MattMaroon.com

So I was watching President-Elect Obama’s first YouTube address (which will be replacing the outdated AM radio weekly updates) today (found via avc.com) and all I could think about was the background:

Early ’80s style wood paneling? Really? Where did you tape that, my grandpa’s basement? At least move up to the kitchen, where there’s some smoke-stained floral-print wallpaper. I know you don’t have access to the Oval Office yet, but at least that room you used in your infomercial looked like it was decorated sometime after I was born.

A lot of the big buzz in the news lately has been about the political divide over bailing out the American car companies. I have to admit, I can’t see the benefit of this in any way. I can’t discern one good thing, in the long run, that will come of dropping more money down this abyss.

For one, it’s not as if these companies are going to just vanish and take all of those jobs with them if the government doesn’t help out. They’ll go into Chapter 11 and continue operations much as they did before, at least in the short term, while their ownership is restructured. But even if they did just disappear overnight, which they won’t, long-term demand for cars won’t drop anymore than it otherwise would. Competitors will just step up and make the amount of cars they were selling, and they will largely employ Americans to do it.

This fascinating (though a little dated) NPR article clearly shows why GM in particular can’t compete with the Japanese manufacturers. It’s 100% the fault of the unions. Unions have blocked them from automating much of the process, so GM spends 34.3 man hours to create a car, whereas Toyota spends only 27.9. Thanks to unions, every GM car produced costs $1,525 in health care, while Toyota pays $201. Average GM salary for (all unionized) assembly-line workers is $31.35/hr, while Toyota (mostly non-union) is at $27. GM loses $2,331 per vehicle while Toyota makes $1,488.

That last one fascinates me the most. Why doesn’t GM just make fewer vehicles and sell them for more? “Sure we lose money with every sale, but we make it up in volume” is supposed to be a joke, not the business model of a multi-billion dollar industry.

This company and the union lobbying dollars that have it on life support are not worth saving. It’s time to pull the plug. We can give them all of the government money in the world, but unless we do something about the core problem they’ll never be able to compete. It would be cheaper and better to just let the companies go out of business and have the government pay those workers $60k a year. I’m certainly not advocating that either, I’m just pointing out that any proposed bailout that’s significantly more expensive than just paying the salaries you’re trying to save in the first place is, without a doubt, a bad idea.

The core problem is, of course, that unions are a form of price fixing and as such they prevent market efficiency. GMs is forced to sell cars at a loss to compete on price, because the unions ensure they have to pay more to ship one. The workers themselves benefit from the short term gain of higher salaries than the open market, which doesn’t value people who have no skill beyond the ability to pull a lever very highly, would otherwise pay but in the long run they find themselves out of a job and with their pensions evaporating.

One of the biggest promises of the Obama campaign was the ability to change the way politics work. Of all of the Presidential campaigns in the modern era, his was the only one that largely raised money in a grass-roots, from-the-people fashion. And though I’m sure he got his share of lobbyist bucks too, he’s the first that competed largely on the basis of individual donations.

So it will be interesting to see which way he goes with this. He’s talked about fast-tracking the loan money that Congress has already approved, which I’m fine with since it’s a sunk cost at this point anyway. But beyond that, what will he do?

My hope is that if he does help them out he will, as Henry Paulson has called for, do so only with assurances of their long-term viability. Without sweeping changes, including undoing much of the damage unions have done, we can’t stop GM from failing, we can only delay it. The path to solvency for our auto industry won’t be popular with the unions, but anything less is just throwing money down the drain in the midst of the second greatest financial crisis in our nation’s history.

A Fox News anchor telling a comedian that there is no liberal bias in the media. It’s like some bizzarro universe Daily Show.

Тюмень ландшафт

Also, wtf is with the Xbox on the shelf behind them? Did they do this interview in the lunchroom? How awesome would it be to play Guitar Hero with Bill O’Reilly?

