The business year is ending on a high note. Got in a bunch of money, most of which was long overdue. All in all, the year was a disaster, but mostly because it was a nasty ride down. Our gross volume literally fell by 50%.
Next year, we're in good shape. Paid off a few notes. So, our monthly cash flow should be a lot better. We also downsized to the bone. We don't even have an office administrator right now. I'm filling that role. Though, if things get better, like I think they should, we'll be hiring one first part of next year.
We've got work on the board, too. Some pretty good stuff. All in all, we may have turned the corner. Even though volume was bitterly disappointing (far worse than anything I could have imagined at this time last year), if we did the same volume next year, the company would be very profitable again. The weather seems to be getting a little more harsh.
It's amazing that I surivived this past year. It was the first real hard bump in the road since I opened my doors. The lesson to take away from all this is that you can't count on a straight 40% growth trajectory, or even for volume to remain consistent from year to year.
I'm looking to make some changes next year. I want to diversify my revenue streams so that a down year in one particular business unit won't necessarily mean pain. Will have to see how it goes.
I am living in the cabin pretty much all the time these days. I call it the cabin because the back yard overlooks a nice wooded ravine. Also, because it's pretty much only 35% or so remodelled at this point. It's like living in a house that's being remodelled.
Half the house looks trashed. One of the bedrooms is 100% done. It's the first room in the house I can say that about, other than the downstairs half-bath. Another two are about 90% there. So far, so good.
Structurally, I feel good about the house, though. We had to fix a problem with some sagging load-bearing beams and everything is 100% right now. It's finally got good bones, though it took a lot of work. My goal is to have this house ready to sell by the time Logan graduates from High School. I figure I'm in Sylvania until then. After that? Who the heck knows.
Logan continues to be an absolute joy. We went skiing twice during his Christmas break and he loves it. Granted, it's not that odd to love skiing. It's about like saying you like amusement parks. It's just something that's generally enjoyable for most folks.
We drove a couple of hours away to a ski slope that's supposed to be a lot nicer than the one we went to last year. It really was better. However, it's all of a 2 hour drive. The other place is less than an hour. So, for day-trips, it makes sense to go to the closer place.
If possible, I may see if I can get Logan for a few days and use the time to visit his grandma in Akron, and then drive up to Peek n Peak in upstate New York. That's a pretty big logistical committment. Peek 'n Peak is almost 3 hours away. However, the skiing there is worlds better than what we've got within driving distance, here.
I wish there were a way to fly out for a skiing vacation. I really wish Logan had year-round school with the breaks interspersed throughout the year. I don't know what the resistance to that is, but it would make things so much nicer for us as far as any activities that involve travel, like visiting the relatives in Arizona.
As for the coming of the new year, here are my resolutions:
1. Guide my business back to high profitability.
2. Embark on a new skill set / career.
3. Make strong progress on all my financial goals, especially debt reduction.
4. Continue to spend quality time with my son. Make the most of these next 9 years with him.
5. Get the house closer and closer to being in a "finished" state. Pretty much anybody who has ever done a major restoration/remodel can tell you that things take a lot more time and money than folks thought they would. So, "progress" is as much as I'll commit to on this goal.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
The Great Moment in TARP
There were lots of horrendous moments in TARP and the crafting of the bills that bailed out Wall Street for their criminal incompetence.
One example is when Chris Dodd's staff (at the behest of an un-named official, probably Tim Geithner) stripped out compensation limits from the legislation.
There was one great moment, though. It was the type of victory for the little guy that almost never happens.
To understand this moment, it is illustrative to look at the two TARP bill votes.
The first vote was to have the government buy up all the toxic assets the banks had acquired. Basically, give us the toxic stuff, and leave the banks to continue raking it in. This vote actually failed due to popular outrage at the possibility that the American people would be stuck with the bad stuff in the banks' portfolios.
The second vote was for the taxpayer to basically give the banks billions of dollars. Now, whether we wanted it to happen or not, it was going to happen and it is happening today. That's why, for instance, the government continues to lend money to the banks at 0% interest, and then sell them T-bills that allow the banks to make 3% interest.
The government wants to use their power to make banks rich.
In the code that was written in the bill, some sneaky congressional staffer added these lines:
(c) Direct purchases
"If the Secretary determines that use of a market mechanism under subsection (b) is not feasible or appropriate, and the purposes of the chapter are best met through direct purchases from an individual financial institution, the Secretary shall pursue additional measures to ensure that prices paid for assets are reasonable and reflect the underlying value of the asset."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/12/usc_sec_12_00005223----000-.html
What does this mean? Well, the bill, without these lines, would have meant that the government would have given the banks loans, or would have simply given them money.
However, they would not have been able to buy the stock of the companies.
It is because we bought stock that people are now saying that TARP may turn a profit. (It probably won't, but it won't cost as much as we thought at first.)
If not for that sneaky staffer, taxpayer losses from TARP would have been much, much greater.
It is ONLY because of that sneaky staffer that the American people had a chance to benefit from the banks (and auto-makers) recovering.
TARP was, in my opinion (as I've mentioned at length) a disgusting series of anti-capitalist measures, taken with no regard for the taxpayer, and which handsomely rewarded Wall Street banks for reckless and criminal behavior.
These lines of code, inserted in the bill, are the only bright spot of the entire debacle. If we had enacted compensation limits, haircuts for counterparties, and wiping out of shareholder equity, along with a nationalization and the US as the sole shareholder to be reimbursed at an IPO sometime down the road when the banks were healthy, I doubt there'd be the outrage about TARP that there is.
Instead, TARP was written in such a way as to maximize the benefit Wall Street received. That's why we're mad.
Thanks to one ballsy congressional staffer, though, we actually derived some benefit from TARP. It's these lines of the bill that are the only part that didn't completely screw over America.
One example is when Chris Dodd's staff (at the behest of an un-named official, probably Tim Geithner) stripped out compensation limits from the legislation.
There was one great moment, though. It was the type of victory for the little guy that almost never happens.
To understand this moment, it is illustrative to look at the two TARP bill votes.
The first vote was to have the government buy up all the toxic assets the banks had acquired. Basically, give us the toxic stuff, and leave the banks to continue raking it in. This vote actually failed due to popular outrage at the possibility that the American people would be stuck with the bad stuff in the banks' portfolios.
The second vote was for the taxpayer to basically give the banks billions of dollars. Now, whether we wanted it to happen or not, it was going to happen and it is happening today. That's why, for instance, the government continues to lend money to the banks at 0% interest, and then sell them T-bills that allow the banks to make 3% interest.
The government wants to use their power to make banks rich.
In the code that was written in the bill, some sneaky congressional staffer added these lines:
(c) Direct purchases
"If the Secretary determines that use of a market mechanism under subsection (b) is not feasible or appropriate, and the purposes of the chapter are best met through direct purchases from an individual financial institution, the Secretary shall pursue additional measures to ensure that prices paid for assets are reasonable and reflect the underlying value of the asset."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/12/usc_sec_12_00005223----000-.html
What does this mean? Well, the bill, without these lines, would have meant that the government would have given the banks loans, or would have simply given them money.
However, they would not have been able to buy the stock of the companies.
It is because we bought stock that people are now saying that TARP may turn a profit. (It probably won't, but it won't cost as much as we thought at first.)
If not for that sneaky staffer, taxpayer losses from TARP would have been much, much greater.
It is ONLY because of that sneaky staffer that the American people had a chance to benefit from the banks (and auto-makers) recovering.
TARP was, in my opinion (as I've mentioned at length) a disgusting series of anti-capitalist measures, taken with no regard for the taxpayer, and which handsomely rewarded Wall Street banks for reckless and criminal behavior.
These lines of code, inserted in the bill, are the only bright spot of the entire debacle. If we had enacted compensation limits, haircuts for counterparties, and wiping out of shareholder equity, along with a nationalization and the US as the sole shareholder to be reimbursed at an IPO sometime down the road when the banks were healthy, I doubt there'd be the outrage about TARP that there is.
Instead, TARP was written in such a way as to maximize the benefit Wall Street received. That's why we're mad.
Thanks to one ballsy congressional staffer, though, we actually derived some benefit from TARP. It's these lines of the bill that are the only part that didn't completely screw over America.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
It wasn't Obama's fault... It really was Bush's fault... But can Obama recover?
As I watch the slow motion train-wreck that the Obama presidency is turning out to be, I can't help but feel sorry for the guy.
He got beaten up a bit for going to the "it's Bush's fault" well one too many times. I think people knew he was right... they just didn't want a president who was going to whine about the past. They wanted one who would lead us into a brighter future.
The economic crisis? I think that was largely Clinton's fault, actually. He's the one who led the repeal of Glass-Steagall. In fact, the biggest villains in all that are probably the Republican congress. They're the one constant when we talk about a continuum of legislative actions that were way too friendly to banking interests, and way too neglectful, or downright hostile, to average citizens.
I want to be frank when I say: if we had not repealed Glass Steagall, we wouldn't have had to respond to the economic crisis the way we did.
Obama bears a lot of the blame too, but mostly, he bears it for badly misplaying a bad hand that he was dealt by Bush.
The Wall Street bailouts? They're huge. Maybe not as huge with most people as they are with me, but they're enough to get vast swaths of the population furious.
Obama, Geithner, Paulson and an army of economists have said, rightly so, that the bailouts were necessary.
Well... I think some form of bailout was necessary. However, there are two things the American people simply cannot forgive, even though years have now passed.
The first is that they told their legislators, flat-out, do not bail out the banks. Make them suffer the consequences of their recklessness. If people on Main Street need to feel the pain that capitalism frequently brings, then the folks on Wall Street should be no different.
We all know the history, there. The congress voted down the TARP, but the Wall Street lobbying machine went into high gear, bought more politicians, Pelosi and Bush twisted more arms, and TARP passed on the second vote.
The voters have absolutely taken it out on the hide of people who voted for TARP. That was a toxic vote. It cost congresspeople their careers, and it should have.
You simply can't tell the population of a democracy that you don't care what they want and expect to get away with it every time.
Eventually, you're really going to piss them off.
The second problem? The second problem is that no effort was made to curb executive compensation during the birth of TARP.
It wasn't that the idea wasn't brought up. Nancy Pelosi mentioned it. Harry Reid was in the room when she did.
Hank Paulson said, basically, no, no, no. If we put any strings on this, the bankers won't go along with it. And if they won't go along with it, we'll be burning library books to keep warm and eating squirrels because we will be cast back into the stone age if we don't do something about the impending financial crisis. (Not a direct quote, but you get the idea.)
So, they didn't. The problems that resulted were predictable and people were furious. In some instances, in some cities, people literally took to the streets.
Obama did what he could to impose compensation limits after the fact, but he really couldn't do much. It was too little, too late.
Those Wall Street banker bonuses were a hidden time bomb that the Bush administration left for Obama.
I honestly feel that once the news of banker bonuses hit the press, Obama was doomed. The public simply didn't trust the government to do anything, for any reason, at any time. The government completely lost any moral authority they may have had when it was laid naked that Wall Street was going to profit immensely for destroying the economy.
Now, Obama also badly misplayed his hand, too. It was a bad one, but he made a critical error of focusing on health care for a year, rather than focusing on Wall Street reform.
The people? Were rightly angry and wanted to see the modern equivalent of Pecora hearings. Pecora was the guy who hauled all the idiots who caused the great depression in front of congress and grilled them.
Instead, Obama was very conciliatory. He was almost Lincolnesque in his handling of Wall Street after the crisis. It was as if his motto for handling Wall Street was "with malice towards none, with charity for all".
The problem is that Lincoln held that attitude about the reconstruction confederacy. They were already decimated. Trying to exact punishment on them would have been pointless.
Obama held that attitude towards the very bankers who caused our problems, and who were cashing multimillion (and in some cases multibillion) dollar checks while the nation got to experience 10% unemployment.
It made things doubly worse that the health-care reform bill he created was nothing short of astoundingly assinine.
His claims that he had implemented new, tough Wall Street reforms were ridiculous to the point of being difficult to claim with a straight face.
Right now, nobody is listening to Obama anymore. He booted Wall Street reform. He went easy on Wall Street in every imagineable way. He booted health care reform.
The public's mistrust of government is higher than at any time since Vietnam. They simply don't trust congress to get anything right, right now.
So, what's Obama to do? I'm not sure there's anything he can do. He is our nation's Jimmy Carter. A guy too nice for the job. Weak and ineffectual at a time when we needed a tough crisis leader.
A person can claim (with valid arguments to support the position) that Bush led the country in the wrong direction in the days after 9/11. However, at the time, he inspired confidence. He gave folks the impression he was in charge.
But the Taliban no longer controls Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein is dead. He did some good things... just probably not the good things that he should have been doing.
Obama? It's hard to name a single thing he's done that's good. Really.
I had a lot of misgivings about Obama the candidate. Some of them were profoundly wrong, such as my fear that he was actually a far-left radical.
However, one of my misgivings was right on the money: this guy has never been a success at any job he's ever held. Not ever. His entire resume consists of getting his ticket punched at various junctures, but he hasn't really had a single notable accomplishment, and the few minor accomplishments he's racked up smack of a thumb being put on the scale to help him gain gravitas that he hasn't quite earned.
He's out of his league. This is his first real job and he's blowing it, badly.
Bill Clinton lost his friends on the left when he moved away from them and started co-opting agenda items from the right like welfare reform.
Obama has lost his friends on the left because they're moving away from him because he's so badly botched his attempts at agenda items from the left.
Right now, we don't need a conciliator in chief. Right now, we need freakin' Harry Truman. We need somebody to rip the throats out of Wall Street Executives and make sure that as many of them as possible finish their lives unemployed and penniless.
(Sound harsh? That's the fate of a whole lot of honest, hard-working people who DIDN'T create this crisis. I feel no need to go softer on the very folks who caused it.)
He needs to take on congress. Reagan didn't work WITH congress. He made congress his enemy. Then he rolled up a newspaper and smacked the crap out of it until it sat up and begged and did what he wanted it to do.
Just as Obama was the right man, in the right place, at the right time, during his campaign. He's the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time as president.
I just don't see how he can turn this around. However, the first thing I'd do is fire Giethner and replace him with Elizabeth Warren or Brooksley Born.
Then, I'd declare war on Wall Street. I'd declare war on the Fed and get the banks off of welfare. I'd force them to mark their assets to market and they'd be insolvent overnight.
I'd let another couple of Wall Street firms fail and when the rest came crying for another bailout, I'd tell them the terms the bailout would come with.
#1, the shareholders will be wiped out.
#2, the board of directors will be fired.
#3, the executives would be fired.
Any director or executive would be barred from ever working for an FDIC insured institution ever again.
Then, I'd re-institute Glass Steagall.
Harsh? Crazy? Maybe. But nothing short of this will rebuild Obama's moral authority. Right now, he has none.
He got beaten up a bit for going to the "it's Bush's fault" well one too many times. I think people knew he was right... they just didn't want a president who was going to whine about the past. They wanted one who would lead us into a brighter future.
The economic crisis? I think that was largely Clinton's fault, actually. He's the one who led the repeal of Glass-Steagall. In fact, the biggest villains in all that are probably the Republican congress. They're the one constant when we talk about a continuum of legislative actions that were way too friendly to banking interests, and way too neglectful, or downright hostile, to average citizens.
I want to be frank when I say: if we had not repealed Glass Steagall, we wouldn't have had to respond to the economic crisis the way we did.
Obama bears a lot of the blame too, but mostly, he bears it for badly misplaying a bad hand that he was dealt by Bush.
The Wall Street bailouts? They're huge. Maybe not as huge with most people as they are with me, but they're enough to get vast swaths of the population furious.
Obama, Geithner, Paulson and an army of economists have said, rightly so, that the bailouts were necessary.
Well... I think some form of bailout was necessary. However, there are two things the American people simply cannot forgive, even though years have now passed.
The first is that they told their legislators, flat-out, do not bail out the banks. Make them suffer the consequences of their recklessness. If people on Main Street need to feel the pain that capitalism frequently brings, then the folks on Wall Street should be no different.
We all know the history, there. The congress voted down the TARP, but the Wall Street lobbying machine went into high gear, bought more politicians, Pelosi and Bush twisted more arms, and TARP passed on the second vote.
The voters have absolutely taken it out on the hide of people who voted for TARP. That was a toxic vote. It cost congresspeople their careers, and it should have.
You simply can't tell the population of a democracy that you don't care what they want and expect to get away with it every time.
Eventually, you're really going to piss them off.
The second problem? The second problem is that no effort was made to curb executive compensation during the birth of TARP.
It wasn't that the idea wasn't brought up. Nancy Pelosi mentioned it. Harry Reid was in the room when she did.
Hank Paulson said, basically, no, no, no. If we put any strings on this, the bankers won't go along with it. And if they won't go along with it, we'll be burning library books to keep warm and eating squirrels because we will be cast back into the stone age if we don't do something about the impending financial crisis. (Not a direct quote, but you get the idea.)
