Redskins? Skins?

I don't follow professional sports, since the game is fixed.  But I might have a solution to this teapot tempest.

The putative problem is the name Washington Redskins (as in Washington DC).  Redskins as a stand-alone term is rather offensive.

So Charles Krauthammer suggests changing the name to 'Skins.  That kinda works, since Washington skins us alive.

I think a better new name would be the Washington Reds, to recognize that fact the city has been taken over by communists.

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Helman Chang

His riff on why he works is fun.. the emphasis on celebrity association is given more time but as he clearly says, the joy is the real motivator.



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Exporting is Scary

An email arrives:

John, it is no wonder why exporting is not a more common activity in the US. The exporting jargon is so complex that the whole process is scary. I know just enough to be dangerous. 

I am grateful that you are telling me exactly what to say.   Don't think for a minute that I could do any of this without you.

Thank you for being my mentor.

I'll keep you posted as to his reply and hopefully we can celebrate with a cyberspace "high five" when this venture is successfully over.

I reply:

Thanks for the kind words.  Let me tell you, I get scared just advising...  just the word FOB causes a lot of confusion.  FOB in int'l trade always means on the vessel in the port between the seller and the buyer, whereas domestically it can mean the warehouse of the buyer.  And as I said, with legal implications!

Another reason to have the MOQ FOB is you have a basic offer down, one you and your FF and banker are all expertly apprised.  For every inquiry from everywhere in the world, that is your offer.  Since you are expert in that very simple, clear offer, any variance requested shines for clear and simple response.

So I encourage you to get the MOQ FOB done, so you can make this exporting no more difficult than a domestic sale.   This two pallet quantity sounds like a good sized MOQ FOB quote.  Why not work it up with an FOB Elizabeth NJ and a FOB Long Beach version, so you can sell the world as easily as you sell San Francisco?

John

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Chase Bank On Cash and Withdrawal Restrictions

Alex Jones has made a splash with some letters to customers issued by Chase Bank, a too-big-to-fail monster bailed out by taxpayers.  It says outbound telegraphic transfers will be banned coming up in a month or so.  I've anticipated this, since having a Government involved in currency always leads to poverty,  The failure rate on paper currency is 100%.  The USDollar will be no different.

The limits on how much cash they will process, note they add both cash collected and cash distributed is being limited too.  This is to force your customers to pay by electronic means, which will allow the powers that be to kick the can down the road, except that while it delays the inevitable, it means the crash will be exponentially worse.

Now this is not to say there will be no way to make int'l payments, it just means that we will go back forty years to letters of credit in int'l payments, so banks and the socialist states can control payment flows.

The problem with this is there are maybe fifty people left on planet earth, like me, who understand that letters of credit are not security, just a mechanism.  When a million bankers re-introduce letters of credit for business, there will be astonishing losses as the sheep are eaten by the wolves.

At the same time, currency fluctuations are hammering Chinese exporters.

Besides the rising value of the currency, increased production costs and possible adjustments to foreign trade policies in the near future also hampered domestic exporters from clinching long-term orders with overseas buyers, Liu said.
"But the key factor is the rising value of the renminbi, which, as far as most Chinese exporters are concerned, will lower their profits in the future," Liu said.

One report suggested the Chinese should require payment in RMBY.  Just like the good old days under Mao.

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Standoff Ends: Both Sides Agree to Oppress the Poor

The big fight was over the spoils of a system in which the rich saddle the poor with debt and regulation, and to the chagrin of right wingers, the left wingers will continue to get the lions share.

What to make of a group who are fighting over who gets what out of borrowed money?  I suppose it is one thing for heirs to fight over actual assets, but these people are fighting over who gets to use up the credit card.

Now the poor in the world, including the USA, are not consulted on this, but it is they who will pay by losing what they have and what they might have had.

A prophet, in the form of a house stenographer, was dragged away from the House Floor last evening, she walked up to the dais and proclaimed loudly that the congress was a house divided and congressmen sons of the devil.  Like most prophets, she was booed by the sons of the devil.  Don't feel bad, lady this was the same group giving a standing ovation to the cops that executed an unarmed mom the week before.

Listen to the prophets.

