04.15.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:56 by lnxwalt
It has been over a year since we first established this domain. In that time, I’ve been mostly working out of state or at least out of my home area, so I haven’t had any time to do anything about it. I may be going out again soon, but I’m trying to at least get things started beforehand.
Be patient and we’ll get there.
Our focus is not really on polishing our own site(s), but on making sure that the SLOBs/OMBs/FOBs that we ally ourselves with have the tools they need to better compete with the big corporations that rule our lives and our country. Only in this way will our towns and cities be rebuilt and our state and local governments begin to focus on the smaller businesses that provide the bulk of our employment.
Our toolset is firmly planted in the open camp. FLOSS uses copyrights and licenses to benefit the user, rather than to oppress the user (as EULAs do). Among the freedoms that are inherent in FLOSS is the freedom to use and distribute modifications to the original application. We look forward to using that freedom to make open source software an even better fit and an even better deal for smaller businesses.
Watch this space for news and updates.
Tags: Announcements, coming soon
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04.10.08
Posted in Economy, Political at 2:40 by lnxwalt
The original article will probably be gone in a couple of weeks.
US water pipelines are breaking - Yahoo! News
Essentially, the article describes some major aqueducts that are reaching the end of their expected lives, either because of their age or because of lack of maintenance and repair.
This is actually an example of where short-term focus is harmful in the long run. One place I lived in this town, we had a water pipe that would break a couple of times each week during the Summer (breaks were discovered less frequently during colder weather). The company would come out and use a metal strap to provide a temporary patch. Then a few days later, the pipe would break somewhere else. In the local case, the pipe is only about four feet deep, so it isn’t infeasible to selectively replace the worst pipes in a desert.
It seems to be an America-wide thing, though. Lack of attention to infrastructure is costing us repair costs elsewhere (damage to homes and vehicles, traffic delays, emergency repairs, maybe even lost lives when some spectacular failure happens). We focus on the short-term instead of acting to prevent failure or to replace already-failing pipes and roads. We even neglect to build needed things like a region-wide high-speed rail system in Southern California, where some commuters travel up to 100 miles one-way to work. Or seeing that our current water imports are going to be reduced in the future (due to sharing Colorado River water and restrictions on other water supplies), we still fail to construct an ocean desalinization plant that can help make up the difference.
While we grumble about almost $4 per gallon fuel, we can’t do something that can help insulate us from the effects when fuel costs rise to $5, $6, $7, or even $10 per gallon? I don’t buy it. When I was spending five hours per day sitting in traffic, I was keenly interested in anything that would be faster and cheaper or even the same time and price but less frustrating.
A few years ago, when California was having its power crisis, our town leaders forbade a resident from putting up a windmill generator. The neighboring city decided to promote a power plant fueled by natural gas and cooled by the very water that is in short supply in the area.
This is nothing less than a failure of leadership. As a citizen, I know that I am not averse to higher taxes if they are spent wisely. Where I begin to put my foot down is when taxes rise, but there is no visible effect. Here in California, this must start in Sacramento and in city hall. There will be no improvement while things stay the same there. Local residents need to make it a big issue that their water pipes are bursting, that their roads are crumbling, that their electric rates continue to rise, that their commutes are taking longer, that their city plan spend more time trying to ensure that everyone’s front yards look alike than actually making the city a better place to live.
We live in a great country, but we’ve gotten so used to enjoying the benefits of it that we never face the fact that there are some costs that need to be borne also. A longer-term perspective helps us think about what we can do to make things better and to maintain what we already have. I hope you will join me in contacting your state and local officials to ask that they invest in the future of your community.
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04.08.08
Posted in General Management, Small Business at 2:58 by lnxwalt
The article is here.
I believe that small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) need more help than the big guys to form tight connections with their customers. After all, a bad experience can permanently chase a customer away from a SLOB, but a nationwide fast food chain will continue to get repeat visits even when a single visit is unsatisfying.
That said, we often hear about how we need to jump on the latest fad or get left behind. The article discusses many of the requirements that you should meet before you consider starting a company blog.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 0:55 by lnxwalt
Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be migrating our software to a different environment. If you find an outage, just wait a day and you should be once again able to get to us.
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04.04.08
Posted in Economy, Political at 22:48 by lnxwalt
Huge job losses set off recession alarms - Yahoo! News
The latest figures, apparently released today, show that experts are starting to realize what everyone else has known for about six months—that we are in a recession period in the U. S. economy. That it took so long to recognize it shows again just how clueless those in the forefront of government and the financial industry are.
It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long.
Workers’ pink slips stacked ever higher in March as jittery employers slashed 80,000 jobs, the most in five years, and the national unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent. Job losses are nearing the staggering level of a quarter-million this year in just three months.
Says one candidate, let’s retrain workers, so they’ll be able to compete for jobs. Says another, let’s boost unemployment benefits and aid to communities, so they can hold on until the recession ends.
Retraining does not hit at the core of the problem: lax oversight of large corporations and financial enterprises has allowed those large enterprises to destabilize the economy. Rather than round up the perpetrators and make them do the perp-walk through phalanxes of TV cameras in their orange jumpsuits, we are trying to bail them out. The result was predictable, even if the timing and the exact sequence of failures was not.
All told, the economy now has lost 232,000 jobs in the first three months of this year.
I would not be surprised if there is a brief recovery in late Summer and early Autumn. We could even get back some of those lost jobs. Make no mistake about it, though. This was not the normal business cycle recession. This was preventable, and since no one is yet dealing with the “wink wink, nudge nudge” regulators who allowed this to happen or the corporate and financial shenanigans that caused it, I would expect that by the end of this year or the beginning of the next, the “double-dip” part of the recession will come, only it is probably going to be much more severe than what we are experiencing today.
I would expect that local communities need to focus on shoring up locally-owned businesses, particularly SLOBs, emphasizing a “buy local” policy. SLOBs, in turn, need to use local sources and locally-produced goods and services as much as possible. If we do this in California’s Victor Valley area, for example, national chains will face the brunt of the effect, while SLOBs will maintain their positions or even grow stronger. Since the area serves primarily as a far-away bedroom community for Los Angeles and Orange counties, this will help to ameliorate the effect of some commuters losing their out-of-area jobs.
Are you a part of your local chamber of commerce? Does your CoC have a “buy local” promotional program? If not, why not? A strong base of SLOBs (small, locally-owned businesses) is the foundation for a strong local economy. Among other things, you need to be involved in advocating that local governments use SLOBs for nearly all of their vendor / supplier and contractor needs. It isn’t just your wallet that is affected—it also affects the wallets of other locally-owned enterprises and the next generation of employees, too.
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04.03.08
Posted in Political at 7:09 by lnxwalt
Just posted on my “Owner-Managed Business” blog.
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