Month: November 2005

So bright and early this morning I had to head over to Fremont for a plant tour of NUMMI, a GM/Toyota joint venture. They build mostly Corollas and Tacomas, with some Pontiac Vibes thrown in for good measure.

Going to NUMMI was a required field trip for my Systems class, and I was pretty psyched because I had never seen cars made before. The place was huge and impressive. We watched a short film and then got driven around the plant; frankly I wish the tour had been longer. Still, you see most major areas of the plant except for the paint shops (I suppose they’re on another floor). The robot welding machines were a standout for me; I’m amazed that robots can do all that detailed work without ‘eyes’. But then, I know very little about either welding or robotics, so maybe robot welders are small potatoes to those in the know.

I wish I could have taken some photos but that’s strictly forbidden. The plant photos on the website don’t do the place justice.

I did find myself wondering as we drove past racks of car and truck doors — why do we need so many new cars?

One of the things I didn’t get to blog about last week was the whole Wal-Mart / health care / evil memo leak. Nathan Newman has a nice piece at the TPM Cafe about why we need to keep holding companies like Wal-Mart’s feet to the fire about health care. Here’s a snippet:

The more large corporations like Wal-Mart are attacked by the public for their health care policies, the more those companies will have an incentive to push for national health care to relieve the pressure on them. But bash government, and those companies are happy to see attention diverted from them.

More fundamentally, such an approach assumes that better government bureaucrats are all that are needed to get a better policy, but the reality is that better health care in other countries is dependent on both better policies and stronger worker power to hold their companies accountable. Yes, some of the irrational incentives in the system can be eliminated, but unless the employer role is completely eliminated — which hasn’t happened except in a few countries — then holding companies accoutable will always be critical.

He is very right.

I’ve seen firsthand how small employers will not hire employees or resort to contractors becasue of the difficulty and cost of offering decent health insurance. Other companies turn to employee leasing — which is not a bad solution but doesn’t address the root problem. The way things work these days it’s going to take the clout of major employers like GM, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, etc to lean hard on the government before we’ll get (dare I say it?) a real single-payer, non-employer based healthcare system for Americans.

One year ago today was the Presidential election. That was a disappointment, to say the least.

Six years ago today, Scott & I boarded a Tower Air flight with one-way tickets to San Francisco. Frankly I never thought we’d stay here so long. It’s been one hell of a roller coaster ride so far. We’ve switched jobs more, suffered more financial setbacks, moved to new apartments more, and generally undergone more change in the last 6 years here than I either expected or wanted. And many of those changes have not been positives.

This time next year? The Congressional elections and I’ll be just about ready to graduate from b-school. Both, I sincerely hope, will be significant changes for the better.

This caught my eye on the CNN scroll while getting ready to head to campus:

The winners of an annual violin competition in Moscow have a new prize — a chance to play for a year on a million-dollar violin once owned by famed 17th century virtuoso Nicolo Paganini.

That’s a really neat way of making your competition stand out from the crowd — offer a prize that literally nobody else can offer.