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May 11, 2012
by jim
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Prius Plug-In is the #3 Fastest Selling Car

Car model sales are rated in days. That is, how many days the average vehicle model will sit on a dealer’s lot before it’s gone, gone, gone. The average number of days for a 2012 or 2013 car is 45 days, so the average car gets unloaded off the hauler and then sits for a month and a half before it’s sold. Manufacturers offer all sorts of incentives to dealers based on these numbers, from the amount of interest the dealers can pay, to a kind of automotive kickback.

Cars that turn quickly these days are frequently luxury SUVs, which says something all by itself. The number of people who can plop down $60,000 or more for a high end SUV must be bigger than I’d think.

According to the Cars.com site, the winners for April are BMW’s X3 and X5 SUVs, selling in 4 days. The Infiniti JX and the Acura RDX sell in six and seven days, respectively. The Toyota Prius Plug-in version sells in an average of five days and the new Prius C compact hybrid, which is rated at 53 mpg is also at seven days. The Porsche Boxster was the big loser at 250 days. (Not all hybrids are at the top of the list, either. The Infiniti M 35H, a luxury hybrid sedan, was at 170 days, well below average.

April 6, 2012
by jim
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Tornadoes

This morning I saw a table of data online on tornadoes in Middle Tennessee, with data from NOAA, that included the number of deaths and injuries, as well as the strength. I went to NOAA and found the raw data just to look at the numbers themselves. I put the data into Excel and just looked at the number of tornadoes each year. Many of the years showed several occurring on the same day, so that’s how I considered them, as several, rather than one that might have hopped and skipped around. I doubt there’s any way to determine that kind of thing anyway, so this is just the raw data.

Things have changed over the years.

April 6, 2012
by jim
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Money Buys Congress

I know. That’s not a surprise to anyone who’s a cynic, but it may be to the few remaining idealists out there. But it’s true, and it’s how that game is operated. This morning on NPR, @RadioBabe and @abexlumberg (Andrea Seabrook and Alex Blumberg) did a story on congressional committees and campaign contributions. Surprise, surprise, there’s a correlation. And moving from a committee that has little influence of companies or people with deep pockets to one that does influence legislation affecting these high rollers can garner a congressman as much as a half a billion dollars (with a $B) more in contributions.

OK, that is an extreme case, but it’s still true. Membership on a committee like the Judiciary or Government Operations or Small Business, where you have no chance of pushing out bills that could have financial impact on Wall Street or Exxon or Boeing, can reduce your contributions from the big money sources by $150,000. ( Congressmen on the judiciary committee raised on average $182,000 less than the average Congressman.) Being on the Ways and Means committee, that controls the pocketbook strings in the House, can boost your “earnings” by a quarter of a million smackers – oh, excuse me. That’s wrong, completely wrong. I’m sure they’re not earning that money, they’re just being given more money that the average person makes in five years out of pure generosity.

But shifting to Ways and Means adds over $250,000 to your contributions, Energy & Commerce adds almost $150,000. (They have a nice chart illustrating the differences at NPR.) What the chart doesn’t add in are the turbo boosts you can get to your contribution dollars if you’re a ranking member or a chairman. Whoosh!

Of course, the Democratic and Republican parties also do some ranking of their own based on that same fundraising potential. Committees are ranked as A, B, or C for their potential, and the parties “suggest” or “recommend” fundraising targets and rollover of contributions to the party coffers with the implicit understand that you’re off your committee if you fail to kick in. It’s one big money-generating game, where the little people get constantly screwed.

And you thought it was like the Schoolhouse Rock song, didn’t you. If we could only get a law passed that would end this sort of thing. Think we could get it through Congress. Oh, wait …

April 5, 2012
by jim
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Advertising

I’ve worked around marketing and customer satisfaction for decades peripherally. For years I led a team who did internal marketing work, and as a result, I am like a lot of people, in that I can tell when a commercial hits it and tell when it falls way short of that. It’s actually not brain surgery. For the most part, it’s just common sense. You focus on how your product or improvement will help the viewers and, if you’re good at it, having it be a little edgy or a little tongue-in-cheek or self-deprecating helps make your big company seem more human.

