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Fractals of Changenothing great has ever been accomplished without irrational exuberance
What Vermont Employers Are Telling Us (about the need for natural gas beyond the pipeline)Mon, 21 May 2012 03:35:40 PDT
"Every day we wait costs us $7,000!" the CEO emailed to my new company, NG Advantage. Turns out that trucking compressed natural gas (CNG) to his factory and using it to replace dirty #6 oil will reduce his fuel costs by almost half – more than two million dollars a year. His company spends as much on fuel as it...
The first question in choosing an application – in the cloud, on the desktop, or on server – is "will this choice affect our ability to serve customers?" If the answer is no - as it is with bookkeeping for us at NG Advantage LLC, then you want to go for a safe choice that'll get the job done and...
Several decades and companies ago Solutions Inc. was on the 4th floor of Vermont National Bank building in Montpelier. We'd grown so we needed a switchboard that the receptionist (remember receptionists?) could use to route calls to support, sales, spouses who needed to pick up the kids, or whomever. The device we needed cost – I think - $6000 which...
Way back in 1997, when I decided to start a new business, I went out and bought QuickBooks for bookkeeping and a server to run it on. How very twentieth century. Servers are the bane of new companies. They crash; they don't get backed up when they should; and – perhaps most important – they are only in one place...
Retirement's over; I've been working on a new business. That's why I haven't been blogging for a while; startups are all-consuming. NG Advantage LLC delivers natural gas "beyond the pipeline." Starting in early 2013 we'll truck compressed natural gas (CNG) from a compressor site we plan to build in Milton, Vermont to commercial users within a two and a half...
My brother, Lee Evslin M.D., who is a pediatrician and who runs the Makai Ola Clinic on Kauai, wrote the email below in response to my post Medicare – The Promise That Can't Be Kept. He has a very different (and more qualified) point of views; so I asked if I could run this as a guest post. Of course,...
The promise was simple: once you reach 65, Medicare will assure that your medical costs don't become a catastrophic burden to you or children who might feel obliged to care for you. Since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill in 1965 and gave exPresident Harry Truman the first enrollment card, the definition of "catastrophic burden" has been lowered many...
Originally House bill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Senate bill PIPA (Protect IP Act) were bipartisan bad policy. The Senate version was reported unanimously from The Judiciary Committee and was supported not only by Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) but also by the Senior Republican on the committee, Orrin Hatch (R-UT), These bills, written largely by Hollywood lobbyists, would have...
President Obama recognized the importance of natural gas and the new, disruptive technologies which have made at least 100 years of this fuel available to us; that's the good news from the State of the Union Address. The bad news is that the President appears to have learned a lot of wrong lessons about the proper role of government in...
The President's own National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform recommended a much flatter tax structure and elimination of most tax deductions and credits in their draft report. The President – and almost everyone else – ignored their recommendation. Ex-candidate Herman Cain made a 9-9-9 flat tax almost famous before he sunk from view. Ron Paul advocates a very flat...
Ostensibly this is a warning to set our parental controls – grandparental in our case. Looks to my jaundiced eye like a pitch for the pay-per-view porn channels in case we didn't realize "changes have been made."
If you're an Amazon Prime member and if you own a Kindle, you can borrow books "free" – one book per month, anyway. You do this through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. You can go to the Library from your Kindle Fire directly from the Fire bookstore; if you have an older Kindle, you go to the Kindle Store and...
We need government and we need banks; but we don't need government to be as big as it's grown and we don't need banks which are too big to fail. When sectors like government or banking grow out of proportion to the benefits they bring, the economy as a whole suffers from a misallocation of resources. So headlines like these...
If either House bill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or Senate bill PIPA (Protect IP Act) or something in between passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the President, Internet censorship, unreachable websites, and forbidden searches will be the law of this land – just as in China. I blogged last week about the dangers these bills pose...
Jon Hunstman: Wall Street’s Big Banks Are the Real Threat to Our EconomySun, 08 Jan 2012 19:48:39 PST
Coddling big banks has been a bipartisan effort. TARP passed in the Bush administration, and President Obama appointed TARP architect Tim Geithner as his Treasury Secretary and reappointed Fed Chairman Ben "bailout" Bernanke. Mitt Romney's background is in the financial industry and he thinks the bailout was necessary; look for more bank bailing should he become President. Jon Huntsman has...
