Business and industry – Page 17

Friday night videos episode 47

I’m going to warn you now – this may be controversial.

The first video I’m going to feature is in “honor” of the 10-10-10 celebration being promoted by the world’s greenies. It’s been called an “environmental snuff film” and I don’t disagree. But you need to know the mindset of these people.

“No pressure” indeed. These people are mentally ill to think this way. I know that 90% of environmentalists just want clean air and water, and so do I. But I want a balance between our economic interests and way of life too. These people just want their way and don’t care.

Speaking of economic interests – well, where are the jobs, Frank?

Certainly I make no assertion that Frank thinks like those people who did the first video, but he agreed with them when he voted for cap-and-trade. I’m sure he’s just in the 90 percent.

On the other hand, it’s sort of unfortunate that we don’t have our own version of a strong conservative woman in this race. But Frank McCaffrey of Americans for Limited Government takes a look at Maryland LG hopeful Mary Kane in this piece.

But some still don’t get it. I’m not a big fan of ‘gotcha’ journalism, but this guy parrots the line that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share, when in fact they overpay.

And yes, as I’ve explained over the last week in the Daily Times, I support the Fair Tax.

Anyway, as I promised last week, I’m doing two music videos. This week has some heavy subject matter and I need a break, too.

The first one I’ve featured before but I was in the mood for Southern rock, and this is among my most-viewed music videos I’ve done.

The second one comes from the exact same venue (WinterPlace Park) but several months later. Not My Own won the Unicity Festival and hopefully it will take them to bigger and better things.

Usually I feature something heavier from the boys, but as I recall this is one of the first songs I heard out of them and it has a nice sound with the acoustic guitar.

Until next week, that’s a wrap on another edition of FNV. I’m hoping to have more music from this weekend’s Good Beer Festival and its solid lineup.

Friday night videos episode 46

I wasn’t done yet, it was simply a dearth of decent video and some other plans taking up my Friday nights. Here you have the return of FNV after a two-week hiatus.

How about we start with this one? This could be a great movie, although it tells us what we already know.

Another thing we already know is that Sarah Palin remains popular, despite all the naysayers. That and she has her own political action committee.

And we also know that the stimulus is a boondoggle. It’s a little tougher to steal these political roadside signs than to take the neighbor’s O’Malley one – not that I condone the activity.

I may reuse this one in a few weeks.

I will be at the polling place on November 2nd with bells on. There could be a hurricane blowing and I’d be there.

Shifting gears, there’s a little surprise at the end of the Freedom Minute. But I’m curious why they used that particular hospital as a backdrop.I came across this a couple weeks back, and you know, it fits in with the mindset of many perfectly. Besides, the series of commercials from Progressive Insurance (which is owned by uberlefty Peter Lewis) really desperately needed to be made fun of.

It’s not quite Halloween, but here is some more scary stuff in a serious vein to close this edition. Whether you come down in favor of amnesty for illegals or not, this is a good case for closing the borders.

Since I crammed this one sort of full, I’ll skip the music this time. Maybe I’ll do a double dose on the next one.

Open for business

As many of you know, today not only marks the beginning the enforcement of several new laws (including the nanny state intrusion of hands-free cel phones) and the new federal fiscal year (for which we have no budget, as usual), but also the beginning of a new quarter and a new opportunity to lock in a prime piece of blogging real estate.

I look at advertising in a unique way – I would rather lock in an advertiser for the long-term (that term being three months, or a quarter) and allow them to set their own price – although I do set a floor price which is based on what I’m paid by a long-term advertiser. If there is a market, the advertisers determine it and right now there are two political ads I’m in the process of adding once they complete a simple process of getting me the graphics and paying for the space. I also give the opportunity for candidates to add an associated business of theirs gratis for the quarter as a thanks for advertising here.

Perhaps other websites do things differently, and some place political ads for free because they like the candidate. (I was the beneficiary of one of those sites.) But having released the genie from the bottle by accepting paid political ads I don’t think it’s either fair to those who pay to put up freebies or good for my long-term goals for this site.

