God, Save Us From the Intelligent People

I just came across an article by a super smart brainiac in a Yale publication on how Detroit was failing, and why. His answer: because they weren't building enough fuel efficient cars. Detroit had to be forced to do the smart thing by smart politicians, or they would stupidly build the wrong cars and those cars would never sell.

He had, in other words, looked at a few months of sales data, ignored decades of data, assumed that Toyota was thriving because of a car that made up a small percentage of its sales, and assumed that government could fix it because he knew the future, and the future was hybrids.

A few choice quotes:

With much fanfare, the Clinton Administration in 1993 launched the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, challenging Detroit’s size-obsessed Big Three to come up with 80-mile-per-gallon vehicles.... versions of them could have hit the market in time to give the Japanese hybrids – Toyota’s Prius and Honda’s Insight – some real competition. Instead, Detroit’s automakers abandoned their hybrids and plowed their research and development money back into the trucks and SUVs that were making them steady profits.

Ooh, there it is, the big bad "P" word - profit! Bane of companies all over America! Making them build the cars people want instead of the cars the Big Brain People know they should buy!

America’s auto industry is drifting toward unprecedented disaster, and its resistance to change is at the heart of the problem. Lawmakers rejecting a $25 billion industry bailout have been understandably skeptical that auto executives, many of whom had flown to the congressional hearings in private planes, had learned the proper lessons, not just about austerity but also about increasing consumer demand for fuel-efficient, low-emission vehicles.

“Their board rooms in my view have been devoid of vision,” said Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT). “The Big Three turned a blind eye to opportunities. They have promoted and often driven the demand for inefficient, gas-guzzling vehicles, and dismissed the threat of global warming.”

As Washington weighs whether to provide some form of assistance, some of the best ideas for saving Detroit are coming from environmental groups that would like to see any bailout or loan package coupled with a green realignment of the industry. Although the Big Three may regard that as a poison pill, it has the virtue of actually putting the automakers in line with the emerging market.

No mention of crushing union obligations there, just a prediction from Brain Man, that Americans are increasingly demanding more fuel efficient cars (and would continue to do so), I would like to refer you to a story I saw today. Mr. Intellect must be gleeful by now, to see that hybrids have grown into such popular and critical vehicles. Let's not even go into the fact that the American car companies already market hybrids - let's just believe, as he apparently believes, that American car companies are so stupid that they never even bothered to develop and market them. And now they are paying for their foolish slavery to their precious (*spit*) profits.

Hybrid car sales go from 60 to 0 at breakneck speed.

Just one quote here:

Last month, only 15,144 hybrids sold nationwide, down almost two-thirds from April, when the segment's sales peaked and gas averaged $3.57 a gallon. That's far larger than the drop in industry sales for the period and scarcely a better showing than January, when hybrid sales were at their lowest since early 2005.

God help us if we ever end up in the hands of these smart people.

Schadenfreude for the Leftist Media

What amazes me about the media is that they do not seem to understand what is going on at all. In fact when they need to become less biased, they believe the solution is to become more biased. When they should be making efforts to appeal to both sides and make amends, many actually just get a lot more biased. The New York Times, for example, is just a leftist rag now. Before it had a bias, but at least it had credibility.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on big circulation declines at most newspapers. The only two to remain steady have reputations for being centrist and unbiased: The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

One might think that dropping all pretense and just openly serving one side is a good business decision, but it is absolutely not, because there are way too many media orgs that choose to serve that one side. There are only so many liberal eyeballs, and they have dozens of news orgs to choose from. The amount of news they consume is limited by how much time there is in the day.

The decline of the newspapers is not solely due to bias, and maybe not even primarily - their big problem is the internet - but it has an effect. When things are tough, it's a lot harder to stay alive when you not only have the Internet Problem, but you also have a reputation for untrustworthy reporting. The decline of the big 3 (ABC, CBS, NBC) is in some ways due to the advance of cable TV, but not all of it. MSNBC's problems are mostly due to their embarrassing bias, I think.

Another thing that is so damned entertaining: seeing these reporters' morale collapse. These guys didn't get paid worth crap to start with. Now they're going to end up looking for a job outside of the media because the demand for "professional" reporters has tanked, and with failing news orgs and the democratization of news generation on the web, supply is huge. So there go there livelihoods. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of sleazeballs.

Some news orgs have taken the effort to appear less biased by employing conservative commentators, or having some commentators appeal to conservative causes. CNN is a good example with Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs. I suspect CNN is going ok in the ratings now. Not that I think that gives them a pass for their actual reporting, but at least they understand that a reputation for bias is going to kill them. For the NYT, there seems to be no such illumination.

