Dueling Generational Sentiments

"Please Get Out of the New One If You Can't Lend A Hand"

A very interesting article in today's NY Times discusses the generational shift that is afoot at college campuses today--and no, I'm not talking about the hordes of young Millenials rushing in from high school; I'm talking about the late Gen Xers who are now taking faculty positions as the Baby Boomers begin to retire in larger numbers.



This article is a bit scant on the larger changes that have occurred at universities--including the dramatic shift in hiring of adjunct faculty rather than full-time faculty--but it does make the point that the ideology of these 'youngsters' is akin to Obama's shushing of the Baby Boomers in his campaign positioning. Andrew Sullivan wrote a good piece about in December, 2007.

I'm Batman ... No, I'm Batman ... I'm Batman and so is my wife!

There's much ado about the new Batman movie, and some people with too much time on their hands managed to splice together a (somewhat comically confusing at times) montage of The Battle of the Batmans:



I'm distracted today, so I'll just end by saying that people called romanes they go the house:

Taking Stock

Correction to yesterday's blog (it's been corrected): I was citing net worth of GM versus Toyota in billions, not stock prices.

Yesterday, as was reported this morning, GM's stock dropped to $10.57, which is the lowest price it's reached since 1954. Of course, with our handy-dandy inflation calculator, we learn that $10.57 in 1954 would be worth around $81 today. Working in reverse, that means the $10.57 stock price would actually be the equivalent of about $1.38 in 1954.

It bugs me when news stories cite things like this without taking basic inflation into account; the worth of the dollar--as we are witnessing today--is more than a little important, and it's far from constant.

Plug It In, Plug It In

Speaking of gasoline, today there was a report that General Motors' worth has dropped to $6.47 billion, compared with Toyota, which is priced at around $148.8 billion.

This is important, because, as The Atlantic reports, General Motors is apparently betting its future on the development of an affordable hybrid that, unlike everything on the road today, would actually plug-in to ordinary power outlets and drive 40 miles on an overnight charge. After that, its gasoline engine would get 50 mpg. But, since most people drive fewer than forty miles each day, you'd probably only need to fill up the tank every few months...

So who wants to buy some GM stock?

P.S. Toyota is pursuing this too. Plug-in hybrids will be on the streets in 2-3 years.

"Don't Everybody Like the Smell of Gasoline?"

It seems like you can't walk outside without six or seven people complaining about gas prices. Fretting over home heating bills has already started, in a summer that has set a few heat records already. According to a new poll, something like 90% of Americans now think fuel prices are doing major damage to the American family. This may be the first thing that 90% of Americans agree about in a generation: what is going on at the gas pump? Why is gas here in Rhode Island cheaper by 40 cents than it is in nearby Connecticut, for example?

In the background, there are a steady stream of voices who say things on public radio like, "This is supply demand." "This is caused by speculators." "Gas prices are higher in Europe."



There has been much ado over oil companies' recent record profits, which incidentally followed the year after companies also reported their highest profits ever. And the year before, and the year before that ...

First, are gas prices higher in Europe? Well, yes, but they're not that much higher when you take away the gas taxes. The reason gas is over $10/gallon in the Netherlands is because they fund a very effective network of alternative transportation with the money raised. It's the same elsewhere in Western Europe, as anyone who has ever spent time there surely knows.

Second, this is not simply supply and demand. Oil is now at more than $140/barrel: are you telling me that the world economy has doubled or tripled in size in the past few years or that all-of-a-sudden supply has constricted unexpectedly? No, and no. Some of those elements are certainly contributing to the prices--and speculators probably are to blame for a bit of it too--but the bigger culprit is the economic system itself. The American political system is now controlled by oil men, and much of the rest of the legislative framework is virtually owned by these interests. Ordinary people are being kicked around, and they know it. Once or twice a year they see a headline that reports record-breaking, billion+ profits at X-oil/gas/energy company, and they look at their energy bills and they think, "Huh."

I would like to add that I am not opposed to high gas prices. Our current system isn't sustainable, and if immediate corporate greed and geo-politics speed up the process of change, so be it. We're headed toward some much more fundamental changes than left-of-center versus right-of-center. What we see now is small potatoes. The cost of living is certainly packing a punch, and a malaise and frustration is setting in, but, in the words of Winston Churchill (he, who Nicholas Baker stopped just short of accusing of causing the Holocaust in his work 'Human Smoke':



"No, this is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. It is perhaps the end of the beginning."

Memories...

Apparently, memory/fact isn't terribly solid, which means the past isn't the past--it's subjective.



One of the things that NY Times piece mentions is the idea that if something is repeated enough times, the brain tends to give it more credence. To anyone familiar with the history of propaganda, this probably isn't much of a shock, but the fact that there is now neuro-science to back it up is a tad disconcerting.