Lee Iacocca on Chrysler and the Future of Detroit

CNN Money had an interesting interview with Lee Iacocca. A couple interesting blurbs:

AT: Do you blame the Japanese for Detroit's decline over the past couple of decades?

LI: I've taken on the Japanese forever. Toyota's a great competitor. Nissan's coming on strong. Honda's always been great on engineering. They're good companies, but they had advantages. It's unfair competition. Their market is closed to us. They still manipulate currency. When they come to this country they don't have unions, and that's tough to compete against. Sometimes I think their trade practices are predatory.

AT: In the '80s you suggested raising the gas tax.

LI: Yes. I went to see Reagan and said, "Let's put a 50-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline. That's $50 billion. We can cut the deficit in half." He said, "You've got to be out of your mind. You don't tax gasoline." And he laughed. So we never did it. Our state and federal taxes add up to about 46 cents a gallon, compared with $5 in Europe.

A 50-cent gas tax? Why not? There's nothing that says people have a god-given right to cheap transportation. Of course, our economy depends on it. And in general more taxes are bad. Still, by having artificially low gas prices, we encourage its waste.

OS X Safe Sleep

I've often wondered why OS X doesn't have an analogue to Windows' hibernate mode. Turns out that newer Macs have the feature, called Safe Sleep, and that it can be enabled on some older Macs as well.

• A how to enable Safe Sleep on legacy Macs.
• An Apple help document depicting a Mac coming out of Safe Sleep.
• A description of the feature.

Minute Man Range

Back on 3/31 I ventured over to the Minute Man Range. Mostly because I wanted to shoot and it was raining, and I wasn't aware of any other indoor ranges near town. It took about 30 minutes to get there, driving through some real country. The drive was kind of nice, actually, except that would've been about a gallon and a half one way in my car.

I took one of my guns and rented a Glock G21 from the shop. Previously I was skeptical about Glocks, but the one I'd shot before was a G19, and 9mm I've found is pretty lame for accuracy, at least relative to .45. The G21 was nice. The range was nice, except their ventilation could've been better. That's a perennial problem with indoor ranges, though.

Seattle Mariners

The wife's father wants to go see Ichiro play at the Mariners' home ground. Thus, we're doing some checking into tickets and such. First there's the Mariners' website. A map of the Safeco Field seating helps pick out where to park it. The "Terrace Club" area looks good, if not spendy. Maybe one game in the lower box and another in the Terrace Club would do. There's a Field A-to-Z Guide, a collection of FAQs about the field. Interesting tidbits include the custom jerseys available for purchase, and that if one shows up during batting practice before the game one might be able to get an autograph. Cool!

Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young

I had occasion to look up on Wikipedia Chris Rock's No Sex (In the Champagne Room), for background on all that good advice. (I particularly liked the part about "don't go parties with metal detectors", and the humor of the pierced tongue part.)

What I didn't realize that was it was a parody of the "Wear Sunscreen" song. I'd heard that on the radio before too, but either had forgotten about it or figured the latest trend was to give random advice accompanied by music. The column that song was based on, apparently often the target of Internet hoaxes, is actually quite good. Especially for a column. Thus, I bookmark it here.