However, business ads are a little different and in order to make this a year-round profitable enterprise I need more of them. Needless to say, there are sites which accept business advertising, with the “leading” one charging $100 per month. But is it the leading one?

Let’s look at some of the local sites which contain advertising. One measure of readership, while perhaps flawed, is the Alexa rating. As of today, here are World and U.S. ranks of some local political and news websites.

monoblogue – world rank 395,413; U.S. rank 77,079
Salisbury News – world rank 339,963; U.S. rank 86,363
The Salisbury Grinch – world rank 802,682; U.S. rank 467,153
Delmarva Dealings – world rank 753,577; U.S. rank 237,163
The Daily Times – world rank 86,706; U.S. rank 19,194
WBOC-TV – world rank 110,922; U.S. rank 23,059
WMDT-TV – world rank 686,267; U.S. rank 203,838

Admittedly, the Grinch’s numbers may be skewed since he recently changed his URL. Normally it’s in the same neighborhood as Salisbury News.

But the interesting thing about Alexa is the site demographics it provides:

The fraction of visits to this site referred by search engines is roughly 2%. Visitors to the site spend approximately 44 seconds on each pageview and a total of 24 minutes on the site during each visit. Monoblogue.us’s visitors view an average of 14.0 unique pages per day. About 14% of visits to the site consist of only one pageview (i.e., are bounces).

In essence, what this says is people come to my site to read it and stick around long enough to get a message. Compare that to:

The time spent in a typical visit to (Salisbury News) is approximately two minutes, with two minutes spent on each pageview.

Is two minutes really long enough to read an ad? I’ll leave that to you to decide. And just so I’m not perceived as picking on Salisbury News, this applies to the WBOC website.

The time spent in a typical visit to Wboc.com is roughly four minutes, with 60 seconds spent on each pageview.

However, I can guarantee that the competition would rightly say that they get more repeat visitors in a day, and that may be true. Obviously they’re not keen on telling people how many people read their site daily, but do you know what? I have nothing to hide. See if you can spot a trend here among the SiteMeter and StatCounter numbers I use for the last quarter.

Week of July 5: Site Meter (SM) 1090, Stat Counter (SC) 1169
Week of July 12: SM 960, SC 1133
Week of July 19: SM 1132, SC 1223
Week of July 26: SM 1109, SC 1188
Week of August 2: SM 1153, SC 1168
Week of August 9: SM 1141, SC 1214
Week of August 16: SM 1108, SC 1152
Week of August 23: SM 1302, SC 1351
Week of August 30: SM 1221, SC 1431
Week of September 6: SM 1664, SC 1540
Week of September 13: SM 1677, SC 2030
Week of September 20: SM 1237, SC1358

My peak week, naturally for a politically-based website, was the week of the election. Guess what we have again in a month?

So there are the facts which I have to present. I have an uncle who was in business for himself for nearly 30 years and he occasionally advises me on how I conduct this website as a business – I’m not sure he’d appreciate my blunt honesty in revealing these “trade secrets” but that’s how I deal with people.

I think this is a great place to advertise for certain businesses:

restaurants (since much of my clientele reads this from work and no one I know of blocks this site)
professional services (a large percentage of clients are professionals with college education)
sports-related (because I do Shorebird of the Week in the summer)
politically-related (this goes without saying)

By having this information, I believe you as prospective clients can judge for yourself whether this would be an effective tool. If you believe it will be, the actual details of how I do advertising are here. Bear in mind that the higher the bid, the better the placement.

I know I have a lot of supporters out there, and many of them own businesses. We can support each other in this endeavor called life, so give this a shot! I look forward to doing business with you. My e-mail address is ttownjotes (at) yahoo.com.

Friday night videos – episode 45

Call this the primary edition. It’s some of the interesting things which have come across my screen lately and I want to share with you.

First, I love the smell of hypocricy in the evening as much as I do in the morning.

