While the brands – Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, etc. – and models are often familiar, GM cars sold in China are almost all made in China by the GM Shanghai division. In other words, the Buick Regal sold in China is made in Fushun, while the Regal sold in North America is made in Oshawa, Ontario (and the European version, rebadged as the Opel Insignia, is made in Russelsheim, Germany). The net result is that the car costs approximately the same in these different markets; the Chinese Regal goes for 150k – 250k RMB, or about $23,000 – $39,000 USD, on par with the US/Canada price.

Chinese-made vehicles are not sold in the US, as consumers are (rightly) skeptical of them. American- or European-made vehicles are not sold in China because of Chinese tariff policy (and, not insignificantly, because nonexistent Chinese safety regulations allow stripped China-only versions of the vehicles to be made at a considerable cost savings. Cue the hilarious Chinese Crash Test footage.) One exception for GM is full-sized trucks. None are made in China, but the American-made models are exported and offered to Chinese consumers. With all taxes and import duties, an American-made GMC Sierra Denali ($45-$50,000 in the US) retails in China for 850,000 RMB…or $135,000 USD.

"Free trade" really is a misleading term, as it implies that goods and services are being exchanged for other goods and services. In practice China sends us millions of shipping containers and we send them a small number of incredibly expensive luxury items. More accurately, they send us cheap shit and we send them our jobs. That doesn't seem like such a great deal.

In short, Bill Kristol has the longest, most baffling track record of obtaining paid, high profile media gigs from which to offer his opinions without ever having been right about anything. And rarely is he merely wrong – more often he is profoundly, even staggeringly wrong. Dewey defeats Truman wrong. "They can't hit anything from this distance" wrong. "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau" wrong. He manages to be wrong so completely and his predictions plow into the side of the mountain at such spectacular speed that we can scarcely comprehend how anyone takes him seriously. That he has not been laughed into an institution for the mentally unwell is difficult to believe.

So when Bill Kristol concern trolls writes a "sincere" column recommending that Obama replace Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton, the one and only correct course of action for the President is to do the exact opposite:

For our part, we'd like to see a decisive triumph for Romney and his running mate over two formidable representatives of contemporary liberalism, rather than a discounted victory over a flawed ticket with only one strong candidate. So we sincerely suggest to President Obama: Dump Joe Biden.

We're sure the thought has occurred to the president. He knows his undisciplined vice president did him no service by popping off about same-sex marriage on Meet the Press, thereby forcing Obama to engage the issue prematurely. Instead of making his announcement of his evolution in a well-prepared speech for which the groundwork had been laid, the president arranged a rushed interview in which he rather inarticulately expressed his personal view in a way that persuaded no one who wasn't already convinced.

…Who should replace Biden? Everyone knows the answer. Hillary Clinton received nearly 18 million votes in the race for the 2008 Democratic nomination. Her rating in a Washington Post survey a couple of weeks ago was 65 percent favorable, 27 percent unfavorable. Biden hurts Obama. She would help him.

What's more, she'd help with precisely the undecided voters Obama needs in November. Many of them are white, working- and middle-class Americans who supported her in the 2008 primaries. They overcame their disappointment at Clinton's defeat to vote for Obama that November. But many became disillusioned and voted Republican in 2010, producing that year's GOP landslide. Barack Obama needs to win back as many of them as possible in 2012. They voted for Hillary Clinton once. Surely they'd be more likely to return to Obama if given the opportunity to vote for her again as part of the ticket.

Ignore the obvious for a moment – Obama has way to justify making desperation moves at this point, Obama and Hillary personally hate each other, Obama wants Bill Clinton as far away from the White House as possible, Hillary as a candidate is actually a deeply polarizing and rather unpopular figure – and look at this from a purely Kristol-centric perspective. If Bill Kristol thinks this is the right move, then it is the worst idea since the Edsel. I temper that last remark only to the extent that it is unfair to the Edsel, which, despite being almost comically ugly and saddled with a chrome vagina for a grille, actually worked.

