Larry Anderson

Like many others, I've been glued to the computer all week watching as events unfolded in Iran. For those of us old enough to remember the Iranian revolution of 1979, the pictures we've been seeing are starkly reminiscent of the unrest leading to the demise of the Shah, even if we're seeing them on YouTube instead of on television accompanied by the voices of Frank Reynolds and Peter Jennings. Time marches on.

But if we recognize the similarities, we must also recognize the differences. Iran in 2009 is not the same country as Iran in 1979. For one thing, here is no charismatic religious leader (Khomeini) returning from foreign exile to seize the reins of power left hanging after the sudden exit of the Shah. For another, it is not clear that the good citizens of Iran protesting in the streets want a new form of government, even if they clearly want those in power to obey the laws of the land—and, most importantly, to respect the will of the people.

They may want less clerical interference in their lives, and they may want a liberalization of the religious laws. But it is important to recognize that something like 70% of the Iranian people are age 30 or under. They have grown up under the Islamic Republic, and they never knew the Shah. Anyone hoping for a Pahlavi restoration is bound to be disappointed. It is possible that a more relaxed theocracy will meet the expectations of the people, with a reformist Ayatollah such as Hossein-Ali Montazeri replacing Khamenei—and it is entirely possible that such a government would still prove to be a foil for the West.

Either way, the next 48 hours are likely to prove crucial, as the opposition moves forward with a Saturday protest that the authorities have forbidden. As a former Baha'i, I've seen and heard too much out of Iran to be overly sanguine about the possibilities. Until you've seen the haunted look in the eyes of a Baha'i recently escaped over the Turkish border, you can't really grasp what evil has been perpetrated there in the name of religion over the last 30 years. Once you've seen that look, it never leaves you.

But it is also important to recognize that there are plenty of good people in Iran of all faiths and ethnicities. These people will be marching tomorrow through the streets of Tehran, and Isfahan, and Tabriz, and Shiraz, and what they choose to do in the next couple of days could well determine the fate of Iran for another generation. I am awed by their courage in the face of brutality, and I am honored to support them in their quest for an honest election. Regardless of how events transpire, we may not see Western-style democracy in Iran anytime soon; but if it is ever to be, that is the most fundamental place to start.

So as of today at 0401 UTC, Facebook finally decided to join the 21st century and give it users URLs that they can actually remember and give out. I joined the stampede and was waiting with an open browser tab as the clock turned 9:01 PM here in California. Much to my surprise, Facebook did not go down—I had thought that with 200,000,000 users surely it would look like a DDOS attack. However, it stayed up, and although Facebook let its employees grab the good usernames first and /larryandersongot taken by someone in the Bay Area, I was able to get my preferred short username. All good.

It seems to me, though, that while those of us who are geeky enough to spend Friday night in front of a browser got reasonable usernames, the rest of the world is going to be disappointed. With hundreds of millions of John Smiths, Muhammads and Rajivs in the world, there are going to be a lot of people who end up with URLs like http://www.facebook.com/jsmith123. In other words, it'll look like AOL screen names in 1995.

A far better way of dealing with it is to get your own domain. That way, you can set up a redirect and give people a URL like jsmith.com/facebookor facebook.jsmith.com, and the actual URL assigned by Facebook (or any other service) doesn't matter. Even better, it's something that you control.For what domains cost these days, literally just a few dollars a year, it's money well spent if you care about your digital identity.

Oh, and my Facebook URL? You can find out which one I got from Facebook by going to http://facebook.larryanderson.org.

Note (2016-10-15): I no longer have a Facebook account.

“I don't like the sauce they put on it. I like other teriyaki sauce, but this is different. It's an oriental teriyaki sauce.”

“Oriental teriyaki sauce”? Ah, of course. She must have been wanting the Norwegian teriyaki sauce.

Teriyaki lutefisk, anyone? Uff da!

(Via the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin)

One person with faith in GM is Gary Dufour, a Rancho Cucamonga attorney who lives in Riverside. Dufour was with his family at Mark Christopher Auto Center in Ontario on Monday looking at possibly buying a new Yukon XL from the GMC truck lot.

