What Is An Entrepreneur?

I'm addressing this article with particular direction to those younger readers, maybe who have conceived they have some entrepreneurial bent within themselves.

It's all very well to want things, to want expensive things, or to have them and to enjoy having them as a collector - and therewith to require the necessary level of income to be able to maintain the lifestyle entailed.

Yet, having money or making large amounts of money is not an unknown thing on this planet by any means - lots of people do it. And lots of people have the name of 'entrepreneur' and many of those do indeed perform such a function in some form. Too many, however, are merely repeating fairly narrow tried-and-tested, and also mostly 'restricted entry' templates for some traditional business. You can't just jump straight into the high end watch-making business, for example, even though you might be a young lab scientist with some innovative composite material or metal alloy which would be highly suitable and applicable to watch-making.

The Rolex Swiss main manufacturing facility

What is passed off as 'exclusive' or 'luxury' in today's world is highly forward-planned, heavily marketed, and scaled-up industrial production output. It's neither rare nor particularly exclusive in reality at all.

Take a look at the Rolex manufacturing facility in Switzerland - it's vast. It's also closed and locked right now. And that is because the 2018-19-20 models have all been made already; they were made in 2016, pre-marketed until this year's Basel World Trade Fair, and only now are they hitting the retailers from where they will be sold over the next two to three years.

But look at the factory again - it caters to an 'exclusive, high-end market,' does it not?

That would be like, a market of between half a million and a million people.

In truth the point of entrepreneur-ship is not 'selling things' or, not just selling things... It's about finding ways and means to do human things quicker, more easily, less expensively, more efficiently, with better materials - in short it is all about the upward progress of humankind through technology. 

To me this photo is about shot composition and coloration,
not 'money!' What does it say to you?

And to be able to have access to new 'ways and means,' to acquire the technical 'know-how,' you have to be open to learning things that other people reject as possible, or that other people are closed-minded about from the outset.

Now, the number of human beings you will ever encounter, who have that necessary mindset, of being able to accept new propositions, is almost impossibly few... Warren Buffett doesn't have it, and neither does Bill Gates. These men are unarguably rich. But they are not entrepreneurs in the purest sense.

And the lifestyle and feelings and rewards that a real entrepreneur has, are totally different - of a different order and magnitude, that anything people like the Gates or the Buffetts of the world ever get even close to experiencing.

Shock.

But fact, nonetheless.

Glorious Luxuries

One of the best things you're ever going to have, is a Flanders Red Ale, accompanying a 'Carbonnade Flamande' - which is a beef stew made with the aforementioned 'red ale.'

American-made, but nonetheless a traditional 'Flanders-style Red Ale...'

Red Ale is a sour ale made with different kinds of organisms than the usual sort used to ferment normal beer and ale - and then the ale is aged in oak casks for more than a year, often several years. Red malt is also used to give the beer or ale its color - there are, as you know, several kinds and especially colors, of malt used to make various beers and ales.

Red Ale is also fruity in taste, like plums or raisins, and not bitter at all. 

Now although it is commonplace to call thinly-sliced potato chips 'French fries,' they are really more part of Belgian cuisine, and traditionally potato chips, or 'fries,' are served with the 'Carbonnade Flamande.'

I'm not sure whether every wealthy person you meet will know about Flanders Red Ale, but then, there are a lot of things that today's wealthy people are shown and know about by the same token, that the underclasses have very little exposure to - like the 'aero-cowls' on the latest Rolls Royce Dawn convertibles...

'Aero-cowls' on the latest Rolls Royce Dawn convertible

We have left off the 'Russian Propaganda Spy Story' today - which, by the way, following the immediate prior article here, sent the viewer numbers sky-rocketing! Well, we have except that the Flanders ale, is red... 

  

The Russian Propaganda Spy Story

Here it is, at last - 

THE RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA SPY STORY.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NQNKuFc_eg4fzLDDFrVxZSjrwvqTo96z

In page 126 of the free downloadable PDF, Dr Peter Duncan is named as the key strategist who has been driving the Russia narrative, and who more than likely, 'encouraged' various US chiefs of Intelligence responsibilities - John Brennan, James Comey, others, into a grossly misguided belief about what Russia's involvement in anything was.

You are looking at total competence personified -
and clear-headed objectivity. 

However, on May 4 of this year, General Paul Nakasone took over from the (outstanding) retiring Admiral Mike S. Rogers as 'Unified Command' chief of the NSA and the US Cyber Command. Together with Gina Haspel, the US Intelligence strategy as a general rule, will become more and more objective and based on firm facts, rather than innuendo and UK-bias and Russo-phobic prejudice.

And hopefully, we can all get back to considering the relative merits of various expensive trinkets and other silly nonsense more appropriate to retiring gentlemen, and a few ladies.

Internet Wasta

'Wasta' is an Arabic word - well, in fact it is a modern idiomatic expression in the Middle East from an Arabic root word 'Wasitah.' ...And it means 'the middle part that makes the connections.' It could be employed as meaning 'entrepreneur,' but I'm afraid in the ME vernacular it more has the meaning of 'unseen connections,' and it therefore implies corruption.

At the same time though, when the sun is beating down hot overhead, 'corruption' as it would be seen in the holier-than-thou West (lol), might be the difference between having enough water to live, or not enough so that you will most certainly die.

There is this tendency in the Western media to impute evil intentions whenever they are even vaguely possible, in order to secure the media its audience - the members of which are all highly motivated to see and to read anything of a lurid nature.

