Your Questions About Colliers International

admin answers:

It’s garbage, and worse – copycat garbage!

Look, there are some really amazing, hand made spirits out there. Tito’s vodka out in Austin, Texas for example. Here is a guy making a premium vodka in the USA. Not Russia, Not Poland. He financed the operation by maxing out his credit cards. Now he can’t fill orders fast enough, and his vodka has won numerous international awards.

Then there’s Collier and McKeel down in Tennessee, making a Tennessee whiskey in a traditional hand-hammered pot still. After distillation they run it through a column of charred sugar maple before going into charred oak barrels where it will rest, taking on color and flavor for years before it is ready to drink.

These are just 2 examples of people working hard at a craft, making a super premium spirit for true fans of drinking.

Contrast that with something like JW or MH; they’re almost all “malt based” which is an industry term for cheap. They use some barley malt and all manner of adjuncts and sugar to make a base alcohol, and then they add preservatives, artificial colors, flavors and processed garbage.

And then there’s the whole issue of drinking with an adult palate. It takes a little effort and maturity to appreciate whiskey. Drinking Mike’s Hard Whatever is like drinking Kool Aid.

It is the alcoholic equivalent to a Happy Meal.

You want to try the best “Hard Lemonade” you’ve ever had? Make yourself up a batch of Vodka Collins. Heck, use Tito’s vodka!. The recipe is simple; vodka, simple syrup, lemon juice and soda water.

admin answers:

WILLIAM P. LEAR (1902 – 1978)

Audio, automotive and aircraft apparatus

Bill From the 1930s to the 1960s, William Powell Lear earned over 100 patents for groundbreaking electronic devices in three industries, including the first practical automobile radio, the airplane radio-compass and autopilot, and the eight-track tape player.

Born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1902, Lear attended public school in Chicago only through the eighth grade. During World War I, at age 16, he joined the Navy; after the War, he became a pilot. Here, Lear received the training that fueled a lifetime of invention in electronic technology.

At the age of 20, Lear founded Quincy Radio Laboratory, the first of his many companies. In the late 1920s Lear was contracted by Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago to assist Galvin engineers with a car radio design project. Later, a car radio patent was issued to Lear (U.S. Patent 1,944,139). In 1930 Galvin Manufacturing introduced this car radio as the “Motorola.” It was one of the first commercially successful car radios, and the first major product for the company that later became Motorola, Inc. Paul V. Galvin created the Motorola brand from “motor” (motorcar) + “ola” (sound).

Meanwhile, Lear turned his attention to airplanes. By the beginning of the Second World War, he had invented the first reliable aeronautical radio compass, as well as the “Learmatic Navigator”—an automatic pilot system, which kept planes on course by locking into whatever radio broadcasts the apparatus picked up.

During World War II, Lear’s companies were a major source of the technology that helped make an Allied victory possible. Lear followed up his War effort by perfecting miniature autopilots for fighter jets, and by developing the first fully automatic landing system. This latter invention won Lear the FAA’s Collier Trophy, bestowed on him by President Truman (1950). In 1962, after he made possible the first-ever completely automatic blind landings of passenger flights, Lear was also honored by the French Government. In the same year, Lear formed Learjet, which soon became — as it remains, under different ownership — the world’s foremost supplier of corporate jets.

But Lear moved on to yet another challenge: the perfection of an endless magnetic loop recording and playback system. As early as 1946, Lear had been interested in audio recordings; after experimenting more seriously in the early 1960s, he created the eight-track tape player. Lear’s tape contained four stereo “programs,” running in parallel on eight “tracks,” for the entire length of a single, continuous tape loop. A solenoid coil detected the splice where the loop was closed, and sent a signal to the playback head to shift over to the next pair of tracks at that point. Because Lear’s system had thinner tape and compact recording heads, this shifting process could be repeated indefinitely.

Lear’s system was a great improvement on the esoteric four-track players that already existed; it was also a huge marketing success. From 1965 well into the 1970s, Lear’s eight-track players made their way from Lear jets and Ford cars into the homes of virtually every music enthusiast.

Lear’s projects in the 1970s included further small-aircraft design, and the search for an antipollutant steam engine. Before and after his death in 1978, Lear earned many other honors, including induction into the International Aerospace Hall of Fame (1981). He also acquired a reputation as an eccentric, since he — like Samuel Clemens, another native of Hannibal, Missouri — vividly envisioned time-travel, and even predicted “teleporting” (cf. “beaming” in Star Trek).

Critics should realize that the vision that earned William Lear sneers is the same vision that helped him transform the automotive, aviation and audio industries. If global technology has not advanced as quickly as Lear thought it would, it was through no fault of his own.

admin answers:

I do think you’re wrong. It is late and I am tired so I’m not going to write as much as could be said. I think that you should read up on the issue to clear up any misunderstandings.

Here’s some suggestions:

Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save – a book arguing that there is a moral obligation to contribute money to aid organizations
Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid – very critical of foreign aid so far and makes some really good points
William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden – Another economist critical of aid, but he argues that aid should be reformed, not abandoned
Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion – An economist who argues that aid, along with other tools, is necessary for helping to lift countries out of poverty
Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty – A book from a pro-aid economist
Millions Saved – I haven’t read this one yet, but I do know it is about the successes in saving millions of lives in developing countries; definitely something worth considering, since critics like Moyo tend only to look at economic numbers, and saving the lives of poor children doesn’t always show up there.

I am wrapping up my MA right now, and its focus is ethics and international development. Arguably foreign aid is the biggest ethical issue in the field. I’m not expecting you to take anything on my authority, though.

I would say the following to you:

1) you probably have a misconception at how much aid gets wasted; polls done of Americans on this issue indicate that Americans regularly think that over half of the aid money gets wasted. There is no data to support waste figures that high that I know of. Americans also tend to think that far more of the federal budget gets spent on aid than actually is. Non-military foreign aid accounts for less than 1% of the federal budget. In 2001, each taxpaying household paid a little less than $30 a year in taxes for all foreign aid, including military.

2) If you are concerned about problems with official foreign aid, make donations through respected NGOs or aid organizations like Oxfam and UNICEF. Far too many people use the shortcomings of official foreign aid by the US government to do nothing, when with a little bit of research they could be donating money with a reasonably high degree of certainty it isn’t being wasted.

3) Don’t become anti foreign aid, support measures to reform it and make it more accountable and responsive. Doing away with foreign aid is a drastic step, and one not at all warranted by its present shortcomings.

4) Even if 50% of aid is wasted by the recipient governments, is that really a good reason to let people die? If, without waste, it costs about $200 to save a child’s life, but with waste it costs $400, is the logical solution really to cut off the aid?

5) Keep in mind that foreign aid often is not simply charity. There are many ways in which wealthy countries harm poorer countries. Agricultural subsidies are a common example; cotton subsidies in the US, for example, are known to cost cotton farmers in West Africa millions of dollars by depressing global cotton prices. The poorest countries also have done the least to contribute to global warming, but many, especially in Africa, are projected to pay the highest costs. Many rich nations, notably France and the US, have a history of supporting corrupt dictators who keep us plied with cheap resources.

My own personal view is that there are problems with bilateral foreign aid; the kind that USAID does. Aid has been used too often to prop up friendly corrupt dictators, it has been thrown away at projects which were insufficiently researched and which lacked feedback mechanisms or failed to get the perspective of the people who it was intended to benefit. It gets used to benefit American business without any thought as to efficiency. I suspect that NGO’s do better work because they don’t have all the political considerations that a government does. So I can understand being skeptical of the government, but I don’t think it is a reason to do away with all aid.