November 29, 2008 by roland.

For those of you unfamiliar with POD, it stands for Print On Demand. These are books printed with icky nasty toner. No matter how great the print quality is, the book still looks and feels cheap. Kind of like wheeling up to a Ferrari convention in a Yugo. It is true that laser printer technology has made amazing strides, but you can spot a toner printed book from quite a distance. You can also identify them blindfolded by simply dragging your fingertips down any given page. Feels kind of like a cross between Braille and 180 grit sandpaper.

POD falls into two categories.

1) a traditional printing house serving up toner printing for ARCs, Galleys, and out-of-print long tail books a publisher still wishes to keep in print. This is the ethical part of the business, and pretty much the only part of toner printing that makes any sense.

An ARC is an Advanced Reading Copy sent out to various professional reviewing services. Traditionally you will print 50-100 of these and they will have a special cover, if you are still entrenched in the business model which uses ARCs. Most people aren’t these days. Why? The pool of individuals requiring ARCs tend to be both unemployed and unemployable. If you have a reference or technical book, don’t bother submitting to a service which requires an ARC. If you do, your book will be handed off to someone holding a Phd. who has never worked an actual day in their chosen field of expertise. If it wasn’t for tenure, they wouldn’t have a job. In many cases they don’t. Anyone who has had to wade through a pool of recent graduates has had first hand experience with just how far out of touch college programs have become.

Galleys aren’t that much different from ARCs in this day and age. Some people still use them and some don’t. The major difference between an ARC and a galley is that a Galley is supposed to be what actually got sent off to the print shop. An ARC is assumed to still be a work in progress. I don’t know of anyone actually sending ARCs out to reviewers anymore. Galleys tend to get either a stamp or special cover indicating they are a galley. Everybody knows it is a cheap print job and they don’t ding you for it. Lead times for offset press can be measured in months, so a galley ensures there are some reviews ready to be posted with the book when it is released. In theory this helps your sales.

2) Vanity “Let us turn you into a published author” scam shops.

There is a large quantity of these companies on the market. Amazon.com even owns some of them. These shops offer “publishing packages” to the budding author/publisher. Generally they have come-ons like “be a published author for under $600″. The package includes one of their ISBN numbers (by definition they are the publisher, not you when it is their ISBN), some kind of on-line sales page, and an immediate listing on Amazon.com when your book is done. There is generally a minimum purchase requirement on the part of the author, so they have to pay the $600, then buy 48 books at list from the printing house which is actually the publisher.

In short, this is the absolute bottom of the industry. Vanity press titles don’t get listed in any major retail chain and all of that “marketing” you thought you were getting with the package won’t generate a single sale. The author generally doesn’t find this out until AFTER they’ve already “published” through this service and find the per unit print cost higher than the retail price most of their competitors list at on Amazon. Given they have to give a 65% discount to Amazon as part of the “package deal” their list price tends to be double that of their nearest competitor. This is the publishing industry equivalent of a dark alley filled with drug dealers and disease riddled hookers.

All of that is coming to an end.

The 3.0 version of OpenOffice is getting close to the Holy Grail, the ability to save directly to ePub format. The first step, being able to export to XHTML has already been delivered. Another team has been working on a PDF import functionality. Judging from the functionality chart and percentages of completion for those features, they are getting very close. Probably by version 4.0 (if not sooner) OpenOffice will be able to import PDF files from lessor Word Processors and save them directly to ePub format.

How is that bringing this to an end?

Sony is in the process of creating a publisher portal for self/small publishers. The portal is currently going to allow for Sony to do conversion services for those who simply don’t have the foresight to bail on the now dying Microsoft platform. Publishers who can provide an ePub format can move directly into being listed. The Sony eBookstore also feeds many partner sites. Instead of being raped by POD and Amazon, you can simply release your book in ePub format to generate revenue until you can do a quality printing with an ethical printer. Or, you can simply leave your work sitting out there generating revenue without any additional costs.
As of today, you have to convert your book into ePub format. Rather than messing with this, I have been sending my files out to IT Global Solutions for conversion and loading into Sony. Very soon Stanza will have its own eCommerce site up and running for the Apple iPhone market which can also read ePub format.

Yes, the days of the POD scam artists are drawing to a close.

