My next car....

....actually it's a truck, but we're splitting hairs.

I want one of those little ISIS Edition Toyota trucks.  Those things are just the best!  Think about it....they can be strafed by jets firing bullets the size of refrigerators and it doesn't faze them.  Napalm just seems to scorch their paint a bit.  Tomahawk missiles might blow them up, but apparently all you have to do is roll them over and they just start right up again, never mind a few missing parts. And if you ever want to load up the guys and treat them to lunch at Applebee's, they'll accommodate 10, plus their grenade launchers.

The best part, though, is they don't ever need gas.  True!  Whenever they show drone footage of the destruction in Syria or Iraq, have you ever seen a gas station?  Or a NAPA store?  Come to think of it, I don't think they ever need replacement tires, either.

I think Ford and GM and all the rest have been upselling us a bunch of phony maintenance stuff.  Wise up America!

S

Credit where credit is due

In the three weeks since President Donald (Donnie John) Trump was inaugurated it seems his administration has been plagued with the "Ready, Fire, Aim" syndrome.  His Executive Orders have almost become comical in how half-baked they come out.  Not surprisingly, all Democrats, many Independents, and even a growing number of Republicans are shaking in their boots, wondering what's going to hit the fan next.  

The good news in all this is that Saturday Night Live has no shortage of material to run with.  There's no such thing as "bad" publicity, right?  Right?

But to be fair, I can think of one thing that Prez Donnie John has done that he should be commended for.  On a regular basis (so far) he has held meetings with business leaders as diverse as Intel, Ford, GM, and all the airlines, small business groups, labor groups, and even special interest groups, supposedly to find out what's on their minds and what he can do to get them to ramp up hiring.  

Some of it has been for show no doubt, as when the CEO of Intel announced that they were spending $7Billion on a new facility in Arizona that will all total add 10,000 new jobs.  Donnie John of course took credit, even though it later turned out that Intel had been planning this for several years.  Still, momentum being what it is, expect others to jump on the bandwagon, too. From his perspective it might be an "ugly win", but it's still a win.  Kudos.

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Yesterday all the stock markets shot through the roof on the news from the Oval Office that we could expect a major announcement in a couple of weeks on tax reform.  "It's tremendous, just incredible.  You'll love it!  Really, you will."

This could be trickier to get through than you might think.  A big tax cut sounds great, until you realize that it will swell the Federal deficit even more, something the hard-core GOP deficit hawks are going to balk at.  The sales pitch will be that the deficit will be offset by more tax revenue due to increased business activity / lower unemployment.  

The Democrats will throw right back Kansas Governor Sam Brownback's failed attempt to do this very thing, leaving his state with a terrible budget mess.   

What do I think?  I think it will be interesting.  *wink*

S

You're all invited to my donkey barbecue

Now for that "donkey barbecue" I promised, better known as an ass chewing:  

We can sure "talk the talk", be we apparently aren't worth a damn at "walking the walk".  

Any time someone pulls out an American flag, we all applaud and whoop and holler and shoot off fireworks.  Many of us will see a service man or woman in uniform, or a veteran wearing a hat so proclaiming, and walk over and shake their hand and thank them for their service.  That's all well and good, BUT....

....When our veterans come home with wounds that previous generations of warriors would have died from on the battlefield, we just shuffle them off to a VA hospital and pat ourselves on the back for "taking such good care of our heroes".  

*pass the potato salad, please*

Fact is, our VA system sucks!  My wife is one of those currently being jerked around by the VA.  (Did you know the VA hospital computers don't talk to the VA HQ computers?)  Let me say right up front that they have some very caring people, and they have at times done wonderful things for her.  But the system as a whole is broken.

I get so sick and tired of hearing those Tea Party types say they are going to cut taxes.  They're like a broken record.  That's much too simplistic.  (Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, considering the simple minds that think up such one-liners.)  IMO, we're not overtaxed....our tax money is just squandered on the wrong things.

