Franchiser Financing

                      

As you know by now, I do not believe most franchises are worthwhile buying. They should be bought for both name recognition and business training. Most franchisers, by far, offer little of both, so why buy into them?

                       

If I were selling franchises and I had little to offer in the way of name recognition and ongoing training I would have to provide some other advantage to keep franchisees happy.

                       

These days. especially, it’s financing. Yet, very few franchisers are able to do so. The ideal type, depending on the business, is accounts receivable financing. It helps the franchisee and keeps him attached to the franchiser. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

Government Bailout Damage

                      

The media and left-leaning members of Congress make much of the fact that most of the bailout is being paid back or will eventually be.

                       

But that is not the important result of what happened with that attempt to get the economy moving. It is not how much money was put up and how much has been repaid. It is the effect of the bailout.

                       

First, the recent bailouts did not work despite today’s rationalization. Doing nothing would have not been the disaster we were lead to believe.

                       

Most importantly: Government interference in all its forms is what causes damage. The meddling, the setting of business policies, and the hiring and firing at bureaucrat whim, to go with salary caps; all that results and that is damaging state capitalism or socialism. ( (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

Educational Inflation

                  

Both college and high school educations are not what they once were. You can call it educational inflation. College levels especially.

                                       

When it becomes too easy to enter college you get a diminution of educational principles. Educators dumb down courses, to appeal to a student’s lowest ability.

                       

Also, affirmative action is practiced, and not just for conventional minorities. It is there for a group not equally represented on attendance roles.

                       

Moreover, schools market themselves by appealing to the baser instincts of students. The idea is to fill the rosters by making it easier to attend.

                       

Students, therefore, wind up in the easiest courses, That’s why so many graduates are unable to find real, practical jobs. Or why we have so many with easy-to-get degrees and so few who are doctors and scientists. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

Executive Ability by Appearance?

                  

Selecting executives primarily for their good looks is well- known. It is an unfortunate fact of business life, as it is in politics.

                   

Top business executives often get where they are on the basis of their good looks. This is particularly so, it appears, when it comes to women.

                   

For men, the taller and handsome they are, the more advancement they achieve. With attractive women, there is a disclaimer. Being too pretty translates as dumb, especially among blonds.

                   

This is unfortunate but my experience in the business world has taught me that too many execs look for shortcuts when evaluating talent among prospects.

                   

All forms of prejudices, including, good looks, fuel and simplify those shortcuts. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

Global Warming and Sun Activity

                     

The sun has been its least active in decades. It’s in its dimmest phase in a hundred years. This is causing scientists to recall the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, that lasted from about 1300 to 1850. The coldest period of the Little Ice Age was between 1645 and 1715, linked to a deep dip in solar storms, known as the Maunder Minimum.

                       

Access to Greenland, at that time, was largely cut off by ice. Canals in Holland routinely froze solidly. Glaciers in

the Alps covered whole villages, and sea ice increased so that no open water flowed around Iceland in 1695.

           

For hundreds of years scientists used the number of sunspots to trace the sun's roughly 11-year cycles of activity. Sunspots indicate intense magnetic activity on the sun's surface. Solar storms send bursts of charged particles hurtling toward Earth.

           

Changes in the sun's activity affect earth in other ways. Research has developed a theory that the sun has a bigger influence on earth's climate than others have predicted.

           

That throws the global warming pessimists who are anti- auto, anti-industry, and anti-industrial development, into their usual dilemma. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

                                   

       

Today's Inflated College Marks

                     

At the College of the City of New York during World War II, students were admitted only if they had the highest grades in local schools.

                       

If they were getting draft deferments because they were science and engineering majors, they had many of their classes marked on a “curve.” This was comparable to having to make the cut in professional golf. The lowest 10% or so of each class flunked, no matter what mark they got. Classmates competed against each other.

                                           

In the toughest college in the city, perhaps the U. S., open only to the top high school graduates, a student with one class failure immediately flunked out.

                       

Compare that to the Ivy League standards of today!

                       

Students go to Ivy League schools because of the aura, and the contacts. The vaunted Ivies are not tough. If anything, they are overrated. We see their products in Wall Street and government. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

Environmental Damage to Food Supplies

                      

Past Americans created farmland out of forests, swamp and deserts.They produced the world's most widespread and inexpensive agriculture. They built dams and canals.

                       

Today, the population is growing by natural and immigration means. Yet many hundreds of thousands of acres of productive land is pushed out of use. At the same time we have chronic water shortages, particularly west of the Mississippi River.

                       

We are also taking too much productive farmland away from food supplies. Thereby making food we do have more expensive.

                       

 Professional environmentalists stop irrigation wherever they can. Too often it’s to save threatened species of fish and other organisms they view on the same level with human needs. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

College Grad Failures

                      

A Pew Charitable Trusts investigation back in 2006 showed that 50% of college seniors failed a practical test. It had asked them to understand a table about exercise and blood pressure, or understand newspaper editorials, or to compare credit card offers.

                       

Graduates are  less adept today, from more recent test scores being reported.

                       

Employers say many college graduates lack basic skills of thinking and writing. This is not surprising.

                       

About 20% of college seniors did not have the ability to estimate whether their car had enough fuel to get to a gas station. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, the percentage of college graduates’ ability in literacy had declined from 40% to 31% in the past decade.

                       

I have often said, colleges do more for their teachers and staff, than for a large portion of their students. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

Small Business Prospects

                         

If you want an idea of where the economy is heading and what the chances are for a brightening in the picture for more jobs, you will want to observe small business optimism.

                       

The National Federation of Independent Business periodically issues its Small Business Optimism Index. That, better than any political pronouncement, will tell you how small business folk are prepared to speculate with their hard-earned money, to create needed jobs that the government can only gab about. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.

The Government and Job Creation

                       

The administration would love to improve the job picture. but continues to overlook how job creation really works.

                       

It does not work by handing out one-time tax credits or benefits. It does help by improving the psychology for hiring. That means providing a clear understanding of the ground rules for business. And those ground rules must be pro-business.

                       

Enterprise requires less cost of doing business. Like future prospects of a choking increase in taxes. And higher minimum wages for unskilled labor, and ever-increasing burdens such as government-mandated expensive health care.

                       

Inasmuch as government bureaucrats and most politicians have never operated a pushcart, how are they to know the psychology of creating private enterprise jobs? (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

College Bait and Switch

                     

Over 4,000 colleges and universities enroll over 17 million students. College has obviously become a huge growth industry. The industry has also mutated negatively, with far too little oversight of quality.

                       

As an example: Colleges appear to be primarily in the business of acquiring students, differing to a degree, only in their approach to marketing.

                       

Some do so as research centers. They may boast professors with science awards and Nobel Prizes which are very appealing marketing devices. Such esteemed faculty also attract more grants and endowments.

                                           

But few undergraduate students have these celebrity professors. They often are taught by graduate students.

                       

Parents and taxpayers pay billions of dollars to colleges and universities. Schools make money whether students learn or not, whether students graduate or not, or are prepared to get good jobs after leaving school, or not.

                       

Colleges and universities thus engage in "bait and switch;" conferring what are actually deficient degrees, and engage in other practices that would bring legal sanctions in any other business. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)