Municipal Code for Small Business/Entrepreneurs

The nitty gritty regulations that cover your small business are found in the municipal code for a city.

These are regulations like how many parking spaces per resident your apartment complex must have, keeping animals, and environmental regulations.

San Marcos Municipal Code LINK

Or, search for the code of your preferred city.

New Beige Book is Out

The Fed Reserve has released its current edition of the Beige Book. Editions come out eight times a year. The actual title is Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions.

This is the book that summarizes current economic conditions in different areas of the country. It's a little general in content, but it's often referred to by economic commentators.

The Baby-Sitting Co-Op Economics Article

Heard about the baby sitting article yet?

Like the book reviews, I will sometimes include thought pieces here that give you context, meaning, and fodder for your imagination.

So today's food-for-thought piece is a famous academic journal article about a group of young families in need of a babysitter. They made coupons that could be redeemed for one night of baby sitting, and....then something unexpected happened.

Nobody wanted to go out (because they wanted to save up the scarce coupons) and therefore people weren't earning coupons for spending. Without coupons, they couldn't go out. What's the solution? In other words, this problem is about demand, money supply, and deflation. Sound familiar?

And this is what people are talking about when they mention "the baby-sitting article."

Book Review of The Black Swan

From this book review:

Taleb is concerned with black swans, i.e., unpredictable and improbable events that have great impact. Among the examples of these he cites are the rapid spread of the Internet and the 9/11 attacks.

People endeavor to explain black swans after they occur, but they cannot do so in advance. Despite the crucial effects of these events, economists and other supposed experts in prediction fail to allow for them; indeed, their theories often deny their possibility.

Because of this failure, Taleb maintains that much business forecasting is useless. To him, only a few economists, e.g., Friedrich Hayek, grasp the vital importance of uncertainty and escape condemnation. Taleb extends his indictment of conventional approaches to risk, contending that the bell curve, a key tool of many standard theories, often fails to fit the actual world. He further posits that people tend not to cope with a black swan properly, tailoring their response to specific details of the incident rather than generalizing their response.

Wake Up Everyday to the Wall Street Journal or Other Business News

Want to automatically receive daily news from the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Barron's or many, many other business titles? You can create an RSS feed that sends you a link to the daily news to your email, Google account, or other RSS readers.

Go to ABI Inform and click on publications. Browse or find the exact title you want. If there's a RSS icon next to the publication title, you can create a RSS feed for that title.

After the RSS is created, click on the URL and you will see several options for receiving the feed.



FYI: A lotta other databases allow you to create alerts or RSS feeds. Look for the option.

Update: Hmmm....there might be a one day delay on the Wall Street Journal RSS feed....but it's still cool.

Book review of Predictably Irrational

This is a neat book about the subjective way people make decisions. It fits into a recent rash of books that argue that people don't make logical judgements based on perfect information. And there is an economic emphasis to the book.

LOTS ABOUT PRICING, CONSUMERS AND MARKETING.

I'll include an excerpt of the New Yorker review below:

When they examined how people deal with uncertainty, Tversky and Kahneman found that there were consistent biases to the responses, and that these biases could be traced to mental shortcuts, or what they called "heuristics." Some of these heuristics were pretty obvious -- people tend to make inferences from their own experiences, so if they've recently seen a traffic accident they will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash -- but others were more surprising, even downright wacky.

When you walk into Starbucks, the prices on the board are supposed to have been determined by the supply of, say, Double Chocolaty Frappuccinos, on the one hand, and the demand for them, on the other. But what if the numbers on the board are influencing your sense of what a Double Chocolaty Frappuccino is worth? In that case, price is not being determined by the interplay of supply and demand; price is, in a sense, determining itself.

Match Your Consumer to A Community

If you've figured out who buys your product, now match your consumer to a community or vice versa.

Here's how to find out this kind of information:

Our Simply Map and Local Market Analyst databases give you consumer information about local populations.

Here are some print options in the library:

County Demographics, the Rand McNally Marketing Atlas and Zip Code Demographics.

Web:

Finally, you could go online and use government census data from American Factfinder.