It seems to me that corporations are playing a game-theoretic game in which they individually want to pay less money and employ fewer people while simultaneously hoping other corporations will keep employing people and paying them enough to maintain a customer base for their product. In other words, a social contract.

What we're seeing now is the result of too many corporations defecting over the past 30 years. A tragedy of the commons, where we're the commons.

The flip side of this chain reaction, of course, is that consumers demand lower and lower prices because they can't afford what they used to. In order to compete, companies are forced to send manufacturing jobs to countries where labor costs are lower, so even more people can't afford what they used to.

How do we stop it?

I'm responding to a comment that was generally in agreement with Tom Friedman's column of 11 November 2008 about what to do about the automakers, but also frightened of the implications their failure will have on the economy, especially here in southeast Michigan:

I know, it's a tough one. I feel sorry for all the employees (and retirees) who are being screwed, but on the other hand, if the market isn't allowed to punish the shareholders (who will in turn punish the management), nothing will ever improve.

I also think that ultimately education is going to have to improved because there is no future for manufacturing in the US; Americans will do R&D, manufacturing will happen overseas. We just need more Americans capable of doing "brain work".

My brilliant plan (just thought up while typing this): the government acquires the assets of the automakers for pennies on the dollar and auctions them off to the highest bidder (i.e. Toyota, Honda, and defense contractors (the only manufacturing that should stay domestic)).

With the capital raised by the sale, put some into health care, but most of it should go into alternative energy research and training. The white-collar auto workers can be trained to do engineering, etc., and the blue-collar workers can handle the massive deployment of new energy technologies.

(While they're waiting for the research and engineering to happen, they can fix what President Elect Obama(!) has been calling our "crumbling infrastructure". The Eisenhower Interstate System was designed to last 50 years^{[citation needed]}. Time's up.)

"The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is [about 10 cents]. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 10 cents each, that's [$734] per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs [of $166 per megabyte]."

So basically, consumers have allowed mobile phone companies to charge literally astronomical rates to send a text message: we pay at least 4.4 times as much to send a text message than NASA does to download data from the Hubble Space Telescope (in cost per unit data, anyway). I can't believe we put up with that. Disgusting, I think.

A very cool example of this is The Huffington Post's Fundrace, which is a Google map of the United States with public political donation information on it. The points are color-coded by party or candidate, and the size of the dot corresponds to the amount given by that individual. That's right: individual. You can zoom all the way down to individual people or households. It's kinda creepy, I'm not gonna lie, but it is a good thing that campaign donations are all public information.

I decided to try Mint.com (Mountain View, CA) today, and I was absolutely blown away. It is so well done and feels so much like a real app that when I needed to go to my bank's website to check something, rather than go for the 'switch tab' keyboard shortcut I reached for the 'switch app' shortcut. It's as if I subconsciously forgot I was using a web app! Starting with the sign-up process, everything seems to work exactly the way it should. For example, when typing in my ZIP code, it made an AJAX request and automatically retrieved the name of my city. Why doesn't everybody do that? I added my accounts (which was an almost flawless process), and away it went. It's really an incredible application.

Since I had that up and running, I decided to glance through my account information and noticed that my car payment is due tomorrow, and it will be the first payment since switching my payment method to "Direct Automatic Pay" with my auto financing provider (Detroit, MI). I figured I'd double-check that everything was set up for that, and I found the following on the Account Center section of their website:

• I had no pending payments
• I had not registered a checking account for direct payment
• The direct payment option was grayed out
• It would not let me change payment methods
• When I tried to re-register my bank account, the results were ambiguous at best

Finding this somewhat worrisome, I immediately set up an online payment with my bank (Chicago, IL/Troy, MI) --- which spawned way more browser windows than I wanted --- then called the auto financing people to work it out.

Amazingly, I got through to a customer service rep. in about 1.5 rings with no hold time (after navigating through a bunch of touch-tone stuff, of course), and it turns out that everything was set up fine, and that four business days before a payment is due, they gray out the payment method because they're already prepping the transfer. Now, I don't understand why it takes 3-5 business days to electronically transfer money from one institution to another, but that's a whole different story. At the very least, the website should have told me that I have a payment pending, to be withdrawn tomorrow, that I have a bank account set up and properly linked to my account, and that I can't change the payment because of this limitation. But no.

Oh, not to mention that I thought maybe there was a browser compatibility issue, so I switched to Firefox from Safari, and in Firefox there was a nasty formatting bug that pushed some text onto a new line that absolutely should not have been there.

Dear Midwest,

It's no longer acceptable to put a few ugly GIF images on an even uglier front-end to your database and call that Online Services like you could in 1996. Take a page from Mint, Google, and the rest of the Mountain View crowd and I bet you'll be able to run your online services with fewer people, using better technology, and have higher customer satisfaction. Until then, I guess I'll have to hope that I can get through to phone reps as quickly as I did today.

Your customer (because I have no other options),
Noah