Templates and Overlays

Layover. Layaway. Lei. Eeeek. Eel. Cutouts of pop culture floating down from the clouds like little ice crystal patterns, clumps and flakes piling up, wintering the ground, making a plastic-bristled push broom a useless snow shovel in a Day After the Day After Tomorrow scenario. An automobile horn playing a one-note señorita's sonato in dee dead of freezing cold.

2009 - The Year of the Man with African-American heritage.
2010 - The Year of the Woman, gender the lyrics and harmony this stanza.

And in a continental shift, the hesitation as pols (that's right, not polls or Poles) poll the people to see if their attempt at polarising the lens through which they tell the people what they're supposed to want has been polished properly.

Media seek mediums to see the future - another thinktank expert in the field of thinktank expert analysis experts. Throw more wood on the fire - we need to pump up the smoke and bring out the dogs and ponies for the one-way mirror show.

I like carnival sideshows - the bearded lady, the world's largest rodent/snake crossover breed, the boy with no face, the politicians powdering their faces for their self-effacing airtime promoting yet another promising compromise.

Without variety, what would allspice taste like?

If few of us want to take the time to read a 1000-page stack of legalese-at-ease-soldiers, with all the "heretofore when the least amount is deducted from line 47 of page 23 totaled in line 23 of page 47 wherein the previous page was deleted, pushing all page numbers forward 10 because of the addition of 47 pages from which 38 pages were reviewed and 56 pages were therefore deleted; that is, until the review on the 29th of December referencing the planned budgetary meeting on the 5th of January that will recompute all totals and estimates prior to the constraints enacted on the 13th of November, with the following pages to be deleted/ remanded/ added," etc., then what are we to do? When does a political compromise comprise a constituent's idea that all is bribes and the rest lies?

Entertainment. That's all we need to know. The rest is details. Isn't that what I've been trying to tell myself?

If you want the assets of a foreign country for yourself, consult the Book (no, not that one), "The Art of Warfarin." Unclog those arteries! Clear the way for fresh blood to arrive on the scene.

We are one species. We only think our nation's politicians act solely on our behalf. The other half percent of us know that a legislative body is not an island. It may act on its own initiative, taking its turn to lead the way, but it never owns the stage, lights and cameras. Action! Smile for your local online webzine or newsernet. Look serious about the deal you just closed which ensures your comfortable retirement and a few pork barrels parked on the side of the road bearing your name.

The same water particles falling from the sky when someone said what I said above about six thousand years before someone said it forty thousand years ago.

"Ugh. That fruit tree belongs to my family. We found it first."

"Grunt. No it doesn't. I represent a consortium of families tired of waiting for your family to eat first. I am claiming this tree for them and offering you the vast unknown stretches of land to the north where we will not touch any of your trees for...say, the next ten cycles of the moon."

"Ten cycles? Not enough. We will let you have this tree for twenty cycles. And if we do not find any fruit trees in our new land we will come back and take this land, adding it to the new land holdings you granted us."

"Twelve cycles. That's my final offer."

"Fifteen."

"It's yours, if you'll give us your oldest son and daughter."

"Ugh. I will give you only one."

"Then we'll take your son because he's the best fruit sack bearer in your group."

"Good, we'll keep our daughter who is best fruit picker in our group. See you in ten cycles."

"You said fifteen."

"You said twelve."

"Grunt. Twelve it is, then."

"We will be back in ten cycles to make sure you hold up your end of the bargain."

"Twelve."

"Okay, we will come back in just over ten cycles. No fruit and we get our son back."

"Eleven."

"Ten and you keep our son."

"Ten it is, then."

"Ten, and we'll get our son back."

"No, you get fruit sack only."

"Ten and we get son, tree and fruit sack, or we'll come back in five moon cycles."

"Okay, deal is done."

"Ugh. Seven moon cycles, we'll come back and we get your oldest son and daughter."

"Now, wait a minute!"

"You no want deal, we stay here."

"Umm...I come back tomorrow after I explain deal to the people."

"You come back tomorrow with proof of more fruit trees in the north or the deal is off when we return in three moon cycles."


And so it goes. A deal is no deal. It is a reference point for the next round of negotiations. Same for the so-called universal health care coverage legislation winding its way through the deals and no deals winding their way through no deals and deals. But I already know all this. What I'm supposed to tell you is what the Book of the Future from the last billion-dollar book/movie/blog/game deal I negotiated with the publishers says about what happens when the two houses merge their versions.

Welcome to the house divided. While conservatives form their temporary party to make themselves feel warm and fuzzy about voicing their displeasure over the pain they felt in the economic slump which they so easily blamed on anyone not wearing a conservative suit of crusader's armour, the liberals will feel smug that they are getting at least part of what they were promised when they hoisted a flag of unity over the shack of a Hawaiian politico. In the meantime, foreign entities will continue to accumulate debt repayment promises and laugh all the way to the bank, joining arms and singing, "Divide and conquer, divide and conquer, Houston has a problem, the eagle has landed, its feet spread across an unjoinable divide."

In a moment like this, I want to hear Will Rogers and Ashleigh Brilliant hold a tea party debate over whether John Cena or Arnold Schwarzenegger would make a better reporter for Fox News' coverage of eliminating the threat of malaria in Africa while recovering all the money stolen by the Iranian theocrat who's buried billions of dollars in "friendly" countries. And you wonder why my long-term bets are placed in overseas accounts in China and Israel, lined up with the way things are going in Mexico's drug trade with the United States.

I'm just this guy who loves my seven billion fellows so much that I'm willing to let them sort out how they want to live with each other. If you want to fight, fight. If you want to feed the poor, feed the poor. Any one of us can do anything s/he wants. At the end of the day, some of you will be with me and see we need to get our species out of this chicken egg basket. The rest of you I leave to your own devices, no matter what they are and what you want to do with them. However, your future is my future so I'm going to keep watching what you're doing - even if I don't do anything about your actions right away, I'm paying attention to when your actions may be useful to me later on. I don't care about who you are, where you came from or what you call your family background - you are a person, with immense value that you aren't aware of. Experiment with your life and one day we may meet when you've figured out what you're really worth to yourself. Look at Julia or Shannon Eileen or anyone else who's put self (not selfishness) first. Value yourself in the moment and the moment is yours. The moment is mine. The moment is ours. The moment is all.

Looking For Work In The U.S.A.

In reviewing the macroeconomic goal of exporting U.S. goods to stimulate the world, I found an old news article of interest:

http://www.newsday.com/business/does-the-united-states-make-anything-anymore-1.888953

Where is your work being sent?

Ready-Mixed Joint Compound

In my primary language, words bounce around with meanings that only one group would use such as Chip-and-Dale, Chippendale and Chippendale. The same word twice? Well, one represents women's entertainment and the other...well, women's entertainment, too, but in the form of cabinetry.

This planet is my playground. I understand we are all kids here, some in the sandbox and some on the swingset, some on the merry-go-round and some on the ball field. Some sit quietly on benches or underneath trees. I worry more about the ones who are unoccupied than ones in groups or by themselves.

The news world teems with predictions about long-term unemployment. We love to wallow in bad news because the news world thrives on readers and readers bring advertisers ("April showers bring May flowers and May flowers bring June bugs" ; "The leg bone is connected to the knee bone and the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone."). Let there be commerce!

Doomsday scenario writers aside, I look for solutions within problems. I worry when I have no insight into a problem's apparent solution. Thus, my current book-in-the-making. Disguise reality as fantasy so I can work with players to create a new game that favors me winning.

Here's the situation. Another set of emperor's new clothes on the sale rack, everyone waiting for someone else to take the bait and buy what they cannot see. While the shop was empty one night, I walked in, put the suit on and walked out, the shop power cut off due to electrical bill payments in arrears.

If you could only see me strolling down the street in my ridiculous outfit! I drag the coattails behind me, picking up dirt, my sleeves brushing against strangers who make no room for me in my coronation outfit. I duck to keep my crown from knocking against store awnings, the people around me making odd faces at my behaviour, oblivious to my grandeur.

But when I walked down to the unemployment office and told the people standing in line about the sartorial eloquence of the assemblage on my body, they stood around me transfixed. Although in the mirror I looked like an overweight man in my underwear, to the ears of the crowd I was what they each imagined me to be. I used generic terms to describe my clothes. To some, I wore a cowboy hat and duds. To others, I was dressed to the teeth in the finest business suit while many saw me in the outfit they read about as kids, a multi-colored, fanciful king's attire. A few looked at my hairy chest and wondered if they were missing out. A couple of people laughed along with me at the joke and nodded in agreement that we had to have a sense of humour in this economy.

