Saturday, January 29, 2011

Consume Vs Produce

Gary North over at LewRockwell.com mentions in passing judging people on what they consume versus what the produce.  I want to make an observation about small business.  We are conditioned to admire people for what they consume.  We follow heiresses and celebrities to see what they consume.  When we ask how much someone makes, we are really asking how much do they consume?
Those who are thriving in small business seem to have an alternative view, not how much can they consume, but what do they they produce?  The emphasis is, integrated with lifestyle, how well customers are impacted by what one offers?  One outlook asks how much do I make?  The other is how well do I serve others?  Neither outlook can assess the other.


One Last Chance

I asked you to vote for this Texan, and you said no.


I asked you NOT to vote for this Texan, an you said yes.


OK, one last chance to get it right.  Please Vote for this Texan.  Get to know him now.


Friday, January 28, 2011

عبد الرحمن يوسف في يوم الغضب

It has been noted that before the center of evil, the USSR fell, all of its satellites went down...  It is encouraging to see the generally peaceful acting up of the Egyptian people, here too...

عبد الرحمن يوسف في يوم الغضب

... no doubt they will throw out their USA backed dictator, like the Iranian threw out the Shah of Iran, and certainly the Iraqis could have thrown out Saddam if they cared to do so.

It is cruel and wrong to trap countless talented and motivated people in a system that benefits only a few, whether in Egypt or the United States.  Voting for change is impossible, but the only sustainable change is through nonviolence.

Islam is the religion of peace, so nonviolence is a typical response to oppression, and an excellent book on this is The Pathan Unarmed.


Start Up Livery

I received and email froma  student explaining he had incorporated in Delaware, given their advantages, lined up special banking, and then ran into cross-state licensing issues, and wondered what to do...  I quoted I think Johnson: "Many a slip twixt the cup and the lip"


and then went on...


I understand getting licenses, filing forms, structuring things is psychological helpful, but it can actually stymie your opportunities.  One advantage you have is your flexibility.  I'd advise against locking yourself down even before you have made a dime.


I have not run into this before because I knew in advance what the problems would be.  I do have a sole proprietorship and a Straight C corporation I own, but each exist only to serve the customer.  I would have waited on all of this licensing and banking until your first incoming funds from a transaction came into your personal account.  Then I would take that money and then deposit it into a bank account and get any licensing. As you go down that list of actions none of it serves the customer.  So I would do nothing else until money is coming in.  My attitude is what form our business takes depends on the needs of our customers.  So far you are only doing research.  You do not need to be registered with the tax collectors to do research.  (Although you may write off the cost of this research on your fed taxes, without any licensing or bank or anything else.) Of course, this presumes first we get customers.

Export management company can have a specific meaning in law, and if so, can be hugely expensive, and require overhead (which may be why you anticipate hiring people 4Q/11.)  My guess is you are following a template that in time you will realize was designed to launder money for only huge companies, not a small or start-up company.  You'll have to pursue massive volumes with tight margins to play that game, which is very difficult to pull off.  

There are alternatives, and they require none of the above.  In Chapter eight of the book I lay out an alternative.
 
Have you tested your hypothesis with the Chileans?  Such as you approach qualified buyers, and speaking to decision makers, have said, "I believe if I offer you Bauxite at $200/ton, 1000 ton MOQ, FAS Long Beach, 14 days after order, you will buy from me on a Letter of Credit confirmed to my local bank?"

The hard fact is until you test the hypothesis, it is all wishing and hoping.  Until you test the hypothesis, none of the above matters.  When you test the hypothesis, it is very likely you will get a "no..", yet it will be "no, because..."  at which point you can get to work overcoming the objection.  Again, overcoming objections is research and you need none of the above to do research....

I understand getting licenses, filing forms, structuring things is psychological helpful, but it can actually stymie your opportunities.  One advantage you have is your flexibility.  I'd advise against locking yourself down even before you have made a dime.


Thursday, January 27, 2011

Astounding Fraud with Gates Donations?

