Are you old enough to remember when “made in Japan” meant inferior goods? I remember the cheap Japanese transister AM radios when I was a kid. I remember my parents mocking the imported cars my grandparents drove. After WW II Japan did an amazing transformation. It was ironically ignited by American consultants during the occupation. With almost no natural resources they focused on adding value to imported resources and selling finished products. Every decade their economic ministers focused on developing a new industry to world leadership. By the 1980s they were buying up America… Then they stopped acting like we used to and started acting like we do. They remain a major economy, but not the explosive threat they were.
Fast forward to today. Chinese goods have been viewed as the old Japanese goods of the 1960s and 70s. Yet everybody is consuming their goods. I saw yesterday that China is the third largest economy in the world and they are now the major trading partner with Latin America, displacing the US. China is not Japan. They have resources and land and over a billion people. The US finances it’s huge debt by selling bonds. Who is buying more than anyone? China. While we are going sideways by well over a trillion dollars in deficit this year (on top of a much larger debt) China has an extra trillion dollars laying around to make loans to developing countries. Are you starting see China differently?
I admit Kitty Hooch isn’t an economic power by any means, but in this time of economic instability you can be sure that 100% of the money we take in stays here in Oregon. Yes, we’re organic and the best quality. We’re old fashioned and we’re guaranteed. We also contract with people to do field work and support our wholesale efforts. It may be a drop in the bucket, but it’s our effort to support made in America products. The next time you go shopping think about where your dollars are going. When you shop with Kitty Hooch remember we are not only the best and the only certified organic hand processed catnip. we are one of the very few toy manufacturers that keeps your dollars in the good old US of A.
Make money online
Thursday, July 16th, 2009I can’t remember what I was searching on Google late the other night but somehow something came up about making money online. Interestingly the link looked like a posting from a California news site and linked to another domain where for the paltry sum of less than $2 you could get a certified kit to make money on Google placing links or something. It was right at the top in a paid ad and it was compelling. Our of curiosity I tried to look at the main page of the news site to validate it. It was the exact same page! Why scam for such a paltry sum?
It didn’t really come together until I read about problems on Facebook where some people were seeing as much as 90% of their click through ad traffic as obvious fraud. Huh? I read the piece on Mashable and it didn’t really make sense. Basically it said that there was too much motivation for people to commit fraud for leverage or pricing. Honestly the whole thing was so convoluted. The point is that to effectively eat someones ad revenue you need to have real people visiting the key words you are trying to spike from different IP addresses. You can’t just have a bot do it. Thus it is not only worth paying someone hundreds of dollars a week to click through links, it seems that the consensus is you are nuts if you don’t do it to level your playing field.
Don’t ask me to explain. Just remember the old addage. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is, only this time instead of you getting hurt you could unknowingly hurting small business people. How exactly did the moral fabric of our society become so amoral?
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