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November 18, 2008 by roland.

The recent merger of XM and Sirus has proven the more management inbreeds the more it becomes unfit to walk the earth. Prior to the merger XM had two channels which completely justified its existence: Fine Tuning & Audio Visions. These channels were unique in their nature and examples to be held up showing what the human race can aspire to become. Their loss can only be said to prove those against the proposed merger were correct.

Fine Tuning used to have the widest variety of non-mainstream radio music I’d ever found. In the same 45 minutes they could play Bach, Genesis, Jethro Tull, and several other artists nobody would associate together and somehow make it all work. There were shows which aired regularly such as Emerald Voyage featuring Irish folk and dance music, and a show featuring music of any genre written by original native Americans. These shows were fascinating. Had it not been for this station I would have never discovered a group called the Mediaeval Baebes, or an artist known as Nils Lofgren. Fine Tuning was a truly astounding station.

Audio Visions was that perfect background music for writing books or software. Most of the music had no lyrics. Simply beautiful sounds that evened out the stress of the day and allowed you to drift away when you needed to.

These were nearly the only stations I ever tuned in. They enriched the human species. Sadly, they are gone now. Soon my XM subscription will be gone as well.

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October 23, 2008 by roland.

I have been a member of PMA for several years. On the surface it looked like a good organization. Membership got you a newsletter, access to shipping discounts, and, in theory, some marketing help. Over the course of the past year the newsletter has turned into and endless stream of “Rah Rah Amazon” feces. And yes, feces is the correct word.

Doing business with Amazon is pretty much a recipe for starving to death on the street. It really pains me when supposedly knowledgeable publishing individuals spout things like “I have to do business with Amazon, because that’s where the customers are.” These individuals apparently have no access to traffic data reports. Very few customers are actually “at” Amazon. The traffic comes primarily from referral and shopping comparison sites. Amazon usually wins on the shopping comparison sites because it is willing to play the price whore game with your money.

Now, Amazon wants even more of your money. They are running around buying POD (Print on Demand) companies and starting to state they will only “stock” books from these companies. This pretty much puts 90% of your money in Amazon’s hands … and you thought flipping burgers at McDonald’s paid bad?

To start with, there are exactly two reasons to print with toner.
1)The book is part of your long tail, but you would like to keep it in print without actually doing another print run for it.
2)You want to print only 50 copies to pass out to people you meet so you can claim you are a published author.

No other reason is justifiable. No other reason has any business knowledge behind it. Printing with toner produces a really crappy book. Oh, yes, the POD companies will be all up in arms claiming they get no complaints about their print quality in a vain attempt to divert the conversation from the rest of the “product” they put out.

You can identify a toner printed book in under a second. Open it to any given page and drag your fingers down the paper. Feel the ridges from the toner? Good, you can now conduct the test that really matters. If you have an old tube type monitor, leave the book sitting on top of it all afternoon while using your computer. If you don’t have one of these old monitors, simply leave it on your car dash on a sunny day, or take it to the beach/pool with you during prime suntanning hours and leave it sitting on your towel. Put the book in a cool place, then try to read it the next day … assuming you can still get it open. Toner partially remelts under these conditions and leaves part of itself on the facing page. In extreme cases, the pages stick together and will rip when you try to separate them.

Why have I veered off on POD? Because the newsletter also contained articles spouting the virtues of this and LOTS of ads from POD companies. An organization which really is focusing on the betterment of small/independent publishers should be refusing all advertising from POD and not printing articles of “success” stories for POD companies.

P. T. Barnum was right. There is a sucker born every minute and Amazon is grabbing for them with both hands. Don’t get suckered.

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October 2, 2008 by roland.

Over the last few weeks I have had the privilege of watching some rather amazing movies I had never really heard of. At least I had never heard of them being in the theater.

Hoax Richard Gere

One of the most unbelievable true stories you will ever watch. A writer that is destitute fakes hand written letters from Howard Hughes authorizing him to be the sole writer of his autobiography. While publicly denying any association with the book, either Hughes himself or some of his people ship the author a very large box with damaging insider information on Richard Nixon, the military, and every other person Hughes needs to get back under control. The book, burned after printing, actually turned out to be the main reason Watergate happened. Anyone old enough to remember Watergate will be floored by this movie and the quality of acting by all cast members.

