Oh No! World Trade Going Down!

But not for those who compete on design.  This drop is rather small, but a solid trend.  If you study what is actually dropping, you'll see specialty is doing fine  See here, here and here.

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/data/index.html

At the small business level, we compete on design, not price.



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Saudis Buy Uber: No More Women Drivers!

Uber has welcomed the largest investment in history by Saudi Arabia, the hegemon's ally, but a named conspirator in the 9-11 attacks.

Uber said on Wednesday that it had raised $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the kingdom’s main investment fund. The money was part of the ride-hailing giant’s most recent financing round and continued to value the company at $62.5 billion. The investment does not cash out any of Uber’s existing investors.

As part of the investment, a managing director at the Public Investment Fund, Yasir Al Rumayyan, will take a seat on Uber’s board, joining Uber’s chief executive, Travis Kalanick, and other directors, including Arianna Huffington.

“We appreciate the vote of confidence in our business as we continue to expand our global presence,” Mr. Kalanick said in a statement. “Our experience in Saudi Arabia is a great example of how Uber can benefit riders, drivers and cities and we look forward to partnering to support their economic and social reforms.”

Social reforms?  Uber is about social reforms?  Where?  Saudi Arabia, where they have beheaded several hundred political dissenters this year?  Shouldn't the 28 pages detailing Saudi provision of the attack on USA be released before we let them get to big to jail?    Well, never mind, in capitalism if you are rich enough you cannot be prosecuted for crimes.

So what do we lear from Uber?  Success comes if you...

1. Benefit the hegemon over states and locals entities, that is shift revenue from local to federal.

2. provide massive self-reporting.

That is the winning combo.  Saudi Arabia wants in on anything that helps the hegemony, since Saudis are utterly dependent on the hegemony.  If the hegemon withdraws support, the Saudi regime will fall faster than Saigon in April of 1975.

Of course the Saudis don't care about women drivers or not, that is just for Saudi Arabia.  Wonder if Uber will be as hypocritical as to accept the Saudi ban on women drivers?  Who cares, it all benefits the hegemony, and the hegemon is who Kalanick worships.  The hegemony is making Uber successful by changing rules to benefit Uber.

The Bush family actively traded with the Nazis during WWII, and had companies seized by Congress when they got caught, so who cares?  Big money never worries.

If you qualify as a Uber driver (background check, fog a mirror), then you may buy any car 4 years old or newer, on credit, no matter how bad your credit is.  Your payments on the car are weekly and out of your Uber earnings (Uber makes the payment.)  The interest rates are very high, and this makes the borrower a slave to Uber (and the usurer).

This has been going on for at least three years.  I wonder how many people have been trapped by this Uber scam.

Four years old or newer means the car is trackable, the dealer can get a tow truck near the car and then shut the car down, repossess it, and have it back on the lot for sale to another Uber sucker before the engine cools down.

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Before You Kill Yourself - Dealing With Suiciders

White males 45-64, already a large group of suiciders, has grown nearly 50% in 15 years.

Men aged 45 to 64 had the highest increase in suicide rate among all groups, rising from 20.8 per 100,000 in 1999 to 29.7 in 2014. 

We live in a regime that believes there are too many people already, so there is not much support for people who are suicidal.  That far more soldiers kill themselves in USA than die in battle is an indication of this fact.  White males 34-64 are owed massive portion of the unfunded liability, so their misery and self-elimination is desirable to the Hegemon.  Both figure out they were lied to. Let the suicides multiply! Bring on the "refugees" to whom nothing is owed!

I've met doctors who care about suicide, and they say you can pretty much ignore chatter about suicide.  We all consider it occasionally, and who would not, given the world we are in?  Where you can pay attention is when the suicider starts talking specifics:  "I've researched shotgun suicides, and people often survive birdshot, but not buckshot, so I got buckshot shells when I bought a shotgun to kill myself."  Now that's serious.  A buddy of mine told me he had been saving up the parts of a speedball to go out wheeeeee!  That's serious planning.

What to do if your buddy is serious about checking out?  Don't argue with him, because it is none of your business and no reflection on you if he kills himself.  With my buddy, I simply noted his life was unique, and he should write it down before he killed himself.  This way you do not get in a pointless argument with him about whether he should kill himself, which would be tedious, but you do note killing himself before telling his story (or doing something valuable) would be wrong.  My buddy took eight years to write his book, it is not a bestseller, but he now says he never felt better, and is considering a second book.  Sometimes I wonder if I went too far.