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Business Start Up and the Unseen

Panjiva, Importgenius, PIERS, Zepol keep chugging along, selling their wares.  Here is the problem...  people have a belief that knowing the buyers and the sellers is a path toward success in starting up a business.  In every single instance of approaching business this way, the effort ends in failure.  80% of new businesses fail within 5 years, and this idea of finding the names of buyers and sellers somehow being of use is a common reason why they fail.  People pursuing known business, hoping for a cut of that, never ask the question their target will ask "why should I buy from you?'  (Or if they ask the question, they ask it only of themselves, and answer it to themselves positively.)

The ineluctable reason why this fails is new businesses must find new customers.  As Drucker says entrepreneurs create customers.  Bastiat talks about the seen and the unseen.  Catholic professions of faith talk of the seen and unseen.    Jesus gave higher marks for those who believed without seeing. What else can I say to emphasize this?  Me, Jesus, Drucker, Bastiat...  just who else can I bring up as a witness?  Entrepreneurs go after the unseen.  Any start-up effort or time spent on the see-able in regards to customers or suppliers is a degenerate waste.  We search and learn.  Yet, there are companies, several, making millions at selling sheer fantasy of "buyers and seller" to people trained to fail.

Government can subsidize only what is seen, and that is why all government programs go no where.  (In research, researchers often cheat on the parameters in order to accomplish any goals.)  Government can only "sell" the seen.

So the point of studying trade data is NOT to find out the names of who is buying and who is selling almonds, but what country is the number one seller or buyer of almonds, for it is most likely that country is most amenable to sprouted almonds, a new item, for which there is no market presently.  So we truly could care less what any report says as to who are buyers and sellers now, we must search and learn and discover markets.

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The ITC and Patent Trolls

Thanks to Larry for the heads-up -

Little known is the role the ITC plays in giving foreign companies a hand up at patent-trolling:

Meanwhile, the entire economy suffers. A recent Boston University study estimates that patent trolls led to $500 billion in lost wealth to defendants—largely technology companies that invest heavily in research and development—between 1990 and 2010. Rent-seeking doesn't increase economic productivity or boost employment. It merely incurs losses for all.
Equally troubling is how the taxpayer-funded ITC has drifted from its mission to protect domestic industries. The sometimes foreign-based patent trolls now use the ITC to attack the very companies the agency was created to defend. We're paying money to benefit entities that are little more than modern-day buccaneers raiding domestic businesses.

As Larry said, get rid of patents, and the patent trolls go away.

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Booze Exports

Jimmy Carter deregulated beer, and there has been follow-on deregulation lite of other spirits.  Hong Kong wine sales have skyrocketed after they deregulated wine and spirits trade.  The upswing in USA business could not have happened with Jimmy Carter's initiative.

American craft breweries, currently enjoying another boom in the United States, are also tapping into global consumers’ desire for unique beverages. In 2012, craft beer export volume increased by 72 percent valued at an estimated $49.1 million, especially to the European Union where the cachet of American craft beer is on the upswing.

Illustrating this growth is NYC-based Brooklyn Brewery, a notable leader in the sector. Not only is the company the largest exporter of American craft beer, with sales to 17 countries around the world, it’s now establishing a secondary production facility in Stockholm, Sweden, its second-largest market.

“Global demand for American craft beer is at an all-time high, as evidenced by small and independent brewers in the U.S. exporting their products to new markets around the world at a growing rate,” confirmed Bob Pease, chief operating officer for the Brewers Association (BA), in a recent public statement.

What might people who were replaced by robots do for a living?  How about make better beer?

But in the USA we have an extremely stupid requirement that all labels be approved by some panel.  Why?  I dunno.  To make work for people who would otherwise be productive?

MILWAUKEE -- The federal government shutdown could leave America's craft brewers with a serious hangover.
Stores will still offer plenty of suds. But the shutdown has closed an obscure agency that quietly approves new breweries, recipes and labels, which could create huge delays throughout the rapidly growing craft industry, whose customers expect a constant supply of inventive and seasonal beers.

The government ought to simply eliminate the programs completely, and don't look back.  These people provide no value, but they do inhibit small businesses from going into business.

And now comes Japan trying to build market in USA for sake.  How?  By negotiating a reduction of restrictions.  (Via googletranslate)

We aim to increase exports by obtaining the elimination of tariffs on Japanese sake in other countries. According to the Development Bank of Japan, domestic consumption of rice wine (sake) was 992,000 kg, liters of fiscal 2000, decreased approximately 40% and 589,000 kilometers, liters to 10 year. Such as the sake of the young people away due, from the brewing industry, to increase the export of Japanese sake, voice asking you encourage the elimination of tariffs for the sake in the TPP negotiations is increasing.

