Auto Sales Off by 1/3

This morning marks the end of the biggest news hole in U.S. history. Since August, most legitimage news stories have been buried by the news media’s focus on the Olympics, major party nominating conventions, hurricane season, general election campaign, and banking system collapse.

Expect a flurry of product announcements and other initiatives over the next 21 days as people who want attention for the things they are doing try to squeeze their stories into this brief window of opportunity before hard news is again drowned out by the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and Christmas carols.

Meanwhile, people who want their announcements to be overlooked have been rushing to get them out before lunch time today.

The continuing bad news for the auto industry has gone largely overlooked this week, and the latest news is grim indeed. October automobile sales are down by a third from a year ago. Sales for the month were the worst since the energy crisis days of 1975, and no one seems to think the trend has hit bottom yet. If consumers are content to drive the cars they already have for an extra two, five, or ten years, there is not much the marketing team can do about that.

For General Motors (GM), the news is worse. Sales are down 45 percent from last year, with per-capita sales at Great Depression levels. Its finance company continues to lose $30 million a day, and shareholders are bracing for another huge loss when GM reports its financial results on Friday. One GM executive called the current sales levels “unsustainable.” Outsiders have been offering that assessment of GM’s business model for years now, but it is another thing entirely to hear that word coming from someone inside the company.

The pain the auto industry is going through is the result of a lack of scalability in its business plans. A business is supposed to be ready to scale back and cut costs when demand softens. Yet many auto workers are still working overtime. It is as if the auto companies can’t quite believe the world doesn’t want as many trucks this year.

In a properly run business, a sales decline of only a third, which was forecast more than two years in advance, should not be a crisis. For companies like Ford, which has moved aggressively to cut capacity, and Toyota, which is particularly cautious in its capacity planning, it probably will not be. But for the companies that have tried to swim against the current in order to increase their market presence during the slowdown, the sting of customer indifference is twice as painful.

Discover Your Own Reason to Vote

If you are a U.S. registered voter, today is the day — the day to vote. I know the candidates, the pundits, your friends, and even robots have been giving you the dumbest reasons imaginable to vote for one candidate or another all year long. But none of that matters now. This is your best chance all year to express an intention for the larger world around you. That is what is really at stake here.

I mean, look, the biggest reason why politics is so dark and ugly is that some of the powerful people out there want to discourage you. They spend millions of dollars to manipulate the media and the political process just to keep you from getting involved. It’s not that they want to keep your candidate or your party from winning. It’s that they want to keep you, and the majority of people, from having any say in what goes on in the world. If you have any kind of active intention about the world, that could interfere with their intention about what should happen in your life — so they make sure politics is filled with infuriating illogic and nonissues.

You don’t have to play that game to be a voter. You don’t have to be serious about it or take a stand on the issues that other people say are important. Just decide something and put it on the ballot. And the world will take note.

Freedom of Speech vs. Freedom to Vote

You protect yourself by making choices, by deciding that one thing is more important than another. If you insist that everything you want is a top priority, you end up being manipulated and possibly not getting anything on your list.

It might seem paradoxical to have to choose between two things that we can’t do without, but we have to do it. You can see an example of this tomorrow on Election Day. As important as freedom of speech is, we have to set it aside in order to protect the freedom to vote.

The rule in Pennsylvania is that political speech is prohibited inside a polling places and for a few steps outside the entrance. It is easy to see why some kind of line has to be drawn. Imagine what could happen if a candidate were allowed to hire goons who would come up to you while you were in the voting booth to tell you, “You’d better vote for our candidate or we’ll be very unhappy with you.” Or even if they were to stand, arms folded, looking surly, directly in front of the entrance to the polling place. To have a high-quality vote, that kind of behavior has to be prevented.

And in order to protect the voting process, the rules have to apply to everyone. That’s why, after you are inside the polling place, you can’t encourage the other voters waiting in line to vote in any particular way.

The way I explain it to people is this. We have freedom of speech all year long so that we can have freedom to vote on Election Day. When there is a conflict between freedom of speech and freedom to vote, freedom to vote has to come first. But it is not that we give up our freedom of speech for the day. You can carry a candidate’s sign around with you all day long if you wish. Just leave it outside when you go into the polling place to vote.

I’m Calling With a Message From the Robotican National Committee

I’ve received an unprecedented number of political phone calls in the last 10 days, and there is an unmistakable trend in the calls. All the calls on behalf of Republican candidates have been placed by machine. For these calls, someone set up a telephone server to place the calls with a recorded message, but there is no actual person there seeing that the calls are made. All the calls for all other parties and candidates were made by volunteers. They were actual people, concerned citizens, who were calling me.

This election, then, is shaping up as the battle of humans against robots. If the robocalls turn out to be more persuasive than the human callers, we can be assured of a political future that is largely controlled by robots. But if candidates who have human supporters win, it may say that humans still control the political process.

The Republican Party is taking a significant risk in turning itself into the Robotican Party. It could alienate voters who decide they don’t like having machines tell them what to do. And if enough people come to the conclusion that it is all part of some big conspiracy of robots and corporate lobbyists to take over the world, it could even be the end of the Robotican Party as a significant political force. Will the Roboticans find themselves frozen out of the debates and competing with the Green Party for air time and attention?

Personally, I think they will give up the robocalls before it gets to that point. Surely the results of this election will get them to finally look for the kind of politics that draws favor from humans rather than robots. Then again, the lessons of the 2004 and 2006 elections did not seem to sink in. So maybe the results of this election will not mean anything to them either.

This is, after all, the party of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don’t expect that he will be running for office again, but perhaps the party could put together a new recorded message that sounds like him saying, “I’ll call baaack.”

Looking for Something That’s Too Simple

One of the improvements I had to make when I moved into my house involved cutting a hole in the concrete foundation. What is the right way to cut a hole in concrete? I wondered. Was there a special tool for this? My reference books did not say, and the answers I found online were vague and inconclusive, so I wondered about it for weeks.

It turns out that while there are various ways of cutting holes in concrete, the standard approach I would want to use involved bashing away with a hammer and chisel (wearing safety glasses, of course). As soon as I tried this I realized it would take only a matter of minutes to cut the hole I wanted. The obvious brute force method worked in less time than I had taken researching the question.

The answers we are looking for the hardest are simpler than we expect them to be. We often miss the answer we want the most just because when we see it, it seems too simple. I knew about chisels, but for some reason that I can’t explain now, a chisel didn’t seem like it had enough firepower to take on the foundation of a house. Holding that belief about the limits of chisels, I didn’t think to try one, even though that was all the answer I needed.

In whatever you are trying to do or wish you could do, look at the obstacles that seem to be stopping you. Imagine that you have learned that an amazingly simple solution exists. What could that solution be? Who else would know about it? When you expect simple solutions, there are not quite so many obstacles to interrupt your progress.