11.07.09
Posted in Economy, News and Announcements at 05:22 by lnxwalt
What recovery? Unemployment shoots past 10 percent – Yahoo! Finance
And the unemployment rate doesn’t include people without jobs who have stopped looking, or those who have settled for part-time jobs. Counting those people, the unemployment rate would be 17.5 percent, the highest since at least 1994.
Economists had expected unemployment to rise to no more than 9.9 percent, up just a tick from September’s 9.8 percent, and the surprising jump added to fears that the recovery could fizzle if Americans don’t spend.
Already, consumer confidence for October came in well below what analysts were expecting. Shoppers’ sentiments about the state of the economy are the gloomiest in nearly three decades.
If you have been listening to the news coverage of business and the economy, you probably thought that things are really getting better. After all, the banks and other financial industry companies are reporting profits again, and even some of the tech industry companies are seeing gains. But the reality is different.
The biggest part of the gross domestic product–somewhere around 70%–consists of consumer purchases, which in recent years was primarily financed through debt, including refinancing of residential real estate. In other words, the level of purchasing we saw in 2003-2006 wasn’t supported solely on personal incomes, but on borrowings, including loans against home values that were far too high. How do we expect to repeat this when between 10 and 22% of the workforce is unemployed?
With layoffs and foreclosures continuing at above-average levels, I would expect that the overall economy will remain at a lower level for at least the next six months. After all, real estate prices still have not fallen to sensible levels, and even if they had, every state in the union is trying to squeeze more money out of its residents. California, for example, raised its payroll withholding rate by one-tenth, as an interest-free loan from its employed citizens.
So I ask you, how does any supposedly competent economist expect things to pick up soon? Is money supposed to fall from the sky? Indeed, I am surprised that economists and financial analysts did not notice that the economy’s underlying fundamentals changed some time in the past twenty years or so. If they had noticed, they would not have been surprised when the debt-fueled growth stopped. And they wouldn’t have supported economically-illiterate moves like the bank bailouts, because they would realize that the overly-expansive financial industry had thrown common sense out the door in the pursuit of ever-increasing profits.
This irresponsibility of finance industry companies hurts families, small businesses, and municipalities, primarily because it hides their need to dramatically constrict spending, and to save up for larger purchases. Irresponsible finance companies make it too easy to spend now, even when the better way would be to defer spending and save. Naturally, fiscally-aware families soon find themselves left behind as overspenders continue to pile up more and more new “stuff”. Finally, even many fiscally-aware families have to take the dangerous course of living on credit just to avoid divorce.
In finance classes, they talk about “financial leverage”, where using debt to finance a part of a company’s capital needs can increase the return to (a reduced-size group of) shareholders. The other side of this, of course, is that the firm’s profits become much more sensitive to changes in sales. In other words, returns can be increased at the expense of making those returns more risky. This kind of financial education is badly needed in every corner of our society, from the White House on down to the guy living in the shack downtown.
Perhaps the media chooses its pundits based on the desired message. It surely cannot be choosing them based on any rational criterion related to understanding the impact of continuing job losses and lender paralysis on the largest part of the economy. For then they would not be seeking out the “the crisis is ending” group. This is not a “jobless recovery”. It isn’t a recovery at all. In fact, it is only the constant promotion through the mainstream media (MSM) that has kept the economy from going into full free-fall.
What should you do? Well start by turning off the media, going to the library, and reading history, economics, political science, and related books. Learn to understand the knowledge gathered by many generations of curious and independent thinkers before you. If you have a back yard, plant a little vegetable garden. This isn’t an attempt to become a subsistence farmer–if things get that bad, your neighbors will kill you and take your food–but an a way to help you feel a little bit of independence. Start cutting your unnecessary spending, so you can save something just in case things get hard.
It might never get harder. In that case, keeping your spending in check and saving up funds can put you in the group we call “investors” instead of the group we call “consumers”. You can be one of the ones who rejoice when the Dow Jones Industrial Average goes above 10,000. But if things do get harder and you have an extra three months worth of income saved up, you might get to keep your home when your neighbor loses his.
Important: I am not a financial advisor. If you take financial advice from some random person on the Internet, you’re being foolish. Instead, consider this an opportunity to start thinking for yourself.