Yep, let’s hire non-union people to protest on behalf of a union. Unless there’s full employment within the union (in which case they shouldn’t need the work anyway) why can’t they use their own members?

In the meantime, the administration they blindly support is killing other union and non-union jobs in the energy industry.

It’s interesting – 5,500 people came of their own accord to speak out on their jobs but providing a handful of jobs to the members of the union who instead paid scab labor to picket was out of the question.

The statewide races for Governor and Senate are quite interesting, with Jim Rutledge and Eric Wargotz fighting out the U.S. Senate nod and Brian Murphy closing the gap on Bob Ehrlich. Here’s a little something from each, beginning with Rutledge. Someone came up with a great video on Jim’s behalf.

I still like the bearded look on Jim. Meanwhile, his opponent Eric Wargotz hit the airwaves with this last week.

It’s a humorous ad, and certainly gets the point across. But is appearing in safari garb Eric’s ‘Dukakis moment’?

A more conventional message comes from Brian Murphy in his TV spot.

It sounds pretty Eastern Shore to me, since that’s where he grew up. Meanwhile, Bob Ehrlich vows to kill the expansion of the sales tax to 43 services.

Oh, I remember the bill – they’ve tried to sneak it through but didn’t have the cajones to do it back then. We fought it tooth and nail and won.

Finally, this week wouldn’t be complete without mentioning something about tomorrow. It’s this week’s Freedom Minute from the Center for Individual Freedom.I decided to skip the music video this week because I may just have fresh ones next week if I’m able. We’ll have to see on that; otherwise enjoy the rest of your night!

A Labor Day message

There’s something about Labor Day which has always bothered me. Perhaps it’s the onset of fall and the ending of the summer season that I enjoy most, not to mention the close of the Shorebirds season, but our celebration of the American worker seems too tied in to glorifying the unions and less to honoring those who both create the jobs by opening the business which employ most Americans and those who had the foresight to invest in these dreams. After all, had Henry Ford not enticed investors to believe in his idea we wouldn’t be driving our Escapes, Crown Vics, or F-150s that are primarily built by UAW members.

It could simply be my upbringing, too. Three years ago I wrote:

I guess some of the issue I have with unions comes from my upbringing. I was raised in a Teamster household but really there wasn’t all that much to show for it. My dad was (and is) a hard worker but people who did nothing made the same amount of money, and that never appealed to the side of me that desires fairness and justice in life. And I’ve heard too many anecdotes of union shops intentionally slowing down production so their quota wouldn’t be increased. It’s sort of the same thinking as the governmental agency spending big money on office supplies and the like at the end of the fiscal year so they make sure they spend their full budget and not have it cut.

Also, to me it was quite sad to see the streets of downtown Toledo full of people and politicans for the annual Labor Day parade when the annual Memorial Day parade was shunted to the Saturday before and was lucky to have a couple thousand watching. Yes, Toledo is a union-dominated city but still I felt their priorities were way out of whack.

Certainly today the unionistas of Toledo are out driving their trucks and their equipment festooned with the paraphernaila of Democratic politicians – they even get a visit from both Vice-President Biden and Ohio Governor Ted Strickland today. But closer to home we even see that same dichotomy because while Brian Murphy is touring the Shore today both Bob Ehrlich and Martin O’Malley are marching in Labor Day parades. (Obviously Maryland is a less hardline state; perhaps it’s because more union members come from the ranks of government employees compared to private-sector workers. My bet is most of the union participants will still be wearing the O’Malley green.)

Yet we sometimes fail to remember that without employers we would have no employees, and for many of those employers today is just another day of work to keep their businesses afloat during trying economic times. The relationship works both ways, and while workers create these shop owners invest time and money in the hopes of supporting their own families. And while you hear about the fat-cat CEOs who make millions, the vast majority of business owners are only among the middle class. We forget they have mortgages to pay and kids to send through college, and they scrimp and save like the employees do. Many pay themselves last so their employees don’t go without during tough times.

