Innovation is for Losers
This proposed $25 billion loan to General Motors is really bothering me. I don't understand how anyone could think they deserve it; they dug themselves into this stupid hole by refusing to run their business like a business. It seems like all GM does is crank out trucks and SUVs, ignoring the fact that people won't be able to afford to drive them for much longer.
So how did this happen? It's pretty obvious, really. GM makes about ten to fifteen thousand dollars on every SUV they sell, making them far and away GM's most profitable vehicle. When gas prices took off this year, people stopped buying them (30% drop). In fact, GM's US sales have dropped about 45% YTD. Instead of behaving like a business and adapting to changing market conditions, GM did stupid stuff like offering $2 gas to their customers for a year. Obviously, it's a little too late for them to do anything about it now, but they should have seen this coming. Look at Toyota, for example. They started selling Priuses in Japan in 1997 and worldwide in 2001, several years before the American car manufacturers did. General Motors is unoriginal, uncreative, and unimaginative. They're just now coming out with the Volt over there ←, although I wonder how it will work out based on the debacle that was the EV-1.
HFS+J is not Your Friend
I tried to install Windows on my MacBook Pro with Apple's little tools, but they failed miserably. They decided that they were hungry for a delicious snack, so they ate my partition table.
I tried a couple of tools and found one that could get it back, so all was well for a while. Then I went to install Windows again and Microsoft thought it would be cute and refuse to write to the hard drive if it couldn't install to the last partition on the disk. So I repartitioned the disk and went to restore my OS X disk image to its new home.
Guess Who's Making Headlines
Barack Obama, that's who. I found a neat collection of newspaper and magazine covers featuring Obama. Just thought I'd share.
I Hope You Voted Today
I did; there was a nice old man handing out stickers. Today should really be a federal holiday.
Keep your eyes on FiveThirtyEight for updates; they're predicting that we'll have a winner by 7:00 if the states closing their polls by then go as expected. Also, CNN was talking about where all the voting difficulties are today. Anyone care to guess where? Why, Ohio and Pennsylvania of course. The biggest issue is people disappearing from the registries; some black woman called in to complain that she had mysteriously vanished between the primaries and today and had to cast a provisional ballot. We all know what happens to those: they get thrown out. We'll see; I really don't see how the Republicans can cheat enough to keep Obama from winning; they can probably only sway the vote something like 1-2% (I hope), leaving enough room for Obama to win handsomely. I didn't run into any problems, but I'm not a minority, so I dunno. Hopefully everybody will get to vote :/
