As a technology person, I see people making the same mistakes over and over again. You are starting a small business? So why are you trusting your business’ lifeblood to big, centralized technologies and big, centralized corporations?

There is a local swap meet slash farmer’s market that meets in town every week or two. As I was walking past getting my exercise, I noticed their advertising banner had a web address. Their site is hosted on Microsoft’s small business hosting service. Now, let me say right now, the issue is not that it is Microsoft. I would have serious doubts about a small business that was hosted exclusively on Google’s or Amazon’s “cloud” offerings also.

In essence, a small business is like a foreign body to large, out-of-area corporations (LOOACs), much like a bacterium or a protozoan would be to your body. In both cases, the larger entity has little incentive to prioritize activities which preserve and strengthen the individual smaller entity, although it may sometimes be incentivized by smaller entities collectively. It isn’t that your business threatens theirs. It is that their business can only survive by systemizing its decisions and activities, and therefore, it may at any time turn on and destroy your business for no particular reason.

Webmink (Simon Phipps) points out that crocodiles do not eat you because it is personal. They eat you because that is their nature. He refers to corporations as “reptiles” as a reminder that they, like crocodiles, are simply following their nature when they turn on you and tear you to shreds. I think the reptiles analogy fits perfectly with this post by the CEO of Hatchlings.

Imagine being the CEO of a small company that hooks its wagon to Apple’s iDevices, then finds that a policy change threatens the business’s viability.

Nope. I really do still like Google (even though I distrust them because of their new anti-privacy policies, they have and are doing some wonderful things for the open web and for open technologies), but I will not hitch my wagon to bigG, whether that is the Android platform or their various advertising networks. I have no problem working with them for our mutual benefit, but they must never be such a powerful part of my enterprise’s revenue stream that they can close it essentially overnight.

It is not in your business’s long term interest to allow a large corporation to control its revenue stream. It may be beneficial today, but it may not always be so.

The Inland Empire gained 17,800 jobs in the first two months of this year compared to the same period in 2011, according to keynote speaker John Husing, a chief economist at the Inland Empire Economic Partnership. And that happened without additional construction jobs, which drove the regional economy during the housing bubble.

…

Husing said the predominance of blue collar jobs in the High Desert reflect demographics in the area.

“It’s not because we wanted to be that way, it is determined by who we are in terms of our educational levels,” Husing said. “This dictates what kind of companies can be in the area.”

More than half the High Desert adults have never taken a college course, according to Husing, compared to Orange County’s 33 percent.

After trying to go through the “proper channels” for almost a year now it’s time to share this story of how Google screwed over our startup with the world.

Hatchlings is the world’s largest Easter Egg hunt. We have over 3.5 million users spanning all 50 states and almost every country on Earth. We have been in operation for over 4 years and are launching our new version, Hatchlings 2, this spring.

In a nutshell: Google bid on, displayed, and then failed to pay for over $40,000 of advertising space on Hatchlings. They have since stonewalled us for almost a year, locking us out of our accounts, screening our phone calls, ignoring our emails, and making it a living hell to figure out what exactly went wrong.

What you can do to help: please share, tweet, and reblog this post. Help us get the word out so that others don’t fall into this same trap. N3TM0uSe

Maybe it is because 2012 is an election year. Or maybe it is just people hoping that the economic collapse will motivate some elected officials (usually politicians who are members of party X or Y) to finally do their jobs. All I know is that a lot of people seem to think that this candidate or that candidate is going to make things better. N3TM0uSe

Look. That is not going to happen. Neither Democrats nor Republicans will ever do anything to benefit the common people except by accident. None of the rhetoric about "hope and change" or "protecting America's families" will amount to anything when their campaign contributors want something else.

Do not tell me that the candidate for one party is "the black messiah", either. Just because one candidate is (partially) of a particular ancestry does not mean that others of that ancestry must or even should vote for him. Particularly, a black man who supports the extermination of his fellow blacks under the guise of "a woman's choice" to abort her preborn child, since any intelligent black person realizes that he or she is part of the target for groups like Planned Parenthood. It is just another example of pandering to special interests when their interests go against those of the people who voted for you.