At no time at all is the mass of the public interested in the actual truth.

And so it's fascinating for us here to observe the ducks slowly disappearing off the pond quietly, and certainly the media is not telling whether this is simply due to the hand of a human wader pulling the legs of the birds, or if there is some other, bigger creature down in there underneath the surface somewhere - I suppose when you see one of the human 'duck-pullers' go down you are entitled to suspect that there might be creatures other than the usual ones around.

The two Koch brothers who dominate that family and who have been the biggest backers of the Republicans over recent decades have just this week announced they are leaving the stage as far as political influencing is concerned, and even that one of them is retiring from the boards of their main corporate entities.

Today's Koch family's father was an inventor of one of the most important thermal cracking processes for petroleum manufacture, and he originally sold the process to the Soviets but Fred C. Koch ended up despising the Soviets because of their brutality towards their citizens and he was personally moved by the fact that all of his own Russian engineers were murdered by Stalin for all kinds of false charges.

It was extraordinarily easy for the Londonistani MI6 strategists to manipulate David and Charles Koch into running with this insane 'Russia is bad/Russia did everything bad' nonsense.

But the Kochs are now gone.

Cui bono... And that was not a question. 

Massive Luxury Market Contraction

Industry insiders across a broad range of so-called 'luxury sector' products are reporting that there have been deep cut-backs in production numbers implemented by the top-end brands.

Rolex, for example, has cut its total production almost in half, according to knowledgeable sources. And this mirrors the huge drop-off in exhibitors at this year's Basel World trade show for high-end watch makers.

I have been saying here for quite a while now that it has been my own personal impression that there was a sudden implosion in the high-end market co-incident with the commencement of the last US Presidential cycle - before the actual rise of Donald Trump even just as a leading contender. You could see that one by one all the high-end glossy magazines were being bought out or just quite obviously declining in the quality of their presentations and also in the standard of the journalism within the magazines themselves.

It isn't the Rolex that is the truly great product here,
it is the Swiss Super-Luminova lighting ceramic pigment

Now the thing I can't understand about what is going on is - what happens to the remaining numbers of high-end customers, do they get to have to live with absolute rubbish for content or product? I mean to say presumably they still have plenty of cash so how do they get serviced? Do they have to live down in the dumps along with everyone else because Hillary lost, do they? And how come this all started BEFORE she lost, anyway?

No. Frankly, I'm a little bit 'weirded out' by what has been going on.

You look at what happened to Volkswagen for one thing - they got into trouble over their supposed deceit concerning the company's claims about fuel efficiency of some of their engines, and so because of that, the whole company has gone to hell overnight, has it? I think not. 

Even if you accept the narrative that the fuel efficiency claims were wrong - and I don't, because the whole argument was made on the strength of actual driving conditions in America, versus factory test parameters, and everybody knows that American roads were in serious disrepair (my god, I was shocked when I drove there compared to what I had been experiencing in other countries) - there was never any basis for suggesting that other performance parameters were not outstanding. And yet, from my perception of things, you could tell that there was a hole punched in the morale of everybody associated with the brand...

A rare pic with a meaningful shot composition
in terms of the particular product as a modern urban culture item 

I have never seen a worse set of professional photo compositions for the outstanding 'world vehicle' package, namely the Golf R or GTI -  I mean what happened to the brains of the photographers?

Just look through any Google Image search for 'Golf GTI's' and you will find a consistently bad bunch of images and photographs; weak backgrounds, terrible angles, utterly careless, indeed mindlessly poor shot compositions with ugly backgrounds or just plain careless backgrounds.

This car is an outstanding product, an outstanding design package for what it is meant to do for the driver and the owner. And the company has completely let the product down in their marketing standards and brand selling.

There is room for all kinds of opinion when it comes to expensive high-end items, and I am not the sort of person who parrots slogans for a dumbed-down public: at 25,000 dollars, the cheapest entry level Golf is not the same price as a loaf of bread! And at 60,000 dollars the Oettinger Sportsystem aftermarket tuned version or the factory 'Wolfsburg Edition' Golf R is a very expensive piece of merchandise.

This is a truly beautiful car,
and this is the only pic I could find with decent shot composition

VW's are not poor people's cars.

The point about 'luxury market' stuff is that they represent two entirely different sets of values and propositions - there is the technical one, that is to say 'scientific excellence or advancement,' and 'performance parameters,' and there is the poetic, 'design intelligence, and aesthetics' proposition. And sometimes the two even meet in the same final product, but that is rare and not necessary at all for the application of the classification 'luxury product' or 'high-end' item. 

The world's best mechanical watch is not a Swiss watch, with a Swiss style of mechanism, it is a Japanese watch, with an entirely different type of mechanism - a spring-drive mechanism with a MEMS passive quartz component regulator which provides 50,000 beats per hour mechanics that vastly out-guns even the Rolex for smoothness of movements, and the world's most accurate mechanical time-keeping. At almost 8,000 dollars the thing is not by any means 'cheap.'

Seems utterly old-fashioned conventional - the GS 'snowflake.'

As we approach a new 'Roaring Twenties' era in financial markets (oh yes, no one else is predicting this but I am) I laugh at the way in which 'experts' are dealing with the high-end of things in the consumer markets...

Trust me, you think you are broke, perhaps, or less well off than you desire to be, with not a lot on the horizon to inflame your enthusiasm - but...

...you simply cannot imagine where the world is heading over the coming ten years or even more from here.