Making Money on the Internet

Bing Gordon, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says that his venture capital firm has to gear up for the coming tech boom. That’s one reason that his company hired famous Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as a new partner on Monday.

Meeker’s investing focus at the firm will be on the Internet and how the shift to mobile  will create huge new opportunities, Gordon said in an interview.

Gordon is sitting pretty himself as the backer of Kleiner’s investments in mobile gaming firm Ngmoco, which was bought by DeNA for $403 million, and Zynga, the hot social gaming company that is valued at $5.6 billion.

“She thinks big and thinks global,” Gordon (pictured right) said. “Among the analysts, she is my favorite personality. She makes fearless macro bets and is right most of the time.”

Gordon said he sees a big boom coming, not a bubble, much like Kleiner’s managing partner John Doerr, who said that we’re in the midst of yet another boom for internet investments at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. The reason is that he sees a lot of technologies that are changing the way we live.

“The world of digital media is being transformed,” Gordon said. “A bunch of new businesses can be reinvented, thanks to social graphs, the mobile internet, and the new shopping habits of the young. Those are going to create a whole generation of cool new companies. Mary has the right stuff to help people take advantage of the opportunities.”

As for his own focus, Gordon said he is fascinated how users are dealing with the information overload from the social internet and how users are building their own social capital. He is also interested in the “new algorithms, data structures and network topologies of the social web.” He is looking at the intersection of mobile operating systems, the social web, and entertainment. He is also interested in gamification, or making non-game applications more fun and engaging by making them more game-like.

Beyond spotting trends, Meeker will now have to pick the right companies and entrepreneurs that are riding those trends. Meeker will focus on Kleiner’s digital investments, which largely means the social and mobile Internet. But Gordon said that renewed emphasis on internet companies doesn’t mean that the company is backing off completely on big cleantech investments.

“If you look at our cleantech and life science press releases, you can see there are other partner recruitments happening there too,” he said.

Kleiner has a new fund, the sFund, to invest in social Internet companies. But Gordon said it isn’t easy to predict whether Kleiner will invest more money in 2011 than it will in 2010.

[photo credit: SF Business Journal]

Next Story: LinkedIn joins the article-sharing party Previous Story: NewsBasis: Death to the bad PR pitch!

What drives an entrepreneur to start a business?  Is it solely about money?  Or is there something more?  I argue that often it is the  same creative drive that compels an artist to paint, a musician to compose, or a sculptor to look at a piece of rough marble and see an angel inside.  And those who understand the mind of the small business owner know why the proposed tax increase in 2011 will do more harm than good to the very people this economy needs most to create jobs.

On FBN’s Bulls & Bears recently Democratic strategist Jehmu Greene, the token liberal steak tossed into the wolf den of laissez faire commentators, uttered words to the effect that if we allow the Bush tax cuts to remain, the “rich” (I guess that’s me?) will not put the money into the economy but rather just squirrel it away “in their banks…It would not go into job creation or creating capital for small business.”

My first thought  was: “In my bank? Really?  How many businesses have you owned?” (To be fair she did co-found some internet venture called Urban Hang Suite which shuttered in 2003).  But then I reminded myself that, like Ms. Greene herself who has been in non-profit and/or government almost her entire career,  very few people in the  Obama administration, from the president on down, have ever started a business.  Thus they cannot understand what drives entrepreneurs to succeed.  They think it is just about take-home pay.

It’s said that small business owners work eighteen hour days for ourselves so we don’t have to work eight hours a day for someone else.  And often our income on a dollar/hour basis is less than the established firms we may have left to go on our own. Certainly this is generally true for those few scary years at the beginning when a myriad of mistakes are made and unanticipated events occur that prompt the principals to pay ourselves only after all other obligations have been met   So why do it?  Why take such risk?

First, the sense of pride of ownership and having built something from nothing is as strong in an entrepreneur as it is in the artists I alluded to earlier.  This is often a foreign concept to those who have spent their lives in secure positions in academia, government, or as line workers and middle managers in huge firms and thus do they discount our passion to create something while passing judgments like Ms. Greene’s.  Do not underestimate the fact that more than just money drives us to take such enormous personal risk.

Secondly, there is of course  that brass ring of selling the firm and walking away with a nice pay-out in hand.  Still, I know of very few successful entrepreneurs who upon a sale leave the world of business.  Rather they look for new ventures.  New challenges.  New job creating entities. Name an artist satisfied at just one piece.

Now, our company’s value is enhanced by increased business.  We have to grow in order to build our firm into a salable entity. And that usually means a larger workforce to generate more revenues.  It’s no coincidence that the targeted 2% of Americans making north of $250k create 28% of the nation’s new jobs.   The reason letting the tax breaks expire is an impediment to that growth is that many small business owners have their business and personal income intertwined. And as such a 5% tax on their personal income is a de facto 5% surcharge on their business.  For someone making $1mm a year, that is a $50k  hit to their business…two entry level employees.  In the end, we are employers, not charity wards.  We take the risks, it is our capital—and homes—at stake and so we will look to other ways to cut before reducing our own deserved compensation.  So in order to make up the shortfall and keep an owner level with 2010 all else being equal, these two employees may get let go.  Certainly an owner will put off hiring until he/she knows if they can afford new hands or not.  The new mantra for small business is “don’t hire one until you need two.”  Not the best recipe for getting the job creators excited about growing the payroll is it?

Before sitting down to write this I looked over my small company’s five-year projections.  Always we try to gage our fixed costs.  When we have some certainty on costs we can plan around them and ‘stress test’ to see how we survive in given revenue scenarios and prepare measures today in anticipation of any issues down the road.  Then we can better tell, for example, how much interest we can afford each month on a loan (assuming we can get one) to bring in more capital and expand the firm—and hire people we need to get us to the next level and that much closer to that holy grail of being bought out while satisfying our desire to build something special along the way.  But right now there is a big blank “N/A” on the spreadheet cells labeled “Federal Income Tax.”  Until I know what to plug in there, it will be hard to move forward.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off
Jabón <b> Noticias </ b>: Días festivos &#39; &#39; de nuestras vidas "Tierras de Big Fish y másLa están saltando en el mundo de las telenovelas, con nuevos personajes que entran y caras familiares que regresan. La semana pasada, se informó que la CBS le dio 'La.

Piers Morgan El frente a frente contra Fox <b> Noticias </ b>: Parte de las conversaciones sucesor de Rupert <b> ...</ b> Larry King de CNN sobre las posibilidades en contra de Fox News.

Exclusiva: el general Petraeus no &#39; &#39; Claro victoria en Afganistán en 2014 <b> ...</ b> En mi entrevista exclusiva con el general David Petraeus se sentía alentado por los progresos realizados desde el aumento del Presidente Obama de las fuerzas en Afganistán, pero que confía en que el ejército afgano puede asumir el liderazgo de las fuerzas de EE.UU. en la OTAN.


bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Bing Gordon, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says that his venture capital firm has to gear up for the coming tech boom. That’s one reason that his company hired famous Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as a new partner on Monday.

