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The Fall of Detroit (Three Minutes to Read)

7/22/2013

 
I guess we found out Obama’s bailout of GM didn’t save Detroit as advertised (literally on TV). In his last campaign he promised to save Detroit and ridiculed Romney saying his ideas would bankrupt the city…interesting. They’re several factors as to why cities typically go bankrupt so here are the major contributors:

They have large government pension liabilities; same thing GM is dealing with. Detroit’s population has dropped 50% over the last decade yet those who are getting pension checks are still climbing. More money being drawn with significantly less people contributing to the plan. It’s a formula for disaster that even a 4th grader would understand.

It’s a union market. Companies aren’t inclined to move into a market where labor costs are high. Manufacturers don’t want the risk of experiencing a shutdown by union employees. The bottom line is manufacturers move out of union states to right to work states like South Carolina (Boeing).

They have average salaries and benefits that are substantially better in the public sector than the private sector. The best jobs were at GM and in local government.  This is called being upside down because the private sector generates jobs plus they provide real tax revenues. Public employees pay taxes that come back to them to sponsor part of their salary and benefits while taxes paid by the private sector actually
contribute to the budget; it goes in and doesn’t go back to the employee. With this in mind, private sector jobs were going away fast while most of the public sector held onto their jobs because trying to fire a public employee is like pulling teeth. So real tax revenues dropped significantly while the costs remained pretty much the same. It has taken Detroit to go broke for them to cut government jobs. They should’ve cut these jobs years ago.  

They didn’t make cuts necessary to balance their budget and instead looked for new creditors each year so they wouldn’t have to make unpopular choices. Politicians get away with this where it wouldn’t fly in the private sector. As it is now, Detroit’s creditors will get around ten cents on the dollar but it’s their fault for investing in Detroit. From what I hear our Federal Government is mulling over a bailout which would once again delay the inevitable and tax payers would end up with ten cents on the dollar or worse.   

The city’s livelihood is highly leveraged by very few industries. Losing one can send a city into a downward spiral that is difficult to stop. This has been the case since the beginning of our nation (i.e. mining towns, mill towns, steel towns, etc.).

They allowed their city to deteriorate. Driving around a dilapidated city makes people want to move out not in. Detroit has run ads for years trying to entice companies and people to move there but it doesn’t take long upon flying into Detroit to realize how depressing it is and unsafe for that matter. Running ads were a waste. Their focus should’ve been on making their city something worth advertising/marketing. 
 
They’ve allowed debt per person to go from $11,000 just a few years ago to over $25,000 now. One of the things I find scary is that debt per person in the U.S. is $53,000 and growing because unlike Detroit, borrowed money is still coming in. Not a good sign for sustainability of our economy. When will we crash like Detroit? When will other countries start thinking we’re no longer a good bet.  

There are of course other reasons Detroit failed. I dealt with a lot of brand managers over the years for a variety of products (i.e. Clorox, Dole, Florida’s Natural, McCormick, Scott’s, etc.). City councils and mayors could learn a lot from them. Each city is a brand and every brand has an image. Let’s face it Ashville, Boise, Charleston, Charlotte, Dallas, Las Vegas, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, etc., are all different brands that bring in different industries and people. They have unique reputations. 

Detroit tried to hold on to a brand image that no longer had a market to appreciate it. They should’ve reinvented themselves years ago. A couple of acres downtown has beautiful new buildings including some condos on the waterfront that are gorgeous. They have great ball fields downtown that are near the water. They have a nice zoo. If someone were blindfolded at the airport and brought downtown to stay on the water…they’d think Detroit was wonderful. The problem is they could go for a very short drive and it would go from a nice neighborhood to one that looks like it had been bombed. 

There’s no overcoming this anytime soon or possibly not at all. I’d hate to be in charge of turning it around. Although there are a lot of factors as to what brought Detroit down I think there that got the spiral started. In the private sector we’re not allowed to make many mistakes because the market will quickly make us get our house in order or go out of business. Detroit continued to be propped up by borrowed cash not
worrying about making the changes necessary to keep the city in business. an overused phrase but applicable…they kept kicking the can down the road.  

Lastly, I think unions and their unwillingness to sacrifice anything to save the city led to Detroit’s bankruptcy. Workers in Greece did the same thing then when France bailed the country out they had their benefits and pensions cut dramatically. Of course these workers were livid but the fact is they should’ve worked within their own country to remain solvent. Now it’s the same thing in Detroit, they should’ve worked with city council and the mayor to work out a deal that would keep the city running for the long haul. They didn’t want to voluntarily give anything up now they don’t have a choice.

I wish Detroit the best and I’m usually very optimistic about life in general but in my opinion they’re down and out. There are way too many negatives to overcome and they’ve been going on for way too long. Detroit is an iconic city which makes this such a terrible tragedy.
  


