What if it doesn't work?

The Republicans in Congress wouldn't approve a bail out for automakers. So Bush and the Democrats in Congress did an end-around and gave up on trying to find fresh money for Detroit. Instead, they filched 14 of the $700 billion that was already approved by Congress to bail out the financial system and directed that to the automakers.

The $14 billion is purportedly being given as secured low interest loans. We are told that the money will be paid back and tax payers may even make a little money off of the deal.

So what happens if the big three automakers take the money and STILL go bankrupt?

Fixing Comments Functionality

New posts should be comment-able now. Bummer that the last few weren't.

To Love the Country or the Countryside

How about this for getting to the root of the problem?

The Chevy Volt (an electric car) is being pushed by General Motors as the first production electric car, to hit the market in 2010. GM unveiled it at a NASCAR event, and they're understandably trying to drum up excitement about the car. But GM has to be careful about pushing the Volt too hard as a patriotic, pro-American car that can help free us from our dependence on foreign oil. While they want to take advantage of the desire by nationalists to see the US become energy independent, they're reluctant to get to stars-and-stripes with the Volt.

Pete Lewis, who works in program operations at GM, puts it this way.

"There is a fear that if we position this as a 'pro-American' car, it will upset some of the environmentally conscious crowd, and we want it to be embraced by everyone."

Mr. Lewis is justified in his concern about offending the green-ers by becoming too pro-American, but I find it tremendously sad.

The most "green" or "environmentally conscious" among us are, by definition, the most anti-American. Take a look at Hollywood, PETA, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club (sorry Steven), and any other such organization if you disagree with me.

And the flag-waving, America-loving nationalists among us tend to be decidedly less concerned about environmental issues. Take a look at any NASCAR event across the country for further proof.

How has it come to this? How have we gotten to the point where, to care about our environment, we must hate our country?

Hubble Repair?

Over the last several years we've seen article after article about how the Hubble space telescope is a dinosaur and not worth repairing. Space geeks get all up in arms when talk of giving up on Hubble surfaces, and NASA officials always calmly explain why Hubble isn't worth maintaining at this point.

Each time this happens, I check Hubble off in my mind as a done deal. It's over. No longer being maintained. Fine.

And then I see stories like this. . . about a planned shuttle mission to repair the Hubble telescope.
I don't get it.

Is the United States Behind. . . or Ahead?

With Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate for president, critics of the United States talk about how our country might just finally catch up with the rest of the civilized world and elect a non-white president.  The implication, of course, is that the rest of the world cleared this discriminatory hurdle decades ago.  

I got to wondering, though. . . has the United Kingdom ever elected a non-white Prime Minister?   I don't think so. And it goes without saying that they've never had a black king or queen.

Have the Germans ever elected a non-white Chancellor?  I'm pretty sure they haven't.  How about Italy?  Or Spain?  

For that matter, how about Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, or Sweden?  Have any of these countries ever had a black national leader?  

I'm not an expert on the history of any of these countries, certainly; to tell you the truth I can't even name the current leader of half of them.  I guess there may be one in there that has elected a black person as their national leader at some point, but I can't think of one off hand. 

Do we still have discriminatory hurdles to conquer here in the United States?  Sure.  But is the US really so far behind on this particular issue?  Or might it just be out in front on this one?

I possess a neat antique brass spyglass of some sort, and I've always wondered about its origins. It's a collapsable (telescoping) spyglass like you'd see a 19th century ship's captain using to scout the horizon. It is 48" long when fully extended. Engraved on the section near the eye piece is:



Docteur Arthur Chevalier
158 Palais Royal
Paris

I looked the dude up and found that Chevalier's company mostly made microscopes and other scientific instruments back in the second half of the 19th century. I couldn't find any real references to telescopes of this nature, so I contacted the Oris group, a trio of scientific instrument enthusiasts in Italy who specialize in the research and identification of antiques such as mine. They can be found at http://www.bononiaemicroscope.it/

They’ve been very helpful to me so far, expressing interest in my spyglass turning me on to this Chevalier catalog from the mid 1800s.

http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/trade-literature/scientific-instruments/files/51671/

I've sent the Oris Group some pics of my telescope and hope to hear back from them soon. I'll keep y'all posted on what (if anything) I find out.

Reality Check

My apologies for the caesura in my blog postings. Work and school conspired to wear me out there for a while, and I reverted to bad habits, namely emailing about blog-ish stuff to a core group of friends instead of blogging about those things here.