Scion, an automotive division of Toyota, that was created to appeal to the younger demographic (OK, people who think a Camry is about as bland and unexciting as you can get), has hired an ad agency that created a series of four ads to popularize their new model, the Scion iQ. It’s a very compact four-seater hatchback that’s great for people living in the city and commuting. You’re not going to buy one to take the family and the dog on a trip to Yellowstone Park, but you’re going to drive it to work and around town.

The four ads are very similar. (I’ll post one below.) In one, four “babes” (how Scion refers to them in the ad) in bikinis stop first at a table filled with donuts and large glasses of milk, then they all four get in the iQ and do reverse donuts in the parking lot of the donut shop. In the second, they have four dudes (One is a woman, but obviously make the transition into being a dude because she now has clothing.

Aside: the woman who is a dude inexplicably also becomes a cop with a mustache in the fourth video. I’m guessing they ran short of people wanting actual jobs in commercials because the economy is doing so well. Or maybe it’s because the casting people were as stupid as the ad agency. After pondering this for maybe 43 nanoseconds, I’m going with the stupidity guess.

Now, I have two questions about this. First, what ad agency actually thought this might be even remotely conceivably possible of being a vehicle for achieving a positive impact on sales? Seriously. Second, what complete and utter morons at Scion/Toyota thought this would have a positive impact on sales or even generate a warm fuzzy feeling about Scion?

Well, it seems I have three questions. Why did Scion pay these people instead of me? even though I’m not a major ad agency, I could have topped this one by miles. Good lord, what were they thinking?

March 26, 2012
by jim
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All Fly Away

OK, I’m not actually suggesting we all fly away, it’s a bit of a pun. You see, I went to Fly on Saturday. Since I went to there, you know it is a place, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find it on a map. Fly has a cemetery (the Fly Cemetery, of course), a grocery store equipped with a checker board and two old men on the front porch, and a restaurant. The restaurant is called Papa Beaudreaux’s Cajun Café & Catering. They actually do have a website, but most of it seems to be down, except for the menu and the About Us pages. Papa had a heart attack a couple of years back, but the family still runs the place. (Given how rich the sauces taste, I think I know what hit Papa.) And one of the sons is opening a place in Franklin, on Main Street. Once it opens (in April, as I understand) Franklin will be able to experience the same arterial congestion their streets already have. But it will be in a good cause.

Papa lives in the house next door to a small concrete block building where the restaurant is, which is in the middle of nowhere. If you don’t know you’re heading there, you’ll never find it, seriously so, because it’s not even on a minor highway. It, however, does show up on a zoomed-in Google maps on my iPhone.

There are two ways to get there and both are scenic. Either take the Natchez Trace Parkway to Exit 7 and hang a left towards Columbia, or go through Leiper’s Fork and instead of turning right towards the Parkway, keep going straight out of town and you’ll end up on State Highway 7 just down a bit from where the Parkway would have taken you. Once you turn left, you’ll barely notice a really small sign on the left with an arrow pointing up a road that seems to head up a ridge. The key words are barely notice and really small. It is both. But the lettering is red and it does have a crayfish on it. Once you’ve gone a little farther than it takes for you to think where in hell is this road going, you’ll be there.

Papa Beaudreaux’s opens at 4 and it closes somewhere around 8. It can get really busy, or so I have heard, so if you get there around 6 p.m., you may or may not get in before it closes. We got there right at opening and had to wait for them to finish mopping the floors. When you go, don’t try to pay with plastic, take cash or a check. And if you want to drink a beer or wine, take that with you too. They don’t serve either. They do seem to have several people who come often enough that they leave their wine bottles for the next time. On the weekends, they have someone who takes up valuable restaurant space playing music, but he was just getting started about the time we were done.

It is worth going to for the food. They have creoles (chicken, shrimp), etoufeés, red beans and rice, jambalayas, beaudan, and pastas. They only seem to serve things is huge bowls, or at least our meals were. One of us had the red beans and rice, one a shrimp etoufeé, one chicken creole, and one garlic chicken & andouille sausage pasta. They always have a special (which seemed to have chicken, shrimp, andouille, kielbasa, and crayfish) and a couple of deserts (chocolate bread pudding and blackberry cobbler). One night a week they devote tp Po Boy sandwiches.

