Looks like Chrysler the parent comapany of Jeep is about to go bankrupt. Which would really suck, Jeeps were cool at one time. Now they are just big SUV’s, like any other big SUV. What happened? It seems that Jeep rather than sticking with their niche of making really good off-road vehicles that were kind of cool to drive around town, ableit somewhat uncomfortably and unreliably, switched to making cars that would appeal to soccer moms. This of course meant that they were competing with Ford and Land Rover and Mercedes etc. etc.
Now the ultimate soccer mom car is of course, the Prius, leaving Jeep with a bunch of unsold vehicles that no body wants. Had they stuck with their original market they would still have a group of hardcore enthusiasts with high brand loyalty. Hopefully Jeep will survive as a company and build a cool small off-road vehicle and leave the mass marketing to another bankrupt cr company.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:30 AM GMT+4
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You Douche!
Douche!
We could have drank at the bar we’ve always gone to and spent half the fucking money, but NO…
Posted by Al Swearengen as Economics, Video, politics at 7:02 PM GMT+4
2 Comments »
That poor 2 year old…
…oh boy, how about some sanity….look, obviously our system of government is a failure, and we need to try something else. Let’s make Obama “king for life” and hang every elected Senator and Representative we can get our hands on! The last straw was CLEARLY just a few months ago when something happened…I’ll let others decide what that “something” was, but I think someone should be detaining Octo-mom, Perez Hilton and Terri Shiavo (if she’s not alive then grab Eric the Midget instead) until we get everything sorted out.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Comedy, Video, politics at 6:45 PM GMT+4
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I love this one:
STEPHANOPOULOS: [O]n the issue of taxes, I think it’s 43 percent of people who file taxes pay no income tax at all. For the middle fifth of taxpayers, they’re paying just about 3 percent in federal income tax this year.
BOEHNER: Well, you want to go out and explain that to the hundreds of thousands of people around America that showed up for these rallies.
Since the eighties conservatives have exploited the low information voter, it now seems pretty apparent at this point that they don’t know what to do with them either.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:47 AM GMT+4
2 Comments »
the governor of Texas has been making quite a bit of noise lateley about secceeding.This seems like a no brainer for the rest of the country, we would need some humanitarian safeguards, specifcaly anyone from Aftexistan should be allowed to migrate north and we would have to make sure that they didn’t have nuclear weapons, but other than that it seems like a the best solution to the countries Texas problem.
The country of Aftexistan would also probably absorb a lot of the unproductive citizens from other states, and it would be a good opportunity to see if christian socialism can succeed. Texas, go ahead make my day.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:23 AM GMT+4
7 Comments »
More Tea Party video
Posted by Al Swearengen as Comedy, Video, politics at 9:41 PM GMT+4
6 Comments »
Chalk up one for Al…I called this
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen at 12:21 AM GMT+4
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This is so fun to watch! One of those ‘tea parties’
Posted by Al Swearengen as Comedy, Economics, Video, politics at 9:34 PM GMT+4
1 Comment »
At pandagon Amanda Marcotte challenges the notion that children are a bundle of joy and that we need to overpopulate to keep our economy going.
At Donkeylicious Niel Sinababu suggests immigration as a solution for those who worry about social security.
The only thing I would add is that some people view children as a material good and as such they feel a need to acquire as many of them as they can, government policies that discourage kid hoarding and perhaps and end to charites that encourage people to have lots of kids might also be a good idea.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:52 PM GMT+4
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This is really good news, hopefully the trend will continue.
There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.
The positive nature of this is somewhat tempered by the fact that the remaining christians are becoming more radicalized.
A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that “these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more ‘evangelical’ outlook among Christians.” With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.
If that trend continues we will probably wind up with a vast underclass of people who insist on believing in creation myths and having large families, all because they know the “rapture” is just around the corner. These people will be left behind, but not in the way they think, chances are they will get bitter over generations of not seeing any of their mythology come true, while the heathens continue to live better and better lives by abandoning the mythology of the past. Leading to a small hard-core group of extremists, who sit around in caves and plot attacks on non-believers. This seems like a familiar story, I just can’t remember from where.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:48 AM GMT+4
1 Comment »
Some people are suggesting our standard of living might be higher with less people:
So the Malthusian logic that says that higher levels of population is a disaster no longer applies. But I’m still not at all convinced that the reverse logic that says that lower levels of population is a disaster does apply. True, lower population will lead to lower measured GDP, but the relevant issue is GDP per capita. We’ve moved away from a strictly resource-based economy, but resources are still pretty darn important. If Canada had only 30,000 inhabitants instead of 30,000,000 citizens, then it seems to me that those 30,000 Canadians could be fabulously wealthy. Conversely, if Alaska had as many inhabitants as California, then Alaskan oil revenues wouldn’t be nearly the boon that they currently are. And if the United States had 200 million citizens instead of 300 million, surely our commute times would be much shorter and patterns of residency would be more driven by where there’s demand for workers and less by where there’s affordable housing.
