Seven Points Against Fair Trade

At the small business level, all trade is fair trade, because we have no power over suppliers.  I am sure big business/big government trade has its problems, but to get a big business to be "certified" fair trade is about as significant as BP Oil being certified "green."

People ask me if I teach about "fair trade."  At the small business level:

1.  What makes you think all trade is not fair trade?  We are quoted a price, and we build our competitive markups based on the price and demand.  We are not in a position to dictate prices of terms.  Negotiate, yes, dictate no.

2. I am sure exploitation occurs, but exploited labor is inconsistent and thus unworkable as a supplier to USA.  Importation of exploited labor goods just does not happen.

3.  Every "fair trade" group I have looked into in reality is just as bad as the problem they purport to alleviate.  One group of parasitical hustlers takes over from another.  Join our "fair trade" group and pay a cut or we'll make your markets dry up.

4. Business is about bringing buyers and sellers together.  Suppliers want their products tested in USA and feedback, so they can get ever more trade with USA.  If you are about "fair trade" then you are wasting a real suppliers time.

5. To speak of "fair trade" is the kiss of death among customers.  They want products to offer their customers, not political cant.  Keep business and charity and business and politics apart; customers do not want the two together.  Yes, I know plenty of people do it, but to the detriment of both parties.  Note how "fair trade" is touted by big business.  Assume they are using it either to squeeze sources overseas or pick-up subsidies in USA.  (Think Apple, City of San Francisco - requirements small biz cannot meet.)

6.  We who import at the small business level take money from the rich and give it to the poor.  Our designs are sold to early adopters and the wealthy who can afford the necessarily premium price.  We buy from people overseas who are not as wealthy as we are.  What we earn in the middle is subject to competition here at home: if we charge our customers too much we invite competition. Why make any supplier pay us extra to be in the "fair trade" club?

7. Consumer item.  I am yet to see an example of "fair trade" that is not just a consumption item:  "I have this car, this house, this fair trade business, this summer cabin..."

What suppliers overseas need is free markets and property rights, not some fresh hell in the form of another idea from USA on how to "help."

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TSA Mass Firings

This from the Washington Post:

At Newark Liberty International Airport, 44 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees face disciplinary action on charges related to screening misconduct. In June, eight transportation security officers there were dismissed.

At Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, 43 employees were disciplined (38 suspended, five fired) this year for not following screening procedures.

At Charlotte Douglas International Airport in 2011, 23 employees were disciplined after an investigation into checked baggage screening.

At Honolulu International Airport last year, TSA moved against 48 employees (36 proposed firings, 12 suspensions) for not screening luggage properly.

And this from the "Union" representing the malefactors.

“I believe it’s more a function of the fact that 1) the standards of conduct are both clearer and more stringent at TSA than at many other federal agencies, 2) TSA workers are more in the public eye than many other federal employees and 3) TSA has a more streamlined disciplinary process than most agencies,” John Palguta said by e-mail. “So when there are problems they are more easily identified and more quickly dealt with.” He is a Partnership for Public Service vice president who previously worked for the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Office of Personnel Management.

So, other Government workers are worse?  We just never hear about it?  Those examples above are the sum total of ever instance ...  everyone who does wrong gets caught?

And this helpful note:

 (The Partnership has a content-sharing relationship with The Washington Post.)

So the Washington Post is just putting a by-line on a TSA-written article?

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Six Pointers On Trademarks in China

I am not fan of trademarks in intellectual property, but here is a curious article on getting a trade mark in China, which may be especially useful for a USA company pursuing a trademark in China.

Businesses on the mainland should stay vigilant to all the products they sell under the trademark because they would be held accountable if there are quality concerns even in just one of the products.

I had to think this through.  In USA a trademark originally was to distinguish one brand from another.  People buying Kodak knew exactly what they were getting.  Quality was assumed.  The trademark was to assist in helping the consumer select a product with a known quality level.  The state role was to assure nobody else used the trademark.