While I've had the good fortune of being continuously gainfully employed throughout the downturn, this is one topic on which I think my example is somewhat illustrative. I began looking for a tenure-track job in 2008 and found one four years and hundreds of applications later in early 2012. In the interim, I worked in a temporary position with all the concomitant benefits – no opportunity for advancement, low salary, high workload, no resources, etc. Compare this course of events to an alternate history in which 2008 was a modal year for the job market in my field. Not landing a real job at the outset has cost me, over this four year period, a conservative estimate of $50-60,000 in salary that I will never earn back (picture the value of that amount, for example, invested until retirement age) and a lengthy delay in beginning the long, slow process of career advancement. If I go up for tenure before I'm 40 it will be a miracle, compared to the more common practice of doing it in one's early 30s. Don't weep for me; I don't live in a cardboard box and I'm not going hungry, but the point holds that the delay in getting started in a profession is a costly one with both short- and long-term consequences.

There's no amount of elbow grease or bootstrap pulling that can make up for two, three, or even five years after graduation spent living in Mom and Dad's basement, making coffee for $7.75/hr, or "interning" (i.e., working for free). Those are wasted years, in the economic sense, that you will never get back. And this is becoming a disturbingly common experience for heavily indebted college graduates. Some combination of unemployment, substantial underemployment, or continued dependence on parental resources (if available) are the rule rather than the exception no matter how we slice the data.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this is not the economic cost to young workers but the psychological shift that accompanies changing expectations. Not only are things not improving, but it's getting to a point at which no one really expects them to improve. Failing to find a career or at least a decently compensated job is the new normal, much as moving back in with the parents now fails to raise eyebrows. Young adults enter the Real World for which college supposedly prepares them with a sense of fatalism and a stunted process of personal and social maturation. Moving back in with the parents, for example, halts the process of learning basic adult skills – living on one's own, cooking, paying bills, budgeting, and so on – that the school-to-work transition is supposed to encourage. Not only are young people losing income that they will never regain, but they are potentially extending an adolescence that already lasts too long in our society (with its college culture that encourages juvenile, irresponsible behavior into one's early twenties).

The solution is not specific to this demographic. Instead, their success depends on stronger demand for workers overall. While the weak economy continues to hurt nearly everyone in some way, it will be easier for those of us already on the train to hold on during the bumpy ride than it will be for young people chasing the train on foot to get aboard.

Performance-based salary and job evaluation schemes are popping up everywhere except, of course, among the people pushing to implement them. Congressional or state legislative salaries remain based on the divine right of kings, and CEO/Job Creator pay has been uncoupled completely from performance under the mantra of rewarding Producers in a manner that will continue to give them incentives to bestow their wisdom upon us. One of the most hilarious examples from the Bush years was General Motors' continued lavish rewarding of the executives who were running the company in the ground. Of course we have to pony up top dollar for brilliant talent like Rick Wagoner, a guy who managed to make Roger Smith look like Bill Gates while pocketing about $100 million in compensation. Talent like that doesn't come cheap.

One of Obama's brief Wall Street love interests, Jaime Dimon, just pocketed $23,000,000 in extra compensation for leading JP Morgan to a $2 billion quarterly loss. And the kicker is that the compensation package was approved in a shareholders' vote. I guess that whole "maximizing shareholder value" thing, the Commandment that has done more to turn this country into Dogpatch than anything else in the last three decades, doesn't apply when it comes to doling out money at the top.

We might expect that the shareholders would be inclined to save money rather than spend it, and certainly to avoid rewarding people who perform so poorly. But a stockholders' meeting is little more than a boys' club operating under the pretext of a transparent process of corporate governance. The kind of heavy-hitting institutional shareholders who decide these votes – mutual fund managers, fellow banking executives, and so on – are either in Dimon's position or expect to be there someday if they can make it to the other side of the shark tank. Perhaps getting to the top, into a position like Dimon's, is so difficult and unpleasant that the people who manage to do it feel entitled to endless compensation to make it all seem worth it.

Or maybe it's just a bunch of assholes born into money, rooming together at prep school, getting the same Gentlemen's B at Harvard or Yale, and using Old Money and family connections to land jobs for which they are woefully unqualified, emerging from their life of privilege with a profound sense of entitlement and a belief in their own greatness that borders on sociopathy. In either case, like so many aspects of our political, economic, and social systems the idea of performance-based compensation and employment standards apply only to the little people.

