Apple iPhone Introduces Gas Fired Cooker

China has begin cracking down on intellectual property violations, and it seems a lot of money for not much of a problem.  Does the world really need to be free of the Apple iPhone Gas cooker?



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Tony Complains From Napoli

On Oct 12, 2012, at 12:37 PM, Tony wrote:

If you can't afford to pay a living wage you can't afford to be in business.  Bottom line. Get a job driving a bus.

You do not have a right to a living wage, you have a responsibility to learn to command a living wage. Work for nothing as you help make an entrepreneurial actor successful, and move on up.  Work in the field you find yourself like an entrepreneur, giving as much as you can for as little compensation as you can, like an entrepreneur.   This is the path to success.

You do not have a right to health care, you have the responsibility to take care of yourself and work enough to cover proper health care.  Real health care costs nothing compared to the fake health care they sell for megadollars, and charge off to taxpayers.

You do not have a right to food, you have a responsibility to provide for yourself and your family.  Stop feeding your kids overpriced Velveeta when you can be clever enough to afford Raw Milk Cheddar.

You do not have a right to housing, you have a responsibility to house yourself.  Section 8 is the end of the line in human existence.

You do not have a right to education, you have a responsibility to get yourself educated.  The gates are still standing, but the walls around an excellent education have come down.  Stop banging on the gate and demanding someone else overpay for your education.  Step slightly to the side, around the gate, and get a first rate education at almost no cost.  (Except in Michigan, where it is a crime to offer or take free online courses.)

Yes, there are those who need help: the lame, the halt, the imbecile, but you and no one you know is lame, halt or imbecile.  We all have a responsibility to earn enough so we can support charities to help them too.  Work on your excrement cohesion factor, so the truly jammed up can be helped directly by you.  Stop pawning them off to the Tuskegee experimentation crowd.

Passing them off to the state which charges too much to provide extremely expensive and useless "help" to people in need is to simply escape responsibility.  If you were responsible, then you would not patronize the frankenfoods producers destroying the people and the planet for profits.  Oh?!  You never buy Velveeta?  But it is OK the state forces Velveeta down the gullet of poor people? It is the State that keeps the Frankenfoods and Frankenmedicine in business as the state fights your battles for you.  J'accuse!

Do not make me come to Naples to sort you out.  I'll do it.  You know I will.

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Lowering Workers Wages Through Minimum Wage Laws

This is something I was not aware of, when the feds started taxing tips, say 20 years ago, and required restaurants declare those to the IRS, the restaurants were able to argue tips should be deducted form minimum wage.  Here is family restaurant chain Dardens...

And last year, the company also put workers on a "tip sharing" program, meaning waiters and waitresses share their tips with other employees such as busboys and bartenders. That allows Darden to pay more workers a far lower "tip credit wage" of $2.13, rather than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

One thing I recall from working in foodservice in my youth was the esprit de corps.  It did not pay real well, but it was fun.  And we learned a lot. Those who really busted their hump were the waitstaff, and so they earned heir tips.  This new thing of tip-sharing to meet minimum wage will wreck the esprit de corp and the small and medium size restaurants.

More subtle damage done by minimum wage laws!

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Five Steps to Business Start-Up

Forty years of working 25 teaching on the side, and here is my best advice for business start-up - precipitated by this note in an email:

On Oct 10, 2012, at 3:46 PM, Robert  wrote:

...

Being privy to what goes on and being at meetings about dealing with retailers  has shown beyond the slightest doubt that volume is not the way to go when starting a business! It more or less confirms everything you say about competing on design, working with specialty retailers on high end products, and working on frequency when ordering. It's all so clear why you say that now.

Robert

1. Find your customers.  Customers are defined as “ready, willing and able.”  If you do not have the names of people who have indicated they are ready, willing and able to buy your product or service, then you do not have customers.  What you have, if not customers, is at best a hypothesis as to customers.  Any hypothesis needs to be tested.  Keep testing the hypotheses until you have customers.

If you spend any time or money working on a business before you have customers, then you are wasting your time and money, and are likely to join the vast majority who fail at business.  You may have a few years of activity, but ultimately your activity will yield a net loss.  Find your customers first.