Winter Passing Zooey Deschanel, Ed Harris

After watching this movie on the STARZ network last night, I firmly believe that Zooey is quite possibly the most gifted actress her generation has spawned. Ed Harris delivers a phenomenal performance and the story line simply sucks you in for the ride. You forget you are watching a movie and get lost in the story. Early on in the movie, there is a troubling scene. After building up a story line about how this struggling actress rescued a kitten and was now raising it in her run down place in New York, they make a point of having the animal hospital call to confirm the kitten has feline leukemia. A few scenes later will come the part which is troubling to watch. It was definitely necessary to show just how far below the bottom the character had landed, but some might skip watching the rest of the movie because of it.

The Hunting Party Richard Gere

No, I haven’t suddenly joined the Richard Gere admiration society. Quite honestly I hadn’t really seen him in anything since Pretty Woman and now I think I know why. It appears he has been making Indy type films which go straight to DVD. Thanks to my BlockBuster subscription I’m actually watching a lot more Indy movies. (Yes, I used to have Netflix, but being an IT professional and having to endure their Web site was just too much. BlockBuster got my business.)

Yet another true story about a journalist who hit rock bottom covering wars all over the world. When he had his meltdown on camera and became fodder for journalist programs in every college around the world he was in Bosnia. The story starts up back in Bosnia, it goes places you don’t see coming, and ends with the most pointed critique of why nobody can find Osama Bin Laden you will ever see.
Put this movie at the top of your viewing list.

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October 1, 2008 by roland.

Where Exactly Did It Go Wrong?

Working in IT I hear that question a lot. Sometimes I even utter that question myself. Some people even insert the word “all” into the question when they utter it, but they are generally talking about only a small portion of the universe. Given the current financial crisis, I hear that question a lot.

Everybody backing some kind of Wall Street bail out is claiming nobody should be punished for it now, just give them a blank check to keep living as they have. If you don’t give them a blank check it will all go bad. Personally, I believe giving them any check without handing out mass quantities of prison time is where it will all go wrong for a second time. The credit markets aren’t frozen and aren’t going to be frozen. Anyone who listens to the news will find that small local and regional banks which were never large enough to play the high risk game are doing just fine. They are issuing loans, receiving deposits, and carrying on with business as usual. Only the mega-banks providing massive quantities of funds to companies and individuals taking huge risks are failing.

In short, the market is working and the pendulum is swinging back. For over a decade the pendulum has been swinging away from local and regional banks. People wanted the higher interest rates and all of the trendy free features they could get at the mega-banks, at least until the first mega-bank fell. As the dominos started toppling, people started pulling their cash out of the mega-banks and putting it into those once scorned local and regional banks. Since the mega-banks had been playing high risk games with the absolute maximum amount of funds they could invest, the withdrawals hastened the demise of mega-banks.

Ask yourself one question. Is the universe really any worse off when all of the mega-banks are gone? I think not. The same amount of actual money exists, it is just spread around to a lot more smaller banks. In the days before mega-banks, it was not uncommon for a business broker to arrange financing with loans spread across a group of banks. Even in the days of the mega-banks, this still happened. No, loans will still happen, people can still have their paycheck direct deposited to their bank account and people will still buy things.

What about all of those reports saying the demise of the auto industry is due to people not being able to get car loans? Just how many of you actually went to a BANK to get your car loan in the last 10 years? Bank notes for cars had about the same or higher interest rate than mortgages. Damn few people used an actual bank to get their car loan. Most went through the finance arm of the OEM, or a third party lending institution which was playing in the high risk financial markets. Just how many of you are still paying off a zero percent car note? When you sit back and think about it, that argument really doesn’t hold water.

Will auto sales reach anything near their prior level? No. We as a nation have adjusted to this type of change before. If you are over 40, you are old enough to remember when people traded cars every two years. Why? Some of it was prestige, but the reality was that most cars made back then (with the introduction of unleaded gas and the changes to paint) were shit. Once you got around 40,000 miles on them they started to fall apart. There were generally only a handful of cars out of each line which could make it to 100,000 miles without having to spend as much on repairs as you originally paid for the car.

