By A. Daniel Bodine
desertmountaintimes.com
It makes you proud to be an American, it does! Someone who had a vision has changed the world. So in a small way, consider life now better for a great sector of the population. It's worthy of a toast.
Among all the items to come out of Big Media's most recent news carnage—world's going to hell in a handbasket, again, with deficit spending off charts; riots threatening Egypt's government and Mid-East stability; foreclosures skyrocketing—one item about a high-speed beer dispenser, off most people's radars I'm guessing, was particularly noteworthy. It captured the essence of America's entrepreneur spirit and optimism. Beginning this baseball season we will now have faster draft beer lines at the ball parks! Yeaaa!!
Never mind all the sky is falling gloom, folks, for the free enterprise is still very much alive and kickin'! An old on-line Libertarian badger I read regularly (both enjoy him/despise him at times), David Galland, editor, Casey's Report–the piece found at (http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayCdd.php?id=640)--)--perked me up some. He touched on the essence of perhaps the majority of Americans' preoccupations this past week (e.g., President Obama's challenge to climb outta this!), when he wrote Jan. 28 in Casey's Daily Dispatch about a new, helpful invention. It's an upside-down bartender that can draw up to 56 tap beers a minute—without waiting on the foam to clear, from one glass to another.
“...(T)he surest way to make a lot of money is to identify problems in everyday life, then find the solutions,” Galland wrote toward the bottom of a news recap piece lamenting all the woes going on now. He cited a CBC News online consumer life story entitled, “High-speed beer tap shortens lineups,” which claims the dispenser can fill a pint cup up to nine times faster than traditional beer taps. And it works from the bottoms up, cutting back on foam and waste spillage.
“The system uses cups with holes in the bottom,” the CBC story stated. “The holes are covered with a magnet, which is pushed up as the beer spews up from the (pressured) device. Once full, the cup is pulled up off the tap and the magnet comes back down to cover the hole, allowing the customer to grab the pint and get back to the game”
Josh Springer, 28, the inventor of the “Bottoms Up” dispensing system, further explained to the Huffington Post ( http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/innovation/article/the-beer-industrys-mad-inventor-darren-dahl) that he came up with the idea after a “vision” in 2009 while at a Mexican restaurant in a city near Olympia, WA. It came to him while finishing off a pitcher of margaritas. (Sigh)
A sign company production manager at the time, Springer was there with other well-wishers for his father's birthday. Almost immediately after the vision he “stood up and exclaimed...he was going to make a pitcher you could fill up from the bottom,” according to the Post story. And “...after returning home from dinner that night, he headed into his own garage and got to work.”
And the rest is history. After recruiting help from a friend, they came up with a one-glass prototype. Marketing it with repeated phone calls was impossible. An “angel” investor helped them expand the prototype. And then they went viral with a YouTube video he and team of more friends made, demonstrating how the new product works. It was seen 3.3 million times last year.
And now GrinOn Industries, the Montesano, WA, startup company Springer created to build and market the system, is sky high with worldwide sales. Already Bottoms Up is in about 30 stadiums and arenas across North America. It was launched at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia last week. And for the upcoming baseball season, Springer said he hopes fans can get their beer and “get back to their seats without missing a single pitch.”
Stories like these—which have literally made this country in the past--can't be overlooked if, indeed, we the American people are going to climb out of our present “mess.” Lamenting is one thing; drowning all hope out of yourself with anger and bitterness, to the point of immobility, is another.
Many are making the case now of an America in decline, for instance, pointing to a political system and an economy more or less ordered by a corpocracy. And yes it can be depressing. In a review of Barry C. Lynn's Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, (http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Books.php/2010/03/04/cornered-the-new-monopoly-capitalism-and), for instance, Stephen Lendman calls these big global, corporate powers “predatory giants.”
'They control governments, the courts, war and peace, dominant information sources, and essential services, including health care, air and water, what we eat and drink, where we live, what we wear, and school curricula to the highest levels. They own genetic code patents, basic human life elements to be commodified the same as toothpaste, tomatoes or toilet paper.
“Omnipotent, they plunder recklessly, ruthlessly at our expense. They're private tyrannies, endangering humanity, basic freedoms, environmental sustainability, and planetary survival. Without exaggeration, they're unaccountable, unchecked 'weapons of mass destruction.'”
But we're Americans, too, let us not forget, and that means there's a little bit of rebel in each of us. “They” don't control our core laws we live under, our Constitution, not yet. Democracy has always been the hardest of all political systems to maintain, and you can simply look at the dwindling numbers of apathetic voters at local levels for the past 30-40 years to see who the real culprits are in the deterioration in our system we are seeing now.
We've gone to sleep in our luxuries and uppity lifestyles, folks! We've met the enemy and he/she is us, in our uneducated, unenlightened selves, we should be saying. Not shooting point blank at the corporate scud fish that's come up in our idleness now. And we should be saying it in increasingly greater participation in local politics—as problem solvers, not problem makers. Anybody can go to a council meeting and shout. What took 30-40 years to develop in our backwaters certainly isn't going to be swept back out to sea with tomorrow's tide.
But just as the young man focusing on one simple idea for improvement above, we, too, can lower our horizons and began searching inside ourselves for a better way to make life more comfortable for those around us. Larger things always have, and always will, grow out of those small first ones. If we keep our eyes on the road ahead. We're Americans.
So get with it. And bottoms up!
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