Socrates contra
mcdonalds
“We
must think of rationality not in terms of justification, but in terms of
criticism. And we must think of criticism not as an offense, or as a show of
contempt or disdain, but as one of the greatest signs of respect that one mind
can show to another.”
Mark Amadeus Notturno
Originally I planned to share with you some
thoughts about some economic theories. And again something happened.
On the f-book several of my friends started to circle the
ingredients of McDonalds french-fries.
ohhhh…. That’s sounds surreal!
As usual I have changed my mind at the last minute, so this time we shall talk
a bit about another of my favourite multinational companies and we shall also not
forget about our main topic and will look after some economic theories in connection
with this.
So…
It is hard for me to write down McDonalds properly, so lets
call it “Meki” – this is anyway their nick name in Hungary, which also refers a
bit on the voice of the goat, which in Hungary says “mek-mek” and it also
refers to a lovely cartoon from the 70th, called “Mekk Master”…
Make it short; let’s just call them “Meki”…
When we start to talk about them, we need to see the history
(as usual)…
The main food in Meki is the “Hamburger”… This originally
means on german language – someone from Hamburg.
You may remember, when JFK made the speech in
Berlin, than he called himself a “Berliner”.
So that also means a tasty sausage, the girls in Berlin loved him for this, as they also loved those sausages…
So, the Hamburger was invented around 1900 in USA and it gained
national recognition at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair when the New York
Tribune namelessly attributed the hamburger as, "the innovation of a food
vendor on the pike.”
I will not make you totally bored, just
let me mention, that originally it was done from some bread buns and some ground meat.
I first met with Meki in Vienna around
1984. This was a love from the first sight!
I decided, that I visit them 3 times!
First time, last time and never again!
But I have also had the rare chance to
see them coming to Hungary and Russia!
Behind the “iron curtain” people
thought, that Meki represents the way of happy life and freedom. How naïve
right? That is the enormous queue in Moscow!!!
Later Meki made an advert campaign in
Hungary at 2008. They were selling their burgers for the same price as at their
opening in 1988… It was my first time to realise, that there is such a big poverty in Budapest.
I have seen a bigger queue in Hungary
only this March, when the Krishna charity group were distributing free food for
the poor in the centre of Budapest.
And now lets stop for a minute.
June 2012 Meki reveals the ingredients
of its products with an aim to become more “consumer friendly”.
And it comes as a sort of a shock, that
the french-fries, which supposed to be done from potato and fried in edible
oil, done from 17 different ingredients. Just take a look…
Potatoes, canola oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, safflower oil, natural flavour (vegetable source), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (maintain colour), citric acid (preservative), dimethylpolysiloxane (antifoaming agent) and cooked in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with THBQ, citric acid and dimethylpolysiloxane) and salt (silicoaluminate, dextrose, potassium iodide).
At a glance, many of the ingredients above are hazardous to human health, including those which are genetically modified (canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil), hydrogenated (soybean oil), chemically preserved and antifoaming (THBQ, citric acid, dimethylpolysiloxane), and artificially colored (sodium acid pyrophosphate).
http://www.undergroundhealth.com/mcdonalds-reveals-17-foul-ingredients-in-their-french-fries-including-gmos/
You have here a number of toxic
ingredients and also a number of those processed from genetically modified (meaning
highly harmful) substances.
Good to know about this right?
And one year later the next news are
coming.
16th of July 2013. Meki opens its restaurant in Vietnam!
After KFC, Lotteria, Burger King, Subway, Pizza Hut and Starbucks, as
well as the Philippines' favorite chain Jollybee.
The franchise was given to Henry
Nguyen.
Henry said: "I have dreamed of one day opening
a McDonald's restaurant in my native country ever since my return to Vietnam
more than a decade ago.”
I had another dream several years
before – how to help to the victims of the “Agent Orange” and how to stop that
in the future. “Agent Orange” is also a US “franchise” – the consequences of it
still a huge problem in Vietnam.