Why can't the VA system get their act together?  Is the system too complex?  Then simplify it.  Is it under-funded?  Then take those billions of $$$ of subsidies doled out to immensely profitable private companies and redirect that to the VA.  

Is it under-staffed?  Then transfer 10,000 of those otherwise questionably productive gubment bureaucrats elsewhere and train them to clear up all that backlog of red tape that is preventing our hurting veterans from getting the care WE PROMISED THEM.  (Then work to abolish the machine what makes the red tape.)

I'm thinking the tail is wagging the dog.  Our government bureaucracy is so bloated and entrenched that department secretaries aren't leaders at all, but just caretakers.  They seem to get settled into their Secretary of ____ job and then just oversee what has been going on there for decades.  What's wrong with COMPLETELY reorganizing how things are done, one section, one department at a time?

Take VA Secretary Eric Shenseki for example:  A retired 4-star General, an honorable man, no doubt.  He's been in his job since 2009, yet the VA seems to be as dysfunctional today as it ever has been.  Perhaps more so, even.  WTH?  What's he been doing the past 5 years?? 

Re-assign some, retire some, fire some, throw out the old rules and write all-new ones if necessary....JUST GET THE JOB DONE!

If Alan Mulally could move from Boeing to become Ford CEO....dead man walking, going down for the third time, dysfunctional, executive backstabbing Ford....and slap it around and reorganize it top to bottom and turn it around, why can't someone do something similar at the VA?   

"But that's the way we've always done it" is the problem.  Whenever a bureaucrat utters that they should be shown the door, pronto.

Come on people!  Fire off an email.  Demand our "leaders" lead.  And if they won't, then kick them to the curb and get new ones who will.  Our hurting veterans deserve better.

Rant over.

S

"If I had some film I'd take a picture if I had a camera"

That title probably makes good sense to an electric car engineer.

The American Automobile Association (AAA) has done tests to determine the effects of heat and cold on the battery life of electric cars, and the results might make a thinking person wonder, "Why bother?" 

Electric plug-in type cars, with the exception of Tesla, have a range of between 38 and 87 miles, or at least that's what their manufacturers claim.  

But according to the AAA test, if the battery is in a cold climate, that number drops by an average of 57%, to a range of 16-50 miles.  In a hot climate the range is degraded by an average of 33%, to just 25-58 miles.  Which I guess isn't so bad if everywhere you go is downhill.

And it gets better: Two of the cars tested, the Mitsubishi and the Ford, had a dedicated "battery temperature maintenance system" (to heat or cool the battery) which in theory should enable the cars to maintain their original range estimate, right?  WRONG!

Researchers found that with only one source of power in the car....the battery....to power the temperature maintenance system, the energy the system sucks from the battery to heat/cool the battery reduces the charge of the battery which....wait for it....shortens the range of the car.  Well DUH!  It's like watching a dog chase his tail.

Here's to you, electric car engineers.*  You rock!  :)

Happy Weekend everyone!
  
S

* I'm sure they're brilliant.  It's just that their theoretical world hasn't caught up with the REAL world.  (I think Tesla snapped up the few that "get it".) 

The art of logos

In my humble opinion, the biggest con man (men) alive today are the ones who design corporate logos.  They'll tell you they're trying to define the essence of a company by just one word or one symbol.  OK, fair enough, but why does it take a whole team of $500-an-hour graphic designers months to come up with a winning design?  Are they the ultimate control freaks or just high-class pickpockets?

A story in this morning's news told of how new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (who makes considerably more than $500 an hour) spent an entire weekend with her "logo design team" putting the finishing touches on a new symbol that had taken months (and probably cost millions) to get to that point. 

Some logos make sense, having a story behind them:

Ford's logo says....well....FORD, as in "Henry Ford".  The epitome of simple.

Audi's four interlocking rings represent the German companies Horch, Auto Union, DKW, and Wanderer that joined together to form Audi in 1932.