IceRocket tags: econolypse
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01.27.09
Posted in News and Announcements at 07:48 by lnxwalt
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07.28.08
Posted in News and Announcements at 04:12 by lnxwalt
I have been pretty busy, what with being on the road eleven out of the past fifteen months. There are a lot of partially-completed projects around the house and around the sites. Even though I probably will not be home for another two to three months, I have started trying to clean things up a little, starting with the WCC site.
There is very little in the way of content, other than the blog articles, but I’m also planning on fixing that as well. The WCC home site, like our communities site, is absolutely barren and undecorated now, but we’ll soon be prettying it up a little. Probably nowhere near the way it should look by launch day, but certainly an improvement over the burned-out ghetto it has been.
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05.15.08
Posted in FLOSS, News and Announcements, Political, Society at 01:01 by lnxwalt
Standards attorney Andy Updegrove announced the creation of the Hague Declaration recently. The Hague Declaration is a statement of human rights on the Internet. But it is more. Without being overly verbose about it, the Declaration also promotes free software, where “free” is not about the price of the software, but about the freedom that the user of that software gains.
I want to encourage you to visit Mr. Updegrove’s blog to read his statement, and then to go to the site to sign the Hague Declaration. As a follow up, write your elected representatives to encourage them to require government agencies to use vendor-neutral, open standard file formats, such as ODF.
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12.25.07
Posted in News and Announcements at 05:57 by lnxwalt
Right now, you still have a chance to participate in the One Laptop Per Child organization’s Give One Get One program. A number of blogs have written about it, so I won’t try to improve on it.
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11.22.07
Posted in News and Announcements, Small Business at 03:58 by lnxwalt
Determined To …
Determined To Build A Business
I have been home less than a month. In this time, I have not had a lot of time for anything. When I left, there were some things in progress, but opportunities and people rapidly move on when you tell them to wait for an indeterminite time period while you are preoccupied with X, whatever X may be. I returned to find some network and system administration issues had arisen in the household. And that the users had forgotten how to do things like upload the photos they use for their own writing.
In addition, I have been busily trying to get another job (preferably) or assignment. I prefer if it is fairly close to home this time, so I can come home after work and work toward starting our family’s business ventures.
If you are seeking to change major and important things in your life, you can expect some opposition. It can be as simple as the family member who wants to stay in the Victor Valley area [or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for that matter], even if it means that you will continue to struggle. It can be an overhang of debt from your lower-income college student days. It can be a household that has gotten used to your present income level and is not not willing to accept the necessary sacrifice for you to pursue your dreams. If you have no opposition, you must be a loner—family and friends do not want you to change, because it might change their situations or they might even have to change in response.
When you know you really want to accomplish something, you also know that you have to change what you are doing, or you will never get different results. If you live in an area like the Victor Valley and you are not independently wealthy, you have to work. If, as is the case here, the local politicians believe that attracting large chain retailers to build stores and create low-wage part-time jobs is what progress is all about, then you have a few choices:
- Shut your mouth and work for “Big Blue” or another retail or restaurant chain, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three of your co-workers so you can afford to live here.
- Buy lottery tickets. Ignore the fundamental unlikeliness that you are going to win a big prize. The odds are, if you buy enough tickets over a long enough time, you will win, even though your winnings will only be a portion of what you spent to get them.
- Commute fifty miles or more one way to obtain better-paying employment. Be sure you understand that you have to make enough to cover the costs of vehicle maintenance & repairs, fuel, and the additional hours out of your day that you will spend on the freeways.
- Find some miraculous burst of funds that enables you to start a business providing some kind of service to local residents who commute outside the area for work, since they haven’t the time to take care of things themselves.
- Get out of Dodge. Yes, that’s it—move away, to a place where you can live and work in the same area.
If a family member or so-called friend is standing in your way when you are trying to liberate yourself from financial bondage by moving out of the local area, you may need to just leave them. Cut them off like a gangrenous leg, and limp away to your future.
Determined To Build A Family
The family is actually more important than a business, at least in my eyes. When I’m gone, it isn’t a business that will be my legacy. It is the people whom I have touched that will best reflect who and what I am.
That may seem to conflict with the “gangrenous leg” comment above, but it does not. I used to have friends where all we ever did together was watch television. As television has become a smaller and smaller influence in my life, that is, as I recognized that there were other things I could be doing with all those hours that were being wasted, we began to grow apart.
