Thursday, September 23, 2010

Oyster Trade

Do you have a passion for oysters, and wish to share these worldwide?  Then perhaps these questions should be asked:

On the demand side, exporters and strategic planners approaching the world market face a number of questions. Which countries are supplying oysters? What is the dollar value of these imports? How much do the imports of oysters vary from one country to another? Do exporters serving the world market have similar market shares across the importing countries? Which countries supply the most exports of oysters? Which countries are buying their exports? What is the value of these exports and which countries are the largest buyers?
Good questions.  Timely answers are good.  This company offers the answers in a report for Euro 637, or about $800.  In my book and courses I show how you can get the same answers at no cost, and I add figures such as prices paid, monthly peaks and valleys.  Sheeeesh.


The New Busy: Microsoft Helps Crush Enemies Worldwide

No wonder the Chinese are developing alternative code to Microsoft products.  Iran is finding its strategic assets under software virus attack.  This is reported as a super-sophisticated state sponsored event, made possible by Microsoft mediocrity. Like the auto industry, software writing would improve tremendously if the IPR were eliminated in the USA.   Such software attacks can go both ways, and USA has far more Microsoft controlled strategic assets than any other country.  Will we see blowback?


Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Biggest Headache For Small Business In India

Here is an interesting story out of India, about a successful start-up garment company.  His market was uniforms for management trainees, a new idea, and he makes clear to survive he must compete on design.  As it is here in USA, he must use independent contractors.  And as usual, as a manager he keeps his own costs down... his biggest headache is getting labor to perform...  Of course better performers cost more, too.  Cheap labor is never a factor that matters in international trade.


Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Apropo Business Start-up and Compliance

It's starting... black markets, cheese sammich division, in response to over-regulation.  Thanks to LewRockwell.Com for this tip.... Give it up to the fellow who is preserving cultural capital.  Image from the NPR site.


The New Busy: Microsoft Helps Crush Dissent Worldwide

Microsoft lawyers are "just following orders" when they assist evil government crackdown on dissent.  Since it costs Microsoft nothing to "combat software piracy" (you and I pay for it) they are happy to go along.  If activists wish to protest the fouling of Lake Baikal, Russian prosecutors seize the groups computers on suspicion of software piracy, Microsoft division.  Microsoft lends full support, because, well, billionaires don't get that way without cooperation with the powers that be.

As usual, Microsoft will bloviate, and continue as usual.  Crushing dissent worldwide is the new busy.


Munger Says Watch Me Eat Cake

They say the bank bailout was necessary because the banks were too big to fail.  What is not made clear is that A system would have failed.  Just one of many system we could pick, a system we happened to have.  I say the bank failures were too important to skip.  Their failure would have ushered in a clearing of the decks and a starting over, a reset of the system, that would have benefitted us all.  Bankruptcy of the bankrupt is important in any system.

Certainly people like Charlie Munger would have suffered, if his system failed (well it did fail, that is why Charlie Munger had to be bailed out.).  He is a billionaire, and likes it.  We all like a system in which we happen to excel.

Charlie Munger is sharp as a tack and very familiar with the term and concept "survivorship bias."  We tend toward what we see as success, and then we are biased toward it, which leads to us organizing around it.  Those yet to succeed assume that is the path to success.  This in part explains such horrors as Nazi Germany.  By tolerating power grabs by ever smaller groups of people, such as with the hated bank bailouts, we invite the horrors that follow from concentrated power.  Munger knows this too, but he pulls out the Hitler card to trump those who do not think Munger should have been bailed out.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the probability theorist and market advisor has a wonderful book called Fooled By Randomness in which he uses the example of the good dolphin.  Throughout history there are stories of dolphins carrying drowning swimmers to shore.  The few dozen stories stories of such rescuees, being saved by dolphins from drowning, give us a warm and fuzzy feeling about dolphins.  What we do not hear about, are the drowning humans who hitch a ride on a dolphin, a dolphin that takes them out further to assure the victim drowns.  We never hear of the evil dolphins, since their victims tell no tales.  We do not take them into consideration.

The victims of the bailouts are posting murderous comments under the articles on Munger's statements.