I hope to be back on track now, for better or for worse.

The Affluent Society

As the government announces today that special tax rebate checks will be delivered early this year, I can’t help worrying about what a fiasco the whole thing is shaping up to be. I understand the intention behind the policy. But given where we are with the economy, where Americans are with debt, where industry is with regard to decreasing productivity, etc. . . I just can't see how the Fed thinks these rebates will do anything but make things worse.

I'm certain that the economists the Bush administration is listening to HAD to have read John Galbraith back in their graduate school days. As Galbraith said over 40 years ago:

• Economy is production-driven. Production drives consumption; not the other way around as we're told to believe.
• Industry has manufactured artificial demand for products we don't really need (therefore possessing zero marginal utility). Reference my quest for a Wii as an example. Or tennis shoes that cost $12 to manufacture and ship and sell for $200. Manufactured demand for goods with zero marginal utility.
• This artificial demand for valueless items is what has sustained production (and the economy) in the 20th century.
• Industry and the country have cashed in on the economic benefits of heightened production by driving that production past all points of reason.
• American consumers have supported this production via over consumption, and they have over consumed by saving zero and leveraging credit.
• Collectively, Americans have maxed out their credit and can no longer support the given levels of production.
• They can definitely NOT support the ever increasing levels of production needed to continue economic growth.
• Consumption has flattened and will begin falling.
• Industry will back off production, staunching the flow of money that the production pumps into the economy.
• Private incomes will fall further, making even less money available for consumption.
  

We know we’re in for a hurting with the whole economy thing, right? It might be just a short slow down. Might be a small recession with a quick recovery. Might be a long recession with a slow recovery. But it'll be something.

Americans can no longer turn to credit expansion as a way to support their consumption and the economy as a whole. So what does the Fed do? They hand maxed-out Americans some money. . . money that Americans are borrowing from their own future selves. . . so that Americans can spend that borrowed money now and continue to artificially support production by increasing debt.

But instead of Americans spending their own credit dollars gotten from unsecured credit card debt, Americans will now be spending borrowed money secured by U.S. Treasury bills. It’s a debt that can’t be wiped out with Chapter 11 bankruptcy or a windfall from an insurance settlement. It’s debt (along with a few trillion other dollars) that our kids and grandkids WILL HAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR.

Don't get me wrong. I'll cash the check when it arrives. But I'm not chipper about it.

What do you mean, “No?”

I wanted a Wii game console for my daughter. I wanted one for Christmas ’07, but none could be found easily. So I waited. In April 2008, I started checking again, and I STILL couldn’t get one. Retailers all told the same story. Each store receives a shipment of 10 units on a random basis, every few weeks. No telling when they’ll be in. No way to reserve them. You just have to be lucky.

Most retail stores had taken to putting Wii status messages on their automated phone recordings. “If you are calling about a Wii, please press 1 and then go away, because we don’t have any.”

Not being able to get a Wii really started to bother me. . . so much so that I started wondering about why it bothered me so much. And I came to realize that we really are spoiled, folks.

We live in such an affluent society that the idea of scarcity is foreign to us. Anything we want is readily available; the only reason we don’t have everything we want is because we don’t have the money. You want a bushel of pomegranates? Those are exotic fruits and only avaialbe in the fall here in the US, right? Nope. Go on-line and buy a bushel now. You want a hundred pairs of designer jeans? Go get ‘em. No sweat. You want designer Indian tea for breakfast? Go to the store and get some.

It seems almost un-American for me not to be able to go out right now and buy a Wii (or ten Wiis) if I want to.

Survival of the Fittest?

Hard core conservatives and virtually all Libertarians lament the existence of most social programs. Leg-up programs like Head Start and Affirmative Action are bad enough in their view, and full-blown entitlement programs like Welfare are wholly unacceptable.

On a good day, those on the far right put on their “compassionate conservative” hats and cite the ways that entitlements and even leg-up programs countermand the American dream, robbing the poor of the personal victory that can only be won when they pull themselves out of poverty or disadvantage without outside help.

On a bad day, though, the most blunt and least delicate of conservatives reveal their real philosophy. Survival of the fittest, baby! SOTF. It’s a hard, hard world, and not everyone can be rich. Heck, it’s not even possible for everyone to be middle income. Some folks will be always be poor. That's just the way it is. Life is tough.