One thing that never ceases to amuse me about elections is the yard signage. What’s the logic behind these? Do the people who put them up just want to show their affiliation to their neighbors? Do they think these influence people? Do they, either individually or in aggregate? I wonder if anyone has ever just said “fuck it, I’m gonna drive down the road and vote for whoever has the most signs.” Maybe people keep a running subconscious sign tally in their heads and that comes into play in the voting booth. Or maybe it’s just a giant, aesthetically displeasing waste of resources.

Has anyone ever measured their effectiveness at determining the outcome? It might be a great indicator if it influences the independent vote. Or it might not, because they don’t give a good indication of the independent vote and don’t have any effect on it. I really don’t know, but I’d love to find out. If it is a reliable indicator, it’s the easiest, least biased one to measure.

Why don’t people have yard signs for anything else? People don’t really express their affinity for other brands the way they do politicians. And yes, politics are a brand, just like Coke or Gillette. You might say that people care about politics more, but I don’t believe it because I read tech blogs and have seen the mindless devotion Apple has inspired and the mindless hatred Microsoft has. The average American opens a can of Coke or Pepsi more times in one week than they vote in their entire lives. And given the health crisis we’re facing, and the almost incontrovertible evidence that it derives from our diet, the contents of that can may matter far more in their future than who gets elected tomorrow.

I wonder if there’s a profitable enterprise in printing yard signs for things like Pepsi or Apple. You’d think folks would want to express their loyalty to other brands as well. Maybe I should print up some signs for Heinz and Hunts and see what happens. Maybe the lack of an expiration date would make them unpopular. At least with a politician, you know there’s a certain date after which you can throw it in the trash, but Heinz is still going to be selling ketchup for the foreseeable future.

Also, if we’re going that far, we don’t even need brands. We can just make ones that say “I really like prime rib.” You’d be exposing your preferences to the world, and you’d have the added bonus of deterring vegans. Actually, if someone would make a sign that says “Vegans will be shot on sight.” I’d nail it to a tree.

Walking my dogs around my neighborhood a while back, I was subconsciously noticing signs and thought “wow, I can’t believe this area is so in favor of Obama.” I live in a pretty rural suburb, and would have guessed it to be McCain country. Then on the way back I noticed that they were mostly McCain/Palin 08 signs, they were just colored blue and white.

What the hell? Democrat signs are supposed to be blue, and Republicans red. Why did the parties get those colors? I don’t know and I don’t care. That’s just the way it’s always been. I have to think McCain’s made a serious mistake in breaking with the convention there. When I’ve passed by 10 of his signs in a row, not really paying attention, and thought they were for his opponent, something is wrong.

If there’s one key thing I’ve learned from studying usability, it’s that when you do something that is the opposite of what a people expect, it creates confusion. Switch from Windows to Mac and see how long it takes you to adjust to the close button being top-left rather than top-right (or, for the more computer literate, alt+w rather than ctrl+w) or vice versa. Neither is, as far as I can tell, any better than the other, but the difference really throws you for a loop until you adjust. If people expect McCain’s signs to be red, McCain should make his sign red, unless there’s a very compelling reason not to. Maybe it’s because he’s perceived as being hot-tempered, and we all know red is the color of anger.

My neighborhood is about a 50/50 split in terms of Obama and McCain signs, but that’s only because a few houses have multiples. One apparent Democrat has at least 10 signs in a row. Every day I drive by and he seems to have another. I’ve seen a few other houses with more than one Obama sign, some of them cleverly spaced apart so you’d almost think it was two separate yards unless you looked close enough, but I’ve yet to see two McCain/Palins.

Maybe ACORN is involved.

One thing playing so much poker ingrained in me was the tendency to use logic first and then decide. That’s counter to human nature, as most people make decisions and then rationalize them with the best available logic. Nobody is perfect at this, and I still sometimes catch myself doing it even when I have the time to think things through.