You can take a look on this site. Me, I
personally visited several projects in Vietnam and organised some feasible help to
those affected children and adult victims. I do not want to disturb anyone by those photos. Just let me share with you one detail. I have had several volunteers came to Vietnam with an aim to help. Out of dozens, only one person could manage the mental tense caused by seeing the enormous suffer of those Agent Orange victims...
So I have a different dream!
My dream is to stop all this chemicals,
no matter if they come from Monsanto or Meki, stop them from destroying the health
of the people around the World.
Monsanto by the way made mega money on
the Agent Orange and refused to pay a penny in compensation to anyone,
including the Vietnamese people.
Do you know, that Meki is using ingredients from Monsanto?
So Mr. Henry I hope you know that your dream means to poison
further your native land and nation by Monsanto, but this time through the help of Meki
right?
Why you do this? Did the Vietnamese
people do something terribly wrong to you Mr. Henry?
Can you tell us any other reason you do
this? Is this revenge?
The Vietnamese people in general do not
really like the bread. They hate the cheese, they are not really in favour of
pickles, mustard and the fried potato. And they are in general against the flavour and taste
of ground meet sold in Meki. The entire concept is simply not in this culture.
Not at all!
And the situation is similar in China –
take a look on this nice photo from Shanghai.
Or this is the best of the best:
Guangzhou Airport – the sign says, that
the Meki is near the Public Toilet! That is the place where they belong to
right?
Henry, why don’t you open free shelters for homeless, free Wi-Fi hotspots and public toilets?
And one advice – please make sure Meki
does not distribute their food even not for free…
At least you will not poison your
nation right? You need to give a try. Honestly…
If you want to know something about
Monsanto just go through this…
By the way in reversed case, if US
would have a legal dispute over a case harming their own people, they would
never allow any company to enter their market or any company in connection with
that particular company… (In our case Monsanto and Meki)
But we talk about this case also for another
reason. Meki in fact told several times, that they do not sell food but they
sell the business. Franchise is a great business.
And here we are. At the point – they
can do this, as they have years of experience, they have their business model.
They have an absolute advantage in the know-how of this kind of business.
So we better stop again in here and
think about another term, we have not yet used, but I want to introduce for
you.
The comparative advantages;
Through the industrial revolution the economic
thinking also started to develop. First Adam Smith mentioned in his book “The
Wealth of Nations” published at 1776, that
"If a foreign country can
supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it
of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in
which we have some advantage."
But the theory itself was exploited by
David Ricardo at 1817 in his book “On the Principles of Political Economy and
Taxation”
He brought an example involving England
and Portugal. In Portugal it is possible to produce both wine and cloth with
less labor than it would take to produce the same quantities in England.
However the relative costs of producing those two goods are different in the
two countries. In England it is very hard to produce wine, and only moderately
difficult to produce cloth. In Portugal both are easy to produce. Therefore
while it is cheaper to produce cloth in Portugal than England, it is cheaper
still for Portugal to produce excess wine, and trade that for English cloth.
Conversely England benefits from this trade because its cost for producing
cloth has not changed but it can now get wine at a lower price, closer to the
cost of cloth.
The conclusion drawn is that each
country can gain by specialising in the good where it has comparative
advantage, and trading that good for the other.
(here you can read the book online http://www.econlib.org/library/Ricardo/ricP.html)
Why it is so important from our point
of view?
It is essential, that a local or
national economy, an enterprise be able to position itself against others. In general
Ricardo’s view was, that economies able to use his findings could benefit for everyone.
This theory moved later a great number
of economists to work further on Ricardo’s idea.
However we have to say, that there was
no efficient model developed, which would be useful to predict future economic
situations. But in general it triggered a vitally necessary awareness of the
decision makers about importance for considering this factor.
Ricardo’s theory did not really
worked in free market, global and dynamic conditions, but it lead to the next stages of scientific development,
The competitive advantage:
Competitive
advantage seeks to
address some of the criticisms of comparative advantage. Michael Porter (and do
not mix him please with Harry Potter…) proposed the theory in 1985. Porter emphasises
productivity growth as the
focus of national strategies.
