Petey's Pipeline E-zine

Issue #35

July 17, 2006

Business First Spinning Wheels, Getting Traction
Random Ramblings & Miscellaneous Musings The Case for Hemp Legalization: Manufacturing, Business & Industry
Write Thinking Win Some, Lose Some

Business First (Editorial)

Spinning Wheels, Getting Traction
by Phil Hanson

Being self-employed—or the owner of a business that employs others—has some indisputable advantages over being someone else's wage slave. You get to call the shots. When things go well, you reap the profits made possible by leveraging other people's labor, knowledge and talents. When things go bad, you . . . well, that brings us to the dark side of entrepreneurship.

When things start to go bad, it's often for reasons beyond your control. An unanticipated energy price hike, a sudden increase in transportation costs, a personal illness or injury, or the unexpected departure of a key employee can send your business into a tailspin. Sometimes, though, an abrupt reversal of fortune has less visible causes.

As profits decline, a common reaction, especially among small-time operators, is to work harder, when what they really should be doing is working smarter. Doing something—anything—will likely produce some kind of effect, but is it a desirable effect? Will your efforts and decisions solve your problems or only make them worse?

This is precisely the time when you need clarity of focus, to assess all available data to determine the near-term and long-term results of any actions you take. Think things through before you act.

In 1987, when I was in an SCCA driver training course (one of the requirements for earning a novice competition license), a volunteer driving instructor by the name of Rick Tiplady gave me some of the best advice I've ever gotten. My lap times around PIR were running in the low 1:38's and high 1:37's, much slower than they should have been. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't seem to improve on those times. In fact, the harder I tried the slower I went.

Finally, I asked Rick if he had any advice for improving my lap times. "You're over-driving the car," he said, "you're on the ragged edge in every turn and making too many mistakes. Every deviation from the racing line requires a course correction, which takes a fraction of a second and costs you valuable time. Try to be smooth at every point on the track. In other words, slow down. You'll go faster."

As it turned out, Rick was right. As soon as I started following his advice, my times improved by two seconds a lap. In essence, Rick was telling me to work smarter, not harder.

What was good advice for an aspiring race car driver is also good advice for beleaguered entrepreneurs. If you want to improve performance, slow down a little. Stop spinning your wheels. Get some traction and regain control. It takes less effort, and you accomplish more. Work smarter, not harder.

• • •

For an occasional fix of insight and opinion, read Petey's Pipeline Blog. Check it out at http://peteys-pipeline.blogspot.com/.

Feel free to respond to blog postings at any time. Whether you agree or disagree, your thoughtful, carefully considered comments are welcome. However, anything suggestive of a temper tantrum, psychotic episode or hysteria will be deleted.

Running a spelling check on your text before making posts is strongly encouraged. Perfect Text, Petey's Pipeline E-zine and Petey's Pipeline Blog exist, in part, to make all of us better writers. Let's not defeat that purpose by being hasty or becoming careless.

Random Ramblings & Miscellaneous Musings

The Case for Hemp Legalization: Manufacturing, Business & Industry
by Phil Hanson

When—and if—it ever becomes legal to grow cannabis hemp in the U.S., expect an industrial revolution. Hemp's versatility as an industrial feedstock is unsurpassed, and its many uses are legendary, though largely forgotten. Despite its potential to support a truly sustainable economy and culture, cannabis remains on the government's proscribed list, a circumstance not likely to change until people learn the truth about hemp and come to their senses.

While much ado about global economies diverts attention and misdirects priorities, the fact remains that local economies are generally more energy efficient, and therein lies the future. Employing local people and serving local consumers, sustainable local economies based on locally available renewable natural resources have the potential to endure indefinitely.

Picture a community where hemp provides the raw materials with which to supply dozens—perhaps hundreds—of manufacturing businesses that create a multiplicity of diverse products. Virtually self-sufficient, such a community enjoys amenities like full employment, a laid-back lifestyle, clean air and water, affordable healthcare for all its citizens, comprehensive education, affordable housing, well maintained infrastructure, and all-around high levels of prosperity, satisfaction and happiness.

Among the industries represented in our fictional community are textiles and paper manufacturing, plastics manufacturing, building products, ethanol and biodiesel production, paint and protective coatings, food products, carbon fiber products, pharmaceuticals, skin care and other health and beauty products. Also included in our list are hundreds of niche manufacturers that either use or create a wide range of primary and/or secondary hemp products.

Imagine living in a community where hemp is the backbone of existence. An economic mainstay, hemp fits into every aspect of your life; every day brings a new appreciation for its positive impacts on your life, lifestyle and livelihood and newfound gratitude for the rising prosperity that benefits all members of the community.

You live in a house made almost entirely of hemp. Isochanvre, lighter, stronger and more durable than cement, is a cement-like building material made by mixing hemp cellulose with lime. Because it will last for centuries, the entire support infrastructure of your house—foundation, basement, floors, load-bearing walls and connecting beams—are constructed of isochanvre.

Hemp-based composites provide particleboard, paneling and roofing. Thermal insulation, also hemp-derived, seals out the weather, making this the most energy efficient house you've ever lived in. PVC pipe made from hemp provides the plumbing, and carpeting made from tough, durable hemp fiber covers the floors. Where appropriate, interior and exterior surfaces are coated with hemp-based paint or varnish for protection, and for a "finished" look.

