You would think I’d think a socialist style bailout of an industry where the workers make good wages with good benefits would be a great idea. But I just don’t see it helping. And for some reason it makes me mad that these companies set themselves up for this kind of failure again and again throughout their histories.* For a company that’s losing $1bil a month, I am unsure of what a bailout would do for GM. I await their proposed plans that are due sometime in early December. And I hope they do come up with an excellent plan that has a great chance of working. But I just don’t think it can be done.

* I read this evening that after WWII, a form of centralized/socialized pension was proposed, but the fear of communism was so great that the companies themselves said they’d take on the costs themselves instead. After that, we’ve had our Michigan Democratic Representatives and Senators (some of whom I vote for, so I guess I’m part of the problem), namely John Dingell (who has been in office since 1955), who has fought hard for the car companies and against regulation of any kind (I’m mostly talking fuel efficiency/emissions here), which automatically gets the car companies stuck in their ways, while the foreign companies continue to innovate. I don’t blame the UAW a whole lot here, because I feel like they took what they could get when it was available. I do blame the arrogance and shortsightedness of management though, in offering things without thinking about the future repercussions. Things like offering healthcare to employees in retirement was a way to avoid giving a wage increase, which in turn, made their numbers look better from one quarter to the next. The notion that this would become a crazy Pyramid scheme type situation never occurred to them, apparently. We should probably also investigate what kind of crazy compensation management gets. When Rick Wagoner states, upon being asked if he could give up his $2.2 million for $1 for a year, “I really hadn’t thought through that yet. I do have a son in college I have to pay for somehow,” I am highly confused by the state of things here. First off, does he really use his entire $2.2mil every year, and basically live paycheck to paycheck like the average working person, without having saved at least a little of that for his son’s college tuition? Secondly… well, I don’t know… Like I said, I am confused and a little bit weirded out that I’m siding with going for Chapter 11 bankruptcy here. I did hear a quote recently: “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell”… so, if we claim to be a free-market society, then all these bailout actions make absolutely no sense without allowing for intense government regulation and oversight. Otherwise, what’s the punishment for running your giant corporation into the ground? The solution to this needs to be giant systemic changes in the way things work (as far as government involvement in industry and universal healthcare), it seems, and it seems pretty impossible in our country.**

** I haven’t cited many sources here, but if you really want (feel free to ask), I’ll Google for the stuff I’ve read about these topics recently and give you a link.

Sit Up, Sit Down

Totally changing subjects:
I don’t often drag my really personal life out for display here, but my step-father-in-law (is that right?), a totally cool dude who was a Hawaiian musician and all around awesome guy, is really ill. Some kind of blood cancer that is eating his bones. Seriously. So it’s been kind of rough with the news of it worsening, etc. My wife will be going to Hawaii to visit in December, but I won’t be able to make the trip. Needless to say, the emotions surrounding the illness, the last minute travel plans, etc has been interesting. We are simply trying to keep our heads up and I’m trying to be a strong support for my wife. Whatever ends up happening, I am glad I have gotten to know and talk to my step-father-in-law.

Anyhow, Thanksgiving is a couple days away and that means long weekend, which I am very much looking forward to. Have a happy one!

Quick note to mention this:

Worldmapper

This site has a ton of world maps with the sizes of the countries adjusted to show various attributes proportionally. The map above is the one for world population. I first found this when I was directed to the site of Mark Newman, a physicist at the University of Michigan. He did maps of the U.S. like this showing the results of the presidential election, which are really interesting too. He also wrote the software that is used to generate these maps, which is interesting to look into if you’re a geek like me.

I recommend looking at the malaria deaths, rabies deaths, and alcohol and cigarettes exports for how interestingly imbalanced they are.

Part Time Songs

Also, there was a pile of “No on Prop 2″ pamphlets on a table right next to the line, which I thought wasn’t appropriate inside a polling place. There was also a box of Kleenex on the same table, so I put the box on top of the pamphlets. Now I’m thinking I should’ve just taken them all.

*Purely from a cartographic perspective, it’s actually a pretty cool map. Green and dark green denote strong Evangelical Christianity, so you can see where the U.S. stands there… Seems to also be a bit of activity in South America and Australia. Doesn’t seem to have much of a foothold in Europe, Africa or Asia, though.

Well, Friday again. My plan is to finish the Marshmallow Mission* 2-song EP this weekend and post that up on Part Time Songs (need to make some cover art too…); other than that, my family will be celebrating a late Diwali by having Indian buffet on Sunday. Other than THAT, I am hoping to get some sleep and hang around the house. I love hanging around the house, lazing about with no agenda. Except that I always seem to give myself an agenda (”record stuff by Sunday”, “vacuum out car”, “read for fun” — yes, I actually have that on a to-do list… what is wrong with me?). I tend to feel a little guilty when I’m not doing SOMETHING. You’d think I’d be more productive.

Happy Halloween.

And please please please make the effort and go vote.

*”Marshmallow Mission” consists of just me and Dan. The idea is to do these songs together where it’s really quick and easy. But it hasn’t been that quick**, due to my time restraints. Anyway, so it’s an easy mission, easy==!hard==soft==Marshmallow. There’s other reasons for the name when it came into my head, but that’s the rational, makes-sense answer.

**Though it’s coming together fairly easily, now that I’m learning/using/exploring Sonar 7 and the workflow is a lot smoother and easier than FL Studio***

***Though I did end up purchasing the VST versions of the FL Parametric EQ2 and other plugins that are built into FL, so I could use them in Sonar, because they are really awesome… I mean, showing a graphical signal analysis in the paraEQ alone is worth the money.

Just wanted to make a quick post pointing you to this other blog post that compares the McCain tax plan to the Obama tax plan. It takes the popular diagram made by the Washington Post:

… and pokes holes in the way they chose to lay out the data. I mean, the Post’s chart DOES make Obama’s plan look pretty good, but the way they calculated the average tax cut is faulty (read the post for more).

Anyway, the person at this blog takes the same data and actually charts it out in a fair and mathematically sound way, which shows that Obama’s tax plan is actually EVEN BETTER for those of us who don’t make millions of dollars*:

Sorry for the lack of analysis, but I’m hurrying to get out of here and to go on to enjoy my Friday night. Hope to have more better/faster/stronger/cooler content in the near future!

BTW, all this graphing and analysis is courtesy of:
http://chartjunk.karmanaut.com/taxplans/

* if you do, in fact, make millions of dollars, please post a comment, because damn, a fucking millionaire is reading my blog, and I need to know these things.

The following image (found here at BoingBoing, created by Aden Renkai, via Political Wire) shows Palin’s debating flow; I’d say it’s a pretty sound algorithm.

There’s been a lot of talk about how many of the statements Sarah Palin has been speaking in her interviews are total gibberish.* It’s not hard to hear (and it’s very difficult to follow), but I like this article in Slate by Kitty Burns Florey, where she diagrams some of the particularly winding sentences uttered by Palin. The above image is an example of the diagram for “It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go?”

* Among the things she said that WEREN’T necessarily gibberish, but definitely “non-answers”, my favorite has been where she was asked by Katie Couric about what newspapers and magazines she’s read to keep abreast of the issues in the world. Her answer was that she read “all of them” and that she had a various variety of sources, and that she reads whatever is put in front of her. Really? You read all of them? You read Le Monde? Do you read Playboy for the articles? Do you read Worker’s World? Do you read the Hindustan Times? If so, name one of your favorite columnists.