Meeker’s investing focus at the firm will be on the Internet and how the shift to mobile  will create huge new opportunities, Gordon said in an interview.

Gordon is sitting pretty himself as the backer of Kleiner’s investments in mobile gaming firm Ngmoco, which was bought by DeNA for $403 million, and Zynga, the hot social gaming company that is valued at $5.6 billion.

“She thinks big and thinks global,” Gordon (pictured right) said. “Among the analysts, she is my favorite personality. She makes fearless macro bets and is right most of the time.”

Gordon said he sees a big boom coming, not a bubble, much like Kleiner’s managing partner John Doerr, who said that we’re in the midst of yet another boom for internet investments at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. The reason is that he sees a lot of technologies that are changing the way we live.

“The world of digital media is being transformed,” Gordon said. “A bunch of new businesses can be reinvented, thanks to social graphs, the mobile internet, and the new shopping habits of the young. Those are going to create a whole generation of cool new companies. Mary has the right stuff to help people take advantage of the opportunities.”

As for his own focus, Gordon said he is fascinated how users are dealing with the information overload from the social internet and how users are building their own social capital. He is also interested in the “new algorithms, data structures and network topologies of the social web.” He is looking at the intersection of mobile operating systems, the social web, and entertainment. He is also interested in gamification, or making non-game applications more fun and engaging by making them more game-like.

Beyond spotting trends, Meeker will now have to pick the right companies and entrepreneurs that are riding those trends. Meeker will focus on Kleiner’s digital investments, which largely means the social and mobile Internet. But Gordon said that renewed emphasis on internet companies doesn’t mean that the company is backing off completely on big cleantech investments.

“If you look at our cleantech and life science press releases, you can see there are other partner recruitments happening there too,” he said.

Kleiner has a new fund, the sFund, to invest in social Internet companies. But Gordon said it isn’t easy to predict whether Kleiner will invest more money in 2011 than it will in 2010.

[photo credit: SF Business Journal]

Next Story: LinkedIn joins the article-sharing party Previous Story: NewsBasis: Death to the bad PR pitch!

What drives an entrepreneur to start a business?  Is it solely about money?  Or is there something more?  I argue that often it is the  same creative drive that compels an artist to paint, a musician to compose, or a sculptor to look at a piece of rough marble and see an angel inside.  And those who understand the mind of the small business owner know why the proposed tax increase in 2011 will do more harm than good to the very people this economy needs most to create jobs.

On FBN’s Bulls & Bears recently Democratic strategist Jehmu Greene, the token liberal steak tossed into the wolf den of laissez faire commentators, uttered words to the effect that if we allow the Bush tax cuts to remain, the “rich” (I guess that’s me?) will not put the money into the economy but rather just squirrel it away “in their banks…It would not go into job creation or creating capital for small business.”

My first thought  was: “In my bank? Really?  How many businesses have you owned?” (To be fair she did co-found some internet venture called Urban Hang Suite which shuttered in 2003).  But then I reminded myself that, like Ms. Greene herself who has been in non-profit and/or government almost her entire career,  very few people in the  Obama administration, from the president on down, have ever started a business.  Thus they cannot understand what drives entrepreneurs to succeed.  They think it is just about take-home pay.

It’s said that small business owners work eighteen hour days for ourselves so we don’t have to work eight hours a day for someone else.  And often our income on a dollar/hour basis is less than the established firms we may have left to go on our own. Certainly this is generally true for those few scary years at the beginning when a myriad of mistakes are made and unanticipated events occur that prompt the principals to pay ourselves only after all other obligations have been met   So why do it?  Why take such risk?

First, the sense of pride of ownership and having built something from nothing is as strong in an entrepreneur as it is in the artists I alluded to earlier.  This is often a foreign concept to those who have spent their lives in secure positions in academia, government, or as line workers and middle managers in huge firms and thus do they discount our passion to create something while passing judgments like Ms. Greene’s.  Do not underestimate the fact that more than just money drives us to take such enormous personal risk.

Secondly, there is of course  that brass ring of selling the firm and walking away with a nice pay-out in hand.  Still, I know of very few successful entrepreneurs who upon a sale leave the world of business.  Rather they look for new ventures.  New challenges.  New job creating entities. Name an artist satisfied at just one piece.

Now, our company’s value is enhanced by increased business.  We have to grow in order to build our firm into a salable entity. And that usually means a larger workforce to generate more revenues.  It’s no coincidence that the targeted 2% of Americans making north of $250k create 28% of the nation’s new jobs.   The reason letting the tax breaks expire is an impediment to that growth is that many small business owners have their business and personal income intertwined. And as such a 5% tax on their personal income is a de facto 5% surcharge on their business.  For someone making $1mm a year, that is a $50k  hit to their business…two entry level employees.  In the end, we are employers, not charity wards.  We take the risks, it is our capital—and homes—at stake and so we will look to other ways to cut before reducing our own deserved compensation.  So in order to make up the shortfall and keep an owner level with 2010 all else being equal, these two employees may get let go.  Certainly an owner will put off hiring until he/she knows if they can afford new hands or not.  The new mantra for small business is “don’t hire one until you need two.”  Not the best recipe for getting the job creators excited about growing the payroll is it?

Before sitting down to write this I looked over my small company’s five-year projections.  Always we try to gage our fixed costs.  When we have some certainty on costs we can plan around them and ‘stress test’ to see how we survive in given revenue scenarios and prepare measures today in anticipation of any issues down the road.  Then we can better tell, for example, how much interest we can afford each month on a loan (assuming we can get one) to bring in more capital and expand the firm—and hire people we need to get us to the next level and that much closer to that holy grail of being bought out while satisfying our desire to build something special along the way.  But right now there is a big blank “N/A” on the spreadheet cells labeled “Federal Income Tax.”  Until I know what to plug in there, it will be hard to move forward.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Bing Gordon, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says that his venture capital firm has to gear up for the coming tech boom. That’s one reason that his company hired famous Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as a new partner on Monday.

Meeker’s investing focus at the firm will be on the Internet and how the shift to mobile  will create huge new opportunities, Gordon said in an interview.

Gordon is sitting pretty himself as the backer of Kleiner’s investments in mobile gaming firm Ngmoco, which was bought by DeNA for $403 million, and Zynga, the hot social gaming company that is valued at $5.6 billion.

“She thinks big and thinks global,” Gordon (pictured right) said. “Among the analysts, she is my favorite personality. She makes fearless macro bets and is right most of the time.”

Gordon said he sees a big boom coming, not a bubble, much like Kleiner’s managing partner John Doerr, who said that we’re in the midst of yet another boom for internet investments at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. The reason is that he sees a lot of technologies that are changing the way we live.

“The world of digital media is being transformed,” Gordon said. “A bunch of new businesses can be reinvented, thanks to social graphs, the mobile internet, and the new shopping habits of the young. Those are going to create a whole generation of cool new companies. Mary has the right stuff to help people take advantage of the opportunities.”

