eBay's Savior

Why Chrysler Needs to Declare Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy is desired in order to rid the car companies of union, dealer, and debt burdens. The biggest mistake American made was helping Lee Iacocca in the first place. Had we let Chrysler go bankrupt back then, perhaps we wouldn't have destroyed GM. This time around, we'll save GM and Chrysler (again) and destroy Ford. Way to go politicians, way to destroy all the car companies, instead of letting the strongest survive.

Blaming Bankers When Government Is Really at Fault

You missed the #1 government error of all, the cause of the problem at its source: leaving the gold standard in 1971. Nixon, Kennedy (Vietnam), and Johnson ("Great" Society) gave our country a legacy which resulted in this 2nd Great Depression-- a Depression which in magnitude will eclipse all others in history.

Suggestions for eBay 2.0

The biggest problem with Craigslist is a lack of auction format. The most effective way to sell an item locally is to list it for cheap and allow the market to determine how much it wants to pay. Yet, no one offers this. All the MBAs are too busy trying to beat Craigslist at their own game. Yes, craigslist is a cruddy site with little investment technologically speaking, but you can't expect to compete with them be giving away a similar free product. Take the standard "classic" eBay auctions model, and apply it to local. Call it "eBay Takeout"-- the shipping is free!

You bid on the used car, refridgerator, TV, book, golf club, you go pick it up. No one wants to send a golf club thru the mail, and no one wants to take the time to figure out what price to list a used golf club. You pay eBay to list it as an auction, you qualify it as zero shipping cost to people that can pick it up and charge a high fee from packaging it, and I guarantee you get all local bids, and you run poor craig out of business and make a profit all at the same time. How easy is that, and I don't even have an MBA.

If given the power and the IT developers, I'd destroy craigslist in less than 5 years, AND I'd pick up the world's best used auto business in the process. How big of a market is that eBay? Give me the job, I'll make it happen. eBay local would dominate. Frankly, if Google understood this with their product search (offering auctions) and maps product, they could dominate here too, but they don't understand it either. Niether does Amazon. Frankly, craig doesn't have a clue either. The market is wide open for an established company with a payments and software infrastructure, yet no one sees it. how is this possible?

[e-mail] if one of the big boys wants to hire me to create a massive local auctions business. Or more accurately HELP create it, since some employee is likely to steal my idea now that it's at the bottom of a giant and well-written eBay criticism.

Mel Karmazin Gives Away the Farm, Saves Job

The article is good. Maffei has been dismal. Karmazin should realize that the company is probably better off in a bankruptcy, as it might get them out of some of those auto OEM contracts. There's no reason SIRI doesn't generate FCF if they can simply cut marketing to zero. But I'm not sure they can, because of the long term OEM contracts they have to pay every time some one gets a sat radio installed. The car OEMs are idiots too, satellite radio is a great product and they deliberately make it more expensive for their customers. they ought to give away the radio as a perk for buying one of their crappily made vehicles.

$5k Vouchers for Car Purchases: Utter Nonsense

This is the stupidest proposal of them all. Why don't we just save ourselves the trouble, and just give auto dealers $5,000 for every car they currently have on the lot, cash. And they can keep the car. Finance this by taking the cash from Ford, GM, and Chrysler, and also make all Toyota, Honda, and BMW dealers fork up another $5,000 to pay the US-OEM dealerships.

Hey, how about we give each person that writes a comment in this article $100k? I'd also like to get paid for doing what I'd already be doing.

More on Lehman Revisionism

What's ironic, about the whole revisionism, is letting Lehman fail was one of the only good decisions made by our government officials. If this Depression wasn't the worst in world history, government officials scrambling over top one another to deny letting Lehman fail would be hysterically funny-- Keystone Cop style.

The fact that badly run companies such as MS, C, AIG, FRE, FNM, GM and BAC are still up and running will prove a massive mistake of epic proportions. We'll be in this Depression for 25 years and a large population-killing war will likely result from these decisions. But only a very small percentage of the population understands this, and won't be convinced by unwise historians that all these problems were the result of some OTHER catalysts.

Bailed Out Executives Will Repeat Mistakes if We Keep Rewarding Their Failures

It's even worse than you portray, because not only are the bad rewarded, but the good are punished with these bailouts. Witness AIG is lowering rates on competitors to the point where well-managed insurance companies must back off from offering too-cheap premiums. Thus, AIG is using our taxpayer cash to write bad premiums below market. Meanwhile, the well-run insurance companies suffer from lack of business and will likely go bankrupt themselves. So please don't forget that not only are the evil rewarded, but the responsible annihilated!

Obama and Bush will both prove clowns-- a vote for Republicrats or Demublicans is a wasted vote-- they are the same party. Vote Libertarian (or whatever 3rd party matches your bent best), it actually changes policy even when your candidate loses because the dumb-dumb parties both move towards your causes in order to attract swing voters (members of the crowd that vote for the #3 party)