Not pocket change, either!

Change you can believe in? Hope and change? Nope. Real change, and real improvement (at least I hope so).

Can’t reveal too much right now, but I hope you will like it!

I know I’m pretty stoked. I will tell all soon…

Changes Are Afoot is a post from: shannonehlers.com

My friend posited the idea that the stark contrast belied the real problem in America today – namely that morality and moral idealism is clouding the judgment of the right-leaning factions of our political jungle, and in turn distracting them from where we should be focusing our efforts. Namely, technological progress.

My own interpretation was a bit different (apologies Don, if I have misrepresented your views, and please feel free to correct me!).

To me it seems both groups are saying similar things, just letting their politics shade the language a bit. I sort of have a different take on nostalgia. I kind of relate to both groups.

Sometimes I feel like we had it much better before I was born, in terms of being competitive on the world stage and understanding our role in shaping it. Just one example: regardless of whether we can, we simply don’t have the will to win the space race today. Yet if you hit the rewind button, that very desire propelled our lives in so many good directions in the 1950s and 1960s. Forget for a moment who the winner actually is, because as the result of simply having the will to win, we all led vastly improved lives.

Prior to that, folks like my grandparents had worked, saved, fought, and died so we could have just such exceptional opportunities and big dreams. As a result America was so exceptional that people gladly risked their lives to get here, just for the opportunities.

Then, perhaps out of a spirit of gratitude or maybe a sense of duty, folks like my parents worked, saved, fought and died to take advantage of those opportunities provided by their parents. That resulted in people like me getting far better lives than we deserve.

Then for some reason, with my generation there was a disconnect. America’s people decided, in the last 15 years, to apologize for how exceptional we really are. We decided to say ‘I am sorry’ when we should have again said ‘I am grateful’.

It would have been bad enough if we had stopped with simply saying these things, but then we decided to act on these ideas. We decided to try to be more like other countries. Now we are like them – like Greece, Iceland and other broke countries, both fiscally broke and morally broke.

To me it seems that there is a necessary risk/reward relationship when you emphasize feeling good and living for the moment above any type of responsibility or accountability. I am no morality expert, but I believe that actively pursuing national policies that promote total dissolution of individual morality takes you to a very similar place as we are in now. I am afraid though, that it still has to get worse before it improves.

Fasten your seatbelt.

Giving Away Our Lead is a post from: shannonehlers.com

So I have been flying a bit lately for work, and it has come to my attention that if you wish to purchase a meal on an airplane – never mind that my grandparents used to tell me about the marvelous FREE food on commercial jets – you now MUST carry a credit card. At least if you aren’t in first class on the airline I flew.

I also tried with all my might to rent a car without producing plastic. Impossible. I had to produce my debit card and the car rental company, if they would accept debit cards at all, would only do so with an exorbitant security deposit, applied in the form of a “hold” on my account. This basically means that several hundred of my dollars, although they were in my account, were not accessible by me. For several days after I returned the rental car. Am I being punished for paying with cash instead of borrowing money when I don’t need to?

I have begun the Dave Ramsey plan of living your life with the money you already have, and I’m closing in on the 100% debt free status. This makes me happy and proud. Somehow, I’ve done something that many of my peers have not done – and apparently cannot do – and I’ve done it without cheating anyone, without crazy good luck like winning a lottery or something, and without slighting my life, my family, or my friends.

So now, back to the airline for a minute – let’s consider a hypothetical person we might meet on the airplane. Let’s imagine someone who grew up in the era of World War I. Let’s call her “Aunt Sophie”, who is 99 years old, worth millions, and who has never had a credit card. Let’s imagine that she is flying from her retirement villa in Florida to Anchorage, Alaska to see her great grandson graduate high school. Are we living in a society that will make this woman endure a cross-continent flight without a meal which she can easily pay for 100 times over, just because she does not have a credit card? This is ridiculous.

I grew up in a home without credit cards. My father never had one, and he taught me that you really shouldn’t need one. If you can afford to pay, you don’t need one, and if you can’t afford to pay, you shouldn’t have one.