BMW used to make airplane engines, and the blue and white circle in the middle of their logo represents a spinning propeller.

I'm guessing their logo "design teams" knocked those out in an afternoon, probably drawn on a cocktail napkin after a few beers down at the corner tavern.  But nowadays we tend to over-think everything.  We have to hear from (pay) graphic designers, consultants, psychologists, focus groups, etc, before we can come up with a winning design.

The stock brokerage firm Merrill Lynch's logo is a bull, as in "Bull Market".  Get it?  I wonder how many million dollars it cost to design that stylized bull?

But back to Yahoo.  Here was their old logo:

Here is their new logo:

They wanted something that would look "sophisticated, yet whimsical".

Here are the doodles that it took to get there:

I have visions of the mail room boy pushing his cart down the hall when he stumbled across the logo team hard at work.  "Why don't you just straighten out the letters, and make that last O a bit bigger and tilt the exclamation point?  That would be sorta whimsical."

DOH!

But what do I know.  I designed ours on the back of a cocktail napkin after a couple of beers down at the corner tavern.

To me it says "Sophisticated, yet too cheap to hire a design team".  ;)

S

Auto Show debrief

Yesterday my friend Neil and I had a good time at the Dallas Auto Show.  We rode the light rail to the convention center, avoiding all the traffic and parking hassles....easily worth the few bucks it cost, and we arrived ahead of most of the crowd.  Much to my delight and surprise the show was NOT dominated by Bubba trucks.  I was rather disappointed that there weren't any wild concept cars.  None.

Of course I was immediately drawn to the European exotics:

Like this 2014 Aston Martin Vanquish.

Of course I ordered mine "Well Equipped".

After gawking at this more proletarian Vantage ($150K) for a while I was invited inside the velvet rope and assigned my own personal advisor, Aaron Stephenson IV*. Before long I had one of his high-dollar catalogues and was calling him "Biff" and picking colors and accessories.  He's probably still waiting for me after I excused myself for a rest room visit.

Maserati Gran Cabrio

McLaren MP4-12C

The new, soon-to-be introduced Jaguar F-Type.

I didn't say there weren't ANY Bubba trucks there.  This was some kind of "wrap" treatment you can cover your truck with enabling you to hide from ducks and deer and such.

I'm not a big Range Rover fan, but I must admit the Evoque ($58K) was rather impressive.

There were some vintage oddities stuck over in one corner, like this Datsun 2000.  It was quite a screamer back in its day....

....as was this '71 Datsun 240Z.  As a college student I lusted for one of these.  ('Course, I lusted for all kinds of things back in my college days. ;)  As I didn't have $34 dollars back then, much less $3400, it became another of my lost loves.

Awwww, my little Fiat 500 Abarth.  Innit cute?  One of these days I'm gonna convince K it followed me home.

One thing I took away is that cars are getting ridiculously expensive.  A decent BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Lexus, Infinity, etc, is just more than I want to pay for wheels.  They're for those who want a "look at me" experience.  Or Lottery winners.

What I found was that Subaru and Mazda in particular have some quite good cars at very reasonable prices....mid-upper $20's.  Even Volkswagen's are getting pricey, although the new GTI @ $33K still seemed like a good value.  Chrysler products seemed way behind the curve, and poor GM seems to be in a continued slow decline.  Ford, however, had some good small world-class cars worth looking at.

The Geneva or Frankfurt or New York show it wasn't, but all things considered the Dallas show was worth the effort to attend.  Oh...and the "booth babes"?  Not a disappointment, either.  ;)

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On today's "to-do" list?  I asked K if she wanted to go to the Greenville Avenue St. Patrick's Day Parade and Alcohol Soiree, but she said she'd rather take a bullet to the head.  I guess that's a "no".   At this point I'm just hoping for lunch out.

Have a great weekend everyone.

