Communism vs Free Enterprise - Some Perspective

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or by Email.
Thanks for visiting!

In response to my Thanksgiving post this year Alex over at the Advice Network left a thought provoking comment. Here’s the comment:

It’s interesting that the European (illegal?) immigrants could not survive with a communal (communist?) economic system, considering the aboriginal neighbors who saved their lives by showing them what crops to plant DID have a communal economic system.

What do you think accounted for this difference?

I started a comment in reply but the question is interesting enough that I think it warrants a full post. So here it goes. Read more

A Little Thanksgiving History

Today is a national holiday here in the US. It’s a day with many different traditions today, from big meals with family, turkey, pumpkin pie, to parades and Detroit Lions football.

Interestingly the Thanksgiving tradition goes back much further than the 1924 inception of the Macy’s parade in New York. In fact, it predates our young country by more than 150 years.

Early Thanksgiving

The first recorded Thanksgiving in North America was actually held up in Canada in 1587 in celebration of surviving an abortive attempt to find a Northwest passage to the orient. Chalk one up to our neighbors to the North.

In the US, the first formal community wide Thanksgiving celebration was held 32 years later in 1619 on the banks of the James River in Virginia to celebrate the completion of an arduous sea passage.

Interestingly, the early Thanksgiving celebration that is most often looked to as the example didn’t happen until nearly two years later.

The folks that came over on the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth Massachusetts had a rough first year. They landed off Cape Cod in November so they didn’t have much time to prepare for the severe New England winter that they were faced with. It’s likely they didn’t understand how bad it would get.

Nearly half the 102 people who made the voyage across the Atlantic were dead within 6 months after disembarking in 1620 including their first leader John Carver. Most died from starvation and disease, although there were many hazards which could kill a person. Carver apparently died from sunstroke.

By the time the survivors got to their first harvest, they were fired up that they looked to have enough to make it through the second winter. So the 53 Europeans who were left had a big old celebration. It went on for days.

They invited some of their Indian friends who had shown them how to grow some of the crops that did so well. And the Native Americans were so impressed with the feast that they sent some of their hunters into the woods to get some venison for the settlers. Read more

Learning with Lynn Lilly and the Ladies

You may or may not know that Gorgeous is the Managing Director of the local Savannah chapter of a business women’s networking group called eWomenNetwork.

I’m proud of what she’s accomplished in growing that group from nothing a little over a year ago. But pretty much it has been her thing. I’ve kept my distance for the most part. Besides I’ve been kept pretty busy with all the ships.

Things are changing however as we grow my own baby, SuccessCREEations.

Networking

One of the concerns of any business or organization has to be growing the contact base. Without a growing contact base there is no potential customer pool and the whole thing may very well wither on the vine.

There are tons of ways to expand your organizations contacts. For example blogging can be a great way to expand your reach online.

Likewise, if you are interested in building a local customer base, one of the best ways is to get out into the community and meet people, network face to face. And from what I’ve seen here in Savannah there is no better place to do that than amongst the ladies at the local eWomenNetwork events.

Granted I might be a little biased. But I’m sure nobody’s fool either.

So I decided it was time to start participating, step in there, meet some folks, and offer my help to whoever might need it. I’m glad I did.

eWomenNetwork is obviously oriented towards women. However there were a handful of smart men who attended last night’s event as well. These guys understand that over 80% of the buying decisions are made by women and not us men. It makes great business sense to get to know some of these ladies who are controlling so much spending power.

I met some new folks. And last night’s speaker shared something that resonated with me as well.

Lynn Lilly

Lynn Lilly is a lady with more than 20 years experience in the marketing business. She did a great job sharing with us last night. One point really struck home with me.

Creativity is the great UN-Equalizer

Never really thought about it before but she’s right.

We all have the ability to creatively come up with ways to give ourselves an edge up on the competition. The trick is to stimulate our minds to get those creative juices flowing.