I'm not one to laugh at privacy / 4th Amendment concerns very often, and such things should generally be taken seriously. There is a curious tendency for Patriotic types to obsess over the loss of individual freedoms only when there is a Democrat in office – It was all "If you haven't done anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about!" from 2000 to 2008 – but for the most part I assume they are sincere if a bit paranoid. I suppose I could get more worked up about it myself if not for reality (75% of cars already have an EDR or EDR-like device, and the law mostly affects the format of the data already being collected) or the fact that I've long since abandoned any illusions of privacy when modern technology is involved. It's a war that was never really fought and, short of living-off-the-grid type strategies for opting out of the world, we've already lost.

There are plenty of people who will hear about this law and assume that The Government is going to be tracking your location 24-7. Aside from the misplaced anger (this is more about information-grabbing by insurers, not the state) there's the little problem that your smartphone is probably already doing this. And if it isn't, it's certainly capable of being used for that purpose. Ditto those neat GPS units that are fast becoming standard features in new cars, which are connected to a Department of Defense satellite network and could presumably be used to harvest copious data from your vehicle. Outside of your car, we already live with the reality of Google, Facebook, and all of our favorite internet tubes are treating us like cows to be milked for data that will be sold to advertisers. And we compound the problem by providing copious information (Account numbers, SSN, passwords, credit cards, etc.) in the course of banking, paying bills, shopping, buying insurance, and everything else online. That data's all secure, right?

I can't say I'm happy about the presence of another electronic data harvesting device in my life, but I can't be alone in getting somewhat numb to it. If someone – the NSA, State Farm, Google, the Illuminati, cabals of Jewish bankers – wants to collect information about my whereabouts they're perfectly capable of doing so already. Even if you ditch the iPhone, things like DARPA's terrifying Total Information Awareness project, which uses city-sized networks of cameras to track an individual's location based solely on gait recognition. So yeah, the technology to keep constant tabs on you already exists and we're going to have enough trouble fighting the big stuff in the coming years – CCTV systems, for example – so there's no point in wasting our time freaking out about things that are blown out of proportion and ultimately irrelevant.

Every discussion about the tepid vat of weaksauce that has been Obama's first term (compared to his 2008 campaign rhetoric and, unfairly, to expectations projected onto him) effectively ends with something about Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia followed by warnings about who President Romney-Santorum-Gingrich would appoint. Republicans are now engaging in the same logic to talk themselves into supporting a nominee about whom they are clearly ambivalent at the very best. We can't let that Kenyan usurper appoint another one of his Marxist academic buddies, so I guess it's time to suck it up and vote for the automaton.

The problem with this argument is not that it is wrong. It's quite obviously valid; the Supreme Court is important and the president has few restraints on who he can appoint. The problem is that resorting to the "We have to vote for Obama because Romney will appoint lunatics to the Court" argument is a glaring indication that your candidate is in trouble. It's the kind of argument of last resort that arises only when all of the arguments that would imply actual enthusiasm about the candidates have been exhaustive and, in most cases, contradicted.

I'm a big believer in the idea that presidential elections are decided by turnout. In any given election the number of persuadable ("undecided") voters is comparatively small. The outcome is more likely determined by the turnout differential between the most likely supporters of each party. In 2008, for example, Barack Obama blew McCain away because a lot of people got really, really excited about his candidacy and drove turnout to its highest level since the Sixties. Conversely, McCain was unpalatable from the beginning to some conservatives and by late October 2008 his campaign was such a debacle that even the most optimistic Republican knew what was coming.

What happens when nobody's enthusiastic on either side? Well, you get elections like 1996 or 2000, and they're usually extremely close. Turning out the base takes on additional importance in close elections, so The Faithful are rallied with every rhetorical tool at the campaign professionals' disposal. And nothing says desperation and lack of interest quite as clearly as "Well Ginsburg's probably gonna die soon, so get excited about Mitt!"

It's obviously incorrect to say that Obama has no accomplishments on which to run, but it is not a good sign that the liberal base is being fired up with hypotheticals – warnings about Mitt Romney's potential Court appointments and Obama's recent endorsement of a position on an issue that, if re-elected, he will never actually vote on. For better or worse, 2008 saw quite a bit of the kind of I Love This Guy, He's Gonna Change the Country enthusiasm that Obama's campaign is going to have to do without this time around. Clearly Romney will be going without it as well since everything about him just screams "default candidate".

So by all means, keep bringing up the Supreme Court. It's a valid point for either candidate. Be aware, though, that in doing so you're tacitly admitting that you've punted on generating actual enthusiasm for the candidate – unless, of course, you envision an electorate full of people who say things like, "Fuck yeah! We better get out and vote for Obama in case there might be a Supreme Court vacancy!" I'm a tad skeptical about how many such voters exist.

