Category Archives: The World

Freedom in the modern age.

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Well I have never talked on here about entertainment before but here is one that is good.  If you do or do not know there was a show called Jericho.  Last night was the last episode of it.  It was a really great, well written show.  It lost some people because for a while it went a bit slow, and most shows with arc don’t last once you miss a episode or too and the network changed it’s time slot at a very critical time in the development of the show.  (Arc is when a show is a story from one episode to the next so you have to watch them in order to understand fully what is going on.)  Basically they did not give it the chance they should have and it failed.   It was canceled after the first season, but the largest fan outcry in TV history made them bring it back.  They did so with little advertising and fanfare, and had a second season of only 7 episodes that mostly concluded the entire story.

The reason this show was special is because it touched on subject that are almost never talked about on TV in this way.  Maybe it made some of the corporate people unhappy with the direction it was going.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A SPOILER.

Basically the story goes like this.  There are bombs that go off and destroy the 23 largest cities in the US except New York.  Communication and power stop.  Food runs out and people in rural Kansas start fighting to survive.  Well equipped mercenaries raid towns and take all the resources and kill many people.  At some point a goverment is put in place.  The old US has the east, TX is independent and the west forms a new nation.  The nation formed in the west is totally controled and financed by a huge mega corporation, the same one that ran the war in Iraq for the US and hired all the mercanires that the US used worldwide before the attack.  The corporation quickly takes part of everything.  They take away freedom, they surround each town with checkpoints so that only products that say can get in or out.  They rush a new constitution that takes away all the power of the people and gives it to the corporation.  Everything is unfair but they have all the resources and power.  Soon the people start to revolt, and by the end of the show all the viewers are calling for revolution.  The last episode is the start of this revolution with Texas shooting down airplanes from this new western nation.

Much of the show focused on the trap of giving corporations too much control of the government, which in turn takes rights away from the people.  This is something that is happening right now in the United States.  There are so many ways that our freedom has been taken.  The government is fairly corrupt.  They spend way too much, and take way too much.  They also spend so much more than they take in.   Who said the federal goverment should secure travel?  Who said they should put so much control on what we eat?  Who said that the government should run the school system in such a poor way?  We tax people so unevenly but yet the government mails out billions of dollars in checks.  The show Jericho showed how this line of thinking will only result in loss of freedom, and at some point the people will revolt.

If you told anyone 20 years ago the things that are going on in this nation right now they would have said you are crazy, that could never happen.  That is way overstepping the role of government.  I guess they are doing it just slow enough that most people don’t notice.   The education system has failed the public by creating the dumbest population this nation has ever had.

People in our nation now expect to carry ID everywhere, go through government checkpoints to travel.  It took me over a year to have our federal government allow my wife to enter the nation, they have no right to say who I can and can’t marry.  People expect to give a personal ID number every time they talk business on the phone.  People expect their information, privacy, and rights to be disrespected.   Most of them are so miseducated that they simply believe what they are told by the media, they have no idea how to think for themselves.

If it goes much farther down this path I will really start to fear for the future success of my country, the United States of America.  Most of the nation and the decisions are totally out of the control of the people, and most of the people disagree with many of the decisions.  Most people think we are not to be the world police, they think we spend way too much and should not carry debt.  Everyone I know thinks the tax system is crazy and needs to be replaced, but yet every year it gets more complex.  When will the craziness end.   Maybe only with revolution.

The world is changing forever. It is getting flat, feel the pressure yet?

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The world is changing forever.  Well this has been a true statement for as long as history has been recorded.  The pace of this change is much faster now than it has ever been.  The problem is that many people are stuck in their way of thinking.  The learn things one way and most people, at some point stop keeping up with the changes and start to fall behind, way behind.

So how is the world changing right now?  Well we are in the middle of a few major changes.  The key to most of these changes it the spread of technology.  Because the United States was first in most everything we had to go slow, create standards and design from scratch.   Other nations have had the gift of just being able to copy our progress.  Think about advances in computers, medicine or cars.  The high tech developed nations have designed the improvements but everyone; even those in the poorest nations get the benefit.

Now having the same, standardized protocols methods for doing things all over the world, along with an instant, worldwide communication system things REALLY have changed.  Now people from anywhere can communicate instantly, they can chat, they can talk.  And now it is everywhere and so cheap that people with almost nothing can still go to a public computer lab and join the global work force.  With just a small investment an office can be opened anywhere to do most things.  This allows the work to be done in the location where the labor is the cheapest.  This premise is called the Flattening of the World.

