Internet, Porn and Playboy

So Playboy Magazine (and website) will no longer feature nudity, after 60 years.  The reason the Playboy CEO gives is internet porn has made nudity passé.  He further went on to say internet porn has reached a critical mass, destroying the possibility of intimacy (presumably among the sexes.)

It's interesting to see a business built on a theme to give up that theme.  It's also interesting his informed comments on the effect of the ubiquity of porn.  I hear the preacher man says by far the biggest problem he faces is the effect of porn on the family.  It is massively destructive.

Porn is used as a lure to kids to get past those "captcha" answer the question pages on websites.  It's expensive to get people to answer the questions, but hackers can get the job done cheap by showing kids some porn after tricking them to take the time to answer the captcha question.  It's all automatic.

I know a cop who in his youth was a undercover vice cop, and one of his jobs was to go to the Seattle porn theatres and watch the movies to see if any movies crossed the line.  Since porn addiction requires always worse scenes, they often crossed the line.  This cop says he has never been able to get some of the scenes out of his head, and it pretty much ruined his relationship with women in his life.  Further, he says, the stuff commonly out on the web is far worse than anything he saw in the movie theaters he busted in the 1970s.

Lending malcredit instead of money is to blame for this.  There is no rational limit to lending malcredit and so anything and everything can be "financially engineered."  And so this vast "information superhighway" was made no charge, and so we have a system that is, if I recall correctly, 94% spam and probably as much life-drain WWW searching on the pointless and destructive.  If the government had not made the web free, if there were never involved, we might have an alternative that was not so destructive.

When I receive spam, I've paid to receive it, by having an ISP that is forced to by tied into the WWW as defined by government regulators.  The USMails used to be you paid for the mail you receive.  Then  they switched to you pay to send it.

Right now all this "free" is being paid for with malcredit, the cost is just be added to the massive tab being left for future generations to pay, future generations who will come from families, many of them, much harmed by internet porn.

Lending mal-credit is irrational, and there will be no rational basis for when it all comes tumbling down.  But what cannot go on, whatever is in a downward spiral, will at she point end.  Even Playboy will no longer show naked ladies.  Even that ends.

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

Bookmark this post --- Email this post

Guns, Cops and Social Conditioning

94 million Americans are not in the labor force.  There is work to be done, but if people want to be employed by someone else, we are short 94 million jobs in a country of 350 million people.  We got here by social conditioning.  And capitalism and democracy. We need freedom.

The killings in Dallas are a direct result of police killing blacks.  Police killing blacks is nothing new, but catching it on film is certainly new.  It sickens and outrages when we actually see it. What is also new is the abject fear police have of guns.  That is social conditioning, and it is not limited to police.  It's not the gun you have to worry about, it's what a person with a gun is doing with it.

When I was growing up, people did not fear guns.  Everyone had them in their homes.  I knew where 3 or 4 guns were at any given time in my house, and the family would take day trips up to the mountains to go shooting.  In some city parks there were open municipal shooting ranges for family shooting outings.

My father was a prof in a small liberal arts college, and he was armed every day.  Back then profs wore a jacket and tie, so no one knew he had a 38 police special on his hip, and being a Southern man, he had a 22 long Derringer on his ankle, in case he got jumped.  But then the school had a shooting competition team, and just as sometimes a student might have a tennis racket with him in class, so a shooting team member might have a rifle.  No one thought twice.  And I can name a half dozen other profs who were armed, simply because some people prefer to be armed.  And it's none of your business.

No one shot us schools back then, since they were not "gun-free zones."

I recall seeing people walk into banks with a gun on the hip, obviously a merchant making a sizable cash deposit.  No one worried.  It's not the gun, it's what is the person with a gun doing.

Back then there was no 911.  You had to dial the police department if you wanted police help.  Cops were probably slower back then than they are now, but no one cared, because enough people were armed to deal with problems. It seems to me there was a balance between troublemakers and gun carriers. And troublemakers had no idea who was armed.  A neighborhood pharmacist was being robbed when the robber took the pharmacist outside with him to the getaway car, for whatever reason.  My friends dad had the robber in his rifle sights from a roof across the street, waiting for the robber to do something threatening with the gun.  No fear of the gun, but ready to ice a robber if he made a threat. That is how people thought back then.

Like now, back then criminals had no problem getting guns.  The problem for criminals was so many civilians were armed.