Therefore, it’s in our best interest to enjoy the day off if you have it, but remember that there are those working so you can enjoy the holiday. Perhaps the labor and toil of these job creators today will pay off in better opportunities for you or your family down the road so let’s celebrate them too.

Friday night videos – episode 42

We’ll see how this week’s episode of FNV flies as I patch together goodies I’ve become aware of.

With tongue strictly in cheek, Andrew Klavan looks at Obama’s “Recovery Summer.”

President Obama can’t catch a break. Even Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has to point out another flaw.

“This is an outrage!” You got that right, Governor. Here’s a look at our porous border through the eyes of hidden cameras.

While we’re at it, let’s look at another issue Obama is on the wrong side of: environmentalism. R.J. Smith and the Center for Private Conservation explains that capitalism tends to be environmentally friendly, despite what some may lead you to believe.

I don’t know if this guy will win a Senate seat, but he has funny videos. Len Britton is running for Senate in Vermont and a couple months back I featured another commercial of his.

Billy is like the rest of us who are furiously bailing. Wonder how that works for bankers and automakers?

Okay, now to the music. This one is loud, this one is hard, this one is Not My Own.

And this one is a wrap until next week.

Harris meets local solar energy maven

Campaign stops aren’t always about gladhanding; they can be educational too.

Such was the case this morning as Congressional candidate Andy Harris toured the tree farm of Bruce Nichols outside of Hebron. His farm is best known as a local pioneer in using solar technology on a fairly significant scale. Nichols invested $90,000 in setting up the solar power system a year and a half ago before getting a single penny back in grants and tax credits, but told Harris that there’s a need to streamline the process of getting alternative energy systems set up.

(continued on my Examiner.com page…)

‘Silly Bandz’ raise serious question

If you know a child of middle school age, you’re probably familiar with the fad of Silly Bandz sweeping the country among that peer group. Now that school is out, the classroom bans imposed on kids who brought those colorful accessories to school to show off or trade are no longer in effect and thousands of “tweens” proudly sport their collections on their arms, a belt clip, or a necklace. With dozens of different shapes based on animals, fantasy characters, sports themes, and the like they appeal to the collector in every child and at about $5 for a pack of 24, Silly Bandz are an inexpensive hobby. Thousands of kids spend part of their allowance to get the latest styles.

Robert Croak, the creator of the brand, is a former bar owner and concert promoter who’s simply changed his target audience from young adults to their younger siblings and children. His company, BCP Imports, fills thousands of orders a day from a warehouse in Toledo, Ohio, where the product is brought in from a Chinese manufacturer.

And the people in Toledo are grateful for the jobs Croak provides. His distribution warehouse now hums with the activity of well over 100 employees, with more being hired every week. In a city where unemployment is 12 percent because the auto industry it depends on is sluggish, anyone who’s hiring can be pegged as a hero and indeed Croak is being treated like one. As he points out in a local television interview, “This is proof that the American Dream can still happen. The sky is the limit right now.”

All told, the success of Silly Bandz, even if fleeting, would seem to be a nice feelgood story. But there’s a question to ponder.

If these silicone bands cost 20 cents apiece at the retail level, one has to ask how it can be profitable to manufacture them at a plant thousands of miles away, ship them overseas, and truck them from port to distribution point. What prevents the manufacturing process (and those jobs which could be created) from being done in Toledo? Undoubtedly there’s plenty of available manufacturing space around the city which could be utilized and a lot of workers who are looking for job openings.

One answer could be the prospect of labor strife, as Toledo is one of the most heavily unionized cities in the country. Placing a Silly Bandz factory in Toledo without paying inflated union wages may lead to a serious picket at the plant gate.

Even if labor relations somehow go smoothly, though, there’s still the prospect of overtaxation and oppressive regulation to consider. With practically any small business, governmental entities make success more difficult than it should be. As one example, building a new factory to make Silly Bandz may require extensive site review by local government, while renovating an existing facility could lead to expensive modifications not necessary for the actual manufacturing process.