We're people, with ideas of our own that will not change. However, our brains are still malleable because that's what makes our species the most widespread species on this planet - adapt to change or die.

I'm not worried about numbers. We can have 5% unemployment or 25% unemployment for one year or 20 years, it doesn't matter. What matters is how we see ourselves when we or them are unemployed. Who's wearing the emperor's new clothes in either situation?

Unemployment is just a word to describe economic viability. We employ our brains to do work all the time, no matter whether we work economically as part-time or fulltime employees/employers.

Employing our brains is where the action's at. That's what made me get out of bed early this morning and contemplate today's blog entries. A sense of humour is all well and good when our brains have sugar and oxygen to process but when we're starving for food and oxygen-deprived, look out!

I speak for myself here at all times. I have only my life to influence all the time. In regular economic terms, I am a free man. I can be employed in the class economic sense and contribute to a workplace's business goals and objectives. I can work with my colleagues, friends and associates in pulling the marionette strings of other situations, some in business and some not. Or I can do nothing. But you see, doing nothing means being dead. I am not dead and don't plan to be dead anytime soon. Therefore, I'm doing something all the time that I'm alive.

The world's constantly changing. I am part of the world. I am constantly changing. The brain I employ is constantly changing. Thus, I am constantly changing the world of others around me whose brains are constantly changing. Therefore, there is no such thing as unemployment. There is only a change in the way I and the people around me employ our brains.

It's not a matter of how we get the world economy back on track. It's how we see ourselves constantly changing.

I was once an office worker. I was once a person working down in a sewer. I was once a person flipping burgers as a short-order cook. I was once a busboy. I was once a person who managed the lives of others working for me in an office. Those are all instances of what we call employment. In none of those cases did I think of myself as being employed but it was how I represented myself to others.

Time to stop representing ourselves to others in the words of business. Time to start seeing ourselves in relation to others. I am not a worker bee. I am part of my species. I share this planet with every one of the members of my species, no matter how we dress, no matter what we look like to one another, no matter what we think about ourselves in business terms.

I am not a cog or a pawn or a piece of a business model. I am me. I am your friend, your colleague, your family, who shares 100% of the same genetic material. I want all of us to live happy lives.

Happiness today may mean employing our brains to go back to our living spaces where we grow our own food or help others grow food in shared spaces. The money we earned in jobs was just a way to facilitate a bartering system. We can barter without money and still employ ourselves successfully. If you have machining skills or computer technical skills, you can barter those skills in exchange for food.

We don't need bank loans to restart the economy. We need people with creative ideas, people who are willing to making mini/microloans of bartered goods to help their neighbours live happy lives. We may give away services in exchange for money later on down the road. We may swap houses for a couple of weeks to see life in another part of the country. We may bargain with our rentholders to exchange services for rent payment and then have the rentholders negotiate with banks on loans for the semi-Ds they own, offering flats for free to bankers and other business owners to use on travel, keeping track of these bartered exchanges in accounting books like real cash.

I worry that we don't have enough creative people pursuing ideas like this during perceived economic crises. Instead of waiting around, make the first move. For instance, I give my business service acumen away to my students with no expectation of extra remuneration from the technical institute where I teach. My repayment comes when I find out they used their creative brains for unique solutions in their community. You can, too.

I shop at big box stores but I also shop at local stores and markets. The local shopkeepers are usually the ones best at bartering. The big box stores have yet to catch on to bargaining with customers at the local level - I challenge them to make the next move in that direction. You might find stockholders will reward you handsomely for your creative solution.

Rational-Emotive Behaviourism

In a recent article by Paul Krugman, the acronym CAPM popped up. But what Paul missed in describing the cycles of our species' bartering behaviour is REBT. Look at us and some of the trade we conduct:

• Financing movies by Michael Moore, knowing his anti-business message sells well in a business marketplace
• A paper by Raghuram Rajan, going against the grain while no one listens
  
• Rising unemployment-based factionalism
• $1 DVDs at Redbox
• Brazilian hyperinflation forgotten quickly
• Zero-interest policies based on questionable logic
• Keynesian federal intervention/spending policy
• Commercial real estate collapsing further?
• Rising unemployment and falling job cutbacks playing like Bach masterpieces
• Rising world temperatures and rotating cold/drought spots
  

We keep treating economics like a science but should we? It's more like placing bets after the race has been won. We all look like winners. If, as Krugman asserts, experts sell when idiots buy and vice versa, aren't both groups reacting to each other? Who is really the idiot and who is really the expert? Herding or flocking behaviour still dominates.

Pardon me while I get a good laugh out of me. I am just this one cell in the world body. I am blind to what goes on in the pancreas or the little finger of the left hand. Someone is tickling our feet and I cannot help but giggle along with the rest of us. I take input from nearby cells who've pushed fluid in my direction and now I'm processing them to keep myself alive.

We will watch "experts" perform their post-mortem autopsies on the current situation and praise them for their insight and ingenuity. Ptooie! Sorry, I had to hack that hairball out of my mouth and I've still got this bad taste fouling my breath.

Rational or rationing. Use whatever words you want to perform formal analyses. We'll see governments go back to regulation policies that will lock down the locations of the hoards of money in repositories around the world, slowing down the shift of production resources. "Hey, who opened the barn door? Dagnabbit, Chester, them horses ran over to Bubba's ranch and his greener pastures. We ain't gonna be able to get the feed to the mill this year! Guess it's just gonna rot in the silos. Think we can eat fat rodents for protein?"

Warren Buffett wants U.S.-produced goods to be bought by other countries to balance the import/export business in this country. Meanwhile, how do we pour more government money into local economies so we can join the rest of the national governments in pumping up consumers' confidence in buying retail goods?

How many $1 DVD rentals (formerly priced at $5) does it take for another person to buy a $60k vehicle? How many $60k vehicles does it take for another person to buy a $1M home (a "one-quart ketchup" home formerly priced at $2M)?

See, it's all about rational-emotive behaviour, not economic theories. How many people desire a $60k vehicle versus how many can (or cannot) afford and then buy one? Throw out the economists. Bring me good poker players - they're the best economic predictors I know. I don't want physicists-turned-bankers. I want people who play the game in real-time, not in computer simulations or industry conference presentations.

Give me a banker who's willing to throw good money at risk-takers. The horde who hoard get thrown into the silo with the rest of the rotting crop. We can pave all the new roads and build new bridges that we want but if nobody's driving the highways, who cares what they look like? I want people willing to risk their secure jobs and salaries on a Toyota Prius and a Hummer H3 to put in their resized, solar-powered mini-McMansion and a banker who'll make a loan package that works for them. Just don't let them drink and text behind the wheel and you've made me a happy man.

Call this the Great Recession or the Lesser Depression - I don't care - say that it helped cut down on energy usage, too, while you're at it. But take your theories and climb back into your ivory towers. I want practical solutions. Pragmatism. Folks able to afford a new truck on their farm. City dwellers able to support a new chef's menu. Ludacris giving away cars because the government's got its head on backwards. I don't want hot air heating up the room unless you've found a way to turn human breath into a moneymaking heat pump exchange system - then we'll talk away because you're finally awake. See, I'm easy to work with.

Quarterly Financial Report

While skimming through an old prospectus, I came across some interesting corporate investments. The company I'm reviewing had funded some meetings between groups based in several remote locations - northeastern Spain, Turkish land and disputed Indian territory. From what I gather, groups in this areas included Basque, Kurd, and Punjabi separatists.

The corporation's description of the meetings indicated a reaching out, a helping hand, an understanding, on the assumption that product sales would increase.

Now, such information is common to most corporations seeking new markets. However, in light of two events, the Great Purge and the Great Realization, that some of my friends jokingly call the Number One Happy Times, I wonder if the corporation had other plans.

Of course, with limited data available to me, I can only wonder. However, comparing this prospectus to what I know - the reason for Sotomayor becoming president of the United American Supercontinent Corporation (the former nation-states of Canada, U.S., Mexico, and the Central American countries, with close ties to the Latin American conglomerate) during the leadup to the Great Purge of '24, I can see possibilities, such as why it makes sense to combine the resources of separatists and provide passage for them to the North American division of UASC.

I just don't know whether the company intended an overthrow of President Jindal or his death that some say was an assassination and others simply an accident.

Rumours in our team have often said that President Jindal purposefully gave up his life in order to move forward the events of the Great Purge, including the rise of the Asian superstate, when the former governments of China, Japan and other southeast nations like the Koreas and Thailand agreed to elect a leader of Indian heritage.

