Tag: starfcker

Eric, this is why it’s important (Part 2)

By starfcker

Thanksgiving is road trip time. My thanksgivings are spent up in Central Florida at big family gatherings that I’ve gone to since I was born. I have dozens of cousins and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews on my mother’s side that I’ve known my whole life and yet I have absolutely no idea how I’m related to them. It’s just too complex of a web for me to untangle. But they are kin. I love them, and I feel very comfortable with them. But they are a different breed. They are a harder people. They are almost all involved in cattle or citrus production. Maybe one or two drive trucks for the phosphate mines, but in general they are basic Florida crackers.

I have lived in South Florida my entire life, but I have spent a huge amount of time up in this part of the state, picking oranges and every other kind of thing that you can pick. Strawberries, okra, black-eyed peas, you name it, I have picked it all. Driving cattle into chutes, shoveling feed, novelty to me, just another day to them. Back when I used to hunt, I spent lots of time up that way, my cousin Dwayne had access to huge tracts of land owned by a man named Ben Hill Griffin. At that time Ben was the largest private landowner in Florida, and the land we went on was intersecting 10 mile square blocks.

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HAMSTER BOY

Guest Post by Starfcker

There has been a lot of chatter on here lately, from people interested in starting their own business. It occurred to me that the last 20 years have conditioned people to think things that aren’t viable businesses , are actually businesses. Think of the bank ads on TV. Cupcake stores, doggy day care, food trucks. Race to the bottom type stuff. Big overhead, low return. The idea of inflating value as opposed to adding value is pretty shaky ground for a business plan. The real problem can be looked at this way. You can’t manufacture anything cheaply enough in the states, or in a large enough quantity, to sell to Walmart. And you can’t retail anything, and buy it in enough quantity, or close enough to source, for it to be cheap enough so you can compete with Walmart. Good ways to waste a lot of time and money.

Not that I would discourage people from striking out on their own. But it helps to know what you are up against. Your best bet nowadays is to find a niche big enough to be worth doing, but too small for the big boys to scale up and crush you. Even in good times, the deck is stacked against you. As it should be. If you want to compete against me, you have tremendous disadvantages. My infrastructure is paid for. My people are trained. I have found all the best suppliers. My customers are happy and loyal. I’ve figured out hundreds of small things that all together reduce my costs significantly. You still have got to figure all that stuff out. How are you going to become someone’s better option?

There’s a lot of other factors involved, time, willingness to pour money into the black hole, patience, and belief that, against all odds, you can succeed. I read something one time about making an independent film, basically if you weren’t willing to throw everything you had at it, every dime, every minute, to complete it, if everything else you had in your life couldn’t be your second priority, you would never get it done. That means roping in everybody you could, your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your friends, your business partners, your acquaintances and being able to keep them all on board, start to finish, even when the going got rough, rough, rough.

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Zeppelin and Me

Guest Post by starfcker

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a long time. I got a shirt for Christmas that says, “I may be old, but I got to see all the great bands.” That’s a true statement. Kids nowadays have no idea how good we had it in the seventies and eighties. Before digital, bands had to go out there and make music. Much tougher thing to do consistently and with excellence than you might imagine. My first musical influences were country. I had a radio, and basically that was what the channels were in my area. A lot of songs that every country fan knows came out of that late sixties early seventies era that are still around today. Music can be timeless. But when I was 12 years old at summer camp, there was another kid with a radio and he had it on the rock station in Palm Beach county.

First rock song I remember was “Reelin In The Years”, by Steely Dan. I loved that song. By the time I went home a week later I forgotten all about country music, and started listening almost exclusively to rock. I was completely drawn in by it. I had never heard anything like it. That early 70s was a great time for that kind of music. Lots of bands hit their peak then. Bands were mysterious, there wasn’t much press about them, most of what you knew about them came from studying album covers. I started going to concerts when I was about 15. Being at the south end of Florida, most big tours skipped us. It was just too far to drive for one show. When bands played Florida, they played Jacksonville or Orlando or Tampa.

Our venue down here was terrible also. The Hollywood Sportatorium. What a dump. The walls and roof from about halfway up were made of corrugated sheet metal , which  most of you can figure out is a fine acoustic surface. Now throw in maximum volume, and you have an echo that never stopped. But it was all we had. And most bands that you’ve ever heard of made it through the sportatorium in their early years. The roster of shows there is very impressive, but the place was hot, loud, crowded and insane. South Florida was pretty redneck back in those days. Fights were very common, but even when it was very peaceful we lacked any veneer of sophistication.

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GRAND THEFT OIL PATCH – PART ONE

Guest Post by starfcker.

Jim Quinn, I am NOT. I’m not the best researcher in the world, and my ability to find charts and such is more limited than the master of that particular science. What I am good at, is taking information about things I know to be factual in one context, and applying them to other situations, and drawing conclusions that generally tend to be very accurate. So with that in mind, let’s proceed. I have two stories about things that I have more knowledge of than the oil business, but that I think are relevant. These are people I know, and situations that I am familiar with. They have to do with information technology and the predatory way that sort of thing is applied in conjunction with a criminal wall street/banking sector.

Those of you who root for no government at all would be wise to pay close attention, this sort of thing is what happens when government allows big business to operate unchecked. The first situation is a small one. I know a couple of guys who runs specialty pet stores. These are small businesses, storefronts, maybe gross a million, million two a year. They happen to be within a quarter mile of each other, but somehow both have prospered for 15-20 years. Both guys have been able to own nice homes and raise children off these small businesses, pure Americana type stuff. They bought their wholesale dry goods from one of three companies who existed in our area. A couple of years ago, a new national competitor arrived on the scene, offering lower prices and most importantly better credit terms. What could go wrong?