 I know cops from back then.  There was none of this fear of the gun, it was watch the person.

There is probably not much we can do, what goes around comes around, and the racist, elective, fun time for-profit wars in the Middle East inevitably have to come back here.  Military trained cops killing blacks like ISIS being killed by military trained black snipers.  Weren't we just idolizing snipers a year or two ago?  Not so cool when we are the targets.

We've got tougher, systemic problems than just law-enforcement murder.  With Hillary walking, we know that voting doesn't count.  The Bush wars we voted against are now the Obama wars. We are descending a bit more into chaos with the Dallas shootings.  (But then we did with the last big Dallas sniper shooting, when JFK got it. These things take time.)  Historically, people escape to anarchy from chaos, and then things can improve.  By then the social conditioning has been cleaned off.

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

Bookmark this post --- Email this post

The Merchant of Venice

Here is an edifying afternoon:

1. Watch the Al Pacino version of the Merchant of Venice.

2. Listen to a Poli-Sci lecture on the play.

3. Study the dialogue, especially act one, scene three.

The play turns on a loan between a Jew and Christian who despise each other.  The loan is for Bassanio, but it is Antonio who puts up the collateral, for Bassanio is broke and Antonio is good for it.  Bitter dialogue between Shylock, the Jew, and Antonio results in Shylock offering the loan at no interest, but requiring "a pound of flesh" for collateral, literally Shylock can cut 16 ounces of Antonio's flesh out of him if the loan goes bad.

The loan is for 3000 ducats, gold coins, and of course no one is lending "credit" back then, they lend money, gold coins.

Now, keep in mind, at this point in history usurious loans are a criminal offense, and loans are otherwise considered a charitable act.  You help out a person in a jam with a loan at no interest and that is charity, loans for excess consumption even at no interest are just foolishness.

Bassanio's need for 3000 ducats is for an adventure, and when Antonio is about to give a bond with his pound of flesh, Bassanio says:

You shall not seal to such a bond for me:I'll rather dwell in my necessity.

Just so. No one ever needs to take out a loan for consumption, for adventure, such as starting a business.  Bassanio figures he'll just work out another way to pursue his adventure.  The loan is just seemingly a quick and easy way to advance. It is a voluntary act, and calculation, usually wrong, as it is in this play, when Antonio says:

Come on: in this there can be no dismay;My ships come home a month before the day.

Of course, Antonio's ships do not come in, not even a dinghy.

The Poli-Sci lecture is illuminating, as the professor is claiming Shakespeare was sketching out a post-Elizabethan path for the the UK, with Venice as a model.  150 years after this play, the founding fathers in the Federalist Papers were often referring to Venice as a model for nascent USA.  As he went through aspects of Venice point by point, I could not help but think he was describing Hong Kong today.

Edifying.

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

Bookmark this post --- Email this post

"I Can See So Many Opportunities"

The genesis of self-employment (more accurately, customer-employment) is to suffer, that is experience passion. You experience a problem (suffer) in a field you love, and find joy in working on the solution. The finding joy is the part everyone else leaves out, and it is the crucial element in a successful start-up, the joy if it.

So many people fail at start-up for the simple reason is they never learned that there can be joy behind suffering.  Add to that the banker's lie that "it takes money to make money" and "entrepreneurship is about risk taking"  and people are off track immediately.

Joy in solving a problem trumps the competition.

When the solution works for you it is valid, but is it reliable, will it work for others?  Often not, without some tweaking, or in other words, redesign.

All products and services are solutions to problems.

There are no solutions that cannot be improved upon.

It does not take much to achieve the requisite "new" required to launch.  As a practical matter you only need enough orders to cover the suppliers minimum production run.  With samples you achieve your first warranted order, then based on customer feedback (practical information you may act on) you continuously redesign.

A common error is to imagine one must seize all possible market as soon as possible.  This leads people to borrow money to "ramp-up" and lawyer-up with IPR to protect the market, create barriers to entry. This is delusional, since the market is being created as you design, and redesign.  Any idea of market outside of that for which you presently hold orders is imaginary, delusional, and people find there is not enough revenue from the frisson of market they imagined to cover the costs of servicing the debts  they incurred protecting their imaginary market.  A dead give-away someone is delusional is if they initiate contact with a lawyer at any point.  If someone mentions "lawyer" quickly ask if he initiated contact with the lawyer, if so, know he is delusional.

