Owners with no business management experience.

In case you didn't notice, the current economy is chock-full of "business management experience." GM, like every other big company including Ford, has a surfeit of "businessmen" who are "experienced" in "managing" ... and all of these MBAs have managed our economy right into a big smoking hole in the ground.

"Management" as a skill is, to put it mildly, highly overrated. What matters is knowledge and experience in a particular business. Let car people manage car companies, computer people manage computer companies, pharmaceutical people manage pharmaceutical companies, etc. Pretty much every time some megacorporation puts its fate in the hands of some bozo who doesn't know anything about the company's core business but thinks he knows how to "manage business," disaster follows.

If GM's bankruptcy means that more decisions will be made by assembly-line workers and automotive engineers, they've got a shot. If decisions continue to be made by overpaid suits who know nothing about cars because they leave those details to their chauffeurs, then the bankruptcy proceedings are only delaying the inevitable. We'll see how it goes.

I think you're being a bit harsh. As a Coloradan who's lived in Minnesota, as well as many other places, I'm pretty impressed with how well "Minnesota nice" generally works in day-to-day life. And in fact I think it has a lot to do with how amazingly clean and transparent the Franken-Coleman battle has been, compared to other well-known close elections in recent memory. Seriously. Despite the heated rhetoric, what we're seeing here is a model for how disputed elections should be handled nationwide.

A decent summary of the findings, with (unsurprisingly) more detail than the Fox News story, is here:

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thehumancondition/archive/2009/06/01/sharon-begley-the-math-gender-gap-explained.aspx

That link comes courtesy of Slashdot, where I wrote the following:

In every field which was once exclusively male, but is now no longer, it's been claimed first, that no woman can perform alongside men; second, when the first claim is disproven, that hardly any woman can; and third, when the second claim is disproven, that maybe a few women can, but a majority lack the ability or the inclination. And every single time, as the residual sexism fades, the third claim is shown to be false as well. Business, politics, medicine: it's a familiar pattern. Now math is next on the list.

In short, if there's a difference, it's not the sex, it's the sexism. Anyone who can't acknowledge this is a bigot and a twit.

Men and women are different, yadda yadda. Yes, they are, and they may be even be different in ways that affect performance at certain jobs. But every time the issue is put to the test, we see that those differences are not nearly as signficant as the bigots desperately believe. The difference in means between the sexes, or any other groups into which people can conveniently be divided, is far smaller than the variances between individuals.

Funny, I thought that was the link I posted. :)

The first letter predicts the right-wing response to the letter, and the second letter provides a perfect example.

... you're right, of course, that the ACLU has a bias. They're biased in favor of the Constitution and the rights of all Americans. Could you explain exactly what problem you have with that?

... but this probably isn't the best way to get it.

Remember the "40-hour-week" and working "nine to five?" This was the standard throughout the longest period of sustained prosperity the US has ever known. Then somehow, working "just" 40 hours became a sign of laziness. Nine to five became eight to five, then eight to six, then eight to sleep-at-the-office. Not coincidentally, decades of anti-union propaganda were finally taking effect at this point, to the degree that white-collar workers reacted to the idea of unionization pretty much the way they'd react to the idea of adopting a pet rattlesnake ... which was pretty damn convenient for the managers who were telling them that the alternative to working these insane hours was not working at all.

We dug our own hole. There's a way out of it, but most of us don't want to admit what it is.

Funny thing is, in the military working conditions are generally pretty good. When you're at war or out on a field exercise, of course, there's no such thing as the "work week" -- you keep going as long as you need to, to accomplish the mission, or until you collapse -- but in peacetime, back at the base, you work on a regular schedule and the number of hours you're on duty averages out to pretty close to 40/week. Obviously it can't be 9-5, M-F for a lot of jobs; e.g. as a medic, I worked 12-hour ER night shifts, but I also worked three or four days a week.

And while it's true that you're provided with food and housing, there's also a paycheck, and it's a pretty good one by the standards of a recent high school graduate. When I got out, with eight years of experience and a marketable skill set, in the middle of a booming economy (1997) for several years I worked longer hours for less pay than I had in the service.