But I am very annoyed by the constant whining of the car dealers who are losing their precious franchises. I looked at the list for Los Angeles, and it is mostly dealers that I have never heard of, in locations that no one buys cars anymore. These guys should have moved on long time ago, turned their real estate in 99cent stores, anything other than selling junky American cars.

Now comes CNN and does a little cry-me-a-river-piece on a Chrysler dealership, “Claxton Chrysler Jeep Dodge” closing in a small town called Claxton, GA. Every bit about this piece is intended to elicit little sobs and sniffles from the ith-tho-thad crowd.  I feel that CNN has lost any pretense of substantive journalism with this piece. Its writer, Jim Kavanagh, should be forced to turn in his keyboard.

The piece writes about all these locals who supposedly love the dealership. Now, considering that overall, auto dealerships are ranked lower than dentists in terms of customer experience, I pulled up the record of this Dealership with the local BBB.

To no surprise, the BBB rated this dealership an “F”.

Now let me show you some choice quotes from this article, with my comments. Quotes in italics, my comments below the quotes.

“It was like standing out in the road and having a bus run over the top of us,” he said.

Wrong. You most likely knew it was coming, based on your customer feedback, your revenues, etc. If you didn’t, then you deseve the shutdown even more.

“We all know each other, we see each other every day. I spend more time with this group here than I do with my own family.”

That’s a sad reflection on your personal priorities in life.

Take Gary Sapp, for example. The military veteran, wounded in Vietnam, stopped in Saturday, as he does just about every day, to say hello and maybe talk about cars a little bit. He said he might come back Monday and make a deal, just as he’s done there three times in the past 10 years. But it’s not really about the cars and pickup trucks. “These are good folks here,” Sapp said.

No, you just have way too much time on your hands, Mr. Sapp.

“How the hell they gon’ sell to those people in small towns?” he said. “They’re a different breed. They’re not gonna go no damn hundred miles to buy a car.”

They won’t have to, there are three other dealers within 30 miles. Just like Wal-Mart.

“It’s just a cryin’ damn shame, is what it is,” he said.

No, it’s a necessary change that’s been a long time coming.

They say reality is stranger than movies.

Globalization has gone wrong, very wrong if a Bangladeshi man has to travel 6000 miles to sells tacos on the streets of Mexico City.

Add to that the fact that this man is sure to be a Muslim-and therefore eats no pork. And he got swine flu?

Or perhaps it is Mexico’s work visa program that has gone wrong?

Now here you are, in a recession. Or a depression. Or a world-wide pandemic that will turn us all into zombies. Take your pick. You decide to increase sales by putting up an ad on Google.

Then when someone clicks through to your site…you might as well have thrown the money away

Anyway, this blog is about business, not emotion, so here we go with the business angle.

I was racking my brain thinking of some innovations to come out of Texas, and I am sure there are some, but other than the Baylor University medical complex, and NASA in Houston, I find it hard to think of anything.

This does not include Texas’s famous steakhouses and their BBQ, both of which are excellent.

Dell is near Austin, but it has never really innovated anything, and is now slowly fading into irrelevance. All it did was ride the boom for about 15 years.

There’s the SXSW festival, but that isn’t innovation.

Southwest is in Texas, and they did innovate a new business model, but they did that back in the 70′s and haven’t changed their secret sauce since then. Jetblue and Virgin America and Spirit and others are making Southwest look more and more like a legacy airline.

The energy companies are concentrated in TX, but try getting them to get off their petroleum crack pipe…it just ain’t happening.

Possibly the only good things in Texas are the rent contol laws (there are none, resulting in plentiful cheap housing) and zoning laws (there are none, resulting in plentiful and cheap housing and industrial).

Mercifully, this state senator in Texas put me out of my misery by publishing this list of Texas ‘firsts’:

1) 49th in teacher pay

2) 1st in the percentage of people over 25 without a high school diploma
3) 41st in high school graduation rate
4) 46th in SAT scores
5) 1st in percentage of uninsured children
6) 1st in percentage of population uninsured
7) 1st in percentage of non-elderly uninsured
3rd in percentage of people living below the poverty level
9) 49th in average Women Infant and Children benefit payments
10) 1st in teenage birth rate
11) 50th in average credit scores for loan applicants
12) 1st in air pollution emissions
13) 1st in volume of volatile organic compounds released into the air
14) 1st in amount of toxic chemicals released into water
15) 1st in amount of recognized cancer-causing carcinogens released into air
16) 1st in amount of carbon dioxide emissions
17) 50th in homeowners’ insurance affordability
18) 50th in percentage of voting age population that votes
19) 1st in annual number of executions

http://shapleigh.org/system/news_article/document/882/Texas_on_the_Brink_2007_Final.pdf

I go to the online app to see what seats are available. It’s nice that they have a seat map, and they helpfully mark out my seat for me. 