Lynn was kind enough to leave us all with a little tool to help get the ball rolling. You can see from the picture that she put together a stack of idea cards to stimulate the synapses.

All in all it was a good night.

And it sure didn’t hurt to be spending time with all those lovely ladies.

Add Functionality to WordPress with Plugins

WordPress is a powerful web publishing platform. That statement almost goes without saying.

Because it is open source there is a tremendous amount of support for the platform freely available out there. And you can really add functionality to your WordPress site by adding plugins.

What Plugins Are

Plugins are simply smaller programs that interact with a bigger program to do something that the original program couldn’t do alone.

The beauty of plugins is that they are modular. They are normally easily activated and deactivated which means that the desired functionality can be turned on and off as desired.

So in theory you can add them, take them away, mix and match without causing problems with the original program.

I say in theory because, as with anything computer related, your mileage may vary if you know what I mean. Sometimes they might produce unexpected and very undesirable results. Those are the fun times.

But I digress. Read more

Anonymity Credit Card Style

Identity theft is a big issue. If you talk to anyone who has been a victim of that particular crime you can get a feel for how incredibly disruptive it can be to your life.

What if a credit card company came along and changed things up to help protect consumers? What are some of the things they would have to do to keep their cardholder’s identity safe?

For starters they would have to remove information like card holder names and account number from the card, right?

Sound crazy, doesn’t it?

Well there is a new credit card company that is doing that very thing.

Revolution Card is a new credit card that leaves the account number and card holder name off of the card.

I think they may very well be on to something. Sounds a little like the PayPal of credit cards.

For those of you unfamiliar with PayPal, it is a system that makes money transactions via email. The person you send or get money from only sees your email address. Your financial information is theoretically much more protected because you can change the email address associated with your account.

In the same way the Revolution Card uses a pin number for each transaction. And they even allow you to create temporary pin numbers. That can be a useful feature for one time purchases, dealing with unfamiliar merchants, and when working online.

I suspect we will be seeing much more of Revolution Card in the future.

Thanks to Valeria Maltoni who shared about this in Fast Company.

Clarify Your Win and Be More Effective

Effectiveness is often a good measure of success. When we are effective we are producing the results we striving to achieve.

Trouble comes when the results we see are different from what we expected. What then? How do we become more effective?

One sure way to be more effective is to Clarify Your Win.

We All Want to Win

Everyone likes to win. People love the excitement when their team is getting ahead. It’s the reason sports are a multi-billion dollar industry around the globe. We are hard wired to crave winning and being associated with winners.

This is also why a team that’s in the middle of a big loosing streak has trouble filling a stadium. No one wants to associate with “losers”.

With sports it’s easy to see who the winner is. One quick look at the scoreboard, or maybe the clock is all it takes. Winning in most sports can be reduced to numbers and guys often memorize an amazing amount of data from their favorite sports teams all with the the goal of figuring out who’s got the best chances to win.

Or sometimes they use their stats to explain why this team won and that team lost. Read more

Thank Your Local Veteran Today

Every now and then I get into a politics discussion with someone having a vastly different perspective than mine. Fortunately that doesn’t happen as often as it used to.

I’m not sure if I’m actually learning something as I grow older, or if I’m actually getting more cynical and apathetic where politics are concerned. Not that it really matters in the scope of what we’re talking about on this Veteran’s Day today, mind you.

But during the course of my recent discussion, the person I was talking with made some rather derogatory and insulting statements about people in uniform and about officers in particular. I’m pretty sure he didn’t realize I’d been a Naval Officer when he said those things.

Truth be told, I wasn’t so much offended as saddened.

It’s one thing to disagree with the decisions made by our sitting President. I totally appreciate that. Here in the US we value freedom of speech and people quite properly do have the right to voice their opinions, no matter how far afield the ideas range. (Keep in mind that doesn’t mean we have a responsibility to listen to every kooky voice out there. But that’s a distinction lost on many folks.)

