@ Duck and Decanter

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The auto industry has been in the news a lot lately. Most of the news has to do with how the industry is struggling in today’s economic malaise. Most of the news has been about the manufacturers but there are also disquieting hints that the problems are flowing downhill. Yesterday the Chicago Tribune ran an article, Credit crunch: Auto dealerships struggle, close as ‘floorplan’ financing dries up, about the effect on Chicago area dealerships. I am not sure how I feel about this. I feel for the employees of the dealerships, as I do for the employees of the auto manufacturers. These are tough times to be out of work. On the other hand I think that both the manufacturers and the dealerships have needed to change the way they do business (and what they sell) for quite some time now. There is one exception to my sympathy for former employees. That is ex-Chief Executive Rick Wagoner of General Motors Corp.

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“On Friday I was in Washington for a meeting with administration officials,” … “In the course of that meeting, they requested that I ‘step aside’ as CEO of GM, and so I have”

Rick Wagoner as reported in the Wall Street Journal

Wagoner was forced to resign by the feds (here, as well as in WSJ). Wagoner consistently supported SUV and truck sales instead of greener alternatives – the profits on trucks and SUVs are better. As a 30 year employee of GM management, he was a champion of doing business in the same old way. The way it has always been done at GM. Apparently the lessons of the 1970s were lost on him. Those lessons were lost on many of us. The difference is that he was paid a lot more than the rest of his co-workers and the rest of us. The theory for higher pay (and bonuses, stock options and etc) is that the recipient is worth more because of his superior judgment and abilities. GM has done nothing but continue on its decline since he took over as CEO in 2000. I’ll reserve my sympathy for the thousands of workers affected by his bad decisions.

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Rick Wagoner is not the only one (in GM or the auto industry) desperately trying to keep things the way they have always been. The last time I shopped for a new car (2006) I shopped on the internet first. I checked a lot of auto websites and asked for many quotes from local dealerships. About half of the time the only information I got was a phone call – which I never answered but listened to the voicemail. Sometimes when I didn’t respond they then sent me an email saying: “We have tried to contact you but…” The email always included a phone number where I could contact them. I would then reply back and ask why they were phoning instead of sending me an email with the information I requested. One dealer had anticipated me and sent an anonymous email (reply not possible). I keep the email as a reminder. That email was from a GM dealer. Most of the GM dealers I sent requests to did not respond except to send me their phone number. That was one of the reasons I did not buy a GM product.

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I think there is a connection between the leadership of Wagoner and my experience with car shopping. The dealers that wanted to talk and not send me information (and I have to admit other brands did also – GM was just the worst) were accustomed to doing business that way. Like Wagoner they balanced profit against change. It is significant to me that Wagoner is an accountant. They had always made more profit by talking than by sending information. Like Wagoner, the dealers have failed to realize that a fundamental shift has occurred, both in the way consumers buy and what they buy.

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To my way of thinking there is some irony here. Ronald Reagan implemented trickledown economics in the 1980s by pushing tax reforms that benefited the wealthy and large corporations more than individuals with lower incomes. The theory being that wealth flows downhill. The present crises are a result of policies started in Reagan’s era. However I don’t believe that they are a direct result of those policies. The shunting of a disproportionate amount wealth to individuals at the top of the economic pyramids seems to have diverted the downhill flow. The irony is that the removal Mr. Wagoner is part of starting at the top. I hope the benefits trickle down.

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I have a question. What about the board that appointed Mr. Wagoner?

Let’s begin with a quote.

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“If God didn’t want us messing with this stuff, we couldn’t do it,” Horner said.

Jack Horner, Curator Museum of the Rockies, author and MSU professor.

As reported in ‘Life after death’ in Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

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Jack Horner was talking about messing with the DNA of chickens (descended from dinosaurs) and reconstructing “dino-chickens”. I think this is a good answer to anytime religious objections are made to scientific inquiries.

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OK, I got that off my chest. On to more current topics.

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The other day I decided that I had had enough and went to the store to buy a pair of 27 inch laces for my new Brooks running shoes. The shortest laces I could find were 40 inch laces. Having thought about this some, I have two observations. Now I don’t know how valid these observations are but they seem related to each other and to other happenings in the world.

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First observation. I believe I started having problems with laces when they stopped being made of natural fibers. Shoelaces are a lot slicker than they used to be. Concurrently with this phenomenon, I noticed that clothing in general contain a lot less natural fibers. The manufactures (or at least the people who dream up ad campaigns for their products) point out all the advantages of manmade fibers but I believe that price is the driving force here. First in the 70s they started making stuff that used less material (example shorter shoelaces) because of cost and then when manmade materials became more prevalent (and the price dropped) they started making stuff that used more material –see, we are giving you more for your money.

