Observe Business

Proof that politicians are ineffective everywhere: The EU agrees to police itself better. This is after the Greek debacle.

I’d like to point out that I am not taking a side on this issue.

I am restricting myself to the decision of how Israel handled the aid flotilla situation.

Israel treated the aid flotilla as a military exercise instead of a PR action.

The entire situation was ready for the news media. You can just see the headlines: “Unarmed, peace-loving activists who are trying to help are instead attacked and killed”.

Israel should not have boarded the ships  that made up the aid flotilla, especially with armed soldiers. Given the amount of animosity towards the Israeli military, it is highly unlikely they would receive a cordial reception. I mean,  did they think the activists would just sit and welcome them? Offer them some biscuits and hummus maybe?

If you send armed soldiers on board a ship full of disgrunted, angry, passionate people, you have to prepared for the eventuality of a firefight, one that could get very messy.

Here is what they should have done, if they did not want the ships to reach Gaza:

1) Israel should have disabled the propellers of the ships in the aid flotilla, and let them just drift around in the Mediterranean. If the people on the ships wanted to get off, they would have to board a ship provided by the Israelis-which would take them back to Cyprus. Israel should have insisted on a neutral party towing the ships back to a non-Israeli port.

2) If there was a need to an assert control, they should have tried nonlethal means. Israel should have fired hundreds of tear-gas shells at the ships, sickening those onboard until they voluntarily agreed to board a ship provided by Israel-to take them back to Cyprus.

3) Israel said they would take the aid supplies brought on the ships to Gaza. This is a miscalculation because it allows the activists to claim that they succeeded despite the Israeli action. Israel should have said that the ships in the flotilla, all of which are now disabled, would be left to drift unless the ship owners made arrangements to have the ships towed back to a neutral port. The aid supplies would stay on the ships.

The point is that Israel should have thought of this as PR exercise, not a military exercise.

Israel handed the activists a tailor-made, read for TV PR victory. All of the activists and soldiers who were killed – a tragedy, because none of these people needed to die in order for Israel to successfully accomplish an interdiction.

So, here we have someone who ostensibly was able to get student loans to STUDY. And they can’t even figure out how to find out, with a few Google searches, what to do?

I also find it completely unbelievable that any collection agency would make an actual threat like that. Most of them just don’t care…they try, they fail, they write you off, and move on.

Student loans are a multibillion dollar business subsidized by the taxpayers of the United States. And like most government run programs, they rate little more than a C-. In this case, they rate an F. This person should never have received a student loan.

I have been laid off before. I didn’t go crying to my mamma afterwards. I accepted it as a fact of life, and moved on.

But I am very annoyed by the constant whining of the car dealers who are losing their precious franchises. I looked at the list for Los Angeles, and it is mostly dealers that I have never heard of, in locations that no one buys cars anymore. These guys should have moved on long time ago, turned their real estate in 99cent stores, anything other than selling junky American cars.

Now comes CNN and does a little cry-me-a-river-piece on a Chrysler dealership, “Claxton Chrysler Jeep Dodge” closing in a small town called Claxton, GA. Every bit about this piece is intended to elicit little sobs and sniffles from the ith-tho-thad crowd.  I feel that CNN has lost any pretense of substantive journalism with this piece. Its writer, Jim Kavanagh, should be forced to turn in his keyboard.

The piece writes about all these locals who supposedly love the dealership. Now, considering that overall, auto dealerships are ranked lower than dentists in terms of customer experience, I pulled up the record of this Dealership with the local BBB.

To no surprise, the BBB rated this dealership an “F”.

Now let me show you some choice quotes from this article, with my comments. Quotes in italics, my comments below the quotes.

“It was like standing out in the road and having a bus run over the top of us,” he said.

Wrong. You most likely knew it was coming, based on your customer feedback, your revenues, etc. If you didn’t, then you deseve the shutdown even more.

“We all know each other, we see each other every day. I spend more time with this group here than I do with my own family.”

That’s a sad reflection on your personal priorities in life.