Your family is the reason for starting a business. If you are starting a business simply for yourself or for strangers, it is time to “stop, turn around, and skate in the opposite skating direction.” The same applies if you are starting a ministry or other non-profit: If your family is not part of the reason you are doing it, then you’d better stop. Now.
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05.09.07
Posted in News and Announcements at 04:36 by lnxwalt
I am currently on an assignment in a very foreign state on the Eastern side of the country. I was in a neighboring state for a few months last year, so I am somewhat familiar with this part of the country. However, I spend too much time lost, rather than getting to the worksite and getting my work done.
I am beginning to wonder why so much of the state is under construction and every map has different road names and highway numbers. I’d understand if they were unfriendly and trying to make the experience unpleasant to outsiders. But the locals here do not know me from Adam.
Others that are here for this project have stated similar things about being perpetually lost, so it is not just me. Traditionally, when I go to a state, I begin to take different routes and sort of intentionally get lost, so that I build an internal map that enables me to do things like route around traffic accidents. However, I do not feel that I have ever been quite so lost as I am wandering this area.
It does bring some things to mind:
- Unfamiliar surroundings and the lack of familiar cues which you may unconsciously use to determine the proper interpretation and response to current conditions are behind feeling "lost" when you leave your home zone.
- Generally, while you are out of town, home is the wonderful place where Donna Reed and Father Knows Best get together to produce Leave It To Beaver. After you return, the illusion is shattered once again. I believe that one key to adjusting to being out of town is to understand and accept that it will be different than what you are used to seeing or experiencing. Embrace the unfamiliarity and wrap your explorations with adventure, so that you will enjoy them.
- Do not explore or experiment during busy periods or when you have a deadline to meet. It is not worth the stress of finding that turning left at Avenue J will put you several miles further from your intended destination.
- If you are a goal-oriented person, give yourself learning goals related to the journeys you undertake.
- See the tourist sites if you can, but you must be sure to meet local residents and talk with them about their lives and views. Try out the local foods and beverages, find out what the locals do for fun.
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05.02.07
Posted in Legal Issues, Local News, News and Announcements at 20:22 by lnxwalt
Shortly after CBS’ Don Imus was fired for his remarks, Clear Channel’s Barbara Stanton was suspended for racially-insensitive comments she made on her radio program.
I had heard of neither broadcaster before their respective incidents. Imus was apparently trying to be funny. Coverage of the event refers to him as a “shock jock,” so it may have been his job to generate controversy (and therefore higher ratings).
Stanton, here in the sleepy Victor Valley, could not have been much of a shock jock–that genre would never survive here in the conservative High Desert. Her words came during a serious discussion about the acquisition of the local bank by an out-of-the-area bank. That the words were serious, and that they come so soon after Imus’ experience is disturbing, to say the least.
Unfortunately, besides being out of line in her expression, Ms. Stanton is also misinformed about the responsibilities of the CEO of a publicly-traded bank. Ron Wilson, CEO of DCB had apparently been interviewed on her program recently, without mentioning buyout talks. Well, I am sorry if he has to obey the laws relating to insider information, but there are some things that can not be revealed except under specific conditions.
As a side note, Jonathan Schwartz of Sun has had a running discussion with the SEC about finding a way to publish announcements on Sun’s site at the same time or even before releasing the information to the traditional channels, because most individual investors do not get those announcements until the next day, when they appear in the Wall Street Journal and other financial publications. This gives large institutions a leg up on reacting to any news or announcement. Schwartz believes that a standardized way of displaying that information on the company site would be a better way to reach investors, because they tend to check the site for information anyway.
What is this thing with degrading groups of people because of their ancestry? After several civil rights movements and hundreds of years of progress, is this all the distance we have come?
On the other hand, I favor freedom of expression. If people feel that they can express such sentiments, we will be more likely to know who actually has those sentiments. It makes it a lot easier to understand it when certain things happen.
Mr. Imus, you need some Black friends. Ms. Stanton, you need some Asian friends. I don’t just mean that you know one another. I mean friends to the point that you get upset when you go with them to a conference and the hotel suddenly has no rooms available; to the point where you get angry when everyone at the restaurant has ordered and been served, but your friends are still waiting for someone to come and take their orders; and to the point where you are mad when people start talking with accents and repeating ethnic stereotypes about your friends’ presumed ancestry.
