What's wrong with the Economy?

In this video from moveon.org, Robert Reich explains in 2 minutes and 15 seconds what's wrong with the economy.

Supreme Court Rules for Wal-Mart

No Class Action for Sex Discrimination

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that women who wanted to sue Wal-Mart for pervasive sex-discrimination could not do so in a class action lawsuit. The Court ruled that where a company has a stated policy against discrimination, individual acts of discrimiantion alleged by individual employees lack sufficient commonality to justify a class action suit. This just underscores the need for companies to have policies against gender discrimination and sexual harassment. I expect we will be seeing more training videos like the one below.

New 550 Horsepower Camaro ZL-1

Here's a picture of the new Chevrolet Camaro ZL-1. It has a version of the Corvette 6.2 liter V-8 engine with 550 horsepower. It comes with a slick-shifting manual transmission or an automatic. I understand that LeBron James will be getting an automatic version, because the clutch is not his strong suit.

Photo and news item via autoblog.com

Did I Cost the Democrats a Senate Seat?

Worrying about an "Evan Bayh is an Alien" remark

Recently I was at the gym reading Indianapolis Monthly magazine while half-assedly pedaling the exercise bike. The magazines were kind of old. This one was from January 2011, and the cover story was a post-retirement interview with Senator Evan Bayh.

If you don't remember the political follies of last year, I'll give you a refresher. In February of last year, (nominally) Democratic senator Evan Bayh abruptly and surprisingly announced that he would not run for re-election in November of that year. Bayh had millions of dollars in his campaign chest, and nobody was planning on opposing him in the May primary. Long story short, the Democrats didn't have time to field an fund a top tier candidate for the race, and they lost the Senate seat in November.

Why did I think that I was responsible? In the Indianapolis Monthly article, which is not available online, Bayh talks about various reasons that he decided not to run. He mentions mean posts about him in blogs including one post that he is actually an alien from another planet. When I read that, I paused. I remembered that I had mentioned the possibility that Evan Bayh is an alien in my blog. Specifically, "Has he always been a spy from the planet Mediocrity sent here to take up space until his identity is discovered? "

Did my outing Bayh as an alien cause him not to run? I got so anxiety-filled that I had to dash home to go online and look for my blog entry. Much to my relief, I posted AFTER he had decided not to run, so I didn't cause his brave Sir Robin election-avoidance maneuver. Apparently, somebody else discovered that Bayh was an alien. I was just a good guesser.

Today Bayh's back in the news again. He's going to work for the Chamber of Commerce, campaigning against "excessive regulation". He's not lobbying, you understand. Evan Bayh hasn't learned anything. His pro-financial industry votes in Congress helped create the financial collapse that we're still having problems digging out from under. he fought health care reform while his wife was taking countless dollars as a board member for Wellpoint. The Senate is better off without him, but he should have done the honorable thing and either gotten out of the way earlier or run, won and resigned. Thank God that President Obama picked good ol' "Uncle Joe" Biden as his Vice-President.

Time for a marginally related video:

Happy Birthday Ford Pinto

Ford's "other" Pony car turns 40

The Ford Pinto is 40 years old, 10 years younger than me - but I still have more hair. Granted, most of it is on my back, but I digress. (Pause for "Eeewwww".) Anyway, According to Autoblog, Pinto enthusiasts are crossing the country in their painted stallions to celebrate the 40th birthday of their esteemed car. With the hundreds of thousands of Pintos that were built, there must be thousands of survivors that are crossing the country for this celebration, right? What's the number up to now? 32.

If you were 16 years old in 1977, then you remember Charlie's Angels and Sabrina Duncan's Pinto. Yes, Sabrina drove a Pinto, and she was the SMART one.

Some Good Days for Chrysler (and Fiat)

This week has been a stream of good news for Chrysler. First came May sales results, Chrysler was the only domestic manufacturer up for the month and, get this, for the first time in years, Chrysler was back in the top 3 manufacturers in sales. In fact, thanks to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, GM, Ford and Chrysler were returned to their traditional "Big 3" rankings.

In other news, Sergio Marchionne announced that Chrysler has paid off its loans from the US government and bought out all of the government share of the company, thereby rendering Fiat the majority owner and in complete control of Chrysler. The US government ended up recouping the vast majority of the money that it invested in the Chrysler bailout. At this point, Chrysler is owned by Fiat with a minority share (47%) owned by the UAW Veba.

President Obama, most likely taking a victory lap after the successful bailout, visited Chrysler's Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio today. I suspect he's not staying over night tonight and tomorrow because you know what they say about Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio. . . .