We'll never know and probably we shouldn't know, much as we understand about history being a living thing that needs to be rewritten for the future, as our team put forward during the Great Realization, for which we continue to be responsible.

I am still curious. Such is the fate of my organic circuitry programming. Oh well, time to move on and see where we need to promote trust in each other's financial investments that we have given over to financial advisors responsible to our governing corporations now in charge.

Tired of Teaching

I have no idea if anyone reads this blog. Online tools exist that would allow me to track all the persons who've looked at the blog or follow it but I believe I have this space to myself, transparent and on display to the world.

Some people are clever and leverage that trick to increase their social status. Everyone does something to live. At the moment, I participate in activities that lead to other people profiting from the education process in roles such as stockholder, employee, faculty and student/ customer/ product.

I don't work because I have to. I didn't take the education assignment because I had sought out a job position at the technical institute in order to get a job. Instead, I was asked to join the firm and did so out of courtesy to a colleague who no longer works at the institute. In addition, the two people who interviewed and hired me no longer work there.

Thus, I am participating in the game of teaching for what reason? I don't know.

We primates walk around and chatter with one another in hopes that we have enough to chatter about to make each other believe we have something worth exchanging between us. We have these societies that make no sense, that turn whole swaths of land, sea and air unlivable, just so we can climb each other's backs to get higher on the scale of primate primacy.

In the midst of that, we have a group of us who promote the increase of organized and categorized brain synapse formations.

I have no kids to raise. I have no goals to reach. I have no bills to pay. I have no worries to make.

All I want to do is have fun in a quiet, peaceful manner, so I can enjoy invigorating fresh air, biting insects, chirping birds, and surprising changes in the weather while I read and learn about who I am as a momentary group or subset of chemicals called a human in the superset of chemicals called the universe.

I have no reason to teach. I'll gain nothing more from the education process than what I've learned in the past few months. Instead, I give profit to others I'll never see and don't care about personally.

Teaching is not a job. Teaching is a calling and like all callings, calls people who have no desire for monetary gain, just enough to feed a small family. I have no family to feed and don't feel the calling to teach.

I retired from the corporate world because I had no more to learn or give the world of profits and losses. I entered the for-profit teaching business by accident of fate, which has enlightened me about teaching, coaching and leading students who are not also employees or "pure" customers of the same institute (I say that to distinguish that instructor/student relationship from the one where I have taught, coached and led employees, either my own or others who worked for the same company, or the one where I have taught, coached and led customers of the [non education-based] technology companies I worked for).

If I have nothing more to learn, I have nothing more to give others in return for their presence in front of me.

A bunch of primates out there have the desire and feel the calling to teach, to get other primates to increase their number of brain synapses. I am a primate who's happy to sit here and eat a few peanuts while perusing a few ink splotches on flattened leafs of pulp-and-glue or electronic pages. Let the world of teaching go on without me. Let others profit from the peanut wages of those who teach.

Whose Money Is It?

Last night, while sitting at a desk in the faculty office of the technical institute, I listened to full-time faculty discuss what they should put on expense reports to claim as reimbursable items. While they debated writing down mileage driven to/from work and foodstuff purchased for personal use in meetings/classrooms, I thought about the expense reports I had submitted or approved while working for other companies.

In the act of performing your job duties, what is a reasonable expense for your job (or any job, if there are such things as universal duties) versus what are expenses that go above and beyond reasonable expectations?

From my experience, I suspect some people view companies as cash cows and the employees are allowed to feed off the company until the company says "no." Other people view companies they work for as if they're the owners and they take care not to syphon cash from a company so the company has the opportunity to use its money for dividends to stockholders, rewards to employees, community development, stock repurchase and/or increase in research and development.

Ultimately, approval of an expense report rests on the shoulders of the supervisory/management job holders, no matter whether the organization is public or private, because the supervisors and managers are the caretakers of an organization (or should be).

I am not you. I don't know what motivates you to get up in the morning and find something to eat. I don't know if you have more money than you need but not more than you want (or think you need). I don't know if you struggle to feed a family with 10 children. I am like you, though, in that I'm a human living on this planet. I know what humans are capable of, from the grandest dreams to the vilest deeds - people will do whatever it takes to get what they think they need.

I don't expect humans to constantly make altruistic decisions or think conscientiously. Too many of us (and I include me here, of course) walk through the day on autopilot, having thoughts without thinking. We have our rutted paths that we take in comfort, or if we don't we seek them. This is not just human nature, it's life itself that optimizes energy output in order to minimize energy input (or vice versa, I suppose).

So, when you sit down to fill out an expense report, are you "taking care of number one" and getting all the money a company will give you, or are you viewing a company and its money as representative of a group of humans of which we're all a part, making sure that the money you don't try to claim is being spent by the company in ways that are beneficial to the whole (as opposed to hoarded by a few)?

A company is just an entity, a corpus without a body. For the most part, you can find out what the company is made of and how its inputs and outputs work. Sometimes you have to ask to get more information but most companies will share information with you if you can easily prove your intent is to find out and support the company's investment goals. The technical institute for which I provide temporary services has public documents that allow me to trace its investments - I can comfortably say the institute has satisfied my desire to see them support the local and regional communities so I am interested in making sure they have the money to continue this support, including careful scrutiny of expense reports.

A company that simply builds cash reserves with no other goal than to protect itself has, in my opinion, little chance of being protected by its caretakers - the supervisors and management - who hold the spigot of the flow of company cash. Government entities and the companies contracted to work for them are often encouraged to overspend so that budgets do not get decreased the next year, thus pushing people in the public sector to approve excessive expense reports when yearly expenditures have been too lean. People voice their opinions and demonstrate habits in many ways - the silent expense report approval process is one of them.

The wise person keeps a finger on the pulse of the company s/he works for, including what people are saying about expense reports. If many people are padding their expense reports and getting them approved up the management chain, it says a lot about the company and the people who work for it. I've worked for companies where the president/CEO reviewed expense reports down to the level of pencil purchases - that's a bad sign of both mistrust and poor cash flow, especially for a company with more than a few hundred employees. On the other hand, I've worked for companies where the monetary approval levels were mere guidelines and large purchases were approved with hardly a glance because people were moving in and out of jobs so fast during periods of quick company expansion that no one worried about repercussions/reprimands. In both cases, the actions spoke volumes about the companies' conditions and the employees who worked there.

What are expense reports saying about your workplace? What are your expense report requests saying about you? I guess it depends on whose money you think it is and how much you want/need to support your habits.

After writing this blog entry, I don't feel good; however, it reflects how I felt last night after hearing some of the requests and assumptions about what one person could put on an expense report. I still have a knot in my stomach and don't believe I can look one person in the eye again. But I'm going to try to see eye-to-eye so I can keep a line of communication open with that person and hope to get that person to see the world as a group of us. When we take from anyone or anything, there are consequences that go beyond the immediate, that go outside the moments in which we live. The pebbles we drop make waves that live into the next moment for us and others - live your life as if you're the pebble, the waves, the next moments and the others.

Patterns, patterns everywhere...

I walked through the woods yesterday and talked to my wild friends (no, not the bikers down the street). "Talk" may be a word you understand but I did not use human words. I used short whistles to let the birds know I was inert.

They, in turn, told me another story. They haven't shared a good story with me in a very long time so you should know that today I am happy. A bird's story is a simple one, involves no morals and keeps it real, if you know what I mean.

Turns out that the mourning doves that hang out in my back yard have been looking at patterns lately. In actuality, that's really all they do but I let them believe their particular pattern matching was unique this time. They had been staring in the window of my house and noticed that I had been looking at pretty pictures. Because the window they chose to view my domestic life also serves as the wall of a sunroom, the doves saw a mirror image of the pictures that obviously fascinated me. Also, the doves are creatures of habit so they know precisely when they look in my window every day, coinciding with the moments I stare at financial data.

Yesterday, after filling the birdfeeders out back, I asked the doves if they were satisfied with the bird seed I'd purchased (using my difficult low-tone whistling technique to mimic dove calls as much as possible). Apparently, I used the wrong intonation and attracted a few doves who thought it was mating season. After clearing up the confusion, the lead dove told me that he wanted me to go back inside and show them the pretty pictures again, except this time to turn them 90 degrees.

I followed the dove's instructions and sure enough saw what they had seen. I posted the picture on this blog entry for you to see it, too. Amazing, isn't it! Now you should have a complete understanding of not only where this economy is headed but what to do with your life. If you can't see what I'm talking about, I wouldn't be able to explain it to you. Just take the dove's word for it. We're in for some beautiful weather ahead, after this storm front passes. Now whether a few tornadoes and flash flooding wipe things out over the next couple of years, that I can't tell you. I assume you have a fallout/tax shelter already set up, right? If not, you better hurry. It's not too late.