Blind Spots (Two Minutes to Read)

7/11/2013

 
Most people know the reason we can see is light goes into our retinas hitting the optic nerve which then goes to the brain to form the images we see. Then there’s the blind spots we also know about but most people don’t know how they work. If someone were to take a black marker and put a dot on our eyeballs this would be a good representation of a blind spot. With this blind spot we’d know it’s there  because we’d see the spot and it would be very annoying. But with a real blind spot we don’t know the spot is there because we don’t see the dot. It’s definitely blocking something in our line of sight but we aren’t consciously aware of it. 
 
Hopefully this example will work for you. Have your head around a foot away from the screen and focus between the R and the L.  Then cover your left eye and use your right eye to look at the L. Lastly,  while remaining looking at the L, slowly turn your head towards the left. What you should notice is the L disappears at some point when you’re turning your head. For most of us it’s actually around the same angle of where our head ends up when the L disappears. This is where the blind spot kicks in but as you notice your mind replaced it with white because that’s what your mind saw around the L. If the L were in a blue box the L would still disappear but it would be replaced with blue.   
 
                                                  R                                                                                                 L                                                                       
                                        
 Most people use the term blind spot when talking about driving as they’ll say they almost ran into another vehicle because it was in his or her blind spot. This is kind of strange to think about because a vehicle is so big but just like the example above, the car disappears in your blind spot and you fill in this space with the surroundings. Let’s say for example you have a lane to your left and trees along the other side of the lane. If you look to your left and a car is coming but it is in your blind spot, you don’t see the car but your brain fills in that blind spot with trees so you don’t have a clue the car is there. I think this is absolutely amazing!

These blind spots create a lot of problems when it comes to eyewitness testimonies; you’d think it would be reliable information but it often isn’t for the police.  As you know there can be several witnesses to a crime with different accounts about what happened (i.e. the kind of getaway car used, what the criminal looked like, what was the criminal wearing, etc.). Some of the problem can be shock but a person’s peripheral vision and blind spot get in the way of accurate eyewitness accounts as well. 

There’s way more to this topic but I hope what I shared was enough to make it interesting.  Although I knew there were blind spots I didn’t really think about how they worked. The fact we create our own images to replace the blind spots amazes me.
 


Leonardo di Vinci (Two Minutes to Read)

7/11/2013

 
According to art historian Helen Gardner,  “The scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote." Of course the author of “The Di Vinci Code” used Leonardo’s focus on religious paintings to create the terrible stir about the Catholic Church. I’m shocked that millions of people who purchased the book in stores or on-line in the fiction section, could think it was true…it’s kind of scary when you think about it.  
 
Not only was Leonardo unique in everything he could do but the fact that he lived to 67 years of age and was 6’ 3” tall in this era, made him even more so. Most people think of di Vinci as an extraordinary painter with amazing works like Madonna with Child, The Last Supper, and the Mona Lisa but he was also a sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the first Renaissance man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination.”  One of the things I find most fascinating is after 500 years his prints are still highly popular. Like most famous artists, you become wealthy when you die and don’t need the money.

Leonardo was born out of wedlock (very common back then), and was destined to be a commoner but he began drawing for recreation and locals saw his amazing talent and sent him off for an apprenticeship with a well-known artist. In a short period of time di Vinci went from pupil to master…some say much to the Master’s dismay. He became known as an artistic genius but what they didn’t know at that time was he was a genius in general. He never married and there was some speculation he was gay. Although if you think about it, he was obsessed with seeking knowledge and the people he hung around with were artists and intellectuals so it might have been more of a case of lack of interests in having any romantic relationships (just a guess).

Many of Di Vinci’s greatest works were religious paintings. Because Catholicism was such a big part of people’s lives back then, people would travel for miles on horse and foot, just to see his paintings. The Pope pursued many of his works and eventually had him move into the Vatican where he became one of the Pope’s closest associates. This made sense because the Pope was an intellectual as well. So Di Vinci’s paintings and the amazing art of De Angelo’s paintings on the ceiling, make the Vatican one of the greatest places in the world to view the best artwork of all time.

A lot of people don’t know this but some of his most important work at that time was with the military. There weren’t very many maps available so the army hired Leonardo to create maps of strategic areas. It was a dangerous job as anytime he was out surveying the landscape he was in danger of being captured or killed. Knowing his value though, he was always accompanied by military personnel. There wasn’t anything close to being as good of maps as the works of art he created. The fact is, knowing the terrain could make or break a military campaign especially back then so they considered him instrumental to their success. 

One of the most unique drawings I saw of his was of a baby in a womb; there’s a picture attached. I don’t have a clue how he had this insight except to figure he saw some autopsies. Then there’s the awesome drawing of a man in a circle with his arms stretched out; this was Di Vinci’s drawing of a perfectly proportioned man (also attached). Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualized a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, and the double hull for ships, and he outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics which explains how the earth is moving beneath our feet moving land masses and creating earth quakes. 
 
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention and his humanity which was evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit of helping other people. He was also known for purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Apparently he had an amazing brain and heart.

Having no heirs, Leonardo gave his money to people who worked for him along with close friends and the poor. He became extremely wealthy but it meant little to him as his happiness was in doing and learning new things. He’s one of the most amazing men in history so I thought it would be worth reminiscing about his life.     


    Author: John Mann

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