So, they didn't. The problems that resulted were predictable and people were furious. In some instances, in some cities, people literally took to the streets.
Obama did what he could to impose compensation limits after the fact, but he really couldn't do much. It was too little, too late.
Those Wall Street banker bonuses were a hidden time bomb that the Bush administration left for Obama.
I honestly feel that once the news of banker bonuses hit the press, Obama was doomed. The public simply didn't trust the government to do anything, for any reason, at any time. The government completely lost any moral authority they may have had when it was laid naked that Wall Street was going to profit immensely for destroying the economy.
Now, Obama also badly misplayed his hand, too. It was a bad one, but he made a critical error of focusing on health care for a year, rather than focusing on Wall Street reform.
The people? Were rightly angry and wanted to see the modern equivalent of Pecora hearings. Pecora was the guy who hauled all the idiots who caused the great depression in front of congress and grilled them.
Instead, Obama was very conciliatory. He was almost Lincolnesque in his handling of Wall Street after the crisis. It was as if his motto for handling Wall Street was "with malice towards none, with charity for all".
The problem is that Lincoln held that attitude about the reconstruction confederacy. They were already decimated. Trying to exact punishment on them would have been pointless.
Obama held that attitude towards the very bankers who caused our problems, and who were cashing multimillion (and in some cases multibillion) dollar checks while the nation got to experience 10% unemployment.
It made things doubly worse that the health-care reform bill he created was nothing short of astoundingly assinine.
His claims that he had implemented new, tough Wall Street reforms were ridiculous to the point of being difficult to claim with a straight face.
Right now, nobody is listening to Obama anymore. He booted Wall Street reform. He went easy on Wall Street in every imagineable way. He booted health care reform.
The public's mistrust of government is higher than at any time since Vietnam. They simply don't trust congress to get anything right, right now.
So, what's Obama to do? I'm not sure there's anything he can do. He is our nation's Jimmy Carter. A guy too nice for the job. Weak and ineffectual at a time when we needed a tough crisis leader.
A person can claim (with valid arguments to support the position) that Bush led the country in the wrong direction in the days after 9/11. However, at the time, he inspired confidence. He gave folks the impression he was in charge.
But the Taliban no longer controls Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein is dead. He did some good things... just probably not the good things that he should have been doing.
Obama? It's hard to name a single thing he's done that's good. Really.
I had a lot of misgivings about Obama the candidate. Some of them were profoundly wrong, such as my fear that he was actually a far-left radical.
However, one of my misgivings was right on the money: this guy has never been a success at any job he's ever held. Not ever. His entire resume consists of getting his ticket punched at various junctures, but he hasn't really had a single notable accomplishment, and the few minor accomplishments he's racked up smack of a thumb being put on the scale to help him gain gravitas that he hasn't quite earned.
He's out of his league. This is his first real job and he's blowing it, badly.
Bill Clinton lost his friends on the left when he moved away from them and started co-opting agenda items from the right like welfare reform.
Obama has lost his friends on the left because they're moving away from him because he's so badly botched his attempts at agenda items from the left.
Right now, we don't need a conciliator in chief. Right now, we need freakin' Harry Truman. We need somebody to rip the throats out of Wall Street Executives and make sure that as many of them as possible finish their lives unemployed and penniless.
(Sound harsh? That's the fate of a whole lot of honest, hard-working people who DIDN'T create this crisis. I feel no need to go softer on the very folks who caused it.)
He needs to take on congress. Reagan didn't work WITH congress. He made congress his enemy. Then he rolled up a newspaper and smacked the crap out of it until it sat up and begged and did what he wanted it to do.
Just as Obama was the right man, in the right place, at the right time, during his campaign. He's the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time as president.
I just don't see how he can turn this around. However, the first thing I'd do is fire Giethner and replace him with Elizabeth Warren or Brooksley Born.
Then, I'd declare war on Wall Street. I'd declare war on the Fed and get the banks off of welfare. I'd force them to mark their assets to market and they'd be insolvent overnight.
I'd let another couple of Wall Street firms fail and when the rest came crying for another bailout, I'd tell them the terms the bailout would come with.
#1, the shareholders will be wiped out.
#2, the board of directors will be fired.
#3, the executives would be fired.
Any director or executive would be barred from ever working for an FDIC insured institution ever again.
Then, I'd re-institute Glass Steagall.
Harsh? Crazy? Maybe. But nothing short of this will rebuild Obama's moral authority. Right now, he has none.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
2010: it was the best of times, it was... you know the rest...
It's December already. Middle of December is looming large. I've gotten pretty used to sweating bullets at payroll time, but the first part of the month is when royalties, notes and rent all hit, too.
We showed a few signs of life on Monday, picking up a couple of smallish jobs and a request to bid on a 3rd. With any luck, that's a sign of the busy season starting. Usually, it starts in mid-December.
In an economy like this, with so many people going under, it's hard to feel sorry for yourself. I think I'd be genuinely bummed if not for the knowledge that so many other people have it much worse.
Every day, I seem to hear a new account of somebody in their late 50s who lost a job after a lifetime of work. Say what you want about baby boomers, but it was a workaholic generation. No 9 to 5 for most of them. I can't even imagine what it might be like to be 58 years old, exhausted unemployment benefits, and eating through what you thought was going to be your retirement savings.
So, yeah, things could be worse. A lot of folks are struggling in this economy.
It shows every indication of being a cold Winter, and that's generally good for business. Last year's Winter was mild, and it really hurt. Frozen pipes and thunderstorms are the two main events that can bump up our volume. Without those, things can get really slow.
I have resigned myself to the fact that I need to update my skill set and prepare myself for Jimmy 4.0.
I consider Jimmy 1.0 to be the time from High School graduation until I finished my BBA and got my first long-term, real job with Parker back in 1993. It was a great time, and I experimented a lot. Tried a lot of things that didn't really work. Stuck with a few things that did. Eventually, I got myself graduated from college and employable.
Jimmy 2.0 would be all those years at Parker: 1993 to 2004. Those were good years, too. I always thought that Parker was exceptionally good to me. They paid for a pretty expensive MBA, and I had a great career with them all the way until I decided to hang out my shingle.
Jimmy 3.0 is my time with Servpro. Basically 2005 to present. Even with the recent year o' crappiness, my time as an entrepreneur has been the most professionally satisfying and happiest time of my life.
The plans I'm looking at will probably involve another few years of school. So, 3.0 will be about a decade-long chunk just like the previous versions.
I think it really is true what they say: you need to constantly adapt and update yourself to the environment. My generation knows that we can't be like the ones before: where you might land a job with one employer and work there until you die.
You can try to homestead yourself in one position with one employer, but wow, that makes you vulnerable. That's probably what all those 58 year olds who are dreading their lives were trying to do.
Sometimes I wish I had stuck with Parker. I loved the company, but really, really hated my job.
With Servpro, I've been doing this about 6 years, now.
Year one sucked.
Year two rocked.
Year three, four and five rocked harder.
Year six has been even worse than year one.
I figure that's probably how this will go. You get a few good years, and a few bad years. You have to react quickly when the tide turns out. It's not just a question of making lots of money when there's money to be made. You also have to try not to lose money when there's no money to be made
I've been really good at the former, not so hot at the latter.
In the long run, I will need to make a change. I think Servpro will be viable for another 5 or 10 years. After that, nobody can predict the business environment, but I see a few things coming along that are very positive, but a few that are very negative. It could break either way.
I do wonder what's going to be next. In a lot of ways, I sort of appreciate the way my life has unfolded. I've gotten to experience a lot of things and see a lot of sides of a lot of different ways to make a living.
I've been a paratrooper on an Army Special Operations Team with a Top Secret Clearance.
I've been a bouncer in a country and western bar. (The world's smallest and least effective bouncer, but that's another topic for another day.)
I've been a guitar teacher.
I've been a technical writer. A computer programmer. An I.T. Manager.
I've been an entrepreneur, both now and when I was in college and ran a small sound-reinforcement business that ended up doing almost weekly gigs with a local Ethiopian party band. (The Mekonnens. They were some of the most awesome people I've ever had the pleasure to meet.)
Then, there's the part-time stuff, like pumping gas, working in a halfway house for mentally retarded criminals and being an officer in the Navy Reserve.
Next? I am considering options from enrolling in a Ph.D. program to getting a JD to whatever.
So, yeah, I do truly, truly curse the fact that our government broke some pretty fundamental tenants of capitalism and human decency by bailing out Wall Street and leaving the rest of us to rot.
My personal situation isn't exactly in great shape. We're trying to sell off equipment and business still hasn't really recovered.
However, even at my age, I have a world of opportunity available to me. America is so awesome, even the politicians can't TOTALLY screw it up.
Even in your mid 40s, you can be anything you want to be in this great land.
So, I'm feeling a bit battered and bruised, but in the end, there's no place that I'd rather be. I also know that there are folks much less fortunate than I am who are sufferring far more than I am right now.
In the long run, everything will be okay. The short run? It's a little hairy. That's life, though, isn't it? It's meant to be a struggle. All our attempts to make it entirely painless almost always fail in the end.
I once heard somebody say that if you knew that, for instance, you would face 5 major challenges and 14 minor challenges in your life, but that in the end, you would be just fine, you would look at life differently.
You'd face each challenge and almost welcome it because you already know the outcome: in the end, you do just fine. Every challenge you face would be one less on the list that you have to endure.
Really? That's how most of our lives will go. We just don't know the exact number of challenges we'll face. In the end, though, the vast, vast, vast majority of us are going to do just fine. We'll retire comfortably. We'll have family to love. If we're lucky we will look back on all the challenges of our lives with a sense of pride in what we've overcome.
I remember once when I was in college in Texas. I was broke, my grades sucked, and I was nowhere near graduation. However, I used to remind myself that in America, every day, an immigrant lands on our shores. Probably once every day we get an immigrant who is brilliant and resourceful and who will be a millionaire within a couple of years.
That's the type of opportunity we have, here. That thought used to keep me going: the knowledge that it's out there, and even folks with less than I have will be able to get it through hard work and perseverance.
So, all the pieces are there for a hugely prosperous 2011. I'm better poised than most. I just need to hang on and watch it play itself out. You buy your ticket, you wait in line, and when it's time to ride, you ride. You won't know until you try it
We showed a few signs of life on Monday, picking up a couple of smallish jobs and a request to bid on a 3rd. With any luck, that's a sign of the busy season starting. Usually, it starts in mid-December.
In an economy like this, with so many people going under, it's hard to feel sorry for yourself. I think I'd be genuinely bummed if not for the knowledge that so many other people have it much worse.
Every day, I seem to hear a new account of somebody in their late 50s who lost a job after a lifetime of work. Say what you want about baby boomers, but it was a workaholic generation. No 9 to 5 for most of them. I can't even imagine what it might be like to be 58 years old, exhausted unemployment benefits, and eating through what you thought was going to be your retirement savings.
So, yeah, things could be worse. A lot of folks are struggling in this economy.
It shows every indication of being a cold Winter, and that's generally good for business. Last year's Winter was mild, and it really hurt. Frozen pipes and thunderstorms are the two main events that can bump up our volume. Without those, things can get really slow.
I have resigned myself to the fact that I need to update my skill set and prepare myself for Jimmy 4.0.
I consider Jimmy 1.0 to be the time from High School graduation until I finished my BBA and got my first long-term, real job with Parker back in 1993. It was a great time, and I experimented a lot. Tried a lot of things that didn't really work. Stuck with a few things that did. Eventually, I got myself graduated from college and employable.
Jimmy 2.0 would be all those years at Parker: 1993 to 2004. Those were good years, too. I always thought that Parker was exceptionally good to me. They paid for a pretty expensive MBA, and I had a great career with them all the way until I decided to hang out my shingle.
Jimmy 3.0 is my time with Servpro. Basically 2005 to present. Even with the recent year o' crappiness, my time as an entrepreneur has been the most professionally satisfying and happiest time of my life.
The plans I'm looking at will probably involve another few years of school. So, 3.0 will be about a decade-long chunk just like the previous versions.
I think it really is true what they say: you need to constantly adapt and update yourself to the environment. My generation knows that we can't be like the ones before: where you might land a job with one employer and work there until you die.
You can try to homestead yourself in one position with one employer, but wow, that makes you vulnerable. That's probably what all those 58 year olds who are dreading their lives were trying to do.
Sometimes I wish I had stuck with Parker. I loved the company, but really, really hated my job.
With Servpro, I've been doing this about 6 years, now.
Year one sucked.
Year two rocked.
Year three, four and five rocked harder.
Year six has been even worse than year one.
I figure that's probably how this will go. You get a few good years, and a few bad years. You have to react quickly when the tide turns out. It's not just a question of making lots of money when there's money to be made. You also have to try not to lose money when there's no money to be made
I've been really good at the former, not so hot at the latter.
In the long run, I will need to make a change. I think Servpro will be viable for another 5 or 10 years. After that, nobody can predict the business environment, but I see a few things coming along that are very positive, but a few that are very negative. It could break either way.
I do wonder what's going to be next. In a lot of ways, I sort of appreciate the way my life has unfolded. I've gotten to experience a lot of things and see a lot of sides of a lot of different ways to make a living.
I've been a paratrooper on an Army Special Operations Team with a Top Secret Clearance.
I've been a bouncer in a country and western bar. (The world's smallest and least effective bouncer, but that's another topic for another day.)
I've been a guitar teacher.
I've been a technical writer. A computer programmer. An I.T. Manager.
I've been an entrepreneur, both now and when I was in college and ran a small sound-reinforcement business that ended up doing almost weekly gigs with a local Ethiopian party band. (The Mekonnens. They were some of the most awesome people I've ever had the pleasure to meet.)
Then, there's the part-time stuff, like pumping gas, working in a halfway house for mentally retarded criminals and being an officer in the Navy Reserve.
Next? I am considering options from enrolling in a Ph.D. program to getting a JD to whatever.
So, yeah, I do truly, truly curse the fact that our government broke some pretty fundamental tenants of capitalism and human decency by bailing out Wall Street and leaving the rest of us to rot.
My personal situation isn't exactly in great shape. We're trying to sell off equipment and business still hasn't really recovered.
However, even at my age, I have a world of opportunity available to me. America is so awesome, even the politicians can't TOTALLY screw it up.
Even in your mid 40s, you can be anything you want to be in this great land.
So, I'm feeling a bit battered and bruised, but in the end, there's no place that I'd rather be. I also know that there are folks much less fortunate than I am who are sufferring far more than I am right now.
In the long run, everything will be okay. The short run? It's a little hairy. That's life, though, isn't it? It's meant to be a struggle. All our attempts to make it entirely painless almost always fail in the end.
I once heard somebody say that if you knew that, for instance, you would face 5 major challenges and 14 minor challenges in your life, but that in the end, you would be just fine, you would look at life differently.
You'd face each challenge and almost welcome it because you already know the outcome: in the end, you do just fine. Every challenge you face would be one less on the list that you have to endure.
Really? That's how most of our lives will go. We just don't know the exact number of challenges we'll face. In the end, though, the vast, vast, vast majority of us are going to do just fine. We'll retire comfortably. We'll have family to love. If we're lucky we will look back on all the challenges of our lives with a sense of pride in what we've overcome.
I remember once when I was in college in Texas. I was broke, my grades sucked, and I was nowhere near graduation. However, I used to remind myself that in America, every day, an immigrant lands on our shores. Probably once every day we get an immigrant who is brilliant and resourceful and who will be a millionaire within a couple of years.
That's the type of opportunity we have, here. That thought used to keep me going: the knowledge that it's out there, and even folks with less than I have will be able to get it through hard work and perseverance.
So, all the pieces are there for a hugely prosperous 2011. I'm better poised than most. I just need to hang on and watch it play itself out. You buy your ticket, you wait in line, and when it's time to ride, you ride. You won't know until you try it
Sunday, November 21, 2010
A Season of Thanks
There are some universal concepts that all the world's great religions hold in common. Personally, I don't believe their origin is divine, but instead, is the result of centuries of human experience. They are a sort of "best practices" of humanity.
One such example is of the healing power of forgiveness. Counterintuitively, the greatest boon of forgiveness is not to the transgressor, but to the transgressed. Anger, resentment and hostility are cancerous to the human spirit. Forgiveness allows a person to rid themselves of these destructive emotions.
The very fact that the benefits are counterintuitive is the reason why these messages need to be carried by religion. Most people gravitate towards the obvious and the self-serving. However, religion can serve a function of reminding us that not everything in life is based on the feelings and perceptions that are most readily at hand.
Another example, appropriate to the season, is that most great world religions embrace the idea that we should be thankful for our blessings. The human condition is one where we disdain our discomforts and difficulties, and embrace our progress and blessings. However, the human condition is also one where our discomforts and difficulties are always manifest. Our progress and blessings? They are easy to take for granted and to overlook.
This is true to a far greater degree in the United States than in many other cultures. Vast swaths of the world have societies where their trials and tribulations are accepted as normal and inevitable facets of life. The US has never been such a society. If we don't like it, we change it. If we like it, we do what it takes to get more of it.