Accountants find astounding that fraud accounts for up to 60% of disease-fighting charity money is diverted.  Astounding?  Read Michael Maren, The Road to Hell, the donors, such as Gates and Bono must know about this already.  My guess is the outrage has to do with population control, or lack thereof due to theft of funds, ZPG being a key factor in these vaccines.

Now one of the reasons we are hated so is because people with brown skin and darker find themselves the object of eugenics worldwide.  AS I've mentioned before, not only does the Gates foundation target humans, Gates' Partner Allen is targeting their animals.

We are conditioned to reflexively acquiesce to population control, as if it was some sort of problem. It is not.  Fly over USA, China, Europe, Africa, and most of the time you are over empty space.  Darwin said the "civilized races" would "exterminate the savage races" in short order.  People who solve problems that do not exist, such a "overpopulation" need a faux science to back up their program.  Darwnism is handy, since Darwin predicted, which is a sort of permission, to exterminate people brown or darker.

The problem is not population, or race, it is freedom, or lack thereof.


A Correspondent Checks In From Tunisia

A correspondent wrote:

One of the concessions made by the former president in the address the day before his abrupt departure was to make the Internet freely accessible; you may be aware that the media were heavily censored here under him. He recognized the power of the Internet; he knew the protesters were young and this could be endearing to them;


There is a film of a news conference in which a East German official is announcing in a live press conference a new policy of East Germans crossing the border was to be instituted.  The fellow was not fully informed of what the conditions would be, nor when the policy would take effect.  An Italian journalist said "when?"  The East German officer guessed, "tonight..."    Homes on both sides of the wall emptied out as bewildered border guards (the watched the news conference too) were overwhelmed by mass humanity flowing past.  That night they partied as they took the wall down,  November 1989.

Often enough in history it is a small bureaucratic mistake that brings the whole thing down.  In USA where we self report ourselves, where what we read and write is tracked, where google is closely allied with intelligence agencies (Oracle started as a CIA database contractor), there is a serious effort at giving the president an "internet kill switch."   We can't have what happened in Tunisia happen here in USA.  I hope our leaders someday do something as equally endearing for our youth.


Seller Financing

Europe is dropping its shoe import restrictions against China, now that China has agreed to buy billions in Spanish and Portuguese bonds.  In essence, this is seller financing, with China putting up the money for europe to buy its shoes.  The aggressors here is the European Central Bank, manipulating the currency to put european small businesses at a disadvantage, making Chinese goods preferable.


Wednesday, January 26, 2011

USA Oldest Wine Merchant Open Office in Hong Kong

Building business in Asia, a USA merchant is moving to Hong Kong too... always a good idea.John Kapon


Anthony Checks in on Tunis

You haven't blogged about problems in Tunis and now Egypt too?   I thought for sure you'd say something since it was a free market attempt at starting a fruit stand that sparked retribution from a tyrannical government.  

You know the power corrupts cliché,  what it is in human nature that leads powerful people to become corrupt?   Even with Anarchy,  someone will gain power and start repressing people.   How can the free market be enforced?


Anthony


But of course I have, here, here and here.  I guess by the time  country decides it needs to be more like Hong Kong they have gone too far.  people sell all sorts of things, like fruit juice, in Hong Kong without trouble form the government.  In fact, no one much talks about government or politics in Hong Kong because both have so little to do with life.


The fellow set himself on fire, not unlike the Buddhists in Vietnam of yore.  Now several others in Egypt have done so too.  Frustration at USA injustice is so overwhelming people resort to blowing themselves up and setting themselves on fire.  At some point the USA people have got to tire of seeing our allies fleeing their countries with our billions.  We are watching the world turn away from USA, and our lawyer-led country. All this criminality is designed by lawyers.  It;s time to limit them to the judiciary part of government.


Man was not designed ot have power over other men, the corruption is quite natural; it is the people who enter the voting booth, who elect "leaders" that are to blame.  Even Thomas Jefferson went bad as president.


In anarchy, by definition, no one can gain power.  There is enough violence in a free market to keep the evil ones at bay, and good and dead.  The problem is, unbidden, we seek a leader, a strong man, when we fear for our safety.  See 1 Samuel 8.   Nobody but ourselves to blame.