At least subconsciously, these conservatives and Libertarians recognize what economists of the central tradition have known since the time of Adam Smith; inequity and misery are inevitable in our economic system. The system on which our economy is based allows for-- and in fact encourages-- great disparities in personal wealth amongst its populace, and the very design of this market-based economy ensures that all individuals will not start life with equal advantages of birth, family wealth, intelligence, culture and opportunity. Even Smith understood that true equity could only be achieved by artificially leveling the playing field.

Recoiling reflexively away from all things redistributive, fearful laissez-fair conservatives shun the idea that an un-level playing field might be unfair in some way. They cling desperately to the immutable law of natural scarcity like a philosophical life raft, and they regress to a bastardized version of Social Darwinism as a way to cleanse their collective conscience. Survival of the Fittest. It's the only solution. What else can be done without us all becoming socialists?

Such Social Darwinists see life as a kind of sporting event, in a way. It's a game, folks. Play like winning is the only thing. If you lose (i.e., failing to excel in life, remaining poor or homeless or without health care or an education), it is because you were weak and ill-prepared. Tough break.

And if you win (i.e. succeed in life, earning well, having health insurance, owning a home, having your kids in decent schools, taking vacations and sending those kids to college). . . well, you worked hard, by God. Unlike those who failed, you did what you had to do, and you deserve your success.

Survival of the Fittest is comfortable enough to most of us when we're watching documentaries on television about life and death on the Serengeti. But the moral rub comes when the lions and zebras in the equation are human beings. The Survival of the Fittest concept brings with it two suppositions that are problematic in my view. First, it assumes that those who don’t survive weren’t fit to begin with. And more troublingly, it assumes that those who aren’t fit do not deserve to survive.

That should be troubling to anyone. Anyone who might just find himself unfit some day, at least.

Those who rail against redistributive social programs as being anti-American or worse would surely denounce my claim that they do not care for the poor and disadvantaged. They'd point to charities or private enterprise as ways that the poor can be cared for without using the strength of the federal government to involuntarily redistribute wealth.

I argue that such "solutions" are empty of any applicability to life here in 2008. And I contend that those decrying social programs and touting the private sector as the solution don't really even believe that the solutions really lie there. I believe these are just vacuous responses to difficult questions, meant to ease the conscience of the Survival of the Fittest crowd while providing no real answers for those who, often through no fault of their own, come up short in life's fitness test.

Post Script: Charles Darwin didn't coin the phrase "survival of the fittest" as part of his evolutionary theory. It was a political theorist who formed that little gem, which seems about right. Look it up if you don't believe me.

Do We Need a Third Party?

Expressions of dissatisfaction with the federal government are common. Many believe that it has overreached its rightful boundaries and become corpulent by feeding on the American public. Individuals expressing such thoughts often see the modern political process in the US as a cause. They see politics as dominated by two political parties that no longer adequately represent the varied preferences of the American people.

The conclusion typically reached in such arguments is that increasing the number of viable parties in the political process would be a step in the right direction. If there were three or four parties, people would have a better chance of finding a candidate that adequately represents their own wants and desires for the country, and the excesses of government could finally be reigned in.

More would be better.

Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, who is widely considered the most influential economist of the twentieth century, spent a career expressing similar dismay at the ways in which the federal government has been allowed to expand. Friedman saw the proper role of the federal government in a free society as being something that could be comfortably summarized on a cocktail napkin. The government should serve as umpire and rule-maker where necessary and look after “madmen and children.” Everything else, in Friedman's view, should be left to the care of market dynamics.

Friedman rejected as inappropriate nearly all allocation functions of government; social security, welfare and cash payments, federal subsidies and tax breaks. . . all were anathema to true freedom in Friedman’s view.

Most of the individuals demanding smaller government and more party options in the political process would likely agree with Friedman, I think.

Yet interestingly, the political process itself was something under which Friedman chaffed. Noting that all governments are inherently coercive by nature, Friedman lamented that “the use of political channels [for any purpose], while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society.” The political process, he posited, always results in wide-spread dissatisfaction for those on the losing side of each and every vote.

So let us look at presidential politics and consider what Friedman might think about our two-party system. With our recent tendency toward very close elections, it is likley that the vote will be roughly evenly split in the 2008 presidential election. About half the country will be happy with the outcome and the other half will be dissatisfied. If the election bucks this trend and shows a wide margin of victory for one candidate, then we might expect 58 to 60 percent of the population to be on the winning side, with 40 percent or more dissatisfied.