Also, if their were less people we probably would not have issues with climate change, and if you believe that the wars we are fighting are at least partially about resources(I happen to think they are all about resources) we would probably not be embroiled in so many conflicts.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 5:23 PM GMT+4
1 Comment »
Nurse says Octamom doesn’t care about her kids, and that is a shock to who?
Octamom lost one of her children about a year ago
Octamom would like her own TV show, this seems like a bad idea inthat it will give social services even more evidence that she is crazy.
Octamom is dissapointed that formula and diaper companies don’t want to sponsor her craziness. I wish fertility doctors were as ethical.
Their is a lot more stuff out there, I guess she is sort of a stimulus package for writers.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:32 AM GMT+4
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I got this via Pandagon as a response to the argument that we need high birth rates to maintain social security:
But without denying that the effect is real, this strikes even a lover of Social Security such as myself as a pretty unpersuasive reason to explicitly target higher birthrates as a policy objective. If it’s true—as I’m inclined to think it is—that slower population growth rates are likely to increase average living standards then people could still be made better off even with smaller transfer payments. Alternatively, a developed country that did find itself in desperate need of additional workers can always let more immigrants in.
Also, if you only have one kid chances are inheritence will be larger, after all you wont be splitting it amongst multiple siblings and by only having one kid you may actually save more money. Who knows people might even be able to afford college for their one child rather than having five of them start their adult life deeply in debt.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:51 AM GMT+4
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Looks like other people are starting to notice that low birth rates may be a good thing:
Matt recently had an interesting post reminding everyone that a lower population has the strong benefit of decreasing the number of people who need to share resources. Predictably, Ross Douthat, knowing that low birthrates are often an indicator of dangerous levels of female equality, threw a minor fit over it. Congrats to Matt for not caving to the disingenuous panic about pension programs, and pointing out a relevant point indicating that there is some level of hypocrisy/bullshitting going on
This seems a bit strange to me, however, since the people urging us to panic about low birthrates are almost always conservatives who oppose the existence of such programs. Certainly, the two commenters I was citing seemed to feel this way.
But he also brings up two things that are simply ignored by people making the argument that we need forced child-bearing to make sure that our dependent elderly are cared for:
What’s more, it’s not entirely clear to me how true this really is. After all, children are a significant—and legitimate—claim on the public purse. And high birthrates seem likely to lead to low workforce participation on the part of women, which makes sustaining your retirement benefits more difficult. Conceivably you could get around that by making public spending on child care and preschool and after school programs even more generous, but that just gets you back around to where we started.
Considering that the people making these arguments would see most women turned into housewives, they’re actually suggesting that we dump what’s probably upwards of 40% of current workers from the workforce, because we’re that desperate for labor. Another thing that seems like it would be great for the economy is cutting that amount of income to so many households, who are already not spending because they don’t have enough money. And the key to making sure that there’s enough money for a dependent elderly population is to dramatically increase the number of dependents overall. Perhaps, if women put our minds to it, we can turn 75-80% of the country into dependents.
I’m only mildly kidding. Obviously, the demographic panickers don’t expect poor women and women of color to quit their jobs and become housewives, and they probably don’t intend for them to be the ones having a dozen children. Ideally, they’d quit fucking altogether so they have more time to work. Because, from what I can tell, Matt’s right and the entire low birthrate panic goes straight back to people who are looking for any excuse to claim that women’s rights have to be revoked for the good of the world. But in order to believe that more children automatically means more wealth because it’s more labor, you have to both ignore the fact that it means less labor (because you take so many women out of the labor pool), but you also have to assume that the only thing that creates wealth is labor, and resources have nothing to do with it. Which is easy to believe if you’re already wealthy enough to shield yourself from the pains of growing prices on all sorts of items, from real estate to gas to food, caused by heightened demand, but for the rest of us, not so much.
Kids are also part of the American dream just like a big car and house in the suburbs, the problem being that all those things are enviromentally damaging and less fulfilling than people think they are. Also, they are expensive in the form of roads and fire protection for the burbs and more schools for the little bundles of joy. The government should do whatever it can to discourage people from having kids, this means making all forms of birth control readily available, mandating real sex education(not abstinence only) in any school that recieves federal money and ending tax advantages for people that have large families, and yes, an end to fertility research and treatment.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:14 AM GMT+4
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