So if you have a serious suicide on your hands, tell them before they waste themselves, you need a favor.  You are starting a business, and you need someone to make some sales calls, help you out with some rather tough steps, finding a customer.  Tell them not to worry, it cannot be screwed up, since this is start up, but it could be a huge help either way, in discovering market.  If your business gets going and when you are thriving, they can always ice themselves later.  But the least they can do before ending a miserable life is to help you out.

As an aside, if you read that article, and see where it notes our elders are not killing themselves as often as they used to, I'd just say because the old folks homes are killing them off before they get depressed.  I could not over-rule my siblings and my mother, but I could go in practically every day and see how even the most elite homes actively pursue homicide, by the book.  My mother caught on too late, but by then my brother and I had the 50 staff members treating her like Queen Victoria and utterly terrified of not making her the happiest broad money can buy.  I could walk in the kitchen and order a fruit compote (what is that?), explain it, and it would be delivered in minutes. Doctors and nurses nearly bowed when we walked the halls.  If your mom is in Bide-a-Wee Acres on the Termination Plan (do these homes have any other?), go in and show you care.  No one will mess with her.

Also, I have found this video a comfort whenever I was considering suicide, share it with the serious:



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When Robots Make Clothes

They will make the same thing over and over. 

 The system also comes with LOWRY, an automated materials handling system. This can pick up and align the required fabrics using a vacuum grip. This means, for the first time, the 20 or so different material cuts required to make one pair of jeans can all be assembled and stitched automatically, without the need for a human operator.
The system has already excited many in the US where it has been seen as a boon to the Made in the USA movement, an industry group keen to restore the domestic manufacturing sector. It has also already been warmly welcomed by a number of fast fashion brands, including Zara. If cost-competitive, the system would allow rapid delivery of in-trend garments from domestic manufacturers, without the need for complex and costly shipping and logistics requirements.
Although manufacturers in the developed world are welcoming this new technology as a way of creating a level playing field with garment producers in Southeast Asia, where labour costs are far lower, it could prove but a temporary respite for US and EU companies. One of the first orders for the system, apparently, has come from Bangladesh.

Tailors will become more valuable.  I was wearing an off-the-shelf shirt while visiting my tailor, and she remarked she could tell it was not hers, one of my shoulders is bigger than the other, not counted for in an off-the-shelf shirt received as a gift.  Forty years as her customer, and I never knew. Tailored clothes fit better, feel better, and must look better given the compliments.

There is nothing new here, just catching up with the inevitable.  With less people making clothes, others  can start looking for cures, something in which big Pharm is uninterested, they need big disease, not big cures.

Following Drucker, the innovator introduces the improvement on what was before, makes money competing on design, lives lifestyle over accumulation, and does good while doing well.  If the thing lasts and grows, inevitably the conservator takes the same item and redesigns it yet again and brings to the product its economies of scale in finance, manufacturing, distribution and retail.  In this was the original good inevitably lessens in price to the point at which virtually everyone can gain access to the good or service with their own money.  This is the free market.

It has become clear this process is only possible in a free market, it cannot happen in capitalism. Capitalism yields the too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-jail monstrosities we have today.  In a free market, those conservators are the co-ops, the granges, the credit unions, those customer-owned entities which thrive today no matter what.

A good world is out there, you simply had to extricate yourself from the warfare/welfare system.

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Why Venezuela is in Crisis

Take a look at this picture, and you can see the entire story:



There are two obvious problems, and one not obvious, which is the most important problem.  The first obvious problem is a soldier is protecting the merchandise.  The second is the shelves are sparse.  The third, not obvious problem is the store is first world, modern, mass merchandise.

Since that store exists, the neighborhood bodega, with its creative and unitive functions, disappeared.  That modern store exists because Venezuela could borrow malcredit against future oil revenues, until its credit ran out.  It ran out.

Before then, the powers that be, anyone in a position to borrow massively, did so wiping out the smaller stores with their discount prices.  Since banks could lend credit, there was false prosperity as far as the eye could see.  Politicians promised free $#!+ forever, whether they were left or right wing, they just promised different people different things.

Sound familiar?