The red beans and rice includes three kinds of sausage, tasso, andouille, and kielbasa. The Chicken creole and the shrimp etoufeé were very good and appropriately spicy. The garlic chicken with andouille was served over linguini and came in a wine and cream sauce that assuredly left remnants throughout my arteries, but it was “oh my” delicious. If I was as rich as that sauce, I wouldn’t have needed to come into work today.

March 21, 2012
by jim
2 Comments

Honda Bad Service Experience

As you know, the Maintenance Minder indicator in your 2009 Honda Fit is displayed when it’s time to bring your vehicle in for scheduled maintenance.

Please call us at … to schedule a service appointment. If you have already scheduled an appointment or
had this service performed, thank you.

I get this email from the Honda system, probably based on data the dealer puts in when my oil is changed. And it represents crappy service to me as a user.

This isn’t my first Honda, it’s my third. I’ve posted before about how this email could be improved, but there is more to it this time.

Honda now has a system to remind you when to do things. A wrench icon, accompanied by a letter (a thru d) gets displayed to tell me what needs to be done. In the pre-technology era, you had a list of things that needed to be done at X thousand miles. At 100,000 miles you do these things. Every 10,000 miles you change the oil.

Honda has eliminated this maintenance schedule. It’s now got the maintenance minder to tell me everything I need to know. Except it doesn’t. The standard interval for an oil change is 10,000 miles (I think). I have always changed my oil more often than that, so I’ve never actually seen that maintenance minder icon.

That also means if I needed to have the valves adjusted or it was time to check the brake discs, I would never know about it. I have to depend on the dealer to tell me these things. Which brings me to the point of this post.

I can’t trust them any more. They have actively done something that seems to stick us with unnecessary charges. Because the quickie oil change places seldom have 5W20, the recommended weight, we usually go to the dealer. Since I drive more than my wife, I’m more aware of how often I need to change my oil than I do hers, but I check hers often.

Earlier this week, she noted that her odometer mileage (170K) was past the mileage on her window sticker (168K), so she took the car to the dealer for service. She would have preferred somewhere more convenient, but as I said, they don’t have the right weight oil. After the service, she headed off for the rest of her day. So what’s the issue, you ask?

She happened to look at the window sticker they replaced on her windshield. It had her current 170K mileage on it. The prior one had the current mileage of the car the last time it had been changed as well, 168K. For my entire life, those oil change stickers have reflected the next time you need to change the oil. That makes sense. It’s a reminder and it’s purpose is to remind you to change the oil after a manufacturer-specified mileage period. it makes a better reminder if it tells you when the next change should be.

She took her car in for service because she thought she was 2,000 miles past due. Instead, because the dealer changed their practice to put current mileage on the sticker instead of due date/mileage, she was pushed into an unnecessary expense to the benefit of the dealer.

They should have said, you’ve only been 2,000 miles, are you sure? They didn’t. They took advantage of a woman. Because they changed a standard industry process to jigger how their customers expect things to work. And they seem to have done it to skim money from their customers. That’s beyond bad service if that’s the intent.

In general, Hondas are excellent cars. I’ve had some issues with the base Fit quality decisions, but it is still is a Honda. I may buy another Honda in the future, but it will take a while before the sour taste of this dealer experience is gone.

March 19, 2012
by jim
1 Comment

Oil Prices

If you believe we can drill for more oil and make the price of gas less, you’re wrong. Check out this chart from EIA:

Gas prices vs Oil Production

Over the last two decades they’re about as unrelated as they can get. Oil production in the U.S. has remained pretty constant and gas prices have done anything but stay the same.

Believe we still need to drill more? We already are, to the tune of almost a million barrels a day.

oil production by year

And, occasionally, someone in Congress actually tells the truth. This is from Senator Bingaman, from New Mexico. He’s the Chairman of the Senate Energy Committee.

the prices that we are paying for oil and the products refined from oil, such as gasoline, are set on the world market. They are relatively insensitive to what happens here in the United States with regards to production. Instead, the world price of oil and our gasoline prices are affected more by events beyond our control, such as instability in Libya last year or instability in Iran and concerns about oil supply in Iran this year.

