As most of you that are reading this we were brought up with Pledging Elegance to the flag every morning in school. I don't know, if it still assists? For some of us it probably meant more than others. I was the last born into a family of 6 children. My family at emigrated from the beautiful Inlands of Azores, Portugal and I was born here in the States. When I was a youngster and my father would introduce me to someone, he would say this is my son Henry he is my youngest and he is an America Born and that meant something to him because he loved this country. Not, that it was more beautiful than his but because of it's ideas. Portugal at the time was ran with a dictator. So when I Pledged Elegance to the Flag it had allot of meaning. One Nation Under God with Freedom and Justice For All.
I don't see it today and the little that is left is slipping away right a front of our eyes. I see allot of talk but no one ever gets close to the core of the real problems in our country. We are control by Fear (Hitlers best weapon of control) and Cooperate Monies. I believe if surveyed 90 percent of us that don't work for Big Pharm will say Pharmaceutical Commercial are ridiculous, we have doctors that go to school to learn what drugs to prescribe, why are they spending billions of they customer's dollars advertising to people that can't prescribe drugs to themselves. They do it to control the media, They are the main principles of all the major media in our country and in doing so they are in control of our country where not even the President of The United State listens very carefully when they talk, or we may have a Health Bill with their approval which is the biggest problem with our Health System. Now, if we really would to help our country lets start at he root of the problem and take our country back. We are boomers we were leaders and warriors but today we are talkers. By the way I had A.D.D.H.D. as a child and I am glad Big Pharm wasn't in control back then because I would of drugged.
Dee Miller
Hope, Idaho
2/04/10
1:02 PM
There are two dominant themes in the majority of the comments here; they are (1) the stifling of innovation to meet the many challenges facing us today due to governmental bureaucratic obstacles in place for the benefit of large business to discourage competition from small business and (2) the crippling costs of doing business for entrepreneurial start-ups. At the same time, it is publicly acknowledged by Congress and the President that small business is being looked to as the golden goose that can lay the golden egg of our economic recovery. It follows than that the entrepreneurs should unite to lobby (by their shear number; not money) the Congress and President to do what they need to do to create the environment that will encourage, or at least allow without these unreasonable obstacles, entrepreneurs to accomplish our recovery as they are best suited to do. I know there are many associations and alliances you may already belong to. If each of you would contact any of the organizations you belong to and direct their leaders to join together in order to unify your voices, it would be a lot easier and less time consuming than to each write your congressional delegations - which may or may not get read - but a consortium of business peoples' association very publicly demanding that Congress address and meaningfully correct these important defects could not be ignored. Since the large businesses and industry organizations write their own legislation for Congress to submit as bills, it would be good to submit what you require with specificity as well. If you leave it to them, they won't give you what you want, if they ever would get around to it. A survey of members' priorities would be followed by a vote to sort out the highest priority amongst them and would be the way to find a starting point. Determine by democratic process the top three priorities. Once those are accomplished, take up the next important until the list is worked through.
Brett Barndt
NYC
1/25/10
6:01 PM
Great to see finally people talking about entrepreneurship with a fine toothed comb. Too much simplistic ideological focus on tax rates, and monetary policy and the needs of the mere owners of money as the only important factors of production have crippled our economy and economic prospects for some time.
I am glad to hear someone at least finally talking about the human inputs that alone make possible turning ordinary money, favorable tax rates and interest rates into anything like a new business.
We've also got to get the unfair political advantages bought by entrenched going concerns who block capital formation around innovation that threatens their out of date business models too! This is major in the energy sector now, where unfair advantages distort IRR calculations for alternative energy, biggest one being the military subsidy taxpayers pay to oil and extractors all over the world to ensure their property rights in foreign hostile, but nevertheless cheap, labor countries, as well as transportation through pirate zones.
None of those real costs turn up in any pump price. Leaving them out therefore distorts IRR calc for kilowatt hour comparisons for new energies. These subsidies and low effective corporate income tax rates also explain the super normal economic rents enjoyed by what is basically a monopoly industry of oligopolies, oligarchs, and their attendant military servants, with no real competition in sight (Well done guys? You won this one. But, we're waking up and we're mad!).
That little problem never gets mentioned in these speeches in the Beltway. Surprise surprise. Don't tell me these people don't know the unintended or maybe fully intended consequences of the whole-system that feeds them.
Those consequences totally disadvantage new entrants in every sector of our economy that has now been overly concentrated into too few corporate shrinking brains' hands. IFIF.org, Businessweek, and Newsweek have all within the last year run articles about 10 yrs of market failure for capital to form around new innovations already funded on campuses by Federal basic R&D $$$ for decades.
