performance Product Manager Mike Goodwin recently told the Performance Racing Industry news outlet that his division is working on a “super-secret project” it calls the “Megazilla” that will be more powerful than the current mill. 

He didn’t provide any details about how Ford plans to achieve that, but Fiat Chrysler’s Mopar division has set a high bar for large-displacement crate engines with its 1,000 hp supercharged 7.0-liter “Hellephant” HEMI V8. 

Now this, from today, Fox Business:

Ram is charging into the end of 2020 on the back of the world’s most powerful pickup. 

The newly-introduced 2021 Ram 1500 TRX features a 702 horsepower version of the supercharged “Hellcat” V8 found in the Dodge Challenger muscle car and is quicker than any full-size truck in production today.

The next most-powerful light-duty pickups for 2021 are the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra, which are available with 420 horsepower V8s.

If it seems like Ram went a little overboard to outshine its rivals, that’s because it did.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

AAPL: could surge 61% to $200 -- Motley Fool, link here.

Amazon: wants to train 29 million people to work in the cloud. The WSJ.

As technology reshapes roles, Amazon plans to train 100,000 workers in new skills, from machine learning to nursing. This is a very, very interesting story.

The prospects for such retraining initiatives remain uncertain. Many companies are assessing whether it is more economical to train their current workers or lay them off in favor of new hires with the needed skills. Those who have studied retraining programs said the “reskilling” can boost employee morale and keep workers from leaving a company, but that not everybody has the capacity or will to prepare themselves for a new role.

Amazon’s promise to upgrade the skills of its workforce—reported by The Wall Street Journal Thursday—represents one of the biggest corporate retraining initiatives on record, and breaks down to about $7,000 per worker, or about $1,200 a year through 2025. By comparison, large employers with 10,000 workers or more that were surveyed by the Association for Talent Development reported spending an average of $500 per worker on training in 2017.

Amazon said it would retrain 100,000 workers in total by expanding existing training programs and rolling out new ones meant to help its employees move into more-advanced jobs inside the company or find new careers outside of it. The training is voluntary and mostly free for employees and won’t obligate participants to remain at Amazon, the Seattle-based company said.

The common theme seems to be that the Covid-19 pandemic has telescoped 2020 --> 2035 to 2020 --> 2025. 

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