Pro Commerce

Did I solve it?

I visited the mother nest of the modern computer back in the early 1970s.  It was Xerox Parc and the man who ran the operation was Bill English.  Bill and his wife Roberta were friends of mine.  This blog is about a dinner we had about a decade ago.

At the time of the dinner there were the remnants of a 1988 lawsuit about computer desktop page design.  The suit was between Apple and Microsoft. The lawsuit was about 9 years old at the time. Apple claimed that Microsoft had copied the ‘look and feel’ of the home computer screen from Apple, which it had. The important truth was that Apple had copied the ‘look and feel’ from what the two Steve’s had seen at Xerox Park and Apple had somewhat of a license from Xerox.

At the dinner with the Englishes, Bill said he had just agreed to go on the board of Sun.  I knew most of the long history and I pointed out to him that he was the perfect person to bring an end to the law suit by getting Xerox to license the original material to Sun.  

Bill was the person who actually ran the shop (Xerox Park) that created the ‘look and feel’ and everyone in Silicon Valley knew it.  All Bill had to do, as a Sun Board of Directors member, was to say that he supported Sun getting rights to his work at Xerox Parc and that the lawsuit should be dropped.  It was.

Did I do it?

Mountain Biking

I have written several blogs in the past on mountain biking. One reason I've done this: mountain biking is truly a hippie creation in the spirit of a genuine Briarpatch business.  It is a perfect example of the way the hippy efflorescence shaped our contemporary world.

I want to call your attention to a DVD that Billy Savage made of the history of the founding of mountain biking. Its called Klunkerz.  You can buy it for $22.

The reason I commend this DVD to you, is that it conveys the values and exuberance of the hippy world.  Everything is there, the community, the sharing, the optimism, the openness and most of all, the DVD conveys the flat-out dedication to fun.

I sure miss that. I'm not sentimental, but it was wonderful to be around other people who acted with confidence and joy.

Small town renaissance

My father had great sympathy for small towns (it was the norm for Lefty Fundamentalists even while living in big cities) and was a strong supporter of a small town renaissance movement in the early 1950s.  He got me to read all the books and articles on the subject.

I never had an interest in small towns.  Somehow I considered life in a small town to be largely petty, vindictive, based on open social warfare between all strata and inter-family vengeance. Mostly I thought they were boring.

By now most small towns have been depopulated, not just in the U.S. but in much of the world. Recently I’ve begun to see small towns being brought back to life by Internet long distance workers and the services that support them.

Thus, I now have advice for small towns with decrepit main streets that want vitality.  First, last and most importantly, don’t go for a comprehensive plan or style.  It is tempting to plant trees, remodel old brick buildings and look quaint to attract tourists and related retail.  Don’t.

Towns that look like Princeton NJ or Carmel CA completely lack humanity, authenticity and interesting people.  They are facades both physically and socially.

Just leave the main street the way it is.  Low rents will attract experimental retail businesses.

To encourage start-up retail here are four simple low cost tools: (1) have regular one day fairs and markets in the street. (2) On these days, open the un-rented stores and have the town pay rent for any person or group that can make a clean-up deposit. (3) Let the sidewalks be used by stores, change ordinances as necessary year-round. (4) Have the town hire a successful window stylist and allow existing businesses to hire him for a few dollars per hour; include businesses that face main street but have no windows or small windows.

Longer term requires an ordinance that favors street facing businesses with interesting windows and displays, and strongly discourages business that currently use main street for long open spaces (garages, repair shops, tire stores, etc).  Encourage them to face the 90 degree side streets.

The two most important major projects for a small town are (1) to provide services for kids and teens…they bring their parents to shop.  There are many: ice rinks, water sports parks, improv movies outdoors and indoors, party halls, fairs, etc.  (2) Allow open and outdoor bars.  Much of America is still fighting prohibition wars, but most adults like to socialize with alcohol... conviviality for adults favors light, open and clean bars with or without food.

Small towns, as small as 5,000 people, do have a chance these days. Follow my advice.

Death by unions

I drove around Ft. Dodge, Iowa, awhile back.  It looks like your traditional union town. 

What is a union town?  The downtown is filled with large brick empty buildings with vacant lots on every side.  No life, mostly a few people scurrying around looking too much like rats.  Think Detroit, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Vallejo Ca. and much of D.C. in the 1980s.