What happened? Cars started getting better, mostly due to imports, and people started keeping them for five to seven years. For a time, there was a mindset in much of the culture which said you shouldn’t trade a car prior to getting 100,000 miles out of it. Then came all of the special financing and the status of driving a $70,000 SUV which got about 8MPG and a lot of that mindset went away. Detroit didn’t listen when everyone looking at the big picture said they were mortgaging their future. People who traded vehicles every two to three years were so massively upside down on their note, eventually even the OEM financing arm couldn’t roll together the financing for them. As soon as the first income hiccup happened for those people, the dominos started falling. Just how well off do you think the financing arm was repossessing a year old $70,000 SUV which was now worth $35,000 wholesale but had $130,000 note?

Where did it go wrong? It went wrong when we let Wall Street and industry analysts like the Gartner Group make decisions for us. Greed is their creed. Large companies making money from the complicated and not understood slices of bundled mortgages started buying them like no tomorrow. When companies not in the financial market wanted to boost their bottom line to look sexier Gartner told them off-shoring was the new Utopia. $10 per day labor. Parts is parts right?

Yes, it was a train wreck and I was preaching about long before it got here. People started playing the “Flip This House” game with money they didn’t have because they were buying into the same sales pitch Wall Street was using to sell mortgage backed assets “housing prices always go up”. They went up dramatically when people started buying into the “Flip This House” idea. But a lot of the people playing that game were in some way an IT worker. They worked a help desk, network admin, programming, etc. because those jobs paid enough to let them get the no money down risky mortgages. The other people who could play the game worked in the financial marketplace where they got healthy year end bonus checks which let them play the “Flip This House” game as well.

Along came Gartner, telling everyone to can their on-shore IT staff as part of the New World Order.

Well take a good look at the New World Order after Gartner told everybody they could run a train without any tracks.

Mega-banks are failing at a pace which rivals the DOT-BOMB flame out.

$70,000 sit rusting on dealer lots.

The used car market is now awash with repossessed cars that cannot be sold for anything close to the value of the note that was on them.

Most famous brokerage houses have ceased to exist, or are now a small division of another company and getting smaller all of the time.

The U.S. taxpayer (not the CEOs and members of the board) are being asked to cough up $700Billion just to keep afloat the very people who got us into this situation. Remember that brokerage firm who paid a golden parachute of $360 million to a guy who held the top job for only six months? Why should ANY of us be asked to bail them out?

The ONLY people we should be bailing out, are those who got talked into buying a house they couldn’t afford with an ARM that had a teaser rate. In that case, the government should outright screw the bank or company who issued the mortgage by forcing them to convert it to a 30 year fixed note at that teaser rate, not the rate it is now.

We were all told that without this bailout the stock market would crash. What happened? One day those companies who had played the game sold everything to try and cover some debts. Biggest one day drop we ever had. On the very next day, the “value” investors who never played the high risk game (or played it with some measure of control) came in to gobble up the solid companies whose stock price had now been corrected to reflect their actual value. Guess what. There will be one or two more days of that after Congress refuses to pass an ill advised bail out. A few more brokerage firms and banks will go under, then the “value” investors will start coming back into the market. “Value” investors play with cash, not credit. They only buy stocks that are cheap. Many of them are the ones who are supposed to be running our mutual funds.

Refusing any kind of bail out for Wall Street is the right thing to do for the world.

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September 29, 2008 by roland.

Today I see on-line Wall Street is trying to force Congress into giving it a bail out by joining in a massive sell off. For about a week now I have been hearing the Wall Street supporters saying “leave executive pay out of this package, deal with it later.” Yeah right. If there is a ruling on executive pay in this bail out package that will be the ONLY thing which benefits the ordinary taxpayer.

Some of you have been long time readers of this blog, no matter where it was located. You will remember that quite some time back I posted a blog here about the “Ethics in Income Act” which was also known as the “100 fold rule”. Total executive compensation could not exceed 100 times that of the lowest paid employee or subcontracted worker. The only limit it imposed on executive income was a limit they imposed upon themselves by underpaying the bottom of the work force.

