Victory Pie!

This is what I had intended to do as an "Endorsement Pie" before the election, but my First Lego League team based at the seriously pro-pie Robinson Community Learning Center is headed to the state tournament after rocking and rolling the regional qualifier, and since the entire team really looks up to our president-elect, a little rebranding was in order.

This is basically an apple pie with crumb topping, with a few blueberries and cranberries added for decoration. Here I explicitly call for a mix of apple types to drive home the idea of delicious diversity.

Ingredients:

1 Whole wheat crust (recipe later)

Filling:
8 apples, including some golden delicious, jonagold, Granny Smith and Fuji apples
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 T lemon juice
2 T granulated sugar
2 T cornstarch

Topping:
1 cup good oats (Quaker or Aldi's store brand)
3/4 cup white flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 t salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup blueberries
1/2 cup cranberries

Procedure:

1) Get the crust into the pan, put it in the freezer for 15min, and set the oven to 425deg.

2) Mix brown sugar, lemon juice, and apples. See any of the fruit pie recipe's steps 2 and 3 for the rest (I've written it about 7 times already)

3) Place pie in hot oven for 30min. Meanwhile, make the topping by mixing the dry ingredients thoroughly, then cut in the butter. If the berries are frozen, help them thaw by placing them in bowls near the oven exhaust.

4) Pull the pie out of the oven. Pour the crumb part of the topping over the pie so it makes a pile in the center. Spread this around with your hands to make a roughly even layer. Now distribute the blueberries and cranberries to form the arc and stripes of our pie-loving president-elect's campaign logo.

5) Reduce the temperature to 400F, return the pie to the oven for about 25min. It's probably wise to place a pan under the pie to catch boiling apple drippings.

6) Let cool at least two hours, preferably six or more.

If you make one, please take a picture for me. For some reason, the kids (and parents) weren't willing to wait for my camera battery to charge.

A pie-centric opposition to the GM bailout

I think this the official end of any possibility of my involvement in a senior post in the Obama administration, and one gets the feeling that this is just writing against the inevitable, but here's perhaps the only pie-centered story of what the GM bailout will likely mean for our economy.

The economy of Anytown, in our story, depends on both Pie Widget Maker and Auto Parts Supplier. While the bank rescue successfully prevented a massive run and general financial collapse, the deleveraging of the town continues. Pie Widget Maker is still waiting on the loan to buy the new Widget Stamper, and sales are down.

However, PWM is a responsible, well run company and has quite a bit of capital tucked away. They also recognize that as people do more of their cooking at home, they'll come to appreciate the joys of home baked pies. Some may even open restaurants or bakeries, and so there is a good chance for a market in both home-size and professional tools for better pie making. In particular, a self-leveling "pie rotisserie" could vastly improve the quality of pie making, especially for people with older houses that have sagged a bit. To build these, PWM will need to hire engineers with expertise working with moving parts in hot environments, get equipment appropriate for working with such metals, and some experienced machinists as well.

Anytown Auto Parts Supplier has all of these, since brake rotors and suspensions are not all that different from what's needed for the next quantum leap in pie technology. However, their factory is booked solid with orders from Lumbering Motors, a huge company that makes very anti-pie products that have fortunately gone entirely out of fashion. They have also been poorly run for a couple decades, and so find themselves teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. If they collapse, then AAPS will be in a struggle for its own survival, forced to find new business and lay off employees.

So now, if you're a concerned citizen of Anytown, USA, it's probably time to write your congressmen. But what to say? The owners of AAPS want the Lumbering 3 to get an unlimited supply of tax dollars because they bought into those bad bets, and won't be able to make their boat payments otherwise. PWM's owner has already picked out the cream of AAPS' workforce, and is hoping to grab some of their equipment in the liquidation sale. But for the rest of Anytown, the choice is less clear. Obviously, the short term answer is to pump money in from their kids' salaries and more prosperous parts of the country to keep the Lumbering 3 lurching along. However, the long term picture is trickier, and supporting the auto maker rescue means betting that they will start making worthwhile products. The last company to be "rescued" bounced from foreign hands to private equity and now back to the bailout bin, leading one to think the problem is their business model, not market conditions. So, they're kids will end up paying for a mess and using lower quality transportation than they would otherwise.

