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Lee A. Iacocca's recent book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, has received a good amount of press this past week, all centered around one specific passage:

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course." Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you? I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have.

Makes me want to read the book. Though, of course, all the blogs I've read covering said passage have just left it at that. They might make some sort of comment about Iacocca's personality, or what he said about the current crop of domestic auto executives, but they don't really go in and dissect what he said. (I'll disclaim right here that I, like the zillion other blogs that have commented on the book so far, have not actually yet read the book, so if the passage - and my comments hereforth - were taken out of context, Mr. Iacocca, I apologize.) To start with, there is a sense of outrage among Americans. Perhaps more of a sense of outrage now than I've ever seen in my lifetime. It's there if you look for it - on the Internet, on college campuses, in demonstrations across the globe, in Keith Olbermann's words, in Jon Stewart's words. Many of us are not happy at all about the course of the nation. Where you're not seeing the outrage is in your daily newspaper, on your nightly mainstream news program, in comfortable suburban homes. I'm glad Mr. Iacocca, once and former business leader himself, has taken a stand against the modern business and corporate climate. If there's anything more sinister than the incompetence of the Bush administration, it's the measures that corporations have taken to ensure and enhance their profit margins. Take, for instance, the bankruptcy law revisions implemented within the last few years. Probably the most severe of those revisions now forces people who declare bankruptcy to continue repaying their debts rather than wipe the debts clean off the board. Granted, some people abused this in the past, racking up debt and then eliminating it via bankruptcy with no reprisal. But for the people for whom bankruptcy was designed - those facing serious hardships who simply need a break - these revisions make their situations worse, not better. In fact, I've yet to see any single benefit to the consumer - the people - and all the benefit to the corporation. What sense does it make to enact laws that give more power to the corporation than to the people? I know what you're thinking: The credit card companies and their Congressmen are in league. That may be the case, but I have no proof of that (blame a complicit media more concerned about Anna Nicole's babydaddy), and besides, shouldn't those Congressmen be on the side of the people they were elected to represent? Another example. The same bankruptcy revisions (or laws passed at about the same time) permitted credit card companies to increase their minimum payment calculations. If credit card debt - and debt in general - was not one of the major problems plaguing this country today, forcing Americans to carry the lowest amount of savings ever, then I'd say fine, such a measure will help Americans clean up their debt. But the end result is an increase in debt as Americans struggle to meet these higher minimum payments and turn to additional means to borrow money. Another example. Most, if not all, states now have mandatory car insurance. Of course, car insurance is a good idea (except when insurance companies cancel your policy after they're actually forced to pay out a claim - but that's another column) and you really don't want some uninsured jerk hitting your car and sticking you with the bill. But in reality, uninsured jerks will remain uninsured jerks. Or underinsured jerks. Making insurance mandatory will not make life any easier for you when one of those uninsured jerks whacks your car - it'll just provide more incentive for him to hit and run. What it will do is create a larger marketplace for insurance companies. Ever wonder why GM and Ford can't seem to muster the ad dollars for many time slots and programs that Geico and Progressive can? Even beyond those examples, businesses and branding have invaded our lives so much over recent years that we've become complacent to the attack. Do me a favor. Look up from your computer screen and without leaving the room count how many brand names you can see. When you next go shopping, examine the size of the brand name on the plastic bag they give you to tote your purchase around the mall. Did Best Buy or American Eagle pay you for the right to advertise on your belongings? No, you paid them and most people gladly pay them. One of the things I despise about modern hip-hop music - even more so than all the negatives being mentioned in the Imus scandal - is the glorification of brands. Are you paying to hear Fiddy rap about shooting gangstas and slappin' his hos, or are you paying for an hour-long Cadillac, Bentley and Rolls-Royce commercial? And to bring it all back to Mr. Iacocca, there is no outrage. Hell, one of the most stinging critiques that Mike Judge delivers in Idiocracy is that of the rampant branding and corporacracy - their clothes are plastered with brand names, a Cabinet member is paid to mention a certain brand in his everyday conversation and everybody has been brainwashed by advertising to believe that a sports drink is superior in every way to water. But most reviews attribute this to the idiocy of that civilization rather than the aggressive marketing practices of those corporations. So, Mr. Iacocca, what should we do about this? Just express our outrage on blogs and on message boards, get a bunch of people who already agree with us to agree yet again with us? The Internet is a great enabler of outrage. In fact, it's one of those things that only the Internet can really excel at. We can't all write books and enjoy the same sort of publicity as the man who introduced the Mustang to the world. We can vote. We can hold our elected representatives accountable. We can cast off the branding that we've allowed to work its way into our lives. We can buy local. We can buy independent. And we can make the same suggestions