Markups and Margins for Hi-tech Electronics

Here are some interesting blog posts on the mark-ups and margins on hi-tech electronics, here talking about mac computers and iphones, here talking about how to figure store margins (scroll down to bootsnake), and here is a detailed discussion talking about margins of mass merchandisers, it's about five years old, and most of these companies are gone, which should tell you something.  But the data collection strategy is very good, and can be copied for today.  And check out this sort-of government-run amazon.com


Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Excellent Summary of US/China Relations

Ambrose Evans Pritchard on US-China relations...  as usual the comments are very good... showing both sides of the argument.  The lawyers who run this country have no idea who they are up against.  Immanual Kant was an observer of the USA revolution and the formation of our government.  Kant pointed out that it would be a mistake to allow members of one branch of government to serve in another, in particular of course, lawyers, who are officers of the court, the judiciary, serving in the legislature or the executive branch. It would be a good improvement to outlaw this conflict of interest.  Can we not trace most of USA crimes and problems back to lawyers serving in the executive or legislative branch?

In Shakespeare's Henry the VI, it is a villain who says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."  Although we can have any of many legal systems, they all seem to yield pretty much the same results, one can make things worse by allowing a conflict of interest.  Get rid of the conflict of interest, get rid of the abuses, and people will not be so anti-lawyer.


Monday, January 24, 2011

Law Merchant and Anarchy

Here is a good review of the history of the formation of governments with references to the law merchant as an example of order from chaos.  The latter half spends time on anglo-saxon law development.  It is very much worth a read.

Most anarchists have trouble identifying quite where we make the mistake of moving from freedom to government oppression, which I find interesting because like so many of these things, it is simple.  In fact, we have a very old lesson on this topic, and example, in 1 Samuel 8.  We are going along quite well with our inalienable right to freedom, when for whatever reason, people demand a king or some sort of leader.  God himself argued against it, but relented, and gave Israel a king..  Israel never quite recovered.  But then every country does the same thing, the Jews have merely the first recorded instance.  Every law passed is just the most recent recorded instance.

The Anglo-Saxons began accreting power to leaders among themselves, and of course such leaders begin to gain more property, power and wealth, an upward spiral to exceptional wealth.  At some point Vikings began raiding Britain, after these power bases formed.

Now pause for a second...  why would Vikings venture all the by by Sea from Denmark to raid Britain? They of course made a cost/benefit analysis that England was the best target for pillage, well worth the effort.  How come?  Why because of the concentration of wealth.  By the very act repudiating their inalienable rights, Englishmen guaranteed eventually the exceptional, concentrated wealth would draw in pillaging Vikings.  And so it did.

Had Englishmen not given up their rights, Viking scouts would have found perhaps cheap dental care and a fine meal, widely available.  Not much to steal, but good.  Plenty of options at a low price, but no exceptional wealth. In fact, since velocity of money would be high, it would not be concentrated, and there would really be no way to steal at the level that attracts pillagers.  Any attempt to sit on the system would lead to a dearth that in time would discourage the Vikings, and encourage them to raid the next best target, say Portugal.

Indeed, instead of cheap dental care and a fine meal, England to this day is known for bad teeth and lousy cuisine.  No wonder Chef Ramsay is so rude and angry.

Japan took captured Hong Kong in WWII, but there was really nothing to take, as opposed to Shanghai and Manila.  Hong Kong suffered under the Japanese, although nothing like Shanghai or Nanjing.  The best protection against pillage is a free market.


Sunday, January 23, 2011

Vatican Sees Problem, Advances Solution

I spoke to a young diplomat who claimed that although London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Tokyo were all plum postings, if one could not get stationed there, an excellent alternative was the Vatican.  Because it is in Rome?  No, because the Vatican has the best informed and the most professional, talented diplomats. And an intel network second to none.

The Vatican banker has come out with a warning that western banking policies are leading to a "weakening of political strength."  But what to do about it...?  Well nothing, except ordain a Chinese national as an Archbishop and put him in charge of Vatican/China relations.  Making friends for the future.