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Second observation. There is a connection between the length of shoelaces and the cupidity of our society. Almost everything has grown in size. I have two Coke bottles from the Second World War. They contained 6 ounces of Coca Cola when issued to troops. Have you tried to find that size lately? First there was 12 oz and then 16 oz sizes. Individual fountain drinks went from 16 to 32 to 44. Sometimes even larger. Coke, shoelaces and fountain drinks aren’t the only things that have increased in size. It seems as if everything has become larger. Food portions, autos and houses have all increased in size from the 1970s. Not to mention the size of American rears. And when portions do get smaller they try to make them larger by oversized packaging or putting some other spin on the product.

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I have a friend who is taking classes related to fashion and design. He recently mentioned to me that even jeans have been affected by synthetic fiber and things getting bigger. To make jeans (made out of cotton) stretchy they have added manmade materials (Lycra, I think but I could be wrong). We need stretchy jeans to make our bigger bodies more comfortable in a smaller size. It would appear that vanity and cupidity are driving our use of synthetic materials.

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Need I say anything about the size of bonuses paid to CEOs, especially in financial businesses?

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From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit.

Jeremiah 6:12 NIV

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@ Duck and Decanter

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This is NOT a theological discussion so bear with me a bit. I almost titled this post “Alcohol, drugs, and violence in the family” but choose a more biblical one because… well, because that is how my mind works.

Sometimes I have problems with concepts I find in the bible. One such concept is the idea of the punishment for someone’s sins being visited upon their children. For example:

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6 – And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness,

7 – maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation”.

Exodus 34:6-7 (New International Version)

You show love to thousands but bring the punishment for the fathers’ sins into the laps of their children after them.

Jeremiah 32:18 (New International Version)

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

John 9:2

I gave the last only to show that the followers of Jesus believed that sin was punished by bad stuff happening and that children could inherit the punishment. I know from experience that this concept is still with the followers of Jesus. I do not subscribe to this belief myself but I do see that dysfunction (maybe “crap” would be a better if less political correct word – I can think of others) runs in families. Take for example the McInerney’s story.

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The story, as I know it, started a year ago last February with the son, Brandon. Brandon McInerney is being tried as an adult for the Feb. 12, 2008, killing of Larry King, 15, a classmate at E.O. Green School in Oxnard, Ca. Do you remember hearing about it? What caught my attention was that Larry King was openly gay. That of course made it a hate crime which is one of the reasons why Brandon is being tried as an adult. It was also (according to accounts I read in the Ventura County Star) deliberate and premeditated. Brandon apparently (I refuse to say allegedly) took one of his father’s guns to school and dispatched Larry in class.

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Brandon’s father, William, died yesterday in an accident in his home. The Ventura County Star carried the story, “William McInerney’s death was accidental, autopsy shows”. The article gave some interesting insights into Brandon’s home life – Brandon lived with his father who was divorced from Brandon’s mother, Kendra. William had a history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence. He had shot Kendra (Brandon’s mother) in 1993 and had been found guilty of domestic violence (against Kendra) in 2000. He was involved in another domestic violence case (against his sister) when he died. It turns out that it was illegal for him to own firearms, since he had been convicted of domestic violence. Had he been law abiding, Brandon would not have had access to a gun.

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One really interesting point for me was that the domestic violence against his sister came about because he was taking Xanax and washing it down with alcohol. That is not helpful in stressful situations. Xanax is prescribed for stress and users are warned not to take it with alcohol. You should also tell your doctor if you have a history of drug addiction or alcohol abuse (see here). But we know already that William was not one for following laws or rules.

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It looks to me like Brandon learned a lot from his father. Brandon was one month into his 14^th year when he put his training to use and killed one of his classmates because he was openly gay. I wonder: what were William’s views on homosexuality?

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I think it a shame when sins of the parents are visited on the children.

@ Duck and Decanter

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I took my father’s microfiche viewer to a Goodwill donation center this morning. My mother and several of my nieces and a nephew had tried to find a place to donate it ever since my father died last December. The sad fact is that no one uses microfiches anymore. Microfiches were invented as a means of storing large amounts of data in small spaces. Essentially they were just large magnifiers that enabled people to read very small print on sheets of microfilm. My dad had one because a lot of census data and other data used in genealogy can be viewed on one. He was into genealogy in a big way.

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At least he was in the 70s and 80s. In the 90s dementia began to affect his memory and as far as I know he never used it later than 1990. So the micro fiche sat in the room he used as an office for 18 years without being turned on. One of my nieces told me that he almost came to tears because he could not remember much of the family tree he had so patiently built up over the years. That was another of the things my father did – or more properly, did not do. He never showed emotion. He also never wrote anything down so when his memory went everything was lost. I think my father had a common human affliction in this regard. He assumed that he would always be blessed with the remarkable memory that he had up to sometime in his 50s.