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MAFF

Guest Post by starfcker

OK, doomers, this is the big one I promised you. Fighter jet America is plunging to earth, engines aflame, all anybody can imagine is the big smoking crater when this bitch hits the ground. 18 trillion in debt, federal deficits as far as the eye can see, unfunded liabilities at as high a numbers as the scaremongers can imagine them, our very place in the world threatened by crushing debt and political ineptitude. America’s time has come and gone. Right, doomers?

Wrong. We’ve got one thing on our side. Math. All of our problems stem from one flawed premise. The flawed premise? Globalization. That we can’t make decisions in our own interest, that there is some greater good that we must sacrifice ourselves and our families and our country to. Horseshit. If you believe that, you are truly a brainwashed idiot. Each of us can change that right now, and as a country we can change that next November. Why is Donald Trump so confident that he can turn our economic trajectory on a dime? Because he can do the math. We have to start somewhere.

So let’s start at the same point as Trump. First, some baseline numbers, all from 2014. United States GDP, 17.4 trillion dollars. Total tax revenue, just over 3 trillion dollars, or about 17.5 % of GDP. Federal deficit, 483 billion dollars. National debt, 18 trillion dollars, more than 100% of GDP. Number of working age Americans not in the labor force, 94 million. Sounds pretty horrible, right? Not if we focus on the root of the problem. Globalization.

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Time to Dream a New Dream

Guest Post by starfcker

OK doomers, I’m calling in a favor. Ride with me here. My, what a difference a few months can make. As we wind down the Obongo presidency, to paraphrase, our long national nightmare may actually be over. We may finally be able to imagine once again a president who runs the country, for the benefit of the country, the CEO of all Americans, as opposed to a part time speech reader. History will look back at Obongo, and if they can find him, wonder what the hell we were thinking. We truly were a captured country, complicit in our own self destruction. 7 years is a long time to beat a dead horse.

Many young adults have never known anything else. The great sales job of globalization, a first world consumer society in every country, hit the rocks in the fall of 2008. It has continued on, a dogmatic zombie, through the injection of about a trillion dollars a year in counterfeit money. This unsustainable path of Americanizing the world should have died a natural death in 2008. Instead we wasted the better part of a decade expecting that somehow, someway, the pipe dream that was being sold to us would somehow work.

In the information age, we would accumulate our wealth not through hard work and effort, but by endlessly manipulating a set of digital numbers, that would automatically rise with time if we took good care of them. We would never age, but retire young, and engage in all the recreational activities we missed as kids. 50 was the new 30, only much better funded. All we had to do was open a Schwab account. Our 401k’s were the ticket to a better tomorrow, we weren’t savers anymore, we were investors. Savers were so foolish, so unhip, so not going on our Mount Everest expedition next year.

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THE PRIMARIES ARE OVER

Guest Post by starfcker

With the end of the Dimocrat party debate the other night, the presidential election shifted from primary to general election mode. Before the first vote was cast. The Republican money men have for some time now been looking for the anti Trump candidate to rally around. They have their man. It’s Hillary. The game is set. Hillary vs Trump. Hillary is not going to get indicted. Notice the unknown Republicans crawling out of the woodwork to slander the Benghazi committee? Her get out of jail free card has been stamped.

She is the only candidate within spitting distance of Trump in any polling at all. She is now the most valuable player in the globalist universe. Some of the other Republican candidates might hang around for a while , they can be useful in testing various potential lines of attack on Trump . But they are going to have to do it on the cheap . Nobody’s going to be pouring money on these guys . Rick Perry’s super PAC was a nightmare . The donors revolted. They wanted their money back. I think a lot of guys are going to want their money back.

Bernie Sanders made clear (or had it made clear to him), he ain’t the guy. His refusal to attack Hillary’s soft underbelly at the debate pretty much told the story, he’s not going to be the Dimocratic nominee. On the Repug side, Trump continues his relentless march, despite every force in the universe having been summoned to try to hatch a plausible new strategy. He’s swatting them away like insects now. He has teamed up with Carson to control the debates. He knows he’s the nominee.

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The Fruit Company

Guest Post by starfcker

Tired of listening to all the paid for economist shills such as Hilsenrath, Krugman, Zandi, pretending to not understand why our economy doesn’t take off? They understand. The function of our economy is a simple thing. And if you have been confused by their attempts to confuse you, this should simplify your understanding of how our economy worked, when it was working. I’ll give it two quick stories, and class will be over.

First, a real life example. I had a cash sale one day. quite rare for a wholesale business. The gentleman paid for his purchase with three 100 dollar bills. I immediately took the money and paid a man that I owed. The next morning, that guy went to another friend of mine’s business, and spent the same three hundred dollar bills. That friend went and paid his property taxes that afternoon in cash, including those same three hundred dollar bills. in less than 24 hours, that $300 had skipped through four sets of hands before ending up in the tax assessor’s office.

If you ever hear terms like velocity of money, and multiplier effect, this is what those terms mean. That $300 got spent 4 times in 24 hours, so it actually counted as $1200 in business activity, GDP, whatever you want to call it. So the multiplier was x 4, in a mere 24 hours. Let’s just call it a week, multiply that $1200. x 52. Even weekly, at that rate, those measly three 100 dollar bills could multiply to over $62,000. a year. And everybody got their piece of that pie through effort, by getting out there and chasing it, no redistribution necessary. And that’s just one example, and a tiny example at that.

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