Many Neanderthal Lefties blame these horrors on malls on the outskirts of town.  Wrong.  The unions destroyed all the main productive businesses and left low income unemployed or semi-employed workers in their wake. The remaining population needs the low cost stores in the malls like WalMart and Target.

Just as importantly, the dominance of unions created long periods where the town was uncooperative and hostile to small and start-up businesses.  Unions create corrupt local politics and a ‘entitlement’ mentality in the work force. After the unions have driven off the large businesses there is no vitality left.

There is no emergence of new small businesses that are necessary to cannibalize the dead buildings in a union town.  There is no one to create new retail street life. Start-up businesses never come to formerly union dominated towns.

Unions (with their zero sum worldview) may have never, over 400 years, served a function that benefited humans.  That is in direct contrast to the face of jubilant generous commerce, the only known source of work and prosperity. 

(The only exception I know, to the last paragraph, are police unions that sometimes protect the police from Lefty goody-goody  blindness.  ( Lefties believe a policeman should use pepper spray in defense against a homicidal criminal with a pistol… just look at the news any day everyday in any city with a big black and radical student population.))

Hotel telephones

Hotels still have phones in every room.  I suspect the years of nickel and diming the traveling public with high hotel telephone fees, remember $1.00 to call information and for local calls, paid-off.  As soon as the public had cell phones that worked, they skipped the hotel phones.

Unfortunately, if the hotels had charged reasonable fees for hotel phones the public would have been just as fast to stop using hotel phones, because the cell phone had a consistent number to respond to.

Sometimes gouging the traveling public doesn’t have automatically harmful marketing consequences. 

Farm coporations?

While many young people are leaving the family farm to work in bigger towns (bigger means 5,000 population), I saw many healthy towns that are the same size they were 50 years ago.  Churches are important in these towns because they are the social center.  Shopping for most items, in these towns, are comparable to big cities and have lower prices at the equivalent of Target and WalMart. Iowa is filled with colleges and universities and public schools are considered good.

The average farm in the county I was in, Humbolt, is 450 acres. That is $500,000 gross revenue at last year's corn and soybean prices and yields. The net on that was about 45%, without taxes or carrying costs: $225,000.

Nevertheless two facts stand out.  (1) A farmer is lucky to find one offspring or relative willing to farm. (2) Farmers don't trust their money to banks, insurance companies or investment funds. 

Combine (1) and (2) and you will see that farmers put their money into buying the farm next door if they can.

Family farms are almost always corporations because a corporate form is easier to divide as family membership changes and, when the time comes, to sell all or part of the farm. 

The only other rational form of ownership for a farm might be an LLC, a form invented by law firms. However, Michael Polan and the kind of people who make 'hate the American farmer, lets all be Amish' movies wouldn't get any mileage talking about LLC farms.

I'm not exaggerating the Lefty hate American farmers campaign.  You can read a farmer on the subject here.

One man

Several of my blogs in the next week will be about my trip to Iowa and the stunning things I learned.  You will probably be stunned as well.

I visited Todd N's farm, where I climbed into his used $250,000 combine.  Todd owns 640 acres (a section). He can single-handedly farm 1,900 acres, roughly three sections of commercial corn or soybeans. He has a five bedroom house a small vegetable garden and an acre of grass around the house. He lives alone and does all the work of the farm himself.  He is 30 years old.  I asked if a spouse would be any help.  'Only if she drove one of the trucks behind the combine a couple a days a year.' Otherwise friends drive the trucks. 

The other two section that Todd farms (for other farm owners) plus his own section, will yield roughly 250 bushels of corn per acre this year or 100 bushels of soybeans.  All from rain, no irrigation in Iowa.  That is one man producing 475,000 bushels of corn or 190,000 bushels of soybean every year.  Usually a mixture of both corn and soybeans in rotation.

Translated into food calories, corn, tofu, sugar, chicken, beef, pork and everything else protein that most people eat, Todd, one farmer, is producing enough food for 600 American families per year*, including the food they eat out.

I loved the combines.  The one in the photo can drive in a straight line by itself with GPS. The harvesting arms have sensors that record, on a computer, the size of the plant and water content of the crop as it is cut to determine the coming year's foot by foot need for more or less fertilizer.

(*Table 667 U.S. Stat. Abstract 2006)