Localities often try to create a “one-stop shop” where red tape can be addressed with the least possible hassle. But not as much thought seems to go into making the burden easier by eliminating the redundant regulations and lowering the tax burden on these companies. Instead of making life better for job creation, the government seems happier to hire even more bureaucrats to try and help navigate the labyrinthine maze of their own creation.

As with all trends the Silly Bandz craze will fade away, but thinking up needless laws and rules is one fad which never seems to fall out of favor with government.

Michael Swartz used to practice architecture but now is a Maryland-based freelance writer and blogger whose work can be found in a number of outlets, including Liberty Features Syndicate. In truth, I didn’t know the distributor hailed from my hometown until recently, but that made this piece much more fun to write after I found out that fact. It debuted June 21.

Cleaning up politically

It goes without saying that thousands of people who depend on Gulf tourism or aquaculture have suffered an economic impact in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. They may suffer for months or years due to the loss of income during this period when these industries would normally be producing.

But there is another group which has been thrown out of work at a time when they, too, would normally be producing – those who ply their trade in helping to provide America’s energy needs. As the group Freedom Action notes:

Freedom Action calls on President Obama to immediately lift the damaging, counterproductive ban on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The six-month ban, which has closed down dozens of safe, productive operations, is doing nothing to help clean up the spill…but is keeping thousands of oil and gas workers from making a living and having a far larger economic impact throughout the region.

“In a knee-jerk move with perverse consequences, the President’s total ban on drilling in the Gulf has created further hardship for communities already reeling from the impact of the BP spill,” said Myron Ebell, Director of Freedom Action. “Now in addition to the tourism and fishing sectors – which together account for about 5% of Louisiana’s economy – the oil and gas sector – which accounts for 16% – is also being knocked down at exactly a time when its high-paying jobs could be helping to support families in the region.”

Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. Mary Landrieu have already spoken out strongly against the White House’s blanket ban, urging the President to allow offshore platforms to re-open and begin providing energy again to the American people. Sen. Landrieu has even proposed a list of several possible alternatives to the ban, including increased safety inspections, while at the same time pointing out that continuing with the current policy could cost as many as 38,000 jobs.

“The empathy and concern from around the country for the affected residents of the Gulf Coast has been tremendous, and it is understandable that Americans would want to see a policy that protects the area from further harm,” said Ebell. “But keeping locals from making a living and sabotaging their economic recovery so that a handful of environmentalists and Washington politicians can congratulate each other on their concern for wildlife is an arrogant and immoral policy. President Obama needs to remove the drilling ban now.”

Allow me to restate one factoid mentioned in the Freedom Action release for you. We see the pictures and interviews of shrimpers idled by the oil spill, and yes they do contribute to the economy of the state of Louisiana. But the energy industry contributes over three times as much and, as I have pointed out, had a long unblemished safety record even through some of the nastiest Mother Nature could throw at them – including Hurricane Katrina.

Even thousands of miles away, our Governor O’Malley and Senator Cardin smirk and gladly dismiss the prospect of offshore oil drilling off Maryland’s coast, regardless of the number of jobs which could be created. To be honest, it’s only a guess to this point whether there’s enough oil and natural gas offshore this far north to be commercially viable for collection, and it would take exploratory wells just to find out.

Instead, O’Malley believes that offshore wind power is the way to go despite the effects that could have on marine life and ocean currents, not to mention the precious ocean view off Ocean City.

To me, it’s shortsighted to dismiss out of hand energy sources proven to be successful at powering our nation’s prosperity. The Gulf shores will eventually be cleaned up just as Alaska’s Prince William Sound has been after the Exxon Valdez accident, hopefully without completely bankrupting British Petroleum (a company which obviously has capping the well as its best interest too since otherwise millions of dollars’ worth of oil gushes forth on a daily basis.)

The answer is not in banning deepwater offshore drilling, but encouraging energy production in shallower waters and in areas where reserves are proven to be but overzealous environmentalism prohibits production. We have plenty of oil within our borders – what we need are the stones (and the courts) to tell the environmentalist wackos to go pound sand.

