Published at November 22, 2008
in Life.
“Truth is, I make car parts for the American working man because I’m a hell of a salesman and he doesn’t know any better.“
So the economy is gone to hell. I didn’t do it. They did it. Probably one of the funniest skits I’ve ever seen Keenan on SNL do was a piece he did on Weekend Update where his only piece of advice to the financial sector was “Fix it”. He basically kept yelling it. Step 1: Fix. Step 2: It. Step 3: Fix it. Repeat steps 1-3 until it is fixed. I couldn’t agree more. The Fed wants to give out $700 billion of our money to help fix it. I am not an economist. But I suppose if the staff of every Senator and Representative decided that we needed to give out $700 billion, then go on ahead.
But recently, the “Big Three”, Ford, GM and Chrysler decided that they wanted a piece of this action because they too were failing as businesses. I guess they are trying to live up to the old adage, so goes GM, so goes the nation. These are private businesses who say they are so important to the economy of the country that if they go down, we all go down. I am not an economist. I am not in the auto manufacturing business. I dont even own a car. No one asked for my opinion, no one cares. Big Three: suck it. It’s not my fault you let Toyota, Honda, and Nissan steal the market away from you. While the Japanese were making smaller, economy sized cars with superior engines, you were selling us SUVs with the same old engines. Detriot’s auto industry is 100 years old. How could they have not saved enough cash to get through a catastrophe such as this? Do you mean to tell me that no one in Detroit saw what the Japanese were doing? As an American, I am almost ashamed. I think as a people we are pretty innovative. Why couldnt The Big Three say, “Hey look at what Toyota is doing. We need to do that. Do that!” Then maybe they’d be better off today. So now they want a handout. And I am not sure we should give it to them.
FYI – I did go through 3 Chevys in 10 years. My friends with Toyotas and Nissans… guess how many they had?
“Do you know the difference between dying for nothing and dying for something. That’s why I’m still alive. That’s the only reason why I managed to stay alive in China, so I wouldn’t die for nothing. Today, I can die for something.“
http://www.xkcd.com/503/
OK. It’s been a while. I know. So I recently went to China. Just me and my parents. Bin, a friend of mine from college, is now living and working in Tokyo, and his parents have wanted my parents to go over to China for a visit for a while. Now that the parents are properly retiring and no longer productive members of society, the time was right. We started in Tokyo, stayed there for a few days and then toured 4 cities in China over 7 days. Shanghai, Wuhan, Xi’an and Beijing. Tokyo was very expensive and quite frankly, I couldnt have afforded to stay there much more than 2 or 3 days. Whatta town though. Very clean. The Japanese people confused me a bit though. On the streets, and from what Bin has told me about his job, they are a very uptight people. But their TV shows paint a very different story. Wacky, crazy, zany, lots of sound effects. It’s almost as if making crazy TV shows is a release for them. Very interesting.
It was a hell of a trip and we all had a blast. Dad managed to find beef in every restaurant we went to and Mom tried a little bit of everything. Noodles, pasta, same principle. More than once I heard from people in China that I would fit in and should consider moving there and getting a job. But you know me, better dead than Red. Ive got a lot of photos and I hope to find a good working wordpress gallery plugin to put some of the pics up. I dont trust flickr, facebook, or anything like that really. GET OFF MY YARD!! Yeah, I guess I am something of an Old Man on The Internet in this regard.