On one hand Macy's got rid of loss prevention, on the other hand Safeway has rent-a-cops standing in their doorways.  Since so much of Macy's is leased departments, let the vendors suffer the loss.  In the meantime, Macy's is permanenrtly on sale, and like Newsweek magazine, even at $1, no one wants it (pension liabilities made Newsweek worthless.).  Like a Detroit home at $50, the taxes and upkeep and liabilities are more than it is worth.

Walgreens is taking out shelving and spreading them, filing what is left with beach balls and styro coolers, large space, slow moving, low ticket items.

Other stories out of Venezuela refer to vigilante justice.  This too echoes Detroit.

Hegemons select bad ideas from all those on offer to maintain their power: discord needs a hegemon.  Sometimes those bad ideas get out of control.  A lot of Venezuela's problems are USA interference, but USA tries to interfere with many other places, like Hong Kong, to little effect.  Good ideas are an immunization to bad ideas.  What hegemon's ultimately run into is chaos:

The public prosecutor opened 74 investigations into vigilante killings in the first four months of this year, compared to two all of last year. And a majority of the country supports mob retribution as a form of self-protection, according to polling from the independent Venezuelan Violence Observatory.
The revenge attacks underscore how far Venezuela has fallen, with the lights flickering out daily, and food shortages fueling supermarket lines that snake around for blocks. As the plunging price of oil has laid bare years of mismanagement, the economy has come apart, and with it, the social fabric.
Venezuela now has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and it's hard to find a person who hasn't been mugged. In the general haze of violence, Bernal's killing didn't stand out enough to make the front pages or provoke comment from local politicians.

There are too many long stretches of peace and prosperity in history with no king, because of no king, for us to fail to recognize anarchy as a preferred option.

Their economy, the hegemon's, cannot recovery.  It's over.  Now the only task is to decide who pays for the damage done during the boom, and no one needs to hurry this process up, since the victims are not going anywhere.  The process is informed by elections, of course.  Just as elections are auctions, going into booms, so they are going out.   It is sort of a reverse auction, "Vote for me and I'll burn you less!" There will be blood, the elected will decide whose blood.  In USA the hegemony originally offered warmonger or warmonger as the options, but Americans are truly sick and tired of war.  Trump is anti-war.  So now we are allowed warmonger vs anti-war.  This does not mean if Trump wins there will be no war, just we got to vote, or at least cast a ballot.

A new economy will emerge, what it looks like, who knows?  You and I can help shape that economy by starting businesses.  Ethical, true economy businesses, and then what comes else we are at least a segment there of.

As a side but important point, there is massive excess product, not only massive excess production capacity.  That exceess product needs to be redistributed, books, cars, furniture, clothes, etc... any given retailer ought to have used products alongside the new, until the economy recovers.  You'll know when the recovery starts, it is at the bottom of the real estate market.  The bottom is not low prices, the bottom is no sales of real estate.

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Retail Roundup - Restoration Hardware: 25% Off Forever

Well this is different.  Restoration Hardware has introduced the Grey Card (playing on 50 shades thereof?)... for $100 a year you get 25% off everything 24/7/365.    Obviously, if you are about to buy a couch to $400 or more, join....  here is a story that makes the obvious points...

Is Restoration Hardware groping toward the superior retail model of customer-ownership?  I belong to REI, PCC, and a credit union, companies all customer owned.  They tend to last through the ups and downs and offer zero investment opportunity.  Stability over speculation.

Next I visited the Amazon Brick and Mortar Store down the way, and it too of course has a membership fee, $99 I think.  The big draw is free shipping.  The big expense for Amazon is "free" shipping, hat "last mile" being the most expensive in the entire logistical chain.  Hmmmm... is Amazon experimenting with Brick & Mortar to escape the cost of the last mile delivery?  Will they eventually become pick-up depots for you merchandise?  At that point, what is the point of Amazon?  Is this the beginning of the end for Amazon?  And yet another indication that the small retailer will come back.

Costco has a membership fee too.  I was pulled out of line last visit and told I buy enough to warrant being in their Executive Plan.  here are some benefits:  they were mostly usury related.  Sorry, none of that for me.  But as an aside, the state obliges Costco to collect the tax on the "before rebate" price of merchandise bought.  So if I get what, $20 worth of whatever for $15, the hegemon requires Costco collect tax on the $20, not $15, even though I only paid $15.  I know that any rebate is thus, since if you buy the computer, and send in for the rebate, they do not rebate the tax.  But really, making Costco collect taxes at that level of granularity?  What do they do with that tax money anyway?