S

*not his real name

More Microsoft pollution

I read today that Ford, which was flying high after saying NO to government bail-out money during the financial crisis, is now in a tailspin.  According to Consumer Report, based on reliability they've dropped from 5th to 10th place, while JD Powers has dropped them from 5th to 23rd place based on customer satisfaction.  And it has nothing to do with the engineering or styling of their cars.  No, by those criteria they're quite good, actually.  They're being panned because of their "MyTouch" system, a dash mounted touch-screen used in place of traditional knobs and switches.  It was developed by Microsoft, and it's crap!


I'm Microsoft-phobic. I loathe Microsoft.  Every PC I've ever owned proved to be more trouble than it was worth, all thanks to Microsoft.  They froze up regularly, need "patches" daily, and were a virus nightmare.  I finally tried a Mac a couple of years ago and have nothing but good to report.  I know Windows runs most businesses, but I also know it's a huge source of irritation for them.  I don't think I'm alone feeling the way I do about this:  Microsoft has been losing market share and their stock price hasn't done squat in 5 years.  Apple on the other hand is on a roll, and is now the most valuable company in the world, worth over $500B.  Which begs the question....What was Ford thinking?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Our downsizing continues.  Last night a guy came by and bought my file cabinet.  It would have made my day if he'd taken the desk, too, but no such luck.  Fortunately I still have over two weeks to unload more stuff find new homes for my family heirlooms.  *sniff*  Today I'm back to The Container Store for more plastic see-thru storage boxes. Those things are great!  

They ought to put me on TV...."Anti-Hoarders".  All the slobs would watch and think, "Ewwww!  How could those people live like that?"  Haha!

Ciao, y'all.

S

Suddenly I feel like a techie!

I never thought of myself as being too technologically savvy.  Far from it.  I proudly wear the label "Neanderthal".  Then I read about Larry Rogers and his wife Joan in the local newspaper.  We'll just conveniently skip over the fact that they're 86 and 84 years old respectively.  


To quote Larry, he doesn't have a "computer, cell phone, iPhone, uPhone, myPod, yourPod, hisPad, herPad, answering machine,VCR, cable TV," etc.  He still uses a rotary dial telephone, a manual typewriter, and watches TV on a boxy 19-inch model.  He did have to break down recently and buy a digital converter box so he could keep his antique Magnavox TV up and running.  He's never used an ATM machine.  When he buys something and the clerk expects him to swipe his credit card, he just hands it to them instead and says, "Here, you do it."  He said "I tried a time or two, but after twisting that credit card around every which way, putting the stripe on this side and that, I just started saying 'you do it'".


He drives a 1992 Ford Crown Victoria.  It has a cassette player and cruise control, neither of which he has ever used.  He says he doesn't own a tape, and "the idea of sticking the gas pedal open just sounds nuts.  Why, I wouldn't feel in control."  And Joan doesn't even own an electric clothes dryer.  "I get out there in the sun and hang clothes on the line.  It's good exercise."


Understand, these aren't poor people, and they're certainly not dumb.  Larry, a veterinarian, retired 30 years ago thanks to his smart investments, and since then they've traveled all over the world.  (By airplane?)  He still manages his portfolio with spiral bound ledgers and a hand held calculator.  He did, however, recently buy a new calculator after his decades-old TI model finally died.  (Whoa.....slow down there, Larry!)


So you see, next to Larry and Joan I feel like an absolute techie.  I have an iPhone with lots of apps, several of which I can actually use.  I have a Kindle and a computer and I know how to blog.  I have a digital camera and, yes, even an electrical clothes drying machine.  


No, I'm not making fun of the Rogers'.  Deep down I actually envy them.  Imagine being happy with what you have and where you live and what you drive.  Do all these modern whiz-bang tools we have today really make our lives easier and less complicated?  I think I know how Larry and Joan would answer that.  I'd be willing to meet them half way.  ;)


S