So it is funny, like a starving man, their bodies have begun to feed on themselves. The NYT is selling part of its building to stay alive. Time and Newsweek are at death's door, I don't think either will survive through 2009. And yet they accelerate in the wrong direction. It is just amazing.

The Religion of Global Warming becomes more evident

When Bjorn Lomborg published The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press - 2001) he must not have been prepared for the onslaught of comment, both personal and professional, that has erupted in the popular and scientific press (see www.lomborg.com ). Whereas the popular media have generally reported positively on the 500-plus page analysis of the global environment, the scientific press in North America has been negative to the point of personal insult. It is very clear that extreme environmentalists are deeply threatened by the breath of fresh air Lomborg brings to the debate.

Among the most scathing of the attacks on Lomborg was an 11-page editorial in the January 2002 edition of Scientific American. With the rather high-handed title "Science Defends itself Against the Skeptical Environmentalist" the editorial declared the book a "failure" and invited four prominent environmentalists to do their worst to discredit Lomborg and his analysis.

Scientific American did not give Lomborg any opportunity to respond to his critics, even though they gave him a copy of the editorial before it went to press. They said they would give Lomborg one page in a future edition to reply to 11 pages of full-on attack. Lomborg's response was to publish the text of the Scientific American article on his own website and to intersperse it with a detailed response to every point raised by his critics. Scientific American then threatened to sue Lomborg over copyright. In response to my complaint Scientific American wrote "This is an infringement of our copyright and interferes with our business of selling the article." Does Scientific American really think that they will lose readership because Lomborg has posted a response to a publication that is already off the newsstands? I believe they acted out of political motivation and are purposefully stifling Lomborg's efforts to defend himself. And I don't blame Lomborg for giving in to such a huge organization when threatened with legal action. (If you go to Lomborg's website www.lomborg.com and look under Critiques you will find he has removed the offending text, thus gutting the effectiveness of his response.)

I think we should defy Scientific American's blatant attempt to muzzle Lomborg. Anyone who reads his response to the Scientific American attack will have to agree that it is thoughtful and thorough. Here is a link to the entire response complete with Lomborg's comments.

LINK TO LOMBORG'S REPLY TO SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (.PDF Acrobat File)

I call on all scientists, organizations, and citizens to publish this document on their websites. I do not believe Scientific American can prevent this legitimate right of free speech. The entire editorial was an attack on Bjorn Lomborg. Surely he has a perfect right to defend himself on his own website. I am willing to bring this to the test. Please help with this effort. If you do not have a website then send the document to someone who does.

You can build a link to Lomborg's original article by referring to www.greenspirit.com or you can retrieve the Acrobat .pdf file from the Link to Lomborg's Reply above and publish the document directly on your site.

The Atlantic's Absurd China Article

I'm reading an article from The Atlantic about China. What I really want to do, more than anything, is pick this detestable piece of crap apart in detail, but I just don't have the energy. If I dismantled every unfit piece of journalism in this country I would never do anything else.

But I will make two points about this odious article by James Fallows. The first should be evident from the first sentence:

"AS CHINA PREPARES to take its place as the world’s dominant power, it faces confounding obstacles: its insularity and sheer stupidity in delivering the genuine good news about its own progress."

As China "prepares to take its place as the world's dominant power"? I'm actually glad this is the first sentence, because it does exactly what the first sentence in an article is supposed to do: It tells you what the article is about. Except in this case, it also tells you that the article is total shit.

Under what definition of "power" can this sentence be true? Is China about to exceed the USA in economic activity? Scientific discovery? Military power? No. It is not. In fact it is not even close in any of those three categories.

China's per capita GDP is woefully behind ours - $5,300 - vs. $45,700. The middle class in China is far below the poverty level of the United States. Their total GDP is 3.3 trillion dollars, vs. America's GDP at 13.8 trillion dollars. In no way, shape or form can China be said to even be in the same league as the United States economically.

And lest you think that America's recent economic troubles have given China a leg up on us, China is suffering more than we are. The Hong Kong stock market is down from its highs more than ours is, having fallen 57% versus America's 40%.

Militarily, the Chinese have a bigger army than we do, but they always have. They have a very land-centric, infantry-centric army, because that is one of China's strengths: It just has an ungodly shitload of people. It can field a 5-million man infantry army because rifles are cheap and in China, so is human life. Tanks and airplanes are expensive.