Sometimes this seemed like a harsh lesson. Sometimes it seemed almost incredible, especially when I saw how other people used the cards they carried. It was so easy and quick to just hand over the card, and watch as the clerk took an impression and then gave back the carbon. Then later, as computer technology pervaded retail space, things became even easier and quicker, with a simple “swipe” of the magnetic strip.

One day I discovered that a debit card works just like a credit card, but it doesn’t use a credit balance – instead taking the funds from your checking account. This was like an epiphany – I could have all the ease and convenience of the “swipe” without the nasty interest rates, fees, etc. I quickly got one of these, and couldn’t wait to use it in front of my dad – loudly telling the clerk “Put it on my VISA!” and watching my dad’s eyes get big. I explained very shortly afterward that it was not really a credit card and told him how it worked.

Recently, in a discussion with a good friend and mentor, I expressed my concerns with credit cards and the whole system of “buy now pay later”. My friend essentially told me that even if you already have the money, and plan to pay for the product entirely, it is safer to buy with a credit card in case there are problems with the product or service. What?? What place on earth would allow it to be easier to get something fixed if the customer had not yet paid? Can this be happening? Here – in America? Can this be possible?

Another point that my friend made was that often the customer gets rewarded for buying items on a credit card. A certain percent back for gas, a certain percent for food, free airline miles, and so on. Since the merchant pays a fee, I assume that some of this “graft” comes from the merchant transaction fee, but surely not all? Where does the rest come from? Card member fees! Interest! This sets up a very strange, slanted situation where many retailers have to factor card fees into their prices (groceries and gas, especially, since they operate on slight margins already). What does all this mean? It means that gas, food, and myriad other items are more expensive (even if you pay cash) because the retailer has to prepare for the credit card company ambush.

We are adding frictional cost to almost every transaction by using credit / debit cards. A cashless society is a very expensive society to operate in. Expensive in terms of added consumer cost, expensive in terms of privacy (consider piles of purchase history data that are floating around cyberspace, just waiting to tell the story of your spending habits to anyone who will take the time to look), and expensive in terms of some of our basic rights (we are now being told how we should store our money and our property, decisions which were previously made by the sovereign individual).

Throughout all of this process, we have made it far easier for us (or for impostors) to spend our savings, we have made it far more difficult to use the power of cash to bargain with (you cannot lay the debit card in front of the car dealer and expect to get a cash discount), and we have made it almost impossible to safeguard a nest egg by putting almost everyone’s savings into investments that not only carry inherent risk (generally the risk involved in stock market investing) but we’ve also separated the owner from the physical asset, placing wealth into paper instruments (and now into so-called “cyber” instruments) which are far more susceptible to pillage than hard assets in a vault.

Have we made life easier and more productive for the man with a fist full of hard-earned money, or have we made the pick-pocket’s job easier? I ask that question both literally, and figuratively. Because there are both literal pick-pockets who hang around busy areas and work crowds, and there are also figurative pick-pockets (some of them are even legal, legit businesses!) who will talk you out of your money, making it easy for you to move it into their accounts.

Just something I’ve been chewing on since first experiencing “Sorry, sir. We don’t accept cash.”

Are we punishing the good and rewarding the evil-doers? is a post from: shannonehlers.com

This year’s Big Omaha experience was filled with great speakers, good friends, great food, interesting stories, fun interactions, emotional stimulation and a boat load of inspiration.  I have listed five examples here.

Thing # 1:  The first wonderful thing that happened to me was that my old college friend Chris Rouw showed up along with his partners at Far Reach Technologies, located in Cedar Falls, Iowa.  Chris was one of the first people I ran into on opening day.  I got to meet the team and he demonstrated an app that they had built for Dwolla which helps you to locate merchants in your area who accept payment via Dwolla.  Pretty neat – these guys are blazing a trail in the mobile payments world, and that is just one example of Far Reach’s, well, far reach.  Sorry (had to be done).  Far Reach is a neat company, just celebrating their fourth “birthday” and it is run by some outstandingly smart and extremely nice people.  You should check them out.