Clearly, this blog is in favor of an orderly unwinding, possibly under the protection of Chapter 11, of GM and Chrysler. If they've developed worthwhile intellectual property towards the development of next generation vehicles, sales of those patents will go a long way towards making their creditors happy. It is almost certain that the new owners will make better use of them than the current ones. This will probably result in a significant reduction in PMCIN in the short term, but pulling down two companies that could not turn a profit in the best of times is the right choice for the long term health of the economy.

In order to make the most of this, it's time for two other big changes: (1) a national health care system and (2) substantial financial regulation. The first is a long overdue reform of a system that has always provided universal coverage in the form of emergency room visits, and while the devil is in the details, the Obama plan is probably a good start. At the very least, giving potential entrepreneurs the freedom of knowing that they are not putting their asthmatic kid at terrible risk by starting a new company would be good. It would also nix one of the major issues in most labor disputes recently. The second would hopefully kill off the notion of "financial innovation" of the type we've seen over the last thirty years, meaning students with strong science and math backgrounds would be more tempted to enter the "real" economy than the murky world of hiding spreading risk around.

Here's to hoping.

What to drive on the Road to Serfdom

It's been coming for a while now, but the Great Lumbering 3 Bailout is slowly gathering steam. Slowly, at least, relative to the rate at which GM is burning cash. Congressional Democrats have made their desires known, and even seem to be maneuvering to cut opposition off at the knees. Obviously, a blog promoting a very Jeffersonian version of prosperity will have a slightly anti-car bias, but this willingness to throw money at executives and unions in order to preserve a manifestly bad business model doesn't bode well for innovation in the economy.

Here's to hoping that an Obama administration will actually nationalize the company and turn it into something that doesn't require most Americans to borrow half or more of their incomes to buy something that loses value. If he's serious about wealth redistribution, stopping that process by which money goes from middle class paychecks to bank profits would be a great first step. There are a lot of business models that might work, and since we seem to be trading suburbs for city life anyway, this would be a great time to invest.

Curiously, there has been almost no commentary on this from the GOP base, at least that I've seen. The sum total is here: http://www.gopusa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=55220 where frustrated conservative inveighs against it, while the forum admin admonishes him for not fully supporting the GOP. There's a longer post coming on how the GOP came to associate protecting suburban prosperity with being patriotic, but that's for later.

Bicycle Poetry

Trek 700
Before you I didn't ride
I just commuted

I haven't posted nutrition information for these pies for a reason, and one might wonder about the wisdom of promoting PMCIN in the face of an obesity epidemic. Instead, I recommend pies as the ultimate in biofuels.

Obama, the pro-pie candidate.

Pie and Policy endorses Barack Obama as the most pro-pie candidate in this election. We really can't say it better than the Financial Times, Economist, Christopher Buckley, or Colin Powell. However, I would like to add here that the McCain campaign has done a good job of insulting his supporters in the science community by, in assending order of annoyance:

(4) They actually failed to send a representative to a "techonology policy smackdown" conducted by the BBC/PRI The World.

(3) Their answers to the Science Debate 2008 questions to not track with much of what has been said elsewhere on the campaign trail, especially the "spending freeze" proposal.

(2) The American Physical Society tried to do a similar, physics-focused debate section in their monthy magazine. Only Obama's campaign sent a representative, and this is read by people who develop nuclear weapons, nuclear power and a host of other defense technologies.

(1) The American Insitute of Aeronaughtics and Astronaughtics submitted an aerospace-focussed qustionaire to both campaigns, and while McCain's camp did respond, it failed to provide answers to two questions, while the Obama camp gave reasonable answers to all of them. These should be the "reddest" of all academics, and it's read by most everyone in the "reddest" of all industries. That lack of attention speaks to either sloppiness or genuine disinterest.

I'll post the recipe for "Obama Apple-Blueberry Pie" this evening. And Mr. Obama, if you read this, I accept your sweet potato pie challange.