Since Munger is successful, we wish to identify with him, and agree with him, in a desperate hope we can be successful like him (although we have no idea what his lifestyle is like, but we can project what we would do if billionaired.)  Never mind a system that fosters excess wealth hoarding necessarily also keeps the pie relatively static.  A system based on freedom would have a pie that grew with peoples' needs and desires, but would make it hard to accumulate extraordinary wealth, and in any event, never more than one generation.

People like Munger and Gates and others have huge followings, merely for their wealth, a function of survivorship bias.  In our system, in which the rich get richer and the poor poorer, someone will be "richest."  It is a matter of survivorship, and there will be a bias toward such survivors.

Our system violates natural law. Natural law is a truth that is accessible through reason. If truth was not accessible through reason, then our free will would have no purpose, for if we could not come to a point where a choice is to be made, then what is the point of free will?  To what purpose would we have a free will?  A choice when unaware of options is not much of a gift. The great choice in life is between good or evil.  Reason leads to a belief in a prime mover, and revelation is God's introduction of Himself.  Religion is how man organizes his response to revelation.

Atheists and Believers alike celebrate the wealthy, although it is unworthy of them given the gift of reason.  By reason alone we can know the system is wrong, and needs to fail.  We can do better. We can have free markets.


Monday, September 20, 2010

Eliminate Their Travel Budget

Why are governors flocking to China?  Because the taxpayers must pick up the tab.  A China junket with a governor is a great way to pay back campaign contributors at taxpayer expense.  These people now travel with more people President Nixon brought with himself in 1972.  They say they no longer have enough money for battered women's shelters, but they sure have enough money for travel.  Budget cut item #1.. freeze government travel budgets at Zero.  Billions saved right there.


Cultural Capital

Any solution to our economic problems that is not based on new business formation will fail.  Borrowing more money to pour into failed initiatives only mkes things worse.  To gain some improvement there will have to be cut backs on regulations and taxes to open opportunities, and there will have to be people willing to take advantage of the opportunities. 

I’ve addressed “why people do not start companies” previously. One problem is the reflexive conditioning which causes people to predicate a decision as to go/no go for biz startup on "health care coverage."   This is so strange, since a mere 50 years ago if you had an income, you could buy health care like groceries or rent or anything else, or buy insurance yourself.  No one sat around worrying about “health care.”  Although there is a crisis in funding the unsustainable “health care” regime now, there is no crisis in obtaining health care.  How people have been duped into thinking they must arrange their lives to accomodate a problem that does not exist is an astonishing thing to behold.  I suppose it is a matter of deprogramming people to move them off their inordinate fear of “health care” shortage.

But let’s move on to another item, whether those who would form new business are able to to so, for want of another predicate: cultural capital. I see rather widespread a simple lack of expertise handed down.  Like farmers whose kids never worked the farm (let Mexicans do it) and fled for college as soon as possible, the children of past entrepreneurs could no more start a biz with what they know, than farmers’ kids could make a farm work.  The serially bad ponzi booms of financial services, dotcom and real estate bubbles crowded out the good of cultural capital inheritance.

This hand-me-down expertise is something Thomas Sowell calls "cultural capital."  I think why I see so many immigrants start biz is 1. they have the cultural capital. 2. they will not follow "the rules."

Part two has to do with a. not knowing "the rules" and b. making a calculated risk that violating the rules is worth it.  By the rules I mean compliance with regulations and taxes, the social contract that is widely assumed and acknowledged and accepted, in spite of the fact that the said contract was imposed through election fraud.  Not only do I think this noncompliance is widespread among some groups, I think there is tacit approval for it by the powers that be.

Welfare is not enough to live on, so everyone on welfare is cheating the system somehow to survive.  This statement is not remarkable.  People cheating on taxes and regs are not on welfare, which saves the state money.  Allowing this on the margin (with some immigrants) saves money, creates new jobs, and reduces welfare cheating.  For those contemplating such an act of independence, with nothing to lose anyway, and a choice between cheating while indolent (welfare) and cheating while producing (start up biz), the choice is of course cheat while contributing.

The solution of course is to somehow carve out opportunity that does not require "cheating." (Since the rules are unjust and grounded in fraud, they are not moral obligations, but this does not mean you cannot be sent to jail. Never mind the regime is illegitimate, crossing the regime will land you in jail, since the judges are regime judges.)  This could be "no rules and regs on your first million in sales," or some sort of new Hong Kong located in USA.

New business generation is the solution to our problem.  We need freedom, and to rebuild our cultural capital.