Getting What You Pay For

As you might expect, I have several computers for which I am responsible. Counting all of them at our company, my personal machine, my wife's computer and our children's machines, I think there are seventeen total.

One that I have is a Pentium computer that I purchased through a reseller from Dash, a local computer distributor here in Kansas City, back in late 2000. It is still running flawlessly. Even so, given it's advanced age, older software and operating system, and relative lack of giddy-up, I've reduced its workload to doing one thing only - it writes and compiles VB6 code for updates to the soon-to-be-replaced  RPMS Version 7.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that machine is the second oldest computer in our domain. The oldest is a 486 that runs an ancient Novell 3.12 network to which we can still connect. We changed over to a Microsoft server back in 2003, but kept the Novell machine running "just in case." I keep thinking that I will take it down and junk it, but now it has become sort of a longevity test. It just sits in the closet with it's monochrome monitor switched off, patiently waiting for the Microsoft server to die. I'm pretty sure that Novell box is from Dash too, and dates back to 1993 or 1994.

I HAD another computer at the office that I used for E-Mail, documents, accounting, and .NET development. But I now have to replace that four-year-old Dell XPS that ran Windows XP. The motherboard went south back in January, and it cost me $75 with my local computer tech to figure that out. That was better than a bad hard drive I guess, but getting a new board is hardly worth the time and trouble, and might necessitate a reformat of my drive anyway. So bottom line, I'm in the market for another computer.

(I've temporarily replaced the XPS with a Dell Vista laptop that our bookkeeper no longer uses. It's fine, but VERY slow to boot and shut down, which Vista seems to want it to do for updates about weekly.)

I'm not a computer reseller, so I can't go to Dash directly, but I would really like to go back to them one way or another for my new Windows 7 computer. Read this article, especially if you're one of our many electronic components reps:

http://www.dashdist.com/1u2u/company/capacitor.html

Who knew?  I used to get computers from resellers that went through Dash all the time, back in the eighties and nineties. But then I stopped. I suppose it was just a dollars and cents thing, because the PC had seemed to become a commodity, with one more or less the same as another. I thought the battle was really about the best software or network.

And now I've re-discovered that the computer really does matter. It's just that it will take you a couple of years to figure that out.

Protectionism and the Balance of Trade

I read a new post by Pat Buchanon titled The Disemboweling of America. As is his wont, Mr. Buchanon rails against free trade, cementing his position in some circles as our chief xenophobe. Let me summarize:

• Nations seem to rise to power while protecting their industry - Great Britain, the US, Stalin's Russia, postwar Japan, and China today
• Nations appear to decline in power as they embrace free trade - see the above list, and consider Great Britain, and the state of the US economy since NAFTA

I've always been a free trade guy. But I also always thought that the Balance of Trade said a lot more about our nation's relative fiscal strength than the trade deficit. Service businesses like mine don't count when we tabulate the so-called 'trade deficit'. Even though we sell a little software and support to Canada, Mexico, and a few other countries, we're not included in that trade measurement.

And that is true for innumerable US businesses. If you work for a company that provides engineering services internationally; or you educate foreign students in our country (or run an American school overseas); or provide sales representation or distribution for a Chinese manufacturer, you don't count. 

I've always been mildly irritated by that. When pundits decry the trade deficit to make some political point or another, I always wonder why they don't look at the Balance of Trade. Shouldn't what any of us sell internationally count?

So because of Buchanon's article, I thought I'd have a look at it. I found the Bureau of Economic Analysis site, and downloaded a couple of their spreadsheets.

In 2009 we exported a shade over a trillion dollars worth of goods (that's a thousand billion, by the way) and imported just over 1.5 trillion or so. That's about on par with what Buchanon said it would be - a 500 billion dollar trade deficit. 

I figured that we'd more or less make it up in services. I figured wrong. In services, yes, we exported half a trillion. But we imported better than 370 billion. And that made our Current BOT deficit 380 billion for 2009! 

How in the world (literally) did we import more than 370 billion dollars of services? Like this:

• 72.6 billion of travel
• 25.5 billion of passenger fares
• 54.2 billion of other transportation
• 24.5 billion of royalties and license fees
• 153.8 billion of other private services
• 35.8 billion of direct defense expenditures
• 4.7 billion of government miscellaneous services

The one that sticks out like a sore thumb is Other Private Services. You know what those services are, even if you didn't know that's what they were called. Here's a sample of Other Private Services:

Help desk with Indian accent: - "Thank you for calling technical support, my name is Maverick, how may I assist you today?" 

Me: "Well, hello there Maverick, what's your last name?"

Help desk: "I don't know, they haven't given it to me yet." 