Take Gary Sapp, for example. The military veteran, wounded in Vietnam, stopped in Saturday, as he does just about every day, to say hello and maybe talk about cars a little bit. He said he might come back Monday and make a deal, just as he’s done there three times in the past 10 years. But it’s not really about the cars and pickup trucks. “These are good folks here,” Sapp said.

No, you just have way too much time on your hands, Mr. Sapp.

“How the hell they gon’ sell to those people in small towns?” he said. “They’re a different breed. They’re not gonna go no damn hundred miles to buy a car.”

They won’t have to, there are three other dealers within 30 miles. Just like Wal-Mart.

“It’s just a cryin’ damn shame, is what it is,” he said.

No, it’s a necessary change that’s been a long time coming.

They say reality is stranger than movies.

Globalization has gone wrong, very wrong if a Bangladeshi man has to travel 6000 miles to sells tacos on the streets of Mexico City.

Add to that the fact that this man is sure to be a Muslim-and therefore eats no pork. And he got swine flu?

Or perhaps it is Mexico’s work visa program that has gone wrong?

A few days ago the governor of Texas made some ham-headed statement about seceding from the USA. Most people asked him to not let the door hit him in the posterior on the way out. Most of the world wants to come to America, STILL, and he wants to leave. Who does he think will want to move to his little redneck rump state if it is not part of America?

Anyway, this blog is about business, not emotion, so here we go with the business angle.

I was racking my brain thinking of some innovations to come out of Texas, and I am sure there are some, but other than the Baylor University medical complex, and NASA in Houston, I find it hard to think of anything.

This does not include Texas’s famous steakhouses and their BBQ, both of which are excellent.

Dell is near Austin, but it has never really innovated anything, and is now slowly fading into irrelevance. All it did was ride the boom for about 15 years.

There’s the SXSW festival, but that isn’t innovation.

Southwest is in Texas, and they did innovate a new business model, but they did that back in the 70’s and haven’t changed their secret sauce since then. Jetblue and Virgin America and Spirit and others are making Southwest look more and more like a legacy airline.

The energy companies are concentrated in TX, but try getting them to get off their petroleum crack pipe…it just ain’t happening.

Possibly the only good things in Texas are the rent contol laws (there are none, resulting in plentiful cheap housing) and zoning laws (there are none, resulting in plentiful and cheap housing and industrial).

Mercifully, this state senator in Texas put me out of my misery by publishing this list of Texas ‘firsts’:

1) 49th in teacher pay

2) 1st in the percentage of people over 25 without a high school diploma
3) 41st in high school graduation rate
4) 46th in SAT scores
5) 1st in percentage of uninsured children
6) 1st in percentage of population uninsured
7) 1st in percentage of non-elderly uninsured
3rd in percentage of people living below the poverty level
9) 49th in average Women Infant and Children benefit payments
10) 1st in teenage birth rate
11) 50th in average credit scores for loan applicants
12) 1st in air pollution emissions
13) 1st in volume of volatile organic compounds released into the air
14) 1st in amount of toxic chemicals released into water
15) 1st in amount of recognized cancer-causing carcinogens released into air
16) 1st in amount of carbon dioxide emissions
17) 50th in homeowners’ insurance affordability
18) 50th in percentage of voting age population that votes
19) 1st in annual number of executions

http://shapleigh.org/system/news_article/document/882/Texas_on_the_Brink_2007_Final.pdf

I am convinced that the government is incompetent. Yes, I know, some parts of the government work well, and the US is pretty well governed as a whole, when compared with the rest of the world (except for Switzerland and Singapore).

But it is little nitwit things like this that drive me up a wall.

Los Angeles is the country’s second largest city, and Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the entire USA, with a population that tops 10 million.

All property owners must pay tax twice a year, on Dec 10 and on Apr 10. So what do most taxpayers do on April 8 and April 9? They go to the website to figure out how much tax they have to pay.

And what happens to the website? That’s right, it goes down.

Stuff like this makes my usual bogeymen the FTC,the SEC and the FAA look competent.