When you make up a list of the materials that went into the building of your home, you discover that there's very little of it that wasn't made from hemp. Window glass, electrical wiring, and a few fixtures are the only exceptions. Even your furniture is made from hemp composites upholstered with hemp fabric.

In the garage, your bicycle, made largely from hemp carbon fiber composite materials, keeps company with your car, a lightweight (1200 lb.), hemp-fueled biodiesel-electric hybrid 3-passenger sportster with monocoque frame/body construction (same material as the bike). Although the car gets 200 miles per gallon, you rarely drive it. Most of the time, riding the bike makes more sense.

Employed as a designer for a carbon fiber composites manufacturer, you're keenly aware of the role hemp plays in your everyday life. Your lifestyle, health and financial well being depend on hemp and you know the same is true for most of your friends and neighbors.

Hemp brings its influence and value to your recreation, too. You golf using composite clubs, fish using composite rods, and, on lazy summer weekends, paddle on a nearby lake in a canoe made of composites. Every summer, you spend a month sailing the San Juans in a 33' ketch made of composites.

All the implements of your leisure and pleasure have several things in common. All were made to your designs and specifications by local craftsmen using locally manufactured parts and materials produced from locally grown hemp.

Because every stage, every process, every transaction involved local people and local products, everyone in the community benefited. When money is cycled and recycled throughout the community, it stays in the community. Everyone wins. Thanks to hemp's amazing versatility and abundance, the forecast for your community's future prosperity—and a healthy environment—looks very bright, indeed.

And to think that hemp used to be illegal!

What were those people thinking?

Write Thinking

Win Some, Lose Some

Okay, okay! I lost this one. But it's not like I didn't see it coming. It was evident four years ago that "online" would eventually become the universally accepted method of writing "on-line." Now that the unbroken spelling of "online" has been officially sanctioned and confirmed, I concede, albeit grudgingly.

However, if writers and publishers are going to set standards and rules (and they should) for writing certain words, then the rules should apply equally to the antitheses of those words that have them. Outline has long been written as one word; it's antithesis, in-line, has not.

Traditionally, both on-line and off-line (as shown here) were hyphenated. Now, only off-line is hyphenated. Shouldn't they be treated the same?

Why am I such a hard-core holdout against what some would term "evolution of the language?" Well, for one thing, I'm not so sure that much of what we're seeing in online publishing represents evolution of the language. Sometimes, it looks more like devolution.

It's ironic that with all the time saving state-of-the-art technology—computers, software, high-speed Internet connections, e-mail, instant text messaging, and speed-of-light communications to almost anywhere on the planet—people still don't take time to run a quick spelling check before sending their written messages. Neither do they take time to hit the shift key occasionally to properly capitalize words, or to put vital punctuation marks in their proper places, or to group their thoughts into readable paragraphs. And hell will freeze over before they'll deign to write out an entire word if a makeshift abbreviation can suffice.

The Internet made it possible for unprecedented numbers of people to write, and it encouraged them to do so; for that it's to be lauded and applauded. What the Internet hasn't done, however, is encourage people to write well. Despite its speed and the wondrous technology that lets almost anyone publish online, the Internet has fostered a culture of literary laziness.

Take LOL, for instance. It stands for "laughing out loud," conveying to the reader that hey, this is funny, or that it should not be taken too seriously. It's your cue to laugh or smile. But LOL is to Web writing as canned laughter is to sitcoms. If you have to tell people it's funny, it's probably not funny. Better to put the humor in your writing by writing honest humor. If your writing isn't funny, adding an LOL or two as an afterthought won't make it so.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to changes that advance the purpose of language, i. e., to facilitate the communication of ideas between people. This is the natural evolution of language. What I am opposed to is the general sloppiness that's so pervasive in writing, as of late. Carelessness and indifference are the bane of lucid thought and thoughtful expression.

As a user of words (apprentice wordsmith), I'm always open to new ideas about everything, but especially about new ideas for harnessing words and making them serve the language in innovative, previously untried ways.

New words that better clarify old ideas or give names to emerging realities are particularly welcome. Grok, multiverse, corporatocracy, Internet and ethernet are words, on a growing list of words, that recently joined (or soon will join) the popular lexicon.

It saddens me that so many online writers advocate dumbing down the text for the benefit of online readers. Their reasoning is that the average Internet surfer reads and comprehends at the 7th-grade level. That's true enough, I suppose, considering that all Internet users must be factored into the average. When you think it through, you'll realize that huge numbers of children, ages 5 through 12, surfing the Web skews the average reading age downward.

What, exactly, does this mean? It means that if you're writing for a business-oriented audience, your readers are a lot more capable than you think they are. Sure, you can use dumbed down writing to send your readers a message that shouts, "Aspire to mediocrity!" Or, you can send them a subtle message that says, "I respect your intelligence."

Grok that for the next hundred years, why don't you? What? You don't understand grok? Read Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and you will.

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The articles appearing in Petey's Pipeline E-zine are based on information believed to be true at the time of publication. Neither Perfecttext.com, Petey's Pipeline E-zine nor their publisher assume any liability or responsibility as to the accuracy or efficacy of any information, products or services that are submitted, advertised or rendered by contributors to Petey's Pipeline E-zine. While we make every effort to screen out scam artists and bogus offers, you should still do your homework. Caveat emptor!

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