I like creative solutions to problems and stories I hear about people using creativity to solve problems. Here’s one of them…

There was a motel that was trying to be a friendly family oriented place to stay. One problem they had that was a local escort service kept coming around and leaving their fliers and cards on the doors and at other various places around the motel. Not what the motel wanted their guests to see since that certainly wasn’t keeping with the wholesome family environment they wanted.

They tried collecting them, asking the service not to post them, threatening them with legal action, everything they could think of, but nothing was working. The escort service just kept putting more fliers up.

The motel finally solved the problem at a cost of about ten bucks. They had a rubber stamp made up. When they found a flier, they’d take it down, stamp it on the back, and put the flier back where they found it. After a couple of weeks, the escort service stopped putting fliers up at the motel.

What where they stamping on the back of the fliers that make the escort service leave them alone????

“First hour free”

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Okay, I admit it doesn’t look like I’ve done much here lately, but there actually has been quite a bit done, it’s just not visible.

One thing I’m pleased about is the new Twitter Tools plugin that I’ve just installed and tested. Alex King wrote it so I very confident it not only works as stated, but a lot of thought went into it from the start. Alex does good work, and Thank You very much for the plugin and everything else you’ve done to support WordPress.

Speaking of WordPress, version 3.0 is out and I’ve also installed that. I still need to see what the new features are though.

The gift page is about to be launched as well….

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While I suppose you could make the case that companies are tax payers, and there isn’t supposed to be taxation without representation (tell that to all the tax paying green card holders here!), it is still a fact that a company cannot walk into a voting booth and cast a vote.

Based on that, why are they allowed to lobby the congress critters? Why should political candidates and lobbyist be giving millions of dollars every year to influence legislation in a manner that companies want?

Maybe it’s a simplistic idea, but I think it would be better to remove the centralization and disallow non-humans from attempting to directly influence legislators. Instead, let them try an influence the legislator’s bosses, the citizens who do vote and elect the officials.

Let the companies spend those millions to lobby their customers, workers, and community. They can make their case to the people, and if the people (remember, the ones who vote, the ones the elected officials are supposed to represent) agree with them, then they can let the politicians know that’s what they want.

That way the companies can still try and influence legislation but it will still be the will of the people. And if the people don’t want to support a position, then that’s it. Companies should not be able to make an end run around the voters.

Yesterday I was listening to WHYY radio, one of the local PBS stations. They were interviewing someone about this year’s taxes filings.

There were several things he said that were surprising.

First, this year they’re estimating that 47% of filers will pay no Federal income tax at all or will get back more in refunds than they paid.

Second, the top 1% of income earners will pay about 25% of all taxes collected and the top 20% will account for about 53% of all taxes paid.

Hmmm…

The past few days certainly have been busy here.

I’ve been working on revamping the site and bringing it more in line with what I’d like to ultimately see here.

One of the things I’ve been working on is compliance and safety. Unfortunantly, the why things are today, blogging is much more risky than it used to be. I spent most of a day working on the legal side of things. I now have my privacy policy to keep Google, California, and the Kiddie Police happy. I have a disclosure to keep the FTC happy. And I have a Terms of Use page, though I’m not exactly sure why I need that…

One of the complaints I hear from people starting businesses is how complex it is to get everything right especially since there are rarely anyplace you can go for a definitive set of requirements you have to meet.

While the “Robber Barons” of old might have been crooked or taken advantage of people, they did get BIG things done. Have we protected ourselves so well that we’ve prevented progress too much?

It definitely seems that the US isn’t as strong a leader in technology and business as we used to be. Is America slowing down in her old age? It wasn’t that long ago that everyone wanted to come to America to go to college and we were the world leader in scientific research. We’re the only country in the world that put men on the moon, but if we were to try again today, I’m not sure we’d get back there first.

How do we regain our glory and make “Yankee Ingenuity” as valued as it used to be? I think one of the problems is we keep killing off the “Glory Projects” like our space program and the super collider.

CERN is the center of particle physics today, not us.

India and Japan have programs to put man back on the Moon, soon we’ll have to hitch a ride to get the space station.

Like global warming, it’s a hard thing to reverse and the longer we wait, the harder it’ll be. One day, we’ll reach the place were we won’t be able to turn it around anymore.

Re-doing the site to add some new features starting with a weekly product giveaway