time after time and watch as people express their outrage, then take the easy way out and ignore all those suggestions. I really hope that Mr. Iacocca expresses some sort of solution in his book and does his best to implement that solution, because I'm sure as heck out of good ideas. UPDATE: Okay, I thought about it. There's at least one thing we all can do. Stop watching television. Seriously, how much TV do you think Mr. Iacocca watches? How much do you think Kurt Vonnegut watched? How much does Stephen Hawking watch? They have better things to do with their time, as do we all. The reason we haven't built a successful hybrid car, as Mr. Iacocca asked, is because that one engineer who has the talent to spearhead such a project and push it through is right now at home watching Dr. Who or CSI. The reason Wal-Mart reigned for so long atop Fortune 500's list isn't necessarily because of their low prices, it's because some whistling dancing smiley face on TV is goading them into shopping there. The reason you take your family to Olive Garden isn't necessarily because the food is good, it's because you saw the ad on TV right before it was time to make a decision about dinner for that evening. So I'll suggest now to not buy that new HDTV set you've got your eye on and when 2009 (or whenever the deadline is) rolls around and all television stations have to switch over to HDTV (do I smell another squeeze-the-consumer plannned obsolescence scheme behind this?), let your TV set go blank. Go outside. Lose some weight. Build that hybrid car. Write a book. Do all the things you can't do while staring at a TV set.

Wind turbines are cool. The might not be able to replace all the coal power plants in the world, but they're a great example of how old concepts and new technology can be put together like peanut butter and jelly to become a delicious source of power. They're also a great example of the sort of positive environmentalism that sees efficiency and economic growth as two sides of the same coin. I would go so far as to say that most of the various groups opposing wind farms around the country are really lame. But what if I wanted to join in on the blade-spinning fun, instead of just blathering on and on about it on the Internet? There's a cool-looking rooftop vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) from a company called Mag-Wind that looked really promising when I first saw it late last year. It's compact, doesn't require a tall mast, and it's designed specifically for roofs. Unfortunately, it might not be on the up-and-up. Paul Gipe at Wind-Works.org ran some numbers and he doesn't think the power output they are claiming is possible. There's also some talk of a fake Mag-Wind dealer (not actually authorized by the company) taking a whole bunch of people's money in North Dakota. More interesting discussion can be found at Treehugger. This is unfortunate because I had dreamed up a plan to put one of these guys on top of my roof any then buy a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt. Charging a battery at night is already cheaper than buying gas according to Prius conversions. I'm just the kind of geek who goes out and spends money on sort of thing. Now it is possible that the calculations are off, because no one seems to have been able to make any independent measurements yet. Maybe the assumptions are wrong - for example, when they say 1100 kWh/month in a 13 mph average wind, maybe they are talking about the wind measured in a clear area away from buildings, like you see on the weather report. Because of the "roof effect" the wind actually hitting the turbine would be more than 13 mph. Also, this isn't a completely fictional company, their representatives and distributors have contacted bloggers and other writers here and there. So I guess I'll hold out a little hope and keep an eye out for something to materialize from these guys. In the mean time, anyone have a recommendation for a roof-mounted wind turbine that definitely exists? Maybe the WindCube (man that is cheesy-sounding bad name)? Oh, and here's some footage of various wind turbines in action in Taiwan. Not too exciting, but it shows that some people have working VAWTs up and running. [youtube]n0_lmtfwUYg[/youtube]

Earlier we wrote about why people will pay for free music. Apple's Steve Jobs wrote that he would happily remove all the DRM locks from iTunes if the record companies would let him. Now one company is. EMI and Apple reached a deal to allow totally restriction-free songs for sale. The kicker is that the songs will cost 30 cents more that the locked-down DRM versions. At ZDNet, they think the success of this move rests on three factors: will this bring in more customers, will the new customers stop file trading, and is the extra $0.30 per track worth it to the record companies? I think the first question is a good one but the last two miss the point completely. The problem here is the way the issue is framed: the record companies have long been more concerned with stopping file trading and suing "pirates" than actually making money. File trading is here to stay. The nature of the Internet makes it a technological inevitability. You cannot sue a whole technology out of existence. Whether or not EMI (or any of the other major companies) allows DRM-free tracks to be sold, the minute one person buys a CD the whole entire system of locks and encryption and watermarks and whatever else has been completely broken. So what do you do? You figure out why people are using Napster or whatever to download songs, and then you compete with it by offering a better value. No one was even willing to try selling song downloads until Jobs convinced them to, and iTunes has been able to sell billions of tracks. I'm not sure the higher price is such a good idea. I agree that DRM reduces the value of the song downloads. But you have to look at the bigger picture: iTunes is still competing against free mp3s on peer to peer networks. I think Apple picked the $.99 price point for logical psychological reasons - it's much easier to justify spending the money if it's not even a dollar. In any event, this is a good move and I think both iTunes and EMI will see real benefits from this.