I really wanted to ask him how Ice Man was doing, but I bit my witty tongue. And there's more to private services of course, but the international outsourcing of tech support, computer programming, engineering, telecom, radiology, and plenty of other services, aided by the the Internet, has put my old stand-by Balance of Trade argument out to pasture. The Balance of Trade now sucks too, and it has for a while.

Our imports of foreign services overall have increased 210 percent in the last 17 years. But the segment called Other Private Services has by itself increased over 500% in that same time! It is by far the fastest growing segment of our services imports, and it means one major thing:

Jobs.

When we travel to foreign countries, we give piecemeal financial support to other nations. And I've always thought that's fine. It's neat to travel, and it's great that international tourists come here too. And if I buy some software from a German company that is the best suited for what we want to do, and that helps my American product work better in Italy - well, that's the upside for my customers of me paying a license fee to a foreign company.

But should we out-source our programming and technical support jobs because it is cheaper?

Henry Ford understood that the employees of his company would and should also be his best customers. And further, those employees would then have the means to purchase any number of product created in the American Industrial age.

I don't think that we should force companies to 'hire American.' But I would sure like to see us do two things to quit killing ourselves in the Balance of Trade for these Other Private Services.

• First, eliminate federal and state minimum wage laws. Those laws are job killers, plain and simple. We would shrink the labor pool so fast and put more Americans to work with that one measure than virtually any other thing we could do. 
• Second, require employers that import labor via Other Private Services to pay employer social security and medicare tax on those purchases. The employer tax is essentially a government tariff on our domestic labor pool. If we don't have the political will to get rid of it, at least impose it on internationals that want to work over here via the Internet and telephone. I know that isn't a very 'free trade' idea - but it has more political potential than asking our government to eliminate that tax.

Otherwise, if all of us in this digital age purchase our Other Private Services from overseas, instead of hiring local workers, what exactly will America become? 

New Ideas for January 2010

We're going to pop in another quick update in January. We've had some nice new ideas that we're going to incorporate.

• Multi-value snapshots will now export to a single Excel worksheet, or multiple sheets with formulas - your choice.
• Sales reps names will be loaded onto the lists for the customer list and, if not split among multiple reps, the commission reconciliation list
• The reorganization of the sales history file (RPYTDSA) will automatically delete history transaction records for years that have no values. This should reduce the number of zero value entities reported on summary, history, and snapshot reports.

We've had a lot of good feedback on the Imap system. The number one request has been to add product and/or point of sale to the system. We'll try to squeeze that one in for January also.

Excuse the Mess

Sorry for the trouble with the blog. I deleted an old gmail address, not knowing that to do so would irrevocably delete my older blog sites.

Ouch. Fortunately (or not, depending on whether you like to read what I write) the sites and the various blogs were indexed by google, among others, so I have been able to re-capture the content, and will re-post it over time.

My old blog site for business, RPMSLLC.blogspot.com, is now therefore in some sort of limbo, so I can't use it right now. But even that has a silver lining, as due to some corporate re-structuring the company name RPMS LLC is no longer how we're known. Nowadays Uncle Sam, Kansas, and our bank knows us as RepSoft LLC. Thus, the new domain for the blog.

Short lesson - be careful when you delete your @gmail E-Mail addresses. You only think you know what you're doing.

Speedy SSD Raid

Now this is fast (and kind of fun, too.)

It has been a long, long time since I put together my own computer. Probably 1998 or '99. BUT it did last up until last year. *

·                                 That is, all except the 3.5" floppy drive, which did not survive a toddler attack with a paper clip that happened in 2002. I managed a few years without it.

Watching this video makes me want to put a machine together again, pretty much just like this one. Since disk reads and writes have ALWAYS been the long pole in the tent for business applications like RPMS, this gives me really interesting ideas.

Solid state drives - SSD's - are basically just the flash memory cards we're all familiar with now from digital cameras and the like, arrayed on a computer card. And RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. So you take the array of flash chips bundled into a single drive (the SSD), and then take a bunch of those SSD's and wire them together on a single computer (the RAID) and presto, pretty darn fast computer. 

I've never put together a RAID before, but hmmmm.....

Google Chrome

Google Chrome seems better to me than FireFox.

I really hate to say it, as I've been a FireFox user for a while now. But Google Chrome is FAST, and I've set it to be my default browser for now. It is still technically beta, so if it fouls up in any substantial way, I'll post and let you know... but it sure looks good today.

I wrote a little Windows application for purely personal purposes that takes both a date and location parameter, then shells to the default browser with an Open statement to display a schedule page.

(Basically, instead of going through typing a really massive URL or five levels of mouse click / display page, I get to the immediate result that I want with three clicks. Sometimes it IS handy to be a geek.)

Results: FireFox - 3 seconds. Google Chrome - less than 1 second.

That's the only rigorous test that I've done to this point, but everything seems faster. And there are several other small touches that I really like.

