Tom's Blog on Life

Hear Earth, she is crying,
In her pain she is lying,

To make profits we haste,
Leaving her burdened by waste,

Destroyed, pillaged and plundered,
Many lands torn asunder.

Her beauty we admire,
But to plunder we conspire,

We overuse and replenish not,
Till the land, it grows not,

If we take more than we give,
How will our granchilren live?

The problem is really not carbon,
It is pollution in the garden,

For us plastic’s fantastic,
But for fish it’s now drastic,

Coporate greed might have won first place,
But it destroyed Earth in the race.

Psyche and street drugs first dull men’s senses,
Excreted, mash fauna’s defenses,

I fear big pharma have gambled,
When fish DNA becomes scrambled,

To forsee disaster from their profit,
You do not need to be a new prophet.

We eat what is promoted,
Too much till we’re bloated,

Our waistlines are growing,
Our lifespan is slowing,

The more artificial the food,
The gloomier becomes our mood.

The authorities in whom we trust,
Be severely corrected they must,

Else our trajectory is plotted,
Until in our graves we are slotted,

We must rise above our disinterest,
To overcome greed, vested interest.

So let us vote with our spending,
Insanity to be ending,

We need to clean up our collective act,
To make “Earth – a salvaged planet” a fact,

We need to set an example to our friends,
Our mind, body and earth we do need to mend.

Tom Grimshaw
January 27, 2011

Rajpat (the father): Son, I want you to marry a girl of my choice.
Son: “I will choose my own bride!!!”
Rajpat: “But the girl is Bill Gates’s daughter..”
Son: “Well, in that case… …OK.”
Next Rajpat approaches Bill Gates.
Rajpat: “I have a husband for your daughter.”
Bill Gates: “But my daughter is too young to marry!!!!!”
Rajpat: “But this young man is a vice-president of the World Bank.”
Bill Gates: “Ah, in that case… …OK.”
Finally Rajpat goes to see the president of the World Bank.
Rajpat: “I have a young man to be recommended as a vice-president..”
President: “But I already have more vice-presidents than I need!”
Rajpat: “But this young man is Bill Gates’s son-in-law.”
President: “Ah, in that case… …OK.”
And that my friend, is how the enterprising do business.

In the seemingly never endingly expanding subject of business tactics there exist many ways to bring buyers and sellers together. In the food arena there still exist manufacturers who sell to distributors who sell to wholesalers who sell to retailers who sell to consumers. In may other markets that model has had one or two layers taken out of it so that manufacturers sell to end users via their web sites. In fact even in the food arena now you can even go to grower’s markets or farmer’s markets where you, the eater, can buy directly from the grower.

This trend has been under way for quite some time. In fact it’s probably close to 30 years since I first heard the term disintermediation – the reduction in the layers of intermediaries between the original manufacturer and the end consumer of a product.

As new technology develops, enterprising individuals will conceive of ways to use the new tools to do better, cheaper and faster, what was previously done slower and at higher cost. In this ever shrinking world of ours there exists a new way to bring buyers and sellers together via intermediaries – it’s called ClickBank.

The way it works is that someone who has a digital or physical product to sell can enter data about it into a seller account at ClickBank. This data includes the sell price and the percentage commission the vendor is willing to provide the seller and a web site from which the product can be purchased.

This information is then available to those people who are looking to market someone else’s product or service. They may have a list of people who subscribe to their newsletter or they may have the ability to promote or advertise a product to the public at large.

The seller then promotes the chosen product and sales are made from the vendor’s website and the proceeds of the sales are collected by ClickBank. ClickBank records the seller for each transaction then remits the seller’s percentage to the seller and the vendor’s percentage to the vendor less ClickBank’s commission for bringing the two together.

So in this case the vendor is the manufacturer, the seller is the retailer and ClickBank the intermediary.