Spokefest 2011

The fourth Spokefest is happening this Sunday. Kathy, Josh and I, along with several other volunteers, worked the registration/pick up at Mountain Gear this afternoon. Out of the nearly 1800 registered riders, over 600 showed up this evening to pick up their shirts and swag.

You have to hand it to Bill Bender and the Spokefest crew. They've done a heck of a job in creating an everyman bicycling event in Spokane.

You can still register up until the start of the ride Sunday morning. If you're not sure about an easy going recreational ride with food and water along the way, check out how it went in 2008, 2009, and 2010.

The weather is going to be toasty, but since we start at 9:30 and there's a new route that allows you to shortcut the 21-mile classic route, most people could be done before the heat sets in real hard. See you Sunday morning.

Who's Doing The Testing?

I've walked by this sign countless times where the new North Face store is going in downtown and never looked at it until today.

Applaud The Death Penalty...

...because it has been proven to work so well and, as the governor stated, Americans understand justice.

INCENDIARY the willingham case (2011 SILVERDOCS U.S. Sterling Feature Competition) from Joe Bailey, Jr. on Vimeo.

Party Time

Had some old family friends and their grandchildren over for some splash time before summer's end.

Profits Vs Everything Else

A couple of researchers with the Asian Development Bank Institute studied up on how the iPhone increases the trade deficit with China (PDF). The paper was published last December and updated last May.

In the study they hypothesize the effect of moving the assembly of the iPhone to the US.

An interesting hypothetical scenario is one where Apple had all iPhones assembled in the US. Assuming that the wages of US workers are ten times as high as those of their PRC counterparts and their productivity would be equal in 2009, if iPhones were assembled in the US the total assembly cost would rise to US$68 and total manufacturing cost would be pushed to approximately US$240. Selling iPhones assembled by US workers at US$500 per unit would still leave a 50% profit margin for Apple. As iPhone sales increase globally, that profit margin would also increase. In this hypothetical scenario, iPhones, the high-tech product invented by the US company, would contribute to US exports and the reduction of the US trade deficit, not only with the PRC, but also with the rest of world. More importantly, Apple created jobs for US low skilled workers; those who could not be the software engineers needed by Apple. Giving up a small portion of profits and sharing them with low skilled US workers by Apple would be a more effective way to reduce the US trade deficit and create jobs in the US.

And their conclusion in part.

PRC workers added a merely $6.50 to the entire US$179 manufacturing cost of an iPhone and the appreciation of the yuan would only affect the assembling cost. Therefore, the appreciation of the yuan would have very little impact on the total manufacturing cost as well as the retail price of iPhones. It is unrealistic to expect the appreciation would lower the demand for iPhones in the US. In other words, the appreciation of the yuan would not help mitigate the US deficit due to iPhone trade. If US high-tech companies, such as Apple, were willing to share their profits with low skilled US workers by keeping assembly jobs in the US, it would be a more effective way to reduce the US trade deficit than by targeting the exchange rate policy of the PRC.

It may also help reduce China's suicide rate.

What Flavor Are They Serving In Your Line?

Mike Lofgren, a recently retired congressional staffer, writes about the evolution of the Republican party to that of chaos-causing, self-contradictory, power-hungry corporate sellouts.

An excerpt:

It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

All of this was there to see at Cathy McMorris Rodgers' town hall meeting last Wednesday evening where we heard the cheers for the complaints about outlawed incandescent light bulbs, threats to Second Amendment rights, renegade regulatory agencies, the high tax rate in America, and runaway federal spending at the hands of the Democrats.

The dangers of unquestioned belief present a huge threat to our deteriorating democracy. The problem is, nobody believes it.