By the way, I’ve caught wind of a local effort to help out with the cleanup – a number of area musicians are putting together plans for a benefit concert to raise funds for the cleanup. Obviously I’ll see what I can find out and pass it along.

Friday night videos – episode 36

Kicking back and relaxing on a warm summer night – take your time with these videos. Perhaps you’re like me and do a lot of your web surfing outside.

You know, that Joe Sestak job offer scandal is still percolating around Washington, casting a shadow on the Obama Administration.

I know the Center for Individual Freedom generally exceeds its “Freedom Minute” but it’s worth watching.

Something that probably won’t be worth watching is an upcoming Comedy Central show called “JC.” It’s a show I wrote about for Patriot Post and begs the question – is America ready for more Christian-bashing out of a network which was afraid to portray the prophet Muhammad? (Probably NSFW if you’re there.)

Yeah, that was pretty disgusting. Speaking of disgusting, let’s have the reaction of folks on the left to this guy becoming violent at a Tea Party protest in North Carolina.

Oh, I forgot, it’s the Tea Partiers who are violent. That might be the next thing Obama blames Bush for, and the background music is priceless. (I actually used the Smokin’ Gunnz version of the song a few weeks back.)

Yeah, I got that from Eric Cantor’s office. But it was good. On a more serious note (and since Obama referred to the Deepwater Horizon spill) the next two videos feature American Petroleum Institute chief economist Dr. John Felmy discussing the effects of the Gulf drilling moratorium.

Of course, some of these jobs could’ve gone to newly minted graduates – ALG talked to some recent ones about the youth job situation and 26.4% unemployment.

As always, let’s close with a song. Local artist Bryan Russo has a jazzy flavor on this song as he takes a trip to the ‘Smokey Cafe.’ Don’t think I’ve ever embedded a Vimeo before.

With that, another episode of FNV is a wrap.

The first of many, I’m sure

Today Sarah Kliff at Politico reports that a small Virginia-based health insurer will be closing its doors, effective December 31. The reason nHealth is shutting down?

“The uncertainties in the regulatory climate coupled with new demands imposed by national health care reforms have made it challenging to sustain the level of sales required to remain viable over the long run,” according to a letter given to company employees.

Cynics and critics of Obamacare pointed out the regulations would indeed drive private insurance companies out of business and it appears that the Richmond-based company will be the first.

What’s most sad about this particular closing is that the company, “specializes in high-deductible insurance plans, meant to cover larger medical emergencies, that are paired with health savings accounts, the tax-deductible accounts used to pay for medical expenses” – exactly the sort of plan which would be most beneficial to the large percentage of the uninsured who are relatively young and healthy.

Part of the problem with the future outlook of companies which specialize in HSAs is that the regulations (which haven’t been written yet) may leave insurers in limbo.

According to Heritage Foundation blogger Kathryn Nix,

“the worst news for those using HSAs is the provision requiring all policies to cover at least 60 percent of the actuarial value of the benefits offered. What’s the actual value? No one really knows—not until the Health and Human Services Department issues regulations on how to calculate it.”

Obviously if the saved portion is counted toward the value those who are just starting out or have little in their HSA wouldn’t qualify. It will be up to career bureaucrats and lobbyists to make this decision and chances are good Fedzilla will want to exert maximum control over consumers.

It’s areas like this where defunding may not have the desired effect and all-out repeal of Obamacare is the only solution.

All talk and no action

In nearly four years as Governor, Martin O’Malley has presided over a near-doubling of Maryland’s unemployment rate. Certainly all the blame can’t be placed on his shoulders, but it is worth pondering why the state’s unemployment rate is higher than neighboring Virginia’s or 14 other states which don’t have the advantage of location near the seat of a burgeoning federal government.

As part of his response to both the issue and the attention paid to it by his three main opponents, Governor O’Malley signed an Executive Order last week to create a 26 member commission to study the issue and report back to the governor annually beginning in June 2011 – safely after both this year’s election and the 2011 General Assembly session.

(continued on my Examiner.com page…)