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There have been times that I have assumed that things will always be the same. Between 1974 and 1989 I drove Volkswagens. Got to be a pretty good VW mechanic and really enjoyed working on the air cooled engines. I can remember thinking that I would drive them forever. Ah, well, so much for my ability to predict the future. Before I retired (December 2004) I could not imagine not working in a technical field. I even dreamed that I would do temporary contract work. The truth is that I never even looked into doing that. In 2002 I moved from a condo in Mesa (AZ) to a “patio home” in Phoenix. I picked a place that had a small yard because I imagined that I would still enjoy doing yard work as I had in 1979 (the last year I owned a yard). Something had changed in the 20 odd years that had elapsed. I detest yard work!

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With millions of other Americans (and billions worldwide?), I could not imagine the stock market, banks and everything else tanking to the extent that it has. All of this proves to me that not only that:

but that I am terrible at predicting the future. Professionals in the financial markets appear to have the same failings.

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I recently reread a book, Earthlight, by Arthur C. Clarke that I first read as a teenager. Clarke was not only a great Science Fiction author he was a futurist. One could almost say he was professional predictor of the future. I was struck by the fact that in Earthlight there were no hints of some technologies that have shaped the modern world. I am not dissing Clark. For a novel written in 1955 about events and life on the moon 200 years after the first moon landing (1966 the USSR made the first unmanned landing – in 1969 the US made the first manned landing) he certainly got a lot correct. But in the novel, Earthlight, computers were still giant mainframes (and mostly analog), teletypes the latest in communicating and for image capture film still had to be processed using chemical baths. I am sure that had Clarke re-written the novel in, let’s say, 2005 it would have all of those deficiencies corrected. I have seen photos of Clarke sitting in from of PC or Mac. Who knew in 1955? No one, not even a great futurist. I believe that Clarke knew that himself.

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1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

As found in Clarke’s three laws – article in Wikipedia.

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On the way to drop off the microfiche I happened to pass a Seventh Day Adventist Church. There was a big sign – red background – with black letters that advertised “Prophetic Seminar”. I am not sure but I suspect that they are using “Prophetic” in the sense of foretelling the future. Thinking about Clarke, Earthlight and obsolete microfiches I had to laugh.

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I wonder what attendees at the seminar would think of Clarke’s three laws? Probably they would not be important enough. When you are considering the end of the world, scientific details don’t rate too high. I could be wrong about this of course; I often have been in the past.

@ Duck and Decanter

I read five foreign newspapers (online) on a regular basis. I read two British newspapers, The London Times & the Telegraph, two Japanese, Ashi Shimbum & Japan Times and the Singapore Straits Times. I read them for several reasons. It is nice to be able to get new that is not filtered through US eyes as well as stories about what is important or at least going on in other countries. I read these particular ones because they are in English (the Japanese ones also have a Japanese version). I also read them because I am interested in knowing what the rest of the world thinks of us. In general, The Japanese are the most sympathetic, the Brits the most critical and the Straits Times the most even handed. At least in my eyes. I suppose I could read all sorts of nonsense in to my observation but I think I will just accept it as my bias.

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I read a blog in the (Manchester) Telegraph that I found especially enlightening. The blog, At Last, the Truth about America: It is becoming less religious, was interesting enough. Basically it was about a survey just completed. For the blogs author, Damian Thompson,

…the truth is that the stereotype of the churchgoing American has been out of date for years, and now we have the statistics to prove it.

Damian

I believe it. But, what I really liked were the reader’s comments that were posted. I’ll quote a few. I’ll only give the posting name with the understanding that they all come (as does the quote above) from Damian’s blog, At Last, the Truth about America: It is becoming less religious, in the Telegraph of March 11, 2009.

It’s true that some Christian churches are losing populations, especially those like the Episcopal church, because they are replacing Christ and the scripture with looney leftist idiocy. The Catholic church has been losing numbers of citizens, who have been angered by the church’s advocacy for open borders, and rationalizing the displacement of citizens from jobs they desperately need.

Mares

The US is different from europe – there are very few communal places to integrate – and Church provides that for a vast majority – especially in rural areas.

The population isn’t as dense ; housing is less concentrated ; they don’t have the pub/social club mentality or structures – they don’t even have the phenomena of young mothers networking on the school runs [school buses !].

Churches provide a communal meeting-place moreso than anywhere this side of the atlantic.

onethesideofangles

Americans have always had a bizarre, self-centered & semi-gnostic understanding of religion, even when it took place within the confines of established, mainline Christian denominations. This more theraputic take on religion has certainly accelerated in recent years, but it’s nothing new. Oprah and Joel Olsteen are just the latest permutations of a long line of Americana religion.

Mr.Crouchback

Interesting, is it not?