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- Barack Obama will stimulate the economy by getting Americans to watch more televisionYesterday
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Suppose you asked an employer building factories in Mexico, China, and South Korea rather than the U.S., “How come you’re not building the factory here?” Perhaps the answer would be “I’m concerned that my workers won’t watch enough television. They might spend their evenings learning new skills, reading books, or volunteering.” In that case, Barack Obama is coming to the rescue of our economy by proposing a delay in our conversion to digital TV (nytimes story).
God forbid that an American would wake up one morning, turn on the television, and find out that there was no longer a broadcast analog signal. If he wanted to continue to watch, he would have to order cable, get a new TV, or buy a conversion box without a subsidy from the Federales (we have apparently spent $1.3 billion so far so that people can keep running their old power-hogging CRT televisions; now the budgeted funds for conversion box coupons have run out).
It is comforting to know that our incoming president wants to ensure that as many Americans as possible waste as much time and electricity as possible watching old analog CRTs.
[I'm almost embarrassed that I didn't add this important initiative to my economic recovery plan.]
[The government-issued coupons are for $40. The converter box
- Affirmative Action for Open Source SoftwareJanuary 6
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I mentioned to a friend my wish that, as long as the government is spending money in hopes of boosting the economy, it would spend it on something that has proven to yield very high returns, i.e., open-source software. He asked “How would you decide which projects to fund? Most of the funding for software so far has come from the Department of Defense.”
My proposal would be copied from the way that universities implement their race-based hiring programs for faculty. Each department in a university is given a fixed number of slots that they can fill by hiring whomever they believe is best qualified to be an assistant professor. If, however, a department should hire someone whose skin is dark enough to qualify them as a desirable minority, that hire does not count towards their allocation. In other words, a department with one slot that has found a white or Asian candidate can still hire that person and a favored minority in addition. This way the university enlists its entire staff in helping with race-based hiring, rather than having one administrator at the top whose job is to find potential professors with the appropriate skin tone.
How can we apply this to open-source software and government agencies? It might seem as though each government agency were spending as much money as humanly possible at all times. Yet in fact each agency has an annual budget and is constrained by that budget. If we were to set aside a few billion dollars we
- Collapse of the Ferrari marketJanuary 5
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A rich friend forwarded me an advertisement that he got…
“Ferrari of New England is pleased to announce that we have 7 brand new Ferrari’s [sic] in Stock [sic] and ready to go, including 6 F430’s [sic] (Spider’s [sic] and Coupes) and a 612 Scaglietti. This is indeed a rare opportunity to become the first original owner of a new Ferrari. Most times it takes years and a purchase of a pre-owned Ferrari to attain this status.”
- Auto sales down 35 percent; the economy must be in pretty good shapeJanuary 5
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Automobile sales in the U.S. are down 35 percent for December 2008 compared to December 2007. My conclusion is that the economy is in surprisingly good shape. Why? There is hardly a single person in the U.S. who actually needs a new car. Cars have become so durable that the easiest purchase to defer is a new car. A neighbor of mine is selling a 1997 Chrysler minivan. It has 125,000 miles on it, works perfectly, and looks almost new because it lives in a garage. He doesn’t trust it for long highway trips anymore. The Blue Book value of this car is $3000 for a private party transaction, $1625 for a trade-in. It would surely be nicer to have a brand new version of this same van (about $23,000 invoice, which presumably is the maximum you’d ever have to pay), but there would be no shame or inconvenience in driving this 12-year-old minivan.
The population growth rate of the U.S. is about 0.9 percent, so we might expect about 2.5 million cars to be sold as a consequence of newly licensed drivers (there are 250 million registered cars on our roads). There are roughly 6 million car accidents every year in the U.S. If we assume that the car is destroyed in 3 million of those, we would expect another 3 million sales due to accidents. That’s an annual sales rate of 5.5 million. In fact, sales are running at a rate of closer to 10 million, which means that 4.5 million cars are being sold as luxury splurges. That doesn’t sound like a depressio
- Should the U.S. Secretary of Commerce have some experience with commerce?January 5
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The news today describes the withdrawal of Bill Richardson from the job of Secretary of Commerce. None of the articles point out that the guy has never had a job outside of government (wikipedia). Does it make sense to have someone running Commerce who has never had any experience of trying to do any sort of business? As private industry continues to shed jobs and government continues to grow, one might argue that in the long run all U.S. jobs will be government or government contracting, but we’re not there yet. As a taxpayer, I get a bit nervous when I see the entire government run by people who’ve never been net payers of taxes (of course government workers do pay income tax, but their tax-funded salaries are larger than their tax payments, so on balance they are net recipients of tax dollars).