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I was trying to stay away from the financial/auto bailout–I really was. However, I just couldn’t resist any longer after seeing a friend of mine battle it out through Facebook comments with his high school teacher.  I hope that maybe I can convince just one more person out there that we have some issues in this country that need to be taken care of…

The graphic pretty much sums it up–American cars are inferior and because we won’t by them, the government stepped in to save the companies.  What right does the government have to give these failing companies MY money?  Who made the government an expert at running an auto company?  If a company fails to perform, it should go out of business, plain and simple.  If you (as an individual) are not good at something, do you just keep going on failing at it or do you try to find something else that perhaps you can do better?  I am terrible at designing an aesthetically pleasing website so I stay way from the aesthetics of web design at let someone else do that.  Rather, I will find something I am good at such as the mechanics and behind-the-scenes aspects of web sites.  Don’t give these companies money to keep doing something they suck at!  If another company can do it better, domestic OR foreign, then they should do it and we should free up our labor force to do something else that they can do better.

“In a truly free economy, profit and loss is a market’s objective measure of the value a business is creating in society” (Koch 102).

In other words, if your business is losing money it is because people do not see the value in what you do!

And another thing!  Although this post is about the auto bailout, why is it that these employees get so angry when they are asked to take a pay cut for a job where they are making twice what they should be in the first place.  Take a pay cut and keep making some money or don’t take a pay cut and lose your job as the company goes under.  You can’t keep asking for more money when the company is doing well but not go the opposite way when the company is doing poorly.  You can’t have it both ways!  I guess I shall return from this sidebar and get back to the point of this post, the bailout.  Time to switch gears from the auto industry to the financial sector.

Bailing out a failing company is just a bad idea.  Why incentivize bad behavior and poor decision making?  How about AIG.  Some AIG executives makes some really bad decisions and the company starts plummeting.  Uncle Sam steps in and tosses some cash their way to keep them afloat.  AIG accepts the money and proceeds to hand out huge bonuses to top executives.  Wait, what?  The very executives that drove the company into the ground are getting bonuses for doing so?  I think I’m going to open up a new business.  My only purpose would be to get hired into a company, run it into bankruptcy, collect a huge bonus, and dodge out of town.  But I digress… Because of this moronic spending, Uncle Sam stepped in and put a few criteria on the money AIG received (one criteria dealt with the handing out of these huge bonuses).  As a result, Robert Benmosche, C.E.O of AIG, threatened to quit and stated that he could not “retain top talent” if he did not have control over compensation.  Are you kidding me?  What “top talent?”  These people drove this company into the ground!  You have no “top talent!”  It boggles my mind to think that anyone believes their executives are “top talent” when they make such poor decisions that they can literally ruin an entire company.

This post has been more of an incoherent rant than I would have liked but this stuff just irritates me and I wanted to get my thoughts out there somewhere (you know, like a website that nobody will read).  This post won’t change anything and I realize that.  All I can hope is that someone will read this and at least start asking questions about how the government is spending tax dollars.

Koch, Charles. (2007). The Science of success. John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Starting today, I have decided to showcase my very first “Fail of the Week.”  Each week I will write a quick post about a fail that I think everyone should see and laugh at.  If I miss a week or post more than one in a week just deal with it–”Fail of the Week or sometimes more or less than once a week” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

I found this first fail while looking though tutorials on migrating from one permalink structure to another in this very blog.  If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it.  In non-techie terms, all of my posts have had a permanent web address and I am now changing that address.  Anything that points to the old address (for example, Facebook) would return the dreaded “404 – Page Not Found” error when looking for that post at the old address.  There are numerous WordPress plugins for making this switch painless and while reading through one of them I came across the following link that would supposedly help out:

That’s right–a supposed tutorial on how to avoid 404 errors returned a 404 error itself.  Fantastic.  How exactly can someone be so careless as to write an article about avoiding an error but then screw up so bad that it returns that very error?  I cannot even begin to describe how happy the unbelievable irony of this whole thing makes me.  I give this fail an ”A” for descriptive title but an ”F” for actually implementing the solution being (apparently) talked about.

Overall, I’ll give this fail 3 out of 5 “IE 6′s.”

(For the rest of these “Fail of the Week” posts I will be using a rating scale of 1-5–1 being a pseudo-fail and a 5 being a full-on fail.  This week I chose to represent the fail rating in terms of Internet Explorer 6.  IE6 was one of Microsoft’s biggest failures and even they want it to go away.  Spoiler alert, a future FotW will show just how bad IE6 sucked.)

Well, I hope you enjoyed this first Fail of the Week and look forward to more as I come across stupid crap on the Internet and perhaps even out in the (*gasp*) “real world.”  If you have a great fail that you would like me to showcase send it my way.

There I was, heading down US-10 on my normal half hour drive home with my arm across my stomach. “Well this was not always this squishy” I thought. “Maybe I’ll go home and get back on the bike since I haven’t done that in a while. Nah, it’s a little chilly so I’ll just do it tomorrow.”  It was at that very moment that I knew something had to change.  At that rate I would never make any progress on my squish removal and my dad’s voice kept ringing in the back of the head saying “You can find a way to say yes or a reason to say no.” Each day that I did not want to ride I found a reason to say no–an excuse to not go for my ride. Well, I was tired of it and something had to change.

Starting that night, April 8, 2010, I began biking with a new goal–300 miles of bike riding within 30 days. Yes, it is only 10 miles a day which may not seem very far to some but the idea is to continue for 30 days, no less than 10 miles each day without missing a single day. So, in actuality, I should end up with more than 300 miles after the 30 days.  In fact, after only 4 days of riding I am already on track to hit nearly 400 miles.

In my first few days of riding I have learned the following:

1. My iPod Touch has a “shake to shuffle” feature that does not like potholes.
2. Little kids are incapable of riding a bike in a straight line.
3. Little kids can take up all 10′ of a 10′ wide path.
4. Little kids don’t listen to parents when they are told to “get over to the side.”
5. Men need to walk with their wives.  She has he hands full with the stroller, 2 kids on bikes, and the dog.
6. The wind will change direction precisely when you are changing directions.
7. Little kids with sidewalk chalk are funny (drawing arrows to piles of dog feces and writing “poop”).

What is the point behind this post you ask?  Simple.  If you want something (in my case to be more fit) get off your butt and do something about it.  Nobody is going to look out for you except you and nobody cares as much about your success as you.  Also, stop making excuses for not doing something.  It is really easy to say “I’ll do it tomorrow” but you know that won’t happen so just get out there and do it.  No more excuses–make it happen.

I recently received the following chain-email and found it to be an excellent example of why socialism just plain does not work.  I hate forwarding chain-emails so I thought this to be the next best method of delivery–I’m not clogging your inbox and you still get to read a great story.

Some disclosures first… Although this particular email references Obama, the same concept applies to any socialist leadership whether it be in government, a local business, or anything in between.  Second, I checked the following story out on Snopes and it cannot be verified as a true story.  That being said, it is still an excellent example of how socialism does not work whether it actually happened or not.

Again, yes, this story may not have actually taken place but you simply cannot deny the lesson it teaches; socialism does not work.  Just as stated above, “…when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great…”