We are not a people who accept our difficulties with resignation. We fight. It is this desire to constantly make our world a better place that defines our greatness as a nation and as a people.
It also, to a great degree, makes us a people who are puzzlingly unhappy. Our natural state of being is one of dissatisfaction.
I am certainly no exception. As I go into this Thanksgiving season, I look back on a very, very difficult year. It had bright spots to be certain. My son is always a source of joy and pride. However, it was a very hard year for me in virtually every other regard.
One need only open a newspaper or turn on the TV news to know that this is a difficult time for many.
The reasons to be unhappy are many. We have a corrupt government that exists only to serve the interests of the monied. The little guy has been taking it on the chin harder than at any other time in my lifetime. The rising tide that was supposed to raise all ships is raising only the biggest and most expensive. Those of us in more modest craft are being swamped and are lucky to stay afloat.
Worst of all, the trend is towards more of the same, with virtually no chance that the tide will turn the other way any time soon. Millions of hopeful voters brought in the Obama administration in '08, only to see the Obama administration is absolutely corrupt, in equal measure to the Bush administration that preceeded it. There was zero change. There isn't any realistic cause for hope.
Like many small business owners, I am in the fight of my life. This time last year, I had 14 full-time employees. I am now down to 5. 9 good people who worked hard every day and wanted nothing more than a day's work for a day's pay are now unemployed. I bear that guilt every day because I just wasn't smart enough to find a way to keep it from happening.
In hindsight, I should have let them go sooner. Trouble is, I didn't have the benefit of hindsight as I made the decisions I made. I don't mind so much for me. My finances are a total wreck, but I can always find a way to get by.
However, I'm grappling with the reality that when everything is said and done, I may not have anything to pass to my son. I still have time to try and rebuild, and with any luck, I will get on my feet again, enough to afford to send him to the school of his choice when the time comes. In the mean time, though, I'm not in a very good place, and there's no guarantee things will improve next year.
So, there's a lot I'm unhappy with right now. However, it doesn't benefit a person to concentrate only on lifes difficulties. I'm also very blessed. I have much to be Thankful for.
I believe an optimistic outlook serves a person well. That a person is more prosperous, happy and healthy when they can go through life looking on the bright side of things.
The reality is that many things in life can be viewed either positively or negatively. It just depends on what you want to do.
For instance, Wall Street's relentless drive to crush the little guy and stack the deck ever further in Wall Street's favor is driven by it's belief that their glass is 3% empty, not 97% full.
In my life, so many of the things I saw as burdens were, if looked at from a different perspective, actually positives in their own way.
So, during this season of thanks, I'll go ahead and spell out the things I'm thankful for. I can count my blessings by the fact that the things I am thankful for encompass almost the entirety of my life.
First and foremost, I'm thankful for my son. I think most parents want to raise kids to be better people than they are. In this case, I have no doubt that this is true. My son is a wonderful, compassionate, athletic, bright, honest and principled young man. I can't think of a single aspect of my boy that I'm not proud of. He has been a blessing from the day he was born to today. I look forward to watching him grow and prosper.
That part is easy. There's no downside, there. There's no need for perspective to be thankful for Logan. He is, without a doubt, my life's greatest joy.
Next, I'm thankful for my business. My business has been the source of most of my difficulties these past 12 months. However, I have a lot of cause for optimism going forward. True, the business is smaller than I'd like, but we have retained almost all the capital equipment that was a constraint on our growth in the early years. We're well-poised to be highly profitable in 2011, even if 2011 is as disastrous as 2010 was. The employees who remain are amazing. I thank my lucky stars every day that they're willing to work for me.
Yeah, this past year has been brutal, but I own a business that did half a million dollars last year. How many people do you know who wish they had that? During a time when small and large businesses are going out right and left, I'm still left standing. So long as the doors are open, I have a shot.
Compared to most Americans, I have great prospects because I own this business. Contrast to most people in the world, and I'm insanely wealthy. So, yeah, my business has been a source of vexation of late. However, it's got every chance to do well in the coming years. There's a lot more upside potential than downside at this point.
I'm thankful for my house. I bought a fixer upper, and it pretty much has played out as a worst-case scenario in terms of its condition. The thing just wasn't in very good shape. I bought it because the view out the back is absolutely heavenly. I also bought it because of proximity to Tessa's house. Logan can walk back and forth between the two houses, easily.
Anybody who ever bought a fixer upper can tell you that doing so is a soul-robbing experience. It's never the best-case scenario. You never really know how good or bad your house is until you start tearing the walls open. Most people get to live in blissful ignorance. If you renovate, though, the realties are laid bare.
At this point, my house still looks like a construction zone, but the walls and ceilings almost all have been repaired, now. They've been modernized with knock-down texture and painted neutral colors. I have all new windows on the second floor. New exterior doors throughout. I had some structural problems that caused one room to slope and the roofline to tilt, but that's all been fixed, now.
If I get to where I have a little money, I'll build a bonus room over the garage. It has a flat-roof and is the source of all the problems that developed over the years. However, that project can wait a year or two.
Once the shell is all taken care of, I can devote attention to the inside. There are a lot of projects there, too. I want hardwood throughout. The bathrooms and kitchen need to be remodelled. It will take years. When it's done, though, this will be a beautiful house. That, by the way, is the battle-cry of all poor souls who own a fixer upper: one day, this house will be beautiful.
Thing is, it's easy to see how it will happen and every passing day, my house gets nicer. It's still a wreck, but it's taking shape. I actually enjoy being in it, now. If I can make this sort of progress every year on the place, it shouldn't be that long until it's actually a home I can be proud of.
I'm thankful that I live in this country. Yes, I think our politicians are corrupt at worst, and inept at best. Yes, I think our society increasingly exists to put the little guy under Wall Street's boot heel.
Yes, I think our various levels of government kick small business owners in the teeth every chance they get. Yes, I think that the business environment is so anti-small business and so pro-Wall Street that it's entirely feasible that my business, like so many others, may go bankrupt in the not too distant future.
Despite all that, I can rebuild my life and my fortunes. I can do that because of the opportunities that are only really present here, in the United States. If I have to, I can build myself back up from nothing as a 50 year old failure. The politicans and Wall Street have destroyed a lot of America, but enough of America still exists that I can't imagine another place where I'd be as likely to succeed.
I'm thankful for Logan's mom, Tessa. We married a decade ago. Things haven't worked out so well between us. A lot is just basic incompatibility. I bear my share, or more, of the blame for the way things have gone.
When you marry somebody, you chose a partner for the duration of the marriage. However, once you have a child with a person, no matter what, your lives are intertwined forever.
In this way, the very things that made her an attractive spouse make her a phenomenal mother to my boy. She is beautiful, hard-working and intelligent. We share all the same values. Half of what Logan is is because of his mother. It is impossible to be grateful for how fantastic he is, without also being grateful for how fantastic she is.
All in all, it could have turned out better. Yet, despite everything, it could have turned out much, much worse and the reality is that things have turned out really well. Despite the fact that we are going our separate ways, we will continue to raise Logan together for the next decade or so. She's as good a partner in this endeavor as I could have hoped for.
I'm thankful for my father. For the first 3 decades of my life, that's something I doubt I would have said. We have a relationship that would have been described, at best, as being strained. He is a person who has made himself into a better person over time. These days, my relationship to him is something very valuable and important to me. He has been there for me in ways I never would have dreamed of in times past.
My relationship with him is one that best illustrates that people can change for the better and that it does not profit a person to harbor a grudge.
As a final note, I'm thankful for all my friends. I haven't always been as good a friend in return as I should have, but as time goes by, I place greater and greater value on the relationships in my life.
All in all, I wish 2010 had gone better. I hope 2011 goes much better. In the end, though, I'm thankful for my life and have every belief that things are good and on an upward arc. Hope the same is true for all of you.
One such example is of the healing power of forgiveness. Counterintuitively, the greatest boon of forgiveness is not to the transgressor, but to the transgressed. Anger, resentment and hostility are cancerous to the human spirit. Forgiveness allows a person to rid themselves of these destructive emotions.
The very fact that the benefits are counterintuitive is the reason why these messages need to be carried by religion. Most people gravitate towards the obvious and the self-serving. However, religion can serve a function of reminding us that not everything in life is based on the feelings and perceptions that are most readily at hand.
Another example, appropriate to the season, is that most great world religions embrace the idea that we should be thankful for our blessings. The human condition is one where we disdain our discomforts and difficulties, and embrace our progress and blessings. However, the human condition is also one where our discomforts and difficulties are always manifest. Our progress and blessings? They are easy to take for granted and to overlook.
This is true to a far greater degree in the United States than in many other cultures. Vast swaths of the world have societies where their trials and tribulations are accepted as normal and inevitable facets of life. The US has never been such a society. If we don't like it, we change it. If we like it, we do what it takes to get more of it.
We are not a people who accept our difficulties with resignation. We fight. It is this desire to constantly make our world a better place that defines our greatness as a nation and as a people.
It also, to a great degree, makes us a people who are puzzlingly unhappy. Our natural state of being is one of dissatisfaction.
I am certainly no exception. As I go into this Thanksgiving season, I look back on a very, very difficult year. It had bright spots to be certain. My son is always a source of joy and pride. However, it was a very hard year for me in virtually every other regard.
One need only open a newspaper or turn on the TV news to know that this is a difficult time for many.
The reasons to be unhappy are many. We have a corrupt government that exists only to serve the interests of the monied. The little guy has been taking it on the chin harder than at any other time in my lifetime. The rising tide that was supposed to raise all ships is raising only the biggest and most expensive. Those of us in more modest craft are being swamped and are lucky to stay afloat.
Worst of all, the trend is towards more of the same, with virtually no chance that the tide will turn the other way any time soon. Millions of hopeful voters brought in the Obama administration in '08, only to see the Obama administration is absolutely corrupt, in equal measure to the Bush administration that preceeded it. There was zero change. There isn't any realistic cause for hope.
Like many small business owners, I am in the fight of my life. This time last year, I had 14 full-time employees. I am now down to 5. 9 good people who worked hard every day and wanted nothing more than a day's work for a day's pay are now unemployed. I bear that guilt every day because I just wasn't smart enough to find a way to keep it from happening.
In hindsight, I should have let them go sooner. Trouble is, I didn't have the benefit of hindsight as I made the decisions I made. I don't mind so much for me. My finances are a total wreck, but I can always find a way to get by.
However, I'm grappling with the reality that when everything is said and done, I may not have anything to pass to my son. I still have time to try and rebuild, and with any luck, I will get on my feet again, enough to afford to send him to the school of his choice when the time comes. In the mean time, though, I'm not in a very good place, and there's no guarantee things will improve next year.
So, there's a lot I'm unhappy with right now. However, it doesn't benefit a person to concentrate only on lifes difficulties. I'm also very blessed. I have much to be Thankful for.
I believe an optimistic outlook serves a person well. That a person is more prosperous, happy and healthy when they can go through life looking on the bright side of things.
The reality is that many things in life can be viewed either positively or negatively. It just depends on what you want to do.
For instance, Wall Street's relentless drive to crush the little guy and stack the deck ever further in Wall Street's favor is driven by it's belief that their glass is 3% empty, not 97% full.
In my life, so many of the things I saw as burdens were, if looked at from a different perspective, actually positives in their own way.
So, during this season of thanks, I'll go ahead and spell out the things I'm thankful for. I can count my blessings by the fact that the things I am thankful for encompass almost the entirety of my life.
First and foremost, I'm thankful for my son. I think most parents want to raise kids to be better people than they are. In this case, I have no doubt that this is true. My son is a wonderful, compassionate, athletic, bright, honest and principled young man. I can't think of a single aspect of my boy that I'm not proud of. He has been a blessing from the day he was born to today. I look forward to watching him grow and prosper.
That part is easy. There's no downside, there. There's no need for perspective to be thankful for Logan. He is, without a doubt, my life's greatest joy.
Next, I'm thankful for my business. My business has been the source of most of my difficulties these past 12 months. However, I have a lot of cause for optimism going forward. True, the business is smaller than I'd like, but we have retained almost all the capital equipment that was a constraint on our growth in the early years. We're well-poised to be highly profitable in 2011, even if 2011 is as disastrous as 2010 was. The employees who remain are amazing. I thank my lucky stars every day that they're willing to work for me.
Yeah, this past year has been brutal, but I own a business that did half a million dollars last year. How many people do you know who wish they had that? During a time when small and large businesses are going out right and left, I'm still left standing. So long as the doors are open, I have a shot.
Compared to most Americans, I have great prospects because I own this business. Contrast to most people in the world, and I'm insanely wealthy. So, yeah, my business has been a source of vexation of late. However, it's got every chance to do well in the coming years. There's a lot more upside potential than downside at this point.
I'm thankful for my house. I bought a fixer upper, and it pretty much has played out as a worst-case scenario in terms of its condition. The thing just wasn't in very good shape. I bought it because the view out the back is absolutely heavenly. I also bought it because of proximity to Tessa's house. Logan can walk back and forth between the two houses, easily.
Anybody who ever bought a fixer upper can tell you that doing so is a soul-robbing experience. It's never the best-case scenario. You never really know how good or bad your house is until you start tearing the walls open. Most people get to live in blissful ignorance. If you renovate, though, the realties are laid bare.
At this point, my house still looks like a construction zone, but the walls and ceilings almost all have been repaired, now. They've been modernized with knock-down texture and painted neutral colors. I have all new windows on the second floor. New exterior doors throughout. I had some structural problems that caused one room to slope and the roofline to tilt, but that's all been fixed, now.
If I get to where I have a little money, I'll build a bonus room over the garage. It has a flat-roof and is the source of all the problems that developed over the years. However, that project can wait a year or two.
Once the shell is all taken care of, I can devote attention to the inside. There are a lot of projects there, too. I want hardwood throughout. The bathrooms and kitchen need to be remodelled. It will take years. When it's done, though, this will be a beautiful house. That, by the way, is the battle-cry of all poor souls who own a fixer upper: one day, this house will be beautiful.
Thing is, it's easy to see how it will happen and every passing day, my house gets nicer. It's still a wreck, but it's taking shape. I actually enjoy being in it, now. If I can make this sort of progress every year on the place, it shouldn't be that long until it's actually a home I can be proud of.
I'm thankful that I live in this country. Yes, I think our politicians are corrupt at worst, and inept at best. Yes, I think our society increasingly exists to put the little guy under Wall Street's boot heel.
Yes, I think our various levels of government kick small business owners in the teeth every chance they get. Yes, I think that the business environment is so anti-small business and so pro-Wall Street that it's entirely feasible that my business, like so many others, may go bankrupt in the not too distant future.
Despite all that, I can rebuild my life and my fortunes. I can do that because of the opportunities that are only really present here, in the United States. If I have to, I can build myself back up from nothing as a 50 year old failure. The politicans and Wall Street have destroyed a lot of America, but enough of America still exists that I can't imagine another place where I'd be as likely to succeed.
I'm thankful for Logan's mom, Tessa. We married a decade ago. Things haven't worked out so well between us. A lot is just basic incompatibility. I bear my share, or more, of the blame for the way things have gone.
When you marry somebody, you chose a partner for the duration of the marriage. However, once you have a child with a person, no matter what, your lives are intertwined forever.
In this way, the very things that made her an attractive spouse make her a phenomenal mother to my boy. She is beautiful, hard-working and intelligent. We share all the same values. Half of what Logan is is because of his mother. It is impossible to be grateful for how fantastic he is, without also being grateful for how fantastic she is.
All in all, it could have turned out better. Yet, despite everything, it could have turned out much, much worse and the reality is that things have turned out really well. Despite the fact that we are going our separate ways, we will continue to raise Logan together for the next decade or so. She's as good a partner in this endeavor as I could have hoped for.
I'm thankful for my father. For the first 3 decades of my life, that's something I doubt I would have said. We have a relationship that would have been described, at best, as being strained. He is a person who has made himself into a better person over time. These days, my relationship to him is something very valuable and important to me. He has been there for me in ways I never would have dreamed of in times past.
My relationship with him is one that best illustrates that people can change for the better and that it does not profit a person to harbor a grudge.
As a final note, I'm thankful for all my friends. I haven't always been as good a friend in return as I should have, but as time goes by, I place greater and greater value on the relationships in my life.
All in all, I wish 2010 had gone better. I hope 2011 goes much better. In the end, though, I'm thankful for my life and have every belief that things are good and on an upward arc. Hope the same is true for all of you.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Captain of my Own Ship
Of many expressions that are used to describe business ownership, the one I like best is "Captain of my Own Ship". Not so much because of the naval references, but because to me, it sums up best what it's like.
Captains not only have to take into account the internal workings of the ship, but the overall environment and seas the ship sails. In business, we run into "perfect storms" just like ships at sea can. Now, granted, owning your own small business is not nearly as dramatic as being captain of a ship at sea. At sea, decisions can involve literal life and death implications.