China does not have a blue water navy. America has twelve aircraft carriers and the Carrier Strike Group ships to support it. This means that with six Carrier Strike Groups at sea at all times, within days, the US Navy can be operating 100 aircraft off of any shore in the world, and they can double, triple or quadruple that number within weeks. China has no carriers.

China has 77 blue water ships like frigates and destroyers, no cruisers, no carriers, and a gaggle of local, littoral combat ships like missile patrol boats, and 800 aircraft. The US Navy has 283 ocean-going, blue water ships. and 3700 aircraft.

The People's Liberation army Air Force has 2,300 aircraft. The US Air Force has 5,700 manned aircraft, and the US Army operates hundreds more aircraft (mostly helicopters) , and the Marines operate hundreds more again.

In the coastal waters of China, China's navy is capable. Beyond Japan and Taiwan, it is no match for the US Navy.

In the ability to project force, China does not even come close to the US. We support military forces all over the world, and in addition, America solely has the ability to put 150,000 troops into Iraq, a country on the other side of the planet, and support them indefinitely. Nobody has this ability besides us, and certainly not China.

So I must ask the Atlantic, what the hell are you talking about? Where is China beating the US? Where is it even matching the US? Where is it even close?, that you would say it is about to become the "dominant world power"?

Secondly, the entire paper addresses a very disturbing premise: that China is, sadly, not very good at telling the world how awesome it is, despite the fac that they control their media and no significant criticism of the government is tolerated. I must point out here that this journalist, who lives in a free country with a free press, is eager to help China expend its power as a brutal dictatorship by teaching it the fine art of PR.

And I bet the irony of it is totally lost on him.

The News

I've come to the realization that my bugaboo is the press. I think it's a good bugaboo to have, though, because it is critically important to the functioning of a democracy, and our press is falling to pieces on multiple fronts.

First, they are entirely unable to reign in their bias. In fact it seems to be getting worse. This last election was a rapid acceleration of the press' plunge into untrustworthiness.

Second, when they're not being biased, they're wasting your time. I assume you're aware of this case with the little girl named Caylee who was, presumably, killed by her own mother. It's a tragic case, but you know what? It has nothing to do with me. It is not news. News is something that is of importance to you on some level. This story is not of any importance to me, period. I don't know these people, I don't live in their town, I don't live within 2,000 miles of them. Whatever happens here has no bearing on me, at all, so it is not news. This story's newsworthiness is limited at best to the city that they live in. Probably not even that.

But it is national story. That doesn't sound right, does it? But I can't call it news. So maybe we need a new word. This is national storypulp. There, that's better. That's my word for "news" that is not fit to be called news.

I could call it entertainment, but it's not entertaining at all, it's a God damned tragedy. So here, I need yet a new word, which brings me to my point. What do you call a story like this, that is not news and is not entertainment?

This is the dissemination of tragedy to people to fulfill some sick inner desire to share in the misery of people that are otherwise of no importance or meaning to us. It has no socially redeeming value. No benefit is made when people are attracted, for whatever sad and pathetic reason, to follow this story. It is porn without the sex, but with the tragedy. What do you call that? How about:

Tragedy Porn.

Fighting Back in the Culture Wars

My question today is, when are conservatives going to actually, you know, put up a fight?

As you probably know, dating site eharmony.com has now been forced to create a gay dating site, because apparently offering a site that does straight dating and not gay dating services is discriminatory.

So, conservatives, what are you doing? You're sitting around on your ass. You're whining and moaning and complaining, and doing nothing else. That's why you're going to lose.

There are many, many gay dating sites that do not provide straight dating services. Just look up "gay dating" on any search engine. Why are they not all being sued today?

Why is conservative America refusing to fight? I don't understand it. You're going to lose over and over, year after year, and what you value and love will all be destroyed by your enemies, and you will be sitting around miserably whining about it, and yet doing nothing.

Sue these sites. They are discriminating. Throw the ridiculous arguments right back at them, only tenfold, a hundredfold. Sue every gay dating site in the country for discrimination.

Start fighting, for God's sake. I'm not a lawyer, but if someone wants to tell me how to go about it, I'll do it myself.

How the Stock Market Works

Originally posted at the Brew Board, for the benefit of the miscreants therein. Or thereon.

It's the first day of a week off, and so I have a bit of spare time. About a week, to be exact. So I will be annoying the Green Board in new and exciting ways. Someone a while back asked to be explained what the stock market is, so I thought I'd give that a go. Please keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times.

