GET AMERICA BACK TO WORK

Fourteen million unemployed represents a gigantic waste of human capital, an irrecoverable loss of wealth and spending power, and an affront to the ideals of America. Some 6.8 million have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. Congressmen went home to celebrate July 4 having failed to extend unemployment benefits.

We recognize the necessity of a program to cut the mid- and long-term federal deficit, but the imperative requirement now, and the surest course to balance the budget over time, is to restore a full measure of economic activity. As in the ’30s, the economy is suffering a sharp decline in aggregate demand and loss of business confidence. Long experience shows that increasing the money supply will not be enough; as Keynes remarked, it is like trying to get fat by buying a bigger belt.

The urgent need is for government to replace the lost purchasing power of the unemployed and their families by substantial investment in our decaying infrastructure and by selective tax-credit incentives for innovation and startups. Making deficit reduction the first target, without addressing the chronic underlying deficiency of demand, is exactly the error of the ’30s. It will prolong the great recession, harm the social cohesion of the country and continue inflicting unnecessary hardship on millions of Americans.

Signatories:

Alan Blinder
Alan Blinder was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and served on Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers; he’s the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Daniel Kevles
Dan Kevles is the former faculty chair at California Institute of Technology and serves as a professor of history at Yale University.

David Reynolds
David Reynolds is an international history professor and fellow at Christ’s College in Cambridge.

Derek Shearer
Derek Shearer served as the ambassador to Finland from 1994-1997. He is now a diplomacy and world affairs professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Jim Hoge
Jim Hoge is editor of Foreign Affairs and the former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, which won six Pulitzer Prizes under his tutelage. He is co-editor of How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War.

John Cassidy
A journalist and author, John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995, covering economics and business.

Joseph Stiglitz
Joe Stiglitz is the former chief economist of the World Bank, and a recipient of the Nobel Prize and the John Bates Clark Medal; currently, he’s a professor at Columbia University.

Laura Tyson
Laura Tyson served as the chair of Council of Economic Advisers and the director of the National Economic Council during the Clinton administration. She is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Lizabeth Cohen
Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University, and author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.

Harold Evans
Sir Harold Evans is a journalist and former editor of The Sunday Times and the Times, who was knighted in 2004 for his services to journalism. His award-winning book, They Made America, chronicled the country’s most important innovators and inventors.

Nancy Folbre
Nancy Folbre is an economist specializing in political economy, feminist theory, and the economics of care-based labor. She is the winner of a MacArthur Genius Award and a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Richard Parker
Richard Parker, a former congressional consultant, is a public-policy lecturer and senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Robert Reich
A professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, Robert Reich was the 22nd secretary of Labor under President Clinton.

Sean Wilentz
Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolution at Princeton. His book The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln won the 2006 Bancroft Prize.

Sidney Blumenthal
Sidney Blumenthal is a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and advised Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential campaign. His books include The Clinton Wars and The Permanent Campaign.

Simon Schama
The author and host of the BBC documentary A History of Britain, Simon Schama is a historian who teaches at Columbia University.

As an avid motorsport fan, I’ve been following the saga of the new IndyCar chassis with great interest from the prospective of a fan, mechanical engineering student and hopeful pilot.

The proposals presented by Delta Wing, Swift, BAT and current chassis supplier Dallara  represent a shift in the mentality of the series from a spec racer model to a transitional model where the series can restructure and prepare for future growth under the stewardship of CEO Randy Bernard.

One issue I take with the series is its goal to remain relevant to current automotive technology, with the Delta Wing concept as the panacea for a cheap engine (small capacity inline 4) with low power that can still drive the car to 230mph+ at Indy as an example. 

This is not a good direction for the series to take, as one of the reasons that fans and drivers complain is due to the lack of the sense of speed and power that current IndyCars have over the former Champ Cars.  IndyCars were never about efficiency as much as they were exercises in ingenuity, technology and speed.

The American Le Mans Series is doing a much better job of being relevant to automotive technology development than IndyCar ever did during the USAC or CART/IRL days, with the Michelin Green Challenge for total mileage per gallon over distance traveled, so let’s leave that in the realm of sports cars, since fuel efficiency is actually relevant in endurance racing.

In its place, the series should adopt the forced induction formula with allowances for engine type, provided they are based off of currently available engine designs for easier branding and maintenance.

For example, Ford could commission Cosworth to build a 3.0 liter twin turbo V6 with EcoBoost branding, Volkswagen could provide another twin turbo V6 based off of its narrow angle VR6 designs and so on, while Honda has preliminary plans to manufacture a twin-turbo V6 package. For smaller teams, a stock block option could be offered with allowances for parity, potentially opening up the series to USAC, WoO and other teams from other series.

Teams could get Champ Car levels of power with adjustability for each type of circuit, lets say up to 700bhp as the limit for ovals and 600 as the bare minimum for street circuits along with a push to pass button good for an additional 150bhp across one minute. Since the biggest complaint for the drivers is the lack of power with the Honda V8, the switch to forced induction will improve the driveability of the cars and force drivers to drive the cars in the corner.

As for chassis, all of the proposals should be approved with a cost ceiling of 400,000 for the bare chassis or $700,000 with all parts and spares included.  With the requirements that all chassis be locally produced, this would significantly reduce the costs of manufacturing and shipping drastically compared to current levels with the 7 year old Dallara IR3.

These are just some of the ideas I had, but the biggest one is that all of them be adopted instead of relying on another spec chassis.  Let the teams decide what chassis to run, not a committee. Let the committee hash out costs and the preliminary rules, but take into account the history of the series.

The download is available here.

I’ve been listening to Evolution of Discord ever since a friend of mine in Long Beach turned me on to them over AIM not too long ago.

To say that I’m impressed is an understatement, as the band classifies itself as death metal on their MySpace, but the truth lies between melodic death metal and thrash  with breakdowns that don’t blow.

Standout tracks on the release include “The Perpetual Misconception” and “The Destructive Cognition of Man” with “Hostis Human Generis” being noteworthy as well. In terms of production, the EP is raw with a live sound on the drums and the guitar solos being rough, but the whole effort is solid as whole.

Hopefully they can get picked up by a label so they can benefit from some much-needed mixing and engineering work to make the percussion more powerful and the solos can be better arranged into the songs, otherwise its awesome as a blueprint for how much potential the band has.  The album is available for free download and streaming below