As for his own focus, Gordon said he is fascinated how users are dealing with the information overload from the social internet and how users are building their own social capital. He is also interested in the “new algorithms, data structures and network topologies of the social web.” He is looking at the intersection of mobile operating systems, the social web, and entertainment. He is also interested in gamification, or making non-game applications more fun and engaging by making them more game-like.

Beyond spotting trends, Meeker will now have to pick the right companies and entrepreneurs that are riding those trends. Meeker will focus on Kleiner’s digital investments, which largely means the social and mobile Internet. But Gordon said that renewed emphasis on internet companies doesn’t mean that the company is backing off completely on big cleantech investments.

“If you look at our cleantech and life science press releases, you can see there are other partner recruitments happening there too,” he said.

Kleiner has a new fund, the sFund, to invest in social Internet companies. But Gordon said it isn’t easy to predict whether Kleiner will invest more money in 2011 than it will in 2010.

[photo credit: SF Business Journal]

Next Story: LinkedIn joins the article-sharing party Previous Story: NewsBasis: Death to the bad PR pitch!

What drives an entrepreneur to start a business?  Is it solely about money?  Or is there something more?  I argue that often it is the  same creative drive that compels an artist to paint, a musician to compose, or a sculptor to look at a piece of rough marble and see an angel inside.  And those who understand the mind of the small business owner know why the proposed tax increase in 2011 will do more harm than good to the very people this economy needs most to create jobs.

On FBN’s Bulls & Bears recently Democratic strategist Jehmu Greene, the token liberal steak tossed into the wolf den of laissez faire commentators, uttered words to the effect that if we allow the Bush tax cuts to remain, the “rich” (I guess that’s me?) will not put the money into the economy but rather just squirrel it away “in their banks…It would not go into job creation or creating capital for small business.”

My first thought  was: “In my bank? Really?  How many businesses have you owned?” (To be fair she did co-found some internet venture called Urban Hang Suite which shuttered in 2003).  But then I reminded myself that, like Ms. Greene herself who has been in non-profit and/or government almost her entire career,  very few people in the  Obama administration, from the president on down, have ever started a business.  Thus they cannot understand what drives entrepreneurs to succeed.  They think it is just about take-home pay.

It’s said that small business owners work eighteen hour days for ourselves so we don’t have to work eight hours a day for someone else.  And often our income on a dollar/hour basis is less than the established firms we may have left to go on our own. Certainly this is generally true for those few scary years at the beginning when a myriad of mistakes are made and unanticipated events occur that prompt the principals to pay ourselves only after all other obligations have been met   So why do it?  Why take such risk?

First, the sense of pride of ownership and having built something from nothing is as strong in an entrepreneur as it is in the artists I alluded to earlier.  This is often a foreign concept to those who have spent their lives in secure positions in academia, government, or as line workers and middle managers in huge firms and thus do they discount our passion to create something while passing judgments like Ms. Greene’s.  Do not underestimate the fact that more than just money drives us to take such enormous personal risk.

Secondly, there is of course  that brass ring of selling the firm and walking away with a nice pay-out in hand.  Still, I know of very few successful entrepreneurs who upon a sale leave the world of business.  Rather they look for new ventures.  New challenges.  New job creating entities. Name an artist satisfied at just one piece.

Now, our company’s value is enhanced by increased business.  We have to grow in order to build our firm into a salable entity. And that usually means a larger workforce to generate more revenues.  It’s no coincidence that the targeted 2% of Americans making north of $250k create 28% of the nation’s new jobs.   The reason letting the tax breaks expire is an impediment to that growth is that many small business owners have their business and personal income intertwined. And as such a 5% tax on their personal income is a de facto 5% surcharge on their business.  For someone making $1mm a year, that is a $50k  hit to their business…two entry level employees.  In the end, we are employers, not charity wards.  We take the risks, it is our capital—and homes—at stake and so we will look to other ways to cut before reducing our own deserved compensation.  So in order to make up the shortfall and keep an owner level with 2010 all else being equal, these two employees may get let go.  Certainly an owner will put off hiring until he/she knows if they can afford new hands or not.  The new mantra for small business is “don’t hire one until you need two.”  Not the best recipe for getting the job creators excited about growing the payroll is it?

Before sitting down to write this I looked over my small company’s five-year projections.  Always we try to gage our fixed costs.  When we have some certainty on costs we can plan around them and ‘stress test’ to see how we survive in given revenue scenarios and prepare measures today in anticipation of any issues down the road.  Then we can better tell, for example, how much interest we can afford each month on a loan (assuming we can get one) to bring in more capital and expand the firm—and hire people we need to get us to the next level and that much closer to that holy grail of being bought out while satisfying our desire to build something special along the way.  But right now there is a big blank “N/A” on the spreadheet cells labeled “Federal Income Tax.”  Until I know what to plug in there, it will be hard to move forward.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

bench craft company rip off

Soap <b>News</b>: &#39;Days of Our Lives&#39; Lands Big Fish and More

The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.

Piers Morgan On Facing Off Against Fox <b>News</b>: Part of Rupert <b>...</b>

Larry King's successor talks about CNN's chances against Fox News.

Exclusive: Gen. Petraeus Not &#39;Sure&#39; Victory in Afghanistan by 2014 <b>...</b>

In my exclusive interview with General David Petraeus he was encouraged by the progress made since President Obama's surge of forces into Afghanistan, but is he confident that the Afghan army can take the lead from US forces by NATO's.

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bench craft company rip off

bench craft company rip off

Middle East violence increases « Liveshots

Another cycle of violence in the Middle East as Israel strikes targets in Gaza in retaliation.

Lions vs. Cowboys: Good <b>News</b> On The Injury Front; Dez Bryant Is <b>...</b>

The Dallas Cowboys get some veterans back in practice, and Dez Bryant is a violent man.

Fox <b>News</b> President: Jon Stewart Is Crazy And NPR Is Run By Nazis <b>...</b>

The second part of The Daily Beast's interview with Fox News president Roger Ailes is out today, and Ailes' encore doesn't disappoint. He responded harshly to Jon Stewart's pervasive criticism of cable news and had some tough, ...

bench craft company rip off

bench craft company rip off

Middle East violence increases « Liveshots

Another cycle of violence in the Middle East as Israel strikes targets in Gaza in retaliation.

Lions vs. Cowboys: Good <b>News</b> On The Injury Front; Dez Bryant Is <b>...</b>

The Dallas Cowboys get some veterans back in practice, and Dez Bryant is a violent man.

Fox <b>News</b> President: Jon Stewart Is Crazy And NPR Is Run By Nazis <b>...</b>

The second part of The Daily Beast's interview with Fox News president Roger Ailes is out today, and Ailes' encore doesn't disappoint. He responded harshly to Jon Stewart's pervasive criticism of cable news and had some tough, ...

bench craft company rip off

Middle East violence increases « Liveshots

Another cycle of violence in the Middle East as Israel strikes targets in Gaza in retaliation.

Lions vs. Cowboys: Good <b>News</b> On The Injury Front; Dez Bryant Is <b>...</b>

The Dallas Cowboys get some veterans back in practice, and Dez Bryant is a violent man.