In China the state role seems to be to assure the trade mark holder maintains a quality level.  So it seems the concept of trade mark has been drafted in the Communist Party campaign on "clean business."

And why not?  the Chinese Communist Party has one of the best brands known to mankind, and very well known logo.  They jealously guard it, and for me when in China the seas part when I present any document stamped by the Communist Party (visa invitations, fair passes).

So, yes, trade marks that serve China's needs, trade marks "Chinese style."  There is a difference.

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New Republic Calls For Scrapping Patents

OK... just for software, but it is a start...

That’s all assuming we need software patents at all—even appointing a commission to examine whether they could be scrapped entirely would be valuable. You’d encounter opposition from some of the big fish that own them, sure, but you’d also find some powerful friends like Google, which has said they’re “gumming up the works of innovation.” 

The logic is inexorable... get rid of all IPR.

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Jeeps To Be Made In China

Lemme see, after bailing out Chrysler, yet again, we now have Fiat, which owns Chrysler, taking Jeep production to China.

Why or why did we bail them out without making them open source their patents?  Then we would see some auto building renaissance in USA.

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Solyndra Suing Chinese Companies

Solyndra, the solar panel company that went bankrupt company that went bankrupt in spite of hundreds of millions of taxpayers subsidies is suing a Chinese solar power companies.

Solyndra, a California-based renewable energy firm that received a $535 million government loan, is seeking $1.5 billion in damages from Suntech Power Holdings, Trina Solar and Yingli Green Energy Holding. The firm alleged that the Chinese companies engaged in "attempted monopolization, conspiracy, predatory pricing" and other tactics in an aim to destroy Solyndra, according to the complaint filed in federal court.

Hmmm... monopolies can only be state enforced.  Is Solyndra saying USA gave the Chinese a monopoly?   The Chinese use a different technology for solar power panels.  How do you use predatory pricing when offering a different product?

This came after the US Commerce Department affirmed anti-dumping duties against Chinese solar firms on Oct 10, ruling that their production was made artificially cheap because of unfair subsidies from the Chinese government.

So Solyndra is complaining that the Chinese got subsidies form the Chinese government?  But Solyndra got subsidies from the USGovernment.  So what is the lesson here?  If you want to be successful in business, get subsidies from a communist government, because they are better at it?

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Chinese Farmer Builds His Own Lamborghini

Out of spare parts, for less than $10,000.  Which coincidentally, tracks the fact the Lamboghini was a tractor maker who built his own Ferrari.  It is a start, which is something that can get you fined, imprisoned or killed in capitalist countries.  Starting a career by building your own version of something already out there is natural free market activity.  Capitalists hate the free market.

By allowing lawyers to serve in the legislature and executive branch, our economy has been destroyed by such things as intellectual property rights rules.  When we rebuild the system, a minimum should be not to allow that conflict of interest to manifest again.

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How Come USA Wine Loses In Hong Kong?

Hong Kong growth in wine imports comes in part by deregulation of wine.

The abolition in 2008 of duty on wine imported into Hong Kong was the catalyst for the city to become Asia’s wine storage and trading hub. Since then, wine has been flowing in by the container load. Government figures show wine imports into Hong Kong rose by 40 per cent last year, reaching a value of US$1.2 billion, while Asia’s wine consumption is forecast to double to US$27 billion in the next five years. Hong Kong also accounted for more than half of the world’s wine-auction market in 2011. 

But it has long been a USA strategy to dump wine in Hong Kong to keep USA prices high. That dumped wine, being dirt cheap, was treated poorly and went bad, and consumers associated USA with bad wine.

Mr De'eb rates Hong Kong’s cold supply chain as second to none. “I would say, if anything, the weak spots are abroad, not in Hong Kong,” he says. “London, for example, has not really evolved in the last 20 or 30 years, so their storage and transport practices haven’t advanced sufficiently to keep pace with the world’s best. In contrast, ours have leapfrogged past the UK and Europe to being the acknowledged leaders in the industry.”

