This New Year's Eve, while you drink and dine and dance, as sapping as this roller coaster of a year has been, never take for granted what you have and who you are.
I'm luckier than most.
The Big Picture, The Globe's beautiful photography blog, features an amazingly well composed photo tour of Israel and Hamas's deterioration after six months of relative but illusive calm.
Even they are luckier than some.
I have long argued, partly in jest, mostly serious, that America should just get out of the car industry altogether and focus our capital on things we are good at, such as the service sector, software, or torts. The cost issue was secondary, I would say, if the cars themselves aren't competitive. (Does everyone at GM have huge fingers? Why are the interiors filled with over-sized plastic buttons?)
My bafflement continues with this latest bailout—unlike the financial package, I am against bailing out the US auto industry—and these comments from Ford's chief on the necessity of action:
Ford said in its plan that it could survive through 2009 with its current cash levels and by tapping its credit line with private banks, and that it could return to profitability by 2011. Even though it is better prepared for the downturn, Ford said it wanted $9 billion in loans to draw upon if necessary.
Ford’s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, said the prospect of a failure of G.M. would cascade through the entire domestic auto industry and put millions of jobs at risk.
"We are very, very concerned, and that’s why we went with G.M. and Chrysler to Congress even though we think we have sufficient liquidity," he said in an interview.
Mulally is saying Ford is financially secure and does not need the bailout to meet payments, but he is worried about the second stage effects from a GM or Chrysler failure.
That seems backwards to me. Ford—and every other car manufacturer—would assuredly benefit from two of its competitors going under. There would be a small drop in demand as supply falls and prices rises, but that drop would be significantly smaller than the decrease in supply. Moreover, the substitution from GM to other manufacturers would overly favor Ford, in contrast to Mulally's statements, as "buy American" types swap one Detroit icon for another. The converse has the government funding a broken GM, propping up supply to the detriment of Ford. I don't get it.
I suppose Mulally could be bluffing, hoping to look good in the eyes of Wall Street and Ford's creditors but still get government help—to have his cake and eat it too. But somehow I doubt his posturing is worth the risk.
I will be live-twittering tonight's election results.
As I wrote four years ago: If you are informed and have an opinion, please vote. Laziness is not an excuse. Although voting for Ralph Nader is.
The Economist endorses Senator Obama for President.
The why is summed up in part by the endorsement—"if only the real John McCain had been running"—and in part by last week's Conservatives for Obama, so-called Obamacon:
The biggest brigade in the Obamacon army consists of libertarians, furious with Mr Bush’s big-government conservatism, worried about his commitment to an open-ended "war on terror," and disgusted by his cavalier way with civil rights.
Of course, the endorsement should be no surprise. The Economist has a history of endorsing the other party: Governor Reagan in 1980, Governor Clinton in 1992, Senator Dole in 1996, Governor Bush in 2000, and Senator Kerry in 2004.
With this heady endorsement, the Illinois senator might just win.
Via my coworkers at the Android Developers Blog: Android is now open source.
Android is the first free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications.
Across my career, I am most proud of Android—as a platform, as a family of phones, and as a catalyst for change in an otherwise closed industry. But the most exciting part is what's next. Download the SDK and start hacking.
Download the Android SDK 1.0 release 1.
Walt Mossberg: "The first real competitor to the iPhone ... the software is slick ... the G1 is a powerful, versatile device."
But the sui generis: Android is open to developers, open to consumers, and open to handset manufacturers. Cannot wait to see what's next.
The Journal has a great primer on this morning's compromise bailout bill.
Do read the article, but the gist is this: The Treasury will initially have $250b, and up to $700b, to buy either directly or via auction bad loans and assets from financial institutions, in return for warrants for equity. Compromise language includes disincentives for high CEO pay, additional congressional oversight, and a surprising requirement for the president "to submit a legislative proposal to seek reimbursement from the financial institutions that participated" if the value of the purchased assets yields a net loss.
The best analogy I can come up with to describe the crisis is the lemon problem, exasperated by mark to market accounting: Balance sheets are full of mortgage-backed or otherwise related assets, the popping of the housing bubble resulted in a revaluation of these assets, and capitalization requirements are driving banks to liquidate the assets. Enter the lemon market. Is the bank selling the assets because it needs cashflow, or because the assets are full of subprime contagion? Is this the firm's best or worst assets? The information asymmetry has snowballed to the point of credit market implosion. Thus the government's first solution, improving lending opportunities. When that was found insufficient, as the last few weeks have witnessed, we enter this second round, where the government actually buys the troubled assets.
It is hard to comprehend how dire this situation is as the economy still "feels" okay. Gas prices might be high, but unemployment is not at 30%. Yet while the societal ramifications are not as bad, the financial conditions are worse than those that kicked off The Great Depression.
If you are not reading my food blog, Food Tastes Good, you are missing out on recipes such as …
If not the actual dishes, at least the pictures are ambrosial.
The greatest Wondermark ever, if not the greatest thing, ever:
Slightly switching gears, David Leonhardt on Obamonics in the Times.
And, in case you missed it, we released version 0.9 of the Android SDK. Its dreamy.
Via Google's Open Source Blog, this Google-sponsored project to study Linux I/O scheduler behavior is quite interesting, yielding unexpected results—for example, deadline is actually best for some workloads and CFS, while ideal for others, has awful worst-case performance.
Curious about I/O schedulers? Check out chapter 13 in my favorite kernel book. Want to optimize your code's file I/O and understand scheduling from the perspective of user-space? Read chapter 4 in my favorite system programming book.
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