Fox <b>News</b> President: Jon Stewart Is Crazy And NPR Is Run By Nazis <b>...</b>

The second part of The Daily Beast's interview with Fox News president Roger Ailes is out today, and Ailes' encore doesn't disappoint. He responded harshly to Jon Stewart's pervasive criticism of cable news and had some tough, ...

bench craft company rip off

Middle East violence increases « Liveshots

Another cycle of violence in the Middle East as Israel strikes targets in Gaza in retaliation.

Lions vs. Cowboys: Good <b>News</b> On The Injury Front; Dez Bryant Is <b>...</b>

The Dallas Cowboys get some veterans back in practice, and Dez Bryant is a violent man.

Fox <b>News</b> President: Jon Stewart Is Crazy And NPR Is Run By Nazis <b>...</b>

The second part of The Daily Beast's interview with Fox News president Roger Ailes is out today, and Ailes' encore doesn't disappoint. He responded harshly to Jon Stewart's pervasive criticism of cable news and had some tough, ...

bench craft company rip off

Middle East violence increases « Liveshots

Another cycle of violence in the Middle East as Israel strikes targets in Gaza in retaliation.

Lions vs. Cowboys: Good <b>News</b> On The Injury Front; Dez Bryant Is <b>...</b>

The Dallas Cowboys get some veterans back in practice, and Dez Bryant is a violent man.

Fox <b>News</b> President: Jon Stewart Is Crazy And NPR Is Run By Nazis <b>...</b>

The second part of The Daily Beast's interview with Fox News president Roger Ailes is out today, and Ailes' encore doesn't disappoint. He responded harshly to Jon Stewart's pervasive criticism of cable news and had some tough, ...

bench craft company rip off

bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off

Middle East violence increases « Liveshots

Another cycle of violence in the Middle East as Israel strikes targets in Gaza in retaliation.

Lions vs. Cowboys: Good <b>News</b> On The Injury Front; Dez Bryant Is <b>...</b>

The Dallas Cowboys get some veterans back in practice, and Dez Bryant is a violent man.

Fox <b>News</b> President: Jon Stewart Is Crazy And NPR Is Run By Nazis <b>...</b>

The second part of The Daily Beast's interview with Fox News president Roger Ailes is out today, and Ailes' encore doesn't disappoint. He responded harshly to Jon Stewart's pervasive criticism of cable news and had some tough, ...

bench craft company rip off

bench craft company rip off

Middle East violence increases « Liveshots

Another cycle of violence in the Middle East as Israel strikes targets in Gaza in retaliation.

Lions vs. Cowboys: Good <b>News</b> On The Injury Front; Dez Bryant Is <b>...</b>

The Dallas Cowboys get some veterans back in practice, and Dez Bryant is a violent man.

Fox <b>News</b> President: Jon Stewart Is Crazy And NPR Is Run By Nazis <b>...</b>

The second part of The Daily Beast's interview with Fox News president Roger Ailes is out today, and Ailes' encore doesn't disappoint. He responded harshly to Jon Stewart's pervasive criticism of cable news and had some tough, ...

bench craft company rip off

Middle East violence increases « Liveshots

Another cycle of violence in the Middle East as Israel strikes targets in Gaza in retaliation.

Lions vs. Cowboys: Good <b>News</b> On The Injury Front; Dez Bryant Is <b>...</b>

The Dallas Cowboys get some veterans back in practice, and Dez Bryant is a violent man.

Fox <b>News</b> President: Jon Stewart Is Crazy And NPR Is Run By Nazis <b>...</b>

The second part of The Daily Beast's interview with Fox News president Roger Ailes is out today, and Ailes' encore doesn't disappoint. He responded harshly to Jon Stewart's pervasive criticism of cable news and had some tough, ...

bench craft company rip off

GT5 installs while played - Sony PlayStation 3 <b>News</b> - Page 1 <b>...</b>

Read our PlayStation 3 news of GT5 installs while played - Sony.

Photos Implant &#39;Memories&#39; of Fictional <b>News</b> Events | Smart <b>...</b>

Participants in a study were far more likely to “remember” a fictional news event when a headline was accompanied by a tangentially relevant photograph.

Small Business <b>News</b>: SMB Blogging and Social Media Basics

Far from a fad, a new blogging and social media infrastructure has emerged and is still being built and becoming a part of the new hierarchy can be important to.

bench craft company rip off

Lions vs. Cowboys: Good <b>News</b> On The Injury Front; Dez Bryant Is <b>...</b>

The Dallas Cowboys get some veterans back in practice, and Dez Bryant is a violent man.

Rivet returning to lineup - Sabres Edge - Blogs - The Buffalo <b>News</b>

The Buffalo News updated every day with news from Buffalo, New York. Links to national and business news, entertainment listings, recipes, sports teams, classified ads, death notices.

Photos Implant &#39;Memories&#39; of Fictional <b>News</b> Events | Smart <b>...</b>

Participants in a study were far more likely to “remember” a fictional news event when a headline was accompanied by a tangentially relevant photograph.

bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> Corp developing a tablet-exclusive publication

News Corp Logo Reuters is reporting that News Corp, the world's third-largest media conglomerate, has confirmed they will be releasing a news publication developed specifically for tablet computers like the iPad. "It's a tablet-only ...

One and a Half Cheers for Fox <b>News</b>, David Henderson | EconLog <b>...</b>

Senator Jay Rockefeller made a splash Wednesday by suggesting that the Federal Communications Commission shut down the Fox News Channel and MSNBC. My guess is that he mentioned MSNBC because he wanted to sound equally oppressive of both ...

Sony Russia confirms Mass Effect 3? PlayStation 3 <b>News</b> - Page 1 <b>...</b>

Read our PlayStation 3 news of Sony Russia confirms Mass Effect 3?.

bench craft company rip off

Making Money Work

Election week is done. It's time to get back to the business of finding real solutions for our nation's economic recovery. As this week ends it is clear that the appetite for federal stimuli is beginning its ebb tide. We see the Federal Reserve playing the risky cards of quantitative easing trying yet again to spark an economic recovery against the odds of a main street economy still mired in the collateral damage of central government's past grand visions.

Don't get me wrong. I actually agree that Fed needs to be doing what it is. We need to find a sustainable balance for our economy and it's a data intensive compass that can only be seen with clarity from the offices occupied by people like Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair. What I do worry about though is that these central solutions too often take from the small and give to the big because the simplifying assumptions used by the economists and statisticians that support the process aren't capable of seeing the one-by-one trench warfare fights being fought by small businesses and individuals. It's an inherent policy formulation weakness of the academic brain trust behind our system that may be costing ordinary people more pain than necessary. But these ordinary Americans are there. We know this because they voted on Tuesday.

Fortunately, the United States is a big country and Washington D.C. isn't the only place exploring ways to find economic recovery formulae. Across the country, cities and states are beginning to chart independent paths to creating their own "islands of recovery". The City of Los Angeles' proposed Responsible Banking Ordinance continues to move through the committee process improving bit-by-bit into what I believe is an important emerging economic policy counterweight to ensure that the "small to big" tendencies of central solutions do not take us astray yet again.