Thing # 2:  Another really neat thing that happened this year was that Big Omaha provided us all with two books to take home – both authors were speakers at this year’s event.  The first was Sarah Lacy (senior editor at Tech Crunch).  Her book, Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky:  How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos (affiliate link) discusses her forty-week excursion into a host of developing markets around the world and what she observed while there.  Her talk gave brief synopses of a few examples.  You will be inspired by her study of how real-life entrepreneurs in little-heard-of places are making their hustle pay off for both themselves and the customers they serve.  The second was Gary Vaynerchuk’s book, The Thank You Economy (affiliate link). If you don’t know Gary already by reputation, then just look back on any of his previous speeches and you’ll feel the genuine, engaged enthusiasm that he seems to have for every task that he undertakes.  The basic message is to pay attention to how we are being marketed to and to ride the wave as this shifts.  We can all have serious advantage in marketing today because now “the ears are more important than the mouth.”  His talk was encouraging and his book has been, too, so far.

Thing # 3:  For those who know me, all three of you know that I am a huge train nut.  While eating lunch on the last day of the conference, I had the opportunity to briefly chat with John Henry Muller of What Cheer.  Turns out he was the creator of the wildly popular (can we actually say ‘viral’ or did it not meet the definition?) web contest to select the route of the Union Pacific steam excursion this year.  The Union Pacific Railroad runs their Heritage Fleet and their steam excursion program to demonstrate the history of railroading in America.  These are always popular with all the rail fans, but I think even John Henry was surprised at the response that his creation generated for the UP.  It was a pleasure for me to visit with him.

Thing # 4:  The reason I went to the first Big Omaha was simply for the opportunity to meet Gary Vaynerchuk and see if he is as good and nice in person as he seems on video (he is).  The reason I decided to attend again at the second, and now third, event was that this serves as a wake-up call to the spirit.  If you listen to your inner voice, you will begin to hear a set of “New Year’s Resolutions” that we start on in May.  For me this year, the new year’s resolution came with a corollary.  The resolution is “This will be my year to begin a side business that I can develop into a marketable property at some point.”  The corollary:  ”It doesn’t HAVE to be in the technology field.”

Thing # 5:  Finally, the last example I will share here is that I ran into my old programming TA from college.  He was a monitor in the computer lab and would help out with any questions we had while attempting to produce functional Pascal programs.  Tej Dhawan is well established in the tech world and worked for a long time in a specialized  software company.  His new gig is at a tech incubator in Des Moines, called Startup City Des Moines.  It is designed to assist fledgling companies get their wings and fly strong.  Though I didn’t get enough time to talk, I thoroughly enjoyed the time I did have with Tej and I will be following along with the progress at SCDM.  You should too.

Well, there you have it.  Five pretty cool things that happened to me at Big Omaha.  There were more, to be sure, but that’s it for now.  What I hope you take away is that although the event is organized with an eye to even the smallest detail, and while everything is in its place and well-planned, you just never know what serendipitous little moments are going to happen at Big Omaha.  That’s where the memories get made.  Thanks for reading!

5 Cool Things That Happened to Me at Big Omaha is a post from: shannonehlers.com

I love traveling and visiting places like Chicago, Milwaukee, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. I have fond memories of visits to New York City and Washington, D.C. I could spend months at a time in Seattle. But home for me will always be a place that is quiet, almost reverently quiet. A place where the sun rises on a similar scene each day which is acted out by the same characters, more or less. A place where your neighbors likely have ancestors who were neighbors to your ancestors.

There exists in this place more civility than in places that are much larger. Forced politeness when meeting the glance of a neighbor who is a stranger to you gives way to genuine warm concern for your neighbor and friend of many years. The human tragedies here, like in larger cities, often involve sickness or death. However, quite often they are the natural outcome of growing old and only very rarely is there any need to investigate why the tragedy happened.

Like all who are considered “outsiders”, we have been made fun of for being “backwards” and we’ve taken our share (and then some) of criticism for living life according to our faith. We’ve been referred to as gun-toting religious zealots. We have been preached at by people who choose to live without absolute standards about being intolerant, all the while being forced to tolerate the odd views of a few odd people as we’ve watched those views begin to taint not only our popular culture, but also the rules that we are forced to live under as citizens who respect the law.