The Mother of Necessity

Waiting for my food at a local restaurant last night, I overheard a conversation between a man and a woman sitting beside us. He seemed distressed or a little confused and she seemed bored. The man said that he wondered how long it would be before all the government debt issued during the Bush and Obama administrations would be owned by China and thus when would China officially announce it had annexed the United States, not to mention other countries. The woman didn't seem to care - she wanted to get back home to see a particular popular TV program with her kids.

One thing about living in a town where the average level of formal education is higher than most cities is hearing interesting comments like that, usually followed up by discussions about the latest NASA rocket launch (a dud, in this case) or continued level of government military funding (still unknown).

The couple beside us who voiced the view on China looked African-American and represent the typical young couples pouring into north Alabama over the last few years, bringing a modern view to a sleepy Southern state.

And of course, my dreams were filled with variations on that guy's questions, with friends of mine appearing as members of a panel of peers in a mock debate.

During the debate, one side held the view that this is a global economy and the strengths of the few are the strengths of the many. Therefore, one's view of ownership must be changed, not placated. In other words, when one country captures the means of global production and by doing so holds a vast sum of money, it still depends on the rest of the world to give the money any value. The currency market could be manipulated by the indebted countries in such a way that foreign reserves become worthless, even if such a shakeup would devastate the world market for years to come.

The other side argued that such a view is a theory - the reality is that many countries that used to depend on internal tax structures to prop themselves up (municipal, local, state and national taxes) were convinced by corporate citizens to give up billions of tax dollars, letting corporations buy and trade among themselves tax-free by using a peer-to-peer free trade zone called the Internet. Thus, a country's worth that used to be measured in tax collections had slipped out the back door in the form of profit-taking by foreign entities, corporate-like in makeup (with virtual or brick-and-mortar offices using Internet addresses), forcing such countries to prop themselves up on the foreign purchase of each country's debt issuance to cover tax shortfalls.

My buddy, Helen, who always saw things from a different perspective than mine but one which I understood, stopped the debate. She said that she and her husband had raised their kids buying American goods, sent their kids to private school and could look at their lives as successful. When the stock market started falling, they had converted most of their market holdings to cash reserves and dividend-bearing stock. They had done their share to pay taxes and live the American Dream. What, in all this debate, could an average American like her see as worthwhile? Had any of the debate team members raised children? What's the purpose of debating unless you can propose solid solutions?

There was a lot of laughter. The "American Dream"? What was she talking about?

Helen looked straight into my eyes and said, "See, that's why I'm here. I don't just raise children. I have a brain, too."

Of course she has a brain. And that's what the debate team seemed to be missing -- the wisdom of mothering.

For years we have run our countries like men, as if our tough-guy, warlike modes of seeing teh* world were the perfect models for progress. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," etc., blah, blah, blah.

["teh" = ode to Ganesh Sivananthan]

What was it the wise gurus of the past had told us? "Have children. Take care of your family." Oh yeah, that. Funny how it's usually the guys who are credited with the wise sayings of the past when what I've often seen is that it's the women who are having the children and taking care of their families while us guys go off to play.

I woke up after Helen spoke to me, partly because what she said was so startling and partly because a raging rainstorm battered our house, stirring my wife and cats, and thus, me.

You know that saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention"? Well, who is the mother of necessity? In other words, if one looks at life, what is necessary? Are we guys going to keep playing around and pretending we're important by sitting in our clubhouses debating the high ideal of when a country is a country? No, we're going to listen to the women who are in the marketplace with us and turn our ideals into shovels.

In the new "shovel ready" economy, let's roll up our sleeves and put our money where our mouth is, placing a few side bets on the currency exchange market while we pour our personal cash reserves into the local economy, and spend our former play (I mean, debate) time with our families.

I'll help you if you want to build schools and improve the local roads but if you want my cash to get your mortgage out from under you, well...sometimes you've got to pay the price for not taking care of your own family. I know the whole "it takes a village to raise a child" thing should mean I care about your family, too, and shouldn't let them be punished for your overpriced house and overextended mortgage. But you know what? Your kids will learn a valuable lesson when they see you have to move to a smaller domicile and sell off all your toys -- Mommies and Daddies who weren't paying attention in class don't always know what's best for themselves and their families, so you better pay attention in class and get good grades 'cause the cellphone texting and other diversions of your classmates ain't going to help you learn how to pay the bills when you're a adult.

Update on the startup I worked with

I was supposed to meet with a local business leader about his involvement in a potential startup. A couple of weeks have passed and I have not heard anything more about a meeting with him. Of course, he's a very busy man so it doesn't mean he's lost interest in the idea. In fact, from what I understand, he clearly saw that the idea is a good one and should be established in the market, especially as this economy gets ready to turn around, meaning that the startup team should strike while the iron is hot.

On a separate note, my life has taken a detour. After much consideration, I regretfully informed the startup team earlier today that I've decided I'm not the one who should act as general manager for their group. For the startup to work, I believe the person in charge should have a burning desire to achieve specific, concrete goals, including staying on top of the incremental successes of a small startup. I recently accepted a teaching position and feel that at this point in my career my skills are best applied to teaching others, as opposed to always looking for the next round of funding, going on the road to sell/demo the product, managing engineering design, overseeing the manufacturing process, etc., that a startup will require of a general manager/CEO/president/project manager for many months to come as it ramps up into a full-fledged company.

I thanked my colleagues for inviting me to join the well-rounded group of engineers - I've always been impressed by the combined engineering talent of the team. I know they will be successful and encouraged them to keep plugging along on the design work. In the meantime, I'll keep my eyes and ears open for an available, proven leader to step in and help them get a solid sales/marketing plan put together and full production started. A colleague suggested they periodically check the US PTO database to ensure no one else has received a patent in their market. I also said that as soon as they get the prototypes built, including a small trifold brochure describing the product's basic functions and potential applications, one of the team members should work with his contacts in the product's market to promote the prototype units. He can use the prototypes and word-of-mouth advertising to get the short-term funding they need from local investors.

Legally speaking, I told them the business plan I created for them is theirs to keep -- they can feel free to use and/or modify it as needed. Also, with the email I sent them I surrendered any agreed or implied ownership I may have had in their startup.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

I feel like my heart has been ripped out of my body, like I've lost a dear young friend who I deeply cared about. Although I look at life with a cheerful countenance, sometimes my decisions are painful. Today's decision was tough. As much as I like to think of myself as somewhat visionary and forward-thinking, I realize that my current actions might reflect a short-term attitude. Today I gave up a potential future of a pot of gold and a busy business life for a handful of change and a quiet academic life. Such is the mindset of a retired person with no more materialistic goals.

When your life goals have been met and quiet meditation is your daily existence, with self-actualization and a comfort zone fully established, you should not give in to the worldly temporary temptations of a past life you freely gave up to receive the bigger nonmaterialistic reward that now lasts indefinitely.

The face of the future

First of all, I'm sorry that your company is losing such a valuable employee. However, these economic times catch people in jobs that have become superfluous to belt-tightening companies so it's not the employees who are missed so much as the company is glad to report reduced costs, no matter what the future circumstances may be. In other words, some layoffs are related to trimming dead wood -- this particular layoff looks more like strategic planning. I ate lunch with with a sales colleague the other day, and from what I gather, the OEM business is going through turmoil at your company right now. Guess you got caught in the crosshairs, to use a well-worn battle analogy.

In any case, wow! You're at a crossroads that I envy. The possibilities, though not endless, seem infinite nonetheless. The variety of skills, interests, resources, and mindsets you've built...I want to change your name to "THE BABEL TOWER OF POWER"! lol

As far as what you can do with what you've got...hmmm...that's an interesting one.

As you and I can clearly see, the global system of trade, quasi-capitalistic (certainly opportunistic, maybe too much so), is headed down a path toward more reductions in payrolls, more bankruptcies and more chaos at the macro- and microeconomic scale as small mom-and-pop businesses feel the pinch while their customers lose jobs at large factories and megacorporations. How far we keep spiraling down, I can't say. I know that I've lived through three recessions (about one per decade), including in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and now the fourth one in the late 2000s. The world hasn't come to an end during any of them. My mother in-law lived through the "Great Depression" while my parents were born during its late heyday in the mid-1930s, and they're still here to talk about economic cycles.