When I was in Asia for much of last year I still had an Arizona phone number, I was able to control computers in Arizona just as if I was sitting at the keyboard.  I was able to send email, create web pages, move money from account to account, write checks online, order parts and have them shipped to our production area, as well as sell products to customers.  I could do 90% of what was required to manage a company.  For the other 10% I delegated it, and was available on the phone to help the person out.  This is happening all over the world.

No longer do the super smart people from all over the world want to move to the US or western Europe so that they could be apart of the global high tech work force, they now can do it from home, in their native country.

This change is HUGE, and it will never be reversed.  It will FOREVER deeply impact the way the world works.  Most jobs are now at risk and the jobs will be given to the person who will do the best job for the best price.  If you keep your job the price pressure of the rest of the world will make the wages you are paid go down.  This is great for the people who see it coming and create a system to take advantage of this new shift.  It will be the worst thing for those that don’t keep up, and those that expect things not to change.

People who are in lesser developed nations will also gain, they will be the target of huge amounts of education, and capital.

There will be a new definition of the middle class, the definition will be MUCH lower than what is currently considered the middle class now, maybe a family income of $15,000 per year.  world is flatBasically what we see as the middle class in the United States will be much smaller than it currently is.  And millions of people all over the developing world will be moved out of poverty and into their definition of a middle class.

If you want to learn much more about this there is a really smart guy named Thomas L Friedman, he invented the term and latterly wrote the book on this subject.  This book is one of the most important books of our current time, and those that understand it will be much more successful in life.

No matter what happens it is huge and will affect you.  So it if your choice get educated about it and take advantage of the change, or just wait and be sideswiped by it.

Launching the Bear Market by killing a Bear

Investment, Money, The World, , ,

Chase (JPM) is getting the deal of the century.  Buying bears stern for just 1% of the value it had just three weeks ago.  It is totally CRAZY.

The Fed is just printing money like crazy (Well creating it on a computer).  It does this first by lowering the interest rate which will make banks borrow more money.  Second they changed the rules and they are now allowing investment banks to borrow from the fed.

The dollar is just crashing.  I have talked about this over and over, be long in the dollar (See the other blogs for what I mean on this).  Silver and gold are spiking, and the dollar fell a few % vs almost every other currency.

This is going to cost the stock market today.  I would say that if the market only falls by 1% then they are lucky.  Check back in a 10 hours and we will see what happens.   Too bad I did not get to buy those options in BSC…would have made a ton.

The dollar is so weak, and we are paying for it, GREAT!

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For years now we have been borrowers.  We spend way more than we make.  I am not just talking about the government but also the people.  You can see this in our balance of trade.  Because of this the dollar is falling like a rock.  People don’t want to lend money because it will probably devalue more than the interest gained.

Imagine that I would lend you $1 million dollars and you need to pay me $1.1 million a year from now, well if the dollar goes down 20% I am only getting paid back (In present dollars) $880,000.  So why on earth would I lend you the money.  This is the problem that we are having now.  Up until recently most of the money being lent to Americans was coming for foreign investment.  These foreign investors as a whole are hesitant to lend us money.

So what is the solution that the government thought up.  Well they offered to lend money, billions of it, to the banks so that they can lend it back out.  But where did the fed get this money to do this, they simply typed it into a computer and created it.  This makes more dollars in existence, and will further sink the dollar down.  This cycle will keep repeating and soon our dollar will be worth very little.

What will this do for us.  Well it will make the dollar cost of most things go up.  Even real estate will soon start to go up with all of this.  Gold is now over 1000, silver is over $20 and oil is at record highs over $110.  This has been coming for YEARS now, I have been talking about it for about 3 years.  This just that start, until we start exporting much more than we import, and we stop spending so much this will keep happening.

So what is the best position to be in?  Well you want to have as little dollars as you can, you even would want to be short on dollars.  This means to borrow them.  I have debt for my house, and for other things, and when I saw this coming I took out as much as I could and invested it in things overseas, and in physical things such as real estate, and I think that in a few months, the value of these assets will be much larger than the debt.  The banks have figured this out and stopped lending to most people.