USA wine is a highly subsidized business, and therefore the market players operate on a distorted field. If wineries pursued full mark in the Chinese market, they might have a chance.

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Solving Global Warming

There is no scientific basis to support the idea of global warming or "climate change"  as a problem one way or another.

There is a nasty problem of pollution, which is undoubtably affecting the environment.

When Marxism folded, the Marxists needed a raison d'etre, so they jumped on the dormant ecology movement to host their predator lifestyle.  They became Greens.

By making the problem of pollution metaphysical, they were able to pose the problem as one needing all of the solutions of Marxism.

The solution to pollution is property rights.  One is not able to spoil unused parts of the planet, nor allow anything to cross over to other's property.

In anarchy, the sanction would be shunning, and any Monsanto strength pollution would no doubt be met with lethal indifference to the pleadings for health and welfare by Monsanto operatives.  It is the state that gives Monsanto a pass to pollute, just as it was the state that gave Jim Crow a pass to create racist laws.  In a truly free market, pollution is suicide to a polluter.

If property rights were respected, then automobiles, an invention, would include other inventions that collected all effluents to be packaged and sold on for industrial uses.  In short cars would be clean.  Or more likely, we would have moved away from cars and 1880s technology of mass transit into clean, non-effluent mag lev.

The state creates huge solutions for tiny problems, and then charges too much.  By making pollution into a boogie man of "climate change" the progressives assure they will have a sinecure managing cap and trade style "solutions" that serve to make pollution an eternal problem and the progressives' sinecure eternal. Remember, cap and trade institutionalizes pollution.

Read all about how it happened.



To believe we can fix this if we can "just get the right people in office" is self-delusional.  Step away from the false dilemma and act as though pollution matters.  Stop pretending if we just make it permanent it can be controlled.

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All Hail Chinese Communist Party Constitutional Amendment!

I've been defining "wealth" properly on this site for a while, making a distinction between the aggregated personal wealth some called billionaires hold, and the commonwealth defined as an ever growing selection of goods and services affordable to an ever widening consumer base.

Now comes the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China which seems to agree with me.

 strive for the full establishment of a moderately prosperous society

Moderately prosperous?  The "spe" in prosperous tells me the root of the word is hope.  Hope for the good in maerial things.

With hope there is aspiration.  The article also says:

the common aspirations of the CPC and people of all ethnic backgrounds, meets the development needs of socialism with Chinese characteristics and adapts to "new situations" and "new tasks," the statement said.

This time the root is "spi" breathing... so the Communist Party seems to be contemplating the idea of wealth as I have been defining it.  Go Reds!

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You Must Read This

An Absolute fundamantal must read:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/the-real-reason-america-is-drifting-towards-fascism.html

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Corporations Cannot Pay Taxes

It is not possible to tax a corporation.  It is possible to destroy a company through taxation, but never to gain revenues by taxing a corporation.  Corporations get their money from customers (or subsidies).  Money that comes from customers cover taxes.  When you buy a Hershey bar, you have covered all of Hershey's taxes.  The idea that "corporations should pay their fair share is utterly delusional.

So this paragraph in this article is economically ignorant:

When the airlines kept ticket prices down by shifting $12.8 billion to baggage fees, they also saved almost $964 million in federal taxes they would have owed if they had increased ticket prices by that amount.

No, the feds simply mulcted a billion less from consumers through one channel, and will mulct it instead through another.  The article goes on to say just that. The only way taxes can be avoided is if the money collected is not spent.  If we eliminated the agency that spends the money, the FAA, then we would avoid taxes, and gain the benefit of tens of thousands of people released into the economy to provide a benefit.

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Silvio Savarese Violates Law and Takes Government Paycheck!

Silvio Savarese is a clear and present danger, offering free courses to people around the world, and in Minnesota, a direct violation of Minnesota law.  Yes, he is paid by Minnesota taxpayers, yet he is sneaking in illegal participants (of Chinese origin!)  Only after being caught redhanded did the conspirators put out this note:

Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

Nonetheless, Silvio Savarese draws a paycheck from the taxpayers of Minnesota, in spite of being a part of an organization conspiring in illegal activity in the State of Minnesota!