The tale of the tape is something I believe worth sharing with the readers of the Huffington Post.

On October 26th, there was a public hearing by the L.A. City Jobs Committee chaired by Councilman Richard Alarcon on item CF 09-0234, Responsible Banking. The measure was approved with a number of questions to be investigated and reported to a hearing of the L.A. City Budget and Finance Committee to take place on Monday, November 8th. The questions aired by Councilman Bernard Parks focused on two areas. He asked for more information to determine if the cost and design of the process for implementation by the City was indeed workable. He also asked for clarification about how the differences between community banks, large complex banks and the city's debt underwriters would be recognized within the final ordinance.

Mr. Park's questions tell me that the L.A. process is indeed making progress because these are no longer questions about whether this a good thing for the economic interests of the City but rather how well is the plan risk managed. The interests behind the initiative become more positive as banks, large and small, begin to recognize that there is opportunity to be had here. The carrot being offered by the City of L.A is preference to win lucrative contracts that the City will be issuing anyway if evidence can be presented by the bidders that they are placing the interests of the region higher up the business priority list than their competition. It's subtle and far reaching in its potential to encourage money to circulate locally longer.

So now to ponder details,

As I reviewed the current version of the ordinance draft, it was clear the that City of Los Angeles had specified a data collection and reporting request that seeks to get banks to translate the nature of their business activities into measurement language that city governments can understand. The policy question is actually spot on but I'm also pretty sure that asking a bank to deliver the answer on a silver platter to the city first time out is a bit of a stretch. I think there's a better way to make it work for everyone and bring the cost/risk of the process well into good comfort.

The path to success here is to recognize two things. The first is that banks know how to report data to their regulators. They actually track all the information the city wants to know. Once a year they even have to report data to the granularity of branch-by-branch information to the FDIC. The other thing that's clear from the city draft is that municipal governments analyze their quality of service based on census tracts because that's how voters are bucketed. The trick in getting one system to talk to the other is to leverage by translating between the two universes via the zip codes of the U.S. postal service.

Asking the banks to do all the work is a lot of work. But if the City of Los Angeles were to re-design the ordinance implementation process to be a two step process where the banks report data in branches with identification of which zip codes are affected by that branch and there was a post- process by the City to morph the submittals into census tract visibility I think this would actually work reasonably well. City employees and/or other specialty vendors are more knowledgeable about the second step of the transformation than any bank will ever be. And there's a reason for that. Bankers, being lenders, have been discouraged from doing the second step for a long time because the technology that does so equates to gathering the data to do "red lining". So it's actually a better plan for the City of L.A. to deliberately separate these two steps from each other in its ordinance design.

My point here is that by taking a step back and recognizing where natural divisions of skill can be used to complement each other what seems onerous as an all-in-one data request can quickly become very doable.

This gets us to Mr. Park's second inquiry about larger out of area institutions and debt underwriters seeking to do business with the City. To that my observation is that the City of Los Angeles needs to set up a fair playing field for everyone. It's my read that by combining the suggestion above for banks with local branches with the tenets of the current ordinance draft language requesting distilled data into zip codes there's plenty of wiggle room for presentation of evidence of local involvement by these larger institutions, even those that do not have physical branches in the region. Complex transforms of data to support reporting requests are well within the capabilities of the IT departments of these larger businesses. Bearing in mind that these are also the banks that will go after the largest contracts with the City there's plenty of incentive for them to get their systems to produce the reports that will give them an advantage over competing bidders.

And in the long run I'm not just talking about competing just for L.A.'s business. There's a far larger universe of municipal and state government opportunities out there and I'll remind the readers of the Huffington post to look back at the history of my blogs for the one reporting on Bill Lockyer's inquiry earlier this year to the largest municipal bond underwriters.

I mean does anyone really think that the rest of America's League of Cities isn't watching how this plays out? Or that incoming California Governor Jerry Brown, the former Mayor of Oakland, doesn't already know that Los Angeles, San Jose and other cities in California are actively exploring how to affect the future of the State's economy using local strategies? Or that Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair and Barack Obama won't read about this?

Keep going L.A. La-La Land may yet become the next shining star of economic recovery innovation.

“Not to the public, they can’t. They can be lent among banks on the fed funds market, but I doubt that’s what you mean.”

copied from below…

When someone makes X product for $1 less in production, then it is going to sell for $5+ less at retail.

The producer will sell more units and make profits, the retailer will sell more units and make higher profits even if they make a smaller margin per product, and millions of people will save $5+ a piece.

AND a bunch of people who before would not have bought the thing, now buy it… they choose to not buy another older thing they value less.

And that company making the older thing is suddenly vulnerable.

HOW those savings make it to the new smaller guy who’s now innovating to go after the older dying product – is IMPOSSIBLE to track. This is the knowledge problem.

But somehow he does get it… and the cycle begins again.

The somehow works like this: in the aggregate those consumers all have an extra $5 in their bank, there is now “more money to lend” more money chasing returns, which gives entrepreneurs better risk return on money borrowed, which brings more entrepreneurs to the game, which crowds out the money to borrow, which raises the cost of money.

And that’s really my point… there is actually an OPTIMAL number of new things coming to market too few and not enough progress happens, too many and not enough progress happens.

Thats IMPOSSIBLE to predict accurately because productivity gains come at the oddest times.

Here’s an example from my past: I know the guys who started Kazaa (and then Skype) … in 2001 we were coming out of a time when a couple BILLION dollars had been poured into Hollywood online content plays + Napster. During that time broadband adoption was slow going. After the entire thing crashed, and there was nothing online for broadband EXCEPT Kazaa/Morpheus stuff… and broadband went ape shit, adoption grew off the hook. Kazaa grew broadband adoption hand over fist, the telecoms and (their union pulling wires) made a killing.

Human Attention was focused – even on a highly questionable product – one that absolutely only gets better when new nodes enter the picture.

And ten years later, artists are richer, ticket sales have gone through the roof, because the cost of being a “fan” went to $0.

Figuring out after the fact WTF HAPPENED?!?! well, that’s doable – and while it was happening, I sat there and watched it, so I might have been able to do a play by play…

BUT TO ACTUALLY predict the exact when, the mechanisms and variables, and then then to try and architect it up front – like a bunch of silly half-wit liberal central planners think is doable. OR chattering about Aggregate Demand and Unused Capacity and thinking it makes you smart is just fucking stupid.

The lines go up, the lines go down and NO ONE is very good at predicting them.

But I can say for sure… printing money interferes with natural process of capital formation, ie savings which is fundamental to progress. And “extra money” doesn’t do anything except reduce the god-given-obligation to make things get cheaper.

bench craft company scam

Former <b>News</b> Corp. Exec Peter Chernin Enters Yahoo Scenarios | Kara <b>...</b>

Things have certainly quieted down in the swirl of mostly vapor plots about the future of Yahoo, although the pondering, machinating and such on the parts of a variety of players have most certainly continued. And that includes the ...