This phenomenon has, in some ways, been accelerated by the communication technologies of the day which seem determined to bring us each hour’s news events before the hour is out. Hot button political issues with strong emotional appeal present themselves sometimes in small town America. This can often put us under the national media’s microscope.

More often than not, this can bring unwanted attention from people who really have no stake in our way of life, nor any intention to take part in it. Frequently these well-meaning absentee experts speak up on this or that issue which is close to their heart and attempt to correct us by imposing their “superior and sophisticated” values onto our “backwards” way of life.

Imagine the roles being reversed, with a “country mouse” telling the urban citizen how to live his or her life the best way. A news report of that same “country mouse” later being shot to death could likely be dismissed by anyone in the vicinity as just some “cracker from the sticks” who was messing around with what they didn’t understand.

Not so in small town U.S.A. Through all of this, small town folks have remained resilient and optimistic, not giving in while at the same time not seeking solutions in violence. While we have had our disagreements, and as my great aunt used to say “strong debates”, it is rare indeed that a conflict ever escalates to the level of, say, shooting. We choose instead to simply live our lives, trying to repeat today what worked well for us yesterday and trying also to avoid repeating any mistakes we may have made. And if the “city mouse” shows up at our Town Hall to push her odd agenda onto us, we will likely offer her a cup of coffee and maybe a homemade cookie along with a warm smile. Then we will patiently attempt to explain to her why she is wrong.

Are The Best of the Real Americans Becoming Innocent Casualties of a Culture War? is a post from: shannonehlers.com

Now imagine watching this person get used up for their talents, taken advantage of for their loyalty, and betrayed in their trust.

Now imagine, despite being perfectly justified, this friend refusing to become angered. Imagine instead, this friend rising naturally above the fray, offering a helping hand to those who caused what likely will prove to be their greatest pain.

Here’s to you, my friend.  I am awed, humbled, and yes, inspired.  Thank you for all you’ve done for me and thank you for providing the inspiration and the great example of how to stay classy when those around you are falling. I pray I can file this lesson away and recall it for future use, when I’m sure I’ll need it.

Ironic Inspiration is a post from: shannonehlers.com

In those last two years of my tenure at this large ag seed company, many things happened.  One event that stood out was that the entire company was purchased by a huge multi-national chemical concern.  A quick look at the parent company’s portfolio of businesses and locations made you think that the world was more dependent on what happened in a particular company than on what happened in any particular country.  The question presented itself to me at that time:  Is there such a thing as corporate sovereignty?

With that question, several others also arose.  Two specific questions that stuck in my mind at the time: “Is there such a thing as corporate food domination?” and “How much involvement in the food distribution system by a single company is healthy?”.  My employer at the time provided roughly half of the corn seed sold in America.  A large percentage of this corn was basically grown as the bulk feedstock for animals (beef, pork and chicken).  The animals’ ultimate fate was, of course, our dinner plate.  The nutrient density of the corn, and thus, of the meat, was “programmed” genetically by this old stalwart seed company.  That in itself was acceptable – the history of the organization was shining, with a long list of good and benevolent achievements.  As time wore on and the impending purchase became imminent, however, examining the situation more deeply gave the impression of a rapidly spreading three alarm fire.

The first alarm rang out when, after a brief courting period and a joint venture, the aforementioned large chemical concern purchased the seed company outright.  Is it still a benevolent business, seeking to help farmers be more productive through the broad application of the science of genetics?  Or is it now simply a platform to sell chemical crop protection products?  At the time, we all knew that we were the same company as when we started.  But who could guess what the future held?  The second alarm, at least for me, sounded when it became evident that the new owner had deep involvement in all aspects of food processing and distribution systems, from packaging and processing all the way to contaminant testing of finished foods, from production aids to the means of delivery.  They owned proprietary products in each critical phase of food production, processing and distribution – now including the raw genetic material that formed the starting material for that food.  The third, and maybe the loudest, alarm sounded after examining the other crop products that were available to this parent company.  Their own existing genetics programs and the programs obtained thru their new purchase provided avenues to control large amounts of available germplasm for wheat, rice, corn, soybean, sunflower, canola and a myriad of minor crop germplasm bases.

