Six weeks in, and the major highlight is Tuesday’s “State of the Trump” address. It was good to see Obamacare addressed as an important issue; back on week one we discussed how that is a major killer of small businesses. We would like to see a broad repeal. However, allowing free market choice (actual choice, not pick-your-poison), allowing pre-tax payment via any means, and breaking down state barriers will do. The President addressed all of these features, which signals that he is in tune with Obamacare’s most destructive features. Regular readers may recall that small business owners are in a custom-fit sinkhole with regard to pre-tax payment. Sure, there are Health Savings Account (HSA) options out there already, but those appear to have been specifically designed to exclude micro-businesses, the seeds from which the middle class, and thus the economy as a whole, grows. Those seeds are you.
Your Open Source Office
The open source revolution is a game-changer in the business world, and also is of significant interest to self-sufficiency enthusiasts. SoftBaugh has released an article on open-source software to establish a baseline for future, more technical articles for small businesses. For self-sufficiency purposes, the (proprietary yet heavily vendor-subsidized) Raspberry Pi single-board computer is an important resource for open source projects, as is the Python programming language, which itself is purely open source. Getting comfortable with open source office tools, then Linux, Python and the Raspberry Pi, will help open the door to more interesting Raspberry Pi projects. A wide variety of self-sufficiency tools can be built around these, such as the field phone Morse decoder project, as only one of many examples.
Incorporation Tax and Filing Myths
Yesterday, SoftBaugh posted a new article on its blog, “Should I Incorporate?” That article generated some lively feedback, much of which was based on misunderstandings about the nature of business taxes and filing requirements. Today, a new SoftBaugh blog article, Incorporation Tax And Filing Myths, addresses those concerns, and pokes holes in the demand-creation strategy by many CPAs who attempt to scare or confuse people into using their services. In a world where individuals are increasingly using TurboTax and the like for their personal returns, and BigCo has its own auditors on staff, CPAs find themselves fighting over a dwindling small business account pie, and will pull out any trick in the book to keep that business. Unfortunately, some of those scare tactics become self-perpetuating, where people repeat the nightmares to each other until they become real.
Should I Incorporate?
SoftBaugh has released a new small business article on whether or not to incorporate. Regular Starving the Monkeys readers (book and classic site) will already recognize that the answer is “yes”. In this article, the various business forms are discussed in detail, and a tiny crack left open for the LLC in limited circumstances (pun intended). Future SoftBaugh articles will continue to help small business owners navigate a variety of issues.
Food Storage Jar Seals
OldSchoolTech has released an article on 3D printing seals for those wire-closure glass food storage jars. This was a fun project for NinjaFlex, which is a flexible, rubber-like material useful for making low-temperature gaskets and seals of all kinds. Our 3D printer also has a dual head, which allows plastic and flex to be printed co-mingled, if desired. This can create a stiffer seal if needed by embedding plastic fibers in the mix. We have several interesting projects in the works for this material.
Trump Week In Review, 24 Feb 2017
On the political front, the fifth week into the Trumpening, cuckservative Congressional Republicans have yet to make a meaningful stand against Obamacare, one of the top three globalist daggers aimed at American small businesses, as we detailed on week one. A Michael Ramirez cartoon, as featured in this WRSA blog post, sums up the slow progress nicely. We look forward to a public Trump-shaming of reluctant politicians. As we have seen here in our Leech City work, public shaming of wayward politicians produces results proportional to the degree that their misbehavior stems from inattention or ideology rather than corruption. Once entrenched in corruption, shaming has little effect, which makes it a useful diagnostic tool if nothing else.
Time Management Skills
SoftBaugh has released a new article on its small business blog about time management skills. Adapted from a system taught to plebes at the Naval Academy (back when paper was a thing), I’ve used this system more effectively than many of the commercial planners and software out there. Just like the kid who starts off the semester with the fancy trapper keeper, and then winds up using ratty folders and notebooks anyway after that falls apart in a month, this tried-and-true low-tech system has produced great results for us for decades. A low-tech system you will actually use beats a high-tech thing you avoid using because it is too awkward.
SoftBaugh Launches Small Business Blog
Running a small business has always been an important topic here at Starving the Monkeys. To help with this, SoftBaugh has started a new small business blog. For those of you who remember the Midnight Engineering magazine, that blog will have a similar mix of practical, hands-on tips and anecdotes, including guest articles from people with a wide range of skills. Some articles over there will highlight technology issues, but most of the business-oriented articles on that site will apply to most businesses, technology aside. We’ll also post some self-sufficiency- and politically-specific small business articles here on this site, along with color commentary wrapper from a self-sufficiency or political point of view for many SoftBaugh articles. Jump in, and as always, if you have a topic or anecdote you want to contribute which will help others, be our guest!
Trump Week In Review, 17 Feb 2017
The fourth week into the Trumpening, we’ve seen some movement on Obamacare and a high-level firing. House Republicans are said to be trial ballooning replacement plans. But, we have yet to see proposed changes that would definitively remove the three most onerous provisions which throttle small businesses, the lifeblood of the middle class, and thus the economy as a whole. We discussed those provisions in the first article in this series. As with many things Republican, effete slapping at irrelevant issues appears to be the order of the day, per the whims of their globalist puppet masters. In related news, the IRS appears to be implementing a policy of selective enforcement regarding the mandate penalty. While this move sounds good superficially, selective enforcement is always a political tool. This IRS policy is similar to that used in dry counties in the South, where political insiders can throw big bashes with no threat of enforcement, while those same laws are used to bash whomever those insiders wish to target.
Double Conversion UPS, Part I
After a long hiatus, Old School Tech has posted the first article in a new series, this time about creating a double-conversion uninterruptible power supply, which is useful for driving loads such as freezers or mission-critical items. Like a computer UPS, this power supply waits, fully-charged, until it is needed. Unlike a computer UPS, however, it produces clean, pure sine wave power. It also can be scaled up in capacity as desired, operating for hours, or days, as needed. For self-sufficiency enthusiasts, a system such as this removes the need to get a generator or other power supplies running immediately when power fails. This buys time for other activities, such as defending your family from the antifas who took out utility power in the first place. As noted in the linked article, a double-conversion UPS can also absorb a variety of glitchy power inputs, increasing the options for using less expensive generators, or allow swapping generators out for maintenance or refueling without compromising the load. The same system, fed with solar during the day, or generators at night, with long gaps of battery operation between, allows much more flexibility and peace of mind than a generator or solar setup alone. This first article shows how to create this system; future articles will report on real world long-term results and multiple topologies we’ve tested.