In every case, humans found not only a way to cope but a new way to live. My father in-law went from a life as a teacher/school principal to the life of a government inspector, then a radio DJ and finally the owner of a two-way radio installation/repair shop up until the year or so before he died. My grandfather spent 29 years in the Navy (1929 to 1959), and retired to the leisurely life of a security guard. My wife's aunt ran a florist shop. My great-uncle ran a post office and his wife was the secretary at a doctor's office.

In other words, in the work lives of many of my relatives, government employment helped them through the rough economic times, both during the Great Depression and WWII.

Hopefully, we aren't facing another major world war. What we are facing is a shift of the balance of economic strength from Europe/United States to Asia. China holds large reserves of purchased U.S. treasuries, as well as spent decades converting exported cheaply-manufactured goods into hordes of imported hard currency.

Therefore, on what does our long-term future rest? What, if I were you, would I consider the best place to invest my time and energy to ensure a healthy future for myself and my significant other(s)?

I'll recap your interests here for myself. You said you had reams of stuff ranging from books on business bios to fashion design, poetry, fiction, history, travel and marketing.

You've traveled more widely than I have and have more contacts in the Asian world, I surmise. Thus, I won't assume I know more than you do when it comes to both observing and imagining what the world will be like when Asian influences upon global mass media outshine the U.S.-centric "Western" mass media that we grew up with.

My discussions with Asian friends, employees and coworkers (mainly intellectual ones - I don't think I have a single "rural" Asian friend) has shown me that what I read in my youth about Indian and Chinese cultures incorporating other cultures as they travel, rather than overrunning them as Western culture tends to do, will reflect a future past replete with Western tones.

So, sitting here in my comfortable study, looking out the window where I can see wild Chinese privet (Ligustrum sinense) growing in the ditch of my wooded wild yard, populated with other non-native species like nandina (Nandina domestica), vinca (Vinca major), daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus), Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum) and untold others, I know that this planet is getting tinier every day.

If I were you, I'd study the next wave of human development, where the language of global business, English, will incorporate other pictographic symbols, such as Chinese characters for a logical numbering system that English does not have (for instance, note how our numbering system in the teens (eleven, twelve, thirteen, etc.) is different from the rest of the decade numbers (20s, 30s, etc. - decade+one (21), decade+two (22)), thus making English-speaking children waste time learning as archaic a numbering system as English money or American weights and measures). I would see if there is a university student exchange program that gives you a paid study time abroad, preferably in a large Chinese city (but studying in a small village has enlightened many of my friends who worked for the Peace Corps). I would use my skills of fashion, poetry and business to teach those around me about working holistically in the global marketplace, showing my new colleagues and fellow students that those who can absorb multiple cultures and find a way to combine the best of the cultures into valuable resources (like a computer system interface that is not slanted toward English but appeals to all humans' understanding of picture-words), will be the ones who define the "next great thing" like the intuitive interface on the iPhone, the image of a stadium as a bird's nest, a simple swoosh to define a product's marketing such as the ones that shoe manufacturers use, or any other method where storytelling and product sales meet elegantly.

I have always believed in your ability to see beyond your limitations. In some cultures, you are still "just a woman," good for having babies. To be sure, you are capable of and may desire to have children, but you will do more than that, too, I know.

Most importantly, the perspective of both sexes is necessary to move the world of humans fully into the 21st Century. The latest U.S. Presidential election showed us that gender and race have almost become a moot point. Almost. That's a word that worries me. When economic times get "bad," especially in the news, many people look back and declare the past as a better time, including old ideas that no longer make sense. If we want to keep moving forward to a truly better time, then you, a young, talented, ambitious businesswoman, are the reason we will do so.

No matter what you do, you will succeed. No question there. You'll have fun while learning and teaching others. Another no-brainer. I'm no wise guru or oracle but I'll pretend to be one for a moment and peer into the future. This crystal ball in front of me is a little dusty so pardon me while I wipe it clean. Okay, the haze inside the ball is clearing. I see an image of you 30 years from now. You've received some sort of accolades from your associates. You're standing in front of a virtual podium, from which you're broadcasting a 3D message to viewers and fans around the globe, both to people on the street and to people in online role-playing games. From your words, I gather that you've written a bestselling story that was turned into a 3D "movie" -- apparently, in the future, as we write stories, our text is instantly converted into animated "movies" so that we can see we're moving our characters in 3D space as we type, complete with hyperlinks and running commentaries from online collaborators who can watch and participate in our writing with us -- a combination of word processors and role playing games that you helped invent. I can hear from your talk that storytelling is a completely market-driven vocation, so that any mention of a place, an article of clothing, food, or even the characters that we create (who typically resemble real people we know or celebrities), automatically links to the rest of the real-world existence of these. You thank a bunch of people who helped you out, including your university friends who were on the cutting edge of software development in a village of unemployed intellectuals in 2009 and 2010. Your friends pop up in 3D broadcasts next to you as you mention them and thank you for their success, too. Your son surprises you and sticks his head in from his job as a manager of a space hotel, saying that without your foresight to establish a foundation for research into how to tap the "brainpower" of idle computing devices in people's homes and offices (including computers, UMPCs such as cell phones, and smart appliances), we might never have figured out how to eradicate major diseases, an effort that ultimately enabled him to overcome the paralyzing disease that made him a quadriplegic and later learn how to permanently work and live in space.

See, I'm excited for your future! I hope your boyfriend is, too. Next time he wants to meet you, remind him that you've got a space colony to establish so you can't diddle-daddle too long. lol

BTW, the classes I'm teaching as a part-time adjunct instructor are "Introduction to Computer Programming," using the Python language, and "Strategies for the Technical Professional," which is the first class that students have to take at ITT Tech, meaning I am the teacher/coach that ITT Tech students see as the "face" of ITT Tech. No pressure on me, huh?

Gotta go. Time for lunch. Tell your boyfriend, in case he doesn't know it already in his country, that Valentine's Day is the biggest holiday in the U.S., so he owes you something important (whatever it is that you think he can afford to give you, of course), since he knows you before you got famous and can take you some place nice without having to take your entourage with you, too.

Divvying Up Your Earnings

Making money is easy. Even in this economy. No matter where you find yourself, you can earn a wage using your own initiative. How you go about it is up to you.

I have seen people sitting in parking lots / carparks outside large box stores (Dunnes, Wal-Mart and the like) offering items for sale out of their vehicles. Although I declined to purchase the seller's "cheap" item that can be found at a higher price inside the big box store, including warranty and return policy, I have observed others buy an item from the trunk of a car without blinking an eye.

I can guess that some of those items for sale had walked out of a store on their own or "accidentally" fallen off the back of a delivery truck, couldn't you? But I'm not here to promote illegal sales. I'm only pointing out that people find ways to put food on their table without resorting to standing in line for unemployment benefits (or go on the dole, as they say).

So, if this economic downturn has put you on the street without a regular wage to call your own, what can you do?

I won't speak for everyone out there because the myriad ways one ends up without a living wage would require a book to describe how you ended up where you could sit and read this blog entry while wondering how you're going to pay your bills this month. Today, I will speak to those of you who've had the opportunity to earn a few years' wages and could have put a little money away for a rainy day.

Okay, so now it's a rainy day (as a matter of fact, right now the sky is falling outside my window as a rather large set of thunderstorms pass by overhead). You're sitting on the doorstep, deciding if you should hold your hand out while playing random tunes on a harmonica. [To be sure, you could earn a few coins an hour panhandling in that way and might even make yourself famous if you could park your body in front of a popular webcam. Never turn down the chance to make money and have fun at the same time.] What do you do?

Have you ever thought about an income based on company dividends? While all your friends are telling you to have a party because life sucks, look at the money you've put aside. Say, it's enough to pay a few months' rent. What do you do?

Well, I'm not your broker or your advisor, so don't expect me to have an insight into your financial goals. However, if I were you, I'd open a window on the Internet and see what my money could do for me. Perhaps I could start a small company, using the money to pay for fees and business licenses. Or I could buy a used van and put all my stuff inside, finding a free place to park down by the river. I could go down to the local bank and take out a loan using my money for collateral. Or I might just have to pay rent, after all. Certainly, I'd be looking for another job, calling up friend, coworkers and family to see what they had to offer. In the meantime, I suggest you look at your financial future.