1. The UK's National Physical Laboratory has a wonderful YouTube channel full of Olde Timey science videos dating back to the late 1940s. This particularly neat one (in color!) details the creation of one of the first atomic clocks:

2. Apparently it's pretty easy for anyone with a decent amount of money to buy a frickin' island and live like Robinson Crusoe. Here's an 86 year old Briton who bought an island in the Seychelles in 1962 for the hefty but not totally outrageous price of £8000.

I kinda want an island.

3. Let's keep going with Britons here. Here is a photo of young Stephen Hawking. Young Stephen Hawking looks like a smartassed hipster.

I find this worth sharing because I've been seeing and hearing Hawking on PBS specials (and even in filmstrips!) since I was old enough to remember, and he has always been the wrinkled man in the wheelchair who talks like a robot. For many of us it's somewhat surprising to see a reminder that prior to his mid-twenties, Hawking walked, talked, and looked like any other 1950s science-nerd stock character. I wonder what his unmodified voice sounded like.

4. If your faith in humanity requires restoration, watch this video of a guy rigging up his bicycle with a compressed air powered train horn. The video description describes this as a test run and tantalizingly promises a "full power demonstration" soon.

5. Oh, and speaking of things that are loud and/or look like Stephen Hawking, Reddit did an Ask Me Anything with…Steve Albini. You won't find a more entertaining way to kill an hour today, I promise.

Work is for suckers.

If something is a right, or more importantly if one understands it as a right, it shouldn't take 15 years into one's political career to express support for it. We don't have to be wildly enthusiastic about things that are rights; I recognize that white supremacists have a right to publish their beliefs, and believe it or not I'm not wild about white supremacists. So if Barack Obama believes that marriage is a right that belongs to same-sex couples, his "personal beliefs" or however the carefully crafted press release phrased it are not relevant. If a right exists according to the Constitution and the law, then your and my personal beliefs about it are irrelevant.

These things are always patiently explained as a matter of pragmatism, of political reality. Americans are ambivalent or worse about SSM, so a candidate who endorses it openly is unlikely to get elected, so the candidate who secretly kinda supports it but doesn't say so is superior to the Republican who will outright oppose it, because Supreme Court nominations &ec &ec. I understand a thing or two about how politics and elections work. Perhaps, however, there is some respect to be won and political support to be enjoyed from being forthright and honest about one's core beliefs. In this era of deeply cynical politics, it's plausible that a Jimmy McMillan-style "You wanna marry a shoe? I'll marry you to a shoe. Next question." position might appeal to the overwhelming majority of people for whom gay marriage is not a political issue of the utmost importance. At least the stance would not come off as an expression of opportunism carefully timed to disrupt what was becoming a dangerously Romney-centric news cycle for the past few weeks.

There are many things that People dislike about politics, and the idea that our elected officials and candidates simply tell us what we want to hear is among the most repellent. Very few of us enjoy a good, solid pandering. It's possible that a "Yeah, I believe a right to marry exists and applies broadly" Obama loses in 2008, but I doubt it unless he happened to make it the dominant issue in the campaign (which, of course, he would not have). Despite the fact that it is extremely important to some of the loudest voices in the Beltway chorus, particularly on the right, the bottom line is that most people don't spend much time thinking about it. Though many people will express support or opposition to it when asked, even those in opposition would gladly vote for a candidate who appeals to them on other, more significant issues. The people most likely to flip their lids – religious conservatives – aren't voting for him anyway. So what was there to lose?

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he said what he said. There is little chance it will produce any policy or substantively different outcomes – this one's eventually going to be decided in the courts, after all – but I guess it's nice to hear. It would be even nicer, though, to hear what the candidates think sooner than four years into their term when the disaffected electorate needs a little firing up. Absent your willingness to buy the contrived, silly "I just had a change of heart, never mind the timing" cover story, this is just another in what will be an unbroken string of campaign stunts on the candidates' part over the next few months. If you're wondering "How can it be opportunistic if it has the potential to cost him support?" consider both the intended audience – the left wing base – and the timing of the announcement and the motives become much clearer.

But, you know, hey, the legal argument for gay marriage is pretty obvious. So I'm glad he finally supports it.