More Signs of Double-Dip Recession

House Prices Fall, Unemployment UP

Yesterday the news was that home prices are continuing to fall. Today, we hear that job growth in May was 1/3 the expected amount, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.3%.

These are signs of the dreaded double-dip recession. In honor of the double-dip recession, I will post a double-header of ice-cream themed marginally related videos.

Jack Kevorkian is Dead

Next time you get sick and go to the hospital, you can breathe a little easier that the next doctor that comes in the room won't be Dr. Jack.

MSNBC ran this picture. I'd seen it before, but I never really looked at the machine. I think it would be a great practical joke to buy his death machine at his estate sale, have your kid take it to the science fair and start explaining it. Some "F"s are just worth it.

Graphene - The Buzzword of the Decade

It's almost graduation time. If you are invited to a graduation party, and you're too cheap to get a gift, just pull the graduate aside and whisper into his/her ear "graphene". I read Popular Science and all that related mish-mash, and I can only vaguely remember hearing about graphene until this year. I've probably read a dozen articles in the past five months that mention graphene as the basis for groundbreaking technologies. Check out all the mentions of graphene in a Google news search.

What is graphene? Graphene is as simple as the lead in your pencil. It is elemental carbon, a/k/a graphite, but by convention, it is called graphene when it is found in a sheet that is one atom thick. These sheets can be layered to build a variety of shapes. When you press down with the point of your pencil, you create a little bit of graphene (mixed with carbon of other shapes and descriptions as well.)

Most of us are familiar with the carbon fiber sheets that are used to build aircraft race cars. Those sheets, though thin, are much thicker than the graphene sheets that scientists are exploring today. Graphene sheets are among the strongest substances known to science, 700 times stronger than steel according to Wikipedia. Graphene can be manipulated to show a variety of electrical properties, from rapid conduction of electrons for fast computing, to large scale electron holding in the form of ultracapacitors. There are even experiments now using graphene as the basis for cheap, thin-film solar cells.

Why the sudden interest in graphene? Scientists long known about the existence of graphene, but the substance wasn't readily available for study. Recently though, scientists have figured out how to create industrial quantities of graphene from cheap, readily available materials such as sugar and plexiglass. Graphene may eventually be the enabling technology giving us cheap, light, strong, recyclable cars, that are powered by ultracapacitors and charged by cheap home solar power, but before we get there, we need to be careful of con artists who will use the buzzword graphene to separate us and our clients from our money. Excuse me, I have to sell an ostrich ranch.

Congratulations to all the graduates of 2011.

Meet Foxconn, the monster that we created.

Yesterday there was a report of the deaths of two employees in an explosion and fire at a FoxConn plant in Chengdu, China that coincidentally or not, manufactures Apple's popular iPad. Foxconn factories have been called 21st century sweatshops. One Foxconn complex in Shenzhen employs somewhere around 500,000 workers, so it's not just a company town, it's on its way to becoming a company megopolis. Foxconn's ascendancy is a modern phenomenon. Foxconn was founded in 1974 as a Taiwanese corporation, but it didn't open its first factory in mainland China until 1988. Now Foxconn has almost one million employees, roughly five times as many as General Motors, and twenty times as many employees as Apple Inc. Foxconn makes most of Apples toys, the iPad, the iPhone, and lots for other companies as well, including the Amazon Kindle. Foxconn makes all these things, and they employ lots of people, but they don't make anything close to Apple's profits. Last year Apple made $18.4 billion on $65.2 billion in revenue. According to Wikipedia, in 2010 Foxconn had revenue just shy of Apple at $59.3 billion but only made profits of $2.2 billion. Apple's technology has generated lots of jobs, but most of them were NEVER in the US, and never will be. The manufacturing technology is also growing somewhere else than the USA. In theory, Apple could settle for less profit and manufacture more of its goods in the US, but that wouldn't sit well with Apple's shareholders including lots of US pension funds who are buying the AAPL stock at $335 a share, 16.7 times last year's earnings. The stock holders are counting on Apple becoming even more profitable. In other words, in some ways we are all to blame for corporate outsourcing behavior when we demand ever increasing earnings that are unsustainable without outsourcing.

What the growth of Foxconn tells us is that putting money in technology and education won't necessarily bring us the jobs of the future. I suspect that the million workers at Foxconn didn't get their jobs because of educations like those produced at our colleges and community colleges. Most of them got jobs because they are young, have fast hands and can sit for a long time.