2. Develop your product of service.  This is done in close coordination with the customers mentioned above.  It cannot be done without customers.  If you develop something without close and open discussions with your customers, you will join the nearly seven million USA patent holders who never made a product, let alone a profit, and the countless other who fail for lack of customer input.  N.B.:  Compete on design.  Never compete on price.  If you try to compete on price, your business will fail.

3. Find the best supplier in the world for your product of service.  There is excess production capacity for anything you might conceive of.  Never buy your own means of production.  What is valuable is customers, not factories.

4. Obtain enough orders from customers to cover the suppliers minimum production run, in a workable amount of time, profitably, or redesign your product in ever closer coordination with the customers, until you are able to obtain enough orders from customers to cover the suppliers minimum production run, in a workable amount of time, profitably.  Once you have enough orders from customers to cover the suppliers minimum production run, in a workable amount of time, profitably, then you import absolute minimum quantities, never pursuing volume importations:

a. manage finance better

i. smaller more frequent shipments are easier to finance.

ii.  Currency fluctuations are more easily addressed

b. manage risk better

i. a minimum order delayed is manageable

ii loss or damage is more easily managed.

5.  After begin receiving money from customers in payment for goods  you have sold to them, you can address the inconsequential issues of licensing, legal structure, location, business cards, etc.

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My Dentist Says Don't Drink the Water

So did my doctor.  It is tough to have serious scientists tell you when you are young that the state cannot and will not protect you.  One wants to believe it will.

Both told me to stay away from tapwater in Seattle.  This was years ago.  More and more people are figuring it out.

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FDA and Medibles Inspections

The Seattle Times has a front page article that asks the question who is inspecting the emerging marijuana-brownie industry, AKA "medibles"?  (Edible medical marijuana.) And it answers, why, the very people who are making dope-soaked stoner food are doing their own policing.  Yikes!

The Times recommends the powers that be get busy to assure this emerging market is well regulated, for our health and safety.

Meanwhile, buried on other pages is the story of how a nasty deadly disease was included in FDA inspected steroid shots.

As many as 13,000 people received steroid shots suspected in a national meningitis outbreak, health officials said Monday. But it's not clear how many are in danger.

Officials don't how many of the shots may have been contaminated with meningitis-causing fungus tied to the outbreak...

The CDC count of cases reached 105 on Monday, including eight deaths. A ninth death was reported late Monday by a Nashville, Tenn., hospital.

Now, I am being unfair in saying "FDA inspected" because the FDA inspects almost nothing, contrary to popular iconography.  Anyone who thinks the FDA in anyway assures anything good simply has not run the numbers.  Here is something I posted earlier in the year, in relation to one fraction of their duties, and that is inspecting imported food.  With imported food, the FDA inspects about 1.5 pounds of food out of every million imported.  Feel safe? And we have not begun to talk about inspecting drugs, too, in this analysis.

Let’s run some numbers:

2009 FDA had “about”(they don’t know) 8800 employees and a budget of 2.4 billion.  This means each FDA employee costs the taxpayers about $272,727 a year. Extrapolating from these facts, let’s say in 2010, they had 12,100 employees, given a budget of $3.3 billion. That is about a 50% increase, so now they should be able to inspect 1.5 pounds in a million. With their 2011 budget of over $4 billion, they nearly double their 2009 capabilities, so they can inspect almost 2 pounds per million, with 14,666 employees.

Let’s get serious:  If we believe inspections matter, we want at least 10% inspection right?  That would be 100,000 pounds per million. So we can reckon with a 2011 budget of $4 billion, and 14,666 employees, to get from 2 pounds to 100,000 pounds per million, we need to bump this up 50,000 times.  OK.. so to get where we inspect 10% of the imports (and note this is only the imports, let alone domestic inspection), or in other words let 90% of our imported food slide by uninspected, we need a FDA budget of 200 Trillion dollars (with a T) and 733 million inspectors, that is twice the population of USA today.  Better open those borders, and hire illegal aliens, if we want to get serious about food safety.