I think, in the end, that is why the whole Joe the Plumber thing has really not done anything for the McCain camp. It’s done a lot for Joe, but it’s largely fallen flat with the electorate. I’d like to say it’s because America is smart enough not to take financial advice from some unknown plumber, but they’ll take medical advice from a stripper so that clearly can’t be it.

Joe the Plumber decided he was a McCain voter before he asked Obama the question that made him infamous. We discovered the day after the debate that he makes about $40k a year (which is low for a plumber) and is in debt to the government, which means there’s a pretty solid chance he’s in debt elsewhere since usually the first collector you pay is the IRS. They can throw you in jail, whereas the rest can’t do anything but call you repeatedly.

And the business he is allegedly going to buy has $510k in sales and 8 employees, meaning that after expenses, if you assume Joe’s salary to be company average (it certainly cannot be high, as the average plumber makes about $7k more than he does) they’d make $190k a year. That’s not even counting non-employee expenses. Rent, utilities equipment, vans, etc. There’s almost no chance that company is making anywhere near $250k.

So, in reality, Joe the Plumber is literally six tax brackets away from getting paying more under Obama’s plan. Seriously, six brackets. Look it up, I’m not joking. In fact, Joe would get a 3.6% decrease under the Obama tax plan. That’s compared to the 0.5% decrease he’d get under McCain. And even if he is able to buy the business, which he presumably is nowhere near, and even if it did make $250k a year, which it almost certainly doesn’t, he’d probably still end up just barely ahead with Obama’s tax plan.

It might seem a little odd, then, that Joe was so worried about what Obama was going to tax people who make six times what he does. It’s because Joe, like most people, wasn’t logically deciding who he should vote for. He was trying to rationalize a decision he’d already made. You can’t be opposed to Obama’s plan, or prefer it to McCain’s, unless you’re in or near the top two tax brackets, so he invented a scenario in which he’d suddenly be catapulted up there. Sadly for him, and maybe more so for McCain, it’s fiction.

At this point, for Joe to improve McCain’s polling results, he’d have to do two things. First, and most likely, he’d have to swing undecided voters to the McCain side. Second, he’d have to swing Obama voters to undecided or McCain.

The first group of people are probably too cautious and spend too much time thinking about it to be swayed by a plumber. The second group is an even tougher sell. Most people who’ve decided one way or the other by now aren’t switching for nearly anything. Nothing short of the police finding a dead stripper in their candidate’s trunk is going to make a difference.

The Obama voters (like the McCain ones) have either spent months thinking about it and come to a decision, or they’ve decided and then spent months rationalizing. Either way you’d have to invalidate their logic to convince them they were wrong. Not just some of it, but most, and that’s really tough to do on the topic of tax policy since 95% of them will be getting a decrease.

Also, most people aren’t rich, and most people aren’t going to be buying the company they work for in the next 4 years. And unlike Joe the Plumber, who is either overtly dishonest or self-delusional, they know it. What they do know is that their household makes $50k per year and they’re struggling to get by. If you tell them that taxing rich people more and them less is socialism, their answer is going to be "well hell, let’s give that whole Marxism thing a try."

I also find the socialism buzzword hilarious, because the only socialism I’ve seen lately is the bailout, and that was supported by both candidates and our current President. If there’s one good thing you can say about Bush, it’s that he most definitely is not a socialist. Socialism is predicated upon state ownership and administration of the means of production. Government taking ownership stakes in banks and possibly automobile manufacturers qualifies. Raising taxes does not.

So on behalf of Ohioans everywhere, I’d like to apologize for this most egregious atrocity. Now it’s your turn Alaska.

Wow, this one is too good to pass up. Using 2005 data and 2004 Presidential voting, here’s some interesting statistics in terms of taxation and socialism. 32 states receive more money from the Federal Government in spending than they pay in taxes. 27 of them (84%) voted Republican. 18 states contribute as much as or more than they receive. 14 states (78%) voted Democrat. Click the above link for proof that people don’t vote with their pocketbooks.