One way to save the brewers in Japan is to market to USA.  There is nothing to USA from enjoying an economic recovery very quickly, except that the solution is to get rid of the problem: government interference.

There is not a single entity on the commanding heights who is calling for a solution to our problems.

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Peak Government

Has this crazy, recent development (probably 250 years at the oldest?) of state control come to it apotheosis?  Is the State over as an idea?

The shutdown of the national parks in USA is what Dr. Gary North sees as an example of an inevitable, where a bureaucrat takes the rules too far.  It is time to return the Parks to the Indians, whence they were taken, and honor our agreements once made.  Italy and Greece are selling off their National Parks, for money to blow where all other national income has been blown.

Greece, another European country under tough EU-imposed austerity rules, last year also enacted a similar sell-off, offering some if its islands, beaches and ski resorts to private buyers. Italy sold off several lighthouses on the island of Sardinia last year.

After Greece and Italy have sold the properties and spent the money where it has been wasted in the past, then what?

Speaking of agreements not honored, there will be much to learn from the Second Xerox Shutdown, in which the food stamp cards did not work.  The event can be studied in real time since the process was entirely electronically channelled.  How many transaction on EBT cards were cancelled, vs. how many proceeded with other payment.  Which other payment?

Now, someone on foods stamps with alternative means to pay for groceries might mean they just used rent money to buy the food, but who knows, and with this systemic failure we can know.

It is pretty clear to me the electronic system, like everything else, is designed to fail.  When it fails for a longer time, and panic turns to looting, and then empty stores get burned, and the citizens of the gun free inner cities starting heading out to the gun-rich suburbs for food, well, time to rethink EBT cards are start thinking life with no State, that is, anarchy.  With freedom to work and freedom from interference by the state, we will get more better cheaper faster and peace and prosperity.

We cannot know yet what that world would look like, so it is a tough sell.  We do know what the world will look like when the EBT cards go down for a sustained period.  We got a preview this weekend.

By the way, the First Xerox Shutdown, more a snafu, was also last week, and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

In an effort to avoid confusion, Currie said, the toll center - which is operated by Xerox - has begun stamping the envelopes with the words "Golden Gate Bridge Toll Invoice" in orange, and plans to design a new envelope.

OK the bridge was fine, but the Xerox processing of claims is a bit of a mess.  People are getting a $25 fine for a nonpayment of a $6 bill that Xerox did not mail out.

What is the theme in both scenarios?  People are depending too much on electronics.  Gotta have a manual back up in all situations.

Also, we need to remember credit creation, when Uncle Sam, who has arrogated all credit creation unto himself, gets caught going too far.  There will not be enough currency (or the currency will be unloved) and so people to trade will need to go back to what we always had, person-to-person credit, with end-users extinguishing the debt chain.

We are in some uncharted waters here.

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When Robots Take Over Your Job

Robots are doing surgery and making cars and picking fruit, which benefits mankind tremendously.  Prince Kropotkin worried terribly about mechanization and the division of labor, what with people stuck in dead-end manual position for a career.

People somehow imagine a job that pays nominally $50 an hour is a good thing, but they do not subtract out the fact that the pensions to which they contributed from the funds earned in the paycheck will not be there.  people who think they made $50 an hour for years must adjust that to $30/hour, and realize that that have long since spent everything they made, and spent it on things of inflated prices given the malinvestment in the auto industry, among other debacles.

But Kropotkin did not have the benefit of reviewing Bastiat, who talked about Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas.   What is seen and what is not seen.  People who are starting businesses can in no way see what is coming.  Steve Jobs might start a computer company, but no way saw in time he would drop "computer" form the company name and be the #1 telephone salesman in the world   When Jobs started Apple, there was no such thing as a telephone salesman, anywhere in America.  He could not possibly see what was in the future.  But he could form an idea, and build on it, and do good.

Politicians are limited to offering visions of free $#!+, which is extremely attractive to people who have had any creativity of hope beaten out of them.  And for the second time this week Xerox has showed people who depend on free $#!+ a glimpse of their future.

The USA is so advanced at crushing hopes and dreams, that the situation is probably irreversible.  But let me give you some examples of what people would be doing if they were not living off EBT cards and working at $50/hour assembly jobs:

Spokeless bicycle.

Drunk-proof keyhole.

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