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 Russia decided to take Hillary at her word and they've hit the Reset button: Russia could use bases for its strategic bombers on the doorstep of the United States in Cuba and Venezuela to underpin long-distance patrols in the region, a senior air force officer said Saturday. "This is possible in Cuba," General Anatoly Zhikharev, chief of the Russian air force's strategic aviation staff, told the Interfax-AVN military news agency. The comments were the latest signal that Moscow intends to project its military capability in far-flung corners of the globe despite a tight defence budget and hardware that experts consider in many respects outdated. Knowing full well that Obama has no intention of building up our military, and knowing full well that Obama pretty much defines pacificist leanings, Russia has no fear of American repercussions from these intentions.That, and Obama and Putin share leftist Marxist similar political philosophies. Birds of a feather! The extra bonus in this little play is that if the Russians do park their military 90 miles off our southern shore, Obama's relaxation of travel restrictions to the island nation means that tourists can go there and take pictures of the buildup. Sweet! Don't you love the smell of HopenchangeTM in the air? The world just loves our president. So much so that they want to get closer to him. The last time that Russia tried this, our president had actually served in and respected our military... ETC: Inevitable...  |
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From the state where he served, for all of you who voted for HopenchangeTM, here's what's bound to come your way (or your children's way): Illinois Income Tax May Jump 50 Percent Because when the government spends money, it must eventually pay it off.Gov. Pat Quinn is reportedly considering raising taxes to deal with a growing budget deficit. Can anyone tell me how spending money to get out of debt works?By way of example, here's a riff on an old joke: Trying to solve a bit of math, a child asked, "What's 2 + 2?"He asked a mathematician, who answered, "4." He asked a statistician, who answered, "Somewhere between 3 and 5." He asked an accountant, who answered, "What do you want it to be?" He asked a politician, who pocketed 3 and then answered, "1, of course." The moral of my little tale: politicians are good at math. They just want to convince you that you aren't. This ain't rocket science, and common sense would tell anyone that if the budget is tight, you don't spend more. Especially on things that don't help anyone but the politicians and their buddies.Super geniuses, those politicians in Washington. |
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Saw this today while entering the freeway:  It asked, "Who is John Galt?" Cool to see the meme in the real world. |
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A few years ago, I worked on a web technology based on a simple premise: wouldn't it be great to create a portal for events? Yep. There's a lot of them out there. But they're all locked to the location they're in. Want events in Chicago? There are a few web sites for that, but they're not the same as the event web sites for Seattle. There is no single hub. So back then, I worked on that. I almost finished my work on it, but ran into a snag in the form of a question: why would people have any incentive to load their events into the portal? Loading events takes time. At that time, I couldn't come up with the right answer. As a result, I abandoned my effort. I had about 800 hours into it. Recently, I stumbled across the answer. So in the last week, I dusted off my previous work and cleaned it up a bit. I've got more work to do - maybe 100 hours - but it's coming along fine. I'm not going to divulge all of the reasons that the technology beats other efforts out there in the marketplace, but I've got hooks into the first channel where it has potential, and in dusting it off, I've set it up to be easily re-skinned for a vertical. If you're interested, you can check out the two instances of the technology here and here. By the end of March, I should have it in polished form and hopefully a contract in the first vertical. I'm in that late night mode, hyper-productive and not sleeping a lot. (As for 247, yes, that's tracking well also. My partners and I are working up presentation material for demos that we hope to have sometime this month. Busy busy...) |
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Dr. Helen Smith has been going on for a while about "going John Galt." If you're unfamiliar with the premise, it's pretty simple: Ayn Rand writes in Atlas Shrugged of what happens to the world when the most productive in society decide to go on strike. The movement is led by a guy called John Galt. A great line from Galt's speech at the end of the book is this: You did not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production - you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder. There are a number of successful, productive people today suggesting that they will do exactly this. They refuse to pay for the missteps of adults and companies who now turn to the government like children who abused a broken toy and demand a replacement by tantrum from mom and dad."Productive," by the way, doesn't come with title. There are a number of executives with a "C" in front of their title who aren't worth a day's salary, much less their entire compensation. I wrote more about that a while ago, but I think a simple way to discern those folks is how quickly they turn to the government for money. In what I wrote back then, I mention the canned CEO of Home Depot, Bob Nardelli, and his unproductive management style. Is it any wonder that Chrysler, with that same Nardelli now at the helm, is drowning and begging for assistance from you, the taxpayer? Unproductive? Oh hell yes. He's a great example of how corporate America will hire an incompetent boob based on an undeserved resume alone. But I digress... sort of... How do you teach people