As to our current situation, there is only one correct solution, so naturally Congress and the White House will not take that approach. The mortgage backed assets are toxic because nobody knows just how much they will lose. Bailing out Wall Street is not the solution. The only correct solution is to force the issuing banks into re-financing notes on homes where people are actually living for 3%. Do not re-finance the mortgages of those who were investing or playing the “flip this house” game as both they and the banks deserve to twist in the breeze. A lot of people got conned into buying homes that simply couldn’t afford them. They could afford the initial payments, so refinancing at 3% will help the vast majority out of this debacle.

The government needs to first target the homes which have been foreclosed on and are still sitting on the open market or are in the process of being foreclosed on. Force the banks to refinance the note to the previous home owners at 3% and let them move back in. I estimate it will take less than 3 months to sweep all of those notes up which can be swept up. Some of the foreclosed properties were bought by speculators so will still be on the market, but a lot of them will be off of the market once that is done.

Phase two requires the government to force the mortgage issuing banks to refinance all mortgages at 3% which are currently on the foreclosure watch list and occupied by the mortgage holding family. By now, most of the people who were going to be in trouble are in trouble. True, some may yet lose their jobs in the downturn requiring a continuation of this program for about a year, but the bulk of the problem will be solved. Those who can afford their homes will begin buying other products which will help pull the economy out of a nose dive.

Phase three requires the government to ban the off-shoring of IT jobs. The best way to help this economy is to keep the highest paying jobs in this economy. The way they will force this is by imposing a $70,000 per head tax on any position sent off shore along with a $50,000 per head tax on any H1-B worker which lands in this country. There was never a shortage of IT workers, there was only a shortage of upper management types willing to pay what IT workers really cost.

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September 1, 2008 by roland.

I must confess that every time I run into someone claiming to be a professional photographer they seem to go on and on about wanting to create a beautiful blur shot which is really attention getting. A blur shot involves having the model or whoever walk as fast as they can while the photographer travels the camera with them snapping pictures. Since the background is stationary it blurs.

Here is a wee bit of information for you photographer boys and girls. You are the only ones who find these shots interesting. Personally, if I’m thumbing through a magazine and come across a blur shot in an article, I pitch the entire magazine in the trash. If the same thing happens with another issue I cancel my subscription. We won’t even talk about what happens to books with a blur shot in them or on the cover.

While we are on the subject of books, I need to lob up this one again. I ran into yet another supposed publishing/printing professional that went on and on about bleeds during a conversation. Suffice it to say, I have put out six books now (Four under my own label and two under another publisher’s label), I have never ever used a bleed. My books are currently shipping to over a dozen countries. Granted they aren’t competing with the “Harry Potter” series in volume but they more than pay for themselves and they open the door to consulting gigs I wouldn’t otherwise hear about.

For some reason I cannot shake the phone conversation I had a few years ago with someone who was actually instructing kids in some form of Publishing Curriculum at a local university. He was also working in the copier/printing center at a local office supply store. Actually I called there getting some business cards printed (I really tried to send the business out as locally as I could, but in the end went with a mail order place where I could just upload the document file.) He went on and on about all of the new software to handle bleeds. He also went on about the class or classes he taught at the college on the subject. Finally I could take no more and dropped the bomb on him that I had been a published author for nearly 20 years and NEVER used or dealt with a bleed.

I don’t know why this is coming up today. Perhaps it is because it is Labor Day and it was around Labor Day a few years ago when this all occurred. I just want to pass on this little bit of wisdom.

Professionals never use either bleeds or a Microsoft product in their work.

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August 17, 2008 by roland.

It is amazing how seemingly unrelated events send you down a path only to find everything was related. This path started many months ago when a septic tank finally hit the end of its life cycle on the family farm. Since it was planting season and the backhoe we have couldn’t go deep enough to set a septic tank, we had to have a contractor come out and install the tank. This lead to an inspector coming out to inspect the job.

The inspector had basically no training to hold this job that anyone has been able to discover. His sole qualification was that he used to be a truck safety lane inspector. Reports differ as to whether he was terminated or allowed to resign. The truth will probably never be made public.