Sarah Palin on Fox <b>News</b> Watch | Palin Attacked On Fox <b>News</b> | Video <b>...</b>

The Fox News Watch crew better learn to watch when the camera is rolling from now on, because they might soon feel the wrath of the Mama Grizzly. Nevermind that Sarah Palin is their Fox News co-worker and a likely contender for the ...

Senator Rockefeller Wants FCC To &#39;End&#39; Fox <b>News</b>, MSNBC

During a committee meeting on Wednesday about television retransmission consent, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) veered away from his prepared remarks to take aim at both Fox News and MSNBC: More than just retransmission consent ails our ...

benchcraft company scam

Election week is done. It's time to get back to the business of finding real solutions for our nation's economic recovery. As this week ends it is clear that the appetite for federal stimuli is beginning its ebb tide. We see the Federal Reserve playing the risky cards of quantitative easing trying yet again to spark an economic recovery against the odds of a main street economy still mired in the collateral damage of central government's past grand visions.

Don't get me wrong. I actually agree that Fed needs to be doing what it is. We need to find a sustainable balance for our economy and it's a data intensive compass that can only be seen with clarity from the offices occupied by people like Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair. What I do worry about though is that these central solutions too often take from the small and give to the big because the simplifying assumptions used by the economists and statisticians that support the process aren't capable of seeing the one-by-one trench warfare fights being fought by small businesses and individuals. It's an inherent policy formulation weakness of the academic brain trust behind our system that may be costing ordinary people more pain than necessary. But these ordinary Americans are there. We know this because they voted on Tuesday.

Fortunately, the United States is a big country and Washington D.C. isn't the only place exploring ways to find economic recovery formulae. Across the country, cities and states are beginning to chart independent paths to creating their own "islands of recovery". The City of Los Angeles' proposed Responsible Banking Ordinance continues to move through the committee process improving bit-by-bit into what I believe is an important emerging economic policy counterweight to ensure that the "small to big" tendencies of central solutions do not take us astray yet again.

The tale of the tape is something I believe worth sharing with the readers of the Huffington Post.

On October 26th, there was a public hearing by the L.A. City Jobs Committee chaired by Councilman Richard Alarcon on item CF 09-0234, Responsible Banking. The measure was approved with a number of questions to be investigated and reported to a hearing of the L.A. City Budget and Finance Committee to take place on Monday, November 8th. The questions aired by Councilman Bernard Parks focused on two areas. He asked for more information to determine if the cost and design of the process for implementation by the City was indeed workable. He also asked for clarification about how the differences between community banks, large complex banks and the city's debt underwriters would be recognized within the final ordinance.

Mr. Park's questions tell me that the L.A. process is indeed making progress because these are no longer questions about whether this a good thing for the economic interests of the City but rather how well is the plan risk managed. The interests behind the initiative become more positive as banks, large and small, begin to recognize that there is opportunity to be had here. The carrot being offered by the City of L.A is preference to win lucrative contracts that the City will be issuing anyway if evidence can be presented by the bidders that they are placing the interests of the region higher up the business priority list than their competition. It's subtle and far reaching in its potential to encourage money to circulate locally longer.

So now to ponder details,

As I reviewed the current version of the ordinance draft, it was clear the that City of Los Angeles had specified a data collection and reporting request that seeks to get banks to translate the nature of their business activities into measurement language that city governments can understand. The policy question is actually spot on but I'm also pretty sure that asking a bank to deliver the answer on a silver platter to the city first time out is a bit of a stretch. I think there's a better way to make it work for everyone and bring the cost/risk of the process well into good comfort.

The path to success here is to recognize two things. The first is that banks know how to report data to their regulators. They actually track all the information the city wants to know. Once a year they even have to report data to the granularity of branch-by-branch information to the FDIC. The other thing that's clear from the city draft is that municipal governments analyze their quality of service based on census tracts because that's how voters are bucketed. The trick in getting one system to talk to the other is to leverage by translating between the two universes via the zip codes of the U.S. postal service.

Asking the banks to do all the work is a lot of work. But if the City of Los Angeles were to re-design the ordinance implementation process to be a two step process where the banks report data in branches with identification of which zip codes are affected by that branch and there was a post- process by the City to morph the submittals into census tract visibility I think this would actually work reasonably well. City employees and/or other specialty vendors are more knowledgeable about the second step of the transformation than any bank will ever be. And there's a reason for that. Bankers, being lenders, have been discouraged from doing the second step for a long time because the technology that does so equates to gathering the data to do "red lining". So it's actually a better plan for the City of L.A. to deliberately separate these two steps from each other in its ordinance design.

My point here is that by taking a step back and recognizing where natural divisions of skill can be used to complement each other what seems onerous as an all-in-one data request can quickly become very doable.

This gets us to Mr. Park's second inquiry about larger out of area institutions and debt underwriters seeking to do business with the City. To that my observation is that the City of Los Angeles needs to set up a fair playing field for everyone. It's my read that by combining the suggestion above for banks with local branches with the tenets of the current ordinance draft language requesting distilled data into zip codes there's plenty of wiggle room for presentation of evidence of local involvement by these larger institutions, even those that do not have physical branches in the region. Complex transforms of data to support reporting requests are well within the capabilities of the IT departments of these larger businesses. Bearing in mind that these are also the banks that will go after the largest contracts with the City there's plenty of incentive for them to get their systems to produce the reports that will give them an advantage over competing bidders.

And in the long run I'm not just talking about competing just for L.A.'s business. There's a far larger universe of municipal and state government opportunities out there and I'll remind the readers of the Huffington post to look back at the history of my blogs for the one reporting on Bill Lockyer's inquiry earlier this year to the largest municipal bond underwriters.

I mean does anyone really think that the rest of America's League of Cities isn't watching how this plays out? Or that incoming California Governor Jerry Brown, the former Mayor of Oakland, doesn't already know that Los Angeles, San Jose and other cities in California are actively exploring how to affect the future of the State's economy using local strategies? Or that Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair and Barack Obama won't read about this?

Keep going L.A. La-La Land may yet become the next shining star of economic recovery innovation.

“Not to the public, they can’t. They can be lent among banks on the fed funds market, but I doubt that’s what you mean.”

copied from below…

When someone makes X product for $1 less in production, then it is going to sell for $5+ less at retail.

The producer will sell more units and make profits, the retailer will sell more units and make higher profits even if they make a smaller margin per product, and millions of people will save $5+ a piece.

AND a bunch of people who before would not have bought the thing, now buy it… they choose to not buy another older thing they value less.

And that company making the older thing is suddenly vulnerable.

HOW those savings make it to the new smaller guy who’s now innovating to go after the older dying product – is IMPOSSIBLE to track. This is the knowledge problem.

But somehow he does get it… and the cycle begins again.

The somehow works like this: in the aggregate those consumers all have an extra $5 in their bank, there is now “more money to lend” more money chasing returns, which gives entrepreneurs better risk return on money borrowed, which brings more entrepreneurs to the game, which crowds out the money to borrow, which raises the cost of money.