For years, the representatives of the recording companies have issued predictions of doom and gloom for their own industry.  Since suing Napster in 1999 they have fretted over copyright infringement and piracy.  According to the RIAA, file sharing costs the industry $4.2 billion per year. But now CD music sales are down 20% from 2006.  Has file sharing finally destroyed the music industry?  I doubt it.  Even if those lawsuits were having the chilling effect they are intended to spread, shutting down every P2P network on the planet, CD sales would be suffering. Why? It's tempting to say there's no good new music, and that the record companies have brought this on themselves by promoting the Brtiney Spears' of the world.  But I'm sure there's good music out there somewhere, and this sounds more like a subjective criticism than a real hypothesis. What if albums are not just competing for your dollar against other albums?  Most people only spend so much money on entertainment or media, and CDs now have to compete against DVDs and video games.  Most people only spend so many hours a day consuming media, and music has to compete with TV, the Internet, and cheap cell phone minutes. I'm not the first person to think of this, I've seen this brought up on blogs and in forums like Slashdot.  But it has always struck me how little coverage this idea gets in the mainstream press, even the business press.  Finally Aaron Pressman from Business Week has put some hard numbers to the notion that CDs are losing out to other media. His source?  A report from the MPAA, hardly a den of piracy-loving communists.  Time spent on entertainment rose 4% between 2001 and 2005, which doesn't even match S&P 500 growth rate.  People spent less time per week listening to music and more time with TV and the Internet. This tracks pretty closely with my experience (and I realize that this is just anecdotal).  In the early and mid 1990s, I spent a good percentage of my entertainment money on CDs.  As videos started to fall in price around 1995 or so, I bought a few here or there.  Then DVDs hit is big around 2000 or 2001.  Soon after that DVDs of television series started appearing and falling to  $20-$40 a season. My CD spending has slowed to a trickle.  I have never been much of a P2P MP3 pirate, and I never even bothered to install Napster.  I am, on the other hand, a big proponent of downloading all the great free MP3s that bands and labels make available.  I also still listen to some of the same music I bought in the 1990s, now ripped to my hard drive. I only have so many hours in a day and although I can listen to CDs while surfing the Internet, I'm not sure I want to put them in my computer anymore, for fear of rootkits. So where does this leave the music industry?  No doubt they will continue to sue 9-year-olds and disabled retirees, and litigating against technological change is not a good business model.  Maybe the open-source-loving interweb hippies are right and bands will promote themselves using MySpace and YouTube and keep a much bigger piece of the profits.  Maybe not. What they are doing right now, though, isn't working.  It's the limits of human consumption and the invisible hand of capitalism they should fear, not some kids with cable modems.