Nor is it my task to defend everything that the US is doing in the world.

Unfortunately, in spite of whatever they say at the front end of the conversation, I find more often than not that when it gets down to brass tacks the overwhelming majority of the folks who are most outspoken against the current utilization of our military truly are hostile to the folks who choose to put on a uniform and accept the danger that comes with working at the tip of the lance.

I wish they’d be honest about their hatred of the military and be done with it.

A Real American Hero

I had dinner this week with some friends. I ended up sitting next to someone I’d not met before. Turns out he’s an Army Ranger. Wouldn’t talk much about what he does, and a big reason for that is the obvious security concerns.

But he also said there are topics he just won’t discuss in public because he’s had too many bad experiences with folks who weren’t even part of his conversation but jumped in on overhearing him. How rude is that?

He was heading back over very soon. By now he’s probably en-route, if he’s not there already. And he was glad to go because he felt they were actually doing good and making things better for people there as well as helping reduce the danger for those of us back here in the States.

Needless to say his job is a bit more dangerous than anything I’ll encounter in the next few months.

We should be grateful that so many men and women are willing to work so hard to protect our rights and freedom. They sure aren’t doing it for the money.

Take a moment today and find a veteran. When you do, say two simple words. Thank you.

Defensio Promises Competition for Spam Killing Akismet

Spam is the scourge of the internet. Spawn of Satan. Evil incarnate.

It’s bad stuff.

They say something on the order of 90% of all email sent is in fact spam. Blech!

Spam Defined

For those of you who live under an un-technological rock, here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia Spam entry.

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, mobile phone messaging spam, internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

In other words there is little cost and effectively no adverse consequences to spammers so they continue to flood the planet with their electronic waste, and tie up huge swaths of bandwidth and countless man hours dealing with their mess.

And if you were wondering where the term spam originated, apparently some of the early computer geeks were fans of Monty Python and they saw all that junk as overwhelming things the same way the Spam song did in this skit.

Read more

The Joys of Vacation

va·ca·tion [vey-key-shuhn, vuh-]
–noun

1. a period of suspension of work, study, or other activity, usually used for rest, recreation, or travel; recess or holiday.
2. a part of the year, regularly set aside, when normal activities of law courts, legislatures, etc., are suspended.
3. freedom or release from duty, business, or activity.
4. an act or instance of vacating.

A Little Time Off

When most bloggers go on vacation they stop blogging for a bit. Me, I’m different. I’ve got a couple days off and I finally get to write!

I guess vacation means different things to different folks. Some people want to get away, do nothing. For me a vacation is time to do some things I want to do.

Sleeping late. Dinner with friends. Building out web sites. Blogging. Exploring new sites. Adding feeds to my reader.

These are all the kinds of things that recharge my batteries. We all need to be sure we make the effort to get recharged now and then or we will burn ourselves out.

Question is, what recharges your batteries?

Customer Service Credit Card Style

Scenario

You make a purchase with your credit card for $171.76. Even before the bill comes due you cut a check to the credit card company for that amount because you believe in paying off the balance in full every month.

Due to your convoluted but very effective personal accounting system you mail in a whole bunch of checks for individual purchases when you pay your bill. However when the credit card company processes your payment, their electronic check scanners mistakenly process that particular check for $5,171.76.

Then your bank’s electronic check scanner makes the exact same mistake and as a result overdraws your account.

Oh, and because the credit card company processes payments made on the same day largest to smallest a whole bunch of the other checks written for that payment bounce.

Fees galore!

How do you fix it?

After your initial panic you start looking at the evidence. A quick glance at the digital image of the check in question shows that it is obviously a mistake by the machine readers.

You better start making calls right away or this will get worse fast.

Now the question is this: How many phone calls and how long do you think it will take to get this obvious mistake by the machines resolved and the fees removed from your account? Read more

Next Page »