There really aren't that many opportunities in business for a person to die or even to get injured. Compliance with OSHA requirements and common sense keep our injuries pretty small. The last injury I can remember happening is when a worker dropped something on his foot. His foot swelled up and because the worker was diabetic, he was concerned. I told him to file a worker's comp claim and go see a doctor. I'm not a physician, and if the guy ended up developing complications and having his foot amputated, I wanted to make sure he was as protected as possible by the worker's comp system.
Of course, it was no such thing. His foot simply had swelled up a little bit and he was fine. That is what qualifies as a big injury in my business. So, yeah, being a Captain at sea? Perfect storms kill people out there. We don't worry about that so much in here.
We are in the midst of a perfect storm here, though. A lot of businesses are not surviving and there's no guarantee that we won't be joining the ranks of companies that didn't make it.
We're selling off assets, now. So far, we're trimming fat, but it won't be too long until the stuff we're selling is hacking into sinew and muscle. We're selling off a thermal imaging camera and a floor sander that we almost never used. However, we're also putting a truck and truckmount up for auction, and those are things we could potentially use.
Right now, though, we have 4 production trucks and 2 minivans for a company that has been downsized to just 5 employees. We literally have more vehicles than people right now, a remnant of our days as a million dollar company.
Both the business cycle and the economic cycle have been exceptionally cruel to us for the past year and a half. We're basically at half our former volume. What was once an exceedingly profitable company with 14 employees is now down to just those who are absolutely necessary to build us up for the future.
I've always tried to be good to my employees. I couldn't afford to offer health care, but instead, tried to offer excpetionally generous 401(k) matching and put a few more dollars in the employee's paychecks. My workers make more than what most newer UAW workers make around here.
A lot of folks look for ways to gain the upper hand against labor, and to pay them as little as possible. I've always felt extremely fortunate to have the great workers I do, and am just sad I can't do more for them.
One of my employees came to me the other day and said that he realized how slow business was. He told me he would be okay with me letting him go if I had to. I told him I had no intention of doing that.
He said, "Jim, you've been good to me. I don't want to see this company go out of business."
It's things like that where I'm simply left speechless. I don't pay great wages. My employees have to work their butts off. I'm not an easy person to work for, and frankly, I'm not always an easy person to be around. Yet, I have these awesome employees who have stuck by me for years.
When I think of the people I've had to lay off, it pains me horribly. These were not people who did anything wrong. They were let go due to lack of business, nothing more. They were let go because I wasn't smart enough to find a way to keep them on the payroll.
Do I feel guilty about that? You bet. Every day.
It's not that I didn't try. My personal finances took a six figure hit to try and keep everybody employed before I simply ran out of money. After that I kept as many people employed as I could until I ran out of credit.
Through it all, though, I feel really bad. I was the captain of this ship and it's run aground. Doesn't matter the whys and wherefores. I was in charge.
I do get into self-pitying moods now and then. When times were good, they were really good. I also think times will get back to that point in the future, which is why I'm hanging on.
In the mean time, this is a ship with problems and I'm doing what I can to try and keep it afloat. This business will see profitable years in the near future. Might not be next year or the year after, but it will happen.
We're really lean right now. Maybe a bit too lean. So, we are in a position to be very, very profitable if business picks up. I've done my best to get the company to the right size for our current level of sales. So, even if we have another year next year at these reduced sales levels, I should be able to make money.
The weather is beautiful right now. This should be our last bad 4 weeks of business. Mid December is the historical start of our busy-season. Last year, though, things never picked up. If we can at least keep things constant, I should be in great shape for next year.
In the mean time, this has been a trauma, both financially and emotionally. I am not sure how much longer I'll do this particular type of business. I'm considering other options and other potential careers for the last two decades of my working life.
So many things I would have done differently, but that's not life, is it? You only get to move forward. You can only try to shape your future. You can't change the past.
I just made travel plans for December drill. I can't tell you how tickled I am that my commander is letting me double up on drills. I'll have half my year's drills done in December. I may also try to get into my certification class a bit earlier, like in March. I had planned on doing it in August, but now, I don't want to wait that long.
I'm also booking my flights with American Airlines instead of Southwest. Too many plane changes and stops with southwest. American has evening nonstops to Detroit, which means I can leave right after my Sunday drill. Fewer nights away from home. Southwest is awesome about everything, but if you fly with them, it can take a long time to get where you're going. I am sort of regretting booking with them to get me to/from Disney next week. The flight back will be a long one, and it will try my patience a little bit, but will probably be really tough for my little guy.
It's a bumpy ride these days, all things considered. Everything feels challenging, but again, that's life, isn't it? I couldn't tell you what my life will look like 12 months from now. If my biz finds a buyer, I may be just a full-time student. There's just no way to know.
Captains not only have to take into account the internal workings of the ship, but the overall environment and seas the ship sails. In business, we run into "perfect storms" just like ships at sea can. Now, granted, owning your own small business is not nearly as dramatic as being captain of a ship at sea. At sea, decisions can involve literal life and death implications.
There really aren't that many opportunities in business for a person to die or even to get injured. Compliance with OSHA requirements and common sense keep our injuries pretty small. The last injury I can remember happening is when a worker dropped something on his foot. His foot swelled up and because the worker was diabetic, he was concerned. I told him to file a worker's comp claim and go see a doctor. I'm not a physician, and if the guy ended up developing complications and having his foot amputated, I wanted to make sure he was as protected as possible by the worker's comp system.
Of course, it was no such thing. His foot simply had swelled up a little bit and he was fine. That is what qualifies as a big injury in my business. So, yeah, being a Captain at sea? Perfect storms kill people out there. We don't worry about that so much in here.
We are in the midst of a perfect storm here, though. A lot of businesses are not surviving and there's no guarantee that we won't be joining the ranks of companies that didn't make it.
We're selling off assets, now. So far, we're trimming fat, but it won't be too long until the stuff we're selling is hacking into sinew and muscle. We're selling off a thermal imaging camera and a floor sander that we almost never used. However, we're also putting a truck and truckmount up for auction, and those are things we could potentially use.
Right now, though, we have 4 production trucks and 2 minivans for a company that has been downsized to just 5 employees. We literally have more vehicles than people right now, a remnant of our days as a million dollar company.
Both the business cycle and the economic cycle have been exceptionally cruel to us for the past year and a half. We're basically at half our former volume. What was once an exceedingly profitable company with 14 employees is now down to just those who are absolutely necessary to build us up for the future.
I've always tried to be good to my employees. I couldn't afford to offer health care, but instead, tried to offer excpetionally generous 401(k) matching and put a few more dollars in the employee's paychecks. My workers make more than what most newer UAW workers make around here.
A lot of folks look for ways to gain the upper hand against labor, and to pay them as little as possible. I've always felt extremely fortunate to have the great workers I do, and am just sad I can't do more for them.
One of my employees came to me the other day and said that he realized how slow business was. He told me he would be okay with me letting him go if I had to. I told him I had no intention of doing that.
He said, "Jim, you've been good to me. I don't want to see this company go out of business."
It's things like that where I'm simply left speechless. I don't pay great wages. My employees have to work their butts off. I'm not an easy person to work for, and frankly, I'm not always an easy person to be around. Yet, I have these awesome employees who have stuck by me for years.
When I think of the people I've had to lay off, it pains me horribly. These were not people who did anything wrong. They were let go due to lack of business, nothing more. They were let go because I wasn't smart enough to find a way to keep them on the payroll.
Do I feel guilty about that? You bet. Every day.
It's not that I didn't try. My personal finances took a six figure hit to try and keep everybody employed before I simply ran out of money. After that I kept as many people employed as I could until I ran out of credit.
Through it all, though, I feel really bad. I was the captain of this ship and it's run aground. Doesn't matter the whys and wherefores. I was in charge.
I do get into self-pitying moods now and then. When times were good, they were really good. I also think times will get back to that point in the future, which is why I'm hanging on.
In the mean time, this is a ship with problems and I'm doing what I can to try and keep it afloat. This business will see profitable years in the near future. Might not be next year or the year after, but it will happen.
We're really lean right now. Maybe a bit too lean. So, we are in a position to be very, very profitable if business picks up. I've done my best to get the company to the right size for our current level of sales. So, even if we have another year next year at these reduced sales levels, I should be able to make money.
The weather is beautiful right now. This should be our last bad 4 weeks of business. Mid December is the historical start of our busy-season. Last year, though, things never picked up. If we can at least keep things constant, I should be in great shape for next year.
In the mean time, this has been a trauma, both financially and emotionally. I am not sure how much longer I'll do this particular type of business. I'm considering other options and other potential careers for the last two decades of my working life.
So many things I would have done differently, but that's not life, is it? You only get to move forward. You can only try to shape your future. You can't change the past.
I just made travel plans for December drill. I can't tell you how tickled I am that my commander is letting me double up on drills. I'll have half my year's drills done in December. I may also try to get into my certification class a bit earlier, like in March. I had planned on doing it in August, but now, I don't want to wait that long.
I'm also booking my flights with American Airlines instead of Southwest. Too many plane changes and stops with southwest. American has evening nonstops to Detroit, which means I can leave right after my Sunday drill. Fewer nights away from home. Southwest is awesome about everything, but if you fly with them, it can take a long time to get where you're going. I am sort of regretting booking with them to get me to/from Disney next week. The flight back will be a long one, and it will try my patience a little bit, but will probably be really tough for my little guy.
It's a bumpy ride these days, all things considered. Everything feels challenging, but again, that's life, isn't it? I couldn't tell you what my life will look like 12 months from now. If my biz finds a buyer, I may be just a full-time student. There's just no way to know.
Friday, November 19, 2010
From the Mouths of Kids...
Yesterday my son heard my Wall Street Journal podcast where one of the advertisers was selling something related to advertising.
He said, "Dad, you should buy that. You should buy more advertising".
I said, "Oh, really? Why do you say that?"
He said, "Because you only have that one TV commercial."
It gave me a chance to talk to him and explain a little bit about marketing.
When I got to the part where I told him about our marketer, he was really interested.
"So, that person just goes around and talks to people? He doesn't have to do any work?"
I had to laugh at that. To him, the "work" of my business would be the heavy lifting involved in fixing a water damage, or cleaning a carpet or some other physical labor.
Driving around? Talking to people? To quote Dire Straits: that ain't workin'.
Actually, I hope there are good sales positions when he grows up. He'd be perfect. He's bright and handsome. However, he's also genuinely personable. He loves people. I get comments all the time from adults about how outgoing and friendly he is.
Like most parents, I want my son to have a better life than I've had. To be a better person and to do better things.
Pretty much every day, he gives me every indication that he'll do just that.
He said, "Dad, you should buy that. You should buy more advertising".
I said, "Oh, really? Why do you say that?"
He said, "Because you only have that one TV commercial."
It gave me a chance to talk to him and explain a little bit about marketing.
When I got to the part where I told him about our marketer, he was really interested.
"So, that person just goes around and talks to people? He doesn't have to do any work?"
I had to laugh at that. To him, the "work" of my business would be the heavy lifting involved in fixing a water damage, or cleaning a carpet or some other physical labor.
Driving around? Talking to people? To quote Dire Straits: that ain't workin'.
Actually, I hope there are good sales positions when he grows up. He'd be perfect. He's bright and handsome. However, he's also genuinely personable. He loves people. I get comments all the time from adults about how outgoing and friendly he is.
Like most parents, I want my son to have a better life than I've had. To be a better person and to do better things.
Pretty much every day, he gives me every indication that he'll do just that.
The Last of a Dying Breed...
It gets very difficult pulling the wagon from time to time. Every year, more people are in the wagon and fewer and fewer of us are pulling it. Every year, I see numerous examples of why.
For instance, today's mail? Contained a letter from the State of Michigan saying that my 2009 Michigan Single Business tax return was incorrect. They wanted me to send them about $1,500 because of the mistake.
Problem is, there wasn't any mistake. The two errors they think they caught were that they claim they never received my quarterly estimated payments, and that they don't have a record of carrying over an overpayment from 2008.
So, I ran to the bank to get front and back images of the checks I wrote them, which I sent them, which were deposited, and which, after all that, they claim they never received.
The carried over overpayment? All I can do there is show them copies of my 2008 return since it's not possible for me to show them that I didn't get the refund. "Look, see? Here's the check I didn't get."
All I can do is show them that I asked them to apply it to my 2009 tax bill.
This tax, by the way, is a particularly insidious one. For those not familiar, Michigan has a tax called the "Single Business Tax", which taxes businesses based on gross, not net, volume.
It is one of many, many reasons why nobody in their right mind puts a business in Michigan if they can avoid it.
Michigan's attitude towards jobs is pretty good. They want them. They want lots of them. They want them to pay well.
This, unfortunately, does not jibe with their attitude about businesses, which is that if you create one, they'll jump on your back and ride you like zorro. If you make a dime, they want it. Even if you don't make a dime, taxes like the single business tax will nail you, anyway.
Honestly, this has been a very, very hard year, and things like this hit me harder than they might if I were more prosperous. I'm in the fight of my life trying to meet payroll and keep the lights on, and instead, I lose a day running to the bank and the CPAs office because some state bureaucrat has nothing better to do than to hound people for tax money... even if the people already paid the tax money.
Basically, if you're the little guy, and you're doing the right thing, and every day, you wake up and devote 100% of your business towards doing the right thing, the government steps in, says you did the wrong thing and then the burden of proof is on YOU to show that they're wrong.
But if you're the big guy? And you do the wrong thing? The government takes a bunch of money from the little guy and bails you out. Nice system, that. Seems I got on the wrong side of that equation, though.
I am starting to wonder if I've simply been incredibly naive my entire life. I believed in the power of capitalism. We've all seen what a total joke that is. My faith in capitalism is completely misguided.
Capitalism has nothing to do with life in America right now. If you're politically connected (Wall Streeters and Union Members), then you are immune to not just the laws of capitalism, but the laws of economics.
If you're not politically connected? Well... the state tries to get you to pay your taxes twice. Even if you already paid them. Even if you pay through the nose every year to have a CPA make sure you pay them.
If you make a profit? They are first in line to snag the lion's share of it. Over 15% Social Security and Medicare taxes. If you're lucky, only 20% or so for Federal. Another 5% for State. $4 grand a year for property taxes. (Unless you've paid on two houses, like I have... then, it's $8,000.) Local income taxes. Business taxes. Sales taxes.
If you're lucky, you get to keep less than half of what you made.
If you're not profitable? Hey, you need to be destroyed by the creative destruction of capitalism... never mind that all the taxes you've paid your entire life saved UAW members and Wall Street from this same necessary creative destruction.
I believed that it was virtuous to work hard. Again, what a joke. Far better to go to Wall Street, take a home run swing every day and if you strike out, make the taxpayer hold you aloft until you can take another swing at a multimillion dollar payday.
Rather than working, having a small business, how much farther along would I be to just be a slip and fall attorney? Sue these insurers every day. Make some poor schmuck with a small business pay for it by paying his premiums so that the insurer and the attorneys can get rich. When I say attorneys, by the way, I mean both the plaintiff's and the defendant's attorneys.
Take 1/3 of my clients' insurance settlements? How much better is society off if guys like me, instead of going to a rigorous MBA program and starting a business, went across the campus to the Law School and just became trial lawyers?
Okay, society would be no better off. I sure as heck would, though. I'd be in the wagon, making a living off the efforts of others, instead of being foolish enough to pull the wagon for others.
Every month, I pay my health insurance. Why? So that people on public assistance can have better health coverage than most low-wage workers? So that Obama can make secret backroom deals that ensure that pharma and insurers will always rip us off and that 10% annual increases will never stop?
Why even try? Why keep pulling this wagon? Used to be I thought it was a point of pride. I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought business was my calling.
Now? I think I've just been stupid, and naive. That I was dumb enough to be idealistic. That I was foolish enough to work hard. That I was pathetic enough to believe that I could compete in the market.
When I was young, I was raised by a grandfather and grandmother on social security. I wore used clothing from garage sales and shoes from KMart. Little did I know that I was actually entitled to a check from social security every month because I was the dependent of a retiree.
My grandparents would never have even dreamed something like this would be possible. How would they? They, like me, believed that the way you got ahead in life was to work hard, take care of yourself and live within your means.
How silly they were. The way you get ahead is to find out what the government is subsidizing, then milk the hell out of it. If the government subsidizes home mortgages? You get rich selling subprime mortgages. If the government is subsidizing college tuition? You get rich by opening a diploma-mill "college".
If you aren't thinking on that sort of scale, you get on the dole, then milk the crap out of that. Your kids go to college for free. You get a caseworker who tells you which offices to go to, and you get to live a modest life without ever doing a speck of work.
My grandparents weren't hip to this. They worked their fingers to the bone for their modest lives. Their kids, myself included, had to join the military to afford college. What a bunch of suckers we all were.
What I needed to do was spend all my time thinking about how to be in the wagon, instead of pulling it.