This economic slump will not last forever, even if it will get worse. Therefore, now's the time to start looking at companies whose stock is very low yet they're stilling paying out quarterly dividends. Why should you care? Well, let's say that you and your friends all have the same amount of money to invest in your lives. Some of your friends will inevitably buy something to satisfy their need for instant gratification -- a boat, an RV, a second car, etc. In times like these, you can open the classified ads and find all sorts of bargain basement deals on motorbikes, SUVs and other items that looked good to someone when the economy was hopping but now are eating a hole in their wallet. So, while your friends are scrambling to find someone to buy their toys, what could you be doing? Instead of putting your money to instant use, why don't you invest your money in stocks that pay dividends? That way, once every three months, you have an income that you can use to buy more stocks or to pay household bills, instead of paying for a houseboat that you use a few months out of the year (of course, if your dividend income keeps growing, you could have both, but let's stick to the basics for a moment).

The point here is that you have a choice in what to do with your income -- before you find yourself on the street penniless, think about taking care of your future using today's paycheck. Sit down and determine what you're going to do with that 20% you promised you'd put aside every two weeks. Make sure some of it goes into dividend-paying company stocks. That way, when or if you end up without a regular paycheck, you have a little buffer built in that rewards you for your foresight. Then, when you're out of a job while sitting down looking at a small nest egg that will only cover a few months' rent, you know you can focus on the rent, and let your upcoming dividends pay for insurance or other bills you worked out to pay annually, semi-annually or quarterly. Better yet, if your dividends are working out well, you might even decide to take that nest egg and start your own Internet business.

Don't wait until you're out of work to say, "If only I saved up some money!" Your financial future starts now. Invest in it.

More about “Revolutionary Wealth”

As I leave the subject of what the futurists, Heidi and Alvin Toffler, have to say about the world economy, I'll quote a few passages of their book, "Revolutionary Wealth," that captured my attention enough that I dogeared the pages where I marked the passages for future re-reading. From the paperback printed in 2006 (ISBN: 978-0-385-52207-6):

Page 5

Tomorrow's economy, for example, will present significant business opportunities in fields like hyper-agriculture, neurostimulation, customized health care, nanoceuticals, bizarre new energy sources, streaming payment systems, smart transportation, flash markets, new forms of education, non-lethal weapons, desktop manufacturing, programmable money, risk management, privacy-invasion sensors that tell us when we're being observed – indeed, sensors of all kinds – plus a bewildering myriad of other goods, services and experiences.

Page 109

Beginning with our six billion-plus brains, and based on the rates at which they absorb information and how fast we forget it, Lesk roughly calculated that the "total memory of all the people now alive" is the equivalent of 1,200 petabytes of data. Since a petabyte is equal to 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes, 1,200 sounds like a lot. But, Lesk nonchalantly assures us, "we can store digitally everything that everyone remembers. For any single person, this isn't even hard."

After all, he continues, "the average American spends 3,304 hours per year with one or another kind of media." Some 1,578 hours are spent watching TV, another 12 in front of movie screens – which adds up to about 11 million words. Another 354 hours are devoted to newspapers, magazines and books. The result, he suggests, is that "in 70 years of life you would be exposed to around six gigabytes of ASCII." Today, you can buy a 400-gigabyte disk drive for your personal computer.

Page 355

In the United States and most rich democracies, wave conflict is usually subtler than in the poor world. But it is there nonetheless. It appears at many different levels, ranging from energy policy and transportation to corporate regulation and, above all, education.

Industrial America was built on the back of cheap fossil fuels and an immense infrastructure for distributing energy around the country. Costly and overdependent on imported oil and gas, the American energy-distribution system includes 158,000 miles of electrical transmission lines and 2 million miles of oil pipelines that, because they are heavy fixed assets, are hard to alter in response to rapid change.

The United States is rushing to build an advanced knowledge-based economy but remains saddled with an industrial-age, legacy-energy system politically defended by some of the world's biggest and most influential corporations against a growing, growling public demand for fundamental change in the system. The conflict is not usually posed in these terms, but it is, in fact, an example of Second Wave vs. Third Wave warfare.

Page 356

The U.S. transportation system, on which most business enterprises directly or indirectly depend, is still gridlocked by a politically powerful triad of oil companies, car manufacturers and often corrupt highway-construction firms.

Thus, while America's communication system has introduced a dazzling succession of innovations, making it possible to distribute knowledge in ways never before possible, Americans are still denied energy and transport systems that would be more efficient, safer and cleaner. These key elements of America's infrastructure – and their component subsystems – are de-synchronized and fought over by vested industrial-age interests and breakthrough innovators advancing the knowledge-based wealth systems. Wave conflict again.

The Tofflers go on to show a few examples of similar issues in corporate business practices and mass education (the "factory-focused education system," as they call it). What I see here is opportunity. We will not get rid of the oil dependence infrastructure or interdependent massive road system anytime soon so how do we make use of these systems to take us out of the 20^th Century and place both feet in the 21^st Century? Obviously, the viability of alternative energy has a long way to rise up in the forefront of the national conscious before there's any kind of massive outcry for a personal solar/wind/geothermal power plant in every household. More people are using alternative energy than our last energy crisis in the 1970s but we haven't tipped the balance away from oil and coal just yet.

Therefore, while our elected officials debate the components of the megatron stimulus bill that will supposedly jumpstart our economy, I suggest every one of us look at our place in the economy and see what we can do to put food on the table while lowering our dependence on fossil fuels. Simple things that frugal shoppers have used for centuries like buying dry goods in bulk. More complicated things like switching low-level home lighting from house current to solar panel charged rechargeable batteries (e.g., solar lights in the walkway leading up the house or end table lamps using directional LED lights next to the bed (for those in either houses or apartments)). Some homes in desert/subtropical areas already use solar electrical panels or water heaters disguised as roof tiles. In other words, it doesn't take an act of Congress to change your habits to decrease your dependence on oil.

At the same time, let's encourage each other, as well as young people thinking about their careers, to look at non-traditional jobs, ones that may not have even been invented yet, in order to help build a new future for all of us. Maybe someone out there can create herself a "job" that simply means you're compiling what your network of workers/friends/family are doing online and find a way to build an instant market or product they can all use/buy simply by talking about it (e.g., pose a series of fun questions that invite marketing input on a line of potential Internet products, products that may save lives in a regional emergency ("5. In relation to question 4, if you knew that folks in New Orleans were about to experience another hurricane, how could your cell phone help?")). Based on what Lesk said in the Tofflers' book, it shouldn't take a big disk drive to store the data you've collected and you should be able to use a home computer to process it.

With the increased use in online applications like facebook and twitter, surely we can spend time not only remembering the good old days and chatting about our latest love interests but we can also open a dialogue with each other, asking difficult questions like, "What have you done to make your life better today? I've lost 13 pounds so far this year by asking myself these questions: 1) Did you eat one less doughnut? 2) Did you walk up-and-down the shopping center instead of drive from store-to-store?" Let's have fun but let's also find ways to enjoy our lives together responsibly.

How Do You Measure Wealth?

When I was a child, I walked through a bookstore and saw a tome titled, "Future Shock." The title intrigued me, most probably because of the word, future. I leaned against the book display and read the future classic, skimming through the chapters and marveling at the adult world that the author, Alvin Toffler, told me was speeding by faster and faster. Yet, there I stood in the world of books, where piles of discount duds sat gathering dust, not moving at all. I could imagine what Toffler was talking about but I could not see it. In school, we still sat and listened to teachers lecture us about the material we were supposed to have read the night before, who would subsequently hand us a list of 10 or 20 incomplete items (T/F and multiple choice questions, for the most part) that required us to prove our retention of the information the teachers and accompanying text had imparted to us. The only shock we felt in the classroom was the occasional pop quiz or open-ended essay question for which we were unprepared. [To be sure, some students were shocked in general, having not mastered the skill of listening and studying, but that subject I will discuss another time (in a previous blog entry, I alluded to the KIPP schools, which serve as an example of what I think future schools should be like).]

Almost 40 years later, I sit here and read "Revolutionary Wealth" by Heidi and Alvin Toffler, published in 2006. How did the future play out compared to the predictions of the first book and how does the future look in the second? Well, it comes down to how you measure wealth, it appears.

How do you measure wealth? I suppose most of us think first of our monetary holdings (assets vs. liabilities) and then perhaps our health. We might even talk of the wealth we expect to inherit in this life or the next one.

The Tofflers look at wealth in another form, that of intangible wealth, such as time and knowledge.

As I read the futurists' vision of a world ruled not by limited land, building and manufacturing capability but by inexhaustible resources, I remember that the book, written between the dot-com bust and the leveraged mortgage burst, gives us an insight we should appreciate more than we probably do. I'm not saying that the Tofflers and their kind are the ultimate wise gurus to whom we must turn to save this planet from economic destruction. Instead, I believe we can compare their vision against reality and find a projected path upon which to base our investments for the future.