“I think it's time for American companies to buckle down and get more competitive with foreign automakers,” Dufour said. “I think they just have to keep up with demand. I think the economy and the price of fuel caught some of these companies by surprise.”

Now that's how you send a message. Because buying a Yukon XL will really let GM know it's time to get serious and start building small, fuel-efficient cars. You know, by buckling down and getting more competitive with foreign automakers. Or whatever.

Something my fellow Californians should take to heart:

This is the lesson of GM's bankruptcy, and it has little to do with market share and miles per gallon. It's a rebuff of the notion of exceptionalism. Any organization that fails to sufficiently safeguard its means of self-correction and reform, that forsakes long-term investment for short-term gain, that piles up debt year after year, will eventually fail, no matter how grand its history or noble its purpose._

—Dan Neil's column in the Los Angeles Times , June 1, 2009

Brilliant stuff.Go read the whole thing.
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I too voted no on the props today. Our problems stem from the fact that we not only screwed up the property tax base with Prop. 13, but we've also voted in idiotic spending mandates like Prop. 98. It's a recipe for disaster. Plus, we're gerrymandered out the wazoo, as Graves said, and while there's a fix coming for that it hasn't taken effect yet. The only real fix for all of it is to rewrite the state constitution, since all of those lovely tax cuts and spending mandates were voted in as constitutional amendments. I'm hoping the failure of the props will spur exactly that.

—My comment on Megan McArdle's blog at The Atlantic

Now we know: Chrysler is going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and when the dust clears it's going to be a whole new ballgame. If everything goes as planned (a fairly big if), the UAW will own a majority stake through its retirement plan, Cerberus Capital Management (the current owners) will be wiped out, Chairman Bob Nardelli will be tossed out on the sidewalk, and the company will start offering cars designed by Fiat.

Fiat??!!

Yes, Fiat. The automaker that ignominiously withdrew from the US market with its tail between its legs twenty-five years ago, the company whose initials were said to stand for "Fix It Again, Tony" (or "Fix It Alla Time"), the company whose Fiat 124 became the basis for the Lada, the Soviet Union's answer to the VW, is going to be the great savior of the New New Chrysler Corporation.

Actually, this isn't as insane as it sounds. For one thing, the Fiat of today is a very different company than the Fiat of 1983\. Led by Sergio Marchionne, an Italian-Canadian who has been obsessed with improving quality, today's Fiat is producing well-designed, well-made cars that are nothing like the temperamental beasts anyone over 40 remembers. Judging today's Fiat by the 1981 Fiat Strada is like judging Ford by the 1981 Escort (an example of which I owned, and which was an indifferently-constructed, flimsy, underpowered, horrid little excuse for an automobile that just loved to warp cylinder heads. But I digress).

There are a couple of potential flies in the ointment, however. One of them is that Chrysler may not emerge from bankruptcy all that quickly, and if so, then it may not survive the process, as the New York Times observed. The other and much bigger potential problem is that Chrysler may decide that it needs to make the Fiat products more palatable to the American consumer by tinkering with the design to "improve" them. According to a Wall Street Journal article quoted in Autoblog, Chrysler's current design chief said as much:

Chrysler's head of design, Ralph Gilles, told dealers that the automaker intends to have its own version of the car, with Fiat providing the chassis and Chrysler designing the exterior.

Oh, please God, no. Don't let them do it.

If there's one thing that the Italian auto industry is good at, it's design. There have been times in the past when the mechanicals underneath were horrendously unreliable, but the sheet metal the mechanicals were wrapped in was so good that they sold anyway. Putting the people who brought us the Dodge Caliber and the current Chrysler Cirrus in the position of redesigning the Fiat 500 or Bravo would be like hiring the old Atari team to redesign the Apple MacBook Air.