I spent 4 years active duty and almost that much time in the reserves willing to defend this system. Again, I'm a chump. I'm willing to die so some Wall Street banker can bet a zillion dollars of other people's money on a red-or-black spin of the roulette wheel, and if he loses, I have to pay to bail him out.
I don't even have a defense to offer on that one. Naive. Stupid. Where in the world did I get such an antiquated world-view.
Today? Every day, I look myself in the mirror and wonder why in the world I'm such a chump. The worst part? It gets worse every day. I weep for the country that our children will be inheriting. By that time, there will probably be 20 people in the wagon for every person pulling it.
If that poor fool pulling the wagon stumbles? The government will finish him off. He won't be able to pay his taxes, which will make him utterly useless to all the folks in the wagon.
Woe be unto the fool who thinks he can get ahead by hard work and square dealing. It just doesn't seem to happen like that these days. For the most part, it looks like our role is to keep the system going so the folks in the wagon, bureaucrats and Wall Streeters included, can make their fortunes while we toil away.
For instance, today's mail? Contained a letter from the State of Michigan saying that my 2009 Michigan Single Business tax return was incorrect. They wanted me to send them about $1,500 because of the mistake.
Problem is, there wasn't any mistake. The two errors they think they caught were that they claim they never received my quarterly estimated payments, and that they don't have a record of carrying over an overpayment from 2008.
So, I ran to the bank to get front and back images of the checks I wrote them, which I sent them, which were deposited, and which, after all that, they claim they never received.
The carried over overpayment? All I can do there is show them copies of my 2008 return since it's not possible for me to show them that I didn't get the refund. "Look, see? Here's the check I didn't get."
All I can do is show them that I asked them to apply it to my 2009 tax bill.
This tax, by the way, is a particularly insidious one. For those not familiar, Michigan has a tax called the "Single Business Tax", which taxes businesses based on gross, not net, volume.
It is one of many, many reasons why nobody in their right mind puts a business in Michigan if they can avoid it.
Michigan's attitude towards jobs is pretty good. They want them. They want lots of them. They want them to pay well.
This, unfortunately, does not jibe with their attitude about businesses, which is that if you create one, they'll jump on your back and ride you like zorro. If you make a dime, they want it. Even if you don't make a dime, taxes like the single business tax will nail you, anyway.
Honestly, this has been a very, very hard year, and things like this hit me harder than they might if I were more prosperous. I'm in the fight of my life trying to meet payroll and keep the lights on, and instead, I lose a day running to the bank and the CPAs office because some state bureaucrat has nothing better to do than to hound people for tax money... even if the people already paid the tax money.
Basically, if you're the little guy, and you're doing the right thing, and every day, you wake up and devote 100% of your business towards doing the right thing, the government steps in, says you did the wrong thing and then the burden of proof is on YOU to show that they're wrong.
But if you're the big guy? And you do the wrong thing? The government takes a bunch of money from the little guy and bails you out. Nice system, that. Seems I got on the wrong side of that equation, though.
I am starting to wonder if I've simply been incredibly naive my entire life. I believed in the power of capitalism. We've all seen what a total joke that is. My faith in capitalism is completely misguided.
Capitalism has nothing to do with life in America right now. If you're politically connected (Wall Streeters and Union Members), then you are immune to not just the laws of capitalism, but the laws of economics.
If you're not politically connected? Well... the state tries to get you to pay your taxes twice. Even if you already paid them. Even if you pay through the nose every year to have a CPA make sure you pay them.
If you make a profit? They are first in line to snag the lion's share of it. Over 15% Social Security and Medicare taxes. If you're lucky, only 20% or so for Federal. Another 5% for State. $4 grand a year for property taxes. (Unless you've paid on two houses, like I have... then, it's $8,000.) Local income taxes. Business taxes. Sales taxes.
If you're lucky, you get to keep less than half of what you made.
If you're not profitable? Hey, you need to be destroyed by the creative destruction of capitalism... never mind that all the taxes you've paid your entire life saved UAW members and Wall Street from this same necessary creative destruction.
I believed that it was virtuous to work hard. Again, what a joke. Far better to go to Wall Street, take a home run swing every day and if you strike out, make the taxpayer hold you aloft until you can take another swing at a multimillion dollar payday.
Rather than working, having a small business, how much farther along would I be to just be a slip and fall attorney? Sue these insurers every day. Make some poor schmuck with a small business pay for it by paying his premiums so that the insurer and the attorneys can get rich. When I say attorneys, by the way, I mean both the plaintiff's and the defendant's attorneys.
Take 1/3 of my clients' insurance settlements? How much better is society off if guys like me, instead of going to a rigorous MBA program and starting a business, went across the campus to the Law School and just became trial lawyers?
Okay, society would be no better off. I sure as heck would, though. I'd be in the wagon, making a living off the efforts of others, instead of being foolish enough to pull the wagon for others.
Every month, I pay my health insurance. Why? So that people on public assistance can have better health coverage than most low-wage workers? So that Obama can make secret backroom deals that ensure that pharma and insurers will always rip us off and that 10% annual increases will never stop?
Why even try? Why keep pulling this wagon? Used to be I thought it was a point of pride. I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought business was my calling.
Now? I think I've just been stupid, and naive. That I was dumb enough to be idealistic. That I was foolish enough to work hard. That I was pathetic enough to believe that I could compete in the market.
When I was young, I was raised by a grandfather and grandmother on social security. I wore used clothing from garage sales and shoes from KMart. Little did I know that I was actually entitled to a check from social security every month because I was the dependent of a retiree.
My grandparents would never have even dreamed something like this would be possible. How would they? They, like me, believed that the way you got ahead in life was to work hard, take care of yourself and live within your means.
How silly they were. The way you get ahead is to find out what the government is subsidizing, then milk the hell out of it. If the government subsidizes home mortgages? You get rich selling subprime mortgages. If the government is subsidizing college tuition? You get rich by opening a diploma-mill "college".
If you aren't thinking on that sort of scale, you get on the dole, then milk the crap out of that. Your kids go to college for free. You get a caseworker who tells you which offices to go to, and you get to live a modest life without ever doing a speck of work.
My grandparents weren't hip to this. They worked their fingers to the bone for their modest lives. Their kids, myself included, had to join the military to afford college. What a bunch of suckers we all were.
What I needed to do was spend all my time thinking about how to be in the wagon, instead of pulling it.
I spent 4 years active duty and almost that much time in the reserves willing to defend this system. Again, I'm a chump. I'm willing to die so some Wall Street banker can bet a zillion dollars of other people's money on a red-or-black spin of the roulette wheel, and if he loses, I have to pay to bail him out.
I don't even have a defense to offer on that one. Naive. Stupid. Where in the world did I get such an antiquated world-view.
Today? Every day, I look myself in the mirror and wonder why in the world I'm such a chump. The worst part? It gets worse every day. I weep for the country that our children will be inheriting. By that time, there will probably be 20 people in the wagon for every person pulling it.
If that poor fool pulling the wagon stumbles? The government will finish him off. He won't be able to pay his taxes, which will make him utterly useless to all the folks in the wagon.
Woe be unto the fool who thinks he can get ahead by hard work and square dealing. It just doesn't seem to happen like that these days. For the most part, it looks like our role is to keep the system going so the folks in the wagon, bureaucrats and Wall Streeters included, can make their fortunes while we toil away.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
6 years without a job...
It was October 15 of 2004 that I worked my last day as an employee. I'm reminded of this because I'm putting my first van up for sale right now. Back when the company consisted of me and a truck, this was the truck.
It's pretty old, now. Runs strong, but at almost 100,000 hard miles, it's going to be at a point where it's going to get unreliable. The truckmount (carpet cleaning machine) in it works great, but it's old, too. For years, that was my workhorse.
Funny to think back on how awesome these past 6 years have been. It's easy to compartmentalize them.
Year one: exhausting, not profitable, but encouraging.
Year two: money
Year three: more money.
Year four: even more money, country club membership, started to really get on a solid foundation.
Year five: First half, like year four. Second half, like year six.
Year six: total crap
It's not easy to be in small business, especially during times like these. Business has been awful.
Still, of all the things I've ever done in my life, these past six years have been, by far, the most enjoyable. I really love this.
I have a lot of anxiety about 2011. Things really died for us mid 2009. I kept thinking, "no way it can stay like this. 2010 has to be good."
Well... no, it doesn't. And there's nothing that says 2011 will be better. In fact, there's nothing to say that 2011 will be as good as 2010.
Still, you have to have a stubborn streak, and a bit of wild eyed optimism to be an entrepreneur.
All in all, I will probably be selling this business, for various reasons related to my long-term goals in life. After that, I'll be looking for something else to do. Maybe take a year off and clear my head. Who knows.
So, I start year 7 in not that much different shape than I was in when I very first opened my doors. There were three songs that I used to play to keep myself pumped up back then.
The first was the Push Stars, "Lucky Sevens". The lyrics that lifted me were, "Hey, disarray is just a moment away, but that's why I've survived all this time."
The next was the song "Living on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi. Particularly the lyrics, "you live for the fight when that's all that you've got".
The last was "save a horse, ride a cowboy" by Big and Rich. Especially the lyrics, "I'm the only John Wayne left in this town."
When you own a small business and it struggles, there aren't a lot of choices left for you. You can just give up and wallow in self-pity. I've been there and done that. Eventually, though, you go all-in. You back up until your back is against the wall and you come out swinging.
A year from now, I could be writing anything. That I had to declare bankruptcy and take a job. I could be writing that my reorg worked and I made money despite another year of anemic volume. I could be rich again.
It's never dull. I guess that's why not everybody does it. It just isn't for everyone. There are plenty of days when I wonder if I'm really up to the task or not. There are other days when being an entreprenuer is a calling.
I still get a little weepy when I see a business close its doors. That's somebody's dreams that just got shattered, along with a big chunk of their financial well-being.
If I can keep this thing afloat, eventually, something will pan out. It's times like these that let you spend the money you make during good times with a clear conscience.
It's pretty old, now. Runs strong, but at almost 100,000 hard miles, it's going to be at a point where it's going to get unreliable. The truckmount (carpet cleaning machine) in it works great, but it's old, too. For years, that was my workhorse.
Funny to think back on how awesome these past 6 years have been. It's easy to compartmentalize them.
Year one: exhausting, not profitable, but encouraging.
Year two: money
Year three: more money.
Year four: even more money, country club membership, started to really get on a solid foundation.
Year five: First half, like year four. Second half, like year six.
Year six: total crap
It's not easy to be in small business, especially during times like these. Business has been awful.
Still, of all the things I've ever done in my life, these past six years have been, by far, the most enjoyable. I really love this.
I have a lot of anxiety about 2011. Things really died for us mid 2009. I kept thinking, "no way it can stay like this. 2010 has to be good."
Well... no, it doesn't. And there's nothing that says 2011 will be better. In fact, there's nothing to say that 2011 will be as good as 2010.
Still, you have to have a stubborn streak, and a bit of wild eyed optimism to be an entrepreneur.
All in all, I will probably be selling this business, for various reasons related to my long-term goals in life. After that, I'll be looking for something else to do. Maybe take a year off and clear my head. Who knows.
So, I start year 7 in not that much different shape than I was in when I very first opened my doors. There were three songs that I used to play to keep myself pumped up back then.
The first was the Push Stars, "Lucky Sevens". The lyrics that lifted me were, "Hey, disarray is just a moment away, but that's why I've survived all this time."
The next was the song "Living on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi. Particularly the lyrics, "you live for the fight when that's all that you've got".
The last was "save a horse, ride a cowboy" by Big and Rich. Especially the lyrics, "I'm the only John Wayne left in this town."
When you own a small business and it struggles, there aren't a lot of choices left for you. You can just give up and wallow in self-pity. I've been there and done that. Eventually, though, you go all-in. You back up until your back is against the wall and you come out swinging.
A year from now, I could be writing anything. That I had to declare bankruptcy and take a job. I could be writing that my reorg worked and I made money despite another year of anemic volume. I could be rich again.
It's never dull. I guess that's why not everybody does it. It just isn't for everyone. There are plenty of days when I wonder if I'm really up to the task or not. There are other days when being an entreprenuer is a calling.
I still get a little weepy when I see a business close its doors. That's somebody's dreams that just got shattered, along with a big chunk of their financial well-being.
If I can keep this thing afloat, eventually, something will pan out. It's times like these that let you spend the money you make during good times with a clear conscience.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Lost Another Friend
I just got word that a friend from High School, Scott Hill, just passed away. Scott and I had a sort of strange relationship. After the 9th grade, I stopped playing sports, entirely, and turned even more moody and sullen than usual. I never quite fit in with the jock crowd. I didn't do enough homework to fit in with the braniac nerds.
I started playing guitar and hanging out at the outcast table at lunch, just biding my time waiting for High School to end, so my life could begin.
"Outcast table" is a bit harsh. We were just sort of a collection of odds and ends that didn't fit neatly into any of the other obvious groups at the High School. We had a wrestler, a techie nerd (believe it or don't, there was a time when this was a really, really unusual thing in a High School), a new kid at school, me, and Scott.
I don't know what role I played in the group. Maybe the underachieving slacker. Scott was the stoner of the group. I'm not sure that he necessarily did all that many drugs. Just more than most of the kids in my high school, which meant that he did some. Probably not a lot, especially by college standards. Just a lot compared to kids who didn't do any.
It still sort of surprises me that our group got along so well. It wasn't a clique. Cliques control their membership and actually kick people out of the group or accept people into it. Us? We were, each in our own way, a bunch of loners, but who were social enough to want to hang out together with somebody at lunch. Other than the techie nerd, everybody was pretty vocal. We'd discuss a wide variety of topics and by no means did we agree with each other on much.
I think the main thing was, nobody was judgemental. We all accepted each other at face value, and there was a total absence of bullying or belittling of each other.
I liked Scott. Granted, he wasn't exactly the typical profile of somebody a future Republican would gravitate to, but he was easygoing, nice, funny. He also played guitar, which gave us something in common.
I bumped into him now and then in life afterwards. In testament to the fact that for most people, what you are in High School has no bearing on what you are once you get to live life on your own terms, he eventually rose to be CIO of his company. At the time of his passing, he had a beautiful wife and two beautiful kids.
It was cancer that did him in.
We re-connected via Facebook, and to be perfectly honest, it struck me as a bit astounding how he'd turned his life into something so overwhelmingly positive. Not long after we touched base, his status updates indicated that he was pretty sick.
Personally, I wouldn't re-live my High School years. I'd go back to pretty much any time in my life, other than that. I think a lot of folks think of High School as the best years of their lives. I thought it was a miserable experience on par with being in prison. I actually liked Army basic training more than I liked High School.
If I had to guess, I bet most of us at that table felt the same way about it.
There were some very positive things that came out of High School, though. One of which was that I got to meet and interact with people who I very likely would not have, under most other circumstances. I got to where I really looked forward to lunch period and sitting at the outcast table with my fellow untouchables.
Scott was a big part of the reason why. For the record, Scott had impeccable music taste. He listened to Bad Company and was into Pink Floyd long before everybody hopped on their bandwagon after "The Wall". He had a Gretsch guitar that he got from his Dad, I believe. He was self-conscious about being thin.
Mostly, though, he was a good guy and a gentle soul. It's sad to think I'll never see him again.
I started playing guitar and hanging out at the outcast table at lunch, just biding my time waiting for High School to end, so my life could begin.
"Outcast table" is a bit harsh. We were just sort of a collection of odds and ends that didn't fit neatly into any of the other obvious groups at the High School. We had a wrestler, a techie nerd (believe it or don't, there was a time when this was a really, really unusual thing in a High School), a new kid at school, me, and Scott.
I don't know what role I played in the group. Maybe the underachieving slacker. Scott was the stoner of the group. I'm not sure that he necessarily did all that many drugs. Just more than most of the kids in my high school, which meant that he did some. Probably not a lot, especially by college standards. Just a lot compared to kids who didn't do any.
It still sort of surprises me that our group got along so well. It wasn't a clique. Cliques control their membership and actually kick people out of the group or accept people into it. Us? We were, each in our own way, a bunch of loners, but who were social enough to want to hang out together with somebody at lunch. Other than the techie nerd, everybody was pretty vocal. We'd discuss a wide variety of topics and by no means did we agree with each other on much.
I think the main thing was, nobody was judgemental. We all accepted each other at face value, and there was a total absence of bullying or belittling of each other.
I liked Scott. Granted, he wasn't exactly the typical profile of somebody a future Republican would gravitate to, but he was easygoing, nice, funny. He also played guitar, which gave us something in common.
I bumped into him now and then in life afterwards. In testament to the fact that for most people, what you are in High School has no bearing on what you are once you get to live life on your own terms, he eventually rose to be CIO of his company. At the time of his passing, he had a beautiful wife and two beautiful kids.
It was cancer that did him in.