So what will happen to people who were not ready?  Well it will not be good.  If you have a job, and save money and have no debt you are in the worst position. The money you have saved will be worth less than it should be.  The

What can you do not?  Well as I said before the people who see it first are the ones that are in the best shape, they can prepare for the change.  Now it is too late, there is very little that can be done.  Right now I think it would be good to move money overseas, invest in companies with a large amount of foreign exposure.  Pay off only the minimum on debt.  Don’t keep cash, go turn it into silver.  But MOST important, if you can afford it GO BUY REAL ESTATE.  The prices will never be this low again, you can still usually borrow money to buy real estate and pay back later with money that is worth less.  Prices will go UP much faster than your pay will go up, so be ready for that.  Food cost will go up, and fuel costs will go way up.  Your pay will probably stay flat.  Consider a side business if you need more money.

What should the government do?  Well they were the ones that created this, they were lending money out so cheaply, and printing money like crazy to keep us afloat.  You got to remember that the government is over 9 trillion in DEBT.  They also have over 30 TRILLION in obligations to people in the form of social security and government retirements.  This is a huge debt.  So what they did is they tied this to CPI, the fake, government created index of inflation.  Today it was released and it was 0%.  The people on CNBC just laughed at how fake it is.  But because it is 0% that means that the social security debt does not go up this month.  Now, by any measure dollar is worth MUCH less now than 5 years ago, I would say it is worth half as much or so.  So basically the government just CUT their debt in half because of the weak dollar, and this is very smart.  But they can’t let people know this is going on, they have to spin this so that foreign investors and the general population don’t know what is going on.  For all the people who are not watching are going to be hurt, but for the government, the big investors and all the people who see the signs and act on it, this will be a great time of huge wealth creation.

Jason Dragon
http://www.jasondragon.com/
http://www.capitalactive.com/

Find someone who can connect the dots for you to shortcut to success.

concepts, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, The World, , , , , ,

So the connecting the dots blog seemed to be popular. (Read that first if you have not done so) As I said in the article, I like to help people become successful. The other day I was chatting online to a 20 year old guy, located in the Philippines. He wanted to become a successful business person, but had no education about business and was working a low level, normal job. He had a web site that he started but there was nothing on it really. His goal was to become an online business phone book for his city, a city where no such thing existed. He then would charge people for premium listings. This is a sound idea but after 5 months doing it he had only 8 listing, all of them free listings.

To me it was obvious what was needed for him to be successful. I told him to get a paper phone book and call business people and verify that their company exists. Tell them about the website, and ask them if they want a premium listing. Give every verified company a free listing. He could probably add over 100 new listings per day. In a few short weeks he would have the largest listing site in the city, and once he has that he can start to advertise it. Maybe even do a customer review page for each customer. He had everything in place on the tech side, just lacked the business side. I hope that I helped him.

This is an example how, finding someone who has more dots can you can rock your company in just a few minutes. Having these dots is a huge asset. I think that I would be a great small business consultant. Maybe I can do that on the side. I basically have been doing that for businesses in the world of computers.

Jason Dragon

The KEY to success in this world. It will surprise you. How to get the next big idea.

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What is the key to success? I think the key is DOTS….let me explain.

You need to recognize dots. Put yourself in a position to see dots. Remember dots. But most importantly connect the dots creatively. Once created these connected dots can be acted with to create something new. Of course success is more than just dots, but dots are the key that unlock the whole thing.

This is the blog I have been thinking of writing for months now, and I finally am getting it done for you to read.

So what are dots, well dots are ideas, facts, and thoughts. Dots are EVERYWHERE, there are many dots in everything you see and touch. In the world of products you can ask: Why is something made like that? How did they make it? How is it marketed? How is it given to the customer? In the world of human relations you can ask: What motivates that person? What is important about they way they do that? How do they spend their time? Why did that person do that?

The basic questions that you need to ask are:

  • Why is this important?
  • How did this come to exist?
  • What can be done with this?
  • How can this be done better?
  • Who could use this?

Most people spend their whole life going around, surrounded by these dots but almost never thinking about them. They don’t think about the why, or the how of the things that surround them. I have ALWAYS been someone who sees these ideas and concepts and I have “collected” thousands of dots in my mind. I much rather watch an educational show on TV then entertainment. I watch to see what leaders do. When I am in public, I watch the way that people move and interact, and try to figure out what is important for them. I spend huge amounts of time on the internet trying to figure out how stuff works.