I had the occasion last year to have a good look, up close and personal, at a couple of examples of the Fiat 500 here in California that were brought over for evaluation (not the ones depicted below), and let me tell you something: the Fiat 500 is the cutest damn automobile to be produced in 30 years. Park it next to a Mini Cooper, that Anglo-German icon of automotive cuteness and effortless cool, and it makes the Mini look like a cold and humorless rectilinear box of stress. And it performs that feat for about half the money of a Mini. All Fiat has to do is make sure that they're built well enough that they don't spray transmission parts out the back in the first 5000 miles, and they're going to sell like ice cream in August.

By way of comparison, here are a couple images of the Dodge Caliber:

If Chrysler screws this one up, they deserve to go out of business.

Exterior photos of Fiat 500 by Marco Molinari; interior photo by Robertofrom Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. All photos used under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic licenseand are published here under the same license.

Dodge Caliber interior photo by Randy Stern. Used under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licenseand published here under the same license. Dodge Caliber exterior photo by Thomas Stromberg. Used under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic Licenseand published here under the same license.

In the aftermath of yesterday's announcement of the death of Pontiac, Autoblog put together a gallery of the 10 Worst Pontiacs Of All Time, and Jalopnik did a piece on Seven Cars That Killed Pontiac. Be sure to read the comments, which are brutally hysterical, unless you have an aversion to the word “shit.” As for me, courtesy of Wikipedia, here's one of the things that killed Pontiac with which I had personal experience. I did my driver's training in one of these execrable badge-engineered monuments to mediocrity, painted Frigidaire white and complete with limp steering, chrome-plated plastic interior trim, bench seats, a beige interior, and a wheezing V-6. Behold, the 1978-1981 Pontiac LeMans:

“We Build Excitement”? Not so much. And they wonder why my generation drives Toyotas.

With today's announcement of the death of Pontiac, I figure it's time for me to say something about GM, Chrysler, and the American auto industry in general. First up: General Motors.

First off, I'm sorry to see Pontiac go. I've never been much of a GM man, but of the traditional five GM divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac) I always liked the Pontiacs the best. With a few exceptions (cough, Aztek, cough) their design seemed to appeal to me more. Unfortunately for Pontiac, not enough Americans agreed with me.

It's hard to imagine now, but there was once a time when the divisions built their own engines and ran with a great deal of autonomy. Those days are long gone, of course, and that is one of the reasons that Pontiac was given a death sentence today. It's one thing when models are shared across divisions--that sort of thing has happened for decades, and not too many people had trouble telling the Chevrolet Chevelle from the Oldsmobile 442, Buick Skylark, and Pontiac Grand Prix (or, for our friends in the Great White North, the Beaumont Acadian). It's another thing entirely to bolt on a new grille and taillights, replace the marque badges, and call it a different car, which is precisely what has been happening with Pontiac. Sure, the G6 has its own bodywork, but the G5 is a Chevy Cobalt with a split grille, the execrable G3 is a barely-disguised Chevy Aveo that's really a Daewoo, and the Torrent is a Chevy Equinox. Even the Solstice, arguably the best-looking of the bunch, is also sold as a Saturn Sky. And finally, the G8, as good as it is, is really an Australian Holden Commodore under its red arrow badges, although since the Commodore isn't sold here under its own name, the badge engineering is less objectionable. At least it was an improvement over the Bonneville.

But with all that platform sharing, the question begs to be asked: why have a Pontiac division at all? 40 years ago, when GM still held a majority of the American auto market, it made sense to have variations on a theme, the better to capture more buyers. If you didn't like the swoop of a chrome strip on the Chevy version, you could have a Pontiac. And so GM was able to capture buyers who might otherwise have bought a Plymouth or a Ford. In today's shrinking automotive marketplace, however, all that duplication became a liability. As GM's market share shrunk to historic lows, it faced competition from the juggernauts that are Honda, Nissan, and Toyota, each of whom has exactly two sales channels apiece in the United States (Toyota's third brand, Scion, is sold exclusively through Toyota dealers). In the compact segment of the market, where Honda fields the Civic, Nissan the Sentra, and Toyota the Corolla, GM has been attempting to counter with 3 vehicles: The Chevy Cobalt, Pontiac G5, and Saturn Astra, all of which are built off the same basic GM Delta platform. The Astra, which is built in Belgium by Opel, is a rebadge of the Opel Astra, also sold in the UK by Vauxhall and Australia by Holden. Its predecessor, the Saturn Ion, was also a Delta-platform product. The strategy appears to be that if you can't compete with the imports on quality, you can baffle your customers with complexity. (Granted, Toyota also sells the Matrix, which is based on the Corolla; but the Matrix is sufficiently different enough to appeal to a different segment than the Corolla sedan.)