Met a couple of buddies for hand dipped haddock fish and chips.  I've come to refuse anything not prepared in house, and these were, quite good.  The bill came, $30 for a beer and fish and chips.seems higher than the menu prices.  Studying the bill, I noted 19% service charge.  Fine with me, but I inquired of the waitress how come?  And is it optional?

The how come of course was because Seattle is moving to $15 minimum wage, and this restaurant is trying out a model where at 19% they will have the revenue to cover the (face it) illegal aliens washing dishes and other entry level tasks that USA kids used to do, but is now effectively outlawed.  I questioned her closely, she gets 10%, and the other 9% goes to the other workers, so in effect she was actually getting less now, although in most restaurants the waitstaff kicks in to the support staff for the night.

Is it optional?  No, if we don't pay, then they call the cops (I guess).  Either the service was terrible and all 19% is taken off, or it is due?  How long has this been going on?  A couple of months?  How have customers reacted?  Most shrug and live with it, some have been outraged and never came back.

The University of Washington owns a famous landmark Seattle Restaurant group called Ivars.  Initially UW claimed to be exempt from Seattle laws because it is state property, not city.  They relented.  In their restaurants they introduced no tipping, but jacked up prices 30%.    Their waitstaff used to 20-40 year pros.  It looks now all gone.  Now kids working for $15 an hour, no one a professional waitstaff.

The $15 an hour is not about living wage nor justice or anything else.  It is all about government union members whose contracts are all "minimum wage plus..."  As the minimum wage goes up, their wages jump exponentially, since their pension, etc contributions jump up to as well as their pay.  Next their supervisors will warrant a pay increase given the lack of respectable premium for their work over the lackeys.  Not the brightest crowd, their increase in wages will largely be taken back in the form of taxes, and their wealth-effect lifestyle will come back to haunt them at pension collection time.

Of course there is no money for this, it is all just tacked onto the next generation, but it does present some principals.  Start a family.  A family business in time can have people who produce but need not be paid the moneys subject to taxation etc.  The business is the lifestyle, so so many costs that are after tax for an employee, are before tax as lifestyle.  When your cost of living is effectively 1/2 of everyone else, you can go farther faster.

Amazon, Restoration Hardware, The Chain Pub and Grub, are all trying new things because they are in trouble.  Most of the problems are too big for any candidate to do anything about.  But noticing the trouble, you can position yourself to float above it, instead of try to swim through it.

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Uline's $25 Fee

I love Uline.com, and I've said so here quite a few times, but they lost me as a customer this week, and therein is a business opportunity.

I put together my order, and noted I'll pick it up myself at their warehouse, will call.  I noticed a $25 charge appear for pick-up, on orders less than $300.  What?  I emailed my complaint, and the response came back that with a busy parking lot, it was risky having people pick-up, and why not use UPS, etc?

Well, it is much cheaper for me to pick it up than have UPS run it through their system.  And hang on, at $300 orders people all of a sudden become safe drivers?  Surely driving on the freeway to Uline around trucks doing 70 is far riskier than on a lot where trucks to 5 mph.

The fact is, Uline is so big after rolling up all of the small local packaging houses that they lose money processing orders under $300.  See a business opportunity?  It gets better...

Uline sells no recycled boxes.  Those small packaging houses once did good business in that.  But now with recycling, those perfectly good used boxes get sent to the landfill.  Did you know that?

Recycling is a fraud.  Almost everything you laboriously sort recycling goes to a false economy make-work center where it is all carefully sorted and taken to the landfill and dumped anyway.  Call up and ask any recycler, they'll tell you.  Go ahead, get mad you've been scammed.  They do not care, because a. you'll do nothing about it (and can't), and b. if you tried, you'll go up against the vast majority of people who have been socially conditioned to believe otherwise.  When people find out what I say is true, they get mad at me, not the people who scammed them, or even themselves for being so gullible.

So a local small business that collects used boxes, and sells recycled packing materials, along with good tape guns (now ones are awful, buy up all the surplus old ones that you can) and other packaging materials, new and used.  Arbitrage the cost between what you pay for the materials and at what price you can sell them.  Get an old truck to do deliveries ... and work up a customer base of small shippers who need inexpensive packing materials, what we had 40 years ago but got rolled up by whoever was willing to borrow the most malcredit.