productivity? How do you teach people the necessity of strident self-sufficiency, except in extreme circumstances when the afflicted can ask for the free will benevolence of others? (Sidenote: who is it who really believes in mankind - the person who believes that people will respond as they can to a personal request for assistance, or those who seek to confiscate and reallocate so that they might ration help as they deem appropriate?) How do you teach people productivity? Ayn Rand dealt with this conundrum by removing the self-sufficient. She believed that by showing the dependent that "business and earning a living and that in man which makes it possible - that is the best within us, that is the thing to defend." She aimed to show the world that the producers are not evil, but essential. Not greedy, but mentors - for those willing to listen and unafraid to work. Capitalism is the pinnacle of liberation. You are free to be as productive as you choose, in any manner you choose, in any trade you choose - so long as there is a market for what you produce. No other system teaches the importance of productivity so directly. You are pulled along into greater and greater output by the rewards directly given to you through productive commerce. Don't like your job? Switch employers or positions. Start your own business. You have choices. The productive know this. They thrive on it. They'll do what it takes, and go further yet. How is that person not a role model to others? But somehow, there are people who have come into prominence who freely ridicule and heap scathing disdain on the productive. Capitalism needs no defense. Its historical effectiveness in prosperity speaks to the lies of those who reject it. What it does need are the frank practitioners, unapologetic and open in what they know. I'm not sure that Galt's solution is the best method of education, but I am sure that capitalists have no business cowering from the ill-informed words of those who want to plunder the achievements of the successful. |
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Watch Out for that Anvil, Wile E. |
Over at Glenn Reynolds' place, he highlights an ABCNews article that discusses productive professionals seeing how to reduce their productivity to avoid Obama's intended tax increases on their income. A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law. "Why kill yourself working if you're going to give it all away to people who aren't working as hard?" That Obama... super genius. To save the American economy, he's discovered a way to encourage people to work less. Masterful!Tomorrow - before breakfast, no doubt - he'll tackle cold fusion and perpetual motion. |
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I once had a friend of mine who was planning to hurt someone. I mean he literally planned it out. He bought the materials, he coordinated his logistics - it was serious. He came to me and showed me all of his prep work, and I looked at him in alarm, wondering why he would want to hurt another person and ultimately want to hurt himself. In his mind, he would wind up unscathed by the incident. Who would know that he did it? And his target - well, he might have gotten a little hurt, Mark told himself, but it shouldn't be serious. It was all about scaring his intended victim into changing behavior, not about really hurting him. What did I do? I told someone in authority. The plot was stopped. While they couldn't prove his intentions with the flammable liquid in his possession, his excuse for it was sketchy enough that daylight put a halt to the whole escapade. Mark said later that he can't believe he was that dumb to have considered such a thing. He was glad that someone stopped him. I wanted him to fail at his endeavor, and I helped him do so. It was the best thing I could have done. It was the right thing to have done. When someone is about to hurt themselves or others, don't you want them to fail? Of course you do. Which is why I want Obama to fail. Socialism is cruel - to everyone. Nationalization ruins industries and jobs and the economy, as Hugo Chavez' Venezuela proves consistently. Teaching people that they don't have to be responsible for their own decisions and then making others pay for those decisions - how is that a positive? It is irresponsible to allow someone to succeed in hurting others. It is selfish to not want to get involved and to not prevent disaster. It is callous to not care about those who will be damaged by the actions of the person who will injure others. Bad ideas are bad ideas. It doesn't matter who it is... we should all want the perpetrator to fail. I resent the hell out of being told that it's wrong to want Obama to fail in his aspirations. If his ideas and intentions would actually help small businesses succeed, and help people who most needed it, I wouldn't have any problem supporting him and wishing him success. But no one can explain to me how what he's doing will help anyone, any business, or the nation's economy. The reason? Because what he's doing can't help, nor will it. Socialism is cruel, and anyone with the intentions of implementing socialist policy is cruel. If you agree with that, then I ask: do you want Obama to succeed or to fail in his planned implemetation of socialism in America? |
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Liberals make the mistake of attacking those with money because they misunderstand the economy. So here's a simple primer. Liberals believe that the rich are not "fair" to others because they have more money than others. Liberals see the economy as a fixed amount of money, like dollar bills in a cookie jar. The rich, as they see it, grab more of the money in the jar and crowd others out. If that were true, it would be unfair. But the economy is not a fixed pot of money where everyone gets a share. If there are four people - a therapist, a mechanic, a grocer, and a truck driver - and between them they collectively have $1,000, the economy instead works like this: - The grocer pays the truck driver $100 for the food delivered to the store.