Apparently what needs two six-hour classes on the first two Saturdays of spring can be summed up within a couple paragraphs (at least in a couple installments) on a slightly successful somewhat humor associated blog. I am, of course, referring to the first time home buyer class my lender has required me to attend in order to obtain a state subsidized mortgage. I’m not knocking the program as it is meant for first time home buyers. But the elementary view and information this class provides these hopeful and somewhat naive homebuyers is almost worthless. At first I assumed the audience was somewhat knowledgeable in regards to personal finance. I mean, this is a class for people ready to make the biggest purchase of their lives. However, I was seriously surprised when more than a few hands raised to notify the teacher that they didn’t know what a “Credit Score� was. As I sat in the freezing room filled with plastic folding chairs listening to a real estate professional, a home inspector, and a real estate lawyer try to drum up business for themselves instead of educate home buyers, I decided to put down on paper the important lessons and intricacies that may be useful to a somewhat more educated, or simply alive, first time home buyer that I’ve discovered not only during the home buying process but also through my experience as a former loan officer and what I’ve learned while preparing to sit for the Real Estate Licensing exam in Ohio. Today’s topic – Preparing your financials for a Mortgage Preparing for a loan is, I think, the most important part of the process. Hopefully you’ve made some decisions as far as where you’re going to live and what type of house you’re looking for. A little bit of research around these assumptions will help you determine how much of a loan and down payment you’re going to need. Preparing yourself, or more importantly your finances for a loan, may take months or years depending on how far off plan you are. The two most important things that the bank will look at will be your debt-to-income ratio and your credit score (hopefully you know what that is). Your debt-to-income ratio simply is your month debt payments divided your gross income divided. Now for the most part you want to pay off debt in order of the highest interest rate, by the way, if you’re carrying credit card balances, you’re not even ready to begin thinking about buying a home. Work on a budget to get your credit cards closed and make yourself debit-dependent instead of credit-dependent. When evaluating your debt-to-income your bank will mainly look at monthly required payments and then debt balances, but the two measures that matter most are your debt-to-income ratio using only your new house payment, taxes, insurance, and possibly condo fee, and your total debt-to-income ratio including all monthly debt payments and your new house payment, taxes etc… These two ratios should be under or close to 28% and 36% respectively. Now this is where some creative financing takes place. The two determinates you can effect in these equations are your income, which is not as controllable as most of us like, and your current monthly debt payments. Like I said before, normally it’s prudent to pay off your highest interest loans and debts first, but when trying to improve your debt-to-income ratio by reducing your monthly debt payments this may not be true. Consider two student loans, one at 8% and one at 4%. Most people’s first instinct is to payoff the first loan with the 8% interest because the interest is higher. However let’s also assume that the 8% interest loan is amortized over 5 years with a balance of $5,000, and the 4% loan is amortized over two years with a balance of $5,000. The payment on the 8% loan is $101.38 and the 4% loan is 217.12. The lower interest rate loan has a higher payment due to the amortization time. After you’ve decided how much money you’ll need for down payment, closing costs, reserve funds, etc… any extra funds should be applied to your highest monthly payment to balance ratio. In other words, the 8% loans ratio is 101.38/5000, or 2% while the 4% loan is about 4.3%. This will lower your debt-to-income ratio. This theory should be applied to all your debt balances and monthly payments that have the same tax advantages. Notice how I compared two student loans instead of a student loan and a car loan. Normally the student loan will have tax advantages over the auto loan, because you can deduct the student loan interest you pay. This theory may also have negative effects in the future. Essentially in the scenario above you’re sacrificing a loan with a lower rate to afford a better home. If you had paid off the 8% loan instead, you’d pay less interest over time. These are all things that should be considered on an individual basis and they unfortunately don’t fit easily into a widely flexible calculation. Paying off any debt will also improve your credit score. The calculations that determine your FICO score are very complicated and outside of the scope of this writing. What I can tell you is that if your FICO score isn’t above 700 you can expect to pay a higher interest rate or points on your loan than what the market is advertising. Also, with all the problems with the sub-prime market if you’re FICO score is below 600 you may not have a prayer finding financing. Based only on my experience alone, the most diligent efforts to improve a bad credit score can only rise a score by 50 points a year at best. Based on that and your own knowledge of you credit history you should be better able to determine what your timeframe is before you apply for a mortgage. And like everyone says but almost no one ever does, you should check your credit score at least once a year and with all three major reporting agencies. Maybe the most helpful thing to do when you want to start preparing for a mortgage is to play with the numbers. Using something like Excel, list all of your debt balances, payments, terms, etc.. along with your income. Make some quick formulas to automatically calculate your debt-to-income ratio and then run through a few scenarios. Playing with the numbers will give you a better idea of what you need to do to improve your debt-to-income ratio and provide you with a better timeline of when it'll be proper to apply for a loan.