Big 3 Bailout..

Being from the midwest with a GM assembly plant in our city, I am sympathetic to the repercussions of a factory closing. However, the auto makers must assume the brunt of the decline in sales. They claim they don't make fuel efficient cars because "It is not what the consumer wants". Well who determines "what we want" anyway? It what we see on TV or what others are driving. All we see in advertising is trucks and suv's. All we see in movies and music videos are BIG vehicles. So I blame the auto companies for not steering the consumer cattle to smaller vehicles with promotional advertising campaigns. The profit margin in a huge vehicle is way more than a small vehicle so it kind of makes sense. And with a failsafe government creating light at the end of a tunnel, why not?

All the auto companies needed to do (about 20 years ago) is start an ad campaign promoting smaller cars and how cool they are. Put a pimped out tiny car in a rap video and there you go. They could call it the "Chevy Bling". Give one to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and it would sell. It would (have been) a long term transition, but the bigwigs are smart, they had to see this coming. They had the inside scoop on how people paid for vehicles and I am sure there are detailed analytics on financing. People have been paying less cash and financing longer. Most people never OWN a vehicle now.

Anyhow, I had a 78 Toyota Corolla that go almost 30 miles a gallon. That was freakin' 30 years ago. Yo can't tell me that technology has stalled. I just think the money went in the wrong direction. And now it is going to be coming out of my pocket... again.

The decline..

I was just sitting here dreading the onset of winter, watching Indiana fade from brown to gray. It reminded me of a time when my brother Chuck asked me how I could stay here all year 'round. Chuck was a world traveler and had "places" in Alaska and Hawaii that he would take turns living at. Complete with mountains, bears etc. He said that from about November to March Indiana was just unbearably gray and he couldn't take it and he would leave.

Not the point of my post though, I was thinking what or when was the beginning of the decline of the US economy (this time). I have to blame it on NAFTA and then SAFTA. We cannot be everything to everybody. And with Mexico having an hourly wage of 1/4 or less of the US, there is no way to compete fairly in the world market. It would be great to think in a Utopian society that we could absorb the difference, but it is evident that we cannot.

If you haven't noticed, I am the poster child for S.A.D., I guess in our family. it is adult onset.

In Memory of Charles (Chuck) F. Mohr Jr. 1950 - 1997

Game Box

I have been struggling trying to figure out how to put games on this blog as well as offer the games to other people to put on their websites and blogs. The problem is I am trying to promote Big Fish games, and they only offer the game as an I-frame. Most cool sites like Myspace don't allow frames. I have found a website (widgetbox.com) that allows you to create widgets. It converts my framed page to javascript and then I can give that code away. This is based on promoting my gaming website http://websitegames.org/. I will be working on ways to use this in the future. I am like a kid in a candy store.. If it works..

The missing dollar..

I am going to lighten up a bait and post an old math puzzle that no one has ever been able to explain to me why it doesn't add up.

3 guys are going on a hunting trip and each pitch in $10 on a hotel room. They pay the desk clerk, get the key and go to the room to get some sleep for an early morning adventure. The clerk's boss shows up and tells the clerk he had promised the room to the hunters for $25. He gives the clerk $5 in one dollar bills and tells him to take it to the hunter's room and refund them the $5. The hunters are so happy with the honesty of the hotel, they each accept a $1 bill and tip the clerk $2 for his trouble.

So each hunter has now paid $9 a piece for their room for a total of $27. Add that back to the $2 the clerk got for a tip and you only come up with $29. What happened to the missing $1?

The internet is addicting...

I just figured out why the internet is so addicting. I got one of those stupid "help us make the internet better" survey things from Yahoo. And I am pissed off at Yahoo anyway for raising the price of domain name renewal from $9.95 to $34.95. (I think they did it to inflate their assets for the Google buyout, but that is a different story). So I thought I would do the survey just to relieve some stress and skew the survey results. But it turned out to be a comparison of Yahoo and Google when you do a search. It made me come up with 3 things I always wanted to search for but never have, which is stupid anyway. Unless you have been have holding back on that search for "Swedish Midget Porn", you probably have done a search for whatever you wanted to search for. But I figured I would play along, after all, my name would be entered in the $1000 drawing!

So I decided to ask these 3:

1. Why did Yahoo raise the price of domain name renewal to $34.95? (What pisses me off here is banners on my Yahoo mail still offers domain names for $1.99 / year. I am a Yahoo affiliate through Commission Junction [http://cj.com] and Yahoo does not allow affiliates to promote the $1.99 offer.)

2. Why does Yahoo tech support suck? I had a bad experience with my Yahoo music subscription 2 years ago. It just quit working and they said no refunds, But "I couldn't talk to tech support directly, this is just the call center"!? They never did fix it, but I got my damn money back. Can you tell I am still pissed?

3. Why do I get these stupid surveys and nobody ever contacts me, and nothing is ever done?

So I actually had to do a search for the above topics on Google, then Yahoo. And what is ironic, if I had already written this blog, I may have found this post in the search results. (at least on Google :). Anyhow, I couldn't find any relevant topics on my searches and I didn't want to waste a bunch of time anyway, so I just went through the motions so I could post my derogatory comments.

My whole point here is I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I had an adrenaline rush with a sadistic undertone. For a while I was so focused on the internet, it felt like I was in a whole different place, not sitting in front of my computer in my underwear. It was a "trip" similar to the drug induced days of my youth. It is the out-of-body experience that becomes the addictive part of the internet (unless you really do search for Swedish Midget Porn). When I was finally done with the survey and clicked out, I came back to reality and only then realized how far gone I really was. This not the only instance I have observed this behavior in my self. Just like the concentration it took to post today...

PS: Nobody from Yahoo has contacted me, and nothing has been done.