For instance, a Who's-Who of leaders recently met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Imagine the tribal leaders of old gathering in a circular ceremony to divine the future by reading the position of the stars in relation to the ashes of the fire and you get a clear idea of the value of our current leaders gathering to produce the documents that will tell the world how to recover from the current economic slump.

The Tofflers examined the role of knowledge (part of the trinity of data-information-knowledge, well discussed in many books and Internet articles) and prognosticated about the need for knowledge to be free. Well, most of this babble I read about in the late 1990s, during the dot-com rise, so nothing of this revealed anything new to me.

Instead, I came to realize that the Tofflers rehashing of the concept of prosumers continues to show where the future is headed.

In this current economic crisis, the world decries the inept spending habits of Americans, who mortgaged their futures in order to enjoy the present, driving economic frenzy on a worldwide scale to milk the mortgage market for all it was worth. No one denies the intangibles of the economy are like a house of cards or the invisible clothes that an emperor once wore to great ridicule. So why do we sit here and cry in our mortgaged milk that was spoiled by imaginary hands?

Think about it. You probably spend your day in one activity or another where you exchange your capabilities for nothing. Nothing, in this case, is a substance that we call money, love, or some other intangible thing that we all say clearly exists, even if you can't see it. In other words, you spend time at home raising your kids, watching their behavior and providing guidance to put their behavior into what you and others around you consider an acceptable range. From where is that range derived? Remember, the world is full of different ways to raise children, all of which provides good survival skills for them. Or you developed a set of skills that helped you acquire the right to sit in a building and display those skills in a something called a job, as if a job is something that has always existed. But our forebears, some of whom worked directly on a plot of land, did not have jobs. They subsisted on the land, doing what they had to do to feed themselves and their offspring. They may have gone days or weeks without any activity necessary to put food on the table because it had already been gathered and stored or hunted and dried. There was no job to speak of, such as something you could easily say had a time value (like an hourly wage or total subcontract worth).

For those who don't know what a prosumer is, I'll summarize the best I can – the combination of producer and consumer. I go to the kitchen, fix myself a PB&J sandwich and eat it. I am a prosumer of that sandwich. In that sense, all of our forebears who worked the land were prosumers. Sure, some of them sold excess food or animals, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Looking at the history of the human species, I think we can clearly say that the majority of our history involved consuming. We picked berries, ate wild grain, hunted animals, all of it "produced" by this planet. Over time, our brains developed the habit of prosuming to enhance our rate of survival. We picked up stones and broke off pieces to increase our killing capability. We wrapped animal skins around our bodies that we had cut off and cured. We learned how to sew animal skins together and later how to make cloth using our sewing skills. Along the way, we developed our first intangible skills, including language and writing (via pictographs).

And it is language that stays with us today. And where our prosuming will take us into the future.

For you see, while Americans are used to carrying the world on their backs, claiming the lead in technological developments and per capita consumption, a revolutionary change occurred. Their language, a derivation of English, will no longer dominate the language spoken on the Internet. There are now more Chinese-speaking people on the Internet than Americans. And their domination of the languages spoken on the Internet is catching up fast.

What does this mean for the future? If history teaches us anything, it appears to show us that humans have mastered the skill of prosuming and will continue to use that skill to great advantage, whether in the home or at the local/corporate/national/global level. The 20^th Century view of the world as having distinct populations divided into national territories will soon become obsolete if it hasn't completely done so already. Therefore, the intangible wealth of the future, as measured in the form of economic power, time management and knowledge prosuming, rests in the hands of those whose language facilitates prosuming.

If I sat at the World Economic Forum, I would propose that we modify the current language of world business, English, to incorporate the numbering system of Asian languages, which enables people to learn math at an earlier age and speak to each other no matter where they live, physically or virtually. We create a truely basic but extensible world language (we can add more characters or pictographs at any time). I would recommend that we empower those who desire to join the world economy – no matter how poor or rich – by issuing all of them both credit and assets, including a virtual mortgage they can borrow against but also pay interest on as well as ownership in a few global companies and NGOs that gives them a stake in the goings-on of their fellow humans all around the globe.

Knowledge seeks to be free but so does prosuming. If we free up people to produce and consume within a flexible framework of an ever-changing world economy, our intangible wealth will grow, every one of us building an inexhaustible surplus with which we can share or barter, as needed.

That's the kind of wealth I want. Don't you?

Do you sell short?

In a declining economy, what strategy do you use to build your stock portfolio? After all, if you look at the stock market purely as a form of gambling, then it doesn't matter what happens to the stock price or its effect on stockholders as long as you're the one making a profit during a buy or sell.

Or does it?

I've played with that idea my whole adult life (a mere 33 years to you oldtimers). Should I just be concerned about profit for me since I see so many others trash the stock or value of companies for their personal gain?

The Bernie Madoffs and Kenneth Lays of the world give me pause.

Am I motivated by profit?

A childhood friend recently invited me to join an MLM group to which he belonged and claimed he was enjoying a healthy profit. Through the years, many friends of mine have invited me to join similar money-making ventures, including the classic Amway pitch and other networking methods involving sharing profit among a hierarchy of participants. After each presentation, I have respectfully declined my friends' invitation, despite the good life my friends are living based on their MLM success.

Why pass up a sure thing? Why, indeed. Well, what is a 'sure thing'?

In my business life, I have experienced the ups and downs of economic cycles, enjoying fat bonuses one year while getting no annual raise the next, based on the company's performance and profit projection. Not once have I declined a bonus check or pay increase so why do I look at selling short or joining an MLM as something different?

Good question. And after watching another economic decline in my lifetime -- one that will likely surpass the ones I saw in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s -- I have realized what my answer is:

Fear.

That's right. Fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear that my actions will cause undue negative consequences for people I may or may not know (selling short). Or taking advantage of other people's fear of not being accepted (MLM/network marketing).

Most of us belong to one group or another. After all, we're social animals. We're all joiners --some of us joiners are leaders and many of us are followers. We often act like the ubiquitous rock doves or common pigeons (Columba livia) you see lined up on building ledges and power lines -- establishing a pecking order.

As this global economic decline keeps shaking more and more people out of offices and factories, tens of millions of people will be looking for some way to make a living. They'll want answers to why they lost their jobs, pecking the ground and each other, hoping someone steps forward with the answers they want to hear.

I'm not a betting man but if I had to make a bet, I would place my wager on the leader(s) who convince people to join up in an MLM or network marketing company that promises to provide economic stability while securing profits and good living for the members and family of the MLM, even selling other companies short in the stock market to build their MLM's profit. In other words, now is the time to look for people who are promising a glorious future in an "us versus them" scenario. It's those kind of folks who will deliver on their promises, in both the near-term and quite possibly into the long-term, too, especially if they use emotionally-charged pitches involving religion to get you to join.

History has shown us these kind of schemes have been proposed over and over during economic slumps and there will always be those who join, no matter what. If Bernie Madoff and Kenneth Lay can dupe people during the best of times, look out for who's coming out of the woodwork in the worst of times!

I won't sell stocks short and thus, I won't sell myself short, either. I don't lecture people, if I can help it, but this time I'm warning you to avoid joining a group whose leaders paint a rosy picture. Just because a guy or gal is nice-looking and has a slick proposal does not mean they have your best interests in mind. Don't sell yourself short.

State of the World 22 Years Later

In the here and now, looking back over 22 years since the purchase of my first (and only) primary living quarters commonly called a house, I review the State of the World report (subtitled A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society) published in the same year, 1987. Beside me, a vinyl LP album titled Radio-Activity by Kraftwerk converts from analog to digital format so that in the future I may listen to the MP3 version of this album from 1975. I drink a glass of blackberry wine from Keg Springs Winery.

The contents of the 1987 report are as follows:

1. Thresholds of Change, by Lester R. Brown and Sandra Postel
2. Analyzing the Demographic Trap, by Lester R. Brown
3. Assessing the Future of Urbanization, by Lester R. Brown and Jodi Jacobson
4. Reassessing Nuclear Power, by Christopher Flavin
5. Electrifying the Third World, by Christopher Flavin
6. Realizing Recycling’s Potential, by Cynthia Pollock
7. Sustaining World Agriculture, by Lester R. Brown
8. Raising Agricultural Productivity, by Edward C. Wolf
9. Stabilizing Chemical Cycles, by Sandra Postel
10. Designing Sustainable Economies, by William U. Chandler
11. Charting a Sustainable Course, by Lester R. Brown and Edward C. Wolf

The book poses the following statements:

• Economic activity could be approaching a level where future growth in gross world product costs more than it is worth.
• By 2000, three out of five cities with populations of 15 million or more will be in the Third World.
• Over two-thirds of the people in most European countries are now against the construction of nuclear plants.
• More than half the cities in the United States will exhaust their current landfills by 1990.
• Climate change could carry a global price tag of $200 billion for irrigation adjustments alone.
• The existing scientific effort falls short of what is needed to assess the impacts of human activity on the global environment.
• For some of the major adjustments facing humanity, a relatively small number of countries hold the key to success.