No, instead, we must stop relying upon politicians and bureaucrats and take the initiative to do whatever is necessary to effectively take care of our own needs, and those of our families, relatives, neighbors, and communities. Instead of spending all of our time in the imaginary world of Facebook and video games, we must focus on the nasty here and now, producing products and services that earn income, and spending time actually supervising, teaching, disciplining, and training our offspring for a future in which nothing is given to them.

Trusting in politicians and relying upon them to take care of your needs is a fool's game. Rely upon them to help with health care, and we get a welfare system for the very insurance companies at the center of the health care crisis. Trust politicians for a more fair tax system and we get both higher rates and more deductions, instead of a flat or semi-flat system, which would be fairest.

We will never have this as long as we have our present pay-for-attention system. And yet, the very politicians who must act to change the system get the most benefit from it (next to the for-profit and non-profit corporations who pay them). Rather, the kind of change that our country needs must come from you and I acting locally to improve our families and communities completely outside the embrace of government. Government is not the enemy, it is just so tightly enmeshed with corporations (for-profit and non-profit) and extremist pressure groups on the left and the right that it cannot be an effective ally right now.

You and I must do what we can for our own families and communities. For example, you should not spend everything you earn on present consumption, but instead, use it to help make the future better. This also means that you and I need to wean ourselves off of the credit-card economy, the idea that we enjoy goods and services now and then pay them off over time in the future. That is stealing. You are stealing from the future in order to live more luxuriously today. Instead, try to use part of your present income to make life better five or ten years down the line.

That’s not to say that credit cards are bad, or that you should never purchase anything on credit. However, you should so scrutinize credit purchases that only a few things get past your examination. If you can take the bus for a couple of years and save up $3000 – $5000 or more, you can get better rates on whatever part you do borrow in the process of purchasing a car. Likewise, if you can stay in a lower-cost rental for several years and put the difference aside, you can save up a down payment to buy a home.

If you substitute home-cooked food for eating out, you can not only have a healthier body, but also a healthier wallet. If you walk around the block and work in your yard, you can skip the monthly gym charges, while still staying fit. And if you visit your local library each week, you may be able to skip that always-increasing cable bill.

Politicians, being in the arms of the banks, insurance companies, and other corporations, including non-profits, will not generally encourage you to live frugally, but that is a must.

If the ten largest banks in the country were to collapse tomorrow, would you have any way to feed your family during the ensuing months of chaos? If some catastrophe closed the bridges into your city, could you and your neighbors keep food, water, and utilities flowing? If the answer is No, you need to sit down with your family members and your neighbors and start thinking about how to make your lives more resilient against unexpected hardships. But most of all, you need to stop looking to Washington DC or to a state capital like Sacramento or Albany and start doing what you must do to take care of yourself, your family, your relatives, and your neighbors.

What are you waiting for? Get started!

NOTE: I favor a semi-flat tax system for personal taxes: The first $20,000 from all sources is tax-free. After that, 25% of everything (no matter what the source) goes to federal income tax, up to $250,000 in income. After that point, $35% of everything goes to federal income tax. This system could only work if there are absolutely no tax deductions or tax credits. This would also require that all businesses, including sole proprietorships and partnerships should have separate income reporting and taxation from the people who own and run them, because businesses will always require deductions. I would like to remove deductions for paying interest. I would also strictly lock depletion and depreciation to the expected lifespan of the asset. No more accellerated depreciation schedules.

The one thing I would add for publicly-traded corporations is to require them to pay a special 50% “gift tax” and note this prominently in their financial statements for all compensation that exceeds 10X the compensation given to their lowest-paid employee. In other words, if the CxO of XYZ corp makes more than 10X what the lowest-paid employee of XYZ corp makes, XYZ corp should pay a special tax (on top of any other taxes it pays) for a “gift of company funds” … also its shareholders should pay an equal amount gift tax proportioned among all shares.