I’ve been reading many articles lately by well-known conservatives who have the same opinion of Sarah Palin and the modern Republican Party that I do. It gives me hope. Sometimes I feel like the intelligent ones have just been too silent over the last 8 years as they’ve been shoved aside by the religious right and those willing to sell their core values to them for votes, figuring it was better to remain in power than to alienate their base. But with that base deteriorating and the grim (to them) prospect of a Democratic Congress and White House, they’re making themselves heard and, if we’re lucky, they’ll take back the party.

Christophers Buckley and Hitchens both endorsed Obama, in part due to Palin who they called “an embarrassment” and “a disgrace” respectively. That, most of all, gives me hope. My first instinct about Palin seems to have been correct, and I admit, I was scared for a couple weeks there that I had been wrong. Maybe there’s an open seat for me on the right side of the aisle yet.

In this video interview on YouTube, David Brooks says that Palin “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.” And “there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.”

I disagree that Palin is a cancer. She’s not the disease. She’s far too new and far too irrelevant to be that. She’s merely a symptom. The only possible result of a decade of pandering to the Sarah Palins of the world is that one of them will rise to the highest ranks, however briefly.

The disease is the desire to win even at the cost of selling out their core ideals. Fear of losing their very vocal base has caused the Republicans to develop that rampant anti-intellectualism our nation has suffered under for eight years now. Rather than compete with ideas, they’ve sought to win the other 30% of the vote they needed by marginalizing them, making them appear elite and unpatriotic. When a Democrat argues his ideas to improve our country, they call him anti-American. Wanting to better our nation has been recast not as every citizen’s patriotic duty, which was the belief that made America great in the past, but rather as self-loathing.

So, here’s what I’d suggest for the Republican Party to get back on track.

First, embrace ideas once again. The downside to cursing as unpatriotic anyone who wants to improve our country is that you yourself can’t suggest the same thing. That won’t work well in the era of the 24 hour news cycle. There’s a multibillion dollar industry devoted to making everyone believe the sky is falling, and winning in politics now means reassuring people that you can make it stop. There’s no way to do that but through ideas.

Depoliticize science. Science is humanity’s greatest achievement, and over time it will always triumph over superstition. There will one day be a time when people view strict creationism much as we currently view the belief that Earth is flat. Over half of the nation already does. Stop holding these people up as shining examples of your party.

Global warming, too, is not a political issue, it’s a scientific one. How we deal with it may be political, but its existence is not. No single scientific body in the world denies that it is largely man-made, not even the ones funded by oil companies. A Republican politician arguing the fact is simply insulting, and their penchant for doing so has given the Democrats a base maybe not as large as the religious right, but every bit as fervent.

Marginalize the religious right. I’m not saying tell them to stick their ballots where the sun don’t shine, but totally remove pandering to them from your policy. They’re not going to switch to the other party anyway. They’re too adamant about abortion for that, and Republicans can stick to their Federalist stance, which is not totally repulsive to the center while still being just anti-Roe enough for the right.

Some of the evangelicals won’t vote at all, or might waste votes on a right-wing third party, but you won’t lose that much. You’ll gain far more from the moderate center than you give up.

Stop whining about the media having a liberal bias. Reality has a liberal bias. Or, more accurately, liberals have a reality bias. While you’ve pandered to the people who believe all truth comes from a 2,000 year old book of Jewish folk stories, liberals have been listening to scientists, economists, and the like. Journalists, who are highly educated people trained to report reality as they see it, of course aren’t too enthused by the right’s epistemology (or lack thereof).

The perceived liberalness, according to those decrying what they feel is a lack of integrity, of a given publication is almost directly proportional to the intelligence of the content, with the New York Times and NPR at the top, all the way down to Fox News. Fierce anti-intellectualism isn’t a good way to get intellectuals to write about you, and equating the opposing side with intelligence might not be the best strategy in general.