And that’s really my point… there is actually an OPTIMAL number of new things coming to market too few and not enough progress happens, too many and not enough progress happens.

Thats IMPOSSIBLE to predict accurately because productivity gains come at the oddest times.

Here’s an example from my past: I know the guys who started Kazaa (and then Skype) … in 2001 we were coming out of a time when a couple BILLION dollars had been poured into Hollywood online content plays + Napster. During that time broadband adoption was slow going. After the entire thing crashed, and there was nothing online for broadband EXCEPT Kazaa/Morpheus stuff… and broadband went ape shit, adoption grew off the hook. Kazaa grew broadband adoption hand over fist, the telecoms and (their union pulling wires) made a killing.

Human Attention was focused – even on a highly questionable product – one that absolutely only gets better when new nodes enter the picture.

And ten years later, artists are richer, ticket sales have gone through the roof, because the cost of being a “fan” went to $0.

Figuring out after the fact WTF HAPPENED?!?! well, that’s doable – and while it was happening, I sat there and watched it, so I might have been able to do a play by play…

BUT TO ACTUALLY predict the exact when, the mechanisms and variables, and then then to try and architect it up front – like a bunch of silly half-wit liberal central planners think is doable. OR chattering about Aggregate Demand and Unused Capacity and thinking it makes you smart is just fucking stupid.

The lines go up, the lines go down and NO ONE is very good at predicting them.

But I can say for sure… printing money interferes with natural process of capital formation, ie savings which is fundamental to progress. And “extra money” doesn’t do anything except reduce the god-given-obligation to make things get cheaper.

bench craft company scam

Former <b>News</b> Corp. Exec Peter Chernin Enters Yahoo Scenarios | Kara <b>...</b>

Things have certainly quieted down in the swirl of mostly vapor plots about the future of Yahoo, although the pondering, machinating and such on the parts of a variety of players have most certainly continued. And that includes the ...

Sarah Palin on Fox <b>News</b> Watch | Palin Attacked On Fox <b>News</b> | Video <b>...</b>

The Fox News Watch crew better learn to watch when the camera is rolling from now on, because they might soon feel the wrath of the Mama Grizzly. Nevermind that Sarah Palin is their Fox News co-worker and a likely contender for the ...

Senator Rockefeller Wants FCC To &#39;End&#39; Fox <b>News</b>, MSNBC

During a committee meeting on Wednesday about television retransmission consent, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) veered away from his prepared remarks to take aim at both Fox News and MSNBC: More than just retransmission consent ails our ...

bench craft company scam

bench craft company scam

benchcraft company scam

Former <b>News</b> Corp. Exec Peter Chernin Enters Yahoo Scenarios | Kara <b>...</b>

Things have certainly quieted down in the swirl of mostly vapor plots about the future of Yahoo, although the pondering, machinating and such on the parts of a variety of players have most certainly continued. And that includes the ...

Sarah Palin on Fox <b>News</b> Watch | Palin Attacked On Fox <b>News</b> | Video <b>...</b>

The Fox News Watch crew better learn to watch when the camera is rolling from now on, because they might soon feel the wrath of the Mama Grizzly. Nevermind that Sarah Palin is their Fox News co-worker and a likely contender for the ...

Senator Rockefeller Wants FCC To &#39;End&#39; Fox <b>News</b>, MSNBC

During a committee meeting on Wednesday about television retransmission consent, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) veered away from his prepared remarks to take aim at both Fox News and MSNBC: More than just retransmission consent ails our ...

benchcraft company scam

Election week is done. It's time to get back to the business of finding real solutions for our nation's economic recovery. As this week ends it is clear that the appetite for federal stimuli is beginning its ebb tide. We see the Federal Reserve playing the risky cards of quantitative easing trying yet again to spark an economic recovery against the odds of a main street economy still mired in the collateral damage of central government's past grand visions.

Don't get me wrong. I actually agree that Fed needs to be doing what it is. We need to find a sustainable balance for our economy and it's a data intensive compass that can only be seen with clarity from the offices occupied by people like Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair. What I do worry about though is that these central solutions too often take from the small and give to the big because the simplifying assumptions used by the economists and statisticians that support the process aren't capable of seeing the one-by-one trench warfare fights being fought by small businesses and individuals. It's an inherent policy formulation weakness of the academic brain trust behind our system that may be costing ordinary people more pain than necessary. But these ordinary Americans are there. We know this because they voted on Tuesday.

Fortunately, the United States is a big country and Washington D.C. isn't the only place exploring ways to find economic recovery formulae. Across the country, cities and states are beginning to chart independent paths to creating their own "islands of recovery". The City of Los Angeles' proposed Responsible Banking Ordinance continues to move through the committee process improving bit-by-bit into what I believe is an important emerging economic policy counterweight to ensure that the "small to big" tendencies of central solutions do not take us astray yet again.

The tale of the tape is something I believe worth sharing with the readers of the Huffington Post.

On October 26th, there was a public hearing by the L.A. City Jobs Committee chaired by Councilman Richard Alarcon on item CF 09-0234, Responsible Banking. The measure was approved with a number of questions to be investigated and reported to a hearing of the L.A. City Budget and Finance Committee to take place on Monday, November 8th. The questions aired by Councilman Bernard Parks focused on two areas. He asked for more information to determine if the cost and design of the process for implementation by the City was indeed workable. He also asked for clarification about how the differences between community banks, large complex banks and the city's debt underwriters would be recognized within the final ordinance.

Mr. Park's questions tell me that the L.A. process is indeed making progress because these are no longer questions about whether this a good thing for the economic interests of the City but rather how well is the plan risk managed. The interests behind the initiative become more positive as banks, large and small, begin to recognize that there is opportunity to be had here. The carrot being offered by the City of L.A is preference to win lucrative contracts that the City will be issuing anyway if evidence can be presented by the bidders that they are placing the interests of the region higher up the business priority list than their competition. It's subtle and far reaching in its potential to encourage money to circulate locally longer.

So now to ponder details,

As I reviewed the current version of the ordinance draft, it was clear the that City of Los Angeles had specified a data collection and reporting request that seeks to get banks to translate the nature of their business activities into measurement language that city governments can understand. The policy question is actually spot on but I'm also pretty sure that asking a bank to deliver the answer on a silver platter to the city first time out is a bit of a stretch. I think there's a better way to make it work for everyone and bring the cost/risk of the process well into good comfort.

The path to success here is to recognize two things. The first is that banks know how to report data to their regulators. They actually track all the information the city wants to know. Once a year they even have to report data to the granularity of branch-by-branch information to the FDIC. The other thing that's clear from the city draft is that municipal governments analyze their quality of service based on census tracts because that's how voters are bucketed. The trick in getting one system to talk to the other is to leverage by translating between the two universes via the zip codes of the U.S. postal service.