Of course, every cook inspects every meal, so we need no FDA whatsoever.  The FDA is just the TSA groping dead animals.  Why do we pretend the FDA can enhance food safety when they cannot, why do pretend cooks cannot when they do?

But back to the medibles article:

A small group, including medibles makers and testing labs, are making the move to self-regulate. 

***Exactly.  Who is more motivated to assure quality?***

Guidelines from the group, the Coalition for Cannabis Standards and Ethics, include business basics: Pay all taxes. Get food-handler permits. Follow Food and Drug Administration labeling standards. Don't produce anything requiring refrigeration, or hot handling, in a personal kitchen.

***Oops.  They made a mistake there.  None of those entities provide any value.  Here they go too far.***

Those standards, however, are voluntary, 

***Of course...***

not widely followed, 

***How do you know this, Seattle Times?  Prove it.***

and they don't provide any legal protection from state prosecution, let alone federal charges.

***Neither does being in compliance with the FDA.  Compliance provides no protection in the law.***

Ironically, that has likely helped dissuade bigger medibles manufacturers, from California or Colorado from moving in. Tripp Keber, managing director of Dixie Elixirs & Edibles, Colorado's largest medibles manufacturer, said Washington is an attractive market, but its laws are too loose to justify investment. "I'm not going to risk breaking the rules in Washington and putting the mothership at risk," said Keber.

***Good.  By keeping the regulation queens trembling in Colorado, the free market Washington State businesses might thrive better faster.  This is an excellent argument for free markets.***

Chaney, of Dream Cream, is also leery. He said he asked state agriculture and county health officials about inspection. Neither would provide guidance, let alone inspections.

***Mr. Chaney! Ask not what your government can do for you, but what you can do for your customer!***

After losing access to the commercial kitchen in Seattle, he has stopped making cannabis-infused drinks, which require refrigeration. In his beach cabin, Chaney focuses on capsules made from a coconut-oil cannabis extract.

***Dude!  We need more of this...  This is an excellent article for deregulation of medicine.  Eliminate the FDA immediately!***

http://www.theweedblog.com/how-to-make-the-perfect-marijuana-brownies/

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What Happened At Alaska Airlines?

The internet was designed so that if any part is broken data traffic is rerouted and so info flow is never stopped.  But info flow stopped for Alaska Airlines yesterday.

The airline had to cancel 78 Alaska and Horizon Air flights, delaying some 6,800 passengers. The biggest delays were at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, but flights were "significantly delayed" across its 64-airport network.

OK...  so why did it not reroute in a split second?

The computer problems began when a Sprint fiber-optic cable running in the ground by railroad tracks between Chicago and Milwaukee was accidentally cut early Monday morning during maintenance work, said Crystal Davis, crisis communication manager for Sprint. The cable carried Alaska Airline's connection to the Sabre ticketing system.

The Sprint spokeswoman said when a cable is cut, the digital traffic is automatically rerouted.

Exactly.  So then what?

But then, said Davis, the overhead fiber-optic cable between Tacoma and Portland that had been rerouting the Sabre connection was also cut.

Well, why did that not also reroute instantly?  There are parallel systems and lines as well.  So it is no longer true, or it never was true, that the internet automatically reroutes?  This is significant.  At a very minimum, everyone should have "no internet" back up manual systems if their business depends on the internet.

But more to the point, if it is not true our internet routes data traffic automatically, then one of our fundamental logistical assumptions is not true.  And we paid a lot for it.


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Another Patent Attorney is Done

Forbes magazine gives Five Reasons to scrap the patent system, and in the comments section an attorney says his piece.

Excellent article (other than a few flaws, as others have pointed out). I’m a patent attorney, and though I make my living from the patent system, I think we would all be better off without it.

Patents are supposed to promote invention. They don’t. If they stimulate anything, it’s litigation. And the patent examiners, though some try hard, produce nothing but crap. When you file a patent application, you have no idea what you are going to get from the examiner, but you know it is going to be a joke.

I don’t blame patent examiners and patent attorneys so much. We’re just working for our paychecks. It’s mainly a political issue. Like so many other things in our bloated government, even a patent system that doesn’t do anything productive, but burns up billions of dollars, cannot be laid to rest. Like a zombie, you just can’t kill it.