Competitive
advantage rests on the notion that cheap labor is ubiquitous and natural
resources are not necessary for a good economy. The other theory, comparative
advantage, can lead countries to specialise in exporting primary goods and raw
materials that trap countries in low-wage economies due to terms of trade.
Competitive
advantage attempts to correct for this issue by stressing maximising scale
economies in goods and services that garner premium prices (Stutz and Warf
2009).
The main
point of the competitive advantages idea is, that in certain fields of economy
(production or other sectors), the national economy or an organisation is able
to outperform any competitor.
This can happen in different fields,
such as natural resources,
like as high grade ores or inexpensive power, or access to highly trained and
skilled personnel human resources. New technologies such as robotics and
information technology can provide competitive advantage, whether as a part of
the product itself, as an advantage to the making of the product, or as a
competitive aid in the business process (for example, better identification and
understanding of customers).
The
competitive advantage should be the ability to stay ahead of present or
potential competition, and superior performance reached through competitive
advantage will ensure market leadership.
Also it
provides the understanding that resources held by an economy or firm and the
business strategy will have a profound impact on generating competitive
advantage.
The main
parts of competitive strategy are:
Cost
Leadership Strategy
Differentiation
Strategy
Innovation
Strategy
Operational
Effectiveness Strategy
Do you think this an important issue?
You decide for yourself:
Project
Socrates was a US Defense Intelligence Agency program
established in 1983 under Ronald Reagan.
This
classified program, founded and directed by physicist Michael C. Sekora, had a
two-fold mission:
Determine the true
root cause of the United States' declining ability to compete, and then use
this understanding to develop the means to rebuild the country's
competitiveness.
According
to Project Socrates:
"(B)ird’s
eye view of competition went far beyond, in terms of scope and completeness,
the extremely narrow slices of data that were available to the professors,
professional economists, and consultants that addressed the issue of
competitiveness.
The
conclusions that the Socrates team derived about competitiveness in general and
about the U.S. in particular were in almost all cases in direct opposition to
what the professors, economists and consultants had been saying for years, and
to what had been accepted as irrefutable underlying truths by decision-makers
throughout the U.S.”
What was discovered in the Socrates Project was that to
rebuild America’s economic competitiveness, key decision-makers throughout the
US in federal and state governments, industry, academia, and the press must make
five significant shifts in their thinking:
#1 The US must change from
economic-based planning back to technology-based planning.
#2 Technology-based planning is the
foundation needed to address the wide range of functions in the private and
public sectors that comprise the US economic competitiveness issue.
#3 The world is poised for the next
revolutionary step in technology-based planning, the Automated Innovation
Revolution, and for the US to regain its ability to compete economically with
its technology-based planning, it must generate and then lead the Automated
Innovation Revolution.
#4 A Techspace Map and Map Navigation
Tool were initially developed within the Socrates Project of the US Federal
Government, and then refined within the private sector, and these make it
possible for the US to generate and then lead the Automated Innovation
Revolution.
#5 To generate the maximum economic
competitive advantage from the Automated Innovation Revolution for the US, the
Techspace Map and Map Navigation Tool must be used to develop symbiotic
technology strategies at the country, state and organization levels, enabling
the full range of US resources to be utilized in a coherent, flexible, and
independent fashion, not in conflict with America’s open, democratic society.
And why do we mention all this?
First time in the history
there was a defence strategy run over economics. For what purpose was this
done?
To re-gain the competitive advantage!
And I just ask a silent
question – is this a war or not?
By the way the Bush administration after a while closed down
this project.
Was this project successful?
You may judge yourself –
“More than
anything else, though, Reagan's sunny disposition
helped Americans recover from the cultural and economic
shocks of the 1970s, and have made Reagan an icon for many.
“The last
century, I believe, he would go down as the most effective president,” said
former Rep. Matt Salmon
And I let you think about this, as later we shall come back in
more details on some parts of the above discussion; Unless something happens again?
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