Most people see success as money so I spend a lot of time figuring out how money and business works. One thing that I just totally love to do is to go to shows, you know the kind were businesses set up these 10”x10” square boots and try to get people to see the vision of their idea. I can not get enough of these shows. I go to everything, from the state fair to the home shows, to CES in Vegas, to the small local business expos with 30 people there. You get more dots each time. Sometimes you get very little of value but other times it is huge.

I also watch commercials. I like to see products marketed, and I think about how effective that form of appeal is working, who the target is and if what I see will work. The worst thing is when they repeat the same commercial over and over, I can’t stand that. So the key is to keep your mind open, always be looking around.

It is important to remember these ideas, I usually have a great memory and do much if it in my head, but I also make lists, and more recently write blogs. I have always written, I have 10 page “blogs” that I wrote about many things before blogs were even invented. When you get a few parts of an idea then put it together, write it down and label it for easy retrieval in the future.

Once you have a ton of dots you can start to see how they can connect. This is the hard part, it takes creativity, and looking out of the box. You see a want over hear and then a solution over there. Once you start thinking like this you will start to see how poor many things are done. It is often hard for me not to complain about something, but I am only doing it because I see how it could be so much better, and have much more potential. Often, now, I don’t bother trying to help, because most people don’t listen anyway, and most of those that do will never act on it. Here is an example: One idea I often have is that a buffet is going to have to fill you up, so they may as well fill you up with soda, because it is cheap and very filling, yet about half of the buffets I go to charge extra for soda and many people there do not buy it, so they then fill up on meat and other expensive foods. So I did research on this and found that almost all the successful buffets include soda, and the ones that don’t often fail. This one simple thing determines the success of a buffet restaurant more than almost anything yet when you explain it clearly to a buffet owner they don’t get it and just think I am complaining.

One bad thing about having a creative mind is that before you get a chance to do much with an idea you get another idea that makes you excited. I have had so many ideas that I have had to suppress or let go simply because I knew that if I would go after it, I would be distracted from the idea I am working on now. What a creative person like me needs is a partner that can get these things done and run with it after I create the ideas. This is what most of the rich and successful people do. Look at Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. Warren looks at a business idea and can see in a few minutes the potential or lack of it, he then makes a decision, buys it then connects it with his business model, and his leaders and they run it and turn it into something much more successful.

What I want to do more than anything in life is help people reach their potential, but I can never do this unless I am very successful. So the plan for me to reach this is to implement my ideas. I have spent much of my life collecting dots, and then creating new creative structures with these dots. The problem is that I have lacked the resources to do much with these great ideas that I have come up with. Other times I just see something as obvious but not worth fixing.

One recent example of this is my idea to “recycle” the heat from clothes dryers. People always want to save energy, and recently this has been taken to a new level. So I have always thought that when you dry clothes you are creating all this hot air and just venting it outside. Why do people do that? How could it be done better. So a year ago I simply unhooked the dryer from the vent. It quickly made the house hotter, and allowed for me to save on my heating bill, but quickly lint started to form. So then I decided to hook up the airhose to a cloth laundry bag, about the size of a king pillow case, that had a cinch cord on it. And “Ah Ha” it worked. I now can dry my clothes and not waste the heat. When the cloths are drying the bag blows up and a nice warm smell fills the house. Of course, during the summer I want the heat to go outside, so I simply hook it back up to the vent. This is an example of a way to do something better, that most people have not thought of. This is also an idea that could be a huge business or product for someone, but I have too much on my plate right now.

Another idea that I am doing right now is the idea of allowing computers to be sold by charities as a fundraiser. It solves two needs at once. It solves the need of my computer company to sell more products, but it also solves the need of charities to have a better product to sell. We have started it recently to limited success. There are finer points that will need to be figured out, but in just a few months I hope this idea will make a ton of money.

Other ideas that we have tried simply suffered from bad situations. One idea was that I saw a very nice a beautiful stone tile produced in a third world nation using cheap labor to make a great products. I also saw the need for these decorative products upscale homes and businesses. So we borrowed money and imported three containers of this stuff, spending a ton of money, because we had a tile distributor that saw the vision. But later on that distributor changed his mind. (I still think he would have had great success). So we looked for another vendor and finally found one, but this new vendor has not given our tile the proper promotion and it is buried in with hundreds of other products in a place that get limited exposure, so it has not sold. At the same time the real estate market crashes and the dollar dropped like a stone, making the tile cost more to import by 20%. I still think it is a great idea, and with the proper tweaking, it will be a huge success.