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Grey Market in Peril

With intellectual property rights distorting markets, good people put violence-prone publishers off their feed by exploiting inherent weaknesses in the evil system.

A massive textbook publisher,  John Wiley & Sons (no relation), makes amazing bank in USA as a textbook publisher.  The system is like this:  for a school to be qualified to facilitate student loans, the school must be accredited.  To be able to facilitate student loans is to be able to trap foolish teenagers and their parents' aspirations for their children into paying too much for an "education" that gets more risible every year.  To be accredited, you must have approved books.  Wiley & Sons specializes in workong the system so their books are approved.  With this subtle advantage, Wiley & Sons can overcharge harmfully for textbooks, given the de facto monopoly.  Over paying for both an education and the textbooks leave students saddled for 20 - 30 years paying off the loans, which, by the magic of usury, grow in spite of payments being made. Overpriced text books are no secret, and "why" is no secret.

Now,  at the same time Wiley & Sons are overcharging in USA given our broken system, Wiley & Sons sells the same books in Thailand, at far less money.  One Thai student at a USA college notices this and has since earned $1.2 million arbitraging the unconscionable price in USA vs the the more free market price for the same book by the same publisher in Thailand.  Such arbitraging is called "grey market."   Please note in both instances both books are John Wiley & Sons.  This is not a case of piracy.

We saw the same thing in medicine.  Since Intellectual Property Rights keeps medicine prices unreasonably and unnecessarily high in USA, the same thing could be sold overseas quite profitably at a much lower cost.  To keep this from happening, USA drug makers sold their drugs overseas quite profitably at a much lower cost.  In this way, there was no point for anyone else to set up a factory overseas, since the goods were available dirt cheap overseas.  Individuals, even states, began buying these real drugs overseas at the low prices, engagin in "grey market" drugs.

At first the drug companies tried to say such drugs were dangerous forgeries, and they were proven wrong.  Then thry tried to say they were beyond shelf life, again wrong.  Finally they got congress to say to include the drugs in medicare, so those who were buying overseas cheaply could now get them "free" (full price USA overcharge price paid by taxpayers, instead of low cost real thing paid by elders who would buy from Canada or Mexico.)

I wonder if Wiley will get Congress to make textbooks "free?"

Wiley & Sons is seeking to stop the Thai lad from reselling books he bought in Thailand.  The very bad news is the US Supreme Court will hear the case.  This is a very bad sign.

At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is the first-sale doctrine in copyright law, which allows you to buy and then sell things like electronics, books, artwork and furniture, as well as CDs and DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those products.

Enlarge Image

A Supreme Court case could limit the resale of goods made overseas but sold in America.

Under the doctrine, which the Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your stuff without worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale.

The Supreme Court, from Marbury v Madison, up to the most recent ObamaCare vote has always done the bidding of the politicians and the powers that be.  There no stability or assurance any legal principles will ever be upheld by the court.  You can read about this yourself in the book The TRansformation of American Law, 1789 - 1860, written by Morton Horwitz, a widely acclaimed historian of law on the Faculty of Harvard.  if nothing else you should read the same book most lawyers read about the reality of USA law, so you are not naive about teh country we live in.

The Supreme Court ruling Wiley & Sons is looking to overturn is a 1908 decision regarding how our economy works.   Expect the US Supreme Court to do the wrong thing, as they did in another case a few years back, on another fundamental economic topic.

This is all apart of the process in figuring out who has to pay for the damage done during the boom.  the people who caused the damage so far will pay nothing.  This case is about the damage done to students by Wiley & Sons never costing Wiley & Sons.

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Almost Nothing Patented is Ever Successful

Did you know that of the near Seven Million patents issued in the USA since 1789 almost nothing every patented turns into a product for sale?  If you need this verified, ask any patent attorney.  They know.

If this is news to you, do you think it is significant?

Of the tiny fraction of patented items that actually become products, did you know that almost none of those ever turn a profit?  Any patent attorney can tell you this.

If this is news to you, do you think it is significant?

What this means is if there is any correlation at all, it is patent equals failure.

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