It’s out of our hands and in the hands of people like government troops in the Sudan, slaughtering innocent people in the way. The only way out is simple, but too simple for most people to believe in because it requires them to change how they live rather than the government changing something that doesn’t affect them. We must use less oil. That’s it, period.

Since 1967, I have only had two cars that got less than 32 mpg running around town. Cars have been capable of doing that for four decades. The automotive industry can do much better. They don’t need to stifle the development of imaginary carburetors that have been rumored for decades, they just need to drive relentlessly towards efficiency by every means.

March 15, 2012
by jim
1 Comment

Morality

This is from Robert Reich’s blog (via Left Wing Cracker). Since I couldn’t have said it better, I’m quoting it.

Republicans have morality upside down. Santorum, Gingrich, and even Romney are barnstorming across the land condemning gay marriage, abortion, out-of-wedlock births, access to contraception, and the wall separating church and state.

But America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us.

There is moral rot in America but it’s not found in the private behavior of ordinary people. It’s located in the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump. It’s found in Wall Street fraud, exorbitant pay of top executives, financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Amen.

March 9, 2012
by jim
2 Comments

The Future

OK, let’s just assume the Mayans were wrong and the world doesn’t end this year. The political realities are that the odds and the historical evidence both are in favor of the incumbent office-holder winning the election. Yes, incumbents do get defeated now and then but it’s usually when they do things like ignore an issue that affects the vast majority of people. A recent example is when the incumbent President George Bush was defeated by the challenger Bill Clinton. President Bush lost primarily because the economy wasn’t getting any better and he wasn’t perceived as doing anything to fix it. (Note: that’s a bum rap. Presidents actually hire almost nobody.)

Can the same thing be said now? Yes, to a degree, it can. But the economy is getting better and, unless something unforeseen happens in the intervening months between now and November, it will keep getting better, although slowly. My expectation is that the odds are in favor of President Obama winning a second term. Partly because the economy is getting better and partly because there is no one in the republican camp capable of stirring the emotions and the support of both republicans and independents. Is it a sure thing? No, absolutely not. Although every progressive in the country considers the President to be a middle-of-the-road-leaning politician, the perception and noise from his opposition still trumpet his “far left wing” policies and that could hurt him. Time will tell. The one thing that seems certain is that the republican candidate will have a less-than-enthusiastic support from his voters, no matter who wins. This reminds me of all the excitement that everyone felt when Michael Dukakis won the democratic primary. Meh generally means a loss.

However, if incumbency and an improving economy save the day, what happens in 2016? It will be exceptionally difficult for anyone other than Mitt Romney to secure the nomination. Not impossible, but difficult. So that means Mitt would be out of the running in 2016 if he loses this year because comeback kids don’t actually come back from a general presidential election loss. That leaves Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum (and Ron Paul, of course. Dying will be the only thing that takes him out of running.) as front-runners for 2016. I figure both Paul and Gingrich are out for different reasons. Newt’s the oldest looking one in the current crop and four more years won’t improve that, probably make it worse. Plus, his tendencies to go off the rails will derail him sooner or later. Paul, who is the most consistent of all of the candidates since Ross Perot, is and always will be an outlier. Despite the heavy pressure for the republican candidates to show their conservative colors, the proportion of the population that actually is as conservative as Ron Paul is around 9%-10% and that will never be enough to win.

(Aside: Gallup shows far-lefties to be around 5% of the population, even less. Conservatives total about 40% and liberals 21% overall. It’s always about winning over the moderate middle-of-the-road)

The caution we all have to live with is the people who are a bit left or a bit right of the moderate center can also swing a little one way or another and their swing tends to be a counter swing. That is, if the candidate is far right or left enough that they are a little uncomfortable with some of the things he or she says, they’ll swing towards the center. They don’t want the pot stirred all that much. I have no idea who could come out of the hinterlands to run in 2016, but if Santorum is the main candidate, I think he stands a chance of pushing the near moderates closer to a more moderate candidate. If he does get elected, I don’t think the majority of the people will like those following four years.

Mind you, we’ll have to scour the hinterlands on the democratic side of the field as well. Nobody stands out, sadly.

February 23, 2012
by jim
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Alternative Energy

This is from 60 Minutes on a technology called the Bloom Box. It’s an interesting concept, but note what the CEO of eBay says about it. “It does what they say it does.”