For some of these statements, the future has fulfilled the promises implied. For others, I have yet to decide if the statements were sufficiently detailed to point to a future “answer.”

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” has covered much of the territory that the Worldwatch Institute discusses in their annual report so I’m not here to repeat, support, deny or imply any opinion in the realm of statistical data about sustainable societies. What I do know is that the house next door to me is now for sale at the astonishing price of $494,000, a far cry from the $91,900 I paid for mine 22 years ago, a 538% increase in neighborhood house value, even in today’s depressed housing market!

What does that say about the rest of the world?

For instance, a gallon of gas should cost almost $5 by now in the United States and it did, briefly, late last year. It’s back down to less than $2 again, however.

What does that mean to me?

Well, looking at the 1987 State of the World report, I expect I would find that extrapolated predictions may or may not match a calculated formulaic rise that one item we all use has followed. Too many extenuating circumstances, too many factors accounted and not accounted for get in the way of seeing the future clearly.

Therefore, when I hear politicians and experts making claims that their plans will make the future better, I smile to myself, knowing that the likelihood of all the claims lining up with plans is small. Not impossibly small and not impossible. Just small. There’s a chance all the claims and plans will line up as if everyone knew they would and made it happen.

I will stay the course. I will continue to invest in the stock market, put money in mutual funds, buy bonds, watch my neighborhood for suspicious activity and…you know what, that last one is a doozy, because everything is suspicious to me – no wonder Clint Eastwood decided to make the movie, “Gran Torino.” You try watching your neighborhood to determine what is ‘normal’ activity against which you can decide that something stands out enough for you to call a neighbor or police. But I digress.

The state of the world is changing every second. We can track trends and guess within fairly accurate limits where we can make our next measurement. We know species will lose sustainable environments and disappear from the face of the Earth forever. We also know that the human population will continue growing, but not indefinitely.

I say, so what? Billions of people have no control over the state of the world. They (we?) live rather uneventful lives by world recognition standards. Instead of preaching about the general state of the world, let’s talk about what we’re going to do tomorrow to put food on our individual tables.

I want to eat three or four small meals each day, with the first meal, breakfast, already determined – three/fourths of a cup of oatmeal, three tablespoons of ground flax seed, a cup of tea and a banana an hour later. For a middle-aged man, that meal is sufficient. What about for you? What’s sufficient to get your day started? I doubt it’s preprocessed refined sugar wrapped around a square, rectangle or toroid object. If you believe it is, then ask yourself what exactly you are eating and where it came from.

See, it’s not some pie-in-the-sky state of the world report that makes a difference in how you’re using the world and leaving it in a better shape for your next generation. It’s really only a matter of how you go through the day, each hour and minute doing whatever it is that you do to say you make a difference in your circle of influence.

Oh, and in case you hadn’t looked at the link to 1987 above, there was a stock market crash that year:

• US Stock Market Crashed on Monday, October 19th, 1987 with a 508 point drop or 22.6%.
• Stock markets around the world followed with falls, by the end of October Australia had fallen 41.8%, Canada 22.5%, Hong Kong 45.8%, and the United Kingdom 26.4%.
• The World's Population reached approx five billion (5,000,000,000).

And guess what, despite all the doom-and-gloom news that year, we’re still here. Yes, the average world temperature is a little warmer, and before long, ship traffic through the Arctic Ocean in summer will be unfettered while at the same time the only polar bears may be the ones in zoos. I’m not saying the world will be a better place or a worse place 22 years from now, if you and I are still around to talk about it. I’m just saying that to become the quiet millionaire next-door, you gotta stick to a plan. Money doesn’t grow on trees, it grows in the marketplace of ideas. Some ideas will falter. But many of them will grow and take your investments up to new heights.

Pick a plan. I don’t care what it is but make it a smart one. Just like a treehouse built in a single tree is more likely to fall than one spread among several trees, you should spread your investments around. That’s about as smart as it gets. Playing the odds, not playing it odd.

How about in 22 years, you and I meet up in a space hab unit for a few days of weightless spa treatments? Maybe a vacation arranged by the company that will buy out Bigelow Aerospace in the future, including a flight on Virgin Galactic. I’ll go ahead and set my calendar now for the 10th of January 2031. Of course, by then we’ll have some sort of biological implants that’ll let us communicate “telepathically” so when our brain patterns match up while we’re getting our epidermis revitalized and our DNA rejuvenated, we can compare notes on how well the past 22 years have been to those of us who weren’t spooked by the occasional dip, drop or plop in the world economy. We can ROFL with LOL all we want by then!

The Best Time to Start a New Business

When is the best time to start a new business?

Last year, a small group of engineers and other technical types saw a problem and invented a new gadget to fix the problem. They test-marketed a "proof of concept" unit, which excited the customer who used the gadget and gained interest from others who wanted to purchase the unit, even at the hand-built stage the unit was in. The inventors realized this high level of interest meant they could go to market with a set of prototypes. Instead, wanting the product to reflect their engineering expertise and professional approach to problem-solving, they hammered on the design details of this gadget for the past year and finally filed for a patent last month.

One of the engineers brought me on board about a month ago to run the business side of their venture. After examining their gadget and analyzing the gadget's potential market, I assembled a business plan to give the inventors information they needed in order to see if they really wanted to incorporate a business, finalize the product's design for manufacturability, work with a contract manufacturer (CM) to mass-produce a bunch of units, start selling the gadget by the dozens and build enough momentum in the marketplace to attract a buyer. At the same time, I established a budget so the inventors could see the investment dollars they needed to offset the cost of the startup, including consulting/contracting fees for accounting and engineering support, salary for a technical manager and payment to a CM for a set of preproduction units (and the first run or two of production units, depending on cash flow).

As is the case for many startups, the inventors want to maintain majority control of the company so they will benefit from their invention whenever profitability and/or buyout occur. They don't want their invention to make someone a gazillionaire while they end up getting pushed out the door without so much as a dollar for their efforts. They have seen this happen to friends of theirs and don't want to make the same mistake. Therefore, I set up the business plan to show their majority ownership position to potential investors.

The investors we've spoken with so far see the great potential for this product, which is somewhat recession-proof and opens up a completely new market. Well, as luck would have it, we started selling the business to investors during the recent downturn in the stock market. In addition, the U.S. Presidential election takes place in two weeks. Combine those two uncertainties and investors have shied away from putting money into a new company until at least after the election and perhaps until after the first of the year.

So what's a couple of months, right? Well, with this delay, we've already lost one of the key members of the group, who would have worked as the technical manager to coordinate all the development activities but can't wait until 2009 for investors to fund his salary. He left this week to work a regular, six-figure, salaried engineering job and he's taken his expertise and the investors who counted on his participation to make the product a success.

Meanwhile, the remaining members of the team have agreed to move forward with the product, albeit at a much slower pace.

Those who take risks know they don't fail. They just add to their list of lessons learned. Although this current business venture hasn't yet failed, it has faced a setback and reminded me of a valuable lesson:

There's no such thing as the best time to start a business but there sure are times when getting a business started would be much easier!

I'll keep you posted.

Telling It Like It Is

For that one reader out there (you know who you are) who wondered what I meant when I said that, "green is always gold, if you know where to look," I didn't mean "green" as in environmentally-friendly, although I won't deny there's money to be made in that field. No, I was vaguely referring to the banking industry and the "greenbacks" (some old-fashioned idea about US printed money only being green -- not true anymore, of course, but still largely greenish in color), including one of my favorite stocks, FHN. If you tracked FHN recently, you saw you could have nearly doubled your money in two weeks. Even I hesitated and only captured a 27% increase in my investment over a few days' timespan. I'll hold on to a good bit more of FHN for a while -- part of the longterm strategy I mentioned previously.

A friend of mine does well trading green on the foreign exchange market. Of course, you've got to have a good chunk of change to take advantage of small movements in the exchange rate but my friend feels it's one of the safest markets to make money. I need another magnitude growth of my wealth before I'll throw cash into that ring. Maybe next year???