Say BrewBasser has a company, it's gotten pretty big, and it is doing well. He makes, let's say, assault rifles (his new model, the "Lonnie Mac10" is very popular). He's selling the guns in the local Chico California area and everyone loves them, but he wants to branch out with new gun stores (Crazy BrewBasser's Guns fer Killin'). But he just doesn't have the money and the bank doesn't want to loan him any.

So what he does is go public. First, he divides the company up by a certain number, let's say one million. Each of these is called a share. He can't really divide the company by a million, picking a brick for one share and a drill bit for another share, so he basically says that each share gives ownership of one millionth of everything in company. A millionth of the drill bit, a millionth of each brick, and a millionth of the painting of Orudis and 80Schilling in the hallway, named "The Fox and Hound in Repose", painted by famous painter LeDis.

He makes up some fancy looking documents called stock certificates, and when a person buys them, they have bought a tiny part of the company. They don't actually have to hold the certificates any more, but they used to.

He can sell these shares to his friends and neighbors, he doesn't have to make them publicly available, or he can sell on the open market to just anybody. That's what BrewBasser does. He goes to a stock market, which is just like any market, but instead of selling apples or LeDis paintings, it just sells shares of stock in a lot of companies.

The main one in the US is the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), but there are stock markets around the world. Australia has one called the ASE (Australian Stock Exchange), Japan has one called the Nikkei, etc. etc.

They give you a nice, easy to remember series of letters, this is your ticker symbol to represent your company. The ticker symbol for Bank of America, for example, is BAC. The symbol for Google is GOOG. This is from the days when stock traders got all their info across an early precursor to the internet called the stock ticker, which printed out stock symbols and prices on tape in some broker's office, from the stock market. They had to be short because thousands of companies were being sent around on this ticker tape machine, and they wanted the names to be really short because tape costs money. This was how you found out what your stock was selling for. You sat around staring at a freaking tape coming out of a machine, waiting for your symbol to come up.

The NYSE gives BrewBasser's company the symbol GUNZ. Now people can find out what his company is selling for by entering the symbol at a site like Yahoo Finance.

Let's say The Stain, in his first foray into the stock market, buys 100 shares. The stock price is $12, so this cost The Stain $1200, which he had to sell his car for, and now he rides a bike to work and his neighbors laugh at him. Ah, but they won't be laughing for long. Or, they'll be laughing even harder. It all depends on how things go.

To add insult to injury, the people who arrange for the stock to be sold (brokers) charge The Stain $10.95 for the transaction. Nothing is free, especially in the stock market. The Stain creates a post on his favorite bulletin board to decry this injustice.

So BrewBasser sells the shares, and keeps 51% of them for himself, because if anyone, or any group, gets more than 50% of that stock, he no longer has control of the company and they can throw him out. When you sell shares, you're selling parts of the company, and anyone who owns more than half controls the company, no matter who started it or who works there. This happened to the founders of Cisco - they sold more than half the company and got fired. They still owned whatever shares they owned, but they no longer had a job at the company they founded.

So, BrewBasser opens five new stores with the $12 million dollars he raised in his Initial Public Offering (IPO, basically the initial sale of the stock.) The new stores do great, because everyone loves how BrewBasser has somehow skirted California law and made them all fully automatic. Woohoo!

When a company that is publicly trades does well, then the stock price goes up, because the company is worth more. It does not necessarily go up by the exact amount of how the value has changed, though. Valuation of stocks is insanely complicated, and also can be driven by emotion.

Why is Bank of America (BAC) worth $20 a share, then a week later worth $11 a share? This is a question I would like the answer to myself. Very much. The value of the company did not decrease by almost half, but people got scared, and thought that because of the economy, it probably wouldn't make much money in the future. The stock price reflects what people think the company is worth, and is going to be worth in the future.

But people love BrewBasser's company and see a big future for it, so the stock price goes up like a rocket. $15, $39, $100, $230, finally today it is at $295. At this point, BrewBasser decides to split the stock, because he wants the stock price to be affordable. So he splits the stock 3 to 1. The Stain's stock is now worth 1/3rd of what it was before, but he has 3 shares for every 1 share he used to have, so now he has 300 shares, and they're worth $98.33 each. His stock is worth $29,500 now.

You don't have to split stock, by the way. Berkeshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet's investment company, has never split, and one share now costs $90,000. It used to be $147,000. Warren Buffet doesn't give a crap whether you can afford his stock or not.