First, the tabs, URL bar, button bar and so forth are minimalist and reasonably intuitive. (See the picture.)

Second, the default home page is kind of cool. It displays all the sites I've been too recently or mostly, and lets me just click them to get back. (See the picture too.)

The pre seeking in the URL is really fast. And Chrome inherited all my FireFox settings perfectly.

Here's another review from CIO magazine. You can download the latest Google Chrome right here.

Sweet Charity

Ok. I'm sorry. You would think one quasi-political post in a month's time would do it, and I'd get back to software and ordinary geek-stuff. But I'm going to gently rant.

The White House Director of OMB (Office of Management & Budget), Peter Orszag, had this to say about the pending reduction to the charitable donation tax write off in the new budget:

But let’s look at how the tax code treats two different contributors to a non-profit. If you’re a teacher making $50,000 a year and decide to donate $1,000 to the Red Cross or United Way, you enjoy a tax break of $150. If you are Warren Buffet or Bill Gates and you make that same donation, you get a $350 deduction – more than twice the break as the teacher.

This proposal walks that difference back some of the way – it would limit the tax benefit for Buffet or Gates to $280. In other words, we are not eliminating the deduction – just reducing it to 28 percent (or $280 on the hypothetical $1,000 contribution) for the 5 percent of families at the very top of the income distribution. That is the same tax benefit that they would have enjoyed at the end of the Reagan Administration.

Obviously this was not written for Gates or Buffet, or even Americans of lesser wealth who are nevertheless big givers with high incomes. They ALL understand what's going on, because they live it at tax time every year. No, this is written specifically for that 50K per year teacher. Or anyone else making less than 250K per year. And here's the kicker - Orszag thinks that we're all idiots.

But, don't take my word for it, read the whole post. Here it is again:The Budget and Charitable Donations

Did you see one word in it about how much more in taxes those big givers already pay?

I know lots of you are already way ahead of me here, but let me spell it out, just because it will make me feel better. If Gates gives $1,000 to the United Way, and Joe Teacher gives $1,000 to the United Way, both Bill and Joe are $1,000 poorer, and the United Way is $2,000 richer.

There's nothing uneven about that.

UNLESS, you are Orszag, and you believe that the money - the $1,000 in either man's pocket - is rightfully YOUR money first. YOU are the government, and YOU have first call on ANYBODY'S money. In that light, his post makes perfect sense. Since all money REALLY belongs to the government, not the people that earn it, the government is free to take as much or little as they want from anybody, any time, at the point of a gun.

Now while as a G man, Orszag knows this is true, he can't SAY it in so many words. It still sounds a little too harsh, too police state, too politically incorrect. He doesn't want to screw up the opportunity for his boss to be re-elected. So he says the word 'tax break' and pretends that it has the same value as real money.

But it doesn't, does it? Remember, each man is $1,000 poorer, and the United Way is $2,000 better off.

But Jim, you may protest, I know there must be something too this. He can't be lying, can he?

No, he's not lying. But he is relying on the fact that you're an idiot. He hopes like hell that you believe this crap about "walking the difference back" because it sounds like he's making it more equitable, making everything the same.

I've got an idea. In the interest of fairness, here's another way we could make it the same. Let's reduce the top tax rate to 15% for Mr. Gates. That way, he would only enjoy a tax break of $150 too, the same as the teacher.

Don't hold your breath.

Despite my rant about this, they'll probably get away with this. And here's where it is really going to hurt charities. Say it's not Gates, but a $450,000 per year family of six, with two kids in college, that gives 10% annually to Joe's charity.

Bush Tax Rates & Charitable Deductions:

·                                 $450,000 income

·                                 ( $45,000) charity

·                                 ($113,325) tax burden

Net for the family after charity and tax burden: $ 291,675

Obama Tax Rates & Charitable Deductions:

·                                 $450,000 income

·                                 ( $45,000) charity

·                                 ($120,721) tax burden

Net for the family after charity and tax burden: $ 284,279

So how does our hypothetical family get back their $7,000? By reducing their charitable giving, of course. If they give only $35,000 to charity, then the numbers work out this way:

Obama Plan after reaction to policy

·                                 $450,000 income

·                                 ( $35,000) charity

·                                 ($123,521) tax burden

Net for the family after charity and tax burden: $ 291,479.

Roughly the same as it was under Bush. So Mr. Orszag is happy, since he gets 10K more for pork funding. The family doesn't feel great about things, but at least they can still pay for tuition (no financial aid for them) and their mortgage (glad somebody can.)

Who's the big loser here? Joe Teacher. Because he thought that things were going to even out. What really happened is that charity that he likes - the one he gives his very hard-earned money to - they can't do as much as they used to do. So ironically, they ask for more from Joe.