Vertical integration in the food industry reached a new milestone with this “merger” of a chemical giant with what had previously been the largest and perhaps the most innocuous seed company, having no previous ties to anyone except their own shareholders.  With the new ownership, what did the shareholders cede to this large chemical manufacturer?  Did they merely hand over control of an undisputed pioneer in the agricultural genetics industry?  Or was it actually a large chunk of the food supply that they served up on a platter?  Does it matter?  Will we all someday become ‘citizens’ of this new genetics giant by virtue of simply eating?

Corporate Sovereignty? is a post from: shannonehlers.com

My current favorite winter reading material

What do you do in the winter time?  Maybe you go hunting, perhaps a cross country ski weekend, or a day of snow shoeing.  It could be that you take saunas, you spend your days baking, or you enjoy a friendly visit to neighbors for coffee.  One of my favorite winter activities, when the evenings are long and days are short, is gardening.  You read that right – I said “gardening”.

Obviously I don’t spend much time working the soil when our high temp is well below freezing, but what I choose to do instead, is plan the garden and pick through the seed catalogs that start arriving mid-winter.  I think that this is just a naturally cathartic activity on cold, dreary days.  What could feel better than to think about warm spring days planting or hot summer days eating tomatoes or strawberries fresh from the garden?

This is something I remember so well from my childhood – my great grandma first showed me the Gurney seed catalog when I was probably about four years old.  She would tell me about peas and beans, how they grew on trellises; she would talk about cucumbers and ask if I remembered making pickles with her, trying to explain to me why we made pickles; she’d ask me about different fruits and then she’d describe the orchard in her back yard;  finally she’d ask me to circle the pictures of vegetables I’d like to grow and eat.  Lots of time was spent talking, thinking, and hoping for good crops.  My great grandma was a superb gardener and could make plants grow almost by her wish.

This wintertime activity always helped chase away the cabin fever if you’d been shut in by bad weather for a few days.  One thing I noticed, though, as I got older is that you can sometimes order seeds just to stave off cabin fever.  More than one time, I have done this and then found out that while it worked to cure the cabin fever, I now have much more seed than I could ever hope to grow in my garden spot.  I won’t be surprised this year if that happens.

Above, in the picture, you see the catalog of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds – a Missouri company dedicated to help preserve long, lost varieties of food crops.  I am not compensated in any way to tell you that this has become one of my favorite seed catalogs simply for the wide variety of foods you can now grow for yourself.  You really have to see it to believe it – and you can see it at their website (link).

Winter Means Gardening is a post from: shannonehlers.com

Anyway, I decided that I’d like to do a photo project for 2011 but I wanted to make up my own rules.  That’s just kinda how I am.  The rules will be finished when the project is finished.  My first photo of 2011 is here for your viewing pleasure.  Check out my Flickr photostream through the year and be sure to check back on December 31, 2011, to see if I took a picture every day, a picture every week, or two pictures today and three pictures next week.  See if they are of me all the time, or if they are of my pets (probably not – I own no pets currently, but I am taking applications :-] ), or if they are just whatever interests me throughout the year. <– If I were a betting man, I’d bet on this last one!

Oh, and lest I forget, “Happy New Year!”

Photos: My 2011, My Rules! is a post from: shannonehlers.com

The last time I had a truly warm, fuzzy feeling was just this week. I had a chance to catch up with someone I haven’t seen in a while. The time, of course, was fleeting so we had to cut our conversation short.

Still, in the precious few moments that we shared I couldn’t help thinking back to the first time we met, the many interactions we’ve had since, and how good it felt to finally break the inadvertent silence that had developed between us.

It’s strange to me but I don’t have the words to accurately describe the moment. It felt good. And warm. And fuzzy.

Reconnection is a post from: shannonehlers.com