And then I scroll down to the bottom of the page

And there are no seats.

There are NO seats available on the ENTIRE plane.

So why even show me a seatmap? Just tell me that there are no seats available to choose from.

Instead, you make me waste time, and waste your own server cycles.

I had a computer science teacher in high school who would have a field day with this example of bad design.

This is the story of a guy who had an accident in which he lopped off his thumb. When he found out what they would charge to reattach it, he bid it a fond farewell.

From the LATimes: “Koemer loves working with his hands..He knew he would miss his thumb….But there were too many other bills to pay”.

No Remorse

I saw this interview, more like a three year old’s tantrum, posted on the NYTimes. The former head of the SEC,(also known as the world’s most toothless agency), Arthur Levitt, says everything was A-OK under his watch.

If you had a cancer growing inside of you for two eight years, and your oncologist didn’t detect it, wouldn’t you think the oncologist was remiss? Wouldn’t you sue the oncologist in court?

Bernie Madoff flourished under Levitt’s watch, in addition to all sorts of questionable behavior that led to the big profits made by insiders during the dot-com bubble.

In the interests of fairness, here is an embarassingly laudatory article from the CPA review saying how good Levitt is. Notice it does not talk about any prosecutions the SEC made, or who they caught. It is saying ‘Thanks for the softball game, Mr. Levitt’. 

The SEC should be hated, it should be like a mean junkyard dog running around and biting Wall Street people. That is what a regulator does. It should not be a shill for Wall Street.

Update: Here is a nice article about Bernie Madoff, again from the NYTimes, being called a psychopath. It also says regulators and Bernie were very cozy-cozy.

He is in favor of the bailout, not just the current bailout, but the last five bailouts. There have been so many, I have lost track.

He was on the New York Fed Reserve, and it is under his watch that the financial industry ran off the rails. Where is accountability when you need it?

Wall Street loves him, which means that the crooks consider him one of their own-ready to turn on the money spigot. Obama’s treasury secretary should be someone Wall Street detests, someone who will make them howl with anger. I don’t know who, but not lap-dog Geithner.

Geithner is also apt to play with fire. In his confirmation hearing, he is claiming that China is keeping its currency undervalued. The Chinese are very prickly about all sorts of things, and this is one of them. Why would Geithner anger our largest creditor? If confirmed, he is going to have to beg them to continue buying treasuries, plus he is going to hope they don’t start unloading their trillion-dollar cache of treasuries.

Finally, there is this great article that takes Geithner to task over his failure to pay taxes. Now, I understand that people mess up on their taxes. But to earn so much money, to know that it is a complicated situation, and then to blame TurboTax for it, is downright disingenuous.

But, he is sure to be confirmed. Don’t worry, Timmy, just hang in there, smile a lot, say you’re sorry, and soon you will be in charge of our 35 trillion dollar economy. God help us all.

Update:

Here is a post from Larry Dignan at ZDNet saying how a guy who cannot handle TurboTax should not be Treasury Secretary. (1/25/9)

Nissan UK stores car on expensive test track

More photos here courtesy of the Guardian 

This photo is amazing. First, I would like to know why Nissan would build a test track in the U.K. Are UK drivers really that different from Japanese drivers? Nissan and its predecessor, Datsun, did fine for 20 years before building a test track in the UK. Second, it shows us how bad the car industry is, that Nissan thinks it is OK to use a test track, with its very expensive smooth track, as storage. There are three rows of cars in some places and two rows in others. This track has room for more!

Wikipedia says: “In 2005 the overall median age for automobiles was 8.9 years, a significant increase over 1990 when the median age of vehicles in operation in the US was 6.5 years”.  There were 250,851,833 cars in the USA in 2005. 

So the age of a car went from 7 years to 9 from 1990 to 2005, a time that the US economy was doing really well, from the stock market boom to the dot com boom to the real estate boom.

Now that we are in a busted economy, the situation is even more dire for carmakers. Cars have become even more reliable. Even American cars are now worth buying again, with the Chevy Malibu beating the Toyota Camry in some surveys. 

So if the average age went from 7 to 9 years in a booming economy, how much longer do you think people will keep their cars in a bad economy? Much, much longer. My car is ten years old and runs just fine. If it breaks, I would replace the engine or the transmission or whatever instead of laying out $20,000 for a comparable new car.

The carmakers are in for a long, extended, painful downturn, even if the economy starts to recover.