Women and Money

Any progressives reading this blog: Suze Orman is a person that needs struggling against. We need to struggle against her big time. This blog will discuss who this peoples' enemy is. What this peoples' enemy is doing and why it is so horrible.

Suze Orman is the peoples' enemy who keeps showing up on TV giving advice on how to save money, avoid debt and become financially independent. This is diametrically opposed to progressivism which aims to reduce people to depenency on the state. Financial independence leads to independent thinking, which leads to the questioning of progressivism itself! We can't have that! There is a reason why PUBLIC SCHOOLS don't teach basic money management skills!!!!

What this peoples' enemy is currently doing is a major threat that has the potential of creating disunity in the progressive movement. Suze Orman is launching a major iniative to encourage women of lower incomes to save. This is the plan: First you buy and read Women and Money. Somewhere in each book is a special code that qualifies the reader for a special high interest TD Ameritrade Account. Participants who manage to transfer $50.00+ a month into the account for 12 months will get a $100 bonus transferred into the account. Low income women save $600 over the year. They end up with $700.00 plus interest! The Save Yourself web site has the full scoop on this plan.

The real danger with this type of program is that when people become used to saving money and financial planning; there is a chance they will continue doing it and enter the middle class. Once in the middle class, they will stop being peoples and start being individuals.

IT IS A THREAT TO THE PROGRESSIVE BASE!!!!!!!

Now for the reason why this is horrible and must be stopped: If women figure out how money works; they no longer need men!!!! This is like the greatest conceivable threat to the survival of men.

If you know of any low income women. Warn them against buying this book. This is not the type of information we want in their hands. Suggest that they spend their money on lingerie to attract a sugar daddy. A sugar daddy can protect them.

PS: Don't let any right wing kooks know about this program. Right wing kooks and free marketeers might just go out an tell low income women to buy the book as saving money will help low income women get on the road to a better future.

Breakage

A legislature in Maryland wants the state to take any breakage on unused gift cards. I agree with Cato At Liberty that the move is silly. In some industries (like the phone card business) the breakage is the profit margin. In some cases, gift certificates are sold at less than face value because they are figuring in the breakage (eg Restaurant.com).

Of course there is a sense of unfairness that businesses profit from lost gift certificates (just as the US benefits when people lose money).

If I were a business selling gift certificates. I would actually do the following. I would give the breakage to a charity. I may even let the gift certificate buyer select the charity to receive the breakage.

Giving the breakage to a charity makes the gift certificate more attractive to buyers, it helps give funds to charities and would pull the gift certificate breakage off the table as something for the state to take.

Angel Investors

Utah is an odd place. The venture capital business in Utah is booming. Apparently, a big reason for this is that local venture capitalists have started calling themselves Angel Investors. Calling yourself an angel elevates you from the mortal to the divine. After all, Utah is a state filled with Saints.

In my business experiences in Utah, most people disdained venture capitalists as corporate sharks. Now that the term "angel investor" is in the lexicon, the Utah VC business is booming. Angel Investors are suddenly seen as the most wonderful of all people in the business community. Utahns flock to seminars by angel investors with the hope that an angel investor will make their scrapbooking firm the biggest of all scrapbooking firms in the album.

Anyhow, the site FundingUniverse has and interesting Freudian Slip on the podcast page. This page introduces a Mr. Scott Frazier as an "Anvel Investor". (Here is the Google Cache, in case they correct their mistake).

I think anvel investor is a better description of what an VC does than "angel investor." An anvil investor hammers down on the entrepreneur foolish enough to take the investor's money.

Business to Business Expo

On the brighter side of life, I crashed the Salt Lake Chamber Business to Business Expo. This is a fun networking event that features several hundred businesses in Utah.

Exxon Mobile's profits are on the move

There is a great big stink being made about Exxon's first quarter profit. Apparently Exxon's profits hit a record $8.4 billion.

The talking heads on TV are reaching news pitches of shrill while government wanks plan ways to buy political favoritism by finding ways to punish the oil companies. (For example Pete Domenici wants to raise a tax then buy voters with a $100 gas rebate.)

Anyway, looking at Exxon's profits. A few people have noted that most of this profit was made overseas. So, while Americans buy gas from overseas, a little bit of it comes back to the US in the form of profits.

Meanwhile the rise in gas prices is spurring American people to do something that no amount of legislation could accomplish. American people are once again engaged in figuring out how to use less gas! We are conserving more, and pumping investment dollars into research for alternative fuels.

I think there is a very good argument that Exxon/Mobile is too big. There is even a good argument that it is so large that it can assert monopolistic behavior. Approval of the Exxon Mobile merger was a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad mistake. Maybe splitting the company in half again would be in order.

A brain dead plan like raising taxes to give everyone a tax rebate check would be stupid. Cutting the taxes on gas would also be stupid since it would stop the current trend to conservation.

Encouraging people to stop wasting fuel is the right path.

I know!!! Why not leave the car home and ride the bike. Yes. Bikes are good. Bikes are fine. They only thing better than riding a bike is walking! Imagine walking a little bit more, and driving just a little be less?

Chambers Galore

Speaking of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, I am not quite sure what to make of the modern tendency to create a Chamber for every diverse group. In Denver; so far I have found a Black Chamber, a Woman's Chamber, a Hispanic Chamber, a Indian Chamber along with a chamber for every single neighborhood.

I do realize that there are driving economic forces behind this trend for ever more specific ethnic chamber and gender based chamber. However I fear that they also feed an innate human impuluse to split into warring sects.

I cut my teeth in the business world in Salt Lake City. In Salt Lake the divide is religious. Salt Lake has an unfortunate history where the market was deeply divided by religion. In early Utah history, Saints were admonished to avoid buying from gentiles. There are still a few hints here and there of this unfortunate tradition. My experience in Salt Lake has been that, whenever anyone makes a decision based primarily on group preference, the decision almost always hurts the stake holders in the decision.