Now I have another great, and huge idea I am working on. I think, of all the ideas I have ever come up with it is the best, the one that will help the most people and be very successful. But once again I need the resources. I am working on that, I hope my business partner really comes through for me on this, because we need it, and people out there need this idea. More details on it when I have it all set in place.

So I hope you now see the important of this idea. I have been thinking about the how, why, and who along with how to make things better for as long as I can remember. I have memories when I was very small wondering these things. Most smart kids naturally wonder this, that is how their brain is wired, but many adults train their kids not to think that way, to just follow the rules, and don’t ask to many questions, and by 5 years old they learn this, and by 10 or so they are set in their ways for the rest of their life. So for most of you reading this, finding, collecting and connecting dots will not be easy for you. You probably have not been practicing your whole life. But it is very worthwhile to change, to start today.

90% of people just let life happen to them, they don’t plan and dream about the future, they don’t see what they can really do with their life, they have given up. I refuse to give up, I dream every day about how I can change the world. And I hope I have made you dream a bit, and start thinking about dots.

Jason Dragon
Jasondragon.com

The truth about being Green, and how the electric car fits in.

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Here is a story about how the green movement, and lack of information can make the masses think something that is simply not true.   This is a story different than what I usually write, but teaches a good lesson so read on.

What do you think about an electric car? Is it a dream that will save the world?  Well if you think that you have been deceived.  Here are the realities of electricity.  First electricity has a cost to make, deliver, transform and store.  All of these things have a huge amount of degradation, first when you make electricity, pollution is made, well more than 70% of electricity in the US is made from burning carbon fuels.  When it burns less than half of the heat energy is converted into electricity (Lets give it a 50% value).  Now that electricity needs to be sent from the power plant to the consumer, on average 40% of all electricity generated in the US is eaten up by getting it from the power plant to you.  Now you need to store this electricity into the battery, by converting it from AC to DC you lose a ton of electricity and then you store it chemically, and lose even more.  From these two processes you lose over 60% of the power.

So if you make 100 units of force at the power plan then convert it to electricity you have only 50 units left, then you move it to the consumer and you now have only 30 units left, now you store it and you are left with only 12 units of power.  Of course gas engines have there share of inefficiencies also, but an electric car actually BURNS over 5 times the amount of fossil fuels than a gas car does if we count that only 70% of our power comes from fossil fuels.

Now there are a few exceptions to this that can make the electric car much more environmentally friendly.

First, use “free” electricity.  The way that electricity works is that there is a baseline power production, and in most cases if that electricity is not used in the next fraction of a second it will be forever lost.  Nuclear plants have to operate at the same level for weeks on end.  Coal power plants are much less efficient when they are running at less than full power, or when they are turning on or turning off, so basically more than 50% of the power production of the US is the same 24 hours a day.  This nighttime power is produced no matter what and much of it is wasted, this is why your power company gives you discounts on the power you use at night and on weekends.   Then when the power company needs to ramp up production during the peak times they turn on natural gas and hydroelectric power.  Of course solar does not work at night.  So how can this make the electric car more environmentally friendly, well you could make a smart grid, that knows when more power is being produced than used and that grid would “talk” to your car and your car would only charge itself during this time.  This electricity is basically free to use, because if it was not used it would be thrown away.

Next use more electricity from non renewable resources.  I can tell you now that in the near future, wind and solar will not be more than 20% of the power generation, and all the good places to build hydroelectric generation already has a dam on it.  The best source that could actually do all the production we need is Nuclear, but many people, who don’t know the facts are against Nuclear power.

Now another MAJOR thing that is making the electric industry greener is new technology to capture the carbon after it is burned.  This does not solve the problem of the amount of fuel it needs, but it does solve almost all of the pollution problems.

So if you ever see an ad for an electric car, or hear someone who is getting one you now know that it is just a way for them to feel good, even though what they are doing is living in ignorance.

Remember that a hybrid car is NOT the same as electric.  It generates the electricity it uses from the breaking of the car, as well as the extra power the car makes when it idles, you don’t plug them into the grid.  These cars are VERY complex, but they do give some great driving benefits, and if you own the car for at least 100k miles it will probably pay for itself.  If you like these benefits then go ahead and buy one.  If you want to throw money at the problem to reduce your carbon footprint this is one way to do it, there are other ways that are much more efficient, but this is a nice prepackaged way to make yourself feel much more green.