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Posted in News and Announcements, Small Business at 07:07 by lnxwalt
Erwin’s StarOffice Tango » Locked-in by a potato
One month prior to the expiration of the PBR certificate in December 2004, Europlant ceased maintenance of the variety, even though its registration on the national list was valid until 2009. This means that no one else could take over maintenance of the variety because it was still under PBR at the time — meaning Europlant had the only rights to produce the variety. So Linda was marked for deletion from the German potato market.
PBR, or plant breeder’s rights, appears to be a kind of exclusive rights period, similar in concept to US plant patents. Shortly before PBR expired, when no one else was allowed to cultivate it, the vendor pulled a popular variety of potato off the market.
Now imagine having software that uses vendor-specific file formats or network protocols. Shortly before competitors are able to make a work-alike product, the market-leading vendor is probably going to do a shift in file formats or protocols for no other reason than to block competition, even though the competition is good for the purchaser or end-user.
Smaller businesses especially have little need to spend large sums of money on software applications with generic functionality, such as office application suites. As a user, I have seen almost zero improvement in office software since I purchased WordPerfect Office Professional 7 in 1997. Microsoft had almost caught up in functionality with their Office 2003 product six or seven years later. However, since Microsoft probably has over 90% of office application software purchases (thousands of people download OpenOffice.org and similar zero-price suites, but actual purchases of non-Microsoft products are a fairly small slice of the market up until now), there has been almost no improvement in the product area.
What has happened is that they have become adept at making minor, slightly-incompatible changes in their file formats from version to version, forcing users to purchase upgrades when their existing software still meets their needs. This happens because they do not use an open and cross-platform , vendor-neutral, standardized file format for the products–they could not play those games any more and their prices would have to be reduced.
I found the documentary fascinating because I, probably for the first time, realized that open competition and vendor lock-in are a key issue of the food sector as well and thus everybody should care. Sure, if a vendor takes your favorite potato from the market, you can easily switch to a different potato type because I’m not aware of any “potato addictions”. This is very different for software where vendors oftent ry to lock in customers via proprietary file formats and interfaces, which often make switching to different products costly or even impossible.
This shows clearly why you should never go with a single-vendor solution. You should always insist on multiple vendors’ products and a standardized set of vendor-independent file formats and network protocols to connect them with.
In office software, you should insist that your software comes with built-in support for OpenDocument Format (ODF), the recognized standard formats for office documents. If your vendor cannot or will not support ODF, you can download OpenOffice.org or contact Sun to find a reseller of StarOffice. Your personal or company data may depend upon it.
technorati tags:ODF, lock-in
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05.01.07
Posted in News and Announcements, Small Business at 05:24 by lnxwalt
I worked in the garden a little bit this evening. I was putting in some more tomatoes to replace the ones that the temperature changes killed, only I could see once I started that a couple of them were not dead–they had new leaves coming up from ground-level. We still have more plants to put in, and one whole corner has more grass on it than any similar-size part of the yard.
In the Western half of the country, you really should read the Sunset Western Garden Book in order to grow a garden or even much of a lawn. It is likely that taking the time to properly prepare the soil before we started the garden would have brought both reduced weed growth and increased crop production.
Weeds–I didn’t know there were that many weeds in all of the High Desert. We pulled and used the hoe and the shovel and still probably left more than half of the weeds still in place. I guess there will be some more weeding tomorrow.
There are times in your life and the life of your business where it seems like your garden is full of weeds, where nothing that you “planted” appears to be coming up. Instead, a whole lot of stuff that you never wanted and never encouraged (or maybe you did at one time and then changed your mind) will be there.
TOUGH.
Being in business is not about picnics on the beach. It is about finding ways to continue to be in business no matter how things appear. Some people don’t make it and have to return to employee life. There is nothing wrong with that except for losing the element of control. As a business owner, you have some part to play in making the crucial decisions that determine whether you stay in business. An employee often has no say over decisions that determine whether he or she will have continued employment. On the other hand, not having that weight of making “important” decisions over your head can mean that you feel like you are in a more secure position.
You need to stick it out if you can, removing all of the unwanted “weeds” and replacing them with the desired “plants.” Not everyone can stick it out, and out of those that can, not everyone will. It is up to you to make it happen.
We’ve been plucking some weeds ourselves. The transition from B2Evolution to Nucleus and Pivot for out other blogs is in progress. The feeds on Feedburner are now pulling off of the new systems, except for “All Our Blogs (minus one),” which is going on hiatus while we get the communities site up and working. Join us in working toward a better future for all of us!
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