With the opinion that dividing people up into groups hurts people, I found myself interested in seeking out those things that unite us.

The local Chambers of Commerce has a history of being one of those things that unite people. In progressive speak, Chambers tend to be filled with a bunch of capitalist pigs who are most interested in the almighty buck and not in the color or shape of the hands holding the buck.

The primary concern of a Chamber is business. As a result, chambers have generally been on the forefront of integration, immigration reform and gender equality.

Seeing this group that has traditionally served as a unifying force in society split up into fractions is a bit disconcerting.

On the positive side of things, the different chambers can serve as a conduit of information between different segments of a segmented community. If your business desires to reach out to the Hispanic community, a Hispanic chamber can serve as a conduit to that elusive market segment. The danger, of course, is that an excessive emphasis on race can lead to bunker mantality where people conclude that they can only do business with people in the same ethnic group.

I do realize that in the current economic climate, the different ethic chambers do serve important needs. The Indian chamber serves a diverse group that is spread over a much larger area than Denver. The Hispanic chamber is a group trying to overcome a language barrier.

The black chamber is working to overcome centuries of racial prejudice. While there is still an unacceptable achievement and education gap between black and white, I hope that someday this chamber will find that there is no longer a need for black owned businesses to be developed outside of the community at large. The same hope applies to the Hispanic chamber.

Hispanic Chambers

Most of the debate on immigration focuses on Hispanics as low wage workers.

In my community directory building business, I've noticed that the Hispanic community has a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Look at the numbers. The consensus that Latinos are taking jobs that no-one else wants is falls short. There are more Latinos running around than there are jobs that no one wants. The truth of the matter is that the Hispanic community is creating jobs!

In our efforts at drafting immigration reform, we need to make sure that we do not undermine this entrepreneurial spirit. One of the centers of this entrepreneurial spirit is the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Mergermania

I wish we had a Security and Exchange Commission that actually did something.

Here is the justification for the Alcatel and Lucent Technology merger:

"Together, the companies will have more power to negotiate prices with their telephone company customers"

The telephone companies that buy products from Lucent have gone through their own slurry of mega mergers. The justification for the reconsolidation of telephone companies was so that they could have more buying power.

In other words, we had to let the telephone companies consolidate so that they would have more power to negotiate with Lucent. That means we have to let the telephone technologies providers consolidate to negotiate with the consolidated telephone companies.

The only losers are the public at large.

Of course, this merger is more benign than the Exxon/Mobile and Conoco/Phillips mergers.

Viawest Tour

I toured the Salt Lake ViaWest data center yesterday. I had been thinking of either putting together a server for colocation or renting a dedicated server for Community Color. The truth is that I really need my own server if I am to expand the programs to the point that they are successful. As it stands, I am sitting here with absurdly tight constraints on bandwidth and disk space (the constraints are absurd for 2005).

Anyway, these data centers are getting better with each passing year. The amount of redundant power supplies, multiple communication links through the facility, seismic isolation of the data center and security at the center is quite admirable.

The primary attraction of the facility is that they have locations in both Salt Lake and Denver. Unfortunately, I suspect that the price of the service will be out of my reach. The sites have just lost one fourth of their income. I don't see the appearance of any possible replacement income sources for the site (at least not in Salt Lake).

There is still a chance that the bid will come within reason. The price of the equipment and software that I need is in the $2000 area. I doubt that the real cost associated with the rack space and bandwidth I use is that extraordinary. Xmission's bid for colocation came in around $80 a month (I would have to buy and set up the server.) I can't imagine the real cost of a dedicated server being over $200 a month. But we will see.

SOHO Groups

I crashed the SOHO Groups monthly meeting this morning. We were split into groups about different topics. I was in a group that discussed networking. My speil, of course, was that blogs are a great tool for building networks within the local business community.

In addition to their corporate web site, companies should have blogs, or at least encourage people in the company to have blogs. The blog would then be a free form space that overviews the activities of the business.

While the blogs themselves are not informative. In many cases, they are not even good reading; such blogs end up building an authentic link structure for the overall community. While the blogs themselves may not be that interesting, aggregate information from blogs written by people who care about their local community is extremely helpful in finding informative web sites.

Rather than limiting your networking efforts to a links page on your website, creating a blog and making short write ups on things would help build a more authentic topology for links.

Marketers are Icky People

Yuck, I just read a marketer forum that was discussing different products for "content generation." You would put in the keywords for the market you are targetting. The programs would spew forth with blather in web pages and blogs. If you lace the cocktail with links to your ad efforts, then the program would theoretically over power the search engines with your machine generated garbage and you would be able to dominate the market.

Marketers really are horrible sick people.

The reason that marketers want blather generating programs that the search engines are getting better at filtering out the white noise that they've been creating with their various mass data replication schemes. Having stuff that the search engines couldn't distinguish from normal writing, will theoretically let them spam the web without getting penalized.

I think there is some open that human edited directories. The problem is, of course, that for each real human edited directory, there's seven or eight pretend human edited directory.

It is more likely that the marketers will simply consume their host (the internet). That would be sad because the internet was shaping up as a nice little tool where small companies and individuals could get their voices heard.

Floating Checks

Watch out!!!! The new check 21 system will end up costing consumers a great deal in bounced check fees. The new system will speed up the processing of some checks but not others. The problem is that funds you deposited in your account may not clear before the check you wrote. There will be some cases where a person deposits money, then writes a check on the money. If the check clears before the deposit, the consumer could get dinged for a fee.

If your bank has a holding period before you can start cashing checks, then you better start paying closer attention to your account. If you've been thinking of investing in banking stock, expect larger than usual profit from fees.