While toothless anti-trust appointees by last President (and this President hasn't done anything to fix it either)have made a few people rich, they have stifled innovation to create new opportunity for everybody else. These rankings show that in painful detail.
I don't agree about Professors becoming entrepreneurs. They don't know how to run a business, and I've seen too many at important schools I won't mention piss away valuable money, time, and patents when keys were handed over to them. They don't know how to make the right hires, don't have the industry contacts they need to make deals, and little comes of it! The big licensing money for Federal R&D recipient universities has always come from Detroit and the military sector. Not from Professor run start-ups.
Let them and their students create patents, and let real business people build diverse teams that can convert ideas on paper (even patent paper) into products and sell them to paying customers. I agree that hard sciences can create patents, but even by choosing science, they self select the personal skills and attributes they will have for life, which are not the ones needed to build run and market a complete enterprise.
They are rarely sales people, rarely people people and most of their work is never validated by insight or market research about sellable products in the first place. For all but special high tech products bought by fellow geeks on the cool factor, start-up technologies have to go through a time consuming and costly iterative process lead by people with sales and marketing skills more than science. These people skills, listening skills, workplace knowledge, and conceptual skills are what is needed to figure out what exactly is the sellable product those patents can become, and how it is going to be sold into already entrenched markets. Read Amar Bhide "Venturesome Economy" about the many many many skillsets it takes up and down any enterprise to convert science into business. That conversion is the hard part, where there is a shortage of skills with the right chemistry, especially as our high schools and universities seem to be failing to create truly generative creative minds these days, as definitely was the case in the past. That is the athletic part. The elastic brain part. And that is the part where everybody screws up!
This is work most VCs don't even know how to oversee correctly, since the profile of VCs has changed significantly over the last 15 years to be less experienced operators, to more MBAs with just finance training.
And certainly BODs of established companies prove themselves to be disincentivized by Wall Street quarterly earnings seasons for getting involved in any of this kind of work. Read Clayton Christensen about how time and time again experienced executives at expensive companies ignore the signs and never get on the band wagon for new innovations until the shareholders money has whittled down to nothing! And worse for the wage earners involved!
There is so much to learn to make into more common knowledge, and so many myths to bust. But those myths are well protected by incumbents of both industrial and money nature who try desperately to keep newcomers out of the secrets!
As most of you that are reading this we were brought up with Pledging Elegance to the flag every morning in school. I don't know, if it still assists? For some of us it probably meant more than others. I was the last born into a family of 6 children. My family at emigrated from the beautiful Inlands of Azores, Portugal and I was born here in the States. When I was a youngster and my father would introduce me to someone, he would say this is my son Henry he is my youngest and he is an America Born and that meant something to him because he loved this country. Not, that it was more beautiful than his but because of it's ideas. Portugal at the time was ran with a dictator. So when I Pledged Elegance to the Flag it had allot of meaning. One Nation Under God with Freedom and Justice For All.
I don't see it today and the little that is left is slipping away right a front of our eyes. I see allot of talk but no one ever gets close to the core of the real problems in our country. We are control by Fear (Hitlers best weapon of control) and Cooperate Monies. I believe if surveyed 90 percent of us that don't work for Big Pharm will say Pharmaceutical Commercial are ridiculous, we have doctors that go to school to learn what drugs to prescribe, why are they spending billions of they customer's dollars advertising to people that can't prescribe drugs to themselves. They do it to control the media, They are the main principles of all the major media in our country and in doing so they are in control of our country where not even the President of The United State listens very carefully when they talk, or we may have a Health Bill with their approval which is the biggest problem with our Health System. Now, if we really would to help our country lets start at he root of the problem and take our country back. We are boomers we were leaders and warriors but today we are talkers. By the way I had A.D.D.H.D. as a child and I am glad Big Pharm wasn't in control back then because I would of drugged.
There are two dominant themes in the majority of the comments here; they are (1) the stifling of innovation to meet the many challenges facing us today due to governmental bureaucratic obstacles in place for the benefit of large business to discourage competition from small business and (2) the crippling costs of doing business for entrepreneurial start-ups. At the same time, it is publicly acknowledged by Congress and the President that small business is being looked to as the golden goose that can lay the golden egg of our economic recovery. It follows than that the entrepreneurs should unite to lobby (by their shear number; not money) the Congress and President to do what they need to do to create the environment that will encourage, or at least allow without these unreasonable obstacles, entrepreneurs to accomplish our recovery as they are best suited to do. I know there are many associations and alliances you may already belong to. If each of you would contact any of the organizations you belong to and direct their leaders to join together in order to unify your voices, it would be a lot easier and less time consuming than to each write your congressional delegations - which may or may not get read - but a consortium of business peoples' association very publicly demanding that Congress address and meaningfully correct these important defects could not be ignored. Since the large businesses and industry organizations write their own legislation for Congress to submit as bills, it would be good to submit what you require with specificity as well. If you leave it to them, they won't give you what you want, if they ever would get around to it. A survey of members' priorities would be followed by a vote to sort out the highest priority amongst them and would be the way to find a starting point. Determine by democratic process the top three priorities. Once those are accomplished, take up the next important until the list is worked through.