We re-connected via Facebook, and to be perfectly honest, it struck me as a bit astounding how he'd turned his life into something so overwhelmingly positive. Not long after we touched base, his status updates indicated that he was pretty sick.
Personally, I wouldn't re-live my High School years. I'd go back to pretty much any time in my life, other than that. I think a lot of folks think of High School as the best years of their lives. I thought it was a miserable experience on par with being in prison. I actually liked Army basic training more than I liked High School.
If I had to guess, I bet most of us at that table felt the same way about it.
There were some very positive things that came out of High School, though. One of which was that I got to meet and interact with people who I very likely would not have, under most other circumstances. I got to where I really looked forward to lunch period and sitting at the outcast table with my fellow untouchables.
Scott was a big part of the reason why. For the record, Scott had impeccable music taste. He listened to Bad Company and was into Pink Floyd long before everybody hopped on their bandwagon after "The Wall". He had a Gretsch guitar that he got from his Dad, I believe. He was self-conscious about being thin.
Mostly, though, he was a good guy and a gentle soul. It's sad to think I'll never see him again.
Monday, November 8, 2010
A Navy Reservist Walks Into an Arab Shopkeeper's Store...
Okay, that's not the setup to a joke. That's what happened yesterday when we went to Dearborn. One of the things we did was go into a store that specialized in Arabic language DVDs and CDs. The store-owner was watching a documentary about the American military in Viet Nam, which I found more than a little odd.
Below the TV was a picture of a handsome young man in ACUs (Army Combat Uniform) and the new black beret that all Army troops wear. (Now that the black beret has been de-Rangerized.)
I asked who the young man was, and he said, "He's my son. He's in Iraq right now."
The tone of his voice struck me as more worried than proud, but proud nonetheless. I can't imagine what it would be like to have a young son in harm's way. I think if my son were to ever spend a year in a war zone, that would be a year without sleep for me.
I am embarassed and ashamed to admit that I had quite a bit of anti-muslim sentiment after 9/11. I wasn't about to commit a hate crime. I also was as friendly as possible to anybody who appeared Muslim when I met them in day-to-day life.
My disdain was more for the group than for individuals. Generally speaking, in my life, I've found it difficult to dislike individual people. Groups? I can dislike the heck out of them, but if there's a hardness of heart that allows a person to look another person in the eye and dislike them just for what they believe, I don't have it.
The one thing that cracked that facade for me was knowing that thousands of Arab-Americans are wearing the uniform in harm's way. Some of them will never come home. By home, of course, I mean to America. Mike Monsoor comes to mind, and I know there are others.
Arab Americans feel uncomfortable in the United States in the days after 9/11. Granted, I think some of them bring a lot of this on themselves. If you wear a burkha, you sort of subject yourself to ridicule in my opinion. Now, though, you probably subject yourself to hostility. I mean, how much of that is really necessary to practice Islam? Who knows. I know I don't.
The fact that people can let their conscience dictate what they feel is an appropriate level of piety and religious observance is one of the greatest of our freedoms, in my opinion. Don't force your beliefs on me, and I won't tell you how you should believe.
In addition to being a form of common courtesy, and observance of the golden rule, we actually have this idea spelled out in the constitution.
It's so easy to demonize people who speak differently, dress differently, worship differently.
Ultimately, though, I could never quite escape the conclusion that doing so is hateful and not particularly clever.
I learn lessons from my boy all the time. One of the more important ones is that way he accepts and appreciates all people, regardless of appearance. He thinks differences are interesting and entertaining. However, he judges people by how they act, not what they look like.
He once stood up for a kid at school named Rouch, who was being teased because his mother had packed him some Dora the Explorer yogurt. They were good friends until Rouch moved away.
When he graduated from pre-school, when everybody got a little award, his was obvious and probably easy to identify. His award was called "Everybody's Friend".
In this way, I really try to be like my son. To judge less, to accept more. To appreciate the goodness and humanity in everybody.
It always amazed me that during World War II, my grandmother's brothers served. They were Hungarian and suffered discrimination during the 30s. When the war started, though, they raised their hand and fought for their country. Not Hungary: they fought for the United States of America, even though they were first generation Americans.
In my opinion, too many people take being American for granted. However, that Arab-American shopkeeper and his son clearly do not.
I feel a kinship and fellowship with them as my countrymen to a greater degree than I do with many who have never had to examine what makes them American.
I'm very, very glad to have taken this class. I'm also fortunate that although I don't live in the most racially diverse community, that the greater Toledo area has a high percentage of Arab Americans. There is also a Hindu temple about a mile from my house.
As a person who experiences the world primarily with my stomach, I eat at Indian Delis, and Lebanese restaurants every week.
Now, do I believe that radical Islam is a problem? Yes. Do I think it's more of a problem than, say, radical Christianity or militant Judaism? In all honesty, yes.
I also believe that my Arab-American and Islamic-American neighbors are really no different than I am. They want to raise their kids to be happy and healthy.
They want to live lives of quiet prosperity.
UItimately, when push comes to shove, they see something unique and beautiful in America that is worth defending, is worth fighting for, and ultimately may be worth dying for.
I hope that Arab-American shopkeeper's boy comes home safe and sound. We need all the great Americans here that we can get.
Below the TV was a picture of a handsome young man in ACUs (Army Combat Uniform) and the new black beret that all Army troops wear. (Now that the black beret has been de-Rangerized.)
I asked who the young man was, and he said, "He's my son. He's in Iraq right now."
The tone of his voice struck me as more worried than proud, but proud nonetheless. I can't imagine what it would be like to have a young son in harm's way. I think if my son were to ever spend a year in a war zone, that would be a year without sleep for me.
I am embarassed and ashamed to admit that I had quite a bit of anti-muslim sentiment after 9/11. I wasn't about to commit a hate crime. I also was as friendly as possible to anybody who appeared Muslim when I met them in day-to-day life.
My disdain was more for the group than for individuals. Generally speaking, in my life, I've found it difficult to dislike individual people. Groups? I can dislike the heck out of them, but if there's a hardness of heart that allows a person to look another person in the eye and dislike them just for what they believe, I don't have it.
The one thing that cracked that facade for me was knowing that thousands of Arab-Americans are wearing the uniform in harm's way. Some of them will never come home. By home, of course, I mean to America. Mike Monsoor comes to mind, and I know there are others.
Arab Americans feel uncomfortable in the United States in the days after 9/11. Granted, I think some of them bring a lot of this on themselves. If you wear a burkha, you sort of subject yourself to ridicule in my opinion. Now, though, you probably subject yourself to hostility. I mean, how much of that is really necessary to practice Islam? Who knows. I know I don't.
The fact that people can let their conscience dictate what they feel is an appropriate level of piety and religious observance is one of the greatest of our freedoms, in my opinion. Don't force your beliefs on me, and I won't tell you how you should believe.
In addition to being a form of common courtesy, and observance of the golden rule, we actually have this idea spelled out in the constitution.
It's so easy to demonize people who speak differently, dress differently, worship differently.
Ultimately, though, I could never quite escape the conclusion that doing so is hateful and not particularly clever.
I learn lessons from my boy all the time. One of the more important ones is that way he accepts and appreciates all people, regardless of appearance. He thinks differences are interesting and entertaining. However, he judges people by how they act, not what they look like.
He once stood up for a kid at school named Rouch, who was being teased because his mother had packed him some Dora the Explorer yogurt. They were good friends until Rouch moved away.
When he graduated from pre-school, when everybody got a little award, his was obvious and probably easy to identify. His award was called "Everybody's Friend".
In this way, I really try to be like my son. To judge less, to accept more. To appreciate the goodness and humanity in everybody.
It always amazed me that during World War II, my grandmother's brothers served. They were Hungarian and suffered discrimination during the 30s. When the war started, though, they raised their hand and fought for their country. Not Hungary: they fought for the United States of America, even though they were first generation Americans.
In my opinion, too many people take being American for granted. However, that Arab-American shopkeeper and his son clearly do not.
I feel a kinship and fellowship with them as my countrymen to a greater degree than I do with many who have never had to examine what makes them American.
I'm very, very glad to have taken this class. I'm also fortunate that although I don't live in the most racially diverse community, that the greater Toledo area has a high percentage of Arab Americans. There is also a Hindu temple about a mile from my house.
As a person who experiences the world primarily with my stomach, I eat at Indian Delis, and Lebanese restaurants every week.
Now, do I believe that radical Islam is a problem? Yes. Do I think it's more of a problem than, say, radical Christianity or militant Judaism? In all honesty, yes.
I also believe that my Arab-American and Islamic-American neighbors are really no different than I am. They want to raise their kids to be happy and healthy.
They want to live lives of quiet prosperity.
UItimately, when push comes to shove, they see something unique and beautiful in America that is worth defending, is worth fighting for, and ultimately may be worth dying for.
I hope that Arab-American shopkeeper's boy comes home safe and sound. We need all the great Americans here that we can get.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Making friends as always
I've often wondered whether I'm just an annoying person or what. Do I just naturally piss people off? Do I just have a face that unknowlingly exudes scorn and brings out the worst in people? Is it just that I'm outspoken? Or perhaps that I'm a combination of outspoken and impulsive, which means I'm frequently saying stupid or poorly thought-out things out loud? Am I unwittingly one of those annoying, sophomoric nerds that nobody can stand?
As an example, we had our class field-trip today for Arabic class. Two of the students for the class are a German professor and the chair of the language department at the Juco who is a French professor.
I was looking forward to the ride up so I could get to know folks a little more. Mostly, I wanted to get to know the kids in the class, but I ended up sitting by the old people, including the two ladies who were also teachers at the school.
We were chatting and everything went fine, but then it was the strangest thing. I'll just explain it as it unfolded because there's not a lot of other ways to go about telling this tale.
The German teacher was talking about living in Germany. She taught English and got her degree there. (In English... all I can think about is that song "mexican Americans... take spanish and get Cs.")
She then said something about having to demonstrate proficiency in British English. That proficiency in American English wasn't good enough for her employer.
This is where things completely jumped the track.
I said something to the effect of, "That's funny, because in a lot of ways, American English is more English than British English."
You would have thought I called her a fat old cat-lady.
She said, flaty, "No, it isn't."
Having clearly touched a nerve, here, I could have gone one of two ways. Just said, "oh, okay" left it at that, or try to explain my position.
I think you know which way I took this.
So, I said, "Well, if you think about it, our English is more Anglo-Saxon. British-English has more French influences."
This, of course, got the French teacher involved. And because they probably both thought I was a French basher, they went off.
The German teacher said, "Of course there are French influences. You can't have English without French".
Me: "Of course. I'm not saying that there aren't French influences. I am saying, though, that as the two languages diverged, American English stayed truer to Anglo-Saxon English, and British English kept absorbing French influence."
Her: "All English has French influence because English is a romance language."
Me: "No, English is a Germanic language." (Odd that I would have to explain this to a teacher of German.)
Her: "yes, but English is half French."
Me: "Half?"
Her: "Okay, not half, but it's got a lot of French."
Me: "I think you misunderstand my point. In the 1600s, our English and the British English were essentially identical, right?"
Her: "I have a degree in English and it's what I teach (she also teaches ESL). What's your background?"
Me: "Now, wait here. I agree you have an education in English, but that doesn't mean that nobody else is allowed to have an opinion or an idea on the subject."
(I wanted to point out that this type of argument from authority is considered the mark of a person who is being out-debated, but figured things were already bad enough. Mostly, I just wanted her to calm her fat ass down for 20 seconds so I could try to explain what I meant by my statement.)
Her: Well, English and French go back a long way, long before the 1600s. In the Magna Carta and other documents, both English and French words were used in legal contexts and they're still used that way in our laws today.
(Wondering, now, how it is possible that I can so badly be communicating my idea that she's clearly not even understanding what I'm saying. This, of course, has nothing to do with the divergence between English-English and American-English as there was simply "english" at the time. Also, the use of french words in legal code is a topic with which I am also not totally unfamiliar, but it didn't have anything to do with the topic at hand.)
Me: Well... let's roll the clock forward just a little bit. In the 1800s, you had Webster's dictionary and Samual Johnson's dictionary, and the two of them clearly show some pretty big differences between the two languages.
Her: I still don't see how that makes British English more French.
Me: How do you spell color and theater?
Her: That doesn't make their language French. They speak English just like we do.
Me: Obviously. Hence the word "english". It's their language. It originated there. I'm just saying that since the two dialects diverged, ours has remained more anglo-saxon and theirs continued to be influenced by French to a greater degree.
(And starting to really wonder, here... weren't the Saxons German? I mean, why is this a foreign concept to a German teacher?)
Anyway, at this point, she was clearly angry. There wasn't much to do here, but interject, "You're getting really angry about this whole discussion."
Her: And you're not?
Me: No, not really. I'm just trying to throw out an idea because I thought you might find the topic interesting to discuss.
Later, in the Arab-American museum, she apologized, twice. I have no idea why she lost her mind like she did. I told her no problem, I was getting a little excited about the topic, too. (Which isn't true. I was getting agitated at her incredible rudeness and the fact that she was either being obtuse or she just didn't know much about the topic at hand.)
I told her, "I really wasn't trying to offend you. I was just trying to bring up an idea that I found interesting."
Maybe it was that I wasn't falling for her appeal to authority. Though, frankly, I do think it's a little chicken-shit to go to a foreign country and get a degree in English. Seriously. That'd be like a Spaniard going to the trouble to attend a US university, then getting a degree in Spanish.
Or, maybe she thought I was being rude and didn't know much about the topic at hand.
Could also be that her boss is a French teacher and she thought somehow she was defending French. Who knows.
Honestly, though, it's pretty clear that she hasn't given this a lot of thought. I mean, yeah, I can see how I might be a little annoying while discussing this subject. I have a smatterring of trival anectdotes, and never really studied the subject seriously.
But at the same time, I have a bachelor's and master's degree and know the level of expertise that those degrees demonstrate. For the most part, sorry, but holding a bachelor's in a subject doesn't make a person an expert by any stretch. I'd expect pretty much any reasonably well-read person to be able to discuss a topic at about the same level as your garden variety baccalaureate holder and unless a master's degree holder has research in a specific are, I wouldn't necessarily presume that a master's degree indicates that a person is thinking on a higher, inaccessible plane.
With no offense intended, I don't think a person needs, for instance, a law degree to intelligently discuss the law, or to have an opinion about it, or to have areas within the law where they're particularly well-informed.
Anyway, I didn't even get to bring up the fact that some folks believe that the closest we can get to hearing shakespeare's english is in some remote areas of applachia, etc.
In fact, pretty much every point I brought up was ignored as though it was a personal attack.
She simply pretended that questions like, "why do the british spell colour and theatre the way they do?" weren't asked and would go off on some tangent.
In fact, she basically refused to acknowledge that the languages diverged in the 1600s.
Or, more precisely, it was pretty obvious that she never gave it any thought.
I guess it's been a long, long time since I've been around a person who just completely came unglued when discussing a topic of trivial importance. I mean, she REALLY got pissed off.
I used to have these sorts of exchanges a lot when I was a LOT younger. In fact, more often than not, I was probably the one getting bent all out of shape and emotional while discussing a topic of minor importance. Then... well... my 20s ended.
Maybe it's just that she thinks I'm a student and she's a teacher and she's not used to being challenged. (The mark of a very, very inadequate teacher, by the way.)
So, when I got home, I was thinking, "Well... maybe this is just a fringe idea that I've heard and adopted because I like it." I mean, thinking back, the book that first introduced me to the idea, "origin of the specious" is just one book.
So, did a quick google search and one of the first sites I pulled up had:
"Also significant beginning around 1600 AD was the English colonization of North America and the subsequent creation of a distinct American dialect. Some pronunciations and usages “froze” when they reached the American shore. In certain respects, American English is closer to the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is."
http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/a_very_brief_history_of_the_english_language3/
Which is not, of course, to say that I am right on the subject. Just that I'm not totally out of my tree and that others hold the same idea.
As for whether or not English-English is more French because Samuel Johnson's dictionary favored Norman spelling as opposed to Webster's which tended towards Anglo-Saxon is probably debatable.
Personally, I was just trying to introduce a topic of discussion based on where the conversation was going. I didn't expect it to piss anybody off.
Sometimes, though... I think I just have that effect on people.
As an example, we had our class field-trip today for Arabic class. Two of the students for the class are a German professor and the chair of the language department at the Juco who is a French professor.
I was looking forward to the ride up so I could get to know folks a little more. Mostly, I wanted to get to know the kids in the class, but I ended up sitting by the old people, including the two ladies who were also teachers at the school.
We were chatting and everything went fine, but then it was the strangest thing. I'll just explain it as it unfolded because there's not a lot of other ways to go about telling this tale.
The German teacher was talking about living in Germany. She taught English and got her degree there. (In English... all I can think about is that song "mexican Americans... take spanish and get Cs.")
She then said something about having to demonstrate proficiency in British English. That proficiency in American English wasn't good enough for her employer.
This is where things completely jumped the track.
I said something to the effect of, "That's funny, because in a lot of ways, American English is more English than British English."