Fie! Note the implicit call to lie!  Won't most Minnesotans simply lie about crossing a state line to take a course.  This is wickedly tempting people to break the law, in addition to breaking the law themselves!

George Roedler, manager of institutional registration and licensing at the Minnesota Office of Higher education, clarifies that his office's issue isn't with Coursera per se, but with the universities that offer classes through its website. State law prohibits degree-granting institutions from offering instruction in Minnesota without obtaining permission from the office and paying a registration fee. (The fee can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand, plus a $1,200 annual renewal.

Of course its not about shaking down schools for a few thousand bucks. No. Never mind no one is paying for free courses, says the apparatchik:

says Roedler, but they could still be wasting their time.

And for George Roedler, an extremely well compensated manager for the Minnesota department of whatever, how you spend your time is a prime concern of his. Requiring state enforcement. Where does it say that in any rules?  Who cares?!  He makes a lot of money and you don't, so go to hell! Under no circumstances is he ever responsible for anything he ever says or does, so shut up!  This is a democracy!  Once a person takes a government job, they automatically become a superior being.  How do we know?  Because the person has a government job.  There.

And it could not be that the odious Capella University, headquartered in Minnesota charges for an ersatz online "education" for dolts who take out student loans for a degree indicating an education inferior to what can be had for free. Cappell paid the bucks and so it is legit.  And Harvard is not.  This Silvio Savarese is sneaking in a Stanford educator into Minnesota in clear violation of Minnesota law. He MUST face the wrath of the people of Minnesota in a struggle session!

And then later someone might look into how much benefit George Roedler gets from Capella University.  At conferences and travel what kind of upgrades and other Secret Service style benefits Roedler might get, for no apparent reason and from no apparent source.  That would be interesting.

When will we see criminals actively participating in a clear and present danger brought to justice?

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he Worked with Everyone

In the mid-60's a guitarist named Jimmy Hendrix was this man's guitarist.

and this... Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.

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Why Google Posts a Less Than Expected

Google experienced a snafu in the reporting of its earnings.  One critical problem area is, as the story goes:

lost traction on the critical Cost per Click metric, and apparently failed to find a way to monetize mobile users.

I wonder if anyone at Google is aware just how difficult they make their offerings.  Sure, the search engine is delightful, but google+1, googledocs, and apparently most important, googleAds, is extremely difficult to use.  And the "help" is always a waste of time.

As an informed consumer of advertising, I can recognize the elements of fantastic leverage in GoogleAds, but in some 3 years of occasionally dipping in to see if Google has yet made it useable, I find, as I did in the last week, not yet.

They must know something is up, because hey sent me an email offering AdExpress or something.  As usual, just spend 20 minutes signing up and creating all sorts of IDs etc, for what, no doubt, yet again, will be a waste of time.

Google need not worry about customer satisfaction, because they have all the money they need from USGovernment security contracts.  All those bright young things in Silicon Valley know that no mater what happens on Wall Street or Washington, they'll have a sinecure.

This is another problem when the critical source of income for a company is the Government.

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Prepping: The Future is Detroit

Do not fear the State going down.  As far as schedules, San Francisco Muni quit trying years ago.  Detroit has gone downhill fast, as far as Government services go, and one can imagine how bad their Bus system might be.

So a kid has opened a new bus service, the Detroit Bus Company.  What do you want in a bus?  You want to come to your house?  OK. You want it to show up on your schedule?  OK. You want enjoy a beer while enjoying your ride?  OK. Why not?

All this with predictive software, at $5 a ride.

Imagine if private companies did this for police and fire?  And every other government service?

As the welfare plantation crashes, what will be left is the essential good we all see.  If you are scared and "prepping" you are wasting your time.  Figure out what is wrong and begin to fix it.  You'll be first man standing apres le deluge.

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