The market is created in an organic process of iteration, feedback, iteration, feedback, ad infinitem in joy.  There is no forecasting where the product will go.  When Jobs started Apple Computer there was no such thing as a phone salesman, and stereo salespeople were one step above used car dealers.  Jobs died the number one phone and stereo salesman ever.  There was no forecasting that.

The work is a relentless, borne in joy, effort at presentation, feedback, correction, iteration.  At no point in the process does an entrepreneur ever take risks.  Each iteration is gauged to achieve only enough increase in demand to shorten the time intervals between placing minimum order requirements.  At the start-up, small and medium enterprise level,  entrepreneurs never seek "economies of scale" only increase of frequency of minimum order transactions.  This is the path to thriving.

One commenter declared he saw so many opportunities right now.  Really?  I cannot see a single one.  But I do know there is a process, valid and reliable, for discovering markets that right now remain unserved.  I do know the work is rewarding, and there is more work than your being can encompass, or put another way, enough work to exercise every fiber of you mind, heart and soul. I do not think opportunities can be seen in advance, it is more one insinuates oneself into a market by providing a superior value in needful things by design.

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

Bookmark this post --- Email this post

How Will Spain Handle Busted Social Security?

AS I noted last week, Puerto Rico's politicians decided, when short of credit, to pay current government workers and skip a bond payment, which means retirees etc do not get paid.  OK.  Now check your retirement portfolio.  Got bonds?  Now you know your future.

Spain will run out of Social Security credit in 2018, according to Mish.  Spain must cut spending or hike taxes, as Mish sees it, but that is a false dilemma.  They can always free up the Spanish economy.

1. Deregulate banks. Give the banks no legitimacy from the state, no bank agreements are enforceable by law. Banks must curry full faith and credit with customers on their own.

2.  Free trade.  End all "free trade" agreements, and announce unilaterally all duties and quotas are eliminated on imports, and  as to liability, "the importer is the manufacturer."

3. All government services are voluntary, and the fees charged are directed to state obligations.  State obligations are constrained by what fees are gathered from voluntary payments for its services.

For good measure, all property in Spain reverts to the King, and no one is allowed to own property, any current titles are converted to 99 year leases.

The idea is to clear the decks and let Spaniards prosper.  Give freedom a chance.

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

Bookmark this post --- Email this post

Is Williams Sonoma Amazon-proof?

This time a writer claims Williams Sonoma is Amazon-proof, implying that it has a online marketing program that counters any threat Amazon might pose:

Williams-Sonoma has differentiated itself from the sector with one of the most robust Internet operations in retail, a crucial advantage as brick-and-mortar stores struggle with an existential crisis. The company garners just over half its revenue online and has built a customer database of nearly 60 million households. It calls the stores “billboards for our brands” that inspire customers to shop online. Internet sales also carry higher margins than in-store sales and are growing faster—8.2% versus 4.7% in the most recent quarter.

What existential crisis?  If WS understands precisely the role of brick-and-mortar stores, then existential crisis it is not.

"Internet sales" is merely self-service checkout.  Since Amazon loses money on online marketing, I doubt it is much of a threat to anyone anyway.

Like Victoria Secrets, WS sends out millions of catalogs to drive "internet sales" which the writer does not mention.  If "internet sales" carry a higher margin, it is only because they are not charging off the cost of millions of catalogs to gain said sales online.

The big question would be what is the WS wedding registry book? WS provides a cachet of class when selling what you can get at mace's, so I bet that is substantial.

This is an example of social conditioning trumping analysis.  Since online marketing is 1/2 of revenue, therefore…  pure delusional results.

Just as it once gained over 1/2 its revenue from mail order catalogs.

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

Bookmark this post --- Email this post

Excess Production Capacity

So the Hong kong Trade Development Council is now offering not only a range of small order factories from which to choose, but free freight!

Well, nothing is free, so the cost is built in somewhere, but what it does highlight is the excess production capacity of factories overseas.

The goods on offer are surplus, what was made in anticipation of customers that never materialized.  This is a form of liquidation, of the old economy inventory.  This will help move some of that.

At the same time, these factories are looking for new products, products for which there are customers in this economy newly emerging.  What has not changed is we find customers first, develop the product, find the supplier, etc.

Things are good right now, and when real estate crashes that will be better.

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

Bookmark this post --- Email this post