You would have thought I called her a fat old cat-lady.
She said, flaty, "No, it isn't."
Having clearly touched a nerve, here, I could have gone one of two ways. Just said, "oh, okay" left it at that, or try to explain my position.
I think you know which way I took this.
So, I said, "Well, if you think about it, our English is more Anglo-Saxon. British-English has more French influences."
This, of course, got the French teacher involved. And because they probably both thought I was a French basher, they went off.
The German teacher said, "Of course there are French influences. You can't have English without French".
Me: "Of course. I'm not saying that there aren't French influences. I am saying, though, that as the two languages diverged, American English stayed truer to Anglo-Saxon English, and British English kept absorbing French influence."
Her: "All English has French influence because English is a romance language."
Me: "No, English is a Germanic language." (Odd that I would have to explain this to a teacher of German.)
Her: "yes, but English is half French."
Me: "Half?"
Her: "Okay, not half, but it's got a lot of French."
Me: "I think you misunderstand my point. In the 1600s, our English and the British English were essentially identical, right?"
Her: "I have a degree in English and it's what I teach (she also teaches ESL). What's your background?"
Me: "Now, wait here. I agree you have an education in English, but that doesn't mean that nobody else is allowed to have an opinion or an idea on the subject."
(I wanted to point out that this type of argument from authority is considered the mark of a person who is being out-debated, but figured things were already bad enough. Mostly, I just wanted her to calm her fat ass down for 20 seconds so I could try to explain what I meant by my statement.)
Her: Well, English and French go back a long way, long before the 1600s. In the Magna Carta and other documents, both English and French words were used in legal contexts and they're still used that way in our laws today.
(Wondering, now, how it is possible that I can so badly be communicating my idea that she's clearly not even understanding what I'm saying. This, of course, has nothing to do with the divergence between English-English and American-English as there was simply "english" at the time. Also, the use of french words in legal code is a topic with which I am also not totally unfamiliar, but it didn't have anything to do with the topic at hand.)
Me: Well... let's roll the clock forward just a little bit. In the 1800s, you had Webster's dictionary and Samual Johnson's dictionary, and the two of them clearly show some pretty big differences between the two languages.
Her: I still don't see how that makes British English more French.
Me: How do you spell color and theater?
Her: That doesn't make their language French. They speak English just like we do.
Me: Obviously. Hence the word "english". It's their language. It originated there. I'm just saying that since the two dialects diverged, ours has remained more anglo-saxon and theirs continued to be influenced by French to a greater degree.
(And starting to really wonder, here... weren't the Saxons German? I mean, why is this a foreign concept to a German teacher?)
Anyway, at this point, she was clearly angry. There wasn't much to do here, but interject, "You're getting really angry about this whole discussion."
Her: And you're not?
Me: No, not really. I'm just trying to throw out an idea because I thought you might find the topic interesting to discuss.
Later, in the Arab-American museum, she apologized, twice. I have no idea why she lost her mind like she did. I told her no problem, I was getting a little excited about the topic, too. (Which isn't true. I was getting agitated at her incredible rudeness and the fact that she was either being obtuse or she just didn't know much about the topic at hand.)
I told her, "I really wasn't trying to offend you. I was just trying to bring up an idea that I found interesting."
Maybe it was that I wasn't falling for her appeal to authority. Though, frankly, I do think it's a little chicken-shit to go to a foreign country and get a degree in English. Seriously. That'd be like a Spaniard going to the trouble to attend a US university, then getting a degree in Spanish.
Or, maybe she thought I was being rude and didn't know much about the topic at hand.
Could also be that her boss is a French teacher and she thought somehow she was defending French. Who knows.
Honestly, though, it's pretty clear that she hasn't given this a lot of thought. I mean, yeah, I can see how I might be a little annoying while discussing this subject. I have a smatterring of trival anectdotes, and never really studied the subject seriously.
But at the same time, I have a bachelor's and master's degree and know the level of expertise that those degrees demonstrate. For the most part, sorry, but holding a bachelor's in a subject doesn't make a person an expert by any stretch. I'd expect pretty much any reasonably well-read person to be able to discuss a topic at about the same level as your garden variety baccalaureate holder and unless a master's degree holder has research in a specific are, I wouldn't necessarily presume that a master's degree indicates that a person is thinking on a higher, inaccessible plane.
With no offense intended, I don't think a person needs, for instance, a law degree to intelligently discuss the law, or to have an opinion about it, or to have areas within the law where they're particularly well-informed.
Anyway, I didn't even get to bring up the fact that some folks believe that the closest we can get to hearing shakespeare's english is in some remote areas of applachia, etc.
In fact, pretty much every point I brought up was ignored as though it was a personal attack.
She simply pretended that questions like, "why do the british spell colour and theatre the way they do?" weren't asked and would go off on some tangent.
In fact, she basically refused to acknowledge that the languages diverged in the 1600s.
Or, more precisely, it was pretty obvious that she never gave it any thought.
I guess it's been a long, long time since I've been around a person who just completely came unglued when discussing a topic of trivial importance. I mean, she REALLY got pissed off.
I used to have these sorts of exchanges a lot when I was a LOT younger. In fact, more often than not, I was probably the one getting bent all out of shape and emotional while discussing a topic of minor importance. Then... well... my 20s ended.
Maybe it's just that she thinks I'm a student and she's a teacher and she's not used to being challenged. (The mark of a very, very inadequate teacher, by the way.)
So, when I got home, I was thinking, "Well... maybe this is just a fringe idea that I've heard and adopted because I like it." I mean, thinking back, the book that first introduced me to the idea, "origin of the specious" is just one book.
So, did a quick google search and one of the first sites I pulled up had:
"Also significant beginning around 1600 AD was the English colonization of North America and the subsequent creation of a distinct American dialect. Some pronunciations and usages “froze” when they reached the American shore. In certain respects, American English is closer to the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is."
http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/a_very_brief_history_of_the_english_language3/
Which is not, of course, to say that I am right on the subject. Just that I'm not totally out of my tree and that others hold the same idea.
As for whether or not English-English is more French because Samuel Johnson's dictionary favored Norman spelling as opposed to Webster's which tended towards Anglo-Saxon is probably debatable.
Personally, I was just trying to introduce a topic of discussion based on where the conversation was going. I didn't expect it to piss anybody off.
Sometimes, though... I think I just have that effect on people.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
What Lessons Does the Election Hold for Our President and Legislators?
The election went pretty much as predicted. A few more Republican seats in the House, but in the Senate and Gubernatorial races, things went pretty much like the polls were indicating they would.
So, what does it mean, and where did things go so wrong for the sea-change for hope and change that happened in 2008?
I agree with our president when he says Republicans drove the car into the ditch. It wasn't entirely them, though. Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass Steagall into law, and that was probably the most identifiable proximate cause of the credit default swap and collateralized debt obligation debacle that caused this current economic crisis.
However, it was a Republican congress that was too cozy with Wall Street that pushed that and other nonsensical, pro-bank legislation. George Bush was at the helm of the world's largest economy for 8 years. He bears the blame for this situation to a far greater degree than his Democratic successor or predecessor.
What I saw in this election was an American population that was fearful, angry and tired of waiting.
The fearful part? This economic collapse was so widespread that it affected huge swaths of the population. Even friends who kept good jobs had work-weeks reduced and bonuses eliminated. Yes, obviously, I don't have any friends on Wall Street.
I don't think there was much our president could do about people's anxiety.
However, the angry part? I can relate. I'm mad as hell, too, and I really wish I didn't have to take it anymore.
The Obama administration has been trying furiously to spin the TARP as something positive. It is true that TARP started under George W. Bush. However, the Obama administration and President Obama, himself, have embraced it whole-hog. Congressional Democrats voted for TARP to a greater degree than Congressional Republicans.
Nothing the Obama administration does has been able to do anything but infuriate the voters on TARP. For a while, they were trying the tagline, "it wasn't fair, but it was necessary."
That made voters furious.
Then, they tried, "It is going to cost much less than originally anticipated".
That still made voters furious.
It's as though the folks in Washington are completely oblivious to the fact that when people are sufferring, the last thing they need to be reminded of is that the government mobilized everything in their power to save Wall Street bankers and UAW members, while leaving the rest of the economy to rot.
Originally, they tried spinning TARP by saying, "without it, lending to small business would have dried up."
Trouble is, WITH it, lending to small business dried up.
Other actions taken primarily by the Fed have meant that banks are able to reap record profits without doing any actual banking. They borrow money from the Fed at essentially 0% and invest it in t-bills paying 2 or 3%. They're getting rich just by taking money from the federal government and lending it back to the federal government.
What does this mean?
First, it means they don't need your deposits. That's why they pay virtually no interest on deposits anymore. Why pay interest to a depositor when the government gives you money for free? This is also why they're abandoning free checking programs. Why provide free checking if you're not trying to attract depositors?
Second, it means they don't need to lend money to anybody. Why lend to a borrower, and go through all that work to determine credit-worthiness, when you can make gobs of money lending to the federal government who can just print money whenever it needs to?
So, what to do? Yes, the TARP and the stimulus bills probably helped things. Trouble is, the way they were done meant that the government was choosing winners and losers. Very, very few winners, and lots and lots of losers.
The losers just showed how much they liked this at the ballot box.
Right now, unfortunately, I just don't see any constructive answers moving forward. The House and Senate are divided, so the odds of doing anything important are next to nil.
All I can do is look back on the idiocy of our president who, while staring at the abyss of what is essentially a second great depression, decided to bail out bankers and auto workers, but let the rest of the economy fend for itself. Meanwhile, he went off on a snipe hunt to implement the most incomprehensibly silly and useless health care bill imagineable.
So, the Democrats deserved the drubbing they got. The Republicans didn't deserve the gains they got. The president continues to be a weak and ineffective leader.
In the mean time, folks are losing their homes and businesses. For the most part, I think the business cycle will be left to its own devices to recover. I fear that we're looking at a lost decade, like Japan's. The scary part is, Japan's lost decade is more like 2 decades in a row.
So, what does it mean, and where did things go so wrong for the sea-change for hope and change that happened in 2008?
I agree with our president when he says Republicans drove the car into the ditch. It wasn't entirely them, though. Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass Steagall into law, and that was probably the most identifiable proximate cause of the credit default swap and collateralized debt obligation debacle that caused this current economic crisis.
However, it was a Republican congress that was too cozy with Wall Street that pushed that and other nonsensical, pro-bank legislation. George Bush was at the helm of the world's largest economy for 8 years. He bears the blame for this situation to a far greater degree than his Democratic successor or predecessor.
What I saw in this election was an American population that was fearful, angry and tired of waiting.
The fearful part? This economic collapse was so widespread that it affected huge swaths of the population. Even friends who kept good jobs had work-weeks reduced and bonuses eliminated. Yes, obviously, I don't have any friends on Wall Street.
I don't think there was much our president could do about people's anxiety.
However, the angry part? I can relate. I'm mad as hell, too, and I really wish I didn't have to take it anymore.
The Obama administration has been trying furiously to spin the TARP as something positive. It is true that TARP started under George W. Bush. However, the Obama administration and President Obama, himself, have embraced it whole-hog. Congressional Democrats voted for TARP to a greater degree than Congressional Republicans.
Nothing the Obama administration does has been able to do anything but infuriate the voters on TARP. For a while, they were trying the tagline, "it wasn't fair, but it was necessary."
That made voters furious.
Then, they tried, "It is going to cost much less than originally anticipated".
That still made voters furious.
It's as though the folks in Washington are completely oblivious to the fact that when people are sufferring, the last thing they need to be reminded of is that the government mobilized everything in their power to save Wall Street bankers and UAW members, while leaving the rest of the economy to rot.
Originally, they tried spinning TARP by saying, "without it, lending to small business would have dried up."
Trouble is, WITH it, lending to small business dried up.
Other actions taken primarily by the Fed have meant that banks are able to reap record profits without doing any actual banking. They borrow money from the Fed at essentially 0% and invest it in t-bills paying 2 or 3%. They're getting rich just by taking money from the federal government and lending it back to the federal government.
What does this mean?
First, it means they don't need your deposits. That's why they pay virtually no interest on deposits anymore. Why pay interest to a depositor when the government gives you money for free? This is also why they're abandoning free checking programs. Why provide free checking if you're not trying to attract depositors?
Second, it means they don't need to lend money to anybody. Why lend to a borrower, and go through all that work to determine credit-worthiness, when you can make gobs of money lending to the federal government who can just print money whenever it needs to?
So, what to do? Yes, the TARP and the stimulus bills probably helped things. Trouble is, the way they were done meant that the government was choosing winners and losers. Very, very few winners, and lots and lots of losers.
The losers just showed how much they liked this at the ballot box.
Right now, unfortunately, I just don't see any constructive answers moving forward. The House and Senate are divided, so the odds of doing anything important are next to nil.
All I can do is look back on the idiocy of our president who, while staring at the abyss of what is essentially a second great depression, decided to bail out bankers and auto workers, but let the rest of the economy fend for itself. Meanwhile, he went off on a snipe hunt to implement the most incomprehensibly silly and useless health care bill imagineable.
So, the Democrats deserved the drubbing they got. The Republicans didn't deserve the gains they got. The president continues to be a weak and ineffective leader.
In the mean time, folks are losing their homes and businesses. For the most part, I think the business cycle will be left to its own devices to recover. I fear that we're looking at a lost decade, like Japan's. The scary part is, Japan's lost decade is more like 2 decades in a row.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
The Arms Dealer, The Townie
The Arms Dealer:
I just sold 3 guns from my collection. Sold two earlier in the year. My collection was a little bit nuts for somebody who doesn't list "militia" as one of their hobbies. At the start of this year, I had 4 AR-15s (the rifle the Army used to use and that I think the Marine Corps still uses), and 4 Beretta 92FS (which is the pistol that all the services use.)
My Dad wanted an AR and a pistol. So, that's where those went.
How I got all these guns is a bit of a story in and of itself.
I bought a Beretta 92FS pistol a few years ago. They were getting hard to find because Obama had just won the Democratic nomination. All the gun stores were selling out anything they had on the shelves.
Shortly after I bought that, I got a great deal on the same gun, but with an integrated laser sight in the handle. If there's anything better than a shark, it's a shark with a freakin' laser on its head and if there's anything better than a gun, it's a gun with a laser built in.
So, I bought that, and kept both guns. Then, almost immediately after that, somebody was selling off a ton of the same gun, but with stainless steel barrels, for only $399. That's basically plinker-type pricing.
I bought two of the stainless barrel ones, which gave me a total of 4. I've only shot one of the 4 and now, I sold 3 of them off. The 4th one, I'm keeping as a home defender.
The rifles? Same story. I couldn't buy a match rifle and was signed up for a rifle competition. So, I ordered 3 of them from different sources, hoping one would arrive in time. One did, but once they all landed, I had 3 match rifles. I still have two of them, but sold one.
The only thing that didn't sell is my Les Baer match pistol. For those who have heard of it, that's pretty much like having a Lamborghini Diablo. Yeah, they have a market price, but the number of people who will buy one and pay what it's worth is pretty small.
So, anyway, that's 5 less guns in the collection since the first of the year. I still have too many guns and will give some thought to which ones I'll be selling here in a few days.
The Hometownie...
My new hometown is Sylvania, OH. It reminds me a lot of my original hometown of Tallmadge. A little bigger, and not entirely the same, but close. Friday night I went to the Northview Southview game where the city's two high schools play each other. It was a lot of fun.
It was refreshing to see our town's young people. They're fresh faced with their entire lives ahead of them. It seems like just yesterday that was me, but of course it wasn't. In fact, it was almost 30 years ago.
I can see the appeal of teaching school and being around young people who are on their way in life. I feel the same way when I am around young active-duty servicemembers. It reminds me of a time in my life when anything was possible and I had nothing but opportunities ahead of me.
Southview typically has a much better football team, and they did on Friday night. They've competed for a few state championships and people move to Sylvania just for the chance to play Southview football.
Northview has the reputation of being the brainier school, though they also have one of the state's best hockey teams. Logan will attend Northview.
Perhaps one of the more touching things was that at halftime, both High School's bands take the field at once and they play together. At the end, they spell out a script "Sylvania" on the field.
Although there are two high schools and these kids have gone to different schools for most of their lives, the bonds between Sylvania residents is pretty strong. They play sports together almost their entire lives. Logan's travel baseball team has an even number of kids who will go to both High Schools. The town just isn't that big, despite the two High Schools. Our recreation programs are pretty impressive and the kids get a lot of time interacting with each other.
Although it shouldn't matter to me one way or another, I felt a little sad for the seniors who would never march in a marching band again, or play organized football ever again. The NV SV game was a neat little tradition and I know I'll be very emotional when / if Logan ever plays in it.
I just sold 3 guns from my collection. Sold two earlier in the year. My collection was a little bit nuts for somebody who doesn't list "militia" as one of their hobbies. At the start of this year, I had 4 AR-15s (the rifle the Army used to use and that I think the Marine Corps still uses), and 4 Beretta 92FS (which is the pistol that all the services use.)