Rather than inspect the septic tank he wandered around the farm unattended and came across a water well which hadn’t been used in nearly 60 years. Being a natural born asshole, he started a flurry of mail about how if the well was no longer in use it needed to be abandoned. The well was no longer in use because it had quite a bit of sulfur in the water and an old jack pump to pump it with. Since he was such a shining example of a walking talking rectal sphincter, I decided to pull the jack pump and sink a submersible pump in the water well. The well could then have a hydrant placed on it and be plumbed through one of the houses on the farm to have a spigot placed on the far wall for watering the garden. With the well in use it wouldn’t have to be abandoned. Keep in mind, this wasn’t an open hole, it was capped and still had the rod and leathers down it for the jack pump. The well was around 874 feet deep and dug by horses before my dad was born.

This weekend, the well drillers showed up to assist in pulling the pipe. Given the depth, we opted to use a sawzall rather than a torch to cut the first couple of pipe joints free. By the time we got to the third pipe joint we got to the ones which had been under water so they came apart with pipe wrenches. When the fourth joint was taken off we noticed some significant bubbles coming up in the water. (The foot valve was still good for the jack pump, so water remained in the pipe.) A joint or two later, the bubbles became a mist rising nearly a inch above the broken connection.

We made a call to NGPL, but by the time they arrived, the water had risen back up in the well and no gas was being emitted. They had done some research before coming and determined we could be inside of a methane vein. When the drillers return to sink the pump they are going to come back with additional testing equipment and sample containers to try and determine what kind of gas and how much of it comes up when we pump out a lot of water. While we could always vent the methane into the atmosphere, if there was a sufficient quantity I wanted to come up with some method of storing and utilizing the gas. We go through a lot of propane during corn drying season, not to mention house heating, etc. It would be nice to have that cost removed from operation.

This lead me to do a little research today. Methane is the primary component of “natural gas” supplied in cities. I’m old enough to remember a house my aunt an uncle had in a city not far from here where the gas company actually put a port on the side of the garage so they could run a gas grill. A little bit more research showed that both Fiat and Volvo had been selling Bi-Fuel vehicles in Europe for a long time. In the case of Volvo, we aren’t talking about an eggbeater sized car, but a Volvo 850. A nice big sedan. It can burn either methane or E85. In fact, you can switch between the two giving the car a 600+ kilometer range on a fill up. (300 for methane and another 300-350 for E85) The Bi-Fuel engine just celebrated its 10th anniversary.

One has to wonder how come Ford hasn’t had the vision to put that engine and bi-fuel system in the 850 sold here in the USA. Natural gas already has a very large distribution network in place. Many older homes in cities also have a port on their garage already to run a gas grill. You could easily fill your car at home before leaving.

Apparently the management at Ford prefers to keep methane between their ears rather than in their cars. How many gas stations already have natural gas plumbed into them for their heating and hot water? Would it really be that much work to extend a line to a pump for sale? Volvo already has the engine and fueling system to take the US market by storm. E85 gas stations are being set up all over the country with many states funding the addition of E85 pumps to existing gas stations. Yet Ford seems intent on going out of business.

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August 4, 2008 by roland.

The following actually came from CNN:
—
Part of the problem with 401(k)s, says Money’s Walter Updegrave in CNNMoney.com, is that 21 percent of Americans “turn to friends and relatives for advice” in picking their 401(k) allocations. There’s way too much at stake to have your “retirement prospects riding on odd Uncle Otto’s mutual fund picks.” You can hire a money manager to advise you, but the fees may make that unprofitable — unless your employer picks up part of the cost. But you can manage on your own, too, if you do “two key things: create a diversified blend of stock and bond funds and then rebalance annually.” You usually get free advice and other tools online. At the very least, try a target-date fund.
—

Because CNN hasn’t bothered to hire a journalist in the past 20 years and run by MBAs, nobody pointed out the real problem with 401k plans. YOUR COMPANY CHOOSES THE VENDOR AND YOU ARE LEFT WITH ONLY A HANDFUL OF TRULY SH*TTY FUNDS TO CHOOSE FROM.

I remember listening to workers at the stock exchange I contracted at. Upper management had chosen “a big name fund company which advertises a lot” to be the retirement plan manager. At the time they had some of the highest performing mutual funds out there, and were making a lot of money for those with millions to invest. Only one catch. Of the funds available to retirement plans, there was only one which had made any money over the past 5 years and it had only made something like 5 or 7 percent. All of the others had lost money. You have to understand that this was during the up-swing of the DOT-BOMB bubble when even funds with bad managers were returning 30% or more.