Great to see finally people talking about entrepreneurship with a fine toothed comb. Too much simplistic ideological focus on tax rates, and monetary policy and the needs of the mere owners of money as the only important factors of production have crippled our economy and economic prospects for some time.
I am glad to hear someone at least finally talking about the human inputs that alone make possible turning ordinary money, favorable tax rates and interest rates into anything like a new business.
We've also got to get the unfair political advantages bought by entrenched going concerns who block capital formation around innovation that threatens their out of date business models too! This is major in the energy sector now, where unfair advantages distort IRR calculations for alternative energy, biggest one being the military subsidy taxpayers pay to oil and extractors all over the world to ensure their property rights in foreign hostile, but nevertheless cheap, labor countries, as well as transportation through pirate zones.
None of those real costs turn up in any pump price. Leaving them out therefore distorts IRR calc for kilowatt hour comparisons for new energies. These subsidies and low effective corporate income tax rates also explain the super normal economic rents enjoyed by what is basically a monopoly industry of oligopolies, oligarchs, and their attendant military servants, with no real competition in sight (Well done guys? You won this one. But, we're waking up and we're mad!).
That little problem never gets mentioned in these speeches in the Beltway. Surprise surprise. Don't tell me these people don't know the unintended or maybe fully intended consequences of the whole-system that feeds them.
Those consequences totally disadvantage new entrants in every sector of our economy that has now been overly concentrated into too few corporate shrinking brains' hands. IFIF.org, Businessweek, and Newsweek have all within the last year run articles about 10 yrs of market failure for capital to form around new innovations already funded on campuses by Federal basic R&D $$$ for decades.
While toothless anti-trust appointees by last President (and this President hasn't done anything to fix it either)have made a few people rich, they have stifled innovation to create new opportunity for everybody else. These rankings show that in painful detail.
I don't agree about Professors becoming entrepreneurs. They don't know how to run a business, and I've seen too many at important schools I won't mention piss away valuable money, time, and patents when keys were handed over to them. They don't know how to make the right hires, don't have the industry contacts they need to make deals, and little comes of it! The big licensing money for Federal R&D recipient universities has always come from Detroit and the military sector. Not from Professor run start-ups.
Let them and their students create patents, and let real business people build diverse teams that can convert ideas on paper (even patent paper) into products and sell them to paying customers. I agree that hard sciences can create patents, but even by choosing science, they self select the personal skills and attributes they will have for life, which are not the ones needed to build run and market a complete enterprise.
They are rarely sales people, rarely people people and most of their work is never validated by insight or market research about sellable products in the first place. For all but special high tech products bought by fellow geeks on the cool factor, start-up technologies have to go through a time consuming and costly iterative process lead by people with sales and marketing skills more than science. These people skills, listening skills, workplace knowledge, and conceptual skills are what is needed to figure out what exactly is the sellable product those patents can become, and how it is going to be sold into already entrenched markets. Read Amar Bhide "Venturesome Economy" about the many many many skillsets it takes up and down any enterprise to convert science into business. That conversion is the hard part, where there is a shortage of skills with the right chemistry, especially as our high schools and universities seem to be failing to create truly generative creative minds these days, as definitely was the case in the past. That is the athletic part. The elastic brain part. And that is the part where everybody screws up!
This is work most VCs don't even know how to oversee correctly, since the profile of VCs has changed significantly over the last 15 years to be less experienced operators, to more MBAs with just finance training.
And certainly BODs of established companies prove themselves to be disincentivized by Wall Street quarterly earnings seasons for getting involved in any of this kind of work. Read Clayton Christensen about how time and time again experienced executives at expensive companies ignore the signs and never get on the band wagon for new innovations until the shareholders money has whittled down to nothing! And worse for the wage earners involved!
There is so much to learn to make into more common knowledge, and so many myths to bust. But those myths are well protected by incumbents of both industrial and money nature who try desperately to keep newcomers out of the secrets!
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