My Dad wanted an AR and a pistol. So, that's where those went.
How I got all these guns is a bit of a story in and of itself.
I bought a Beretta 92FS pistol a few years ago. They were getting hard to find because Obama had just won the Democratic nomination. All the gun stores were selling out anything they had on the shelves.
Shortly after I bought that, I got a great deal on the same gun, but with an integrated laser sight in the handle. If there's anything better than a shark, it's a shark with a freakin' laser on its head and if there's anything better than a gun, it's a gun with a laser built in.
So, I bought that, and kept both guns. Then, almost immediately after that, somebody was selling off a ton of the same gun, but with stainless steel barrels, for only $399. That's basically plinker-type pricing.
I bought two of the stainless barrel ones, which gave me a total of 4. I've only shot one of the 4 and now, I sold 3 of them off. The 4th one, I'm keeping as a home defender.
The rifles? Same story. I couldn't buy a match rifle and was signed up for a rifle competition. So, I ordered 3 of them from different sources, hoping one would arrive in time. One did, but once they all landed, I had 3 match rifles. I still have two of them, but sold one.
The only thing that didn't sell is my Les Baer match pistol. For those who have heard of it, that's pretty much like having a Lamborghini Diablo. Yeah, they have a market price, but the number of people who will buy one and pay what it's worth is pretty small.
So, anyway, that's 5 less guns in the collection since the first of the year. I still have too many guns and will give some thought to which ones I'll be selling here in a few days.
The Hometownie...
My new hometown is Sylvania, OH. It reminds me a lot of my original hometown of Tallmadge. A little bigger, and not entirely the same, but close. Friday night I went to the Northview Southview game where the city's two high schools play each other. It was a lot of fun.
It was refreshing to see our town's young people. They're fresh faced with their entire lives ahead of them. It seems like just yesterday that was me, but of course it wasn't. In fact, it was almost 30 years ago.
I can see the appeal of teaching school and being around young people who are on their way in life. I feel the same way when I am around young active-duty servicemembers. It reminds me of a time in my life when anything was possible and I had nothing but opportunities ahead of me.
Southview typically has a much better football team, and they did on Friday night. They've competed for a few state championships and people move to Sylvania just for the chance to play Southview football.
Northview has the reputation of being the brainier school, though they also have one of the state's best hockey teams. Logan will attend Northview.
Perhaps one of the more touching things was that at halftime, both High School's bands take the field at once and they play together. At the end, they spell out a script "Sylvania" on the field.
Although there are two high schools and these kids have gone to different schools for most of their lives, the bonds between Sylvania residents is pretty strong. They play sports together almost their entire lives. Logan's travel baseball team has an even number of kids who will go to both High Schools. The town just isn't that big, despite the two High Schools. Our recreation programs are pretty impressive and the kids get a lot of time interacting with each other.
Although it shouldn't matter to me one way or another, I felt a little sad for the seniors who would never march in a marching band again, or play organized football ever again. The NV SV game was a neat little tradition and I know I'll be very emotional when / if Logan ever plays in it.
The Deal With These Elections
Pretty much anybody who cracks a newspaper knows that election night is going to be bad for Democrats. The only question is "how bad". By that, we're talking complete armageddon, or just "almost complete" armageddon.
It is largely a referendum on Barack Obama and his handling of the economy.
Now, to be fair, even if Barack Obama had masterfully led during the past 2 years, I think he'd be in trouble. I think the economy would still be screwed.
So, to claim that there was much he could have done to avert the upcoming trip to the woodshed that his party is about to face is a bit of a stretch. He was just doomed. He was doomed by events outside of his control, that were created largely by the policy decisions of his predecessors.
That also includes Bill Clinton who presided over the dismantling of Glass Steagall, which was instrumental in preventing another Great Depression for 66 years. Within 10 years of it's repeal, here we are.
There were other things that have worked against him since day one. For instance, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. I know she's popular in the Bay Area. For that part of the country, she's fine. For the rest of the country, having her as speaker of the house and one of the most prominent Democrats in the country is about as much of a disaster as one could imagine. The only thing I could see that would be a comparable diaster on the right-wing side of the leger would be to have... I dunno... somebody like David Duke as the pointman for the Republican party.
The Republicans have been relentless as identifying the Democrat congress and Obama with Pelosi and have been able to make that connection in the public consciousness. This might not hurt the Democrats in the Bay Area, but it hurts them everywhere else.
People are angry, and not just because the economy sucks. They're angry at Obama for his what they sense are his priorities, which they largely can't figure out. And the parts they can figure out? That makes the voters furious.
The biggest of Obama's blunders? Had to be the utter ineptitude he showed when he chose to pursue his health care bill during his first year in office.
If there was any other way Obama could have gotten this wrong, I'd like to hear about it. Many independents and moderates (I like to include myself in the "moderate" category) wanted to see some action taken on health care.
We've got huge problems with health care in this country: specifically with health-care costs. Really, when you get down to it, medical technology can solve the problems it can solve. It can't solve the problems it can't solve. People understand this. When they complain about health care, though, the main complaint is that they can't get it because it costs too much.
Obama had a huge amount of political capital when he won the election. His approval ratings were astoudingly high.
The basic theory goes: you use up that political capital to do something good. When something good happens, you get more political capital you can use later.
Bush expended all his political capital on the wars, and when they didn't produce discernable productive achievements, he was out of capital and his party was out of office. That's a case study in how unwisely using political capital can result in having no political capital left.
Obama's health care bill is another.
Had Obama actually produced a good health care bill, I think he wouldn't be in quite the dire circumstances he is in, now. However, he made so many tactical errors that the bill that resulted is almost completely worthless.
First, in spite of being Mr. Hope and Change, the first thing he did was bring in pharma and insurance companies behind closed doors, cut them special deals which would allow them to continue to gouge the American people, and took any meaningful reform of health care costs off the table.
Basically, the biggest problem with health care? Cost? The first thing he did was make sure that costs would not be addressed.
In the end, the bill took much longer to pass than he thought. Largely because the bill really didn't offer much, he wasn't able to garner public support to push it through once it faced opposition by the Republicans whose votes weren't needed, anyway.
Ultimately, the bill couldn't pass, and it only became law through a very, very convoluted use of reconciliation between the house and senate bills.
There is one good thing that came out of the bill: pre-existing conditions can't be excluded anymore. Literally, just one good thing.
Meanwhile, the bill ensured that, for instance, the United States would not be able to negotiate drug purchase prices. Probably the biggest single purchaser of pharmaceuticals in the world is not allowed to negotiate on behalf of the American people for a fair deal.
This bill is so bad that it will, absolutely, make the health care situation in the US worse.
In the end, I suspect that Obama knew his bill wasn't very good. It accomplished very little, and didn't do anything to address the real issues with health care cost. However, he had wasted the first year of his presidency, and all his political capital on it. To walk away with nothing would have been even more disastrous for him, politically.
So, did he take half a loaf when that was all he could get? I'd say more like he took that end piece that everybody throws away.
People detest politicians whose only agenda is to maintain their political power. Obama's final passage of the health care bill was only intended to help 3 types of people:
1. People with pre-existing conditions can now buy policies, which are going to be priced so outrageously expensively that they can't afford them. This is small progress since in the past, they just couldn't buy policies.
2. The very people who are charging the US 2 and 3 and 4 times as much as they charge the rest of the world won big. Obama guaranteed, in law, that nobody will be allowed to stop them from destroying our economy.
3. It helped Obama because walking away with nothing, would have been a horrible disaster, he walked away being able to claim victory. Trouble is, the bill is downright bad. The American people have no tolerance for politicians who do bad things just because it benefits their political career.
Now, by focusing on health care, what he wasn't focusing on was the economy. What if, instead of spending all his political capital on a health care bill of dubious value, he had used it to get Wall Street regulatory reform.
We have regulatory reform? Well... yeah, if you think the health care bill was a victory, you probably love Wall Street reform.
What if he'd used all that goodwill early in his presidency, combined with populist outrage about Wall Street, to re-enact Glass Steagall?
What if he'd used all that to fund a government agency to wind-down the nation's 10 largest insolvent banks. (Right now, if you can name a bank off the top of your head, they're insolvent under mark-to-market rules).
What if he used that energy, combined with a special prosecutor, and the Sarbanes-Oxley law to throw 400 Wall Street executives in prison and ban then from ever working for an FDIC insured institution?
We can only theorize about that because Obama didn't do that. In fact, he did the exact opposite. He continued the Bush Administration's policies of ensuring that the bankers who caused this problem were richly rewarded with multi-million dollar bonuses.
If anything, Obama is WORSE as far as being a Wall Street toady. Bush actually let one of the Wall Street banks fail before Paulson discovered the benefits of a totalitarian, command economic model. Obama? As both a Senator and as President, has put Wall Street first.
Now, again, would this have helped the economy? I doubt it. The economy will fix itself when it fixes itself. If we spend billions, it'll fix itself. If we do nothing, it'll fix itself.
However, right now, the American people are feeling betrayed. They don't trust Obama. They think he only acts to preserve his power and to protect the politically connected. Which means if you're not a Wall Street Banker or a member of the UAW, it's darned hard to figure out any way Obama has done anything for you at all.
The American people believe in hard work and sacrifice. We all know this is going to take a while for us to fix. Trouble is, right now, we don't think our government gives a whit about us. The American people feel, and rightly so, that the only people who have to sacrifice are those who followed the rules and played fair.
The folks who cheated? Who got rich doing it? Deep down, I think a sizeable portion of the population feels that Obama represents them, not the guy on Main Street trying to make his budget work.
Nobody is willing to follow Obama now, and it's his own fault.
Granted, if the economy recovers in the next two years, Obama will get the credit and get re-elected. Though even so, his actions to date paint him as horribly out of touch and completely oblivious to what ordinary Americans deal with on a day to day basis.
Bill Clinton always had the potential to come back because he had the ability to make people believe that he cared about them.
Obama? I don't think anybody thinks Obama cares about them one whit. He needs to connect with the voters. He needs to stop doing what's politically expedient and start figuring out how to do what's right.
It is largely a referendum on Barack Obama and his handling of the economy.
Now, to be fair, even if Barack Obama had masterfully led during the past 2 years, I think he'd be in trouble. I think the economy would still be screwed.
So, to claim that there was much he could have done to avert the upcoming trip to the woodshed that his party is about to face is a bit of a stretch. He was just doomed. He was doomed by events outside of his control, that were created largely by the policy decisions of his predecessors.
That also includes Bill Clinton who presided over the dismantling of Glass Steagall, which was instrumental in preventing another Great Depression for 66 years. Within 10 years of it's repeal, here we are.
There were other things that have worked against him since day one. For instance, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. I know she's popular in the Bay Area. For that part of the country, she's fine. For the rest of the country, having her as speaker of the house and one of the most prominent Democrats in the country is about as much of a disaster as one could imagine. The only thing I could see that would be a comparable diaster on the right-wing side of the leger would be to have... I dunno... somebody like David Duke as the pointman for the Republican party.
The Republicans have been relentless as identifying the Democrat congress and Obama with Pelosi and have been able to make that connection in the public consciousness. This might not hurt the Democrats in the Bay Area, but it hurts them everywhere else.
People are angry, and not just because the economy sucks. They're angry at Obama for his what they sense are his priorities, which they largely can't figure out. And the parts they can figure out? That makes the voters furious.
The biggest of Obama's blunders? Had to be the utter ineptitude he showed when he chose to pursue his health care bill during his first year in office.
If there was any other way Obama could have gotten this wrong, I'd like to hear about it. Many independents and moderates (I like to include myself in the "moderate" category) wanted to see some action taken on health care.
We've got huge problems with health care in this country: specifically with health-care costs. Really, when you get down to it, medical technology can solve the problems it can solve. It can't solve the problems it can't solve. People understand this. When they complain about health care, though, the main complaint is that they can't get it because it costs too much.
Obama had a huge amount of political capital when he won the election. His approval ratings were astoudingly high.
The basic theory goes: you use up that political capital to do something good. When something good happens, you get more political capital you can use later.
Bush expended all his political capital on the wars, and when they didn't produce discernable productive achievements, he was out of capital and his party was out of office. That's a case study in how unwisely using political capital can result in having no political capital left.
Obama's health care bill is another.
Had Obama actually produced a good health care bill, I think he wouldn't be in quite the dire circumstances he is in, now. However, he made so many tactical errors that the bill that resulted is almost completely worthless.
First, in spite of being Mr. Hope and Change, the first thing he did was bring in pharma and insurance companies behind closed doors, cut them special deals which would allow them to continue to gouge the American people, and took any meaningful reform of health care costs off the table.
Basically, the biggest problem with health care? Cost? The first thing he did was make sure that costs would not be addressed.
In the end, the bill took much longer to pass than he thought. Largely because the bill really didn't offer much, he wasn't able to garner public support to push it through once it faced opposition by the Republicans whose votes weren't needed, anyway.
Ultimately, the bill couldn't pass, and it only became law through a very, very convoluted use of reconciliation between the house and senate bills.
There is one good thing that came out of the bill: pre-existing conditions can't be excluded anymore. Literally, just one good thing.
Meanwhile, the bill ensured that, for instance, the United States would not be able to negotiate drug purchase prices. Probably the biggest single purchaser of pharmaceuticals in the world is not allowed to negotiate on behalf of the American people for a fair deal.
This bill is so bad that it will, absolutely, make the health care situation in the US worse.
In the end, I suspect that Obama knew his bill wasn't very good. It accomplished very little, and didn't do anything to address the real issues with health care cost. However, he had wasted the first year of his presidency, and all his political capital on it. To walk away with nothing would have been even more disastrous for him, politically.
So, did he take half a loaf when that was all he could get? I'd say more like he took that end piece that everybody throws away.
People detest politicians whose only agenda is to maintain their political power. Obama's final passage of the health care bill was only intended to help 3 types of people:
1. People with pre-existing conditions can now buy policies, which are going to be priced so outrageously expensively that they can't afford them. This is small progress since in the past, they just couldn't buy policies.
2. The very people who are charging the US 2 and 3 and 4 times as much as they charge the rest of the world won big. Obama guaranteed, in law, that nobody will be allowed to stop them from destroying our economy.
3. It helped Obama because walking away with nothing, would have been a horrible disaster, he walked away being able to claim victory. Trouble is, the bill is downright bad. The American people have no tolerance for politicians who do bad things just because it benefits their political career.
Now, by focusing on health care, what he wasn't focusing on was the economy. What if, instead of spending all his political capital on a health care bill of dubious value, he had used it to get Wall Street regulatory reform.
We have regulatory reform? Well... yeah, if you think the health care bill was a victory, you probably love Wall Street reform.
What if he'd used all that goodwill early in his presidency, combined with populist outrage about Wall Street, to re-enact Glass Steagall?
What if he'd used all that to fund a government agency to wind-down the nation's 10 largest insolvent banks. (Right now, if you can name a bank off the top of your head, they're insolvent under mark-to-market rules).
What if he used that energy, combined with a special prosecutor, and the Sarbanes-Oxley law to throw 400 Wall Street executives in prison and ban then from ever working for an FDIC insured institution?
We can only theorize about that because Obama didn't do that. In fact, he did the exact opposite. He continued the Bush Administration's policies of ensuring that the bankers who caused this problem were richly rewarded with multi-million dollar bonuses.
If anything, Obama is WORSE as far as being a Wall Street toady. Bush actually let one of the Wall Street banks fail before Paulson discovered the benefits of a totalitarian, command economic model. Obama? As both a Senator and as President, has put Wall Street first.
Now, again, would this have helped the economy? I doubt it. The economy will fix itself when it fixes itself. If we spend billions, it'll fix itself. If we do nothing, it'll fix itself.
However, right now, the American people are feeling betrayed. They don't trust Obama. They think he only acts to preserve his power and to protect the politically connected. Which means if you're not a Wall Street Banker or a member of the UAW, it's darned hard to figure out any way Obama has done anything for you at all.
The American people believe in hard work and sacrifice. We all know this is going to take a while for us to fix. Trouble is, right now, we don't think our government gives a whit about us. The American people feel, and rightly so, that the only people who have to sacrifice are those who followed the rules and played fair.
The folks who cheated? Who got rich doing it? Deep down, I think a sizeable portion of the population feels that Obama represents them, not the guy on Main Street trying to make his budget work.
Nobody is willing to follow Obama now, and it's his own fault.
Granted, if the economy recovers in the next two years, Obama will get the credit and get re-elected. Though even so, his actions to date paint him as horribly out of touch and completely oblivious to what ordinary Americans deal with on a day to day basis.
Bill Clinton always had the potential to come back because he had the ability to make people believe that he cared about them.
Obama? I don't think anybody thinks Obama cares about them one whit. He needs to connect with the voters. He needs to stop doing what's politically expedient and start figuring out how to do what's right.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)