Three-Pronged Attack

In wartime, a popular strategy is the use of a "Three Pronged Attack". What this essentially means is that the attackers will use three different forces to attempt to achieve some goal.

For my personal life, I've mentally adapted this concept to apply to the goal of raising enough finances for retirement. The different prongs are (1) traditional methods, (2) entrepreneurial methods, and (3) investment methods. Basically, I figure that "diversifying myself" is the best plan towards financial security.

The three methods elementarily break down thusly: (1) work for somebody else, (2) work for yourself, and (3) have somebody else work for you. There's nothing novel about these three individually, but I think combining them as a semi-formalized diversification strategy is somewhat novel. So it goes, three-prongs for me.

A Review!

I found a review of my work over on one of the wordpress blogs. I think it's a good and honest tribute of my work, though the author points out, "There are a few more obvious errors". I assume this refers to type-o's and other grammar errors, and this isn't something that I would argue with... as I've been following up on my own private revision of the story for some time.

I also found that I'm cataloged over at The Assayer (which provides book reviews and discussion for the free-information renaissance).

And I'm going to announce April 15, 2009 for the release date of the revised version of 2076. As of this writing, it's noted on the book's website that it's an "Unpublished Novel" which was my way of saying "I know it needs work prior to publication". Officially, I had uploaded that version to the Internet on July 4, 2007 and then let it stew (both on the site and in my head). By now, the April 15, 2009 version is expected to be the "Published Novel" version of the story. Maybe I'll schedule a Publication Party (won't that be fun!). There'll definitely be a cake.

There will additionally be an Audiobook, which is already a work in progress (although I'll probably redo what I've done so far). As it stands, when I listened to the recording of myself reading my book, I physically yelled at the speakers during parts where words need to be removed, added, rearranged, or modified (this was during a car ride from NJ to Boston earlier this month). My current plan is to listen to it while I've got my laptop in front of me and work out those kinks and re-record... and then call it "Publishable". I should apply for a patent for that... "a method to accomplish Copy Editing through the process of revising the work as the recording plays back". But yeah... that's the basic plan. Mark your calendars for the Party.

New Homepage

This post is to announce the introduction of the site www.robertvandyk.com. During a trip to NJ two weekends ago, it occurred to me to check for the availability of this domain and I was pleasantly surprised to be able to pick it up. Unfortunately, godaddy.com's "Free Hosting" means that they corrupt all my pages with an advertisement banner... so I'm eventually going to have to upgrade to a paid hosting provider.

The future goal of this domain is to showcase various artistic accomplishments that I produce over the years, including but not limited to (a) writing, (b) videography, (c) photography, (d) painting, (e) music, and (f) culinary arts.

In the meantime, I also secured a couple of domains for possible business ventures. Did you know it costs $500 in "administrative fees" to process the forms to establish a Limited Liability Corporation in the state of Massachusetts? This is the page that has all the information on that. The only prerequisite that I saw was (a) you need a Massachusetts address where company papers are stored, and (b) you need a Federal EIN (which is free). Also, you're required to produce an "Annual Report" that they charge you an addition $500 for every year. All else being equal, though, if you're running a business and not generating at least $500 in revenues each year you probably shouldn't be running that business.

The first possible venture is the discussion item number four from Evolutionary Thought. The goal of that would be to become a city sanctioned (or not) advisory institution who offers guidance towards individuals who don't know much about large and complicated purchases that they're not sure they can afford. Things like college, homeownership, and automobiles all fall under the category of "expensive" and there are a wide range of possibilities that can quickly fall into the "over-budget" category of financing. It's my theory that this sort of agency could have prevented the economic crash because it doesn't take a finance student to realize that you can't afford a $600k mortgage on $50k per year. Thus, this venture will protect people and banks from themselves.

The second possibility, although the one I feel more strongly about, is incorporating my own publishing company. One target would be to produce and sell my own novel, but I would quickly branch out to publishing work from others, as capital began to flow in.

Hopefully there will be updates on one or both of these ventures periodically in the future. Though, rest assured that as time passes you'll begin to see robertvandyk.com built-up.

Competition and Productivity

There's a belief that competition drives innovation. Monopolies stagnate when they're allowed total control over entire industries. Invisible forces maintain control over competitors to ensure the right balance of efficiency and production.

Ergo, Microsoft needs Apple, Google needs Yahoo, Walmart needs Target, and Verizon needs AT&T. But having said all that... these companies are in competition with one another for dominance and control of their respective marketplace. They each individually want to control the market and set prices at whatever they want. As a result, you see them use every opportunity to get advantages over each other. From advertising to prices to cross-promotions with other favored industries... there's always some way to gain an advantage. And that's to the benefit of everybody.

However, another way to gain a competitive advantage is to "trim the fat". Oftentimes, this resolves to identifying the least productive areas of the business and figuring out how to integrate their functionality into other areas (this is called "synergy") or creating better methods of accomplishing the same things (called "innovation"). With synergy and innovation, companies are able to produce the same quality of goods and services for less cost and with less manpower. This is generally good, until you consider the last bit about "less manpower".

Industries keep around their labor force to maintain expert knowledge during the transition from the old systems to the more efficient new systems. As the expert knowledge is utilized to iron-out bugs with the new synergies and innovations, the expert knowledge becomes common knowledge. After that, less emphasis is put on maintaining the personnel who had the expert knowledge. In addition, other pressures are applied for the business to build profits. The natural response to that is... job cuts! So the people who aren't needed anymore because their roles have been replaced are let go.

Then you have unemployment... which is where the country is currently at. 6.5% of the current workforce is unemployed. That's how new industries are created. Either the emerging energy industry will find a place for those people or something new will come along. If not... something cataclysmic will happen. And that is... the government will step in and find work for the unemployed. At the end of the day, the final competitive balance that Google, Microsoft, Walmart, and AT&T have to face is Washington. If those companies lay off too many of their employees... Uncle Sam will pick up the slack. That's the PRIMARY FUNCTION of government... security for its population.

Ergo, if companies don't want to answer to a stronger central government, they need to stop laying off their workforce or else the government will step in and start "hiring" all these people in some capacity or another.

This is why it is particularly unnerving that The Federal Reserve has not stepped in to bailout General Motors. It's as if the government has a different plan for Detroit (maybe they want to implement the GTC!). Either way, there's a waiting game to see if GM can pull themselves out of the muck or if the government enact some radically new legislation that'll make large scale automotive manufacturing obsolete.

What is also particularly unnerving is the Exxon has sat on their hands through the entire Gas/Energy crisis. It's as if they don't care. How dare they have record profits while other industries suffer. Fuck them. With their billions in profits, they ought to rebuild Detroit and New Orleans! At the very least, they *ought* to make headlines with whatever their efforts have been to replace the fossil fuels that have been the lifeblood of their company for so long. Investment in solar technology? Investment in wind power? No, as far as we know the executives at Exxon are swimming in their profits like Scrooge McDuck used to swim in his vault. And as a result... by sitting on their profits I predict a rude awakening for Exxon during the upcoming administration.

And that's the invisible hand of the market. Corporations versus governments. And in the end... everybody wins.