And at the same time, be a true recycler.

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Ting! I Got A New Phone

I have written here many times about the way things were, and resuming those practice is a path to escaping the terrors upon us.  I was thinking small business, but here comes Ting using precisely what I am arguing to take on "too big to fail" phone companies.

Why I came across Ting, I am not kidding, is because AT&T just made it too hard to pay.  Their websites are tedious junkyards of whiz-bang coding ostensibly designed to get me to upgrade.  Trying to figure out the path to pay a bill was so onerous I took to simply paying in their stores at a payment kiosk (so it seems I am not alone) while I was running errands.  Then they required a password and login to pay, even with a debit card, at the kiosk!  I complained, and a clerk advised me to contact "customer support."  I advised the clerk I had come to make a payment, not chat with customer support.  I was miffed.

So I began to search for the phone company with the easiest payment method.  It was never about the fees, which I assume you get what you pay for, VOIP being cheap but sounding like a car radio at 3am in the High Sierras.  Ting jumped out as the easiest pay method.  Their billing system is old school benecredit, they bill you at end of month for usage, what you used...

Nope. No plans here. Rather than asking you to pre-pay for a portion of your usage, we decided to keep things simple. Just use what you need and we'll settle up at the end of your billing cycle.

Well, I don't use much at all. My bill:

Hi John Spiers,
Thanks for continuing to be a part of Ting!Here are a few details for your Ting bill, which was for Apr 20 through May 19, 2016...
-------------------------------------------------------------------Activation Fee                 2069150337                     $0.00 Plan Data Usage XS->XS plus... 1 MB                           $0.00 Plan SMS Usage S               24 messages                    $3.00 Plan Minutes Usage M           426 minutes                    $9.00 Line Fee                       2069150337                     $6.00 Apr 20 - May 19 -------------------------------------------------------------------
And here were the taxes we collected for Uncle Sam...-------------------------------------------------------------------Utility Users Tax - Wireless                                  $1.54Sales Tax                                                     $1.97E911 (Wireless)                                               $0.95Fed USF Cellular                                              $1.00FCC Regulatory Fee (Wireless)                                 $0.01-------------------------------------------------------------------Total comes to:                                              $23.47

You should see a charge for 23.47 on your card ending in 4XXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX  from Tingin the next day or so (if you don't already). That's us..

For years I have paid around $60, often more, a month for AT&T.

I like Ting's humor: Uncle Sam.  Note that the taxes are more then 30% of the bill, just as with AT&T.  That is wealth transfer from me to the bankers.  There were no telephone taxes before the Vietnam War.  Then Johnson laid them on to help pay for the war, and the war ended, but the taxes never went away, they just went up.

We had a pro-peace/anti-war movement back 1960 & 70s, and most of us just refused to pay that part of the bill.  The phone company never cut anyone off, you were just not paying Uncle Sam.  The amount, a few dimes back them, a couple of bucks in today's world, was too small for Uncle Sam to come after you.   With larger amounts, and computerization, now Uncle Sam can strike an individual quite easily.

Sadly, with the poverty draft and deep-state perpetual wars, the American people have come to accept war as a given, even if the people of Vietnam, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc, themselves have never abandoned their anti-war/pro-peace aspirations.

With all of this in mind, here is what I will do. If you have any of the biggy phone company services, dump them now and move to Ting.  Do yourself a favor.

Sign up with Ting, I get $50 or $25 (at some point, depending on how much you spend). (Apparently, at this time, you get $25 off, too!) What I will do is bundle up any and all remittances to me and donate them to one of the land mine removal charities, with a request they get it to SE Asia.  (Not sure which charity yet, I'll have to check the various ones for legitimacy).  There is a symmetry that telephone revenue would be directed to remove UXO in SEAsia delivered in part with funds from telephone taxes.  I like it!

(If remittances are in the form of deduction from my phone bills, then the money I would have put on the phone will be what is bundled and remitted to the charity.  Whatever, we'll make it work.)

It will be delightful to report say quarterly how much we have directed to war reparations.  To sign up with Ting in which kickbacks are directed to me, click here: https://z32i345idje.ting.com/

And by the way, I've experienced zero difference in call quality despite the half-off pricing.

So right now, click on the Ting link above, sign up to save money (and ease of payment!) secure your credit and mine, and let's do good while doing well.

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