My friend Greg is getting his new Tiki site off the ground. Go to Go tiki to see it. He is importing thousands of Tiki products with each container he gets in and the stuff is incredible.

I am getting kind of crazy, trying to find ERP software that meets our needs. We are using Quickbooks for orders and accounting, SugarCRM for customer management, and UPS Worldship for shipping. None of them talk to each other, and this is a big headache.

I have looked at Netsuite, MySAP, Everest and about a dozen others and have yet to find one that meets our needs.

Ok, end of the venting session and back to work.

I was reading the latest issue of Business 2.0 the other night, and a VC wants to put a Blackberry on the steering wheel of your car with a heads-up display. Not a bad idea, I thought, since people are using the things while driving anyway, laws be damned.

The part that gets me is that he is willing to back it with a COUPLE OF MILLION dollars to see if it works. Why not just give me a Blackberry and a hacksaw? A little careful cutting, some duct tape, and a mirror to reflect the screen image onto the windshield and the proof-of-concept is done. It would take two days and less than a thousand bucks to see if the idea works. Why the need for millions?

I moved back home. Not in the sense that I am living with my mom - in the sense that I moved my work location to home. My office is a gigantic two miles away, but it is filled with very competent people, so there is no need for me to be there everyday. So now I work from home, on all the big picture, important but not urgent projects that have been piling up for the last two years.

I bet everyone at work is happy I am gone too.

The change has been interesting. There is far less going on at home, despite the fact my wife works here, the nanny and Troy “work” here - but it seems much much quieter. So I get more done. And then I worry about the office, and call, and they tell me not to worry, and then I get more done.

At least there is always something to eat here.

Since I have started several businesses now, I recognize great advice when I read it. Go to Entrepeneurial Proverbs and read it for yourselves. Another good companion to this article is Guy Kawasaki’s book, the Art of the Start.

House Passes 3 Tax Cuts, Plans a 4th. A little disclaimer - I am a capitalist, and my wife is a devoted liberal. I have previously identified with the Republican party, but I can’t any more.

How do they think this will work? Spending money on bridges to nowhere in Alaska, and then tax cuts to not pay for it? Do they not get the concept of basic mathematics? Decisons like these terrify me. Bush and his team are elected based on moral values (gay marriage) and then all the voters ignore the fact that they can’t add. The tremendous irony is that this sort of reckless spending would lead to bankruptcy in an average person, the same people that are now affected by the recent changes in bankruptcy law.

The Detroit News is reporting that Ford will cut 30,000 jobs and shut down 10 factories. This is a huge move, since Ford has roughly 90,000 employees in North America.

The plan will be officially released January 23, and until then the board of directors is not saying much - except that it is a “way forward plan”. Whatever that means.

See also Ford Job Cuts and GM Bailout

Yesterday as our little family was leaving the zoo, my wife signed a petition to increase the minimum wage. The goal of the petition was to increase the minimum wage in Arizona to $6.50 or something - I wasnt really listening.

The point of it is this - I have not ever paid minimum wage to an employee. I haven’t ever considered it a good deal for ME, as an employer. Here is my explanation. A person being paid minimum has no incentive to keep working for you. They can get a crappy minimum wage job anywhere. Since the biggest problem that I have as an employer is getting people to show up, and the second biggest problem is getting them to try - why would I want them to have less incentive to do these things?

Shawn Ritenour wrote a long acedemic blog about the effect of a wage increase on employment, and while most of it appears to be acedemically true, I think it fails to address the true needs of an employer. Yes, I pay more than the stated wage for an employee - besides the extra taxes of the governement there is uniforms, training, and benefits. The biggest expense has to be training. It costs so much time and energy to get an employee up to speed, why would I want to risk it by not offering them an incentive to stay?

I need employees to be less mobile, and less incentivised to leave for the next crappy job down the street. I need them to stay at my crappy job . So I am opposed to the increase on the grounds that I want to be differentiated from the fast food place. If minimum is $5.15 and I am paying $9, then there is a significant spread in wage potential. Confused yet? I always pay more, and I am opposed to an increase in the minimum.

The simple economic truth of any job is this - you have to be more valuable to the company than they are paying for you. If this is not so, you will be unemployed sooner or later. Or as I like to say “everybody is on commission - some just don’t realize it”.

As previously noted Ford has been talking about job cuts. Now there is more news, that a rumored 7500 workers in 5 plants will be facing a bleak 2006.

The company is likely to shut assembly plants in St Louis, Atlanta and St Paul, Minnesota, as well as an engine-parts plant in Windsor, Ontario, and a truck-assembly plant in Cuautitlan, Mexico, the newspaper said.(WSJ)

So this means that there is some bitter sweet irony for the American workers who lost their jobs to Mexico, watching the Mexican workers lose their jobs to Chinese suppliers. Where are you now, UAW? The real problem in all of this is not the appetite for new vehicles - that has not slowed down. The issue is the continous erosion of market share that GM and Ford have suffered because they continue to make cars that are less desirable than that of their competition.

It is really that simple. A little history of the Ford Motor Company will tell you that Henry Ford got it really right once, and had a 66% market share of the WORLD automotive market at one point. He sold what the people wanted, and it was notably different from the industry norms of the time.

But what will happen in the near term? Bailout? While some will view this as a dirty word, remember that Chrysler was able to repay their bailout loans 7 years early. Maybe the bailout can be directed to the design department, or engineering. Just keep it away from the marketing guys and their rebates programs.

Henry Ford is alleged to have said words to the effect of: “I would give the cars away for free if I could get all the replacement parts sales” and Gillete did make their money on razor blades, not razors. Now, printer companies make profits out of toner and ink. I am continually outraged at the cost of replacing the toner in my printer in the office. I have calculated that I have spent more than four times the cost of the printer in the last 18 months on toner alone.

Sometimes I am jealous that I didn’t think to do it.

My fax machine costs $80 to fill it back up, and it only cost $150 new. I have tried toner refills, and they have proven to be unsuccesful. Why is it that the trivial expenses are the ones that drive you mad?