Some argue that adding more parties to the mix would help increase overall satisfaction with the process and the popularity of the eventual president. But I (and perhaps Friedman) would argue just the opposite.

Introduce a third party into the mix, and instead of an election win requiring a majority of electoral college votes, such a win might require only a simple plurality (34 percent of the electoral college vote). That could leave roughly two thirds of the country dissatisfied with the election results. Introduce a fourth party into the equation, and our next president could be elected with 26 percent of the electoral vote, leaving three quarters of the country opposed to their new leader.

I honestly do not know how our electoral process would handle three or four or five parties. There may be rules in place that would prevent a candidate from winning with just 24 percent of electoral college votes in a four-party race.

But from just a logical perspective, is more better in this case? If the political process is coercive and leaves the losers of each exchange dissatisfied, then adding parties to the process would necessarily leave more voters on the losing side of the election. More parties means more losers.

We only have to look to other countries and their parliamentary processes to see what elections look like with three or four or five (or ten) parties in contention. It could be argued that few people win in such cases.

More is better? I’m thinking not.

Should They Vote Their Race or Their Gender?

CNN.com headline from Monday, January 21 showed side-by-side pictures of Obama and Clinton.

Beneath the picture, the article talked about the significant role that black women will play in deciding the Democratic winner in the South Carolina primary. “These women face a unique dilemma: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?” That line was followed by a link to the “full story.”

Should they vote their race (Obama)? Or should they vote their gender (Clinton)? Those are the two key questions?

I find the entire article insulting. Why aren’t black women given the credit that the other demographic groups (black men, white men, white women, working-class voters, rural voters, etc.) are given? Why would black women be less concerned about the actual issues than everyone else? Why would black women NOT be considering what the rest of us are considering. . . namely who they think might actually do the best job as president?

Maybe the link at the end of that paragraph should point to “Less than the Full Story.”

Everybody Look What's Goin' Round

I’m no daisy, certainly, but sometimes it is overwhelming. A snapshot of CNN.com on Wednesday January 9 showed links to 20 or so separate stories. Of those 20, here are 10 headlines:

Four children's bodies found with woman
Hiker murder suspect now focus of Florida case
Pregnant Marine vanishes before testifying
Police: Spiteful dad threw 4 tots off bridge
'Brutal execution' caught on tape, U.S. says
KSAT: Medic never checked victim's pulse
2 children among 5 deaths blamed on weird weather
Man sees 'mark of the beast,' cuts off hand
3 die in 50-car pileup in fog, smoke
Investigator: Tiger attack victims will not face charges

Roughly half of the stories on the site at that moment pertained directly with murder or tragic death in extremis.

This death story ratio on CNN.com is considerably higher, I believe, than the death ratio of CNN’s TV news coverage.

None of these stories affects me. Not in the way that politics and world events and the economy and public policy issues affect me. These are tragic stories to be sure, but the four dead children and their dead mother do not inform my life in any important way. A father throwing his four kids off of a bridge doesn’t lead me to take any action or learn any lessons. They simply sadden me and shock me and make me shake my head in dismay.

So I couldn’t help wondering what pushed CNN.com’s editors to the point at which their seining of the day’s world news for publication resulted in this deathly detritus instead of real news that affects everyone.

I don’t believe that TV news could sustain such a high death ratio in its stories; national TV news tends toward broader stories with more national and international applicability.

Surely some of these tragedies would also be talked about on CNN and Headline News, but the broadcasts could not get by with having these stories comprise the majority of their programming.

But CNN.com, while global, really does serve a personal, what’s-interesting-to-me purpose. They can make it as trivial and tragic as they want, knowing that the few folks who want more substantive news can easily toggle over to another web browser instance. CNN.com knows that its readers want quick-hit 200 to 400 word articles about stuff that gives them a thrill.

That explains why web news and broadcast news CAN be so different. People expect different things from TV and the web. But what explains why the two ARE so different?

Simply put, death stories cause people to click. This is far more important, I think, than the tired old lament about the media gravitating toward bloody, sensational stories. For sites like CNN.com, this has come to truly represent their purpose; to not just provide news, but to provide tragic news, almost to the exclusion of other subjects.