- The truck driver pays the mechanic $125 for maintenance for the truck.
- The mechanic pays the therapist $75 for marriage counseling.
- The therpist buys groceries at the grocery store for $100.
And let's say that this happens once a month.At the end of the year, collectively, their total income is nearly $5,000, which far exceeds the total amount of money in the system. How fair is this system? In this system, there is really no limit to the amount of money you earn. So I ask you: which model better represents real life? The system I describe above? Or Obama's model that he presented in a campaign speech last fall: I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Unfortunately, our president believes that the economy is most simply and truly explained as dividing up a PBJ sandwich - of which there is only so much, like money in a cookie jar.From my example above, socialism says that each person should get $250. That's "fair." Capitalism says that each person has an income of anywhere from $900 to $1,500. Who exactly is on the short end of the stick in this system? Which system sounds more attractive to you? Kindergarten... I mean I know that capitalism requires just a bit of sophistication to understand it, but didn't this guy go to Harvard? Maybe he didn't take any economics courses. Which is too bad - for all of us. ETC: What I illustrate above is exactly why Liberals can't fathom how lowering tax rates can actually increase revenue to the government. How? Because taxation in America is based on income... the greater the income, the more can be taxed. Therefore the greater the velocity of money, the more revenue is collected. If Liberals were really interested in fairness, they would not go after income for taxation, but wealth. The problem with that for them is that there are too many Liberals with old money and accumulated wealth for that to even be considered, so they invent the straw man of the "rich" being those with the highest income. Which is how John Kerry was welcomed as a man of the people by the Left in 2004. |
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Definition of Productivity |
By the way, as a definition for productivity, here's mine: Productivity is the proportion at which an entity converts resources into goods and services that others esteem to purchase. Take the artist in his basement cranking out art... he might be making a lot of art, but if nobody wants what he's making, then he is unproductive. Busy, but unproductive.Or the woman working the drive-thru lane at Wendy's. If she is busy texting her friends while on the job, she isn't very efficient at converting her resources into goods and services, even though people are lined up at the drive-thru lane and want the goods. She too is unproductive. The nation's economy is only as strong as the number of people working to maximize their productivity. I see relatively little that our government is doing to increase productivity. I see a lot that our government is doing to insure its permanency. That too is highly unproductive. But then, by the definition I've given here, government can hardly be a model of productivity, though it can certainly inhibit the productivity of others... |
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Productivity has been on my mind a lot these days. At this moment, I am gainfully unemployed. I say "gainfully" because while I have no paying clients, I'm busier than I've been in quite a while. I have no less than six initiatives keeping me occupied. None of them are paying me yet, but they're generating a lot of activity and buzz. As I've been doing this for the last three weeks, I've been forming up a concept that has been on my mind for a couple of months. If you could think of all of the industries where disruptive innovation is oh-so-ripe, what would it be? The oldest institution/industry I can think of that has had no real disruptive innovation for hundreds of years is: Higher education. I ask: why does it make sense for the person who ambitions to be a social worker to rack up $60,000 to $80,000 in debt for a $20,000 a year job? Most of college is reading books. Does it take several hundred dollars per credit hour to read a book and test on it? I get that some professors really work hard to be great instructors, but in my college experience at Iowa State University, there were just as many who outsourced it to TA's. In fact, when I was there, I worked briefly for the Iowa State Daily. I was to attend then-president Martin Jischke's press conference, during which he awarded teacher of the year awards. They went to TA's. I asked him, what does it say about the quality of ISU's professors that the teacher of the year awards went to TA's, and not tenured professors? He said it meant that ISU had great TA's. It's no secret that universities are bastions of liberal thought. A conservative professor unafraid to teach conservative views? It's unheard of. But liberal professors who aren't shy about pushing their liberal opinions? That's pretty much par for the course. So yes, I think the university experience is overripe for disruptive innovation. And I have some ideas about that... and they begin with this thought: Colleges don't teach people productivity. And I could argue - successfully, I think - that productivity is what really matters about whatever we do. So what would an education centered on productivity look like? And from that, what does a fiscally responsible, affordable, self-motivated adventure in curiosity and self-improvement look like? Hint: it doesn't look much like a university. Our real lives don't look anything like the university experience because the university experience doesn't have much to do with real life. And isn't life training supposed to be the purpose of the university experience? Enter disruptive innovation... |
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