Thursday, May 25, 2017

Book Review: The Professional Fence

Book: The Professional Fence by Carl Klockars.

One of the best books about negotiation and small business management I have ever read.

And it's about professional fences - you know, the people that traffic in stolen goods!

Check out the negotiation tactics the fence uses in dealing with the thief. One of my favorite strategies is how the fence will often state something as a fact that is not true. Or how fences conspire to fix prices in the underworld.

You will see these tactics - misstatements, misdirection, intentionally misleading math, apples to oranges comparisons - time and time again in your business dealings even in the law-abiding world.

What about a business model? Check out the book's intro about famed London thief Jonathan Wild and how he organized the London underworld so that all goods would come to him.

Telling ya, check it out.

Internet Business

The official category is electronic commerce.

A link to more good subject headings. These include information for people who want to find information on internet marketing and advertising as well.

Bonus: Great government report about size, growth and other stats about the internet sales.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

A Critical View of The New Middle-Class Day Labor

The Baffler magazine has an essay entitled The Crowdsourcing Scam.

Crowdsourcing here means contract labor for the middle class: you know, Amazon or Uber or the like posts a lists of tasks and people bid on doing them. Right now these are data entry tasks and Uber car rides, but expect this to extend to everything....