CNN.com is a for-profit site generating advertising revenue off of its content while also cross promoting its broadcast ventures. Fine. The more clicks a story gets, the more profitable it is. Dandy. And apparently, the more tragic a headline is, the more prone viewers are to click it. Sad, but not surprising.

What is most pitiable about the situation is that the administrators of CNN.com surely have robust metrics to show PRECISELY which kinds of stories generate the most activity. I imagine the marketing folks with a sophisticated metrics dashboard at their disposal, allowing them to see associations between content and page hits in dozens of different ways. The editors are attuned to (and likely compensated directly for) posting as many of those stories as possible.

What this really tells me is that CNN.com has become what broadcast news wishes it could become. . . a revenue factory that is free (because of its format) to ride the far edge of sensationalism and tragedy to generate income instead of informing with actual news. Broadcast media doesn’t do this only because they can’t. Yet.

I hereby vow to use headlines as a screed to smooth out the concrete of my news consumption, pulling the news that I need to consume to the surface (for me to read) and making invisible those stories that are designed only to titillate and earn revenue. I will contribute to the bloodbath no longer.

Is this a big move on my part? Nope. Will it bring about any change? Nope.

But as Mother Teresa once said, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

Nothing Better Than a GRN

I was feeling punk last Sunday, just cresting the peak of a January cold. Sick enough to be miserable, but not sick enough to admit to being so.

Wild card weekend in the NFL meant there was no football worth watching on TV. I was weary and uncomfortable and irascible and just couldn’t figure out where to put myself. I couldn’t get comfortable on the living room couch. We have no comfortable chairs in our house. The idea of going to bed in our bedroom seemed too much like admitting that I really was sick. So what was I to do?

The guest room.

It stands apart from the general traffic and bustle of our house in a kind of sub-space isolation. It’s a simple room, neatly arranged with a tidy little bed and an old fashioned writer’s desk. Quiet and dim, uncluttered and neatly appointed, it's a kind of peaceful in-home hotel room retreat.

I’m pretty sure there are few things better than an impromptu Sunday afternoon guest room nap. Door closed, shades pulled, asleep on top of the bed spread, covered by a light blanket, removed from the world for a time.

A guest room nap (GRN). I can't wait for my next one.

"Subprime" Update

As an addendum to my earlier post about the meaning and misunderstanding of the word subprime. . .

In early 2008, the American Dialect Society named subprime the word of the year for 2007.

Then again, the same group chose plutoed (to be demoted or devalued) as their 2006 word of the year, which goes to show you. . . something, I guess.

How Important, Service?

Took the wife and daughter to Big Cedar Lodge near Branson, Missouri between Christmas and New Years this year. Pricey by our standards, but it was a short trip and we like our niceties. (Note, the room we had is circled in red in the picture above. Second floor, all the way to the left.)

The first two days of our trip were great. We ate at the lodge restaurants, partook of a carriage ride around the grounds, bought a car load of souvenirs and generally acted like great patrons.

Toward the evening on that second day, our daughter started not feeling well.

Thinking ahead, I saw us perhaps wanting to check out a day early to get our sick daughter home. I stopped by the front desk that evening and asked the guy (we’ll call him John) about my chances of NOT being charged for that last day if we checked out the following morning, a day early. John’s response? “You’ll still be held responsible for that last day. Sorry.” He was implacable.

That night, our daughter’s fever spiked to 103.3 and by morning she was throwing up every fifteen minutes. We had to leave, regardless of whether or not we’d be charged for that last day.

I packed the car and went back to the front desk at 9:00 a.m. that morning to give them one more shot at doing the right thing. This time, I talked to a different guy (we’ll call him Andy), and I could tell before I even opened my mouth that he’d be able to help me out.

I told Andy my story and asked if I’d be charged for that last day. Andy’s response? “No sweat. I can take care of that for you.” Clickity clickity click. Done. No charge for the last unused day. Andy wished my daughter well and sent us on our way with a caring smile.

Had the first guy (John) with the obstructionist attitude prevailed, that resort would have made $269 more from me this year. But I would have left that resort angry, I would have never returned, and I would have made it my mission in life to steer others clear of Big Cedar Lodge.

Because of Andy, though, I’ll likely take my family back to that resort again around Christmas time, spending around $1200 on lodging, food, souvenirs and activities. And we’ll likely go back year after year.

How important is customer service?