Asking the banks to do all the work is a lot of work. But if the City of Los Angeles were to re-design the ordinance implementation process to be a two step process where the banks report data in branches with identification of which zip codes are affected by that branch and there was a post- process by the City to morph the submittals into census tract visibility I think this would actually work reasonably well. City employees and/or other specialty vendors are more knowledgeable about the second step of the transformation than any bank will ever be. And there's a reason for that. Bankers, being lenders, have been discouraged from doing the second step for a long time because the technology that does so equates to gathering the data to do "red lining". So it's actually a better plan for the City of L.A. to deliberately separate these two steps from each other in its ordinance design.

My point here is that by taking a step back and recognizing where natural divisions of skill can be used to complement each other what seems onerous as an all-in-one data request can quickly become very doable.

This gets us to Mr. Park's second inquiry about larger out of area institutions and debt underwriters seeking to do business with the City. To that my observation is that the City of Los Angeles needs to set up a fair playing field for everyone. It's my read that by combining the suggestion above for banks with local branches with the tenets of the current ordinance draft language requesting distilled data into zip codes there's plenty of wiggle room for presentation of evidence of local involvement by these larger institutions, even those that do not have physical branches in the region. Complex transforms of data to support reporting requests are well within the capabilities of the IT departments of these larger businesses. Bearing in mind that these are also the banks that will go after the largest contracts with the City there's plenty of incentive for them to get their systems to produce the reports that will give them an advantage over competing bidders.

And in the long run I'm not just talking about competing just for L.A.'s business. There's a far larger universe of municipal and state government opportunities out there and I'll remind the readers of the Huffington post to look back at the history of my blogs for the one reporting on Bill Lockyer's inquiry earlier this year to the largest municipal bond underwriters.

I mean does anyone really think that the rest of America's League of Cities isn't watching how this plays out? Or that incoming California Governor Jerry Brown, the former Mayor of Oakland, doesn't already know that Los Angeles, San Jose and other cities in California are actively exploring how to affect the future of the State's economy using local strategies? Or that Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair and Barack Obama won't read about this?

Keep going L.A. La-La Land may yet become the next shining star of economic recovery innovation.

“Not to the public, they can’t. They can be lent among banks on the fed funds market, but I doubt that’s what you mean.”

copied from below…

When someone makes X product for $1 less in production, then it is going to sell for $5+ less at retail.

The producer will sell more units and make profits, the retailer will sell more units and make higher profits even if they make a smaller margin per product, and millions of people will save $5+ a piece.

AND a bunch of people who before would not have bought the thing, now buy it… they choose to not buy another older thing they value less.

And that company making the older thing is suddenly vulnerable.

HOW those savings make it to the new smaller guy who’s now innovating to go after the older dying product – is IMPOSSIBLE to track. This is the knowledge problem.

But somehow he does get it… and the cycle begins again.

The somehow works like this: in the aggregate those consumers all have an extra $5 in their bank, there is now “more money to lend” more money chasing returns, which gives entrepreneurs better risk return on money borrowed, which brings more entrepreneurs to the game, which crowds out the money to borrow, which raises the cost of money.

And that’s really my point… there is actually an OPTIMAL number of new things coming to market too few and not enough progress happens, too many and not enough progress happens.

Thats IMPOSSIBLE to predict accurately because productivity gains come at the oddest times.

Here’s an example from my past: I know the guys who started Kazaa (and then Skype) … in 2001 we were coming out of a time when a couple BILLION dollars had been poured into Hollywood online content plays + Napster. During that time broadband adoption was slow going. After the entire thing crashed, and there was nothing online for broadband EXCEPT Kazaa/Morpheus stuff… and broadband went ape shit, adoption grew off the hook. Kazaa grew broadband adoption hand over fist, the telecoms and (their union pulling wires) made a killing.

Human Attention was focused – even on a highly questionable product – one that absolutely only gets better when new nodes enter the picture.

And ten years later, artists are richer, ticket sales have gone through the roof, because the cost of being a “fan” went to $0.

Figuring out after the fact WTF HAPPENED?!?! well, that’s doable – and while it was happening, I sat there and watched it, so I might have been able to do a play by play…

BUT TO ACTUALLY predict the exact when, the mechanisms and variables, and then then to try and architect it up front – like a bunch of silly half-wit liberal central planners think is doable. OR chattering about Aggregate Demand and Unused Capacity and thinking it makes you smart is just fucking stupid.

The lines go up, the lines go down and NO ONE is very good at predicting them.

But I can say for sure… printing money interferes with natural process of capital formation, ie savings which is fundamental to progress. And “extra money” doesn’t do anything except reduce the god-given-obligation to make things get cheaper.

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Former <b>News</b> Corp. Exec Peter Chernin Enters Yahoo Scenarios | Kara <b>...</b>

Things have certainly quieted down in the swirl of mostly vapor plots about the future of Yahoo, although the pondering, machinating and such on the parts of a variety of players have most certainly continued. And that includes the ...

Sarah Palin on Fox <b>News</b> Watch | Palin Attacked On Fox <b>News</b> | Video <b>...</b>

The Fox News Watch crew better learn to watch when the camera is rolling from now on, because they might soon feel the wrath of the Mama Grizzly. Nevermind that Sarah Palin is their Fox News co-worker and a likely contender for the ...

Senator Rockefeller Wants FCC To &#39;End&#39; Fox <b>News</b>, MSNBC

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Former <b>News</b> Corp. Exec Peter Chernin Enters Yahoo Scenarios | Kara <b>...</b>

Things have certainly quieted down in the swirl of mostly vapor plots about the future of Yahoo, although the pondering, machinating and such on the parts of a variety of players have most certainly continued. And that includes the ...

Sarah Palin on Fox <b>News</b> Watch | Palin Attacked On Fox <b>News</b> | Video <b>...</b>

The Fox News Watch crew better learn to watch when the camera is rolling from now on, because they might soon feel the wrath of the Mama Grizzly. Nevermind that Sarah Palin is their Fox News co-worker and a likely contender for the ...

Senator Rockefeller Wants FCC To &#39;End&#39; Fox <b>News</b>, MSNBC

During a committee meeting on Wednesday about television retransmission consent, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) veered away from his prepared remarks to take aim at both Fox News and MSNBC: More than just retransmission consent ails our ...

bench craft company scam

Former <b>News</b> Corp. Exec Peter Chernin Enters Yahoo Scenarios | Kara <b>...</b>

Things have certainly quieted down in the swirl of mostly vapor plots about the future of Yahoo, although the pondering, machinating and such on the parts of a variety of players have most certainly continued. And that includes the ...

Sarah Palin on Fox <b>News</b> Watch | Palin Attacked On Fox <b>News</b> | Video <b>...</b>

The Fox News Watch crew better learn to watch when the camera is rolling from now on, because they might soon feel the wrath of the Mama Grizzly. Nevermind that Sarah Palin is their Fox News co-worker and a likely contender for the ...

Senator Rockefeller Wants FCC To &#39;End&#39; Fox <b>News</b>, MSNBC

During a committee meeting on Wednesday about television retransmission consent, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) veered away from his prepared remarks to take aim at both Fox News and MSNBC: More than just retransmission consent ails our ...

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