The real problem with the 401k industry is that the mutual fund companies have been allowed to bleed it, and upper management hasn’t been sent to prison for their choices.

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July 30, 2008 by roland.

There has been a lot of talk lately in the financial community about how manufacturing jobs are now trying to move back on-shore because the high fuel costs have made it more expensive to ship from overseas than it is to pay decent American wages. A lot of other energy industry analysts are saying that gas will hit $6.00/gallon by this time next year.

What Wall Street and the rest of the analysts have completely overlooked is that two of their darling investments will simply cease to exist once gas hits $6.00/gallon. Those two investments would be eBay and Walmart.

eBay is the world’s yard sale. Granted it is full of thieves and con artists which eBay does absolutely nothing about, yet it has somehow survived. It has even managed to survive becoming the largest stolen items fencing operation on the planet. On any given day you can find more pirated entertainment media sold on this site than a New York street corner, yet eBay has survived. Why? Because a lot of people don’t care if an item is stolen or pirated, as long as it is cheap. eBay even went so far as to try and make money off the criminals with their PayPal shipping. Basically a scam which provides virtually no service, yet doubles the postal charges for anything shipped. Nice ethical markup eh?

Many eBay sellers have been asking for more in shipping than what it will cost to ship plus the price of the item for years. This is a time honored scam which is about to come crashing down. UPS, FedEx, and the Post Office have all been hit hard by $4.00 fuel. There is now more than a $2.00 difference in shipping charges to ship a book Priority Mail when you use your own shipping package instead of a flat rate box which lets the book slide around. There is now talk from all of the main shipping companies about about quarterly and weekly price adjustments for all small package shipping. It’s not really greed on their part, the trucks they use get around 6 MPG and there aren’t more fuel efficient models out there. We won’t speak about how much fuel their planes take.

This brings us back to the “cheap” factor and eBay. Pretty soon, if it hasn’t happened already, everyone and their brother is going to start paying attention to the shipping charges on an auction. Once that happens, eBay’s business will vaporize. I used to buy a good deal of things on eBay. Hell, I even bought a Jeep on eBay and had it shipped cross country. Wouldn’t do that today. Nine times out of ten it is cheaper for me to buy what I want in a local store paying both for the round trip gas and the sales tax. $4.00 gas has taken the “cheap” factor away from eBay. It cannot survive $6.00 gas.

Walmart: the last bastion of the anti-christ. This corporation’s list of sins makes the Chinese government look like Mother Theresa. They have enslaved multiple generations of Chinese citizens in their off-shore “company towns”. Those people will never know freedom or prosperity. Anybody who has ever watched the documentary “Walmart – The High Cost of Low Price” will never spend another nickel in that God forsaken place. There can really be no more un-American corporation on the face of the planet.
Be that as it may, Walmart has managed to rape, pillage and plunder its way into Wall Street’s heart. It did so by screwing every company insane enough to sell product to them, and by building its own knock-off factories in China using slaves as labor. (We won’t even mention the illegal alien cleaning crews they’ve been convicted of using here in this country.) Why did the building of off-shore slave operated factories work for Walmart? Because shipping was cheap. Back when gas was around $2.00/gallon it was cheap to pack a ship full of cargo containers and push them across the ocean. Now the push costs more than buying the real product from the real manufacturer at a retail chain which pays a living wage.

Diesel fuel is quite a bit higher than gas. Even today as gas dipped just below $4.00/gallon it was at least 80 cents higher. For some reason as the price of gas goes up, the spread between diesel and gas increases rather than remaining constant. When gas is $6.00/gallon, diesel will be over $9.00/gallon if the spread continues as it had.

Walmart’s ace in the hole has always been the throngs of off-shore slaves they keep in their company towns. Now those company towns are about to become their greatest burden. Walmart will have to actually try making nice with the thousands of suppliers it has screwed over the years. It will have to compete with K-Mart and Target who somehow have managed to avoid screwing those same vendors, or at least didn’t screw those vendors nearly as badly as Walmart did. It is highly unlikely any of those vendors are going to bother doing business with Walmart again. If they do, Walmart will be paying more for the same products than Target and K-Mart are. Because of this, when gas hits $6.00/gallon, Walmart will go out of business.

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