Better Banter

Finally catching up with some of my reading and came across Scott Johnson's annual post about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and specifically Lincoln's scathing rejoinder of July 10, 1858. Lincoln spoke in response to Douglas' speech the previous night. He had no word processor, no team of writers, and certainly no teleprompter, but he penned and delivered a speech for the ages. Worth reading again even if you've seen it a hundred times: Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, sometime about the 4th of July, for some reason or other. These 4th of July gatherings I suppose have their uses. If you will indulge me, I will state what I suppose to be some of them. We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty---or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point

Rain has made for a lazy day indoors today, and I wanted to revisit the notion I brought up earlier of CAFE standards and the government directing product strategy. The argument seems to be that the Big Three has been terrible at choosing what people want (not making enough small cars) and perhaps the U.S. Government can force them to do what consumers have wanted all along.. It's true the Big Three made few small cars and loads of bigger and bigger SUVs. They also profited handsomely from the practice because consumers bought up the behemoths like hotcakes - not because there were no alternatives, but because they wanted large vehicles and gas was cheap. Obviously, the manufacturers were ill-prepared for a sharp increase in gas prices. It was always a risk, and in hindsight it was one that was managed poorly. But that's what capitalism is: you take risks and you may profit or lose your shirt. I have a little something to do with product strategy at my company. I have made LOA

Look, America. It's time we all say this together: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." As I mentioned earlier, we seem to be either unable or unwilling to look beyond the tips of our noses to see how whatever it is we're doing now is going to play out in the future. Today's case in point: New CAFE standards for automobiles. Let's back this up and proceed deliberately here. What are CAFE standards? Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards were imposed on automakers in the wake of the OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s to help reduce fuel consumption by automobiles. The idea, of course, was to force automakers to make more fuel-efficient vehicles. It worked, but with a wrinkle. Fuel economy standards were broken out by type of vehicle. "Average fuel economy" is actually a fairly complicated formula, not a simple arithmetic mean, but that doesn't much matter to the purposes of this discussion. The end message for the automakers was not that each

Read some WSJ on Dead Tree last night on the plane. Good editorial about the climate change fiasco facing the G8. It's always a little more complicated than it seems, isn't it? Meanwhile, the supposed economic benefits of "green technologies" are evaporating. In Germany, government subsidies for installing solar panels -- and, it was presumed, thereby creating domestic manufacturing jobs -- backfired when it turned out that it was cheaper to make solar panels in China. A recent paper from Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada Álvarez noted that since Spain started investing in a "green jobs" policy nine years ago, the country has lost 110,500 jobs in other parts of the economy. That amounts to 2.2 jobs lost for every green job created. Thomas Sowell laments frequently that politicians don't "think beyond Stage One." Stage One gets somebody elected. Stage Three is somebody else's problem. We need to start recognizing that Stage Three is everybo

Wrote last week but neglected to actually post: Nightline has become simply absurd. Tonight: Hit piece on Palin ("controversy" with Letterman consisted of Palin accusing him of being strangely obsessed with her daughter... Wouldn't be newsworthy to repeat what he said, would it?) Next was something about a couple of Christians taking their message to remote and dangerous parts of the world, and the tone was a bit snarky, in my opinion. But they outdid themselves with a story about how many people live to be centenarians in Japan. They report that in 1963, there were only 153 people who had reached that milestone. Today there are over 36,000. They spent most of the piece giving the boilerplate soft news profiles of very nice but very old people, and reported many assorted theories, including diet, for the phenomenon. But then, inexplicably, they say it's all at risk... due to us. Yes, ominous music coupled with shots of Burger King and McDonalds and the warning that al