DISQUS

Fred,

You argue there is "no lack of good opportunities, [and] no lack of talent." Yet you believe there is an oversupply of capital? How does this make sense? If there are good investment options relative to the rest of the market that suggests an undersupply of capital.

If the strongest concerns are with exit markets, that means VC exit strategies are not aligned with market realities. In the presence of good investment options, that is evidence of historically poor investment decisions, and/or poor execution by funded companies. As a the founder of a small bootstrapped business I find it hard to sympathize. Not every business needs to be on life support. Why are people funding those that do?

Matt,

I don't think this post really makes sense. Chrysler is a large enough concern it should be beating the market at health care costs. If it isn't then the company should outsource that and their failure to do so is a sign of managerial incompetence.

I just checked Hoovers which claims the company has 66000 employees. A 5 billion bailout would be enough to give every one of those employees 75 thousand dollars for a full year to stay home and play plinko. And the company supposedly still has a revenue stream from... you know... actually producing stuff? Yet media reports claim public support will only keep the company alive for a few months and labor costs are the issue?

Huh? The burn rate is way too high for this to be an issue of salaries for the average worker. At a 2000 loss per car Chrysler still has a runway of 250 million vehicles. It doesn't seem plausible that any organization can lose money this quickly unless it has already lost it, which suggests that problems are in the supply chain and/or that the company has a boatload of financial obligations that it is hemmoraghing on: contracts with suppliers, ventures in capital markets, etc. that have not been properly accounted for or weren't treated as risky.

My best guess is that the company was probably rolling over a lot of short-term debt and found its financing costs soar earlier this year when interest rates went up. But that is a guess - I do not know how much debt the company is servicing and why, and in its fray to crucify labor the media seems intent on ignoring a fairly obvious question: where will the money actually go?

As a small business owner myself, I am not subsidized so have an emotional reaction to this too: it feels like unjust enrichment for someone. But I also ask why it's considered generally appropriate for the government to guarantee expensive and private financial contracts between two parties who were funded and should have hedged risks, but not relatively inexpensive labor costs. Surely our collective social preferences should flow the other way.

> On top of that this exercise only took an 13 hours which
> less than the total time I’ve put into trying to get C++
> to play nice with MySQL.

If you're still having trouble, you might want to just use the C API. Feel free to contact me by email if you'd like some happily functioning sample code to work from.

Server identity verification can and should be tested in the same manner that Google Apps does it - stick a new page up on your server or add a new CNAME record to prove you control the domain.

If domain names can be registered for under $10, why should domain name verification cost hundreds of dollars per year?

Christian Bale, on the other hand, truly rocks. So the new Batman film can't be that bad.