Query From Cebu

On Feb 13, 2010, at 9:27 AM, JE wrote:

 I am an emergency nurse. I have seen many things/equipments/supplies in the emergency room setting that needs to be improve to give more quality and efficient care to my patients. Everything in health care is expensive. I am trying to find ways to make logistics in health care less expensive but with good quality so people at home can start treating themselves first before coming to the Emergency (w/ full blown diagnosis). My target is Philippines to be my supplier for my logistics, for one thing because I am Filipino and i know the country. In your own experience, have you trade in the Philippines before? If so, what problems have you encountered?

*** I think your idea is great.. a lot of medicine is simple and easy, but in USA it is all expensive...  You would probably find it much easier to do in Philippines than USA, although I ‘d say USA needs better distribution of health care than the Philippines does... we are in a crisis, Philippines is not...

I cannot say anything about problems working in Philippines, because I do not know.  As an importer, I buy from a Filipino exporter.  AS an exporter, I sell to a Filipino importer.  The country of the Philippines I know little of, only spent a few hours in Manila Airport once, although I will say that was an adventure!

Never mind what problems you may face, focus on the joy you will find solving this problem that bothers you.

John

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China Approaches Its Place

After winning the Chinese Revolution, Chairman Mao approached the microphone in Tian An Men Square to make a victory speech to the assembled victorious masses.  He said "The Chinese people have stood up."  Indeed they did. Communism is an esoteric system to the Chinese, and the Maoists rather stumbled forward for a few decades after 1949 until the indomitable Deng Xiaoping took the reins.

The Hamiltonians in the USA bet their capitalist system would best Chinese communism, and the USA powers that be had a plan:  trade worthless pieces of paper for Chinese manufactures, and trap the Chinese into wage slavery to the USA.  Deng Xiaoping looked at Hong Kong and Singapore as models and for advice, and came up with a better idea.  Free market communism.  OK, that sounds weird, but so is "free market capitalism."

With no real effective legal structure, out of the chaos came spontaneous order in China, and wealth and freedom. The USA bet that China would be trapped was ill-advised. Now China has moved (for one month) into the world's largest exporter and even the Chinese military is savvy enough to spot a way to judo-flip the American arm-bar on the Chinese economy.

China has grown in new ways now, much more sure footed, and presenting a better offer around the world than USA will offer.  We do not compete on cheap labor, we compete on cheap management.  When the powers that be want their resources exploited, USA takes far more than the Chinese demand, because USA management charges far more (think Blackwater, Bechtel, etc).

USA may have had an edge technologically, but our confident arrogance that China would be our factory floor caused us to pass that technology on.  

The path we are on practically guarantees a conflict with China.  If we were to get rid of the Fed, get rid of the hundreds of thousands of rules that hamstring small business, get rid of IP rights and restore the power to contract and property rights in USA, we could have both prosperity and peace.

China and USA have different roles in the world, and the hamiltonian assertion we are the world's policeman puts us in direct and unnecessary conflict with China (since our "police work" usually involves invasion for oil.)

That oil is for sale, which is a dirt cheap way to acquire it.  China has plenty of problems, but their people save and are willing to work.  Two huge advantages.

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Financing Small Business

Mish Shedlock is critiquing Obama policy and he quotes a National Federation of Small Business study,

only five percent of small business owners cite “financing” as their top business problem but 31 percent cite “poor sales.”

Exactly.  Financing is never THE problem, it is mere a problem.  The problem is getting the product right, which genreates those sales they are missing.  Government can't help with design.

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A Great Place to Spot Design Talent

Madoka tips me off to http://www.etsy.com/, and it looks great.  It seems to be a gathering place for small run artists all over the world.  There are many categories with many items, all quite creative. For example glassware has some 3200 items.  The problem for these people is marketing.  We all have our talents, and wealth is created and extended through division of labor, no matter what Kropotkin says.  These people need your efforts to get them marketed into real stores.

I suppose you could start at etsy.com, but I would say get your own designs going first, and look there for artists who are keen on being promoted (and the hardest part, allowing their items in to small scale production and sold on a royalty basis.)

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Private Business Breaks the Big Stories

Although it was clear to anyone who bothered to review the global warming data that the case was bogus, there was much money to be made and grants to be granted if a "scientist" went along with the scam to lock down people.  It was never the newspapers who broke the stories, it was private businesspeople working on their own and networking.  Here is a an article on who did it and how.

Now if someone, somewhere would just expose the Iraq and Afghan war scam, please quickly, before we attack Iran.

Like securities regulation, it was private businesses, not the SEC who spotted the frauds such as Enron and Bernie Madoff.  James Chanos risked his own capital and then got rich spotting the nonsense about Enron. The requisite and govt approved ratings agencies, this time Moody's, did not get around to warning about Enron until 3 days AFTER it crashed, and 3 weeks before it went into bankruptcy.

The free market works.  Capitalism and communisn do not.

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Upscale Retail Doing Just Fine

Financial Times reports on Upscale Retailer sales trends.

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Blame The Black Guy

Every culture has scapegoat group, and in USA blacks are "it." Given the disasterous results of USA policies under clinton and bush, it was useful to the powers that be to run Obama as president, and those whose premise was "race matters, ideas don't" got Obama elected.  Chris Rock joked George Bush made it so no white man could ever get elected president again.  I am afraid when the blame Obama project is finished, no black person will ever get elected again.  We will remain  "race matters, ideas do not."

Now comes a neocon publisher with a series of books specifically naming and blaming Obama for America's problems, capitalizing on and promoting the blame obama movement. There are seven titles so far, such as "How the Obama Administration Has Politicized Justice." The title is so tendentiously stated one may forget that George Bush fired a half dozen US Attorneys around the United States for pursuing republican election fraud and other political matters.  We are to believe the problem started with the black guy.  Nonetheless, the amazon sales rank for this book currently is 33,000 overall (it changes hourly) which means it sells perhaps a dozen copies a day on amazon.  It's rank among those who are interested in government is 42.  The titles take the most pressing bush/clinton policy disasters and blame them on Obama. Check out the whole range here. which I first saw at the San Francisco airport.

Let's update google search results for the terms blame bush and blame obama:

Blame bush: 5,600,000 hits

blame obama: 23,300,000 hits

Bear in mind Bush was in office 8 years (count 12 if you assume the term Bush will include his fathers 4 yeas in office.)  Obama has been in office one year.  Whole lotta blaming going on.

A funny title is Obama's Betrayal of Israel, as though the necons never criticized bush or clinton for the same. And never mind that Obama;s Chief of Staff, the gatekeeper to the President, Rahm Emmanuel, is an Israeli Defense Forces officer.

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maximal vs minimal thinking

If you think in terms of how much money you can make, then the mind runs to countless variations of the maximal kind, and three beers later you are no further along.

If you think in terms of "can I make money...?", thoughts of the minimal kind, then it is just a matter of "can you get enough orders to cover the suppliers minimum in a workable amount of time."  If you can (and you can), if you execute this small thing, then thereafter it is a matter of increasing the velocity of the minimum orders by redesigning the product based on customer feedback, ever tweaking efficiencies in overhead, and growing the base business exponentially by introducing new products based on customer feedback as to what is "next."

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