It's an interesting strategy, but not one that appears to be working very well. With a mishmash of confused marketing messages, GM is trying to sell one vehicle to a whole bunch of different people, and to convince them at the same time that they're not the same thing. Good luck with that. Show the average consumer a side view of the Cobalt, the G5, and the Astra, and most of them won't be able to tell the difference. A G5 looks like a Cobalt coupe, and even the Astra, while a hatchback instead of a three-box sedan, bears the telltale marks of platform sharing (hint: look at the shape of the rear side window frames and compare to a Cobalt sedan).

All of that duplication is senseless, of course, which is why we've arrived where we are today. Pontiac, once the "We Build Excitement" division, was reduced to selling indifferently-built Korean econoboxes and rebadged Chevrolet SUVs, and had to rely on our Australian friends for its flagship sedan. You can blame it on GM management, who for years have figured that if something sells as a Chevy, it'll also sell as a Pontiac; you can also blame the dealers, who wanted to sell a "full line" without regard for whether or not it damaged the brand. Small wonder that it received its death warrant today. It'll be strange not having Pontiac around, but it can fairly be said that it's been dying the death of a thousand cuts for years now. At least someone finally had the courage to do the decent thing and put a bullet in it.

Some random topics that are too long for Twitter, but not developed enough for a regular blog post:

• Has the Los Angeles Times lost its freaking mind? Today they sold a big chunk of the front page to NBC for a promotion, and Sunday they're going to do something similar with the Calendar section—only this time, it's going to include a Q&A with Times columnist Steve Lopez, just to blur the lines of journalism and advertising even more thoroughly. Nice to know that when the going gets tough, there's nothing the Times won't sell and no principle of journalistic integrity they won't betray. Hope they enjoy those thirty pieces of silver.

• In a surprising new Rasmussen poll, only about half of all Americans believe capitalism is better than socialism. Of course, you can slice and dice the wording of the poll however you want, but it would seem that more than a few Americans are prepared to start questioning the most basic of assumptions about our economic system. It's hard to blame them. In a world where the government is pumping billlions of dollars into failed companies, while ordinary Americans lose their homes and unemployment climbs into the double digits, our current system looks less and less appealing. Or maybe they just figure that since we've effectively started to nationalize companies anyway, we might as well go whole hog.

• What's up with GM's styling department when it comes to Buicks? The Lucerne looks like someone grafted portholes and a Buick grille onto a VW Passat (the side and rear views are especially Passat-esque), and the LaCrosse looks like a previous-generation Ford Taurus with slightly better detailing. Where's Harley Earl when you need him?

• Speaking of GM, it seems to me that the troubles of the automotive industry have a lot in common with the problems faced by the music industry and our rapidly sinking newspapers (see above remarks vis-a-vis the LA Times). In each case, you've got entrenched bureaucracies that have gotten used to having their way, coupled with an old-world view that refuses to die. Recent moves notwithstanding, GM is still behaving as if it had 70% market share (and Chrysler as if it still had a chance of surviving), the music business acts as if people still go to record stores to buy CDs (and as if artists still need them to distribute their music), and the newspapers still think that they're the ones to decide what is and isn't news. All of them are basically dead men walking. They just don't know it yet. And it is worth remembering that there will still be cars built in America if GM and Chrysler go under, there will still be music if the record industry collapses, and there will still be vibrant journalism if newspapers die. We may be reading RSS feeds on iPhones or Kindles while listening to MP3 files in our Teslas instead of reading the New York Times on paper while listening to FM radio in our Pontiacs, but then again we're also not reading papyrus scrolls while listening to wax cylinders in our Studebakers. Life goes on, you know?