This is an important distinction, because many companies are using college degrees the way they used to use high school diplomas: as an additional hurdle to cull the applicant pool of otherwise-qualified candidates. In such a situation, a college-educated person could find that his / her investment becomes superfluous when a skilled person who is not college-educated is shown to perform at least as well as the college graduate. The college graduate is also placed at a disadvantage by the huge debt that many acquire on their way to working for that big blue discount store or its big red competitor.

When a college graduate has student loan payments of hundreds of dollars per month, but is being paid less than $10 per hour, he or she is going to have problems paying for a vehicle, rent, utilities, and food. This leads, then, to bad credit ratings, which leads to an inability to obtain better-paying employment.

We know that the employment model as we currently know it is relatively new. It primarily came about during the industrial revolution. Suddenly, we had these massive companies that sought to remove independence from their employees, sometimes going to the extent of requiring employees to live in “company towns” and to do business with “company stores” in order to ensure this. This was so that they could keep people working until they were too tired to engage in outside ventures or obtain employment with competitors, and especially to prevent unions from organizing employees and forcing companies to pay better, improve the safety of their workplaces, and limit work hours. It was also a way to fight unions’ attempts to end child labor, children being easily-controllable and low-priced laborers who did not know enough to recognize dangerous conditions.

People say that “not everyone should be an entrepreneur,” but that is not true. Whether you start and run your own business or you are an employee for someone else’s business, you are a risk-taker, which is the literal meaning of entrepreneur. If you work for someone else’s business, you are taking the risk that the company will suddenly close, lay you off, or move your position overseas. You are taking the risk that the company will not pay your for your work, or that it will not pay you when you expect the pay to arrive. You are taking the risk that the company will unilaterally change the terms of employment, as when Circuit City laid off its best (highest-paid) in-store staff and forced them to reapply for their jobs at substantially lower pay. As such, the only way to handle your employment is to consider any and every employment to be a contracted position. Always be your own advocate, and always be looking both inside and outside the organization for your next opportunity.

Entrepreneurship, not in the sense of the high-profile, growth-oriented, self-absorbed jerks that get all the press, but in the sense of owner-managed business enterprises, is key to helping get us past the mess of a job market that currently exists. It, along with buy-local-first policies, will give our next generation to ability to navigate through the mess we are leaving them with.

Now, there are some reasons why I might hire a college graduate ahead of a high school graduate. One of them is the idea that completing college takes some self-discipline and focus, which the candidate might then apply to the tasks of the job. The other reason is that college, because it emphasizes broadening one’s horizons, will cause the graduate to be able to offer different perspectives, to ask questions and challenge assumptions, and in that way to help managers do a better job of formulating objectives, goals, strategies, tactics, and tasks. However, in most businesses, questioning management’s decisions is a quick way to get fired. In such an environment, I would favor someone with a high school diploma, possibly with additional related vocational training and experience.

In real life, most jobs do not need what a college degree adds. This is why there are so many college graduates working in menial service jobs, where they are clearly “overqualified” for the job. As you grow up, you have to work somewhere, and if you can’t obtain work in a field that requires your education, you have to accept what you can obtain.

It is also common for managers to prefer “experience” to education, believing that previous experience frees their companies from having to train someone to do the job. Nothing is further from the truth. In reality, even if someone did the exact same job for a competitor, they’ll still need on-the-job training. Often, that training is even longer than it is for someone who has never worked in the field, because the experienced person must first unlearn much of what he/she learned with the prior employer(s) before learning what and how things get done in the present employer. Even in fields such as quick-serve restaurants (“fast food”), this is true. (You might not know it, but it takes up to 90 days before a new fast food employee is fully productive. It can be double that if the new employee comes from a competitor with the differences in processes, procedures and policies.)

All in all, our current teens and young adults face a very challenging job environment. If we continue to tell them the same lies we were told (go to college and get a corporate job), we will cripple their economic futures. Yes, many should go to college, but college is not job-training, and never was. Therefore, if the debt level is going to be too much, they might be better off getting a job and starting a business on the side, possibly while working their ways through college. Certainly, they must be told that no bank and no corporation is going to take care of your needs, so you have to learn to do it yourself.