Also, some stocks pay dividends. This is basically taking the profit that the company has and splitting it up by one million, and paying each share that amount. So every quarter, The Stain gets on average 25 cents per share. With the new 300 shares he has, he's making $75, and let's say since he's just turning around and buying new stocks every time that happens.

By the way, people have gotten rich on small numbers of shares over a long time. Early investors in Wal Mart who owned only a small amount, who held their shares did very well. Stocks can go up an unlimited amount.

The Stain decides he doesn't want to be exposed to just one stock, because what if the California Legislature closes that loophole that lets BrewBasser sell automatic weapons? The company will probably be severely affected and the stock price will crash. So The Stain sells 2/3rds of his holdings and spends 1/3rd on another stock (a company called "Folsom Example Stories, Inc.", ticker symbol WTF). He also decides that even having money in two stocks is too limiting, so he invests in what is called a mutual fund.

A mutual fund is simply a collection of other stocks. There is a huge and frightening array of mutual funds. Some mutual funds only buy tech stocks like Google, Apple and Microsoft. Some only buy industrials like GE, Kraft Foods and Chevron. Others only invest in big companies, or small companies, or any combination anyone wants to invent.

So then, one day, things start to go to hell. How do we know its going to hell? We can't watch individual prices, they're too volatile and tell us too little about the economy as a whole, or the sector we are interested in. Some nice people make a list of stocks, and they call that an index.

One of the most popular and influential indexes is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. When people say "The Dow went down 400 points today", this is what they mean. The Dow is not a stock or a fund, it's just a list of companies and their stock prices. There are 30 companies on the Dow right now, all very large companies that are thought to represent big companies as a whole pretty well. These companies include GM, AT&T, Walt Disney Company and McDonald's.

So basically, when the Dow starts to fall, the biggest, most stable companies in the country are making less money and becoming less valuable. This is a good indicator of the stock market as a whole, and the future economy.

There are other indexes too, like the NASDAQ (which is tech companies) and the S&P 500, which tracks 500 companies.

We could talk about the myriad of other securities and how to trade them, but you're probably bored and stopped reading five paragraphs ago. But just as an example, you don't have to buy stocks thinking they're going to go up (which is called "buying long" or "going long"). If you think they're going to go down, you can sell them short, which is basically selling stocks you don't own and buying them later, hopefully at a lower price. But if the stock actually goes up, you lose money, and since it can go up an unlimited amount, you can lose an unlimited amount. Short selling was stopped when the market was really tanking, but now you can do it again.

So the Dow is going down, and The Stain interprets this as a sign of a coming economic downturn. He thinks agricultural companies are going to do ok because no matter what happens, people gotta eat (this is a popular strategy today actually). So he finds a mutual fund that invests in agriculture stocks. He chooses DBA.

Now he owns stock in many companies by owning the fund.

Then things go right to hell. Companies are laying off, people are spending less, and the economy is in the crapper. Worse, California elected Gavin Newsom to be governor and he closed that gun loophole. But The Stain is a very clever individual. He is friends with the secretary in Newsom's office, and she tells him that the new law is going to happen. The Stain, seeing the BrewBasser's company is going to be ruined, sells all of his stock in the company. The next day, the law goes through and BrewBasser's stock goes down 90%.

If you know something that the general public does not, and you buy or sell a stock based on that info, that is called insider trading, and it is thoroughly illegal. Martha Stewart went to prison for this. The Stain only had 100 shares of stock in GUNZ though, so his sale doesn't look out of the ordinary. If it had been 100,000 shares, the SEC would soon be knocking on his door and asking all kinds of uncomfortable questions. Damn do-gooders.

The agriculture stocks do ok, as expected. Unfortunately, Folsom Example Stories, Inc. goes out of business because there's just no money in writing example stories. That stock plunges and The Stain loses all of that investment, but since he diversified, he's still doing ok.

BrewBasser goes on to start a new company, Full Auto Beer, but it just isn't the same. He falls into a vat at the brewery, and stays there for a week.

Famous painter LeDis ended up in a huge controversy in the art world: It turned out that he worked for the military and contributed money to the McCain campaign. This was intolerable, and he was hounded out. He eventually made a living analyzing the migratory movement of African Swallows, which is not good work because as we all know, African Swallows are non-migratory.

Finally, The Stain returns to his neighborhood, triumphant. He takes the money he got from selling GUNZ and buys a custom Ford F-150, black, totally sweet ride. He drives down the street now with pride as he surveys the wrecked lives of his neighbors, most of whom are now unemployed, alcoholic and involved in prostitution in some way.

"Revenge is a dish best served cold, ****ers" he cackles under his breath.